7/10/22 - Love God and Do What You Will - Deuteronomy 6:1-9; Luke 10:25-28

Love God and Do What You Will

Deuteronomy 6:1-9, Luke 10:25-28

July 10, 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=Q2eVrb_r9aQ

As I said earlier, several weeks ago, one of you asked me to preach on knowing God’s will.  The question, as I remember, was set in the context of prayer.  “How do I know if what I’m praying for is God’s will or my own?”  Or another version of that might be, “How do I know if the answer I think I’m hearing is God’s will or mine?” 

This question took me back to my days as a campus minister. Fresh out of seminary, I was working with students who were within a decade of my own age.  They were asking the important questions of young adulthood, about what to study and a vocation and a possible life partner. And very often, they framed those questions in terms of God’s will.  

Many, but not all, of these students came from a church background where they had been taught a very specific way of thinking about God’s will.  That framework might be summed up in one sentence –“God has a plan for your life.”

Maybe that is your framework, or was at one time. 

If that is your framework and it works for you, then there is no need to change it and I would love to hear about that.  If that is your framework and it works for you, then this sermon may not be for you.

The idea that “God has a plan for your life” often comes to mean that God has a course laid out for every day for every person.  Our job, as faithful people, then becomes to learn and follow that course. 

This framework breaks down for me in two ways. 

First, it starts to feel like God has an important plan, but it is secret, and I’m not sure how to decode the signs to find it.  If this plan is so important, then God should really make it super easy for me to know what it is.    

Second, it seems too easy to irrevocably mess it up.  It seems like, in the case of my campus ministry students, a person could choose the wrong major which would lead to the wrong vocation and a whole lot of other wrong dominos would fall and they would end up very far outside God’s plan for them.   If you believe that God has one life partner lined up just for you, and you accidentally marry someone else, but also you made vows before God to that partner . . . well then, you really are between a rock and a hard place.   Some people have a term for that.  They call it God’s permissive will.  That’s God’s second best choice for you when you screw up and marry a person or buy a house or take a job other than the one God intended for you.

Many of my students fervently believed that God had an individual plan for their lives.  But they came to me because they didn’t know how to find it.  They prayed.  They studied the Bible. They listened in all the ways they knew, but they still didn’t know how to choose what would be most pleasing to God.

My answer was to offer a different framework. As we heard in Luke’s gospel, a religious person asked Jesus how to gain eternal life. That question sounds a lot like a question about finding God’s will to me. Jesus asked the man how he would answer the question based on the Bible.  The man said to love God with all you’ve got and to love your neighbor as yourself.  And Jesus said, “That’s the right answer!”

This is how I try to answer the question of finding God’s will.  I find God’s will by loving God with everything I have and by loving my neighbor as myself.  Within this framework, I still have to make hard decisions.  But I am not burdened by the sense that God has already made a choice for me and everything hinges on whether or not I can find it.  A more positive way to say that is that God entrusts me with the freedom to make good choices.

In the Garden of Eden, God told the humans that they could eat freely of every tree in the garden except one.  We have been gifted with much freedom and some limits.  If we love God and love our neighbors, then some choices will be eliminated.  We know that, not because there is some special secret plan for us as individuals, but because God’s desire for the well-being of all creation is repeated from generation to generation in Scripture.  If the decision can be boiled down to a choice between something that is loving and something that is unloving, well that’s easy.  If we are actively seeking to do God’s will, we choose what is loving. 

I told this to my students.  Some of them joyfully embraced the freedom.  A few were suspicious that I might be leading them into contemporary, liberal thinking and away from traditional theology.  The irony is that this idea is mine and it’s not new.

Perhaps you have heard of St. Augustine.  I don’t mean the city in Florida, but the African theologian who lived about 400 years after Jesus.  His writings and teachings greatly influenced the development of Christianity.  It St. Augustine who said, “Love God, and do what you will.”[1] 

Love God and drive a bus.  Love God and be an architect. Love God and raise children.  Love God and don’t raise children. The good news here is that we are free to choose. Frederick Buechner says that God calls us to the place where our deep hunger meets the world’s deep need.  We get to choose that place, that place which fulfills our need for work and purpose and meaning, as we love God and love our neighbors as ourselves.

By now, some of have undoubtedly thought of some Biblical counter-arguments. Maybe some of you are thinking of Jeremiah 29:11, which many people have memorized. That is where God says, “For surely I know the plans I have for you, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”  Right there, it says that God has a plan.  Yes, you are correct.  It does.  But this passage, like many, many others in the Bible is not addressed to an individual. It is offered to the people of Israel who are in exile,  a whole group of people enduring a very difficult time. It is about God’s plan for their ultimate hope as a people, not any about one individual life.

Some of you are thinking about a different Biblical example.  You are thinking of someone like Jonah, who God sent to the people of Ninevah.  It didn’t seem like Jonah had much choice.  He wasn’t going to have any peace until he went where God chose.  Or you might be thinking of Jesus who prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, “not my will, but thine be done.” 

To that, I would say that you are correct.  I concede the point.  It does seem that sometimes God calls some people to particular tasks.  That’s why I said that if the “God has a plan for your life” framework might be working for you and you shouldn’t change it.

Henri Nouwen wrote “when Jesus talks about faith, he means first of all to trust unreservedly that you are loved, so that you can abandon every false way of obtaining love.” [2]

Faith is trusting, as deeply, as wholeheartedly as we can, that God loves us, that we are worthy of love.  This is a process that takes most of us our whole lives.  The more we seek to know God, to love God with everything we have, the more we understand that God is love.  The more we believe that, the more we can live into our own place in that love, and the more we are free to love others as we ourselves are loved.

“Love God and do what you will” is an important framework for me.  I celebrate the freedom that I believe God has provided.

But I suspect that the question about God’s will is about decisions that are harder than choosing between a loving action and a non-loving one. What may be harder is the decision between two loving actions.  If the decision is between chocolate and strawberry, both are equally loving, feel the freedom and take our pick. 

Most decision between two good things are harder than that, aren’t they?  Sometimes the most loving action is to keep silent.  Other times, the most loving action is to speak up loudly.  The best action, the one that will bring the most love into play, is not always clear.  That is not because God has a secret plan, and we can’t find it.  It is not because we are confusing our desires with God’s desires.  It is because life is complicated, and other get to make their own choices, and none of us possesses all wisdom and knowledge. 

In addition to reading Augustine this week, I read through several essays on finding wisdom.  Christians from a variety of times and places agreed on a few things about wise decision making. These are things you already know but a reminder might be helpful.  First, these thoughtful Christians said, take your time with important decisions.  Don’t be in a hurry to make a choice.  Examine your own motivations for what is less than loving.  Get to know the neighbor you are seeking to love, so that you may discern well between what is wanted and what is needed.  Seek the counsel of a few trusted persons.  But mostly, they said, listen to yourself.  Trust the wisdom within.  Know that God loves you beyond measure and trust that love as you decide.  Whatever you ultimately choose, you will remain in the center of that love. 

Love God, and do what you will. 

Amen.

[1] Augustine of Hippo in his sermon on I John 4:4-12 https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/study/module/augustine

[2] Henri Nouwen, Letters to Marc About Jesus, (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), p. 58

7/3/22 - FOCUS Joint Summer Worship - First Church in Albany

An outdoor FOCUS summer worship service was hosted by First Church in Albany on July 3, 2022. It was broadcast over Zoom.

FOCUS was formed in 1967 as a consortium of 5 churches in downtown Albany. It now consists of 6 covenant churches: Delmar Reformed, Emmanuel Baptist, First Church in Albany, First Presbyterian Church, Trinity United Methodist Church, and Westminster Presbyterian Church. For 3 Sundays each summer, a joint worship service is hosted by one of these churches. For more information about FOCUS, go to https://www.focuschurches.net .

A link to a recording of the service may be found here: https://youtu.be/Ja5ddlq-Le4

6/5/22 - Holy Conversations - John 4:7-26

Holy Conversations

John 4:7-26

June 5, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Our Jewish siblings are celebrating Shavuot this weekend.  In ancient Israel, Shavuot happened at the time of the wheat harvest.  It was also called the Feast of Weeks, because it fell 7 weeks after Passover. Seven weeks is approximately 50 days.  The Greek word for fifty is Pentecost.    The Jewish and Christian calendars operate separately nowadays, but sometimes, our holidays still align. In 2022, Easter and Passover fell together, which is why Shavuot and Pentecost both fall on this weekend.

On that day in Jerusalem, fifty days after Jesus’ death and resurrection, there was a festival going on.  That festival already had a name in Greek and in Hebrew, but the Greek name, Pentecost, has become associated with the Christian festival from that day forward.

Something happened on that Pentecost. Something unexpected and highly unusual.  Something hard to describe.  Acts 2 tells us that some people experienced it like wind.  They felt the force of a violent wind, maybe like a hurricane.  Maybe it sounded like a freight train, as people often report the sound of a tornado.  Some people experienced it like fire – the raw power of flame which danced in the air, hot and colorful,  but somehow without consuming any thing.  Other people described it as words and language coming through something like a universal translator.  A few weeks ago, I attended a Zoom meeting with translation.  My language setting was on English.  When the speaker lapsed into Spanish, I could faintly hear them and I could see their lips moving, but in my ear, I heard the voice of the translator, speaking their words into English.  I wonder if it was like that for those people in Jerusalem. 

There was a powerful event on Pentecost.  The event felt like wind.  It felt like fire. It felt like a message you received in your birth language.  The event was visceral. It was hard to describe.  And then there was the interpretation of the event. The event happened.  And then Peter stood up to explain it. There was an event and then interpretation.

I want to suggest today that that sequence is repeated over and over again in our lives.  Something happens and then we interpret it.  Something happens and then we talk about it, we name it, we tell a story about it. It is how we do life with God.  It is how we do life in general. 

Something happened one day at a well in Sychar.  Jesus was thirsty, so he asked a Samaritan woman for water from the well. That was the event.  It was an event because Jews and Samaritans had separate drinking fountains. They had separate places of worship and separate Bibles.  They stayed as far apart from each other as they could.  Jesus didn’t stay in his place.   If he had travelled the roads his people usually did, he wouldn’t have gone through Samaria in the first place.  Then he wouldn’t have been thirsty at the well in Sychar and wouldn’t have asked this woman for a drink.  That’s why it was an event.

The woman knows it is an event and she immediately tries to interpret it. “How come you are asking me for a drink?” she says.  She is suspicious, trying to figure out his angle.  She is wondering how dangerous he is and looking for her safest way to exit. 

Jesus asks her for water.  He deliberately breaks all the rules about social engagement. Because he does that, they have the longest recorded conversation in the New Testament.  Jesus talked to her, this unnamed woman, longer than anyone else in all of the Gospels.  She is a triple outsider.[1]  She is a Samaritan, an identified religious enemy.  She is a woman.  Men and women who were unrelated kept their distance from each other in public.   There is something unusual about her marital history which also makes her suspect, outside the lines of respectability.

Today we might use the word intersectionality to describe the overlapping identities which shape her life experiences. Her relative lack of power in the world is limited by her gender and her race and her marital status.  All of that is implicitly and explicitly part of the long conversation which she has with Jesus.

This is an important conversation, a hard conversation.  They talk for a long time about deeply personal stuff and about very controversial stuff. 

Jesus starts it, by asking her for water. Think of the stories you’ve heard – about black people in this country being punished by daring to drink from white only water fountains, about farm workers in hot fields not able to share canteens or water bottles because of the fear of contamination by members of other races.  Jesus’ request is an event.  It ups the ante of tension between them. 

But Jesus doesn’t stop there.  He brings up the issue of her husband.  It is a sore subject.  She isn’t married right now, but she has had five husbands.  She probably had very little choice about that.  However it happened, it would have been the decision of the men in her life.  So even though the marriages are something that happened to her, she is somehow responsible for having had so many.  It becomes a reflection on her morality, a classic example of blaming the victim.  It isn’t polite of Jesus to bring that up. 

Maybe she is trying to turn the tables when she raises the question about where to worship.  She mentions that her people and Jesus’ people worship in two different places.  This is a controversial thing.  What they both know is that the Samaritan temple on Mt. Gerazim had been destroyed by Jewish troops about 150 years before this conversation.  Jesus will have been taught one version of that history.  The woman will know her people’s version.  It is an ugly and uncomfortable history.  She doesn’t avoid it out of politeness.  She brings it into the conversation, puts it on the table.

James Baldwin was a black, gay man, an author and activist of the last century.  He was a truth teller, one who brought uncomfortable issues into conversations about politics and history. In 1968, he testified before a US House subcommittee on Negro History and Culture.  He said, “If we are going to build a multiracial society, which is our only hope, then one has got to accept that I have learned a lot from you and a lot of it is bitter, but you have a lot to learn from me and a lot of that will be bitter. That bitterness is our only hope. That is the only way we get past it.”[2]

Two people meet at a well.  One is male and Jewish.  He has an entourage, people who look to him for leadership. The other is female and Samaritan.  She is alone and marginalized in multiple ways.  Across those differences, despite those differences, they have a conversation. 

They have a conversation which begins with vulnerability.  Jesus is thirsty. She is alone and unprotected.  Each of them takes a risk.  In this conversation, they speak, they reveal themselves and yet they also listen.  They attend to what is not said – the shared history that unites and separates them, their own individual circumstances, the personal choices which led the woman to the well at noon and Jesus to be in Samaria.  They give the conversation the time that it takes.  They stay present and authentic to each other.  They share some bitterness.

This is a Pentecostal moment.  Something happens, like the rush of wind or the dance of fire which is hard to describe, but is full of power.  This is the kind of Pentecostal moment which we desperately need to overcome and transform the detachment and distance and enmities which pervade our lives. What comes out of this conversation is transformation – for the woman and then for her village, and probably for Jesus too.

Holy conversations take time and energy. They require attention to the events of history and personal circumstance and the ways that we interpret them.  They require vulnerability and listening for differences in our shared history and continuing to listen when it is controversial or painful or offensive. 

Friends, these conversations are hard work. They don’t usually happen spontaneously.  We make them happen, by going out of our way to be in the neighborhood, by asking for a cup of water, by showing up with vulnerability and courage. 

I invite you to be alert for the opportunities to have these kinds of conversations.  The Thrive team tries to provide some of them as we grapple with books and movies on the shared history of racism.  The Exec Team will be calling us to conversations in the fall about who Emmanuel has been and is now and how God is shaping and transforming us.  I hope you will engage in those. 

And I hope that you will find other opportunities for deep and careful conversations with friends or family or neighbors or strangers. Keep on listening.  Keep on telling your truth in love.  And may the Spirit arrive in those conversations with transformational power.  Amen.

[1] Barbara Brown Taylor,  “Living By the Word:  Identity Confirmation John 4:5-42,” The Christian Century February 12, 2008  https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2008-02/identity-confirmation

[2] https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/swear-tell-truth

5/29/22 - Footprints on the Earth - Acts 1:1-11

Footprints on the Earth

Acts 1:1-11

May 29, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Image:  St. Vitale Church, Ravenna, Italy. Apse, mosaic. Early sixth century. Jesus Pantocrator.  Photo by Richard Mortel, creative commons license, https://flic.kr/p/2hm8zrX

Last weekend, we buried my mother’s ashes.  Most of you know that she died in January 2021.  That’s a delay of 16 months between her funeral and burial.  My aunt died in August 2021.   We interred her ashes last weekend as well in the same cemetery. Actually, they are in neighboring gravesites.  Each of these women had a funeral, a celebration of life, which was conducted in person and on-line.  Most family members had attended one way or another, but those of us who attended remotely couldn’t hug each other, couldn’t cry together, couldn’t have the one-on-one conversations that are so important. We got to do some of that this time.

We waited this long to inter my Mom’s ashes because of Covid and supply chain delays.  I had hoped that by this time, the tombstone, which was ordered a year ago, would be in place, but the granite is still on back-order. Many other people are also still waiting. 

Sometime last winter, we realized that there were going to be two family trips to the cemetery in the near future, one for my mom and one for my aunt.  I am not sure who suggested that we combine it into one event, but my father and my uncle accepted the suggestion, so we gathered, about 30 of us, with representatives from my mother’s family of origin and my aunt’s family of origin and the Donley family into which they each married.  I offered scripture and prayers at the cemetery. It felt right and good, an important and necessary stage of saying good-bye. It also felt strange and awkward, to be doing this more than a year after the funeral and to be attending to the grief for two wonderful women at the same time.

Grief -- saying good-bye for the last time, sharing that with others who knew and loved the one you saying good-bye to, remembering the highs and lows of their life, trying to hold on to the best memories – all of that swirls around us at times like this.  All of that swirls around the scene that Luke describes as Jesus leaves his disciples for the last time. 

Some of them don’t seem to understand what is happening. They watched Jesus die.  They have come to terms, as much as a person can, with the reality of his resurrection, and now, they think – now is the time when Jesus is going to really make things right.  “Is this the time when you’re going to make Israel sovereign again, Jesus?   Now, now, are you going to throw off Roman control and set us free?”  That’s the question they’re asking as Jesus disappears from their sight.  He was leading a liberation movement, after all, and I guess it seems only logical that having defeated death, Jesus’s next task would be to overcome Rome.  They are ready for next steps.  Maybe they are anticipating what they see as the real fulfillment of his mission, and . . . then, suddenly,  Jesus is gone. 

There are rituals for mourning, expectations for what to do at a funeral and at a cemetery, and even though Covid may forced us to adapt, we still understand the basic protocol.  But there is no established protocol for an Ascension.  It’s hard to blame the disciples for standing there looking up with their mouths hanging open.  Jesus has left and returned before.  Maybe he’ll be back again in just a minute.

That’s when the two men in white, presumably angels, ask why they’re just standing there.  Only a few verses earlier Jesus had told them, not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait.  Those might feel like contradictory messages – Jesus said “Just wait.  Don’t leave Jerusalem.”  The angels say “Why are you just standing there?”

Perhaps we can identify.  As we inhabit the space between full covid lockdown and life as we knew it before March 2020. As we attend to the messengers who say “wait, be vigilant, it isn’t over yet” and those who say “don’t just stand there, get on with life, go do something.”

Watching Jesus fade from sight, the disciples may feel abandoned, left to carry on without him.  They aren’t ready.  They need more time, more answers.  They want more of his stories and his laughter and his reassuring presence.  What comes next?  Who will they be without Jesus in their midst?

As we hear the anguish of people who are suffering, as we watch evil appear to win in Ukraine and Buffalo and Uvalde, as we feel overwhelmed by the task of caring for so much need and the enormity of making any kind of difference, we may also feel that God has abandoned us.

The disciples want to know when and where.  They ask “is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”  Jesus’ answer has two parts. The first part is that timing is known only to God.  It’s not your business. Humans don’t know everything. Get used to it. 

The second part is that it’s not only about Israel. Jesus says “you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”  This is an outline for the entire book of Acts.  The disciple’s next steps will be to begin their ministry where they last saw Jesus, in Jerusalem, but it will keep expanding to places they never went when Jesus was on earth.  They will keep discovering that the reign of God is much wider than they ever expected. 

Many artists have tried to capture the Ascension. Paintings and stained glass from across the centuries portray Jesus among the clouds. I appreciate this black and white woodcut by Albrecht Durer.  In it, Jesus is barely visible. We see the hem of his robes and the bottom of his feet at the top of the frame. The center of the woodcut is a hill.  And if you look closely, you can see two footprints.  They are the marks left by the feet of Jesus.

Barbara Brown Taylor suggests that this is Durer’s response to the question “why do you stand looking up into heaven? Look at these footprints here on the earth.” [1]

Why are you looking up to heaven?  The focus is here.  My best work was here.  You will be my witnesses here, on the earth, all over it.

Several years ago, a young woman – I’ll call her Susan – had an opportunity to spend a summer in Calcutta, India, where she worked in the homes of Mother Teresa. Susan had prepared for months, with so much leading up to this moment when she would work alongside Mother Teresa, one of her idols, maybe holding the hands of those who were nearing the end or running programs for children that would help them to know that they were the beloved of God.

Only when she arrived, Mother Teresa wasn't there. Susan learned that her idol would be spending those months on an international tour. And then when she reported for work her first day, she was placed in the kitchen, washing pots. And then the next day in the laundry, washing sheets. This went on for weeks and she was frustrated. So, she asked one of her supervisors, "Hey, I've been spending all of my time washing pots and cleaning sheets and folding bandages. I came here to work with Mother Teresa. What does Mother Teresa do when she's here?" And the supervisor said, "Well, when she's here, Mother Teresa cleans sheets, she folds bandages, and she washes pots."[2]

I feel Susan’s frustration. To continue with daily work, even the daily work of caring for the needs of others, doesn’t seem enough, not nearly enough.  And yet, it is important.

And I want to note that sometimes, it is appropriate to disrupt that daily work. Mother Teresa left it at times to go out on tour.  The disciples allowed Jesus to disrupt their ordinary lives and re-order them in profound ways.  Please don’t hear me saying that we should stick to our safe routines. What I do want to say is that doing what we are called to do, over and over again, with love and good humor – that is faithful and good work.  And it is the way that the good news of Jesus has always been spread – with one courageous encounter here and another act of loving kindness there.

We remember that Jesus talked about inconspicuous beginnings like leaven hidden in the dough or the tiny mustard seed. On the day when he left the earth, he told his disciples, “This is bigger than you realize.  Start here where you are and keep going to Judea, Samaria and the ends of the earth.” 

The following words were written by Father Ken Untener in 1979.  They were written in appreciation for the work of priests like Oscar Romero who had been faithful in big and small ways and who died without knowing the impact they had had.

Father Untener wrote

It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is beyond our vision. . . .
This is what we are about: We plant seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something, and to do it well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for God's grace to enter and to do the rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.[3]

Why are you looking up?  The focus is down here; our life is down here; our most authentic life is here in the midst of all the messiness and frailty and sin and violence and need and unselfishness and kindness and joy.  May God grant us wisdom and courage and hope for the living of these days. 

[1] The Rev. Dr. Barbara K. Lundblad “Footprints on the Earth” Ascension Sunday May 08, 2005, as posted on http://www.day1.com

[2] This story comes from the Rev. Alan Sherouse, as relayed in his sermon Walking Downhill 

https://day1.org/weekly-broadcast/5d9b820ef71918cdf2003e8b/view

[3] http://www.romerotrust.org.uk/romero-prayer

5/15/22 - Called to Life - John 5:25-29; Acts 5:12-19

Called to Life

John 5:25-29 Acts 5:12-19        

May 15, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Kathy Donley

Image:  Cathedral of St. Giovanni in Laterano, Rome, Italy. Apse, mosaic. Fourth to thirteenth centuries. Baptism cross. Photo by Deb Nystrom, October 2018 creative commons license, https://www.flickr.com/photos/stella12/46020766322

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZqqpS2dJzs

I found a question in my notes that surprised me.  I did some Bible study on our two scripture passages early this week.  What I usually do is to read some commentaries, maybe some other people’s sermons, and take a few notes. Then I let my brain mull things over for several days and then come back to write the sermon.  This week, when I came back to my notes, I found a question that I didn’t remember writing.  I honestly don’t know if this was my question or a question posed by someone else. I usually do a better job with note-taking. 

Anyway, the question I found in my notes is this:  “When abundant life is found, is there always a super religious person who is upset about it?”

It seems to me that the answer is usually yes.  Whenever life breaks forth, whenever someone finds liberation or grace or forgiveness or acceptance, it often seems that someone else protests.  And often, the protestor is a highly religious person who claims that the new life violates some natural order, or God’s will.

When American women found new life in the right to vote, some religious people said that it would put the moral health of the nation in danger.  At the time of desegregation, when African American people were legally free to move through spaces formerly restricted to whites only, religious people and churches actively opposed them.  They wrote local laws calling for the arrest of any black person who attempted to attend a white church. 

Over the last many decades, gay and lesbian and trans people have come out of the tomb of the closet and enjoyed more abundant living in many ways. And the church has often resisted that.  You might know that this month, a new denomination was launched from within the United Methodist Church.   After years of debate on same-sex marriage and the ordination of openly gay pastors, the conservative Global Methodist Church could wait no longer to separate from Methodist siblings who would honor and celebrate the fullness of gender and sexuality as God’s gifts in human life. 

In John’s gospel, Jesus healed a man who had been ill for 38 years. He did it on the Sabbath, which was a no-no.  And predictably, some super religious people got upset.  When they confronted Jesus, he claimed that he had God’s blessing, that this was God’s life-giving power at work.  So then they were upset that he claimed to speak for God. 

Our reading includes Jesus’ response.  He says, “Very truly, I tell you, the hour is coming and is now here, when the dead will hear  . . . and those who hear will live.”  He says that the time is coming when those who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out. 

What might those graves be?  Graves like poverty and domestic violence, the need to always be right, addiction, undervaluing our own worth.  What are the tombs from which Christ calls us to life?  Tombs like white supremacy, transphobia, an abusive childhood, capitalism, misogyny, toxic theology, war. 

Wilda Gladney writes “Between the resurrection of Jesus and the final resurrection, the Church is called to life, a life apart from all of the dead and death-dealing things that would prevent us from living fully in Christ.” [1]

Jesus said, “I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly.”  We are called out of deadly and death-dealing tombs, called to life.

One of the links between Jesus’ earthly ministry and post-resurrection gatherings of the first Christians is the presence of healings.  In Acts 5, we have one of Luke’s summary statements about the early church  -- great numbers of believers are being added and great numbers of people are coming in from everywhere to be healed.  The healing power is so profound that you might even be cured if you can just position yourself so that Peter’s shadow will fall on you. 

Modern people tend to struggle with passages like this.  It doesn’t fit our worldview for coping with disease or injury.  It sounds like magic or superstition, not something real enough to effect lasting healing.  If we think about it too long, we might doubt its truthfulness, but we don’t want to call into question the rest of the book of Acts, so we may gloss over this section.  This text is not in the lectionary, by the way. 

Justo Gonzalez is a Cuban-American theologian and church historian.  He argues that if we cannot let ourselves be open to the miraculous, then that serves the interests of the maintaining the status quo. He says that there are those whose only hope is in a radical change from the way things are. If all that is to be will only be the result of what already is, there is no reason to hope for a new order; and without that hope, the struggle to break free of the tomb loses momentum.[2]

If government forces kill a journalist and then representatives of that same government attack the mourners at her funeral because they are disturbing the peace, the best hope for change must come from beyond the status quo.

If the police in this country kill black people for driving while black or walking while black or living while black and then, time and time again,  the police investigate and exonerate themselves, hope for change must come from elsewhere. 

The hope for change, the possibility of radical disruption, is found in resurrection and we see it through the lens of miraculous healing in Acts 5.  Powerful change is happening in Jerusalem.  The group of people gathering at the edge of the temple is larger every week.  Within the Jesus movement, they are finding healing and wholeness.  They are coming into a more abundant life.  And everyone is amazed and impressed. 

But not everyone is joining them.  Acts 5:13 has this curious statement “none of the others dared to join them.”   It doesn’t say who these others are and it doesn’t say why they are keeping their distance.  Scholars offer two possibilities.  One possibility is that the others refers to those who believe in Jesus, but are afraid to join the group publicly because of what happened earlier.  What happened earlier was that Peter and John were arrested and held overnight and told to cease and desist.  Of course they didn’t stop and they were arrested again just after this. 

The other possibility is that the others are non-believers who admire those in the Jesus movement, but they feel the pressure of their social and religious traditions and aren’t courageous enough to break with them. 

Whoever they are, their presence is felt enough that Luke mentions them.  It is another small reminder that the generous, loving power of God is likely to be resisted by some who prefer the status quo and some who are entombed by it.  Or to put it another way, whenever someone somewhere embraces the abundance of life that Jesus offers, there is likely to be a super religious person who is upset about it. 

Those who gathered on Solomon’s Porch were proactive.  They were engaged in healing and teaching, in sharing the good news of Jesus.  They were actively joining the work of God as it swept through their world.  And there were others who admired them, but kept their distance.  They heard Jesus’ voice, but chose not to come out from the grave.

Stephanie Spellers is an Episcopal priest.  Several years ago, she began to serve with others in her denomination in a focused way to lead people into more deeply following Jesus and living life in abundance.  They developed some practices called the Way of Love and the Jesus-Shaped Life.  They thought that the Spirit of God was at work and that there was going to be an important opening, a break in the status quo and they wanted to be ready.  They thought it might take a couple of decades. 

And then the pandemic came. Then came the murder of George Floyd and a new sense of racial reckoning.  And Rev. Spellers said, “If our churches were ever going to follow Jesus in his way of self-giving love, if we had a chance of decentering off self and empire and recentering on God, if we hoped to turn and become even a little more the beloved community Jesus inaugurated – this might be our shot. . . . Many of us are praying that the church has indeed arrived at a point when—thanks to disruption and decline—Christians have less to lose or to prove and can choose to pour ourselves out in love for the world.”[3]

Church life all over the world has been disrupted.  Churches are recognizing the numerical and spiritual decline which had been happening for years, but which become glaringly obvious as our buildings emptied out during the pandemic.

Is it possible that we could see that some forms of church were like graves?  Is it possible that we can hear Jesus calling us to step out from those tombs to be vibrant, self-giving, world-changing people who embrace life in all its fullness?

I started with this question “When abundant life is found, is there always a super religious person who is upset about it?”

I’d like to ask a better question of myself.  I’d like to ask if abundant life is to be found, in this moment, then what am I doing to embrace it?  What are the true loves and concerns around which I organize my life?  Am I actively joining the movement of the Spirit for healing and wholeness?  Are you?

“Very truly, I tell you,” Jesus said, “the hour is coming and is now here, when the dead will hear  . . . and those who hear will live.”

Between the resurrection of Jesus and the final resurrection, between the past and the future, we are called to life.  Thanks be to God.

[1] Wilda C Gafney, A Woman’s Lectionary for the Whole Church Year W, (NY: Church Publishing, 2021)  p. 181

[2] Justo L. Gonazalez, Acts: The Gospel of the Spirit (Maryknoll, NY:  Orbis Books, 2001) pp.84-85

[3] Stephanie Spellers. The Church Cracked Open: Disruption, Decline and New Hope for the Beloved Community,  (New York:  Church Publishing Incorporated, 2021)  p. 151, 149

5/8/22 - Treasure in Clay Jars - Luke 7:18-23; 2 Cor 4:7-12

Treasure in Clay Jars

Luke 7:18-23, 2 Cor 4:7-12

May 8, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Image:  6th century mosaic Transfiguration in Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy.

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpzplSQNYc8  

The bulletin covers for this Eastertide season reflect some of the earliest surviving Christian art.  You might recognize today’s image, because I have used it before.  If you go into almost any Christian church today, you will find a cross or a crucifix.  It may be large, even life-size, mounted on a wall or suspended.  It may be smaller, like the one that rests on our communion table.  In many churches, you will find more than one cross.  You probably expect to find it there.   It might even surprise you to know that it wasn’t always like that.  For the first thousand years of Christianity, the evidence is that the cross was largely absent from church art and architecture.   The focus was not on the death of Jesus, but on his resurrection. They believed that the resurrection had re-opened Paradise on earth, returning the world to the beauty in which it was first created.  Paradise was to be found on this earth, permeated and blessed by the Spirit of God.[1]

That is the finding of two clergywomen, Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, who studied sanctuaries of the oldest existing church buildings, dating from the fourth and fifth centuries, and the writings of the theologians and church leaders from that same time period.  Their description and interpretation of some significant pieces of art will be on the front and back panels of the bulletin each week.

I was reminded of their research at the Alliance of Baptists gathering two weeks ago. Rita Nakashima Brock was one of two excellent keynote speakers.  She delivered a lot of insightful content very quickly in each of her presentations.   In one presentation, she fired off a list of 8 assumptions that underpin how people understand the cross and why she doesn’t share those assumptions.  I couldn’t write fast enough to get them all into my notes, but I got some of them. 

One in particular came to mind as I looked at the two readings for today.  Dr. Nakashima Brock said that there is an assumption that evil must be overcome and ended in order for good to flourish.  Evil must be overcome and ended before good can flourish.  She pointed out that the serpent was in the garden from the beginning when God pronounced it good. 

That’s the starting point of today’s sermon – Good can flourish, even in the presence of evil.  Here’s a hint:  I’m going to end the sermon where I begin, so if you want to tune out, now would be the time.

The first contact that Luke describes between John the Baptist and Jesus happens in today’s reading. Now I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking that John baptized Jesus, so this can’t be first contact.  And you might be right.  But it is the first contact that Luke describes.  Luke indicates that John was baptizing people and he indicates that Jesus was baptized, but he never explicitly says that John baptized John.  It is only implied.  And he tells us that Herod Antipas put John in prison, before he mentions that Jesus was baptized. So, he doesn’t necessarily tell the story in chronological order. 

Here's why that might matter – if the story is being told out of chronological order, then this encounter with John’s disciples might have happened before the baptism.  John’s whole life seems to have been spent preparing the way for the Messiah.  And this incident might represent John’s hopeful exploration of possibility.  “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

John’s ministry style was fire and brimstone preaching with a side helping of political protest.  Jesus’ style was different.  His approach was raising awareness with his teachings and providing direct services with his healings.  There was a political edge to Jesus’ work, but at the beginning, it was more low key than John’s.  As the word spread about Jesus,  John may have wondered whether Jesus just might be the Messiah, but he seems to have expected the Messiah to be more like an old-time fiery prophet.

Jesus tells John’s disciples to tell John what they see and hear.  One scholar writes, “That will mean, first and foremost, that they must take in the suffering around them. They must stop and see the pain on their neighbors’ faces; they must make time to hear the hard stories of strangers. In the process, they will see the hope that is born in someone who is given a second chance: a chance to walk, a chance to see, a chance to live in community after long years of isolation, a chance to live again.” [2]

Jesus says to tell John about many kinds of healings and to tell John that the poor have good news preached to them.  John may recognize an allusion to Isaiah 61 which lists several prophetic tasks.  If he is in prison, he will notice what Jesus has omitted, because Isaiah 61 includes “release to the prisoners”.  He may receive the message that Jesus isn’t coming to spring him from jail.

John will have to listen to what is reported back to him and evaluate whether or not it provides evidence that Jesus is the Messiah.  And in the process, he may have to revise what he thinks the Messiah is.  That is probably why Jesus says “Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”

Jesus may be the One, the One John was hoping for, but he is something different than the Messiah John was expecting.  Blessed is John if he can accept Jesus as Jesus is. 

Baptist scholar Alan Culpepper says that we often share John’s experience. “We think we know who Jesus is, what he is doing and what he stands for, and then we are forced by experience to revise our understandings:  are you the one, or should we look for another?”[3]

When Jesus doesn’t meet our expectations, we may revise our understandings.  But sometimes, we do take offense.  We reject a new understanding, we cling to expectations that are not completely true but somehow seem more comfortable. When Jesus doesn’t meet our expectations, we may believe that evil has won. We may give in to despair.

If we are tempted to doubt the power of resurrection, if we are feeling that evil keeps rearing its head, even in ways that we thought were long resolved, then let us remember Jesus’ words to John and look for the places of healing, the places where the poor find good news.  Let us remember Dr. Brock’s assertion that good can flourish even in the midst of evil.

I heard a story from Mariupol this week.  A person came out from a bomb shelter and immediately saw an empty car with keys in the ignition.  He watched the car for 2 hours, but the owner never appeared. So he loaded his family in and drove them to relatives in a safer area of Ukraine. In the glove box, he found the owner’s phone number.  He called the owner and said, “Sorry I stole your car.  I saved my family.” 

The owner said, “Thank God.  Don’t worry.  I have 4 cars.  I took my family out.  The rest of the cars I left filled with fuel in different places with the keys in the ignition and my phone number in the glove box.  I received calls back from all the cars.  There will be peace.  Take care of yourself.”

The evil in Ukraine is monstrous.  It is happening on a scale that I can’t fathom. But every day, I hear stories of courage and kindness, of people risking themselves for others. Good can flourish even in the midst of evil.

Writing to the church in Corinth, Paul lists a number of difficulties that he has faced, including beatings, imprisonment, sleepless nights, riots and hunger. Sometimes, we think we know who Jesus is, what he is doing and what he stands for, and then we are forced by experience to revise our understandings. When our experiences don’t meet our expectations, we may believe that evil has won.

But Paul says “we have this treasure in earthen vessels.”  We carry the power of God within our frail, human existence.  We might be oppressed, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; knocked down, but not destroyed. 

There is a big difference between being down, which we will certainly be, and being out, which Paul assures us we will not be.  We find strength in the power unleashed on the world in the resurrection of Jesus. 

When we look for Messiah, Jesus points us to acts of healing and wholeness, to good news for the poor, to second chances for those who desperately need them.  Our lives may be easier, more convenient and involve less suffering when they are shallow and unconnected, when we do not allow ourselves to be touched by the pain and death of others.[4]  But we follow the One who entered our world and suffered with and for us.   

John Lewis’s memoir is titled Walking With the Wind.  The title comes from an incident in his childhood when lovely summer day turned into a fierce storm. 

"About fifteen of us children were outside my aunt Seneva’s house, playing in her dirt yard,” he wrote. Aunt Seneva gathered them inside the little shotgun house. Their laughter and play had given way to quiet terror. The wind howled, the rains pounded, and the house began to shake, then to sway, and the wooden floor boards upon which they stood began to bend.

“And then,” he wrote, “a corner of the room started lifting up…This storm was actually pulling the house toward the sky” with all of them inside.

Aunt Seneva instructed the kids line up and hold hands and to walk together toward the corner of the room

that was rising. Back and forth they went from the kitchen to the front, “walking with the wind, holding that trembling house down with the weight of [their] small bodies.”

Lewis reflects, “More than half a century has passed since that day, and it has struck me more than once over those many years that our society is not unlike the children in that house, rocked again and again by the winds of one storm or another, the walls around us seeming at times as if they might fly apart.”

“It seemed that way in the 1960s, at the height of the civil rights movement, when America itself felt as if it might burst at the seams—so much tension, so many storms. But the people of conscience never left the house. They never ran away. They stayed, they came together and they did the best they could, clasping hands and moving toward the corner of the house that was the weakest. And then another corner would lift, and we would go there.”

He continues, “And eventually, inevitably, the storm would settle, and the house would still stand. But we knew another storm would come, and we would have to do it all over again. And we did. And we still do, all of us. You and I.

Children holding hands, walking with the wind. . . . "[5]

Beloved ones, this is the spiritual reality on which we stake our lives – God is in Christ, restoring Paradise and reconciling the world.  We have this treasure, the extraordinary power of God, in earthen vessels.  Even in the face of persistent evil, good flourishes as we walk with the Spirit.  Thanks be to God.

[1] Rita Nakashima Brock, Rebecca Ann Parker, Saving Paradise:  How Christianity Traded Love of  This World for Crucifixion and Empire, (Boston:  Beacon Press, 2008), p. xv

[2] Margaret Lamotte Torrence in Feasting on the Gospels, Luke, Volume 1, Cynthia Jarvis and E. Elizabeth Johnson, editors, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2014)   p. 196

[3] Alan Culpepper, The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IX, (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 1995), p. 162

[4] Mitzi Minor, 2 Corinthians:  Smyth and Helwys Bible Commentary, (Macon, GA:  Smyth and Helwys, 2009), p. 101.

[5](John Lewis, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), pp. xvi–xvii

5/1/22 - God of the Living - Matthew 22:28-33

God of the Living

Matthew 22:28-33

May 1, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; 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=SRLhxMd47ts

Easter comes around every year.  The concept of resurrection, the idea that Jesus was all the way dead when God restored him to life, has been part of the story of Jesus for about 2000 years now.  Even after all that time, it is not necessarily easy for us to understand or believe. Imagine how incredible that task must have been for Jesus’ first disciples. 

Jesus was executed and everyone was in terrified shock.   On Sunday morning, they discovered the empty tomb.  Some of them had an encounter with Jesus and had their minds blown by the idea of resurrection.  Others didn’t share that experience and couldn’t bring themselves to believe it, not at first anyway.  But eventually, most of the inner circle disciples did see Jesus, even if only briefly, even if, like the two on the road to Emmaus, they didn’t recognize him at first. 

Jesus was dead and gone . . . and then alive and present . . . and then gone again, back to God. As the disciples tried to make sense of it all, I imagine that they went back over everything Jesus had ever said about life or death or resurrection. 

Surely they would have quickly remembered the conversation with the Sadducees that took place just a few days before Jesus’ death. 

It was intended as a trick question.  The Sadducees were a group within first-century Judaism who believed that this life was all there was. They followed the Torah with great earnestness and could not believe in resurrection because they could not find any scriptural support for it.    In contrast, the Pharisees were the more liberal group who were more likely to accept the idea of life after death that was developing at that time.  The Pharisees and Sadducees operated from different power bases and were kind of each other’s out-group.  So, the question that the Sadducees ask is sarcastic and mocking of Jesus and the Pharisees for believing resurrection.

The question is based on the custom of levirate marriage or brother-in-law marriage.  If a man died before having children, then his brother had an obligation to marry the first man’s widow.  This was intended primarily to provide heirs for the dead man, but it also provided some protection for a woman who had no husband and no children to care for her in old age. So, the Sadducees push the rule of levirate marriage to absurdity.  They ask a hypothetical question.  They say, “What if a man died without children and each of his 6 brothers married her in order and each of them died, also without having children —Jesus, when the resurrection happens, whose wife is will she be?”

This ridiculous question is intended to discredit Jesus. If he answers that a particular brother will be her husband in the resurrection, that doesn’t work, because each brother had equal claim on her during their earthly marriage.  If he says that she will be the wife of all seven, that makes even less sense.  So, perhaps they were hoping that Jesus would see the error of his ways.  Maybe they thought he would throw up his hands and say “You got me.  I can’t answer your hypothetical question.  The whole idea of resurrection is preposterous.”[1] 

Of course, Jesus doesn’t do that.  He refuses to engage with their absurd hypothetical. He says “you just don’t get it. Your categories are all wrong.”

They want to know to whom the woman will belong in heaven, which of her earthly husbands will have control of her there. They cannot imagine resurrection as anything more than a continuation of life as it is on earth. 

What the disciples begin to understand after Easter, is what Jesus has been teaching them all along about the nature of power.  Resurrection power is not just life-preserving.  It is also life-transforming.  In the resurrection, Jesus was saying, women will not be given away as if they are property.  In the resurrection, they will be persons, just as men are persons.  

Resurrection does not lead to more of the same.  Resurrection is a shift to something completely new.  The resurrection of Jesus is the event from God’s future breaking into the present. Resurrection transforms life as we know it. It marks the end of the oppression of women, for starters, but also the end of all oppression.  It ends of the power of death itself, death in all its forms.[2] 

This was hard for people to understand. It’s not necessarily any easier for us to understand now.  We are so well acquainted with death and fear and suffering and oppression.

Conceiving of an existence without them is beyond us most of the time.   

Mark Twain said “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”    

It seems to me that much of Jesus’ teaching was aimed at refocusing the disciples’ imagination.  

John Senior is a professor at Wake Forest Divinity School.  He writes “There is nothing wrong with making sense of life from within the human perspective. . . . The mistake, however, is to insist that all that life can mean is contained within the horizon of our of own experience. . . . There is profoundly more to life than just the human experience of it, even if that means we cannot wrap our heads around it. Death is not an ultimate condition for Christians, and it does not permanently bind the experience of life, and meaning.”[3] 

Every Easter, we tell the story of resurrection.  It’s a story about a different kind of power, a story that turns our experience inside out and right-side-up. It’s so hard to comprehend that we tell it over and over again, refocusing our imagination a little more each time. 

When the Sadducees struggle with this, Jesus sends them back to the scriptures.  He says “Haven’t you read that God is the God of the living?”  They know and trust the Bible.  It is a key part of their human experience.  So he invites them to read it again, with eyes and ears focused by a new imagination.  

Our call to worship was from Psalm 78.  It speaks of teaching the next generation that which is life-giving.  The story of Jesus, the story of Easter is life-giving and we keep on telling it to the next generation. We keep in mind that God is the God of the living.  God is alive and in our midst. Resurrection is not just more of the same. God was never bound by first century ideas about marriage where women were property.  Neither is God constrained by the human experience of the twentieth century or of the twenty-first.  God is the God of the living. 

A few of us attended the Alliance of Baptists gathering on-line last week.  There we heard a sermon offered in dialogue between two pastors, Russ and John.  The focus of this gathering was on understanding the cross.  In their sermon, John and Russ looked back on how their own theology of the cross had changed.   

They recalled an event from 25 years ago.  It was at another Baptist gathering. At that time, they sat and talked after their children had gone to bed.  The gathering was in a hotel. They each sat in the threshold of their hotel rooms, where they were near to their sleeping children in case they were needed.  In that space, across the hall from each other,  they talked about things that they had been taught that were no longer life-giving.  They were committed Christians, already pastors even, but they were re-evaluating everything.  Today we would say that they were deconstructing their theology, but I’m not sure that word was trendy then.  They did not yet have language for the understandings which were emerging, but together they were refocusing each other’s imaginations.  In the sermon offered to us, they remarked that the children who had been asleep in the hotel rooms are now adults.  As they looked back, what Russ and John hoped was that the theology they passed on to the next generation was more life-giving, less death-dealing, than the one they had inherited, the one they had to dismantle.   

“Behold! I am doing a new thing” God says through the prophet Isaiah.  In resurrection,  the future has broken into the present.  Heaven and earth are joined together.  May it be so for you and for me.

[1] Thomas G. Long, Matthew:  The Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 1997), p. 252

[2] J. Peter Holmes, in Feasting on the Gospels, Luke, Volume 2, Cynthia Jarvis and E. Elizabeth Johnson, editors, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2014), p.210-11. 

[3] John E. Senior, in Feasting on the Gospels, Luke, Volume 2, Cynthia Jarvis and E. Elizabeth Johnson, editors, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2014), p.209-210

4/17/22 - Changed - Luke 24:1-12

Changed

Luke 24:1-12

April 17, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

A few weeks ago, I had a remarkable conversation with Judah, who is 9 ½.  I asked if we could let you overhear our conversation and he agreed.  We have some notes in front of us, to make sure that we remember it right together, but what we’re about to share was a spontaneous, in-the-moment conversation. 

We were reading from Matthew’s gospel where it says: ‘Who do people say that the Son of Man is?’ And they said, ‘Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.’ He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.’ 

Judah:  “But how could Jesus be John the Baptist? John baptized Jesus. They’re two different people.”

Kathy:  That’s a good question, Judah.  John did baptize Jesus, but later John died. So, some people think that Jesus is John the Baptist come back to life. 

Judah:  How did John die?

 Kathy:  He was executed by Herod Antipas, the ruler of that area. 

Judah:  But John was baptizing people and that’s a good thing.  Why would someone kill him for doing good?

Kathy:  In addition to baptizing people, John was a preacher.   One of the things he preached about was some bad stuff that Herod Antipas was doing.  People were listening to John and  not approving of Herod.  So Herod killed him to shut him up.

Judah:  How come, when you follow Jesus, it leads you to the path of execution?

Kathy:  I don’t have an easy answer for that question, Judah.   But you are right, when you follow Jesus, it can lead you to the path of execution.  . . . So, I’m looking at the rest of the Bible passage.  Jesus asks his disciple Peter, “But what about you, who do you say that I am?”  And I wonder if you can imagine that Jesus is standing right here in front us and he says “Judah, who do you say that I am?”  What would your answer be?

Judah:  You are the Holy One, the Human One, the Living God,  The True One. You’re the One who we know we’re safe with, the One we trust.

Thank you Judah.

When Judah asked me how John the Baptist died, I went into Biblical scholar mode. I went into historian mode, explaining about all the King Herods in the Bible. Judah patiently listened to all that, but then he got to the heart of the matter.  He asked the theological question – “how come when you follow Jesus, it leads to the path of execution?”

What a great question.  How come Jesus is so threatening?  How is that a poor rabbi who preached love and justice was so threatening?    Jesus said that the two most important principles were to love God with everything you’ve got and to love your neighbor as yourself.  These were not new ideas.  Jesus was quoting scripture which was already old in his time.  He was reminding ordinary people and people in power what they already knew. Jesus practiced what he preached.  He loved his friends and his detractors.  He kept on loving his enemies, even as they mocked him, beat him and killed him. 

How come, when you follow Jesus, it leads to the path of execution? 

It was the path feared by his disciples.  Crucifixion was intended to terrorize and it did.  Fear is incredibly powerful.  We are hardwired for fight or flight. The disciples mostly flee.  After Jesus is arrested, they are largely absent from the story.  Except for Peter, who follows from a distance and lingers outside, trying to learn what is happening.  But when he is confronted, first he denies that he even knows Jesus and then he also flees.

Early in the morning, on the first day of the week, they are still afraid.  Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women wake early, if they ever slept.  The memories of Jesus’ horrific last hours persist as heart-wrenching grief and traumatizing sights and sounds that won’t leave their minds.  Have you seen the photographs of survivers in Ukraine, waiting for the bodies of their loved ones to be recovered?  They are just waiting,  standing watch, because there is nothing else that can be done.  Their anguish is probably an accurate reflection of  the mood of the Galilean women. 

They go to the tomb early.  Perhaps hoping for the cover of darkness.  There are no men among them.  Maybe because preparing a body for burial is considered women’s work. Maybe because the authorities are less likely to concern themselves with women who associate with a criminal.    

They go, in spite of their fear, because they love Jesus. Just as Joseph of Arimathea had loved Jesus enough to ask for his body and buried it in his own tomb. It is an expression of loyalty and kinship.  Taking the spices to the tomb, as the women do, is a gesture normally offered by close family members.[1]

As Judah said, Jesus is the one we know we’re safe with, the one we trust. Following Jesus can put you on the path to execution, but somehow, at the same time, Jesus is the one we’re safe with.  It’s a paradox.    

This is where we live our lives, balanced between fear and deep trust.  Or its where I live my life anyway. I have noticed something in my sermons, especially over the last year.  I’ve been using the word “courage” a lot.  I’m always preaching to myself first and now that I’ve become aware of the pattern, I’m wondering what it is that I need to summon courage for?  What is the bravest thing I need to be doing right now? 

The women start off at early dawn. A more poetic way to translate that phrase is as “deep dawn”.  Poet and theologian James Lowry says that deep dawn is that indefinable time between darkness and light, that moment when everything you have been taught to believe about hope is true or it is a lie.[2]   It is the time when change is possible, when our defenses are lowered, when perceptions can shift.  At deep dawn, they journey toward the graveyard, looking for a corpse.  Then everything, every thing, changes. 

Two beings appear.  We would call them angels. And on the basis of their appearance and their words, the women are transformed. They are no longer grieving and traumatized, no longer fearing the path of execution, but somehow they are confident, secure, deeply trusting that their hope is true. 

This is the change that I want, maybe you want it too. The ability to live above my fear, beyond my anxiety, to know that no matter what, Jesus is the one I am safe with.

The women know it.  They didn’t when they woke.  But now they do. 

The women stuck around.  They watched Jesus carry his cross to Golgotha. They saw him die.  They waited and watched Joseph take down his body.  They saw exactly which tomb he was laid in.  And they know that he is not there any more.  They believe the angels when they say “He is risen.”  They know from first-hand experience.

The balance shifts from fear of execution to deep confident trust.  It shifts because of resurrection.  It happens in a moment. It happens at deep dawn.  Every thing, every thing changes. The women see and hear and trust. They know.

But the other disciples do not know.  The others are still afraid.  Have you ever tried to convince someone not to be afraid?  Imagine how the women tried to frame this announcement

“There’s something we need to tell you.”

 “Maybe you should sit down.” 

Mary and Mary and Joanna – what they have to say is so important. It is every thing.  But the men dismiss it as nonsense, too trivial even to bother them. 

The men resist it when the women tell them. Because listening might require change and change is hard.  Even considering it might evoke hope and hope can lead to disappointment.  

First century Galilean women weren’t considered credible witnesses in court.  The culture treated them as perpetual children, always needing to be under the guidance of a man – a father, husband, son, or uncle.  They didn’t have status or authority or credentials, and so were easily dismissed. 

We are not so very different.  We often resist messages that could change everything.   We also may find it hard to listen to voices outside our experience, voices with first-hand knowledge, those whose truth comes from their trauma.  We are listening to the voices of those suffering in Ukraine.  I am grateful for that.  But how well are we listening to those from Honduras who are some of the world’s first climate refugees?  They have stories to tell of hunger and poverty from year after year of drought.  They and those from El Salvador and Guatemala are fleeing the same kind of violent power and sexual assault and brutality as those in Ukraine.  The stories I have heard from Central American migrants are directly parallel to those being reported in Ukraine.  Our government is responding to the needs of the Ukranians, as we should, but we have steadfastly ignored and dismissed the voices of our southern neighbors for years. 

What other voices do we resist?  How well do we listen to Black Lives Matter activists who describe living in a reality distinct from white people’s reality?  How well do we listen to those who live in poverty?  How easy is it to disregard the voices of children, because they don’t have authority or credentials?

Did I mention that Judah is 9 ½?  Entirely on his own, he arrived at the truth that following Jesus puts you on the path to execution and that also Jesus is the one we know we can trust. 

Everything shifts for the women because of their first-hand experience.  For the men, it begins when they listen to those with an experience beyond their own. If we seek transformation, we may need to listen deeply to experiences well beyond what we already know.

Between the fear of execution and deep, confident trust lies resurrection. It happens in a flash. It happens at deep dawn, the moment when we choose to believe that hope is true, that love is stronger than death. 

Resurrection changes everything.  Jesus’s despairing, traumatized, grieving disciples are transformed into brave, hopeful, loving bearers of good news.  They come out from their hiding places and boldly proclaim all they know, in public, over and over again. It is because of their courage that you and I even know the story. They live out the rest of their days in full confidence.  The path of execution is real, yes, and many will follow Jesus on it, but its death is not so deadly as to hold them back. 

The grip of death does not have to bind us either.  “We no longer need to hold on to the old formulations – moral, religious, economic or political – that have run our lives for so long.  Today is the day to proclaim that the death systems of our time will not have dominion over us.  We no longer need to live as cowards.  We will not be defined by war or violence or even our struggle for security and safety.  The news that comes to us out of that empty tomb is the news that God is not defeated by the systems of death.”[3]

Today is the day to proclaim that we are changed, because of the Risen One, the Living God, the True one, the One we know we’re safe with, the  One we trust.  Today is the day.  Because Christ is Risen.  Christ is risen indeed.

[1] Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), p. 321-22

[2] J. Lowry, “At Deep Dawn”  Journal for Preachers, Easter 2004

[3] These are the words of the Rev. Patricia De Jong as proclaimed in her sermon Easter is Hard to Hold, delivered on April 8, 2007 at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, CA

4/10/22 - Even the Stones Cry Out - Luke 19:28-40

Even the Stones Cry Out

 Luke 19:28-40

April 10, 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/CKUecweOc1E

Today we enter Jerusalem with Jesus.  Over the last 10 chapters of Luke’s gospel, he has been making his way to this city, very deliberately.  Several times, he has told his disciples that it is necessary for him to go there,  He has said that he expects to be rejected and insulted and beaten and even killed in Jerusalem.  Some of his friends have tried to dissuade him from going, but he insists on it.

He and his disciples are joining a huge crowd. Scholars estimate that Jerusalem’s population swelled from its usual 40,000 to as much as 200,000 at Passover.[1] 

They have walked all over Galilee to get here.  The destination was always clear, even though the route was anything but direct.  Someone has said that the path that Jesus follows in Luke’s gospel is like the family that was going from Florida to New Jersey for a family wedding.  The Grandpa asked if they could swing by Minnesota on their way home to Florida. [2]   Luke spends 10 chapters on Jesus’ travel because he is more interested in the theology of the places Jesus goes than their geography.  We can talk about that some other time.  The point I’m making is that Jesus covered miles and miles by walking. He never needed a donkey . . .  until now. 

If he had to go to Jerusalem, he could have done it more discretely.  On foot, he could have been just one more anonymous pilgrim.  But he chose to be conspicuous.  He chose to make an entrance.

He rides in on a donkey.  It is not a war-horse, and thus is a symbol of peace.  But he is riding it into Jerusalem on Passover and the other pilgrims immediately make a connection with a prophecy from Zechariah about the king who will come to Jerusalem, triumphant and yet humble, riding on a donkey.  They are chanting Psalm 118 which is the song you sing on the way into Jerusalem.  But when they see Jesus on the donkey, they change one word.  Instead of “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord” they say “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord”

It is Passover, a religious-political holiday that recalls the liberation of the people of Israel from bondage in Egypt. It is Passover, that event which led Pharoah to “let my people go” as God and Moses demanded.  That liberation and freedom and opportunity for self-determination is what 200,000 people are cramming the streets to celebrate—all while they are not liberated or free, but under the thumb of Rome, subject to the whims of Roman governors or emperors, controlled by the humiliating, and ruthless tactics of Roman soldiers. 

I have a different sense of what it might be like to live in an occupied country now, as I watch Russia’s attempts to occupy Ukraine. I read one woman’s explanation of her family’s decision not to abandon Kiev.  They know they are risking their lives.  But she says, that they cannot give into fear, or the enemy wins. She also says that they stay in order to help others who have no way to leave.  And that they have a deep conviction from God that their place was in Kiev.

And so I read this text this year, through the lens of a small country being unjustifiably over-powered by an exponentially larger occupying force.  If people in the crowd believe that Jesus is the one who will deliver them, if they think that he is the military strategist, the guerrilla warfare expert who can lead them to liberation and freedom again, then the crowd could easily become a mob and things could get seriously out of control.  When they start throwing the word “king” around, the sense of danger ratchets up.

The religious leaders hear it.  They’re afraid the Romans will hear it and retaliate with violence.  So they tell Jesus to make his disciples shut up. And Jesus says, “I tell you, if they were silent, the stones would shout out.”

Wondering what the stones might say, Presbyterian pastor William Klein writes  “ . . . they could tell of the river of tears and blood spilled here and there as the result of any number of brutal campaigns. They could tell of one military leader after another parading into the city and filling the people’s ears with fear. The singing stones’ song on the day Jesus entered the city would sing, not just for joy at the coming of a gracious king, but also for grief and lamentation -- like Rachel weeping over her children, like Jesus weeping over the city.  Their song would be a cry rising from any boulevard of broken dreams across this planet where God’s people have suffered.”[3] 

When he speaks of the stones crying out, Jesus is quoting Habakkuk. The prophet wrote that the stones will cry out against the corruption of the wicked. The people are crying out against the injustice and violence being used against them, against the greed and the will to power that exploit them.  They want a king who will deliver lasting peace.

Writing from the cell where he was imprisoned for his resistance to the Nazis in WWII, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “There remains an experience of incomparable value. We have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled – in short from the perspective of those who suffer.[4] 

The world is now watching Ukraine and seeing history from below.

Jesus does not silence them. Those who suffer and those who care for them will cry out  He knows that some truths cannot be suppressed.  There comes a time when we cannot stay quiet any longer.

The Russian Orthodox Church officially supports the invasion of Ukraine.  But one Russian priest cannot do that. The Rev. John Burdin spoke out last month.  He criticized the war in an open letter he published on-line.  He named the invasion an invasion and a war.  It was an act of truth-telling that contrasts with Putin’s insistence that it is a “special military operation.” He wrote that the blood spilled is a curse on the killers but also on those who keep silent or don’t protest.

He preached about this on a Sunday morning and within three hours, the police were investigating him. He has been fined.  If he is charged with spreading false information, he could face up to 15 years in prison. In an interview that was relayed internationally, he said, “I don’t consider it possible to remain silent on this situation.  It wasn’t about politics. It was about the Bible. … If I remain silent, I’m not a priest.”[5]

Ironically, his bishop has now told him to keep quiet and warned that he might be banned from ministry if he doesn’t. This is what they often tell preachers.  Just preach the Bible. Stay in your lane. Don’t talk about justice or systemic racism or immigration or climate change.  Whatever you do, they say, leave politics out of the pulpit. 

That’s hard to do.  If we can’t preach on justice, that leaves very little of the Bible left to preach. If we can’t preach about Jesus who insisted on coming to the capital city, the intersection of religion and politics, whose gospel are we preaching?  

Lord George MacLeod, the founder of the Iona Community, said, “I simply argue that the cross be raised at the center of the marketplace as well as on the steeple of the church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on a town garbage heap; at a crossroad of politics so cosmopolitan that they had to write his title in Hebrew and in Latin and in Greek . . . and at the kind of place where cynics talk smut and thieves curse and soldiers gamble. Because that is where he died, and that is what he died about. And that is where Christ’s people ought to be and what church people ought to be about.[6]

Jesus does not silence his followers.  But he is not naïve. He knows that justice and peace are not coming quickly.  He knows that he is not the kind of king they want. 

He does not offer a military solution.  He will not confront the powers with domination or retaliation or retribution.  Instead, he will keep walking into the fear, walking into the hatred, walking into the violence, telling the truth and offering his life.

They will not understand.  Truthfully, we still do not understand, even though we have the benefit of knowing the rest of the story.  Even though we know that Jesus’ path of courage and vulnerability leads to resurrection.  “We still mostly trust the peace of armaments, the peace of vigilance, even the peace of isolation from those we fear.  We still find it difficult, almost impossible, to trust and practice the peace of love.” [7] 

And the Jesus who wept over Jerusalem still weeps,  

over Kiev

and Kramatorsk

and Aleppo

and Kandahar

and Tijuana

and San Salvador

and St. Louis

and New Town

and Albany. 

And we say Hosanna  -- Save us. 

[1] Borg, Marcus J. and John Dominic Crossan.  The Last Week:  What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’ Final Days in Jerusalem   (New York:  HarperCollins, 2006), p. 18.

[2] https://www.christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2010-10/travel-narratives

[3] William Klein, in Feasting on the Gospels, Luke, Volume 2, Cynthia Jarvis and E. Elizabeth Johnson, editors, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2014), p. 178.

[4] Dietrich Bonhoeffer,  Letters and Papers from Prison, (New York:  Simon and Schuster, 1953) p. 17

[5] https://religionnews.com/2022/04/05/for-russian-priest-protesting-ukraine-invasion-a-mixture-of-defiance-and-concern/

[6] George MacLeod, The Cunningham Lectures, delivered at New College, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1954

[7] Justo Gonzalez, Luke in the Belief Commentary Series, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2010), p. 228.

4/3/22 - Brazen Acts of Beauty - John 12:1-11

Brazen Acts of Beauty

John 12:1-11

April 3, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Irene Smith went to Hollywood with the hopes of becoming a movie star.  She got a few parts and made some connections,  but along the way, she also become a heavy drug user.  Her career as an actress ended when she got so stoned she couldn’t learn her lines.  Looking for work to support her drug habit, she took a job as one of the first topless dances in Southern California.  Things got even worse for Irene in the next years.  She took a job giving massages that led her directly into prostitution.  She became a heroin user. 

Finally, when her weight had dropped to 88 pounds and it became obvious that she was dying, she ended up at three workshops done by Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, the well-known specialist on death and dying.  In those workshops, she discovered and revived the parts of her self that had been deeply wounded in the past.  She said, “by being truly heard, witnessed and forgiven, I gained the tools I needed to continue living.”  At the end of the third workshop, Irene raised her hand to speak.  She announced to the group, “ I’m a prostitute and I’m going to become a massage therapist.”

I’m sure there were people who doubted her.  Probably not out loud, but in their minds, they thought to themselves that they knew exactly what kind of massages she could offer.  But she was bold and determined.  She volunteered to massage people in hospice care.   In 1983, she contacted San Francisco General Hospital.  She talked with the staff about her experiences with hospice and how people with AIDS were deprived of human touch.  She became the first volunteer to do massage therapy with people with AIDS.  She went on to create and direct an internationally acclaimed non-profit that established massage programs for people with AIDS all over the world.[1]   She died on April 4, 2021, almost a year ago today. 

She was brazen, determining to care for others when her own life was a train-wreck.  What she did was beautiful.

Mary of Bethany is also brazen.  In one reckless act, she breaks her precious jar and dumps out expensive perfume.  She lavishes perfume worth a year’s wages on Jesus’ feet in one grand gesture. Then to make things even more cringe-worthy, she unbinds her hair and bends over Jesus’ feet so that she could wipe off some of the perfume with her hair.  She violates all kinds of rules about appropriate behavior. Everyone in the room is suddenly very uncomfortable.  Some probably wonder what kind of relationship she and Jesus actually had.  Others may think that her brother’s recent death and resuscitation had unhinged her. 

You remember Lazarus. He is present, alive at this dinner party.  In fact, his aliveness is a problem.  The authorities, who want to kill Jesus, also want to kill Lazarus because his being alive is evidence of Jesus’ power. 

Maybe Lazarus’ brush with death and Mary’s experience of grief has changed them.  Maybe Mary is more determined to live boldly, to show love to Jesus while he is still alive.  She is aware, perhaps as never before, about the danger he is in, the closeness of death and the preciousness of life. 

What she does is intimate, not sexual, but intimate. Jesus and Mary and Martha and Lazarus have shared meals and meaningful conversation.  They have wept together, been vulnerable together.  Offering her gratitude and devotion and deep love, she is boldly extravagant. 

But not everyone appreciates it.  Judas the treasurer, thinks it is a waste. That much perfume could have provided a lot of food for the poor, he says.   Jesus defends Mary,

“She’s been keeping the perfume for my burial, which could happen any day now.”

I wonder if Mary remembers Jesus weeping at Lazarus’ tomb. I wonder if she wants Jesus to know that she will weep when Jesus dies. Maybe she wants him to know that she will grieve because he means so much to her.

We often celebrate people at their funerals, but sometimes we celebrate them while they’re alive.  Many of you will remember Ken Graham who was a faithful member here for decades.  His adult children planned a celebration for  his 90th birthday.  At his request, they all came to church with him on that day. They gathered from across the country.  He knew that part. The surprise was that in worship that morning they gave a gift to Emmanuel in his honor.  Their gift enabled us to purchase the projector and screen that we use today.  They celebrated his life while he was alive with them. 

Some version of this story is told in every gospel.  In Matthew and Mark, Jesus says that wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.  This action is so important that while it is happening, Jesus tells them to pay attention and remember, so they can tell the story. 

Paul Tillich was a German theologian of the last century. About Mary he said,  “She has performed an act of holy waste growing out of the abundance of her heart. Judas,” Tillich observed, “has his emotional life under control. . . . Jesus knows that without the abundance of heart nothing great can happen. . . . He knows that calculating love is not love at all.”

“The history of humankind,” Tillich continues, “is the history of men and women who wasted themselves and were not afraid to do so. They did not fear to waste themselves in the service of a new creation. They wasted out of the fullness of their hearts.”[2]

Brazen acts of beauty, of love and abundance are all around us.  Some are acts of resistance, like the Ukrainian grandmother who walked up to a Russian soldier. With a few salty words, she gave him sunflower seeds and told him to put them in his pocket.  She said that she looks forward to seeing sunflowers grow when his dead body lies down on Ukrainian soil.   Props to her for creative non-violent resistance. It isn’t exactly beautiful, but definitely brazen.

There was the time when an artist named JR brought people together at the US/Mexico border.[3]  They installed two tables, end to end at the border fence, just for one day.  All day long, people showed up on each side for a picnic.  They enjoyed the same food, the same water, the same music, as half of the band was on each side.  Technically, this was illegal, but it was not shut down.  He called it “Giant Picnic”  Some might call it a waste.  Others a brazen act of beauty.

For over a decade in Houston, someone kept painting this simple message on a bridge “Be Someone.”  Others would paint over it, but then the original street artist would risk climbing the bridge and getting caught to re-paint it, encouraging more commuters, more pedestrians, more Houstonians to “be someone.   

And then, there was the pair of skaters who arrived at the World Figure Skating Championship two weeks ago, without their coach, without costumes. They barely escaped the shelling in Kharkiv.  Three days before hand they changed their music and redid their choreography. 

It begins with them dancing to a song called 1944, which is about Stalin’s deportation of Crimean Tatars.  The second piece is a Ukrainian folk song.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2csIfrSevUI

The standing ovation went on for several minutes.  One fan said, “Maybe it doesn’t look like the strongest performance, but if you understand how they got there, you would wonder how they were able to perform at all.” 

A waste of resources or a brazen act of beauty.  Judge for yourself.

Paul Tillich wrote “Without the abundance and heart, nothing great can happen. Do not suppress in yourselves the abundant heart, the waste of self-surrender. . . . Keep yourself open for the creative moment. Do not suppress the impulse to do what Mary did at Bethany. You will be reproached as she was. But Jesus was on her side and he is also on yours.” [4]

As we respond to Jesus, may we find within ourselves, Mary’s courage and devotion. May we be surprised with beauty and joy.  Amen.

[1] Sherry Anderson and Patricia Hopkins,  The Feminine Face of God, (New York:  Bantam Books, 1991), pp 82-84.

[2] Paul Tillich, “Holy Waste” in The New Being (New York:  Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1955), p. 47-48

[3] https://time.com/4977283/artist-stages-picnic-on-us-mexico-border/

[4] Paul Tillich, “Holy Waste” in The New Being (New York:  Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1955), p. 47

3/27/22 - The Risk of Grace - Luke 15:11-32

Luke 15:11-32

The Risk of Grace

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

March 27, 2022

 Image:  New in Christ 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/axiRiW-micQ

Somewhere in America, there lived a man and a woman who had 8 children, 4 sons and 4 daughters.  They lived through some world wars and some local wars and the Great Depression.  The children had enough to eat and clothes to wear, but mostly they grew up in poverty. Eventually they each made their way out into the world.  Almost all of them became successful in their chosen occupations.  None of them became very wealthy, but most were comfortably middle-class.  Back on the farm, the decades went by.  The adult children went home regularly.  They maintained and modernized the place for their aging parents.  One day, the father died of a heart attack.  The mother continued to live there, but neither she nor her husband had been farming for years.  The farmland was rented out to others. She got older and eventually she went to live in a nursing home.  The farm was put into a trust with its income providing care for her for the rest of her life and with the stipulation that when she died, the farm would be sold and evenly divided among her 8 children. 

One of her daughters, Susie, had not done as well as her siblings.  She had made a series of poor choices and never seemed to land on her feet. One day, she went to visit her mother in the nursing home.  She asked her mother to give her a parcel of land from the farm, maybe 100 acres.  Susie planned to farm it herself.  The mother, who had always felt bad for Susie, agreed and signed the papers that Susie had drawn up. Well, of course, the entire farm was now held in trust and what Susie was attempting to do was illegal.  When she tried to file the papers, her siblings found out.  She did not get the farmland she wanted and none of her brothers and sisters ever spoke to her again. 

This could be a true story.  We all know about serious family fights and a lot of them are about money.

Jesus told a story about a family fight.  This story, which is often called the parable of the prodigal son, may be the most well-known of all of Jesus’ stories.   We have heard it interpreted from the father’s point of view, from the younger brother’s point of view, from the experience of the older brother.  I have even seen a few sermons written from the point of view of a mother, whom Jesus doesn’t even mention.  

This story is found in the Bible and so we think it is a story about God.  And maybe it is.  But first, it is a story about a human family in all its messiness.

The messiness starts when the younger brother asks for his inheritance and the father gives it to him. The son might be considered rude or bold to ask for it, but the father definitely looks foolish for giving it to him. Ben Sirach, an influential rabbi from two hundred years before Jesus, counseled “do not give your property to another, in case you change your mind and must ask for it. . . When the days of your life reach their end, at the time of your death, [then]distribute your property.”   (Sirach 33:20, 23)

About the time that the young son has blown through his wad of cash, famine has come to the land.  He has no money to buy food, but less food is available for everyone, undoubtedly driving up prices. So, how much of this should be laid on the father? If he had just said no,  would the younger son have gotten into that predicament?

Amy-Jill Levine, New Testament professor at Vanderbilt, reports that people from different cultures see this differently.  Readers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and South Africa tend to blame it on a combination of bad parenting and personal irresponsibility.  Russian readers point to the famine – there was no food to distribute.  And one Kenyan graduate student said that the real problem was a lack of generosity, that when the young man was hungry in the far country, no one gave him anything.[1]

That’s kind of what happens in the family stories we know, isn’t it? Some parents blame themselves—  they think “if only I had not been so hard on him” or “I should have practiced tough love and just said no.”  Outsiders mutter about permissive parenting and about kids today who just don’t have any respect.

Sometimes, the person in this kind of predicament recognizes their own error and understands that they kind of  brought the problem on themselves.  Sometimes, they are too ashamed to go home or ask for help.  In other cases, they may continue to blame everything and everyone one else.

“I was doing just fine. It would have all worked out if it hadn’t been for the darn famine.”

Or “If my father had just been better at his job, then he would have been wealthier and I would have had a better inheritance.  This is not my fault.” 

You probably know real-life people who blame themselves too much or too little. Parents who are torn up about decisions their children have made.  Siblings who are furious at or indifferent to or grieving for a sister or brother who isn’t around much any more. 

The story gets even messier when the younger brother decides to go home again.  This is the fulcrum, the hinge point of interpretation in the story.  It says that the son came to himself  -- but that statement is neutral.  It could mean a couple of different things.  It could mean that he takes responsibility for his actions, that he is sincerely sorry and wants to make things right with his father and brother. Or it could mean that he realizes he is out of options, except the option which had worked before, which was manipulating his father.

We can read the story either way.  It is really ambiguous.  I have always chosen to read it as if the younger brother is sincerely sorry.  But there are some clues that that might not be the case. First, it says that while he is desperately hungry, he thinks about his father’s servants who have more than they need to eat. When he talks to himself about the situation, it sounds like he resents the servants for having more than they should rightly have, while he, a son and heir, is starving.  It is only when he plans what to say to his father, that he sounds willing to give up his status.[2]

In his planning, he keeps repeating the term “father”, even though he says he is not worthy to be called “son”, He still think of himself as the son of his father. When the two men are reunited, he begins with the word “Father,” not “Sir” or “Lord”. As soon as he speaks the word, he reinstates himself a son, not a hired worker or slave.[3]

Is he sincerely sorry? Who knows? I’m a first-born child.  Are there any other oldest children in the room? How many remember the rules in your house – rules about how late you could stay out, how old you had to be to go to certain movies or before you could spend the night at a friend’s house?  How many remember seeing your parents change the rules for your younger siblings?  Your parents let them do stuff way before you got to.  That’s a familiar dynamic.

Those of us who are older children may more easily see that the younger son may be a classic manipulator. He was able to convince his father to divide up his estate, after all.  Maybe he knows that his carefully planned speech “I have sinned against heaven and earth.  I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” is the exact right thing to say to get his father to welcome him home. 

The father either thinks that his son is sincere or he doesn’t care whether he is.  The father is willing to look foolish, willing to be taken advantage of, for the joy of having his son home again.   

In all the excitement, no one has thought to inform the older brother. As he finishes his chores for the day, he hears the noise of a party.  He only finds out that his brother is home because he asks a servant.  Then, he absolutely refuses to be under the same roof as his long-lost brother.  He knows from experience how his old man indulges him. His kid brother is probably going to ask for something more, for something that now belongs to him, and his dad will probably hand it over as well.  

It is at this point that the father realizes that he has also lost his older son.  The older son’s resentment, which is somewhat justified, has eaten away at their relationship even though he stayed home and worked dutifully all these years. The story ends with a party going on inside while the father is outside pleading with his older son, assuring him of his love and care.

When someone mentions this parable to me, I think “oh that’s the one where the son runs away and the father welcomes him home and all is forgiven.”  I don’t think to myself “that’s the one where you have to make up your own ending.”  But that’s really closer to the truth.  Jesus leaves so much unsaid. What happens next?  Does the older brother reconcile with his father, with his brother? Does the younger brother become a considerate, contributing member of the household?  Or does he hang around long enough to recover and then take off again on another get-rich scheme?  Does the village speak of a wise and generous father, or of an indulgent, gullible fool?    

I’m left wondering what Jesus really intended with this parable. Luke says that he told it because some religious leaders were judging him for the people he was friendly with.  Maybe they thought Jesus was being taken advantage of, that Jesus was the fool.  Maybe this story was Jesus’ way of saying that everyone is invited to the celebration -the ones whose life mission is to do good and those whose only goal is to party hearty.  Maybe he is saying that he knows some people resent him and other people want to take advantage of him, but that is the risk of grace.  Extending grace, trying to include everyone, often ends up pleasing no one.

Trying to bring the family together, going for the joy of reconciliation, of having everyone at the party under the same roof is really hard.  Some one is going to be resentful.  Someone will need admit they were wrong.  Some one may have to forgive.  Some one may end up being duped.

Grace is risky, it is costly, as Bonhoeffer says. You might look foolish. You might be taken advantage of or stabbed in the back. That’s very real.  “But,” Jesus seems to be saying, “it’s worth the risk.  It’s worth the risk for the possibility of joy.  The joy of being found again, of being welcomed home.  It’s worth it for the possibility of joy.

It's worth the risk of meeting your sibling halfway.  Risking their rejection. Offering an apology.  There is a joy that is possible if you cross the threshold and share the space with the one you want to despise. 

Grace is risky.  Grace is costly. Grace can get you killed. But it just might be worth it for the joy. 

[1] Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus, (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), p. 55

[2] Richard Swanson, A Provocation:  Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year C at https://provokingthegospel.wordpress.com/2022/03/20/a-provocation-4th-sunday-in-lent-march-27-2022-luke-151-3-11-32/

[3] Amy-Jill Levine, p. 64.

3/20/22 - Ask a Better Question[1] - Luke 13:1-9

Luke 13:1-9

Ask a Better Question[1]

March 20, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Image You Are Worthy

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/nz1RoFryPy8

For one semester in seminary, I worked as a student chaplain in a class called Clinical Pastoral Education.  As part of the class, I had to write down a verbatim conversation with a patient and discuss it with my supervisor and others in the class.  One time, there was a patient who was very bored.  He just talked and talked.  I probably spent an hour in his room.  Afterwards, I wrote down everything that I could remember, but I couldn’t remember everything from this very long conversation.   My supervisor pointed out the places in my verbatim where the conversation skipped from one topic to another with absolutely no logic. In at least one case, I remember, the verbatim made me look extremely clueless about one of the patient’s concerns.

I thought about that experience when I read our text from Luke at the beginning of this week.  The parable that starts in verse 6 seems to have little connection to the preceding conversation. I began to wonder if Luke left out something important between verse 5 and verse 6 or if Jesus was clueless about the people’s concerns.  By the end of the week, I had a different sense about it.  I’m always grateful when that lightbulb glows, however dimly, before Sunday.

Jesus in on his way to Jerusalem.  Luke is reporting on various encounters that he has along the way.  The news of this day includes a story about Pilate, the Roman governor, who killed people while they were engaged in worship. The conversation is about current events, but on another level, it is about why bad things happen to good people. That is a big question that most of us still struggle with. 

One popular answer blames the victims.  If those people died in church, then God must have been angry with them.  They must not have been good people after all, and they got what they deserved. That is not my answer, but you hear it all the time.  A natural disaster wipes out an area and some preacher will blame it on the sinfulness of that city.  Someone is killed by the police and the swift judgment is that if they had just complied, nothing bad would have happened.  The fact that they died becomes evidence that they somehow deserved it.

Jesus anticipates that answer.  He brings up another current event – the collapsing of a tower wall that killed 18 people.  He says that the Galileans who were killed by Pilate were no worse than anyone else and neither were those who died in the tower accident. One was a case of human violence, the other probably human construction error.  Jesus seems to be saying, “stuff happens. It’s random.”

But the people want to know why.  Of all the people who offer sacrifices, why did Pilate kill those particular ones?  Why did the tower fall when it did, when those 18 people were caught under it?

They seem to assume a connection between God and violence or between God and suffering. Jesus rejects that premise. Those who died were not worse sinners than anyone else.  There is no correlation between God and violence. God was not punishing the ones who died. That is not how God works. 

Jesus seems to ignore their very pressing “why” questions and tells a story about a fig tree

Pádraig Ó Tuama is an Irish theologian and poet. One of his books is entitled In the Shelter: Finding Welcome in the Here and Now. In that book, he talks about inappropriate questions and the Japanese word “mu” which can mean “un-ask.”  If someone asks a question that is too small, too simplistic, too flat, Ó Tuama points to this word, which is also used in Buddhist practice, to say ‘un-ask’ that question because there’s a better one, a wiser one, a deeper one. [2]

We might imagine the crowd pressing Jesus with their why’s.  Why did the Galileans die?  Why is there so much pain in the world? Why does God allow suffering?  It is as if to all of those whys, Jesus says “mu -- ask a better question.”

He invites them to find a deeper question by telling the parable.  It’s a short story. There’s a fig tree that has not borne fruit for three years.  The owner is tired of waiting for it to produce.  He tells the gardener to cut it down.  The gardener says “Give it more time. Let me give it some extra care and attention. See what happens next year. If it still doesn’t bear figs, then you can cut it down.”   Notice that the gardener doesn’t say that he will cut it down, but that the owner can.

This strange little story is Jesus’ response to the question about God and violence, about why there is so much suffering.  Before he tells it, he says one other curious thing.  He has said that the people who died were just normal people, no better or worse than anyone else, but then he says, “Unless you repent, you will die just as they did.” 

“Unless you repent, you will die just like they did.” What on earth could that mean?  Everyone is going to die, and Jesus just said that those people didn’t die because of something bad they did.  But we should repent?

This is confusing because of how we understand that word which gets translated as repent. We hear repent and we think “be sorry.”  We hear repent and we think “confess your sins.” 

Metanoia is the Greek word that gets translated “repent” in English.  Metanoia can be broken down into two parts.  Meta is a preposition that can mean with or after or beyond.  Noia is related to the verb to think and to the noun for mind.  When you put them together, the word metanoia refers to a changed mind, a new way of seeing things, being persuaded to adopt a different perspective.[3]  Marcus Borg says that “to repent is to go beyond the mind that you have.”[4]  This is the kind of change of mind that results in a change of behavior.

So, when Jesus calls for repentance, he is not asking people to be sorry.  He is asking them to let their minds be transformed, to go beyond their conventional understanding of what life with God is like. 

A conventional understanding of God – in Jesus’ day and now – is that God is out to punish people, that God inflicts suffering, that people get what they deserve.  If we hear the fig tree story with a conventional understanding, we might think that God is like the vineyard owner who wants to chop down the unproductive tree. 

But Jesus says “ask a better question.  Change your mind.” 

What if God is not like the vineyard owner, looking to maximize production, striking down unfruitful trees?  What if God is like the gardener?  What if God is the one who is willing to wait with care and patience for the tree to bear fruit in its own time?

There is not a straight line between the people’s concerns and Jesus’ story, but I think that Jesus is trying to help them break free of simplistic answers, of quick judgments that burden us and each other. 

Productivity is one of those burdens.  Like the fig tree, we are often measured by how much we do.  Sometimes it is the only standard by which we evaluate ourselves.  Some people, at the beginning of the pandemic lockdown could not stand to be idle.  So, they cleaned house from top to bottom, they painted rooms and fixed things that they had been too busy to do for years. When all the usual outlets for productivity had been taken from them, they created new ones.  Because if they don’t produce, their inherent value, their self-understanding, is called into question.

Other people did not undertake those projects, but now, two years later, they regret it.  “I should have done more” they say.  Never mind that they were coping with a traumatic event felt all over the world – they think should have something to show for it.

 I have a friend who seems to be functioning just fine in terms of outward appearances.  His boss is satisfied with his work.  His relationships with friends and family have endured.  But he has been forcing himself to work, to produce, to keep caring for others, for a long time now. What he needs is rest, what he needs is grace, but he tells himself that he is lazy, that other people are doing more than he is.  He is like the vineyard owner warning himself that if he doesn’t bear fruit, he deserves to be cut down. 

He needs metanoia.  He needs the transformation of mind that says he is worthy of tender care just as he is. 

“Let your mind be transformed,” Jesus says.  “There is not a correlation between God and suffering.  You insist on dividing the world up into good and bad people. You separate yourself from those who are suffering by thinking that you are not like them, and maybe even subconsciously you think that they must deserve it.  And then when you suffer, as everyone does, you think that you must deserve it.  So, you try harder and feel worse. And that way of thinking is diminishing your life.  It is killing you.”   

So, ask a different question.  Ask what kind of tending you need to come back to life.  Ask what you need, how much digging around your roots and piling on of manure you are willing to receive so that you can flourish.

God does not send suffering to punish us.  The Galileans who died were no worse sinners than anyone else.  But sometimes, we do learn from our suffering. God does not cause our suffering in order to teach us, but sometimes we learn from it. Experience changes our minds more powerfully than anything.  It can make us more tender and caring, more open to each other.  It can bring us into solidarity with each other. 

The Rev. Larissa Kwong Abazia is a Presbyterian pastor in New Jersey. She notes that the fig tree is in the midst of a vineyard.  The main focus here is cultivating grapes, not figs.  She says “Many of us [who are people of color] experience the world as a fig tree in the midst of grape vines. We are placed in fields not meant for us and yet expected to thrive. People discount and doubt us, threatening to cut us down if we don’t produce in the ways that have been defined on our behalf. We are afterthoughts demanded to bear fruit or be destroyed.”[5]

The metanoia Jesus invites us to releases us from judgment.  It removes the burden of productivity from our shoulders. And it also changes our perspective on other people.  When we are more gracious with ourselves, we can be more gracious with others.  We can stop rushing to judgment and consider the complexity of individual circumstances. It goes back to something else Jesus said, “love your neighbor as you love yourself” Or learn to love yourself so that you can learn to love your neighbor in the same way.

Allow your mind to be changed, so that everyone has an opportunity to thrive. Ask a wiser question, a deeper question, a truer question.  Learn the art of patient, hope-filled tending. Live life to the brim.

[1] This title and organizational framework of this sermon come from a wonderfully provocative essay by Debi Thomas. https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2130-ask-a-better-question

[2]Pádraig Ó Tuama  In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World (London:  Hodder and Stoughton, 2015) , p. 110

[3] Matt Skinner, Commentary on Luke 13:1-9, Working Preacher,  https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2789

[4] Marcus Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary, (New York:  HarperCollins, 2006), pp. 219-220.

[5] Larissa Kwong Abazia, Full to the Brim Sermon Planning Guide, Full to the Brim Lenten Resource, A Sanctified Art © 2022 https://sanctifiedart.org/full-to-the-brim-lent-bundle-year-c

3/13/22 - Ferocious Love - Luke 13:31-35

Luke 13:31-35

Ferocious Love

March 13, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Image:  Hen and chicks mosaic  in the Church of Dominus Flevit  on the Mount of Olives overlooking Jerusalem

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/Tx6OAaCtNrY

How often did Jesus get angry?  There was that one time, when he seemed to blow his stack, turning over the tables in the Temple. I tend to think of that as a one-time kind of thing, but I wonder. 

I shared a meme this week that says “My alone time is for your safety.”  I remember that Jesus was always going off alone to pray.  I mean, if I had to explain the same things over and over again to twelve guys who never seemed to get it, my mood might occasionally rise to a boil.  Maybe Jesus’ alone time was for prayer and for their safety. 

How often did Jesus get angry?  We don’t really know. Maybe we like to think it was just the one time, with the tables in the Temple.  And maybe we like to think that he wasn’t even angry that day, maybe he was calmly carrying out a planned piece of civil disobedience.  That might be true.  But it might be that we don’t like to imagine Jesus as angry, because we think that anger is inappropriate or sinful. 

I’m here to say that I believe Jesus is angry in today’s text.

Some people come to warn him about Herod Antipas. This Herod is the son of Herod the Great.  Herod the Great reigned when Jesus was born. It was for fear of him that Joseph and Mary fled to Egypt with baby Jesus.  Herod Antipas is one of Herod the Great’s younger sons. He wasn’t the first choice as heir, but since Herod the Great executed three of his older sons, Antipas inherited a part of Herod the Great’s kingdom and become the ruler of Galilee.  Israel was a client state, subservient to Rome, which meant that Antipas only held his position as long as he was pleasing to the Roman emperor.

Antipas came from a dysfunctional, violent family.  He may have had an inferiority complex, may have felt a little diminished with a territory much smaller than his father’s. Being under the emperor’s thumb, he might have felt a need to prove himself.  People who have power and a need to prove themselves can be dangerous.

Antipas has already beheaded John the Baptist. This is a credible threat.  So the people say “Jesus, get out of here. Herod Antipas is after you.  He wants you dead.” 

But Jesus says, “No, you get out of here.  And you can tell that fox something for me.”

Jesus is angry.  “Go tell that fox” means “go tell that so-and-so.”  “Go tell that no-good murderer.”

One scholar suggests that in the world of Palestinian metaphors, lions and foxes can be contrasted with each other.  To call a ruler a lion is to suggest that they are great and purposeful and principled, but to call them a fox implies that they are worthless and degenerate.[1]  Especially given Antipas’ background, we might hear Jesus saying, “Go tell that insignificant poser, go tell that pompous pretender, that I don’t have time for him. Not today, Herod, not today!”

Maybe there is a scenario in which Jesus might have said that without anger, but I don’t think so.

Four chapters earlier, Luke reported that Jesus had set his face to go to Jerusalem. He has already told his followers twice that he expects to die there, but they don’t understand. Jesus’ mission, to free people from illness and evil, is urgent and has a time limit.  He is going to Jerusalem, like the ancient prophets before him. He expects to be killed there, as many of them were. 

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that “the prophet is a person who holds God’s love as well as God’s anger in his soul.” [2] Love and anger.  Isn’t that interesting?  I tend to think of the prophets as angry, always ranting about injustice. Maybe the prophets were loving. I tend to think of Jesus as loving.  Maybe Jesus is angry.  Maybe love and anger go together more often than we usually acknowledge. 

Andrew Lester was a professor of pastoral care at my seminary.  In his book, The Angry Christian, he said that there’s a common notion that anger is always sinful and that spiritually mature people never get angry.  He says the opposite is true, arguing that “in many situations, anger is the most loving and, therefore, the most Christian response. Rather than squelching our anger,” he suggests “the commandment to ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ should often motivate us to be angry.”[3]

Being angry can be holy, but our expression of it can be destructive.  What we do with our anger is often sinful, and that is why, we may prefer to think of Jesus as never angry.

Many psychologists describe anger as a secondary emotion. Some other emotion triggers anger. A teenager stays out past curfew and the parent worries about their safety.  The parent is afraid, but when the teenager comes breezing in, the parent is angry.  They are angry because they were afraid. They were afraid because they love the child.  Their anger is secondary to fear and to love.

What underlies Jesus’ anger here?  It seems to be profound sadness.   He says to Jerusalem, “how often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings and you were not willing.”   Jesus has work to do, work that would gather God’s children closer and closer together in safety and peace, but his time is running out and the children are not cooperating.  His anger comes because he loves Jerusalem and he is unbearably sad.  When he reaches Jerusalem, he will weep loudly over it. He will ugly cry for the city and its people.

Herod Antipas, and others like him, endanger the chicks that Jesus would protect. When a fox gets loose in a henhouse, it is often kills more prey than it can consume, leaving wanton destruction behind.  Herod, that fox, represents the dangerous, predatory evil of empire.

Jesus is angry at that destruction, just as you and I are angry when we see people taking shelter in their basements night after night or children walking across borders with tears running down their faces. Jesus lets his anger show, but he doesn’t let it carry him away.  In fact, his anger seems to become fuel to continue to energize his mission.  “Go tell that fox that I am working here – casting out demons and curing people.”  He is proclaiming the reign of God fully, all the way to the end.   He proclaims it on his own terms, with anger and with love, but never with violence.

Jesus does not approach Jerusalem like a fox, but like a mother hen, whose chicks will not come home to her. 

The mother hen puts her body between her chicks and danger. She will give her life to protect them from destruction.

Jesus the mother hen is determined to go to Jerusalem, where he will take up his cross.  About the cross, preacher Barbara Brown Taylor says, “It may have looked like a minor skirmish to those who were there, but that contest between the chicken and the fox turned out to be the cosmic battle of all time, in which the power of tooth and fang was put up against the power of a mother’s love for her chicks.  And God bet the farm on the hen.”

“Depending on who you believe,” Taylor says, “she won.  It did not look that way at first, with feathers all over the place and chicks running for cover. But as time went on, it became clear what she had done.  She had refused to run from the foxes, and she had refused to become one of them.  Having loved her own who were in the world, she loved them to the end.  She died a mother hen, and afterwards, she came back to them with teeth marks on her body to make sure they got the point:  that the power of foxes could not kill her love for them . . . They might have to go through what she went through in order to get past the foxes, but she would be waiting for them on the other side, with love stronger than death.” [4]

Angry at oppression and evil,  loving of all God’s children, even those who wanted to stone and kill him, Jesus the mother hen gave his own body, his own life. Even from the cross, he would gather us under wing.

Beloved ones, this is the Christ we follow.  May God’s love dwell so deep in our hearts that it makes us angry when the world that God loves is threatened.  May that anger empower us to speak and act to make that love known.  In the name of Jesus, who longs to gather us and all God’s children to himself. Amen.

[1] https://www.jerusalemperspective.com/2667/

[2] Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets, (New York: HarperCollins, 1962),  p. 400

[3] Andrew D. Lester, The Angry Christian: A Theology for Care and Counseling, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2003)  p. 206

[4] Barbara Brown Taylor, “Chickens and Foxes “ in Bread of Angels  (Boston:  Cowley Publications, 1997), p.126.

3/6/22 - Beloved is Where We Begin[1] - Luke 4:1-13

Beloved is Where We Begin[1]

Luke 4:1-13

March 6, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Image:  Christ in the Wilderness - Ivan Kramskoy, 1872

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x778wnuY79U

Sometimes I hang out with other pastors on social media.  We can sustain lengthy conversations on seemingly minor topics. That probably comes as no surprise to you.  Last week, I saw at least three different threads on the question of the words Protestant pastors were going to say while imposing ashes on Ash Wednesday. Sounds riveting, doesn’t it?

The tradition of Ash Wednesday is only about 1000 years old.  Many Protestant churches abandoned it altogether believing it to belong too much to the Roman Catholic Church. However, in the conversations I was seeing this week, for some Protestant pastors, if you are leading an Ash Wednesday service, you had better well stick with the traditional language. The traditional words “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return” are a reminder of our mortality. Being reminded that we have just one precious life to live on earth is a way of encouraging us to live well every day of that life. That is a good reminder and I often use those words.

The minor kerfuffle I saw on social media happened because people wanted to keep the tradition of Ash Wednesday, with its focus on sin and mortality, and they also wanted to speak about the love and grace of God. A number of folks found other words to say, but some could not bring themselves to offer anything other than “you are dust and to dust you shall return.” 

If you were present on Ash Wednesday at Emmanuel, you heard “Remember that you are beloved and to love you shall return.”   I started saying that the year that Ash Wednesday fell on Valentine’s Day. Sometimes I say something else, but when I speak about being loved, it is not to shy away from thinking about our mortality. I offer them because of a Biblical precedent.

Every year, on the first Sunday in Lent, the gospel reading assigned by the lectionary is the story of Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are the gospel writers that tell us about this time in the wilderness. They also tell us about the event that came right before, which was Jesus’ baptism. And you remember that when Jesus was baptized, there was a voice from heaven which said, “You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” 

Those words are ringing in Jesus’ ears, settling into his soul, as the Spirit leads him into the wilderness. If Lent is in some sense, our own wilderness journey, then it seems appropriate to me that we are launched with a similar affirmation. “Know that you are Beloved and to love you shall return.”

In the wilderness, Jesus prays and fasts for 40 days. Then, hungry, and alone, in the glare of the sun by day and the desert cold at night, he considers his options: how will he accomplish the most good in his one precious life.   He could turn stones into bread and feed scores of hungry people. He could accumulate political influence and rule with justice. He could demonstrate his super-spirituality, his intimate connection with God by throwing himself from the top of the Temple, because he and God are so tight that God will save him. Any or all of those things could be good, because they would bring more people to God. 

And so, the voice in his ear says “Since you are the Son of God, why not? That voice from heaven just said it. You are the Son of God. Why not act like it?”

Jesus is tempted to do good things, but at a cost. The cost is taking the shortcut, the easy path, aligning himself with the devil or with conventional power.

Jesus is tempted to do good on his own terms. So are we. There is so much goodness and beauty in life. The world is full to the brim, as our theme says, with possibilities. We want to experience all that life has to offer. We don’t intentionally choose the most difficult path, but we know that the best, most abundant life often results when we make the harder choice.  Reaching for the shortcut, the quick fix often requires us to abandon a more profound, deeper value.

The deepest temptation that Jesus faces is to compromise his baptismal identity, to be who he was not called to be, to be something less than, other than, God’s Beloved Child.

This is our temptation as well. Genesis tells us that it has been so from the beginning. Adam and Eve were made in God’s image, but the serpent told them they could be like God if they ate the forbidden fruit. So they reached for the shortcut, the easy fix, instead of trusting God and tending the garden as they were created to.   To be like God is tempting only when we forget that we already bear God’s image.

Sometimes we sin by thinking too highly of ourselves, making it all about ourselves, our wants and needs and goals. But when we don’t think highly enough of ourselves, that is also sin.  If we devalue ourselves and let others define our roles, then we are not trusting the God who created us in God’s own image.

Jesus is already like God. God has claimed him as Beloved.

The temptation is to be something other than that, something less than that. The temptation is to prove it. Jesus refuses. Matt Fitzgerald, a pastor in Chicago, says that “by refusing to practice human power, Jesus made himself vulnerable to human power.”[2]  Jesus’ vulnerability is paradoxically his strength.

Jesus refuses to practice human power. He won’t turn stones into bread.  He won’t form an alliance that puts him at the top of a political ladder.  He won’t market himself with sensationalism by throwing himself off tall buildings. He refuses to practice human power, refuses to be cowed or silenced by human power, and in the process makes himself vulnerable to human power.

If that isn’t clear, let me offer a very contemporary example.  Elena Kovalskaya was the director of a State Theatre and Cultural Center in Moscow. She resigned her position in protest against the invasion of Ukraine.  She did this after the governmental Department of Culture warned that any negative comments would be considered treason. She did not go quietly. On international social media, she said that she would not work for Putin, whom she called a murderer and be on his payroll.[3]  If she were playing by the rules of human power, she would have kept her mouth shut and kept her job security. She would have betrayed her principles in order to save her own life.  By quitting her job and broadcasting the reasons for it, she refused to be controlled and left herself very vulnerable to severe punishment or even death. You have probably heard stories of many others exercising the same choice in Russia or Ukraine just now.  Elena is far from the only one. She was just one of the first I heard about. Jesus’ temptations are very human temptations, and his ultimate choice is one available to all of us.

Jesus rejects the short-cuts, the quick fixes offered in the desert, but those opportunities to do good come to him again in due time. He refuses to turn stones into bread, but he does feed many, many hungry people. He refuses political power on the Tester’s terms, but he will speak truth to power proclaiming God’s reign of justice and peace over and over again. He refuses to jump off the temple to demonstrate faith, but he will go to the cross confident in God. [4]

After forty days, the Tester departs, to return again at an opportune time.   Jesus refuses to practice human power. It is an exercise of radical freedom, but it leaves him vulnerable to human power. We know this story leads to a cross. And there, when Jesus is most diminished, most depleted, most vulnerable, the temptation comes again.

As he is being executed between two men, one of them says “Since you are the Son of God, save yourself and us.” (Throw yourself down from here, Jesus. What good is it to be the Son of God if you don’t use the power?)

The man on the other side says, essentially, “do not put God to the test.”

The second one also says “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”  While he is most diminished, most depleted, most vulnerable, Jesus refuses to grasp for human power, but confidently replies “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”

It begins with Beloved. The journey to the cross begins with Jesus’ baptism, with the pronouncement “This is my Beloved.”  The overflowing love of God, the knowledge deep within him that he is profoundly loved, that nothing, not scorn, not rejection, not violence, not even death, nothing can separate him from that love, sustains him and enlivens him with courage and power that will endure forever.

Beloved ones, do you hear it? We are created in the image of God and claimed in baptism as God’s very own. We are profoundly loved and empowered to live life to the brim, full of freedom, courage, and power. May it be so for you and for me. Amen.

[1] The sermon title was taken from a blessing of the same name by Jan Richardson, which was used as the benediction at the end of worship. https://paintedprayerbook.com/2016/02/11/lent-1-beloved-is-where-we-begin/

[2] Matt Fitzgerald in Feasting on the Gospels, Luke, Volume1, Cynthia Jarvis and E. Elizabeth Johnson, editors, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2014), p. 97.

[3] https://northeastbylines.co.uk/russian-theatre-says-no-to-war/

[4] Sharon Ringe, in Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 2 David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, general editors, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2009), p. 49.

2/27/22 - Courage and Humility - Luke 6:39-45

Courage and Humility

Luke 6:39-45

February 27, 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=vhcJwFOfX7A

A mother went to a famous spiritual teacher for help with her son. "My son has horrible eating habits," she said. "He will listen to you if you tell him to stop eating foods with so much sugar."  The Teacher listened sympathetically. "I ask that you come back next week and ask me again."

The mother agreed and returned seven days later. "My son’s problem continues," she said. "I am concerned about his health. He rarely eats any fruit or vegetables.

 Please, won’t you talk to him about the danger of eating too much sugar?"

"Please, come back and see me in a week," the Teacher said simply. Though the mother was disappointed, she left and returned one week later. Once again she made her plea. This time the Teacher agreed to talk with her son.

When the conversation was done, the mother thanked the Teacher. " I am grateful that you took the time to talk to my son, but I don’t understand why it took three requests for you to do so."

The Teacher looked at the woman and said, "I didn’t realize how hard it would be for me to give up sugar."

We are at the end of our reading of the Sermon on the Plain. Today’s reading begins with a concern for  teaching and learning, with the responsibilities and pitfalls of each.  Those who would teach others are encouraged to maintain humility

You cannot teach what you do not know, and no one knows everything, so the wise teacher may take three weeks (or more)  to learn something themselves before attempting to instruct others. 

The sermon is sort of a tag-team effort by Jesus and Luke.  Jesus taught the principles of this sermon over and over again as he roamed through Galilee.  Luke gathered together what he thought were the most important pieces and compiled them into one sermon here at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry.  We can surmise that because Mark and Matthew also include some of the same teachings, but they describe them in other contexts in Jesus’ ministry. In this sermon, Jesus is speaking to the crowds in general, but also specifically to those who will carry on his ministry.  Luke writes his gospel about 50 years after Jesus’s lifetime and he is careful to preserve Jesus’ teachings especially for those who will convey them to the next generation.  

That well-known saying about taking the log out of your own eye so that you can see to remove the speck from someone else’s eye is true, but also supposed to be funny. Many of us have a tendency to exaggerate the faults of other people and minimize our own.  Jesus turns that around and invites us to laugh at our selves, so that we don’t fall into the trap of thinking we have it all together. 

Jesus warns that the blind should not lead the blind. It’s an unfortunate metaphor from a time that was less aware of ableism. What he means is that an uninformed teacher can easily lead astray an uninformed student. People who would lead others have a responsibility to attend to themselves, to intentionally examine and know themselves, because we are teaching matters of truth and spirit. 

Larry and John are both well-respected, mature teachers in their church. One time, they led a church retreat together. Larry happens to be physically blind. He lost his sight before he was 10. One evening he and John went for a walk, just the two of them. As they moved away from the lights of the retreat center, it got darker and darker until John could not see a thing. Larry asked if John would trust him to guide them. John agreed.

Larry upped the ante and asked if they could start with a trust fall. Would John fall backwards and trust Larry to catch him? John did fall and Larry did catch him. Then they continued on the walk with Larry in the lead, and contrary to Jesus’ prediction, they did not fall into a pit. [1] Larry was used to navigating safely without the use of his sight.

This story illustrates the dangers of taking things too literally. It also manages to illustrate Jesus’ point. You want your leader to be someone who knows the terrain, someone who has been down the path that you’re on now. And in John’s case, when he needed to get home safely in the dark, Larry knew things John didn’t. John had the humility to recognize that Larry was his best guide and the courage to trust him.

Jesus says that trees are known by their fruit. What is on the inside of a person (their thoughts and goals and motivations) will likely be revealed by their speech and actions. This is a standard for everyone – the quality of our discipleship is measured by integrity between what is internal and what is external. It is also a warning to be careful about the teachers we follow. If someone claims to be following Jesus, claims to be teaching others how to love like Jesus loved, but the outcome of their beliefs is shame and anger and division, then we are wise to question those beliefs.

If we would truly follow Jesus, then just listening is not enough. He ends the sermon with the stress that those who follow him faithfully will hear his words and act on them.

We build our lives on the foundation of his teachings. We remember from the last few weeks that those teachings include God’s complete disregard for human categories of worthiness and Jesus’ dismantling of social hierarchies to bring everyone to a level place. We might remember his hard teachings about loving enemies and facing persecution.

Spiritual formation occurs when we know those things and we practice them. We have the humility to recognize our inadequacies, the log in our eye, and the courage to act anyway.

The parable at the end of the sermon uses the metaphor of a storm. The storm reveals the strength of the foundation. It is one thing to talk about loving enemies during peace-time; another thing altogether when war breaks out.  It is one thing to speak of blessings when all is going well; the real test comes in crisis or calamity.

Like you, I have watched the news from Ukraine this week with deep concern but also with admiration for the courage of the Ukrainian people. I have learned some things about Baptists in Ukraine. Protestants make up about 2% of the population and Baptists fall within that 2%, but Ukraine has the largest concentration of Baptists in Europe.

In 2014, when Russia occupied some western areas of Ukraine, Baptist churches in those areas were officially declared terrorist organizations as was the Baptist Union of Ukraine. The Baptist Hymnal was outlawed as extremist material. More than 40 churches were forced to shut down or go into hiding. 

In spite of that persecution, over the last 5 years, Baptists poured $2 million dollars into aid relief and community development in those disputed territories.  While being labelled terrorists, they planted 25 new churches in those areas.

In the last few weeks, Baptist churches across the country have stocked up on food and supplies and gasoline. They have prepared to be centers of refuge in the chaos and confusion of war. Pastors are not fleeing, but are determined to care for those in need around them.[2]   Blessed are those who hear Jesus’ words and act on them.  God grant them wisdom and courage for the living of these days.

Anthony Ray Hinton was in Albany this week and several of us got to hear him speak. When he was 29 years old, Mr. Hinton was convicted for crimes he did not commit. The structural racism that sent him to death row was evident at every level, from the arresting officers to the negligence of his attorney to the judges who refused to hear the merits of his case. It was not subtle. It was blatant. He spent 30 years on death row until the US Supreme Court finally overturned his conviction.

I cannot think of a person who demonstrates more faithful courage and humility than Mr. Hinton. After he had been in prison for many years, a lawyer offered to try to get a plea deal. In this deal, the state of Alabama would reduce his sentence to life without parole in exchange for a guilty plea. Facing execution, Mr. Hinton said that he could never say that he did something he did not do. He would not lie, would not be false to himself, even to save his life. That’s courage.

He has a story to tell and he tells it over and over again.  It is a story of unmitigated, intentional injustice and abuse of power. And yet, he does not tell the story with the arrogance of one who has been there and knows it all. He tells it courageously and openly.

He describes the victory of having finally won his release, but also the trauma that he carries from 30 years in captivity. After his release, he couldn’t sleep in a regular bed. He spent the first two nights on a bathroom floor, sleeping on a bath mat because the bathroom was more like the size of his cell.  In a recent interview, he said that he now has a king-sized bed, but he still sleeps with his knees up in a fetal position. He still wakes at 2:45 every morning because for 30 years, breakfast was at 3:00 a.m.[3] He says that people think he is fine, but he is not. That’s humility.

While he was in prison, he formed relationships with others on Death Row – on 54 occasions, someone was marched past his cell to the execution chamber. One of them was Henry. Henry was a lifelong racist, a card-carrying member of the Klan. He was the last person executed in Alabama for lynching a black man. He committed that crime at age 19, following orders from his father.

Mr. Hinton became friends with Henry. The man locked up simply because of the color of skin chose to be friends with someone who would have killed him for being black. He said that to survive there, he had to become family with those in prison around him and they had to become family with him. It didn’t matter who you were or what you had done when you all lived a few feet away from an electric chair.  Can you imagine? I cannot.

On the day of his death, it was Mr. Hinton that Henry wanted to accompany him, to bear witness. Of course, that was not allowed. Before his execution, Henry made a statement. His last words were “All of my life, my father, my mother, my community, taught me to hate. The very people that they taught me to hate are the very people that taught me how to love. And tonight, as I leave this world, I leave knowing what love feels like.”[4] 

One of the things that Mr. Hinton says about that is “God allowed me to go to prison . . . God allowed me to go to prison, so that I could teach Henry how to love.” 

In solidarity with Jesus, may we be found in such good company as those in Ukraine, as Anthony Ray Hinton. May God grant to us wisdom and trust, courage, and humility for the living of our days. Amen.

[1] https://liturgy.slu.edu/8OrdC022722/reflections_foley.html

[2] https://christiancitizen.us/what-does-the-russian-invasion-of-ukraine-mean-for-religious-minorities/?fbclid=IwAR1OOie7xaBVk5VonU2K_MHF9gK0snACUv7QsIOyv15xyMVOQxa7DJSPFCY

[3] https://youtu.be/0XqdJrmLnog

[4] https://youtu.be/NaTpwqPrS0s

2/20/22 - To You That Listen - Luke 6:27-38

To You That Listen

Luke 6:27-38

February 20, 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/ZaxD8Z57G7A

Last week, we heard the first part of this extended teaching called the Sermon on the Plain. We heard Jesus bless the poor and warn the rich and single out for a special blessing those who would suffer persecution for following him.  Today, the teaching continues, but now Jesus addresses “you who will listen.” 

To those who will listen, Jesus says “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.”  This is one of Jesus’ hardest teachings. No doubt about it. 

To you that listen today, I offer two stories.

The first one comes from the Rev. Fred Craddock. Dr. Craddock was a world-renowned preacher.  He was a professor of preaching from 1979-1994 at Chandler School of Theology in Atlanta.  I had the good fortune of hearing him lecture when he came to my seminary shortly before his retirement.  When he retired from being a professor, he planted a church in an area of great poverty in northern Georgia.

Cherry Log Christian Church was formed on Easter Sunday, 1997.  Everyone seemed to have a good time that day, Craddock said, except one man.  That man had an objection to register. Craddock asked him what it was and he said, “The Scripture you read.  That was a bad choice.”

Craddock said, “Well, those were the words of Jesus.” 

And the man said, “Well, there are a lot of words in the Bible that are out of keeping with the spirit of our time. It’s just out of touch. What people expect of the church now-a-days is not a lot of talk about cross-bearing and loving enemies, they want to come to church to feel better, be part of a group that will help them be successful. In a case or two, maybe some therapy, but otherwise, we get together to mutually enjoy each other, so knock off the ‘ought’ and ‘must’ and ‘should.”

Craddock said, “Why?’

The man said, “It sets the bar too high. If you keep doing it, you’ll never have a church. . .. Don’t be out of touch with the spirit of the time.”[1]  

“Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you.”

This is incredibly hard work. Those of us who read Stride Toward Freedom last month were reminded of the enormous, sustained discipline it took for the black residents of Montgomery to continue to love their enemies.  That love was evidenced in the way they framed the issue.  The goal was never to humiliate or defeat white people (their identified enemy), but to defeat the unjust practices in the bus system. It was demonstrated when there was no retaliation for the bombings of several leader’s homes, and again, when the Supreme Court ruled that Alabama’s segregation on buses was unconstitutional. When they had won, they did not gloat.  Instead, they lovingly prepared to resume riding the buses with care to extend courtesy to white passengers and drivers, the courtesy that had never been extended to them.

“Love your enemies” is probably Jesus’ hardest teaching.  It is important that we understand what Jesus is actually saying.  He is not suggesting that people should overlook the harm done by our enemies and pretend that it doesn’t matter in the name of just loving them.  His examples of turning the other cheek and walking the second mile – these are actions which highlight the insult and injury, the lack of human dignity being inflicted upon the oppressed person.  If you treat someone who is your enemy like that, if you hold up a mirror to them, they might not like what they see and they may take it out on you even more.  This is a risky, radical kind of love. 

It is not the kind of love that can be exercised by someone who is being abused and cannot escape. Turning the other cheek has been used to justify putting up with violence in the name of love.  That is absolutely not what Jesus means here.  If that is something you question, please, please talk with me about it. 

We have one word for love in English. We might love pizza or a pet or a spouse or a child or a best friend.  The same word ‘love’ is used to describe the bond with chocolate cake and a life partner.  Greek, on the other hand, has at least three words for love. One is eros, which has come to mean erotic or romantic love. When Jesus says, “love your enemies”, he does not say “seduce your enemies; start up a romantic relationship with them”.

Another love is philia, like the city Philadelphia. It means affection between personal friends.  It is a love that is reciprocated.   Jesus does not say “become friends with your enemies.”   What he says is “agape your enemies”.  Agape is sometimes called unconditional love.  Agape is the overwhelming love of God in John 3:16, the love which compels God to send the Beloved One into the world.

Martin Luther King said this about agape, “Agape . . .is an overflowing love which is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless, and creative. It is not set in motion by any quality or function of its object. It is the love of God operating in the human heart.  Agape is disinterested love. It is a love in which individuals seek not their own good, but the good of their neighbors Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people, or any qualities people possess. It begins by loving others for their sakes.”[2]

You do not love your enemies in order to get them to stop hurting you. You do not love them to convert them into being your friends.  You love them while they are hostile.  You love them, Jesus says, because you are children of the Most High and God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.  “Love your enemies and do good to them because that’s the way God treats enemies. God loves and does good to those who hate and curse and abuse God.”[3]

That is a high bar.  Probably out of touch with the spirit of our time.

To you who will listen today, I offer a second story.

When the Nazis invaded Holland in 1940, Gerrit tenZythoff was 17 years old and leading the sort of life that was common for teenage boys even then — a life filled with schoolwork and sports and good friends. And then his life began to change.

First the authorities confiscated the textbooks written by Jews. Then his Jewish teachers and classmates disappeared, the family doctor — also a Jew — died by suicide, and the local butcher who had served the family for so many years — another Jew — was beaten to death.

Gerrit’s parents had been active in the underground movement to transport Jewish people out of danger.  After the occupation, his father gave specific instructions to Gerrit and his five siblings. He said, “One day you will see people whose presence you will deny.  You will see faces that you shall not remember. And you will never ask a name.” 

So, the tenZthoff children heard movements in the night that were never explained to them, and their parents harbored mysterious people until they could make the next leg of their journey. Some mornings they had breakfast with people who were “never there.”

Gerrit found his own ways to protest.  He was a good student, but once he came home with a report card with an F in German.  He was proud of himself for deliberately flunking the class.  His father, a school principal, said “Son, it was not always like this in Germany, not will it always be.  A day will come when you have to know the language.  After the Germans have lost the war, we will have to talk to them, and you will have to know the language if you want to be part of the solution.” So, he compromised and agreed to pass the class.  

In 1943, when he was a university student, Gerrit refused to sign a loyalty oath to the German regime.  He was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in a forced labor camp in Berlin.  At twenty-years old, he was tortured in an attempt to get the names of people in his village who were sheltering Jewish people. Gerrit adamantly refused. The injuries he sustained to his bones, spinal cord, and nervous system would plague him for life.

Then, in 1945, an Allied bombing raid scored a direct hit on the factory where he was imprisoned. Gerrit and another Dutch student escaped, but they had to make their way 500 miles to home.  They were dressed in shabby clothes, had no real shoes, no identification papers and no ration coupons. Because of his father’s long-ago insistence, Gerrit spoke fluent German.  That probably saved his life when a soldier engaged him in conversation on a train. 

When he crossed the border into Holland, his home country was still occupied and dangerous.  In fact, the Nazis knew of his disappearance from Berlin and had already been to his family home looking for him. He spent the next two years in hiding on a farm owned by a family friend.

When the war was over, Gerrit finally returned home. He had endured torture, deprivation, confinement and taken great risks.  This was in part because of the example set by his parents. But his suffering had been at the hands of the Nazi’s. They had more than earned the label of enemy.

When he finally made it to his parent’s house, he found two children he did not know.  Names of guests were no longer a secret, so he asked who they were. When he heard the names, he said “What! These are Nazis!”  His parents said that yes, their parents had been Nazis.  Gerrit said “Then I don’t want to be under the same roof with them.”  He stormed out, slamming the back door as he went.   

It was his mother who followed him and said, “Gerrit, I love you very much but you’re wrong.  They are children of Nazis.  But, we are Christians and we will stand with those who suffer.” 

Years later, Gerrit became a pastor and then a professor.  He taught in the United States at Reformed Church seminaries, including New Brunswick in New Jersey.  He said, “My father’s and mother’s actions really, literally saved me from a life of bitterness, resentment and hatred.”[4]

To those who will listen, Jesus says “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. . .  

Because you are children of the Most High who is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.

[1] Fred B. Craddock, “On Being Gracious” The Collected Sermons of Fred B. Craddock, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2011), p. 155-156.

[2] Martin Luther King, Jr. Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, New York:  Harper and Row, 1958) p. 93

[3] The Rev. Nathan Nettleton in his sermon “Becoming Children of the Most High” https://southyarrabaptist.church/sermons/children-of-the-most-high/

[4] Most of this information comes from Southwest Missouri State University, where Gerrit tenZthoff founded the Department of Religious Studies in 1969 https://www.missouristate.edu/assets/relst/The_Tablet_Summer_2001_GerrittenZythoff.pdf

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/