3/31/24 - Now What? - Mark 16:1-8

Now What?

Mark 16:1-8

March 31, 2024

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=ICdWObijd3s

If you were here on Thursday night, you heard the end of the story of Jesus’ death.  If you weren’t here, that’s OK, you’ll get this quickly. You heard that a man named Joseph got permission from the Roman governor to take Jesus’ body and bury it in a new tomb.   Mark tells us that the women watched while that happened. So they know where to go on Sunday morning. 

But let’s stick with Joseph for a minute. Mark describes him as being from a place called Arimathea and a member of the council.  Every Jewish town had a council, which was the religious and political leadership. But the suggestion is that Joseph is a member of the council in Jerusalem, that body that convinced the Roman authorities to crucify him. That subtly implicates Joseph in Jesus’ death.  Mark also describes him as a person who was waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God.  He is pious and earnest, but as Mark tells the story, Joseph is not a disciple of Jesus.  (Mark’s details are different from those in John’s gospel, by the way.)

Some time earlier, when John the Baptist was executed, his disciples were courageous enough to go to Herod Antipas and ask for his body which they buried.  Jesus’ disciples do not have that courage. Joseph is protected by his status and privilege, so he asks. 

People executed by crucifixion were not generally buried.  Decomposing at the mercy of the elements and scavenging animals was the very last bit of humiliation and degradation that went with crucifixion. So, perhaps Joseph is performing an act of mercy, to spare Jesus and his family that.  Or perhaps he wants Jesus dead and buried, conveniently out of sight.  In any case, the burial is hurried.  Joseph buys a linen cloth, wraps it around the body and puts the body into the rock hewn tomb. He does not attend to any of the usual burial rites. He does not wash or anoint the body. The women observe, but they do not assist.  This is more evidence that Joseph is not a disciple. 

This is why the women are going to the tomb on Sunday morning, to wash Jesus’ body and anoint it with spices, to give Jesus the dignity of a proper burial.

These women are not from Jerusalem. They are outsiders.  They are women. They don’t have the protection of any kind of privilege.   They have followed Jesus from Galilee, where Mark says, they used to provide for him. They have been partners in Jesus’ ministry, but silent ones because Mark has not mentioned them, them, until now. 

Watching Jesus’ slow suffering death would have been a terrifying agony.  They have been traumatized. They’re still feeling that on the way to the tomb. But maybe, they are also starting to feel a tiny bit of relief.  They can tell each other that Jesus is no longer suffering, no longer in pain. And they’re relieved of the tension that had been mounting every time he predicted his death.  Now instead of being powerless bystanders, watching him die, they can something.  They can care for his body and settle into the grief process.  Death is awful, but it is known.  They can do this.  They will do this together.

But we know that’s not what happens. The tomb is empty. There is no body to tend.  Some guy is there and he tells them that Jesus is alive and has gone back to Galilee.  He says that they should go get the disciples and tell them Jesus will meet them all back at home. It is not what they’re expecting. They’re amazed and terrified.  They cannot deal with it.  They are afraid, so instead of telling the disciples, they say nothing to nobody.  

Fred Craddock says, “This is no way to run a resurrection.”[1]

The male disciples failed Jesus in chapter 14.  They all fled when he was arrested. The women stick around longer, then they fail to share the message of resurrection.  Mark’s gospel has the most disappointing ending.

Mark knows more. He writes years after the first Easter. He surely knows about Pentecost, about how the first church forms within the Temple in Jerusalem and spreads out from there.  He is probably writing to a Christian community in Rome because the gospel has spread that far.  He knows more, but he chooses to tell the story from within the point of view of the very first witnesses to Resurrection.  They have to decide what to do with this news. And so do we.

They want closure.  They want relief from the anxiety of following Jesus, the emotional stretching of caring for people all the time, the financial pressures of paying the bills, because these women were Jesus’ benefactors. Being a disciple is sometimes exhausting. If Jesus is dead, they can come to terms with it and get on with their regular lives.

But if resurrection is true, they won’t get relief. They won’t get closure. If resurrection is true  -- and that’s still a big IF -- then they have to reset their own expectations.  If resurrection is true, the mission goes on.  If resurrection is true, then what now? They have to begin again.  They don’t even know what that means yet, so they don’t any anything to anyone.

That’s how Mark ends the story.  He doesn’t tell us what happens next which leaves many of us with the women at the tomb, wondering how to begin again. Lots of people were uncomfortable with this ending.  They agreed with Craddock – that’s no way to run a resurrection, no way to end the story.  So beginning as early as the second century, they wrote their own endings, to tidy things up, to offer closure. There are not one but two re-writes included in most Bibles after verse 8. The style of the Greek and the vocabulary tells us that they were not written by Mark.

If we stick with Mark’s actual ending, we may be caught between faith and fear, standing at the intersection of “I believe” and “I am afraid”

As in, “I believe that the way of Jesus has nurtured me and thousands of people before me, and I am afraid that my children and grandchildren will not find faith.”

“I believe that the presentation of the gospel has always changed as necessary to meet the needs of a new time or people, and I am afraid of change.”

“I believe that God is a God of second and third chances, always ready to forgive, to restore, to redeem, and I am afraid that I have used up all of mine.”

Rev. Julie Pennington Russell is pastor of First Baptist Church in Washington D.C. Years ago, she was a pastor in Texas, where she had a friend – a rugged, burly, brilliant guy that Julie said reminded her of the Marlborough Man. He studied at a prestigious university in the Eastern U.S. some years ago, and then he moved to Texas to work on his doctorate. But somewhere along the way he became addicted to cocaine. He tumbled into a dark hole. He lost his family, lost his place in graduate school, lost big pieces of himself. But somehow he washed up on the shores of a good church. And the people of that church put their arms around that man and slowly he started to heal, and eventually, miraculously, even reunited with his wife and children.

Julie and her husband, Tim, had this man and his wife in their home for dinner and the man began to talk about where his life was going. “I want to believe,” he said, “that my best days aren’t behind me, and that my life can still count, can still make a difference for God.” He sat at their table with his head in his hands. “I just can’t help but feel like I’ve blown all of my best chances,” he said. That’s when his wife, whom Julie describes as a “wonderful, Texas flower- child kind of woman,” reached over and took his hands and said, “Baby, you’ve got to take your sticky fingers off that steering wheel. If God could yank Jesus out of a grave, I figure he can make something beautiful out of busted parts.”

Julie says “I tell you what, if I live a hundred and ten years, I don’t expect to hear the gospel better articulated than that.”[2]

Mark knows more than he tells.  What he surely knows is that Jesus’ disciples, the discouraged, frightened, traumatized men and women found the courage to begin again. Eventually, they shared the news of resurrection.  They were transformed into brave, hopeful, loving bearers of good news who literally put their lives on the line for the same mission Jesus had, the dream of God’s reign on earth. Somehow, Jesus was alive.  Somehow, resurrection destroyed the fear and power of death.  They trusted resurrection, even without understanding it, and they began again.

This is the way life always is.  It changes without our permission, without our understanding. We learn to crawl and then to walk by doing it. You don’t even know what your profession is until you’ve been in it a while. We don’t understand what love is, or courage, until we’ve practiced it for years.   As the poet says “We make the road by walking it.”

Or, to put it another way,  “you have to keep going.” This is the advice shared in the wonderful children’s book, Finding Winnie – an origin story of “Winnie the Pooh.”  Before the popular and plush fictional character ever developed, there was an actual bear. In 1914, Harry Colebourn, a Canadian veterinarian who was on his way to tend horses in World War I, rescued a baby bear. Naming the bear after his hometown of Winnipeg, he called her “Winnie.” In the book, Colebourn’s great-granddaughter narrates the story of a remarkable friendship and a remarkable journey – across continents, through war and conflict, and after the war to the London Zoo, where eventually Winnie the bear made another new friend: a real life boy named Christopher Robin. Reflecting on the twists and turns that led this baby bear to inspire a timeless children’s character, the book says this: “You never know when one story ends and another begins. That’s why you have to keep going.”[3]

I think that Mark would agree, “You never know when one story ends and another begins.”  Jesus’ story does not end on the cross.  Our story does not end in fearful silence at an empty tomb.  The dream of God’s reign is not over. Because love is stronger than death and .  . . .Christ is Risen.  Christ is risen indeed.

[1] Fred B. Craddock, “And They Said Nothing to Anyone” The Collected Sermons of Fred B. Craddock, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2011), p. 138

[2] “Our First Calling” on Day1 (September 7, 2008) https://day1.org/weeklybroadcast/5d9b820ef71918cdf200269d/our_first_calling

[3]Lindsay Mattick,  Finding Winnie:  The True Story of the World’s Most Famous Bear (New York:  Little Brown & Company, 2015).

3/24/24 - Palm Sunday - We Love a Parade/The Parade Must Go On - John 12:1-19

Cover Image:  Through the Palms  by Rev. Lauren Wright Pittman  | 

Inspired by John 12:1-19 | Hand-carved block printed with oil-based ink 

The Call to Worship and Prayer of Confession by the Rev. Sarah Speed                      A Sanctified Art LLC | sanctifiedart.org

The Lord’s Prayer is from A New Zealand Prayer Book, 

The Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Polynesia

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtU2iL13HOw

3/17/24 - We Would See Jesus - John 12:20-33

We Would See Jesus

John 12:20-33

March 17, 2024

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=P3bU1vJS-yQ

There’s a cardinal rule of story-telling.  This rule also applies to mime and to preaching, probably to all kinds of public speaking and performance.  The basic  rule is that you close every door you open.  You finish the story.  You don’t leave the audience hanging on an incomplete detail.  If you open a door, you close it.  If you say “I’m going to tell you three things” and then you only provide two, you have broken the rule.

The author of John’s gospel breaks that simple rule and it has been bugging me all week. John introduces some nameless characters.  He calls them Greeks, which is to say that they are not Jewish like the rest of Jesus’ disciples. They are outsiders. This incident happens just after Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on what we now call Palm Sunday.  That created a spectacle that led the authorities to throw up their hands and say “There’s nothing we can do.  Look, the whole world has gone after him.”  These Greeks are part of the world that seems to be clamoring after Jesus.

These unknown strangers find Philip and tell him that they wish to see Jesus. Like almost everything in John’s gospel, this has two meanings.  It means that they want an introduction.  It can also mean that they want to become disciples. Philip is one of the disciples with a Greek name which might be why the strangers seek him out. So, they ask to see Jesus, but Philip does not take them directly to him. Instead, he goes to consult his brother Andrew.  And then, Philip and Andrew go together to Jesus.  That’s where John leaves us hanging.  He never says whether these Greek guys get to meet Jesus or not. 

Maybe Philip and Andrew are suspicious of these strangers. What if they just want backstage passes to Jesus’ donkey show, or worse, what if they are spies sent by the authorities.  Maybe there’s a language barrier.  Maybe they’re tired of sharing Jesus with the crowd.  Or maybe, even though John doesn’t say so, they do bring the strangers with them and the Greeks are standing right there with everyone else when Jesus makes his next speech.

If they are there, what an introduction!  There’s no small talk, no social niceties.  No “Good to meet you, where are you from?” Jesus just launches into a life and death conversation.  He’s talking about his own imminent death, but he’s just cryptic enough that the newcomers might not follow.  This could be one more reason that the Philip and Andrew hesitated, because they know that Jesus is likely to say stuff like this and scare people off.

There was not a single one of Jesus’ disciples, friends, or family who wanted to see Jesus crucified.

Jesus keeps saying it is going to happen and they keep resisting it.  Theirs is a visceral, immediate, bodily response.   Maybe it is similar to the kind of reaction a person has when facing a difficult surgery or being told they need to undergo a painful procedure in order to get a diagnosis. Is the pain worth the gain?  Is there really no other way?  Are they willing to risk their life in order to save it?

“We wish to see Jesus” the strangers say.  Those of us who have been inside the church for a long time don’t understand how hard this is.  We don’t appreciate the incredible effort that it takes for someone to enter a church space looking for Jesus.  There are a few people among us who have done that here in the last few years.  They have screwed up their courage and crossed the threshold into this insider space where they didn’t know the roles, didn’t know a soul. Perhaps they were risking their life to save it, and Emmanuel is richer for it. 

“We wish to see Jesus” is inscribed on pulpits all over the world. Not out front for all the worshippers, but back here where just the preacher sees it. No pressure, preacher, but show us Jesus. No pressure, but this is not about you. No pressure, but remember what we’re here for.

Sometimes, preachers need the reminder.  Because sometimes preachers just want to preach our favorite easy stories.  Sometimes we want to proclaim the safe stuff that we know everyone already agrees with. 

And sometimes, congregations need the reminder that the reason we come together, again and again, is to see Jesus, to be formed and reformed.  We often want to see the peacemaker Jesus, to know the healer Jesus, but in this case, it is Jesus the disrupter, Jesus the change-agent, Jesus the trouble-maker who demands to be heard.

What happens next is life and death. What happens next will change everything for those who identify as Jesus’ disciples.  As he is crucified, their physical lives will be in danger. They may be found guilty by association. Rome will have no qualms about executing a few more rebels. 

After the resurrection, their entire world will be transformed. They upend their routines. They re-orient their lives and those of family and friends, subverting everyone’s expectations.

They abandon their livelihoods.  After this they are no longer fishermen or tax collectors, but church leaders, wandering evangelists, non-profit service providers who make sure that widows and orphans get fed.

After this their religious world changes.  They used to worship on the Sabbath and maybe make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the big festivals when they could afford it.  But after resurrection, they will worship on the seventh day and the first day.  Instead of being ordinary people in the center of their mainline religion, they will become leaders of an unauthorized minority operating on the fringes. 

If you want to live, really live, sometimes you have to learn to give your life away.  That is what Jesus is saying when he talks about a grain of wheat dying. If you want to live, really live, sometimes you have to learn to give your life away. 

No one wants to hear that.  No disciple or friend or family member wanted Jesus to be crucified.  They resist it, refuse to think about it, fight against it with everything they have. Even when it is happening, when the guards come to arrest Jesus in the garden, Peter draws a sword to fight back. 

And we’re not so very different on this side of history, are we?  We’d like to change the subject.  Don’t talk to us about death, Jesus. Don’t require us to change. You already did that for us, remember? You died so that we could have eternal life. That’s the safe, feel-good gospel.  Let’s focus on that. No more talk about following you to the cross, please.

The incomparable Barbara Brown Taylor says “it is hard to preach the gospel to people who are scared to death of dying.” [1]

Jesus was talking life and death. 

And I’m still wondering if the Greeks ever got to Jesus. I’m still wondering if Philip and Andrew were so caught up in managing expectations and softening the blow and resisting the coming change that they never even risked the introduction.

If you want to live, really live, sometimes you have to learn to give your life away.

[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, “Learning to Fall” in Always a Guest: Speaking on Faith Far From Home, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2020), p. 215

3/10/24 - Are We Doing Good To Others, For Others, or With Others? - Ephesians 2:1-10 - Rev. Jim Ketcham

Are We Doing Good To Others, For Others, or With Others?

March 10, 2024

Ephesians 2:8-9

Emmanuel Baptist Church of Albany; Rev. Jim Ketcham

Cover Image:  Light Wave  by Rev. Lisle Gwynn Garrity; Inspired by John 3:14-21 | Acrylic painting with gold leaf on canvas

The call to worship and prayer of confession by the Rev. Sarah Speed                      A Sanctified Art LLC | sanctifiedart.org

The Lord’s Prayer is from A New Zealand Prayer Book,  The Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Polynesia

 Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQyOUkezt80

Scene One: A classroom at Chicago Theological Seminary

New Testament Professor Dr. Robin Scroggs was discussing the focus on grace in Ephesians – perhaps even on the passage we read this morning.

Sometimes we do good TO others, Dr Scroggs explained, such as when a church sets up a youth mission trip to an impoverished area of the world without considering the difficulties and expenses of finding sleeping quarters, dining quarters, food and cooks and cleaners.

Sometimes the local hosts who are ostensibly the recipients of our largesse, have to make up a project for our earnest “missionaries” to do. It can take a lot of time and money to host people who are oblivious to the hidden costs of the “gifts” they bring.

We all want to be doing good deeds FOR others, but too often we are deciding what’s good for others and when we provide it, we wonder why no one is acclaiming us as their savior.

If we’re only trying to earn brownie points in heaven, or avoid punishment in Hell, that’s doing good TO people, using them for our benefit while patting ourselves on the back.

As the writer of Ephesians says, “by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not the result of works.”

Dr Scroggs ended by suggesting the best way of doing good is to do good with others, in partnership with others, in a mutual relationship. Our mission work can only become transformational if we are willing to transform ourselves in light of the gift of salvation we have already been given.

If we’re keeping score of exactly how much we’ve given, if we are giving only because we fear punishment, we’ll end up anxious, exhausted and miserable. And eventually anxiety, exhaustion and misery will appear to be the primary “gifts” we are offering the world.

We don't give because we “have to.” We don’t give because we “need to.”  Truly accepting the freely given gift of salvation produces joy and generosity and creativity -- and truly transformational encounters.

Scene 2: Classroom at Bethel College near St Paul, MN 

I am Interim Minister UBC in Minneapolis. I am invited to attend, like my predecessor, a class on types/styles theology. I am to be the sole presenter of liberal theology for this class at a conservative school founded by the General Conference of Regular Baptists

I began with the Hebrew prophets and their focus on justice for widows and orphans and the poor.

I spoke about how Jesus bent or broke many of the “rules” of his religion and the Roman Empire

I spoke about the abolitionist movement in the 19th Century, the Social Gospel Movement at the turn of the 20th century and the way liberal Christians brought their faith in a loving God to the ecumenical movement of the mid-20th century, followed by the civil rights, women’s rights, anti-war, and welcoming and affirming movements.

Just as I finished, a student in the front row shot up her hand and blurted out “I just want to know one thing. Do you believe in Hell?”

I said I did not.

She gasped - “Well, if there’s no Hell, why should anyone work so hard to be a good Christian??”

I replied, “If you practice your faith only to avoid punishment, that’s a hell of a reason to be a Christian!”

About a month later, I ran into the professor in the grocery store. “You know,” he said, “my students are still discussing your presentation.”

With a grin, I replied, “Isn’t that every lecturer’s dream?

Salvation is the gift of God, not the result of works.

Scene Three: A Town in Eastern TN 

About 20 years ago, my wife Jan was invited to fly down to have an interview with a company based in the eastern end of TN, near the border with Virginia.

I thought it might be sensible to check out the local church situation to see where we might find a church home if Jan did get this job. I found many Baptist churches, of course, but they all seemed to be Southern Baptist or independent congregations. There were also several churches pronouncing themselves to be “non-denominational.”

I don’t mean to pick on churches, but I believe they are representative of all too many churches the world over.

A surprising number of churches had what they called a “Plan of Salvation” on their websites.  These ranged in size from 3 or 4 paragraphs to 3+ pages, single spaced.

Mostly these consisted of a series of theological propositions, things a believer would have to believe to be saved: the Bible is inerrant and/or infallible. The Bible is literally true; six days of creation, virgin birth, all the miracles are real, etc., etc.

The scripture verses they cited leaned heavily on books like Deuteronomy and Leviticus and the Epistles. But almost none of them chose our verses from this morning.

There was nothing about how one should behave in light of one’s salvation, it was all about what one should “believe.”

The more I read these “Plans of Salvation,” I wanted to write one of my own. In my head, my plan of salvation read something like:

“It’s a gift, freely given. You cannot plan to earn it or embellish it. Say thank you. Now get out of your head and go feed the hungry, clothe the naked and liberate the captive, showing ALL of them the same grace and generosity you have already been shown!” End of ‘plan!’

That’s the plan I hear in today’s reading from Ephesians.

This past week, as I worked on this homily, I looked up the current websites of several churches in that same area to see what had changed, if anything, about their “Plan of Salvation.”

None of the current sites I looked at used that term, but they always listed something about how one can achieve salvation. It was the same stuff under a different heading.

“Hell is real. Everyone deserves death, with no hope of escaping eternal punishment, without a personal relationship with Jesus.”

The only “essential parts of the gospel are the substitutionary death of Jesus and his bodily resurrection.” Is that what Jesus taught?

“The Bible is infallible and inerrant in every detail, including history, science and grammar.” Funny, the Bible itself never makes such a claim.

There was nothing, nothing at all, about what Jesus did. Or his parables. There were only a few quotes about “God the father,” and “believe in me.”

Again, I don’t mean to pick on these particular churches. But if they are representative of many churches, and I know they are, is it any wonder the group of people who want nothing to do with church is growing faster than any denomination?

Christianity has very little to do with what we believe. It has everything to do with how we behave. “Love your neighbor as yourself" is not about a belief. It is about how we treat each other – and ourselves.

“By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing. It is the gift of God, not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”

May we learn to give out of our joy and thanks, and not out of pride or obligation.

AMEN.

3/3/24 - Confronting Injustice in Holy Places - John 2:13-17 - Gerardo Marti, PhD, Guest Preacher

Note: A recording of this worship service may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SVK5kuro28

Photo Credit: Overturn by Rev. Lisle Gwynn Garrity Inspired by John 2:13-22 | Digital Painting with collage

2/25/24 - Called to Listen - Mark 8:31-38

Mark 8:31-38

Called to Listen

February 25, 2024

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=Ap30hs_kksQ

Frederick Buechner says to pay attention to your tears because God often speaks through them. Many of us on the Civil Rights Pilgrimage wept unexpectedly at various moments this week. Even those of us who didn’t actually shed tears felt very strong emotions like grief, anger, despair and hope. Please talk with the pilgrims today and next Sunday.  They might be a little shy to bring it up, so you might give them an opening by asking what was most moving for them.

The most unexpected tears in my week happened at a museum in Birmingham. Among other things, this museum tells the story of the children’s marches for desegregation and of the physical beatings, dogs and fire hoses inflicted on children.  As horrific as that was, it didn’t make me cry.

What made me tear up was one name.  This name kept appearing as I made my way through the museum. The name is Fred Shuttlesworth.  Rev. Shuttlesworth was the pastor of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham from 1953-1961.   That church was the headquarters of  a group called the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, which was formed after the state of Alabama outlawed the NAACP.  The protest movement launched from this church challenged segregation in every arena in Birmingham and inspired people across the world.

Rev. Shuttlesworth was a chapel speaker at my seminary in the 1990’s and I did not know who he was.  I think the shame of that ignorance may have contributed to my tears. 

Bethel Baptist Church was a black church in a black neighborhood in fiercely segregated Birmingham. In 1963, they reached out to 16th Street Baptist Church downtown. 16th Street was a large and prominent church located just blocks from City Hall and the commercial district.  It was the center of the Black Community, serving as church and social center and lecture hall.   Famous people like Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Dubois and Paul Robeson were among the guest lecturers or performers.

When Fred Shuttlesworth wanted to invite Dr. King and the Southern Leadership Conference to come to Birmingham, 16th Street was the logical gathering place, but some church leaders and members resisted. They did not want to link themselves with the civil rights movement. They did not want to attract any more attention from the white authorities than they already had.

That’s an echo from Jesus’ conversation with Peter.  When Jesus tells the disciples about the suffering he will face at the hands of the religious and civil authorities, not for doing anything wrong, but for speaking truth and advocating for the marginalized, Peter pulls him aside and says, “Don’t talk like that Jesus.  Don’t take unnecessary risks.  Keep your head down. The Romans don’t even have to know what you’re doing.” 

That’s human nature, isn’t it?  To protect ourselves, to want to live our lives as normally and as trouble-free as possible. 

We heard similar concerns in Selma. The gathering places for the movement were churches.  Looking back on history, we might assume that connection came easily, but we would be wrong.   The churches often actively resisted.  “Don’t bring that kind of attention to us. We don’t need that trouble.”   

That’s what they said at first at Brown Chapel and at First Baptist in Selma.  When the police chased peaceful marchers off the Edmund Pettus bridge, they ran after them into the sanctuaries of those two churches and continued beating them there.

That’s what they said at first at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.  Five months after they hosted Dr. King, the Klan placed a bomb which exploded in the building on a Sunday morning killing four little girls and leaving a community traumatized.  The people were right.  The consequences were severe.

But Jesus rebuked Peter for focusing on the wrong things.  Jesus said “If you want to follow me, take up your cross.”  The cross had only one meaning in the Roman empire.  It meant a painful, torturous execution.  Fear of the cross was the way that Rome maintained its power. 

On Thursday, we went to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.  It remembers more than 4,400 black people killed in racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950.  One of our pilgrims said “This was systemic terrorism.”   In Jesus’ day, crucifixion was state-sponsored terrorism, designed to keep occupied Israel under control.  Lynching served a similar function.  Perhaps it was not officially state-sponsored everywhere, but unofficially it was, because the government did not do anything to prosecute those murders.

When Jesus said, “take up your cross and follow me” in 19th century language, he was saying “if you follow me, chances are good you will be lynched.”

The churches were hesitant and fearful but they did it anyway. They came to understand, as the earliest Christians had, that when you pursue the Kingdom of God, even at the cost of your own life, you work on shattering the power of Empire.[1]

After I found myself welling up in the museum, I wanted a closer connection to Fred Shuttlesworth.  A few pilgrims cut their lunch time short and went with me to Bethel Baptist Church.  There we learned the details about one of the three times the church was bombed.

The sign that we read out loud together said this “On Christmas Evening 1956, Rev Fred Shuttlesworth was sitting in the bedroom of the parsonage reading his Bible when a bomb exploded in the yard. The house foundations were blown away and the structure collapsed instantly.  Neighbors who rushed to the scene presumed Rev. Shuttlesworth had been crushed. Soon a crowd gathered and angry voices began shouting for retaliation.  Slowly out of the rubble and confusion, Rev. Shuttlesworth emerged. He assured the crowd that he was unharmed and urged them to return peacefully to their homes. Later he said that at the moment of the explosion he felt an overwhelming sense of peace and assurance that his life would be saved to continue his work.” 

He said to a policeman “you go back and tell your Klan brethren if God could keep me through this, then I’m here for the duration.”

The next year, he was savagely beaten by a white mob when he tried to register his children to attend an all-white school. That was three years after Brown vs. Board of Education had ruled segregation schools were unconstitutional. The year after that Bethel Baptist Church was bombed again. 

Some might argue that the church was doing political work, not spiritual ministry, but Baptist scholar Alan Culpepper says, “Taking up the cross means being at work where God is at work in the world to relieve suffering and injustice, to rescue the weak, and to bring peace and justice to bear in the human community.”[2]

This is the call of Jesus that still sounds for us.  “ Lose the normal life you had planned for yourself.  Discover with others the life that God intends for us and for all people. Take up your cross . . . follow me and get lynched.”

For, Jesus says,  those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”

Beloved ones, . . . you with ears, . . .  listen . . . and take courage.  Amen.

[1] Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man, p 247.

[2] Alan Culpepper, Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary: Mark, (Macon, GA:  Smyth and Helwys Publishing, 2007), p. 288

2/18/24 - On the Edge of the Inside - Mark 1:9-15 - Mike Asbury, Guest Preacher

On the Edge of the Inside  

Mark 1:9-15

February 18, 2024

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Mike Asbury

 Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI5R7vgQLJs

Cover Image:  I Delight in You by Rev. Lisle Gwynn Garrity

Inspired by Mark 1:9-15 | Digital Painting with collage

The call to worship and prayer of confession by the Rev. Sarah Speed,  A Sanctified Art LLC | sanctifiedart.org

The Lord’s Prayer is from A New Zealand Prayer Book, The Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Polynesia

In the year 1181, a son was born to a wealthy Italian father, Pietro di Bernadone dei Moriconi, a silk merchant, and to a French mother, Pica di Boulemont.  As a boy and young man, he lived a life of pleasure and leisure, a life newly found among the burgeoning class of entrepreneurs in Europe, with their new economic and political challenge to the landed aristocracy.  This class of newly rich wanted to gain control of the political and economic systems, and they were willing to spill blood to attain it.   Cities were at war with other cities, when this son, a young man named Francis, of his city of Assisi, went to war against the city Perugia.  At the stern encouragement of his father Pietro, Francis went looking for the plunder and romance of war.  Nonetheless, Francis had misgivings about such an accumulation of worldly power and wealth, while he witnessed the lower economic classes bear the cost of greed by the wealthy. In opposition to his father, and encouraged by his mother, he began to question his conscience about the injustice of human greed.  Then on one momentous occasion, he met a suffering leper on the road, dismounted his horse and kissed this leper.   His life and his heart changed forever.  He knew joy for the first time in his life, was moved in his purpose, from controlling at the center of worldly affairs, to living on the “edge of the inside” of his world, to serve those with simple human needs, dropping all pretense from living in greed, shifting to meet human need.  He called for repentance and belief in the Good News of God’s love.  He lived in the wilderness, among beggars, as a beggar.  He found others to follow in this religious life, not an endowed life as a bishop in a comfortable palace, nor as a parish priest in a cottage, nor even as a monk in a monastery, rather he lived among the ordinary ones, the “minores”, the lesser ones, the beggars, suffering in poverty, and yet finding joy from God, on the “edge of the inside” of his religion. 

Living on the “edge of the inside” of his world and of his religion, Francis was becoming like John the Baptist and Jesus, in today’s gospel, two otherwise very ordinary men, separated from the center of “society”, away from the false constraints of religion, family life, neighborhoods, politics and a greedy economy.  As with John and Jesus, Francis often found criticism that he was not facing “reality”, however “reality” was defined, yet they and he, lived in love and joy, while sharing the sorrows and burdens of those poor in spirit and in possessions. They each lived in wholeness, by first being broken. 

*****************************

In today’s gospel, within only 7 short verses, Mark reports of three unconventional events from the life of Jesus:

1. Jesus was initiated into Judaism with an odd baptism performed by his cousin John, not within the center of religious life, but in the wilderness.

2. Jesus was comforted by angels, after wild attacks by Satan, the Accuser

3. Jesus proclaimed God’s nearness by calling to repent, as did John before prison.

AND in all this...His Father DELIGHTS!!     

AGAIN AND AGAIN, HIS FATHER DELIGHTS

Therefore...Joy lives within John, Jesus and Francis!

John’s challenging message prepared us for repentance AGAIN in Christ Jesus. Today, in part due to John the Baptist, we are disciples of John’s wild eyed and wonderful cousin from Nazareth, Jesus, the son of Mary and Joseph.

These two men were told by many that they lived outside of “reality”, away from the center of power and wealth.  Yet we know.... by faith .... that they lived in a true and greater reality, yes, close to being on the outside ...so they were always within REACH... of those outside of wholeness,  ..They touched those in brokenness.... and... they were protected and empowered at the “edge of the inside” by God’s Holy love in Christ. 

Their lives included both challenges and comfort from God. 

·       Where is God challenging and comforting you today?

·       How do we challenge false worldly power?

·       How do we comfort the broken, the sufferer? 

To answer these central questions, as followers of Christ...and in his footsteps along with all those that have walked ahead of us, we must always begin at the same place....you guessed it...AT THE EDGE of the INSIDE by repenting of our own sins, not someone else’s, whether during lent ...or any day of any week. 

Here’s a few ideas how we might repent:

·       May we simply admit we are without the answers to life, since we don’t even know the right questions;

·       May we take time to empty our mind, and listen to another, in our shared emptiness, instead of spouting a self-centered reply to someone with different life experiences;

·       May we claim our absence of compassion for those less privileged, so we may then together identify with each other’s brokenness;

·       May we speak truth to false power, while still coming up empty handed, recognizing that God has claimed us, we have not claimed God; God has found us, we have not found God; so that those in positions of false worldly power may know.... we are the sons and daughters of the Most-High, coming only in love, as we live and move and breathe on the “edge of the inside”, yet next to the outside, prepared to reach out and serve

·       finally, I remain in prayer today with our Emmanuel Baptist family honoring the Christ centered, civil rights advocates from Georgia and Alabama and from across our nation.

My friends, God lives, not at the center of worldly power, not within possessions or shiny objects or historic buildings or even bold oratorical messages.... God lives among the poor of spirit, among the weak and lost, God lives here today, regardless of your burdens, your separation from centers of worldly power and control!  

God continues to shower all of us with love and power from on high, in spite of ourselves.

*********************************

I have told you of my vows in the Order of Ecumenical Franciscans.   Listen now to these words from my fellow Franciscan, Brother John Michael of Rutland, VT, explaining how and why we follow our Father Francis of Assisi and we aim to love as he did, in the footsteps of Jesus, following the footsteps of John the Baptist:

“We exist to provoke the conscience of the church and the world both through our unashamed proclamation of a Loving God and our fearless demonstration of that love to our neighbors. We are called to be so small that we could never make a difference, and so foolish that we are bound to [barely] make a dent. We are called to be hopeful in the mud puddles, joyful in the pouring rain, and grounded in God when all hell breaks loose. We are here to volunteer to be taken next. We are here to let others have the megaphone and we will skip to the margins of the crowd to put ourselves between harm and our neighbors. We are here to love each other without shame and to trust that our Spirit-Chosen family is a testimony to the powers that would splinter us into struggling households. We are here to be as wildly and unreasonably in love with God, as God already is with us.”

May this be so for us today, and every day, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit...AGAIN AND AGAIN, here, on the “edge of the inside”.

2/11/24 - On the Mountain - Mark 9:2-9

On the Mountain

Mark 9:2-9

February 11, 2024

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=RLZshuEBS9c

We come to the end of the Epiphany season today.  Our worship theme has been “Wandering Heart” and we have wandered widely from one gospel to another, tracing some of the story of Simon, also known as Peter.  Because of last Sunday’s FOCUS service, it has been two weeks since we heard about Peter, so let’s do a very quick review.  We started with an incident on the Lake of Galilee. Simon and some other local fishermen had fishing all night with nothing to show for it. The next morning, Jesus had asked to use one of their boats as a floating stage so that he could teach the crowds standing on the shore.  Afterwards, he told Simon to go back out fishing.  Simon was reluctant because he had fished all night and caught nothing, but he did it anyway. And then he caught so many fish, it almost broke his nets. His first reaction was awe.  He told Jesus to get away from him, because he, Simon, was sinful.  But then, when Jesus invited all of them to follow him, Simon dropped his nets and did so.

The next week, we wandered to the incident where Jesus commanded the disciples to get in a boat without him and row for the other side.  But then he came walking toward them in the midst of a storm and they didn’t recognize him.  We recalled how Simon chose to get out of the boat and walk towards Jesus, sinking after just a few steps. I suggested that I think it is somewhat of a toss-up about whether he was being brave or stupid, but that Jesus stuck with Simon and kept him safe regardless. 

Two weeks ago, it was the identity question – Who do you say that I am?  Kathy Moore offered a sermon that asked who we are and who Jesus is to us.  In that story, Simon seems as confident as he ever is about anything.  He says to Jesus “you are the Messiah.” “You are the Christ.”  Jesus answers “I’m changing your name to Peter, the rock solid one on which I will build my church.”  

This is the push and pull of Peter’s relationship with Jesus.  One minute its “get away from me Jesus.”  The next it is Peter abandoning the family business to be with him.  One day it is walking on the water and sinking when he sees the waves. The next it is being so sure, so insightful that Jesus gives him a new name which is the Rock.

And then we come to today’s story.  Leaving the rest of the disciples, Jesus takes Peter and James and John up on a mountain. On the mountain, something spectacular happens.  Something that is really hard to put into words, unless you were there, and even then.  They know the story of Moses going up a mountain to talk with God.  We know that story too.  We know that it is dangerous to see God face-to-face, dangerous and deadly.  So when Moses went up the mountain, he only saw God’s back, and even then, the glory of God scorched him.  When he came back down, his skin was shining and he had to cover up so as not to frighten anyone.

That same glory appears on this mountain.  God lets all God’s glory loose in Jesus, making hm one big light, shining from every pore, dazzling in his brightness. 

Barbara Brown Taylor says  “The . . .word for what happened to Moses and Jesus is transfiguration – another word we rarely use outside of church vocabulary. While people who knew them both very well watched, they were changed into beings of light, as if their skin had become transparent for a moment and what had been inside them all along shone through for everyone to see.”[1] 

Sometimes, God shows up in ways we cannot deny.  Halfway between Jesus’ baptism and his resurrection, something is revealed. In this moment, Peter, James and John see who Jesus really is. Not all is as it seems on the surface; there is a hidden glory waiting to be revealed for those who will see and believe. 

It is not enough that Jesus turns into a human light bulb; Moses and Elijah also appear.  What are we supposed to make of that?  One standard interpretation is that they represent the Law and the Prophets, the ways that God has revealed God’s self in the past.  The presence of Moses and Elijah puts Jesus in a context of continuity with religious tradition. 

We might also remember that Moses and Elijah each encountered God on a mountain at a crucial point of discouragement.  For Moses, it was after the people made a golden calf to worship and he got so angry that he broke the tablets on which God had inscribed the law, so that Moses had to go back up the mountain and ask God for forgiveness, again. For Elijah, it was that time when he ran for his life with Queen Jezebel pursuing him.  When he could run no longer, he hid in a cave on the mountain and God found him there. 

Moses and Elijah each beheld God on a mountain at a crucial moment, a moment of fear and discouragement, an experience which the disciples are now sharing. What happens for Moses and Elijah, is that God sends them back into the struggle.

Peter doesn’t pick up on that clue right away.  He wants to prolong this experience.  He says “let’s build some booths.” It’s a reference to a the Feast of Booths, a week-long religious festival which recalled the wandering in the wilderness.  Peter is saying, “Let’s stay up here together for at least a week.”

Verse 6 immediately follows.  It reads “He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.”   Who is the He being referred to in that verse?  It might be Peter.  It might an explanation that Peter blurts out the thing about building booths because they are all terrified and he doesn’t know what to say.  That would be on brand for Peter. But the He might also be Jesus.  Jesus doesn’t know how to respond because he knows that he is shining and the disciples are terrified.

A voice from the cloud takes over. It is the voice heard at his baptism and it says “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” 

Now you have seen who he really is.  Now you know that he is the glory of God covered with skin  -- listen!  Listen to him.

Six days earlier, Jesus had told them something they didn’t want to hear.  Six days before this, Jesus told them that he was going to be rejected and killed and be raised from the dead.  They did not want to hear that.  In fact, Peter had pulled him aside to tell him not to say things like that. But Jesus had insisted and now the voice from the cloud makes the same demand – “Listen! 

He told you what is coming.

Believe him.

Listen and follow.

Listen and go. 

You can’t stay here. 

Get back into the struggle.” 

Sometimes God shows up in ways we cannot deny.  Sometimes we have an experience with God we can’t easily share with others.  We call that  a mystical experience.  Now, I have just done what you probably shouldn’t do with mystical experiences.  I have examined it, taken it apart, trying to make sense of it on a logical level.  Mystical experiences aren’t intended for that kind of analysis . . . but since I’m in this far already . . . here is my take-away:

There may be moments of spectacular awareness of the presence of God, but they are not ours to initiate; they are not ours to prolong, and not every one gets them.

These moments are not ours to initiate – Jesus took the disciples up on the mountain.  They did that often and only had this experience once.  And they had no expectation that it would happen until it did.

These moments are not ours to prolong.  We cannot extend the God-moment.  More likely than not, we will sent back into the struggle, back out on mission.

Not every one gets them.  There were at least 12 people following Jesus around Galilee and often more than that.  Only three people were privileged to have this experience.  Everyone else kept listening and following without the benefit of it. I am not a mystic.  I do not have these experiences.  I try to lean hard into the mysticism of others.

And Peter?  Peter keeps wandering.  Even after this, he will fall asleep in Gethsemane. Even after this, when Jesus is arrested, he will deny that he even knows who Jesus is.

On the way back down the mountain, Jesus tells the three of them “Don’t speak of this until after Easter.”  It won’t make any sense.  You won’t begin to understand it until then.  And maybe not even then.

This is my other take-away.  This journey takes a lifetime.  Even Peter, the Rock, wanders.  Even Peter, who has what seems like one revelatory, faith-confirming moment after another, has his doubts and fear.  At no point does Peter have it made.  His understanding is always limited.  But somehow, he keeps showing up.  He keeps failing to read the room, keeps leaping before he looks, keeps being stupid or courageous – sometimes it is hard to tell the difference. He keeps yearning.  He keeps exploring.  He keeps following, in spite of the cost, because he is one of the imperfect people whom God claims and calls. 

Just like you and me.

Just like you and me. 

Thanks be to God.

[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, “Glory Doors”, in Bread of Angels, (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1997),  p. 6

1/21/24 - When We Cannot Walk on Water - Matthew 14:22-33; January 21, 2024

When We Cannot Walk on Water  

Matthew 14:22-33

January 21, 2024

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=yn5VwNzHmQE

Image:  Lorenzo Veneziano, Christ Rescuing Peter from Drowning. 1370 Staatliche Museen, Berlin

There are so many ways to read this old familiar story. First, we might jump in as twenty-first century people.   If we do that, our default may be to call into question whether this really happened.  Everyone knows that you can’t walk on water, unless it is frozen, and if it were frozen, then the disciples could not have been sailing a boat across it.  So, some contemporary people read this story and immediately dismiss it as un-factual and therefore untrue.

But some contemporary readers are not bothered by those details.  They understand that a story can be true on another level. So when they read it, they comprehend that the story is about storms.  Storms might be weather-related with thunder and lighting and rain and wind as in this story.  Or storms might be a metaphor for difficult times in life.  Whatever this story means, maybe it can be applied to something like a health crisis or a relationship challenge or a job loss or grief or any other time when circumstances have rocked your boat and knocked you down and the waves of fear and uncertainty keep rolling over you.

Not caring whether Jesus really walked on water, these readers focus on the message which they think is about having  faith in the midst of a storm. Often, their take-away is that Peter just didn’t have quite enough faith. He jumped out of the boat full of confidence, but then then he noticed the wind and became afraid and started to sink. “But if he would have stuck with it”, they say, “he would have walked on the water all the way to Jesus.”  When the story is read this way, it too easily becomes a guilt-trip for ourselves or for other people.

Sometimes, the message sounds like this:  Peter could have walked on water if he had only believed. So if you just have enough faith, then your marriage will be happy.  Or if you just believe hard enough, you will be healed. . . or your children will be safe. . . or you will overcome whatever storm is currently about to knock you off your feet.

You could read it that way. Many a sermon has been preached around that premise.

Nadia Bolz-Weber has a great response to that.  She says, “this approach . . means that a) the chaos of my life is still terrifying and b) now I also have to feel bad for not being able to transcend it through a sufficient amount of faith and self-esteem.”[1]

If we are currently afraid and doubting in the midst of a storm, then that reading may do more harm than good. 

Another approach – you might read from the perspective of someone who understands the Sea of Galilee.  Local tour guides apparently will tell you that wind storms spring up suddenly and frequently.  This is a typical part of the region’s weather. [2] 

As experienced fishermen, the disciples would surely have been used to this. This is a strong storm, battering the boat as they row into the wind, but it is not the storm that scares them. They only become afraid when Jesus comes towards them.  They are afraid because they don’t recognize him.  They think he is a ghost.  This is Jesus, their friend, their amazing teacher.  They spend the better part of every day with him – why don’t they recognize him? 

To be fair, the disciples have had quite a day. First, they had received news that John the Baptist had been executed. John who had baptized Jesus not so long ago.  John, whose disciples had brought word to Jesus when John was in prison.  The news that John had been beheaded would have been terrifying and grievous.   But they hadn’t been given any time to mourn or process, because there was a crowd of needy people and Jesus spent the day teaching and healing them.  And then, when they finally thought they might get to call it a day, Jesus had insisted on feeding everyone.  They had been pressed into picnic set up and clean up for a few thousand people.  Pushing down their grief and terror about John – now we call that compartmentalization – they must have been completely astonished to find themselves playing a role in this miraculous feeding. 

And again, they find themselves with questions and thoughts that need to be explored with their community and with Jesus.

But, do they get that opportunity now?  Absolutely not, because Jesus makes them get into a boat without him.  He commands them to go to the other side of the lake.   The way their day has gone, maybe they are not surprised when the winds start up and the whitecaps form.  They have been rowing hard into the wind and are still far from shore.  When Jesus comes walking toward them on the water, they are physically and emotionally spent.   It’s not really that surprising that they don’t recognize him.

What is it that keeps any of us from recognizing God’s presence among us?  Could it be anxiety or confusion?  Are we emotionally overloaded, pre-occupied with worry or distress or grief?   Are we physically spent from living life too fast – the to-do list, maintaining home life and church life in ways that deplete rather than sustain.  Are we overwhelmed with responsibility and caring for others, like the disciples who had to put the needs of 5,000 people ahead of their own?  Have we pushed out all sense of wonder and possibility so that when God shows up, we don’t recognize them and we are afraid? 

Where does fear lead us?

I don’t know about you, but sometimes, when I am afraid, I do something stupid– like getting out of the boat in the middle of the lake.  Author and minister Debi Thomas says “Nowhere in the Gospels are we called to prove our faith (or test God’s character) by taking pointless risks that threaten our lives.  Nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus teach that bad things happen to us because we’re too chicken to earn God’s protective care.”[3]

Sometimes, in our fear, we call out to God for help.  Jesus helps Peter do what Peter asks – to walk on the water to him. “Jesus does not demand that Peter get out of the boat, but he seems as interested as anyone else to see how the venture will end.”[4]  Even when Peter fails, he doesn’t drown, because Jesus rescues him.   Perhaps this is how our faith develops, how we start to recognize God’s presence, in the tension between doubt and trust, between we know and what we don’t, between sinking and swimming. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew all about the real dangers of courageous faith.  In The Cost of Discipleship, he wrote  “Peter had to leave the ship and risk his life on the sea in order to know both his own weakness and the almighty power of his Lord.  If Peter had not taken the risk, he would never have learned the meaning of faith.”[5]

There is a third way we might read this story. We could see it through the eyes of Matthew’s post Easter community.  If the storm is the metaphor that 21st century people recognize, the first century Christians would have immediately understood the symbolism of the boat.  For Matthew’s first readers, the boat, on the water with the disciples inside it, is an image of the church on mission in the world.  Matthew says that Jesus made the disciples get in the boat and go without him to the other side.  “This, then, is a story about the community of faith commanded by Jesus to sail off without his physical presence.  It is a story about the church in every age.

We’re all together in the same boat, and finding it hard going. We’ve been rowing all night, but the wind is against us, the waves are battering and the shore is still a long ways off.  We have less and less hope, and more and more doubt about ever really getting there. 

In this story, Jesus is not in the boat with the disciples.  And is this true also of us, more than we realize?  Are we, like them, a lot of the time just sailing by our own wits and wiles?  Relying on our skill sets and past experience to get us through.  Doing over and over what got us through storms in the past ?” [6]  

What takes Peter out of the boat?  Is it his fear or his courage?  That’s the question for me.  If the boat as symbol of the church, is Peter abandoning ship because the external forces against it are too strong?  Is he leaving because the chaos and hostility are just too much?  Or is he leaving the boat to be closer to Jesus?  Is he stepping out on faith in order to be more like Jesus?

I agree with Debi Thomas.  We are not called to prove our faith with pointless risks.  But sometimes we are called to leave the safety of our tribe, our church, our comfort zone to go where Jesus is.  We remember that when Jesus said “take up your cross and follow me,” that was not a call to a safe and convenient life.

One final thing I notice is that Jesus neither praises nor scolds the disciples who stay in the boat.  We have not explored this story from their point of view. Matthew doesn’t really offer it to us.  But I’m sure they have opinions about what Peter did.  Maybe some of them wanted to join him.  Maybe some thought he was a total fool or even disobedient because Jesus had put them into the boat in the first place.   Maybe they were angry at him for abandoning his post and endangering them all further. 

Even when we are in the same boat, we are not in the same place on our spiritual journeys.  For some of us, the most faithful thing to do is to stay inside the boat. Others needs to test the waters, to see what happens when they test the waters. But what Jesus says to all of us. What Jesus says to everyone in the boat or out of the boat or about to go over the side,  is this  “Take heart, it is I.  Do not be afraid.” 

Take heart, friends. Trust that God who brought us this far will be with us all the way to the far shore, even when we can’t see them or don’t recognize them.  Take heart –reach for deep for the courage that comes from leading and living and loving with your heart.  Trust and doubt and trust again, even in the storm, even thought we have been rowing all night.  Trust and doubt and trust again even when we are foolish or afraid.  Even when the sea is so great and our boat is so small, take heart, all the way to the far shore.

[1] https://thecorners.substack.com/p/the-case-against-wwjd-bracelets

[2] Karoline Lewis, https://www.workingpreacher.org/dear-working-preacher/when-we-cant-walk-on-water

[3] https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2709-out-on-the-water

[4] Lance Pape, in Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year A, Volume 3 Joel Green, Thomas Long, Luke Powery, Cynthia Rigby, Carolyn Sharp Editors, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2020), p. 225.

[5] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship,  rev. ed,  trans. R.H. Fuller (New York:  Macmillan, 1959), p. 53.

[6] I am greatly indebted to the Rev. Brian Donst, for this sermonic angle and his succinct phrasing.  http://food4fifty.blogspot.com/2023/08/welcoming-jesus-as-he-is-not-as-we.html

1/7/24 - Those Who Dream Will Not Keep Silent - Luke 2:22-40

Those Who Dream Will Not Keep Silent

Luke 2:22-40

January 7, 2024

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=YU-Adtgb5nI

Anna and Simeon are doubters.  They have to be. Luke tells us about one particular day when they seem full of faith and confidence, but that’s just one day.  I have to believe that they had other days, different days.  We don’t know Simeon’s age,  but he is always pictured as old.  At some earlier point, he received a word from God that he would not die until he saw the Messiah.  He might have received that word at 20 and now be in his 30’s.  But, on this day, he says “I can die now because I have seen God’s salvation.” And that suggests he is old enough to be close to death. But think about it. If you had become convinced that you were going to see the Messiah in your lifetime, could you really sustain that belief every day?  Wouldn’t there be times of doubt?  Especially when you witness, as Simeon did, the violence being visited on his country, the religious and political factions among his people.  Perhaps he has lost a beloved spouse or been alienated from his children.  Maybe he deals with chronic pain. We don’t know any of the details that make up his life, but I expect that he has the same kinds of worries and hardships that all people face. And that’s why I say he has to have his doubts. 

Anna has been a widow for most of her eighty-four years. Widows are dependent on other people’s charity.  They are often poor and treated unjustly. Anna knows suffering. She is from the university of life, the school of hard knocks. She’s among the company of those who suffer in this world and among those who create space in their hearts to pray. I do not know any praying person who does not also sometimes doubt. 

Fred Buechner said  “Whether your faith is that there is a God or that there is not a God, if you don't have any doubts, you are either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”[1]

I’m belaboring this point because sometimes we separate ourselves from people in the Bible. Sometimes we think that we could never be like them, never speak or act as boldly as they did, because we see them as totally confident and faithful and we know that we are not. So I want to remind us that what we see is one extraordinary day which has probably been a long time in coming.   Anna and Simeon are able to speak and act as they do because they have lived through the cycles of doubt and trust many, many times. 

When Simeon and Anna became aware of Jesus’ presence in the temple, they could not keep silent. They were compelled to speak up. God’s dreams were not for them alone.  Like them, we should not keep silent, but keep speaking and acting to share God’s dream.

Doug Pagitt was the founding pastor of a church in Minneapolis called Solomon’s Porch. That church went out of existence last year at age 23.  Doug was also a leader in the Emerging Church Movement.  That movement and the example of Solomon’s Porch were formative for thousands of Christians and church leaders of my generation. 

Before Doug got involved in that movement, he was considered a highly successful pastor. He served as youth minister at nationally known church running a very large youth ministry. And then he worked for a private foundation where his job was to find the next generation of church leaders and his funding for that was virtually unlimited.  But there came a day when he realized that a voice inside him was saying that there was a different kind of church world he wanted to see happen.  Some might call that a dream. So he left his fully-funded job and set off to plant a church without any money and little support. In a recent interview, he said “you know one of the things that happens when you do something like this and that other people consider to be brave or heroic, often in the moment it doesn't feel that way.  It’s not a self-narrative of I'm being brave. It’s normally a sense of “I don't have another choice right now.”   I was serious enough about my Christian spirituality and my vocation to say “there is not a future for me that I see as preferable inside this [church] world.” [2] He was compelled to speak and to act, to share God’s dream as he understood it with people who were not receiving it.

This week, I had the incredible privilege to be part of an interfaith group, Christians, Muslims and Jews together, who were lobbying for a ceasefire in Gaza.  I was in the presence of some extraordinary people who were compelled to speak up.  There was an Israeli woman whose grandparents and other family members were killed by Nazis in Poland during the Holocaust.  Her father narrowly survived at age 11.   She recognizes genocide when she sees it.  She had her 9-month-old baby with her. She said that she cannot look at her own child without seeing the images of Palestinian children being killed and she cannot keep silent. She was articulate and persistent and kept speaking even when her voice shook with emotion.

I heard the testimony of a woman from Gaza who has lived here for decades.  On October 21, sixteen members of her immediate family in Gaza were killed by an airstrike.  Sixteen people. All at once, she lost her mother, her brother, her sister-in-law, two nephews, the losses go on and on.   There are some members of the family still alive, she thinks, but she doesn’t know where they are and can’t contact them. She weeps every day.  Her husband has also lost family members. They say that they have to speak up, to plead for the bombs and the killing to stop,  for the sake of those who are still alive. 

I heard from first generation Palestinian- Americans, US citizens who believe that they do no matter, that no one who looks like them is valued in this country, which is their homeland.  Even so, they cannot keep silent.  This was not their first meeting with this elected official.  They keep raising their voices, even though they often think no one cares, no one is listening.

I wonder how many people heard Anna and Simeon in the temple that day?  It probably would have been easy to dismiss them.  They were strangers, old people, probably talking nonsense.    I wonder how it was that Simeon got to hold baby Jesus. Most new parents don’t hand over their newborns to strangers in crowded public places.  Did he just grab the baby from Mary’s arms?  Or did Mary recognize something important was happening?  I don’t know.   But someone listened. Someone was paying attention or else we wouldn’t know the story. 

The Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie said, “Stories matter. [Multiple] stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.”[3]

God’s dream of shalom, of intense pervasive well-being for all creation, is not for us alone.   We must share it.  We must tell our stories about Jesus, about ourselves, about the world we live in.   There is a time to speak and also a time to keep silent so that we can listen to others. When we lobbied earlier this week, the meeting scheduled for 30 minutes lasted 45 minutes.  And in all of that time, I spoke for less than a minute, just to introduce myself.  My default, you might have noticed, is to talk, but what I might have said did not compare to the stories and voices that needed to be heard.

Friends, we live in a time of great change, a time when one world is dying and another is struggling to be born.  That may make us fearful.  It may increase our doubts.  But we cannot lose hope.  We must keep dreaming.  On the threshold of this new year, this is my prayer for myself and for all of us – that we will speak up when necessary, for ourselves and on behalf of others to share God’s dream,  and that we will also be silent to hear the stories of strangers and friends who “dare to seek to dream God’s reign anew.”

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

[1] Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, (New York:  HarperCollins, 1973), p 20.

[2] https://trippfuller.com/2023/12/18/doug-pagitt-the-emerging-church-the-end-of-solomons-porch/

[3] TED Talk:  The Danger of a Single Story, https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en

12/24/23 - This Night We are Those who Dream - John 1:1-5, 9-14

John 1:1-5, 9-14   

December 24, 2023

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=6Pv5w2u9tYQ

John does not start with the birth of Jesus.  There are no angels visiting or singing, no shepherds, no Bethlehem Inn with no vacancy, no baby in swaddling clothes lying in a manger.  John begins long, long before that. 

“In the beginning,” John writes, “in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”

In the beginning, John says, referring to that time when God said “let there be light”  and there was light. And when God proclaimed “let the dry land appear” and it was so.  God speaks and things happen. The Word goes out and light emerges from the darkness, waters move and dry land forms, plants and animals inhabit the land. 

John is telling the story of the Word of God.  That Word is Jesus. The Word of God is that generative power, that wisdom, that divine reason at the heart of everything. The Word of God is the mystery that was long before Christmas and is also at the very center of Christmas. John’s gospel begins not with Jesus’ conception or his birth, but at the birth of the cosmos.

The first century philosophers reading along would be nodding their heads in vigorous agreement.  God is pure spirit – sound and light, powerful from the beginning.  They would have approved, until they got to verse 14, which says “The Word became flesh” This word flesh would have been jarring for John’s first readers.  Flesh is impure, weak, and vulnerable. The extreme opposite of the perfect, spiritual essence of God.  This is the scandal of incarnation, that the immensity of God should be revealed in the smallness of a human being.

For 36 years, Dean Smith was the head basketball coach at the University of North Carolina. He was well-loved by his players. One of those players was  Makhtar N’Diaye.  Mak had a lot of talent and potential, but near the start, he had a tough time in practice. All of his coaches were unhappy with him. They kept telling him changes to make and he didn’t seem to be listening.  So eventually, the assistant coach, Bill Guthridge, threw him out of practice. 

Afterwards, Dean Smith, the head coach finds him and asked “Mak, is everything all right? Are you homesick?” 

Mak says “No coach. I’m fine.” But he isn’t looking at the coach.

Smith says “Mal, look at me when I’m talking to you.”

Mak again says, ‘I’m just not feeling . .

Smith interrupts “Mak, look at me as I talk to you.”

They do this a couple more times and then Mak says “Coach, in my culture to look an adult in the eye is not right. It is a sign of disrespect.”

So Coach Smith says “Oh OK.” And he walks out.

The next day in practice, there’s no Coach Guthridge.  The man who kicked Makhtar out of practice is just gone.  He doesn’t show up the next day or the day after that.  Coach Guthridge is absent day after day without any explanation. Then Mak gets a call from his Mom.  Mak is from Senegal.  His mother says “Mak, there’s a man here in my house.  He says he is your coach, your assistant coach.  I know Coach Smith.  I don’t know this man.  He says he’s been here in Senegal for a week learning our culture.” 

Dean Smith sent Coach Guthridge to Senegal to learn his player’s culture so that he would understand him and know how to relate to him and coach him. [1]

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. The Word came to our homeland to learn our culture.

Many Decembers ago, a man was in his study at home when his kids came into the room.

"Dad, we have a play to put on?  Do you want to see it?"

He didn't really want to, but he knew he needed to, so he followed them into the living room and became a one-man audience. At  the foot of the piano stool was a lighted flashlight wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a shoe box. Joseph came in wearing his father’s bathrobe and carrying a mop handle staff. Mary wore a sheet draped over her head. The 4-year-old was an angel with who ran in with pillowcases over her arms which she spread as wings.  Finally, the last child arrived, obviously one of the magi.  She moved like she was riding a camel, probably from trying to walk in her mother’s high heels. She was wearing all the wearing all the jewelry she could find and on a pillow she carried three items. She clip-clopped across the room, bowed to the flashlight, and announced, “I’m all three wise men.  I bring precious gifts: gold, circumstance and mud.”

That was all. The play was over. The father applauded, but he didn’t laugh.  He didn’t correct the wise man.  That child got to the heart of the story:  God loves us for who we are; gold –when we are at our best, circumstance – in the particulars of time, place and custom, and mud – in the messiest parts of our lives. [2]

The scandal of Christmas is that God comes into the world as it is to demonstrate how much we are loved. If you want to know how God feels about human beings, look at Jesus. Jesus came that we might become children of God, John says.  People who are not dominated by the circumstances in which we find ourselves, not defined by how much gold or mud is in our lives, but who understand our worth and power as God’s beloved ones.

Every person is born out of the love of God, expresses this love in their unique personal form, and has the capacity to be united with God.[3]  This is the truth that can change the world.  God became like us so that we might become like God.

A final story for tonight. It comes from a column by Ed Williams, a journalist for 60 years who is now retired.  Ed says “I grew up with the certainties of the fundamentalist Baptist faith.  In my younger days I focused on the uncertainties. As I age, I find myself more comfortable with the mystery, and I find in myself an inclination simply to trust.”

Many years ago, in the weeks before Christmas, Ed was attending a meeting in Miami.  It was hotter than he expected and he had packed only long-sleeved shirts.  So he went to the mall to buy some cooler clothes. A young man emerged from the crowd. Ed thought he was coming to ask for something and he braced himself for the pitch.

But the question came as a surprise.

The thin young man said “Do you believe in Jesus?” 

Ed looked him over. In his mid-30s, he had on a rumpled shirt, jeans and loafers with no socks. Visible on his arms and neck were large sores. Ed recognized them as Kaposi’s sarcoma, signs of the disease AIDS.

“Why do you ask?” Ed said

The young man shared his story.  He had come to Miami years ago. When he was diagnosed with HIV, his family told him not to come home. Over time, his condition had developed into AIDS. 

A few days earlier, he said, his family had called.  They had had a change of heart and invited him home for Christmas. 

He said that he couldn’t tell them that he was broke.  He needed money for bus fare.  Ten dollars would get him home for Christmas.

Ed was in a Bible study class at his home church. Not long before this trip, they had discussed the passage where Jesus speaks to those who are to inherit the kingdom and reminds them of how they had helped him when he was down and out. In the scripture, they ask, “When did we do this?”  Jesus answers “Whenever you did it for one of my siblings, you did it to me.”

Ed said the problem with knowing the Bible stories is that you need to act on them.  In his pocket, he had a $20 bill that he had intended to spend on a shirt.  He didn’t know whether to believe the young man or not. But he decided it didn’t matter, he obviously needed the money.

Ed handed him the twenty.

“Here,” he said, “Merry Christmas.”

The young man was surprised. He took the money and looked straight into Ed’s eyes.

"Thank you," he said, and it was as heartfelt a thanks as Ed has ever received.

Then he put the money in his pocket and walked away. Just before he melted into the crowd, the young man turned and raised his hand in a farewell salute. And he said, "I think you are Jesus."

Before Ed could respond, he vanished into the crowd of shoppers. What Ed wanted to say to him was, "I thought you were Jesus."[4]

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God.  And God said “Let there be light.”  And there was light.  And the Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood to share our gold, circumstance and mud.  And God said “Let there be peace.” 

And there was peace.

God said “Let there be joy.” 

And there was joy.

God said “Let there be love.” 

And there was love.

The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, full of grace and truth.

[1] https://youtu.be/l8b52JwLojM?si=PlnU2AZGDyyupCw3

[2] Rex Knowles, “Gifts of the Wise Children; or Gold, Circumstance, and Mud.” The Guideposts Christmas Treasury (Carmel, NY: Guideposts Associates, 1972), pp. 197–98]

[3] Ilia Delio, Mini-Incarnation of Christ,  https://cac.org/daily-meditations/mini-incarnations-of-christ/

[4] Ed Williams FB post December 21, 2022 https://www.facebook.com/profile/100001444266449/search/?q=Christmas

12/10/23 - Those Who Dream - Sow Joy - Luke 1:46-55

Note: A recording of this worship service may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUJytFvg3v8

12/3/23 - Those Who Dream … Prepare the Way - Isaiah 40:1-11; Mark 1:1-8

Those Who Dream … Prepare the Way

Isaiah 40:1-11,

Mark 1:1-8

December 3, 2023

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=wHcd66dFuTk

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

This is the either the first line of Mark’s narrative or it is the title of the whole ting.  The beginning of the good news. Perhaps Mark wants us to hear echoes of another beginning “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth.”  The good news that Mark is telling began a long time ago. It rests on other beginnings. It is a continuation of an old dream, a new chapter in a long book.

Perhaps Mark is suggesting that everything he will write, his whole story about Jesus from John the Baptist to the calling of disciples to healing the sick and feeding the hungry to his execution and resurrection – all of that is just the beginning.  

This is the beginning of the church year.  In another month, the beginning of the calendar year. Seems like we’re always beginning things, by participating in the opening rituals of another cycle of life or trying to re-establish habits which we have let slip. We begin again to practice healthy ways eating, exercising and sleeping. We resolve again to be generous, to read more good books, to spend time outdoors, to seek to love that person who pushes all our buttons.

For some of us, this time of year carries nostalgia and longing.  We unpack decorations that carry memories- good and bad.  We sing the songs and make the favorite holiday foods.  Others take on the persona of Scrooge or the Grinch and resolve to grit our teeth until the month is over.  Whether you love or hate this time of year, there is often a sense of “here we go again”.  After a few decades of that, we may become jaded.  Is decorating really worth all this time and effort?  What really matters?  We have begun again and again so many times  and what have we accomplished? 

“The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God,”  Mark writes.  The Greek word there is euangelion.  I love to say that. Euangelion. In the second half of the word, angelion sounds like angels.  Angels are messengers.  Angelion means message.  Eu is a prefix that means good. Good message, good news, sometimes we translate it gospel.

When Mark was writing, euangelion was used most often about good news of victory from the battlefield.  By extension that mean good news of peace and prosperity, or the good life resulting from military power. [1]

Mark deliberately uses that word, with its cultural implications, in the title of his story about Jesus.  The good news of Jesus is not news of a military victory.  Mark’s story is of a different kind of battle.  He is declaring war on the political culture of Empire; he is subverting the way things are with the way things could be.

Mark begins his story of Jesus with John the Baptist. Of course, John’s story begins earlier, with his parents Zechariah and Elizabeth.  His parents who were faithful to God in spite of the lifelong disappointment of not having children, of struggling to live under occupation and practice a faith that was being corrupted by politics. The story of John’s beginnings includes his father’s dream that his son would be part of guiding his people in the way of peace.

In Zechariah’s time, a decisive military victory in Egypt ended decades of war in the Mediterranean and united the known world. Caesar Augustus inaugurated the Roman Peace, the Pax Romana. No one before had accomplished such a feat.  And many declared Caesar the savior of the world, the one who ended the cycles of endless war.   One commentator, Kelley Nikondeha, wonders “Why did God choose this time in human history to enter the world through the vulnerability of incarnation?  Why come when peace had finally arrived?” 

Her answer lies in recognizing how Caesar’s peace had arrived – through crushing military victory and control over his subjects through violence.  The Pax Romana benefitted the few while exploiting the many. [2]   Nikondeha writes “After world peace was announced by the empire, God began a counter-campaign in the hills of Judea, a vision of peace with no reliance on violence or war. “

Tradition says that John was born in Ein Karem, a village about 2 ½ miles from downtown Jerusalem.  Both of his parents were from the tribes of priests.  It would have been the most natural thing in the world for John to have followed the path to priesthood and to have stayed in the center of power in Jerusalem, to use that power for the cause of peace.

Instead he emerges from the wilderness.  He dresses strangely – wearing clothes of camel hair.  He is likely very thin, even by first century standards, because he mostly eats honey and locusts.  John has abandoned the easier life he might have had in Jerusalem, for a life of identifying with the poor.  His lifestyle is not eccentric but rather a reflection of his disciplined ability to live on the sustenance the desert provides.[3]

Out in the desert, John is preaching about repentance. He is asking people to change their ways, to start over with God and with each other. He implores them to get ready for the one who is coming.

I don’t know how you picture John the Baptist.  I picture him looking kind of wild – dressed in camel hair with a belt cinched tightly around his skinny self. I think of him shouting at people, like a sidewalk evangelist with a megaphone, maybe almost foaming at the mouth while he tells them how much they need to change.  That’s often my mental picture. But that’s not what Mark describes.

Mark quotes from the Hebrew Bible, mostly from Isaiah 40 which was read a few minutes ago.  Isaiah 40 describes a messenger in the wilderness.  It begins with God saying  “Comfort, comfort my people.”  “Speak tenderly.”

What if all those people are going out to see John in the wilderness, not for a scolding, but for comfort.  What if John is tenderly inviting them to imagine themselves living a different life? Inviting them to be done with all the things that bind them to anger and resentment.  With kindness and love, suggesting that they face the truth about themselves and prepare for change.[4] 

As he quotes from Isaiah, Mark inserts a new verb. Where the older text described preparing a path, Mark speaks of the construction of a new way.  What is being created is no mere path; a new way of life is being built into the shell of the old world.[5]  John calls for repentance.  Repentance is beginning again. Repentance requires a shift in imagination, the ability to dream a new dream, to see a new pattern, and the energy to construct that new way. 

John shows up at the beginning of the good news to tenderly invite us to begin again, to prepare for God’s appearance as much as we can, because the Holy One always breaks into our world in ways that surprise us.  There is a danger that we may reject this invitation -- that we may close ourselves off from one another, cutting away any risks that might lead to joy, refusing to believe that God could care enough to comfort us and others in distress.[6]

How do we receive this good news? How do we begin again?  Maybe by returning to what we already know, to loving God with our whole hearts and our neighbors as ourselves. Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “To make bread or love, to dig in the earth, to feed an animal or cook for a stranger—these activities require no extensive commentary, no lucid theology. All they require is someone willing to bend, reach, chop, stir. Most of these tasks are so full of pleasure that there is no need to complicate things by calling them holy. And yet these are the same activities that change lives, sometimes all at once and sometimes more slowly, the way dripping water changes stone. In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life.” [7]

There is a story told about Ruth and Billy Graham.  One afternoon they were traveling through the mountains of North Carolina where they lived. On that day, they encountered several miles of road construction.  There was one-lane traffic.  There were detours. It was frustrating.  Finally, they came to the end and they saw a road sign.  Ruth Graham turned to her husband and said, "Those words, on that road sign, that is what I would like to have printed on my tombstone." The words on the road sign read: End of construction. Thanks for your patience.

 Beloved ones, until the end of our days, we are always under construction.  And so, we do not lost heart. We begin again, preparing the way, dreaming God’s dream so that imagination and compassion and God’s creative love can find a way into our lives and into the life of this world. Thanks be to God.

[1] Eugene Boring, Mark (New Testament Library)  (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2006).  p. 30

[2] Kelley Nikondeha, The First Advent in Palestine: Reversals, Resistance, and the Ongoing Complexity of Hope  (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2022), p. 25-26

[3] Mary Grey, The Advent of Peace: A Gospel to Christmas, (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2010), p.21-22

[4] Richard Swanson, A Provocation: Second Sunday of Advent, December 10, 2017, Mark 1:1-8 https://provokingthegospel.wordpress.com/?s=Mark+1%3A1-8

[5] Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man (Maryknoll, NY:  Orbis Books, 1988, 2008), p. 124

[6]Glenn Bell in Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year B, Volume 1 Joel Green, Thomas Long, Luke Powery, Cynthia Rigby, Carolyn Sharp Editors, ,  (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2020), p. 21.

[7] Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith, (New York:  HarperOne, 2009), p. 9

11/19/23 - To Feed with Justice - Ezekiel 34:11-24

To Feed with Justice

Ezekiel 34:11-24    

November 19, 2023

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=CVwEil3qHAQ

 “You cannot tell the story of injustice  without telling the story of power.”[1] So says Cole Arthur Riley in her wonderful book This Here Flesh.  “You cannot tell the story of injustice without telling the story of power.

The prophet Ezekiel is also concerned with the relationships between injustice, or justice, and power.  We did not read the first part of chapter 34. It begins with “Woe to the shepherds.”  It accuses them of five sins of omission, and for emphasis, the usual Hebrew word order is reversed. The word from the Lord to the shepherds is:

·       the weak you have not strengthened

·       the sick you have not healed,

·       the injured you have not bound up,

·       the strayed you have not brought back

·       the lost you have not sought.[2]

In Ezekiel’s time, shepherd was a common metaphor for a king. Kings were expected to govern well, to protect and diligently care for their subjects. The last four kings had worthless, not so much shepherds, but wolves.  Wolves who ruled so brutally that it recalls the harshness of the Hebrew people’s suffering under Pharoah’s rule in Egypt.[3]  The result of their failed leadership is that the flock has been devoured and scattered, taken into captivity by a foreign nation. 

Ezekiel is describing the time when they are without a king, without a shepherd, in exile. God has had it with the human shepherds. Now God will be their shepherd. God will seek the lost, bring back the strayed, bind up the injured and strengthen the weak

The thirteenth-century German theologian, Meister Eckhart, said that “you may call God love. You may call God goodness, but the best name for God is compassion.”

God is the quintessential Good Shepherd, actively gathering the scattered sheep, tending injuries, nursing the sick, restoring the flock to wholeness.  This is a mercy and tender love at their very best. The best name for God is compassion.

But it is not only the shepherd-kings that God is angry with. There are other leaders from within the flock who, Ezekiel says, “pushed with flank and shoulder and butted at all the weak animals with their horns.” There were bullies, strong ones who abused the weaker ones.

Some sheep got to the good pastures first and when they had eaten their fill, they tromped it down so that others couldn’t eat. They got to the clean streams and then polluted them so that there was not clean water for others. God is also displeased with those sheep. 

When I was young, I was taught a certain simple narrative about the Bible.  I was taught that there was a pattern in the Old Testament. The pattern was that things would go well for a time while the people were worshipping and obeying the true God, but then they would fall away and worship idols and things would go badly for them. Eventually, things would go so badly that they would turn back to God.  God would forgive them and things would go well as long as they kept to God’s ways. But inevitably they would turn away from God and worship idols and the pattern would repeat itself.  

That’s what I was taught.  Maybe some of you were taught that too. It is somewhat true, not a bad way to describe the arc of much of Biblical history.  Except that when it was taught to me, it came with another message.  The accompanying message was that we modern Christians were not like those ancient Hebrew people.  Because Jesus had broken that cycle and delivered us and we always only worshipped the true God and never fell away.  That is a dangerous message. It is easily put to work to bolster anti-Semitism for one thing. For another, it falsely presumes that we do not have our own idols.

What I believe is that the Bible tells us the stories of a particular people, because we understand things best when they are specific. But the stories are not unique to the ancient Hebrews. The stories describe the tendencies of all human beings. They teach us what it is to be human.

My friend, Vince Amlin,  is a pastor in Chicago. Last summer, during his sabbatical, he had a powerful experience. He describes it like this,

On a rainy Wednesday afternoon, my family gathered with a dozen others outside the mouth of a cave in Northern Spain. Our guide unlocked the gate and led us on a 20-minute walk, deeper and deeper into the earth. 

Finally, we stood in total darkness at the heart of the cavern until our guide turned on his flashlight and panned it slowly across the rock wall to reveal a horse, painted in purple with a black mane and standing in a red field. This image, the cave’s earliest, is thought to be as many as 36,000 years old. By far the oldest human-made thing I have ever been in the presence of. 

It was beautiful…and daunting. 

To hold my own life up against that timeline. To reckon my days against that horse’s. It makes my time here seem very small. And makes the God who stretches from everlasting to everlasting seem very large.”

“It makes the psalmist number his days,” Vince says. “To count each one as precious, knowing how few we have been given by the one who was before horse paintings, and before horses, before caves that lead into the earth, and before the earth itself.”[4]

Vince’s story reminds that humans have been around for a very long time. It gives me a window on Scripture, an appreciation for the ancient people whose stories still matter.

Ezekiel describes corrupt political leaders, those who use the power of their office for themselves, in ways that destroy the vitality of the whole country. Sound familiar?  It describes people who push to the front of every line and take all that they want with no concern for those behind them.  You and I know people like that.   These are old patterns, but we are still living them out. We might even understand verses 17-22 as descriptive of people who exploit the resources offered by the earth and pollute what remains.   For people in our time concerned with environmental stewardship, Ezekiel’s word are more relevant than the prophet could have imagined.[5]

The solution to bad shepherding and stray sheep is the Good Shepherd, the God whose name is compassion, the one who seeks and gathers and binds up and strengthens.  And one more thing, God says, “I will feed them with justice.” 

“I will feed them with justice.”  We may read that and cheer.  The fat sheep, the bullies are going to get what’s coming to them.  It’s payback time.   We think that justice means to give people what they deserve, like payback or punishment, but in the Bible, the word justice means that people get what they need. 

God will feed the flock with justice, the whole flock.  God will distribute the resources so that everyone gets what they need to live. That’s one sense of the phrase.  But we can also hear another meaning.  The idea that the flock needs to eat justice.  They need to be nourished with justice so that justice will become the fiber of their lives. They need to receive justice where everyone gets what they need and  also they to absorb the ways of justice, so that they will live justly in the renewed land to which they will return.[6] 

“You cannot tell the story of injustice without telling the story of power.”   The story of injustice that Ezekiel tells is a story of the abuse of power, the exploitation of privilege, the failure of leadership. Many of his proclamations have condemned all the people, both those Judeans who remained in the homeland and those deported to Babylon. 
For much of this book, all of the people shared the blame for the situation.  But here, he recognizes that many of the people are victims, led astray by those whom they should have been able to trust. 

In his time, Jesus spoke about religious and political leaders who tied up heavy burdens and laid them on other people’s shoulders, but were unwilling to lift a finger to move them themselves. It’s the same pattern than Ezekiel saw.

Cole Arthur Riley writes now as a person of color in a white-supremacist culture. She says, “We cannot trust a society that makes judgments on the morality of a person without taking responsibility for how its own morality has instigated the conditions that call for such desperate decision-making . . .   You cannot tell the story of injustice without telling the story of power. It requires integrity to become honest about how our power systems and our position in the world affect our capacity to do justice.  Which is to say, justice can never be severed from mercy.” [7]

That message that I absorbed as a child, that message that we are different, that we no longer worship other gods was wrong and dangerous.  We still go after idols like status, self-sufficiency, and convenience. We still maintain systems that exploit or neglect or stigmatize.   We give our primary allegiance to something other than God, whether it be  family, or political party, a way of life or national identity. 

Today we mark the last Sunday in the church year.  Next week Advent begins.  Advent is the first Sunday in the new church year. Some of us have done this cycle so many times that we forget.  We have been keeping the church running for so long that we may be in danger of forgetting the point.  So, today, Ezekiel reminds us about the true nature of the God we worship.  God is the true shepherd of the sheep, the one who nurtures and protects and guides us.  And God is the one who feeds us with justice. At the end of a year, on the threshold of another one, it is all about love and justice. Thanks be to God.

[1] Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us (New York, Convergent Books, 2022), p. 122

[2] NIB, p. 1466

[3] Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 21-37, Anchor Bible Commentary, Volume 22a (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1997) p 69.

[4] https://www.ucc.org/daily-devotional/your-days-are-numbered/?fbclid=IwAR1K2sJaw-CWnABmgQw2ELq0hX4fade552DoMvWL3rPnTfd2l6qm-FhfoIY

[5]Katheryn Pfisterer Darr, New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume 5, (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 2015), p. 1469

[6] John Holbert, “On Recognizing the Shepherd:  Reflections on Christ the King Sunday,” https://www.patheos.com/progressive-christian/on-recognizing-the-shepherd-john-c-holbert-10-13-2014

[7] Cole Arthur Riley, pp 121-123

11/12/23 - Time for a New Foundation - Rev. Dr. Elijah Zehyoue - Psalm 118

Note: A recording of this worship service may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsaAfVE7EL8

11/5/23 - Children of God - Deuteronomy 34:1-12; I John 3:1-3

Children of God  

Deuteronomy 34:1-12; I John 3:1-3

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

November 5, 2023 

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy7mNCRUFAg

Last month, my high school graduating class had our 40th class reunion.  I wasn’t there, but several friends sent reports about it.  In the six months before the reunion, two well-known and well-liked classmates died.  One died of an apparent heart attack. The other died by suicide, as a result of severe depression.  My friends told me about the stories shared and the toasts offered to the memories of these recently departed classmates. Partly because of that, partly because I have a tendency towards the melancholy at this time of year, and partly because the church calendar invites exactly this kind of reflection on All Saints Sunday, I have been reflecting on the concept of legacy.

I am thinking about an individual’s legacy, what they accomplish or teach or inspire within their lifetime that has a lasting impact.  It is the kind of thing that you sometimes find in an obituary or a eulogy, although neither of those is ever complete.

Moses’ eulogy in Deuteronomy 34 says “Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face. He was unequalled for all the signs and wonders that the Lord sent him to perform . . .”  Moses left big shoes for the leaders who would come after him.  There no one like him, says the author of Deuteronomy. We know from other books of the Bible that Moses lived a complicated life. He was born in the midst of genocide, but was spared because of the actions of his mother and sister and Pharaoh’s own daughter.  He grew up in the midst of privilege, as witness to oppression, until one day he killed the Egyptian who abused another Hebrew. Then he fled for his life, eventually settling down as a shepherd in the wilderness. Until God called him to return to Egypt to lead his people to freedom.  Moses did so, but only after a good bit of arguing and making excuses.  That kind of doubt and arguing and whining to God seems to have continued for the duration of his life.  What God accomplished for the Hebrew people through Moses’ leadership was unparalleled.  His legacy was enormous, but his life was far from perfect. In so many ways, he was an ordinary human being with faults and strengths who was used by God in spite of himself.

He died within sight of the land he had journeyed towards for years, but without entering it.  Every death is like this. Every death leaves us with questions about how things might have been different.  . . Every death leaves unfinished business.

The actor Matthew Perry died last week. He became famous overnight starring on the TV show Friends which lasted for 10 seasons.  More recently, Matthew disclosed his lifelong struggle with addiction.  He wrote a book about it and discussed it on talk shows.  In one interview he said, “The best thing about me is that if someone says to me ‘I want to stop drinking, can you help me?’  I can say Yes and follow up and do it.”  Matthew went on, “When I die, I don’t want Friends to be the first thing that’s mentioned.  I want [my willingness to help others] to be the first thing that’s mentioned.”[1]  What matters to most of us is not the awards or accolades, but the relationships and the times that we felt like we made a difference for someone else.  Even for someone as famous as Matthew Perry. 

Moses and Matthew both died with unfinished business.  We too shall die with things left undone. 

Reinhold Niebuhr taught theology at Union Seminary in New York for decades and was an influential voice in the middle of the last century.  He wrote

“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.  Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.”[2] 

If Niebuhr is correct, that nothing can be achieved in a lifetime, then important work takes the work of several lifetimes.  Important work takes multiple generations.  I am thinking about an individual’s legacy, what a person leaves behind.  I am also thinking about the other side of legacy which is receiving what is left for us by others.   Some of us are grateful for ancestors who emigrated to this land. Because of their sacrifices, we may have received an easier way of life.  Some of us are grateful for opportunities for education or travel or life wisdom of faith transmitted to us by parents or grandparents or trusted elders.

This summer I came across a list of the people who transferred from Temple Baptist Church to Emmanuel in 1970.  That list is on the insert in your bulletin. Of the approximately 150 names listed, I have personally known  only 9.  I am grateful that I knew Audrey Ford, James Ford, Chris Moaton and Mattie Smith Blassengale.  I am also grateful for continuing to know Sam Koonce, Rosemary Koonce, Esther Moore, Beverly Norwood and Dwight Smith.  Many of you will recognize and remember other names on the list.  When these 150 people joined Emmanuel, they provided a legacy for us.  The historic black Temple Church and the very white Emmanuel Church looked very different after 1970.   Because we became racially diverse, people of different races joined us and still do. That is a rare gift, a legacy to be treasured.

I want to honor our elders, those in leadership in 1969 and 1970 who had the wisdom and courage to bring those two churches together. We continue in the work of anti-racism shared by those folks fifty years ago, because nothing that is worth doing can be accomplished in our lifetime.

We inherit a legacy.  We hope to leave a good legacy.   Our ordinary daily actions shape that legacy.  The letter of I John was written to Christians who struggled with some of our same questions.  They had been through some hard times.  At the end of the first century, their church is splintering.  They may wonder what will become of them. There are a lot of theological fights in their time, but the writer of this letter is more concerned with the practical than the theoretical.  He wants his readers to behave like Jesus, not just to believe that he is the Christ.[3]   He wants them to support each other in the love that comes from God who is love.

“Beloved, we are children of God,” he writes.  Not because we have earned that identity, but because God has freely bestowed it.  We often declare that Jesus is God’s Son. What could that mean?

–      That Jesus resembles God, in the ways that a child resembles their parents

–      That Jesus is close to God, close to understanding who God is and what God desires

–      That Jesus enacts the will of God on earth.

“Beloved, we are children of God,” John says. 

What if John means that we are God’s beloved offspring, just like Jesus?  What if we believed that?  What if, on a daily basis, we looked in the mirror and reminded ourselves “Beloved, now you are a child of God.”  

John says that the world does not recognize us as God’s children, just as Jesus was not recognized.  Maybe the world doesn’t recognize us because we don’t recognize it in ourselves.  What if we did? Imagine the legacy that we could create as children of God.

You recognize the name of Rev. Desmond Tutu.  Known for his powerful non-violent leadership in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, he became bishop of Johannesburg and later the Archbishop of Cape Town, in both cases he was the first black African to hold the position.  I was blessed to hear him preach on a couple of occasions. He could remain calm and composed in the face of soldiers occupying a sanctuary, but he was also an excited and joyful preacher, especially when he got warmed up on his favorite subject which was the love of God.   

Someone once asked him about a defining moment in his life.  He told a story from his childhood.  One time, when he and his mother were walking down a sidewalk, a tall white man was approaching them.  Under the rules of apartheid, it was expected that Desmond and his mother would step into the gutter and nod their heads in deference as the white man passed. But this white man was different, and to their surprise he stepped off the pavement and tipped his hat as they passed him. The man was an Anglican priest called Trevor Huddleston who was bitterly opposed to apartheid. When Desmond’s mother explained to him that Huddleston was a ‘man of God’ he made up his mind there and then to become an Anglican priest just like him.[4]  The tip of the hat, the simple act of kindness and dignity, confirmed for Desmond that he was a child of God.  I cannot think of a better example of someone who lived into that identity. 

 John writes “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed . . . but we will be like him.”   

This is our identity and also our future goal, who we are to become.   We live in the now and the not yet.

“Nothing worth doing,” Niebuhr said, “can be accomplished in a lifetime, therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, . . . can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.” 

And so we are saved by a love that accompanies us all our days, to death and beyond.  Thanks be to God for a love like that.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Culture/matthew-perry-wanted-remembered-beyond-friends/story?id=104474000

[2] Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, (New York:  Scribner Book Company, 1952).

[3] Frank Stagg, [3] As quoted by Peter Rhea Jones in  Smyth and Helwys Bible Commentary:  1,2 & 3 John (Macon, GA:  Smyth and Helwys, 2009), p. 9

[4] https://www.ministrymatters.com/all/entry/3326/you-never-know-what-will-grow

10/29/23 - What Animals Can Teach Us - Genesis 1:1, 20-25

What Animals Can Teach Us

Genesis 1:1, 20-25

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

October 29, 2023

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

There’s an old video of a beaver on the internet. This young kit is named JB, which is short for Justin Beaver. Orphaned as a baby, JB was brought to a wildlife rehab.[1]  In the video, he lives temporarily  in a regular human house where he hangs out in the bathtub a lot.  JB is a busy guy.  He chews on doors and table legs.  He moves around the human house, gathering things. In the video, we see him pushing the front door mat and lugging the recycling tub and gathering a stream of objects like mop handles, stuffed animals, and shoes – all to build a dam which blocks the hallway. JB is a beaver and this is what beavers do. 

What might we learn from JB?  We might recognize that somethings are deeply ingrained and not likely to change.  If we press that insight for people, we might realize that instead of trying to get someone to change what we don’t like about them, we might just try to appreciate them for who they are.  That’s what I was thinking as I reflected on JB.

But I mentioned it to Jim and he had a different take.  He said that some behaviors are essential for survival in one situation, but completely wrong in another one.  The beaver might not be able to read the situation, but we humans need to do so.  Sometimes we have to change, even to change something really deeply ingrained, in order to thrive.

Perhaps trying to learn life lessons from animals is really more of a projection test.  Watching JB led to very different conclusions for Jim and for me.   But maybe that is also part of the learning.

Genesis 1 proclaims that God created animals – the birds of the air, everything that swims in the sea, and the ones that creep or crawl on the ground, wild and domesticated.  God pronounced them good.  We note that the animals were created first.    Before God created the first humans, the planet was populated with all kinds of plants and animals.  In fact, God felt that animals were so important that the first task God assigned to Adam was to name the animals.  Naming creates relationship. From the beginning, we were intended to be in  relationship with the other animals. And that is good.

We are gathered here today to honor and bless our beloved animal companions.  We are here to thank them for the gift of their friendship; their unconditional love. But we are not only here for the animals that we live closest with—we want to praise all animals that exist in our world and affect the ecosystems we all exist in. The apex predators, the smallest rodents, the annoying gnats and mosquitos and the creatures that feed on them. All life is linked.  It is our duty to protect it in any way we can and help it to prosper, because its prosperity is ours as well.

Entire books have been written about human interactions with animals.  Let me just lift up a few.  

Pets teach us about companionship – the cat that winds around our feet every morning on our way to the coffee pot,  the dog that requires us to stop whatever we’re doing and go for a walk or play a game of fetch. There is joy in those relationships, a wonder at the ability to love across species when sometimes loving members of our own species seems beyond us, and also a strong reminder that life on this planet is not all about us. It includes all of creation, which is full of the love and goodness of God.

We’ve heard the stories of pets making journeys of hundreds of miles in order to find their humans after the animal got lost or the humans relocated.  We’ve seen the uncontrolled exuberance of a dog reuniting with its human after a long absence, like a deployment or a long illness. Those bonds are incredible. Animals can teach us about loyalty.

I am amazed at the ways that animals protect humans. There are highly trained service animals that guide their humans safely through busy intersections and crowded shopping malls.  Others that respond to the triggers of a seizure or a dangerous change in blood sugar and use their own bodies to ensure the human’s safety.  Even more amazing is when this happens in the wild.  You might remember several years ago, a scientist was in the ocean observing whales when a humpback started pushing her around with its pectoral fin and ultimately swam her back to her boat. It could have easily hurt her, but didn’t.  She believes it was trying to protect her from a nearby tiger shark.

Sam-I-Am was the dog in our lives when Erin was born and Molly was 4.  Erin learned to walk holding on to Sam’s tail for support.  When Sam developed epilepsy, they learned how to spot the signs of an impending seizure and how to comfort her afterwards.  When Sam died at age 9, we all cried together. That was their first experience with real grief.

Francis of Assisi, perhaps the most well-known animal lover in Christian history, said that people who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, will deal in similar ways with people.  I think that he is right, people who mistreat animals also mistreat people, but the reverse is also true: people who can be taught to love animals can also learn to love people.  I think of various kinds of animal-therapy programs in prisons or rehab or with those suffering from PTSD.

Jesus told a lot of stories about animals.  In Matthew 6, he tells people not to worry, saying “consider the lilies, look at the birds.”   If he walked among us today, he might say “Quit doomscrolling, go take a walk. Attend to the birds, the squirrels.  Learn about monarch butterflies or earthworms or beavers and be open to new insights about yourself and God.”

Yesterday we put out some pumpkins and mums in our yard.  Last night, Jim took our dog Memphis out front for his final walk before bed.  When they got to the mailbox, Memphis sounded the alarm, barking his most urgent bark. Those pumpkins had never been there before. They did not belong there and people needed to be told – the whole neighborhood, apparently.

This is what I have learned from my dogs. They are fully present in the current moment.  They really notice their environment. They pay attention.  They encourage me to do the same.  To see.  To be present.  To leave the worrying behind. 

Let me close with these words from the poet and priest John O’Donohue

Nearer to the earth’s heart,

Deeper within its silence:

Animals know this world

In a way we never will.

We who are ever

Distanced and distracted

By the parade of bright

Windows thought opens:

Their seamless presence

Is not fractured thus.

Stranded between time

Gone and time emerging,

We manage seldom

To be where we are:

Whereas they are always

Looking out from

The here and now.

May we learn to return

And rest in the beauty

Of animal being,

Learn to lean low,

Leave our locked minds,

And with freed senses

Feel the earth

Breathing with us

May we enter

Into lightness of spirit,

And slip frequently into

The feel of the wild

Let the clear silence

Of our animal being

Cleanse our hearts

Of corrosive words.

May we learn to walk

Upon the earth

With all their confidence

And clear-eyed stillness

So that our minds

Might be baptized

In the name of the wind,

And the light and the rain.[2]

[1] https://youtu.be/DggHeuhpFvg?si=lYb5wSZot5im2Jdh

[2] John O’Donohue “To Learn from Animal Being”

 In To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings (New York:  Doubleday, 2008), pp 73-74

10/22/23 - Encouraging Words About Difficult Times - Galatians 6:9-10

Note: A recording of this worship service may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu4eACGJGik

10/15/23 - For Such a Time as This? Who Knows? - Esther 4:1-17

For Such a Time as This?  Who Knows?

Esther 4:1-17

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

October 15, 2023

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

Some of you are troubled by the book of Esther.  There are many things which might distress us – the sexualization of women and the violence with which the story ends are high on the list.   You are not alone in wondering about the place and value of this book within the Bible.

In 1946, when three shepherds tossed some rocks into a cave, they heard pottery break and discovered some ancient scrolls which had been stored in jars for centuries.  This was at a place called Qumran, near the Dead Sea.  The scrolls they found, now called the Dead Sea Scrolls, are one of the greatest archaeological finds in modern times.  Tens of thousands of fragments of text were found in eleven caves within a two mile radius.  There were many different kinds of writing – some political, some religious, some legal.  About 200 of the scrolls were manuscripts from every single book of the Jewish Bible.  Every book, that is, except for the book of Esther.[1]  Most scholars believe that these scrolls were created by the Essenes, a Jewish sectarian community that flourished about 200 years before Jesus. They apparently had no use for the book of Esther.

The book of Esther does not mention God, which was also a problem for some.  So, when Egyptian Jews translated the Bible into Greek, a translation we now call the Septuagint,  they wrote in 107 new verses.  They wanted to make a secular story sacred. All of this is to say that we who are Bible nerds could spend a lot of time studying many fascinating issues within and around this book.   If you’re interested in a detailed Bible study of Esther, share that with someone working on adult faith formation.

Our time today is limited, so I am recognizing those valid concerns and setting them aside.  Despite its troubling aspects, the book of Esther has endured.  

Here’s a quick summary of the plot. The villain of the story is Haman. Haman is plotting to kill all the Jews in Persia, mostly because he doesn’t think he has gotten the respect he deserves from one named Mordecai.  Haman has the trust of King Xerxes.  He has convinced Xerxes that these people are foreigners who don’t obey his laws.  King Xerxes has authorized Haman to find and destroy them all over the kingdom of Persia.  What the king doesn’t know is that his new queen, a woman named Esther, is Jewish.  She is Mordecai’s cousin and adopted daughter.  We pick up the story as Mordecai has learned of Haman’s plot. 

The news has spread. Jewish people throughout Persia are afraid and mourning. Mordecai protests publicly, by sitting outside the king’s gate wearing sackcloth and ashes.  But Esther, who lives within the palace walls, is insulated from such information. Perhaps she would prefer not to know.  But Mordecai offers her proof.  He confronts her with the very real threat of genocide. 

Those of us who went to the American Baptist Mission Summit this summer heard an amazing sermon on this text by Rev. Frederick Douglas Haynes. The sermon was entitled “Too Woke Not to Weep”.  In it, Rev Haynes implored us to stay awake to the realities of poverty and injustice faced by people around us, even if our privilege shelters us from them.  That was what Mordecai did. He woke Esther up to the reality that her people were suffering.

Esther comes to understand what is happening. She agrees it is a serious problem.  But her first response is to be overwhelmed. It is a huge thing, under the control and machinations of powerful men.  She comes and goes at the king’s bidding. She cannot even talk to him unless he summons her, and he hasn’t done that for a month. She may be considered the queen, but she is one of many women in the king’s harem. What can she possibly do to change the situation? 

Mordecai replies with the most quoted words in this book “Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.”   Maybe you are in the place you are for this particular moment in history.  Perhaps you have more power than you think. 

For such a time as this.  For a time of potential genocide, for a time of blatant injustice and oppression. That was Esther’s time. What might it be for us?  A time of war, when major world powers are again choosing war,  a time when old toxic ideologies which we might have thought long defeated are popular again, a time when families are divided over politics and worldviews and faith, a time when most of our institutions are being challenged and many seem to be failing.   “Who knows, perhaps you have come into the kingdom for just such a time as this.”  That’s another translation of that verse.  

Who knows?  This phrase is repeated throughout the Bible in response to the realities of life that are hidden or uncertain or beyond human comprehension.[2]

When King David was told that the child Bathsheba was carrying, his child, would die, he fasted and prayed and said “Who knows?  The Lord may be gracious to me and the child may live.”

When Jonah took a message of impending destruction to the people of Ninevah, the king proclaimed a fast and ordered the people to pray and he said Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.’

So Mordecai says to Esther, “Who knows?  Perhaps you are where you are for just such a time as this.”

The implied answer is “Only God knows.”  Is this a time when peace might prevail over war?  Is this a time when we will radically re-invent our institutions or must we continue to suffer through the brokenness?  Only God knows. 

The ambiguity, the uncertainty, the not-knowing are part of the faithful risk-taking that Esther models for us. 

The First Baptist Church of Albany launched Pearl Street Baptist Church at a time when First Baptist was going strong. Who would have thought that the time was ripe to plant a new church?  Who knew that they were in the kingdom for such a time?

Pearl Street was only thirty-four years old and struggling when they raised the motivation and the money to move up the hill to State Street and build the building that we are worshipping in right now. Who knew that it was the right time for that?

The 1960’s were a time of great social change including the civil rights movement and anti-war movements.  The city of Albany was being radically reshaped by the building of the plaza. In that moment, we joined together with others to form FOCUS Churches.  Who knew?

Only a few Baptist churches were grappling with the questions of sexual orientation and the ever widening circle of grace and inclusion in the 1980’s and 90’s.  Who knew that Emmanuel would be called to join that ministry at such a time? 

In each of those pivotal times in our history and others, we were blessed with some Mordecais and some Esthers.  There were some Mordecais to wake us up to the reality around us, the urgent human needs from which we might be sheltered. Those Mordecais also remind us that we are more than we think we are.  They break us out of our paralysis, our temptation to think that there’s nothing we can do about it anyway.

And there were some Esthers.  Some people who listened to the Mordecais and rallied the community and led with decisive action.

Esther offers us a model that is inspiring and instructive for such a time as this.  We should notice that she doesn’t act alone.  She calls for others to pray and fast.  She looks to her community for support.  Earlier I referred to additions to the book in the Greek translation.  One of those additions is her prayer which ends with the words “and save me from my fear.”

She feels the fear and resolves to act anyway.  She knows the risks, but says “If I perish, I perish.”  “If I die, I die.”  Sometimes what we are called to do looks foolish or reckless. And it might be. That doesn’t mean it is not faithful.  For people of the Resurrection, death has no ultimate power.  So, there are occasions when we might say with Esther, we will do what we believe God is calling us to do and if we die, we die.

Esther resolves to act.  She summons her community for support. And she takes action. She seeks an audience with the king and when he grants her permission, she invites him to a dinner party.  As she wines and dines him, he asks to hear her request, which he ultimately grants.  She has no political power. She has no economic power.  She has no leverage to convince the king to rescind his decree.  But she uses her specific gifts which included her relationship, her charm, her gifts of hospitality and words and strategy and imagination.

Esther might have continued to believe that she was powerless, that her gifts were inadequate, but instead she took a faithful risk and changed the story of her people.

This story stands out because people and churches often don’t act and the story doesn’t get changed.  We may not take action because  

·       We feel our gifts are not enough to make a difference, or that we don’t have the right gifts, or that we have no gifts at all.

·       We feel that we have to do everything the way we have always done it, even when the situation has dramatically changed.

·       We think we have to do things the way everyone else is doing them, and we compare ourselves to other churches and find ourselves wanting.[3]

This story, which has endured for centuries, is a reminder that we are more and we have more than we think.  It is a call to creative courageous stewardship, to giving our time and energy and finances to risky faithful action in this time and place.  If we die in doing so, then we die faithfully. 

And who knows? Maybe we have come to this place, to this community, to this challenge, to this moment for just such a time as this.

[1] Dan Clendenin, https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/373-queen-esther-unedited

[2] Walter Brueggemann, Who Knows?  https://churchanew.org/brueggemann/who-knows

[3] These bullet points and much of the flow of this sermon comes from the work of the Rev. Dr. Rochelle Stackhouse in For Such a Time as This:  A Bible Study for Stewardship in Challenging Times published by the United Church of Christ https://www.uccresources.com/

10/8/23 - Gratitude - Ecclesiastes 3:11; John 1:1-15

Note: A recording of this worship service may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGHchvWs0A