12/24/22 - From Generation to Generation: We Tell This Story - Luke 2: 1-20

From Generation to Generation:

We Tell This Story

Luke 2: 1-20

Emmanuel Baptist Church; December 24, 2022

Image: How God Shows Up  by Rev. Lisle Gwynn Garrity, sanctifiedart.org

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here:  https://youtu.be/D6k-mDP0BG0

When Mary learned that she was going to give birth to the Son of God,  she sang the song we call the Magnificat.  “My soul magnifies the Lord,” she sang. “For the Mighty One has done great things . . . God’s mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.”   For the last month, we have immersed ourselves in this theme, recalling the ways our lives and histories, actions and faith are interconnected and woven together from one generation to the next to the next. 

As the youth have reminded us, this story, of a baby born to redeem the world, speaks to the deepest parts of us. Humans have been telling and re-telling this story in all  kinds of places, across cultures and contexts, in times of plenty and hardship, in war zones and peace time, in hospital rooms and in front of family Christmas trees, for centuries. I invite you to settle in for a few minutes as we remember some of those contexts together.

A thousand years ago, the world was a very different place. Since the vast majority of people did not read or write, Biblical stories were often told in pictures which were preserved in stained glass windows. According to legend, in 1223, Francis of Assisi told the story of Jesus’ birth by creating the first nativity scene with hay and an ox and donkey and a manger in a cave in an Italian village. He invited villagers to gaze on the scene while he preached about the babe in Bethlehem.

 Skipping ahead to the early 1800’s, the twelve years of the Napoleonic wars had decimated the political and social infrastructures across Europe. 1816 was an especially cold year with widespread crop failure and famine.  Pastor Joseph Mohr was serving a congregation in Austria that was poverty-stricken, hungry and traumatized. So he wrote the story in song, to convey the hope that there was still a God who cared.  The next year, he transferred to St. Nicholas Church in Oberndorf.  Just before Christmas, he asked his friend Franz Gruber to set his verses to music.  On Christmas Eve, 1818, the two friends sang Silent Night together for the first time in public, accompanied on guitar.

Another hundred years passed.  Another war was underway.   People had thought it would be over quickly, but six months into World War I, the winter had set in and the Western Front stretched hundreds of miles. Countless soldiers were living in misery in the trenches and tens of thousands had already died.   

On Christmas, they remembered this story in a profound way.  At various places along the 400-mile front, soldiers crossed into the No Man’s Land between trenches and met their enemies, unarmed.  They exchanged food and gifts, sang carols and played soccer together. 

German Lieutenant Zehmisch of the 134 Saxons Infantry, described a pick-up soccer game in his diary, “Eventually the English brought a soccer ball from their trenches, and pretty soon a lively game ensued,” he wrote. “How marvelously wonderful, yet how strange it was. The English officers felt the same way about it. Thus Christmas, the celebration of Love, managed to bring mortal enemies together as friends for a time.”[1]

The Great Depression was another time when the story of Emmanuel, God with us, was told by people who especially needed to remember it.  On Christmas Eve, 1931, construction workers building the Rockefeller Center Complex in New York City were grateful to be employed at that time when jobs were scarce. They decided to pool their money to buy a Christmas tree to lift their own spirits and others. They decorated a 20-foot-balsam fir with handmade garland and strings of cranberries and a few tin cans.  The foreman set up a table near the tree where the workers lined up to receive their paychecks.

You might remember with me that in 2016 a ceasefire allowed Christians in Syria to gather on Christmas Eve for the first time in 5 years. With great joy, they met in a bombed out church to tell the story of the baby born to bring peace.  Tonight, they tell the story again, although the conflict continues and many face intolerable hardships.

Two years ago, a pandemic changed the world and Christmas Eve was different from anything any of us had ever known.  But still, we gathered. Worshipping from our homes, but connected by Zoom, we could see each other in the gallery screen.  Each little box represented a household with its own stories.  There were the faithful who never miss a worship service and the newcomers who had only recently discovered this church.  In one window, maybe, was the ninety-year-old who had quit using her computer 5 years earlier but who had taught herself how to get on Zoom in order to gather with her faith community.  Maybe there were some families who had cleaned out every closet and drawer and repainted every possible room in the preceding months and were now pretty tired of being in the house together all the time.  There were grandparents separated from grandchildren and people who lived alone keenly bearing the weight of isolation.  Family members and friends showed up from different time zones and different weather zones.

Each of us, in our spaces lit a candle and sang Silent Night, reminding ourselves and each other of the light of Christ that shines in the darkness. In one household, maybe, two young siblings turned on the LED candles that the church had distributed and they held them where they could see the world through them, a kind of science experiment. In another place, maybe, a child held a candle flame in one hand and a page of Silent Night lyrics in the other and tried to see how close the two could get to each other before the paper caught fire. 

We gathered, in the midst of real-life, to hear the story again and to tell it for the next generation. And we are here again tonight, for the same reason. We are aware that we are not the same people who gathered two years ago. We have changed in many ways.  We are mourning loved ones who have died.  We celebrate the babies who have been born among us.  From generation to generation, we tell this story which speaks to the deepest parts of us.

And we are not alone, all over the world tonight, Christians are telling this story. In Myanmar, Karen and Karenni and other ethnic-minority Christians are remembering it in the jungles and refugee camps where they have fled to escape bombings, mortars, and drones.

At the US/Mexico border, the story is being told by Pastor Abraham Barberi and Team Brownsville as they distribute rice and beans and blankets to cold migrants in Matamoros and Reynosa, Mexico.

And in Ukraine, where the destruction is incomprehensible, and thousands are without heat, electricity and water.  One Ukrainian woman said, “the essence of this holiday [is] when we celebrate the birth of Hope that humanity received through Jesus Christ. Hope is what Ukrainians need as air during these dark times. Light will overcome Darkness.”[2]

 The Rev. Meredith Miller is a pastor who has celebrated Christmas for decades.   She says this “Christmas is not here to offer a four-week escape from the pain of the world with a paper-thin layer of twinkle lights.  . . . Christmas is not offering us the chance to escape the ache of life through piles of presents.  Christmas is God saying “Yes this pain is too much.  Yes it is too sad. Yes, the ache is too great.  Hang on.  I’ll come carry it with you.”[3]

We tell this story of a extraordinary baby born to ordinary people. A baby who would grow up to to bring love close, because “this is how God shows up – in a child who cries, in hands that hold, in human flesh, in life and death.  Each year, we tell this story because it is raw with joy, pain and all the complexities of being human.”[4]

This is how God chooses to be known by us, in the messiness and pain of life, as one who is right there with us, sharing it all -- flesh and blood, joy and suffering, boredom and excitement, courage and fear.  This, beloved ones, is the good news, for all of us and for everyone, that God’s great love has been born among us. No matter how your story is unfolding, may you find that this truth holds space for you.  Thanks be to God.

[1] https://www.history.com/news/christmas-truce-1914-world-war-i-soldier-accounts

[2] https://www.facebook.com/maia.mikhaluk

[3] https://www.instagram.com/p/CW3GLAVlcLY/?hl=en

[4] Lisle Gwynn Garrity, artisti’s statement about How God Comes, sanctifiedart.org

12/18/22 - From Generation to Generation: We See God In Each Other - Luke 1:39-58

From Generation to Generation:

We See God In Each Other

Luke 1:39-58       

December 18, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Image:  The Golden Cradle by Carmelle Beaugelin

A Sanctified Art LLC| sanctifiedart.org.

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here:  https://youtu.be/gbsBA-0v9VI

It happens fairly often.  Someone will be talking to me about a decision they’re making, like whether to accept a certain job offer or go back to school.   They may be conflicted about the right approach in a delicate situation, wondering if they should be supportive and understanding or practice tough love.  They will say to me, “I just wish God will tell me plainly what I’m supposed to do.  I want to do God’s will.  I’ve prayed about it, but I’m still not sure.”  What they want is a direct communication from God, some kind of unmistakable sign.  They think if they get it, they’ll be confident in their course of action.

The last time we saw Mary, she was receiving that unmistakable sign.  It doesn’t get any more direct than having a one-on-one visit from Gabriel.  In most of the art I’ve seen, angels look like beautiful, shiny people with two wings.   But that’s not exactly how the Bible describes them. In Isaiah’s vision, angels have 6 wings.  They use two of the wings to fly and two more like clothing, for modesty’s sake and the last two wings cover their faces, which makes me wonder what those faces look like.  Ezekiel depicts angels  with gleaming brass hooves for feet and with the faces of four animals – a lion, an ox, an eagle and a human.  And Luke, describes the angels who sing to the shepherds on Christmas as an army. We aren’t told what Gabriel looks like, but I’m willing to bet his appearance is not calming.  Mary gets the explicit communication from God that so many people in my experience say they want, and then as soon as she has it, she seeks a human to help her process it.

As soon as the angel is gone, it seems, Mary runs for the hills. Luke says “with haste”.  The newly pregnant teenager heads for her relative Elizabeth whom Gabriel told her was also pregnant. It’s a journey of 80 or 90 miles.

“Travel for other than culturally expected reasons was often considered deviant behavior.  While travel to visit family was considered legitimate, the report of Mary traveling alone into the ‘hill country’ is highly unusual and improper.”[1]  From this we understand the urgency of Mary’s quest. Mary has heard from God.  Now she needs the confirmation of a human being 

She is barely over the threshold when Elizabeth  affirms what the angel said.  Now,  Elizabeth was not visited by an angel.   If she was told anything about Mary’s situation before Mary showed up at her door, Luke has not told us that.   But somehow she knows. Luke says the Holy Spirit reveals it to her. Elizabeth sees God at work in Mary and affirms what the angel told her. She addresses her as “the mother of my Lord” and praises her for believing what the angel said.

We see God in each other.  We often have a hard time claiming for ourselves the image of God that we bear.  We are too humble or conflicted or too aware of our failures. We may be unaware of the most powerful truth about ourselves. But those around us can see  and name it

In This Here Flesh, Cole Arthur Riley, writes  “We need other people to see our own faces – to bear witness to their beauty and truth.  God has made it so that I can never truly know myself apart from another person.  I cannot trust myself to describe the curve of my nose because I’ve never seen it. I want someone to bear witness to my face, that we could behold the image of God in one another and believe it on one another’s behalf.”[2]

We see God in each other.  Others see God in us.   Because of Elizabeth’s blessing, Mary believes more strongly. Because of Elizabeth’s blessing, she takes another step towards living into her calling.  She sings her song saying “My soul rejoices because God has done great things. From now on, all generations will call me blessed.” 

This is a moment of acceptance and confirmation and blessing.  It provides clarity of purpose and steadiness for Mary.   

Moments when we see God in others or when we accept God within ourselves because of others are often tender and warm like this.  But not always.

Over the last year, I can remember two distinct times when someone took great care to speak the truth in love to me. In each case, the person very gently shared that I had failed who they needed me to be. In one case, I had said something without understanding how my words would be received and instead of being uplifting, they were wounding.  In the other, I had simply failed to show up, not been present when I was needed.

No one likes being told that they’ve let someone else down.  I felt exposed and vulnerable. But I also recognized the other person’s choice to be vulnerable with me, their courage in risking that I might respond with anger or defensiveness.  They took that risk in order to give me a chance to make amends and restore relationship. I am grateful for that.  I believe that it is often in moments of shared vulnerability that we glimpse the face of God in each other. 

Bearing the image of God is a gift and a responsibility.  Others may see God in us in ways we never know. And we may be strengthened by what we see in others, even perhaps in strangers and often in those in close relationship.

Tex Sample taught at St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City for 32 years.  He taught and wrote about church and culture.  He sought out and got to know people from all different walks of life.  He is a wonderful storyteller.  I only got to hear him speak in person one time. That was at a conference about 26 years ago, when I was new to ministry and he was close to the age I am now. But he made a lasting impression on me.  You could say that I saw the image of God in him.  For that reason, I want to let you hear him for yourself in this video, even though the quality is not great. 

[Video in which Tex Sample  tells the story of a woman of German Lutheran heritage who had suffered a serious stroke.  She was unable to form many words, but could make sounds. She communicated to a visitor that she wanted him to sing. Because it was close to Christmas and because he knew she knew German, he sang Stille Nacht. She joined in and they spent the rest of the evening singing her back to life. Tex ends by saying “Someone has said that a friend is that person who knows your song and when you forget it, or can’t sing it, they sing it for your and they sing you back into life.”[3]]

“A friend is that person who knows your song and when you forget it, they sing it for you and they sing you back into life.” 

John O’Donohue was an Irish theologian and poet who revived the lost art of blessing.  He says that humans are distant from a place of wholeness, but that blessing can awaken and restore it.

He writes, “We never see the script of our lives; nor do we know what is coming toward us, or why our life takes on this particular shape or sequence. . . .

Our longing for the eternal kindles our imagination to bless. Regardless of how we configure the eternal, the human heart continues to dream of a state of wholeness, a place where everything comes together, where loss will be made good, where blindness will transform into vision, where damage will be made whole, where the clenched question will open in the house of surprise, where the travails of life’s journey will enjoy a homecoming. To invoke a blessing is to call some of that wholeness upon a person now.”[4]

To invoke a blessing is to call some of that wholeness upon a person now.  Beloved ones, we see God in each other.  Believe it or not, others see God in us.  We have the power and authority, even the responsibility, to bless each other.  We are blessed and we bless.  Thanks be to God.

[1] Bruce Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, 2nd edition (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 2003), p.229

[2] Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh, (New York:  Convergent Books, 2022), p. 81

[3] video “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht” from Tex Mix:  Stories of Earthly Mysticism with Tex Sample, published by livingthequestions.com, 2008

[4] John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us,  (New York:  Doubleday, 2008) p. 199

12/11/22 - From Generation to Generation: We Can Choose A Better Way - Matthew 1:18-25

From Generation to Generation:

We Can Choose A Better Way

Matthew 1:18-25

December 11, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

 Image:  The Courageous Choice by Rev. Lisle Gwynn Garrity ©A Sanctified Art LLC sanctifiedart.org

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here:  https://youtu.be/2qGMmGGiVy0

Last Sunday, we remembered the time Gabriel came to Mary to ask her to bear God’s Son. We remembered that she was afraid and that she said yes anyway.  That is a familiar story to us.  We know it so well that it may get in our way when we read today’s text.  You see, Matthew doesn’t seem to know that story.  Joseph certainly doesn’t know it.

What Joseph knows, somehow, is that Mary is pregnant.  We don’t know how Joseph knows this.  Maybe he noticed the morning sickness and figured it out.  Maybe she told him, but if she did, she didn’t tell him the part about a visit from an angel.  She didn’t tell him the part about where she was faithful to him and was pregnant any way. Don’t you wish someone had been a fly on the wall to record that scene for us?  But that is not the story Matthew tells.

What Matthew tells us is that Mary is pregnant and Joseph knows it. And he knows that he is not the father. They are betrothed, which is more like being married than being engaged.  To be betrothed is to be married but not yet living together. The only way to get out of a betrothal is by dying or divorcing.

Apparently Joseph wants out. He is undoubtedly hurt, probably feeling duped, humiliated, betrayed, and angry.  But Joseph is righteous.  He is honorable.  He wants to do the right thing for himself and for Mary, despite his personal pain. And so, Matthew says, that Joseph was unwilling to expose her to public disgrace and planned to divorce her quietly.  

To divorce her quietly means not asking his best friend for advice about the situation.  It means not going down to the pub and having a good cry in his beer with whomever happens to be there to listen.  It means not telling his mother or his sisters so that they can each tell their best friends.  It means simply going to the rabbi and signing the paperwork without giving any reason for his actions. 

Think about this for a minute.  What might have happened if Joseph had carried through with this plan?  Well, for one thing, people who didn’t the truth might have jumped to conclusions.  Believing Joseph to be the father, they might have assumed that he was the jerk for abandoning her and their child.  For his part, Joseph probably thought that he was just making a way for Mary to marry someone she actually wanted to be with.  Maybe he loved her that much.  Matthew says that he was a stand-up guy, the kind who would do that.

Joseph  has already made a good choice.  He is already doing a good thing, the best thing he can think of,  when the angel comes to him in a dream and invites him to do something even better.

Maybe, until the dream, he thought there were only two options – divorce her publicly and ruin her reputation and get back at her for humiliating him, or divorce her quietly.  Those were the only possibilities, so he chose the most honorable one.  But the angel said “do not be afraid” and presented him with a third possibility.  He can choose an even better way. 

Gareth Higgins grew up in Belfast, Ireland during The Troubles, that conflict over whether Northern Ireland would remain part of Great Britain or gain the independence to unite with the Republic of Ireland.  It was a period of about 30 years characterized by street fighting, sensational bombings, roadblocks, and imprisonment without trial.

Gareth says that when he was growing up, you didn’t know who to trust.  “Everyday activities like opening doors, turning a car-ignition key, going to a movie or having a conversation with a stranger were fraught with suspicion. Would the cinema be evacuated because of a bomb under a car outside? Would the stranger be one of those lovely friends you hadn’t met you or would they tell other strangers things about you that could get you killed? Were your loved ones dead or just stuck in traffic?”[1]

There were two competing narratives that shaped his childhood.  The dominant story was that you had to choose a side -- either support for Great Britain or for Irish re-unification.  Whichever side you chose, you knew that the “other side” had caused the conflict in the first place and that your side was merely defending itself.

That was the prevailing story.  Pick a side and do the best you can because nobody knows how to fix this. 

But, there was another story too. It was a story of people who refused the options presented to them and looked for a better way.  Gareth says, “Many people were willing to let go of the old certainties about winning and create communities of beautiful, life-giving ambiguity rather than the superficial gratification of being right.  People were allowing their imaginations to be funded by the heart, the mind, and experimentation rather than dogma.  People were refusing to use violence to get what they wanted and were caring for the suffering and the bereaved. People were initiating conversations with their political opponents, including those who might harm them, and moving into neighborhoods where they didn't 'belong' in order to show that everyone belongs. People were laying aside vengeance in favor of cooperation."[2]

We can choose a better way. Joseph models that for us.  Choosing a better way requires a desire to do the right thing and time to step back from the immediate context, to consider all parties involved.  It involves imagination, like that which can operate in dreams.  In the Biblical world, dreams were often the place where God communicated with people.  “Dreams are the way God frees us and rebirths us and pushes us into new life.”[3]  

A visionary like Joseph or Dr. King might take a dream and work to make it true, while others shrug it off and get back to “real life” in the light of day.  This might be what Frederick Buechner called the “dark side of Christmas” – that God comes to us in such a way that we can always say no.  “God comes to us in the hungry [wo]man we do not have to feed, comes to us in the lonely man we do not have to comfort, comes to us in all the desperate human need of people everywhere that we are always free to turn our backs upon.” [4]

God comes and waits for a response. An angel whispers to us in a dream, or some other equally unlikely being persuades us not to be afraid, not to walk away, but to find the even better way, the unimagined possibility, the quiet, courageous, creative option waiting to be born. 

Joseph makes a quiet decision that, at first, seems like it only affects him and his family, but it will ripple for generations. Jesus’ life and Mary’s would have turned out very differently otherwise. Mary also made a choice that affected the future. I often wonder how many women before her refused the offer that Gabriel made.

You are probably familiar with the Iroquois concept of seven generation thinking.  It calls us to consider the effects of our actions on our descendants to the next seven generations.  An interesting twist on that idea is to put ourselves in the middle of the seven generations, reflecting on the life spans before and after ours.   The idea is that an individual might have personal/material contact with someone 90 years older than they are and that person might have personal/material contact with someone 90 years old than they. The focus then becomes a timespan of 180 years before and after any individual life.  We are born into a continuous ribbon of generations, with the past 180 years as an immediate presence in our lives.[5]

Just for grins, I went back 180 years to see what kinds of things were happening then.  I learned that in 1842, unions and the right to strike were ruled legal in the United States and that inhaled anesthesia was used for the first time. 

In 1870, (152 years ago), a man named Rockefeller founded the Standard Oil Company.  Perhaps you’ve heard of him.  

In 1872, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened in New York City and in November of that year, a woman named Susan B. Anthony cast a ballot in an election.  Because it was illegal for women to vote, she was arrested.  At her trial, she was fined $100 which she never paid. And also in 1872,  despite enduring a stroke and the death of two of his daughters, Louis Pasteur created the first laboratory-produced vaccine. 

Each of these long-ago actions and so many others continue to bear fruit in the now. That may give us some appreciation that our choices will echo past our own short lifespans.  Our dreams, our imagining what is possible,  are ways that God frees us and rebirths us and calls us into new life. 

One more example.  The place we now call Yellowstone became a national park in 1872, (150 years ago). There is a campaign going on right now to celebrate and preserve the park for future generations.  People who make a donation of $1500 or more will receive a free annual park pass for this year and also one valid in 2172, which is 150 years from now.[6]  That pass will surely become a family heirloom passed through the generations until the birth of a descendant who can use it. 

I love the creativity behind that campaign.  It makes me wonder what choices we are making as the Body of Christ now, that will impact the faith of people who come 150 years after us.

God comes to us in ways that we can refuse . . . or accept.  God comes and waits for a response. We can believe the dream that Emmanuel is with us, that God is still being born among us.

Barbara Brown Taylor summarizes it this way, “The heart of this story is about a just man who wakes up one day to find his life wrecked: his wife pregnant, his trust betrayed, his name ruined, his future revoked. It is about a righteous man who surveys a mess he has had absolutely nothing to do with and decides to believe that God is present in it.”[7]

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

[1]Gareth Higgins, How Not to Be Afraid:  Seven Ways to Live When Everything Seems Terrifying, (Minneapolis:  Broadleaf Books, 2021).  p. 26

[2] Higgins,  p. 27

[3] Susan R. Andrews, “Pastoral Perspective: Matthew 1:18-25,” Feasting on the Gospels: Matthew, Volume 1, Chapters 1-13, Cynthia A. Jarvis and E. Elizabeth Johnson, editors, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013).

[4] Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark, (New York:  HarperCollins, 1969),  p. 14

[5] https://www.ecoresolution.earth/resources/seven-generation-thinking

[6] https://www.yellowstone.org/inheritance-pass/

[7] Barbara Brown Taylor, “Believing the Impossible” in Gospel Medicine, (Lanham, Maryland:  Cowley Publications, 1995), p,157

12/4/22 - From Generation to Generation: God Meets Us in Our Fear - Luke 1:26-38

From Generation to Generation:

God Meets Us in Our Fear   

Luke 1:26-38

December 4, 2022 

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Image:  Mary’s Golden Annunciation by Carmelle Beaugelin

©A Sanctified Art LLC sanctifiedart.org

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

Of course Mary was afraid.  To begin with, an angel had just appeared out of nowhere. She was startled like you are when someone suddenly speaks from a dark corner of the room that you thought was empty.   But this was not like the momentary jolt you get which fades as soon as you recognize that unseen person.  This was an angel, who kept being there, no matter how many times she blinked or wiped her eyes.  Of course she was afraid.  Her heart was racing.  Adrenaline was pumping.  Maybe she thought to run or to stand super still and pretend nothing unusual was happening. Nothing at all.

But something was happening.  Gabriel was talking - - To her. Her life had not necessarily been easy before he appeared.  Mary is a poor young woman in a small village in one of the farthest corners of the Empire.  Her homeland is under the control of Rome.  Living under occupation tends to increase everyone’s anxiety.  Mary undoubtedly has the worries of any bride-to-be in her time – will the wedding celebration uphold her family’s honor and that of Joseph’s family? Will she and Joseph do well as married couple?  Is he as kind and protective as she believes him to be?  

Mary knows the popular folk tale about a jealous angel who visited on a bride’s wedding night and killed the groom.  It’s just a story, isn’t it?  But now an actual angel has shown up. Maybe there is more to the story than she knew.  Maybe something evil is threatening her marriage.[1]

And even though Gabriel says not to be afraid, she is, and the rest of his message only amps up her fears.  She is afraid of the reaction of her family.  Joseph will never believe this.  She doesn’t even believe it.  She is afraid of the scandal that will spread when everyone else realizes she is pregnant.  Nazareth is a small place, home to maybe 150-200 people.  It is impossible to keep a secret in a place like that. She might be stoned for adultery.  Joseph might abandon her.  And if he doesn’t, she might die in childbirth. And maybe, later, when Gabriel is gone, she will start to be afraid to bring a baby into the poor and violent world in which she lives. 

Mary is afraid.  We all carry a mental image of Mary.  Maybe for some of us, that image is of the serene, wise one who simply says “let it be.”  Some of us may remember her as the one who jump-started Jesus’ ministry, getting him to turn water into wine for some family friends.  Others may think of her in anguish as her son dies on the cross. But here, the first time we meet her, Luke says that she is “perplexed” or “greatly troubled” at Gabriel’s words.  Other appropriate translations are agitated, confused and terrified. If we are to understand Mary, we must not minimize the intensity of her fear. She is very afraid, and with good reason.

I recently discovered a young woman named Cole Arthur Riley. She serves as the spiritual teacher in residence with Cornell University’s Office of Spirituality and Meaning Making.   She is a writer and poet, the creator of a resource called Black Liturgies, which she describes as a project that seeks to integrate the truths of dignity, lament, rage, justice and rest into written prayers. In her book This Here Flesh, she reflects on the stories of her grandmother and father and what their lives revealed to her about life and faith.  This book is one of the best gifts of this season to me. 

In her chapter on fear, she writes “I’m told the most frequent command from God in the Bible is  Do not fear.  Some have interpreted this as an indictment on those who are afraid, as if to say fear signifies a less robust faith.  This offends me, God is not criticizing us for being afraid in a world haunted by so many terrors and traumas. … I hear Don’t be afraid and hope that it is not a command not to fear, but rather the nurturing voice of a God drawing near to our trembling. I hear those words and imagine God in all tenderness cradling her creation against her breast.”[2]

When Mary hears the angel’s words Do not be afraid, perhaps she recognizes the voice of God drawing near to her trembling.   Gabriel says “The Lord is with you.”

How does she know that is true?  How does she know that God is with her?  How do we know it? 

Sometimes we don’t. Not for sure. The very idea, the calling to which we are being summoned may be preposterous, even to us. Like Mary we may be perplexed, deeply troubled or terrified.  Like Mary, we may have questions.  “How can this be?”  she asked the angel.   

We may have to feel the fear and do it anyway.  We may know on a deep level,  that God is with us, in spite of the facts on the surface. Sometimes, along with the fear, there is another energy, a conviction, an internal urgency that it really is God prompting us.

Speaking of a time when she needed her father’s help to get through a very scary situation, Cole Arthur Riley writes “I didn’t conquer a fear.  I rose to meet it. This is rare in me.”[3] 

And sometimes we know that it is God because there is confirmation along the way.  For Mary, confirmation comes from Elizabeth.  We’ll return to that part of the story in a couple of weeks. But I want to recognize that confirmation may come in the form of another person who joins us or who strongly supports us. It might come in the form of providential timing or opportunities opening that didn’t exist earlier. Sometimes we recognize God in the confirmation we receive only as we rise to meet the fear.

Finally, this story might suggest that we know God is with us when it is not all about us.  When the summons is not something that will bring wealth or popularity, not something that makes our lives easier or more secure. We can more readily trust God’s presence when the calling is to embody, to make real, the goodness of God for the well-being of others and ourselves.

Somehow, Gabriel’s message gets through to Mary, past her wildly beating heart, through the worries piling up in her mind. Without receiving any clear answers to her question, without knowing what will happen next, she rises to meet her fear and says “ Here am I, the servant of the Lord.”  It is a profound moment.

“We without God, cannot and God without us, will not.” 

Augustine of Hippo first said something like that and others have adapted it.  “We without God, cannot and God without us, will not.”  It means that God has chosen to share power with human beings, to work with and through people who are willing to participate in God’s reign on earth.  God comes to us, to call us to faithfulness, to love and compassion and generosity.  God comes and asks us to be brave, to release our tight grip on certainty, and security, and to risk ourselves, in trust and faith.

Cole Arthur Riley writes “I believe fear has the holy potential to draw out awe in us.  To lead us into deeper patterns of protection and trust.  To mold us into people engaged in the unknown, capable of making mystery of it instead of terror.” [4]  

We are all afraid, you and me. But we can rise to meet our fear and God will meet us there also, to draw out awe and wonder, to mold us into people engaged in the mystery of the unknown.  Here we are, servants of the Lord.  Thanks be to God.

[1] Alan Culpepper, The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IX, (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 1995), p. 51

[2] Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh, (New York:  Convergent Books, 2022),  pp 83-84.

[3] This Here Flesh, p. 84

[4] This Here Flesh, p. 86

11/27/22 - From Generation to Generation: There's Room for Every Story - Matthew 1:1-17

From Generation to Generation:

There’s Room for Every Story

Matthew 1:1-17

November 27, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Image:  Genealogy of Christ by Rev. Lauren Wright Pittman

©A Sanctified Art LLC sanctifiedart.org

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here:  https://youtu.be/t5gGGdtZwxs

My part of the Donley family, which included my grandparents, their five sons and spouses and their children used to gather for Thanksgiving in mid-October.  We did it then because my grandparents spent the winter in Florida and they left their home in Illinois by November 1.  When I was growing up, that October weekend included a family cider-making project.  Downed apples were harvested from a local orchard and we spent all day washing apples and running them through a cider press.  By nightfall, every household had 4 or 5 gallons of cider to take home. One time I asked my grandfather how they came to own the cider press. He said to me, “Your grandmother thought she would enjoy it.  She asks for so little that I wanted to get it for her.” 

He was speaking about my grandmother who had gone to work in the local Motorola factory assembling radios during World War II. She raised her children through the Great Depression. Later those sons would pick buckets of wild blackberries which she made into jam to sell to earn the money to show their cows at the state fair.  She was a frugal, resourceful woman.

I once told Jim the story of how my grandfather bought the cider press for my grandmother. Every so often, if I mention something that might be nice to have, Jim will say “You ask for so little. We should get that.” Of course, Jim is being ironic.  My life experiences are very different from my grandmother’s and my wish list has been quite long in comparison.

The cider-making days were over long before Jim joined the family, but he knows that story.  And he keeps it alive by quoting my grandfather to me every now and then.   We undoubtedly all have stories like that.  A tradition, a memory, an heirloom,  a family rule that started in a previous generation. 

Matthew’s version of Jesus’ family tree is full of all kinds of stories. Stories about cowardice and courage, about people who were so well-behaved that they barely made history, stories of heartache and betrayal and resilience and faithfulness.

We see the expected patterns, like when the eldest son carries the line forward, and surprises, when it is the second-born (Jacob) or even the fourth-born (Judah) who becomes God’s primary covenantal partner. A big surprise is the inclusion of five women in this time when the fathers and grandfathers were considered the only ones who mattered.

Each of these women has a remarkable story to tell.  Many were Gentiles who came to play an important role in Jewish history.  If you’ve been at Emmanuel for a while, you might remember that one year, we spent all four weeks of Advent remembering Ruth’s story.  Another year, we spent the time with the other women named in Jesus’ family tree. Most were connected to some scandal or impropriety, which was not usually their doing.  Each was resilient and resourceful, surviving and even thriving in a world where they held little power.

Some actions have consequences that bear on generations far into the future.  Joseph who ended up in Egypt because his brothers hated him, became the Pharoah’s right-hand man.  He exploited the disaster of a 7-year famine to enrich the Pharoah and make the people of Egypt into slaves.  In Genesis 47, we read “All the Egyptians sold their fields, because the famine was severe upon them; and the land became Pharaoh’s. As for the people, he made slaves of them from one end of Egypt to the other.”  In tragic irony, the next book of the Bible, Exodus, opens with Joseph’s own descendants having been made slaves in Egypt.[1]

If we delve into the family tree, we see that God is at work in the particularity of  individual lives and also in a bigger pattern across history.  God makes a way for a baby named Moses to survive the genocidal intentions of one Pharaoh.  Then God delivers God’s people from another Pharoah through the leadership of the adult Moses in the Exodus.

Pharaohs and kings are powerful, but not strong enough to thwart God’s purposes.  Babylon was ultimately no threat to God’s intentions, and Matthew wants to say to his readers fourteen generations later, that Rome will not prevail either.[2] 

The last man named in Jesus’ family tree is Joseph.  The  ancestral line is traced through his side of the family, which is another kind of surprise, because Matthew will insist that Mary had not known Joseph in any physical way when she became pregnant with Jesus.  One scholar suggests that the entire genealogy is a “parody of pedigree,” [3] that Matthew is poking fun at the ways human beings find meaning in knowing who our ancestors were and continuing to identify with our heroes and against our enemies.  Our history is important, but it is not destiny.   The inclusion of Joseph is a reminder that kinship is not just biological.  It encourages us to dig deeper into the complexities and contradictions of human existence.  Our lineage includes all those who nurture and confront us, protect us and change us.[4] This message will be especially important to the new community that Jesus is forming, the community that will require allegiance to him over loyalty to fathers and mothers and siblings.

The genealogy underscores, over and over again, that Jesus is born into the human family with all of our triumphs and trials, all of our plans and good intentions and best efforts and disappointments and shameful memories. If we read closer, it also reveals the very nature of God.  God is the one who, time and time again, welcomes outsiders, redeems scoundrels and schemers, honors those who pursue justice, and invites siblings to be reconciled.

Today, the church year begins again.  We receive again the stories and scriptures and traditions of faith that have come down to us from generation to generation. The work of God is always unfolding in each of us, in this historical time and place, and there is room for every story.  If you come to this season with the wide-eyed wonder of a child on Christmas Eve or the cynicism of a skeptic who has experienced too many years of human interactions, you belong here. If you come burdened by the consequences of history, fighting for justice or shamed by trauma, there is a place for you. Whether you are joyful or grieving or faking it ‘til you make it, God is at work for your good.  This Advent, may we remember that we belong to a story etched into the wrinkles of time, to generations that have come before us and will come after, a story of a love that will not let us go.  Amen.

[1] Bert Newton, Bible Study:  Parody and Subversion in Matthew’s Gospel,

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bible-study-parody-and-subversion-in-matthews-gospel/id1500071636

[2] Warren Carter, Matthew and Empire: Initial Explorations (Harrisburg, PA : Trinity Press International, 2001)  p. 162

[3] Bert Newton, Bible Study:  Parody and Subversion in Matthew’s Gospel,

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bible-study-parody-and-subversion-in-matthews-gospel/id1500071636

[4] Susan R. Andrews,  in Feasting on the Gospels, Matthew, Volume 1, Cynthia Jarvis and E. Elizabeth Johnson, editors, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2013)   p. 4.

11/20/22 - Reign of Christ - Jeremiah 23:1-6; Colossians 1:15-20

Reign of Christ

Jeremiah 23:1-6

Colossians 1:15-20

November 20, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

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

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

“Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep”

When the prophets say “woe”, it is never a good sign.  “Woe”  means “look out”. It means that someone has some ‘splaining to do.  It means what went around is gonna come around. 

“Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of God’s pasture,” Jeremiah proclaims.

The Bible loves to refer to people as sheep. So when it says shepherd, it usually means a person who is charged with caring for people.   Sometimes it means pastors. There church traditions which refer to their ministers as under-shepherds, because Jesus is the Good Shepherd.  And sometimes, I have heard you refer to members of Emmanuel as part of the flock, which picks up the same idea.  We might legitimately read “woe to the pastors who destroy and scatter God’s sheep”  These are terrifying words.  Trust me, that is not a reading that I take lightly. 

In Jeremiah’s time, the term shepherd was most often a reference to the king.  It was a reminder for those who ruled Israel, that they were to care for the people as a shepherd cares for the flock, guiding them to restful pastures, leading them to clear water, not ruling by the sword or punitive laws.  In the previous chapter, Jeremiah had delivered some specific expectations from God to the king:

“Act with justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor anyone who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place.” (Jeremiah 22:3)

Those expectations were not met.  Our reading today is the word from God that comes after the king was inattentive, preoccupied with his own well-being and ignoring the most vulnerable under his care.  Which is when Jeremiah speaks up to say “Woe.”  What is coming for Israel is the Babylonian invasion and exile.  Woe be unto the leaders who have brought this on their people by caring more about their own wealth and power than the common good.

This Sunday is the last Sunday of the church year.  Next week, is the first Sunday of Advent which is the start of the church year.  In the Christian traditions which pay attention to these things, today is called Reign of Christ Sunday.

Reign of Christ Sunday is less than a hundred years old. It was established by Pope Pius in 1925.  That was when the world was still reeling from the bloodshed of WWI. It was a time of rising nationalism and fascism as Mussolini, Stalin, Franco and Hitler came into leadership. In 1925, 40,000 members of the Klan marched in Washington using their “America First” slogan.  Pope Pius wanted to re-establish the kingdom of Christ with peace in Christ and so he created this liturgical event to refocus on Jesus and away from unquestioning loyalty to earthly powers.  Some of us might consider that and see that history is repeating itself 100 years later. Or we might look back to Jeremiah and see that it has been repeating itself for centuries. 

While pronouncing the woes on the bad shepherds,  Jeremiah also conveys hope to the sheep. God is on the side of those who suffer because of bad leadership.  God will gather the flock.  Not acting through a human agent this time, God will be the shepherd to bring them home from exile. Only after they are safely returned, will new human shepherds be established.  Then kings will do what shepherds are supposed to do.  A second promise is that God has not abandoned the house of David.  A new king will come who will reign with righteousness and justice and peace for the good of all.[1]

Five hundred years later, some first century Jewish persons came to understand that this righteousness was embodied in Jesus of Nazareth. It is the reign of Jesus the Christ that will bring peace and healing and well-being to all. Jesus the Christ is the one who demands our highest allegiance. 

The letter to the Colossians tells us that Jesus is the exact image of the invisible God, and that in Jesus all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. Jesus is not a stand-in, not an understudy for God.  Jesus is not cardboard cut-out of God.  All the fullness of God dwells in Jesus. The visible Jesus shows us the invisible God.  That is mystery which we can only begin to articulate.

Sometimes, before or after funerals, people talk to me about mystery.    It happened this week. Someone who attended Sally’s funeral, told me about an experience they witnessed when someone was near death.  Before the person died, the onlooker thought they were seeing a hallucination or confusion from an unclear mind. After the person died, they re-interpreted it and wondered whether the one who was dying was able to see into another reality.  They aren’t sure, but are keeping an open mind about that possibility.

Colossians tells us that in Christ God is at work in the world, in the whole universe, and that we need to open our eyes, our minds to the vast mystery.  It encourages our trust in the goodness of a reality that we cannot see, the image of the invisible God.

Paul piles up the words to try to communicate the enormity of God’s work in Jesus the Christ.  “In him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible, and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers.”

In Christ, all things hold together.  As the Rev. Fred Anderson says, “This tells us that this world is not under the control of national leaders, thirsty for power, or weapons of mass destruction--nuclear or otherwise--nor those crazed with a religious zeal . . . What holds this world together is not the survival of the fittest nor the unending cycle of violence since Cain and Abel acted out in the various theaters of hatred in today's world, nor even the continuing biological cycle of birth, life, death, decay and re-birth that we see in nature. What holds this world together is the power--the life force--of the One who created and redeemed it and who in sovereignty over it all continues to hold it together. The cosmos belongs to the Cosmic Christ and will not be wrested from him; in him all things hold together”[2]

There is a pattern to New Testament poems about Christ.  They usually speak of his pre-existence, then his time on earth, and then his return to heaven.    We would expect the center of this to be his death on the cross or his resurrection, but instead of that, right in the middle this one says “Christ is the head of the body, the church.”[3]   The church, for all its weakness and struggles and even sin, is where Christ is now present on earth.

This is another way that history repeats.  In the time of the prophets, God took action for God’s people, but then shared the power of leadership with future shepherds.   In the unfolding story of God’s work throughout history . . . God creates and restores on our behalf, but always God gives the work back to us to carry forward.”

You and I are called to manifest that reign of Christ in our lives, seeking reconciliation where there is alienation, healing where there is brokenness.  We know there is profound brokenness in God’s good creation.  We know that the task of human beings is to till and to keep the creation.  We are made in God’s image.  God has given us responsibility for our own lives and for the care of God’s good creation.  God has high hopes for us, high expectations of us, and Christ, the firstborn from creation and the firstborn from the dead, is our sovereign. 

This is mystery and poetry and more of my words are not going to make it any clearer.  So, let me turn back to poetry and the words of Brian Walsh, as he reflects on Colossians:

“In the face of a culture of death
a world of killing fields
a world of the walking dead
Christ is at the head of the resurrection parade
transforming our tears of betrayal into tears of joy
giving us dancing shoes for the resurrection party
And this glittering joker
who has danced in the dragon's jaws of death
now dances with a dance that is full
of nothing less than the fullness of God
this is the dance of the new creation
this is the dance of life out of death
and in this dance all that was broken
all that was estranged
all that was alienated
all that was dislocated and disconnected
is reconciled
comes home
is healed
and is made whole
everything
all things
whatever you can imagine
visible and invisible
mountains and atoms
outer space, urban space, and cyberspace
every inch of creation
every dimension of our lives
all things are reconciled in him
And it all happens on a cross
it all happens at a state execution
where the governor did not commute the sentence
it all happens at the hands of the empire
that has captivated our imaginations
it all happens through blood
not through a power grab by the sovereign one
it all happens in embraced pain
for the sake of others
it all happens on a cross
arms outstretched in embrace
and this is the image of the invisible God
this is the body of Christ. [4]

Thanks be to God.

[1] Walter Brueggemann, A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming, (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmanns, 1998).  p 206-207

[2] Rev. Dr. Fred Anderson, http://day1.org/1074-image_of_the_invisiblesermon at www.day1.net, November 25, 2007

[3] Ben Witherington,  The Letters to Philemon, the Colossians, and the Ephesians: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on the Captivity Epistles (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmanns, 2007)  p 132

[4] Sylvia Keesmat and Brian Walsh, Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire, (Downers Grove, IL:  InterVarsity Press, 2004). pp 88-89

11/13/22 - Glimpses of God's Dream - Luke 21:5-19; Isaiah 65:17-25

Glimpses of God’s Dream

Luke 21:5-19, Isaiah 65:17-25

November 13, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Image:  Hope George Frederick Watts, 1897

Blind Hope is seated on a globe, playing on a lyre which has all its strings broken except one.  She bends her head to listen to the faint music.

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

In the days of the Babylonian invasion in ancient Israel, houses were destroyed, crops were burnt as part of the enemy’s scorched earth policy and many people died before their time because of the war and the hunger and disease that followed.  Others were carried off into captivity.

In the days of the Russian invasion in contemporary Ukraine, houses and buildings were destroyed in nightly bombings.  Crops were burnt as part of a scorched earth policy.  People died before their time.  Others were taken away, tortured, disappeared. 

Have you seen what has happened in Kherson, Ukaine?  The headline in yesterday’s New York Times read Amid Joy in Kherson, a Humanitarian Disaster Looms. After 8 months of occupation, the Russians have withdrawn.  The Ukrainian people are partying in the streets, dancing to the light of headlights and flashlights. They have endured and they are jubilant. 

But there is no water, no electricity, no internet or cell phone service.  Homes and buildings have been reduced to rubble.  Medicine and food are in short supply. Land mines must be found and removed.  Pretty soon, the Ukrainians’ joy  may give way to despair. Future generations will likely still be dealing with the fall-out from this war.

That situation offers a snapshot into today’s scriptures.  Isaiah is speaking to the grandchildren of those who suffered during the Babylonian conquest in Israel.  They are the ones who have to unite  a country divided by war, the ones who have to rebuild infrastructure and cope with generational trauma and poverty.  And in the gospel, Jesus is speaking to those who will soon see the destruction of Jerusalem by the occupying Roman army. By the time, Luke’s gospel is written down, Jesus’ words are being circulated among those who have seen the temple reduced to rubble, many of whom have scattered in fear for their lives.

Can you imagine quoting Jesus to the people of Kherson right now?

“When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified” 

Do not be terrified?  -- Too late.  They passed that stage a long time ago. 

Can we imagine Isaiah speaking of idyllic peace to the ancient Israelites?  One scholar describes the scene this way. “‘But, [Isaiah],’ we can hear the people complain, ‘how can we know that justice and peace will be restored when all we see is the victory of our adversaries while we continue to suffer humiliation and defeat? When you [tell us that] ‘The former things shall not be remembered or come to mind’, [are you seeing] something that we fail to see?’” 

In response to that question, the scholar continues, “we can picture the prophet [Isaiah] closing his eyes, quietly reflecting, and then, after a period of silence, replying with poetry”[1] 

for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy,  

   and its people   as a delight.

I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people;
   no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it,  

   or the cry of distress.
No more shall there be in it
   an infant that lives but a few days,
   or an old person who does not live out a lifetime;

for one who dies at a hundred years

   will be considered a  youth,  

and one who falls short of a hundred

   will be considered accursed. 

They shall build houses and inhabit them;
   they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
They shall not build and another inhabit;
   they shall not plant and another eat;
for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, 

   and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.

Isaiah gives them glimpses of God’s dream, the sight of a healed future on its way.  Glimpses of the new thing that God is creating:  a deep well-being, a pervasive peace that the imagination-exhausted, hope-depleted people will have difficulty trusting and seeing for themselves.

Some of us are also running low on hope and imagination. We read Jesus’ words  “Nation will rise again nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes,  . famines, plagues . . .”

Yes, Jesus, we know.  We got that part.  When do we get to the good stuff, the healing and peace? 

Have you noticed that Jesus almost never answers “when” questions?  The disciples ask when Jesus return or when kingdom would be restored to Israel and Jesus says “only God knows.”

When the walls come tumbling down, Jesus says “do not be terrified.”  When the world as you know it seems to be ending, “do not be terrified.”  What an unhelpful, almost useless piece of advice. If you’re not afraid, you might not be paying attention.

But you know, being afraid is not really working.  The fear-mongering and misinformation campaigns are dividing families and countries, escalating already tense relationships into actual violence, and changing the economy.  Perhaps you’ve heard that in the new Twitter-verse where truth is entirely optional, a fake pharmaceutical account announced that insulin would be free from now on which led to the stock of the real pharmaceutical company immediately dropping by 5%.[2] 

What we are seeing all over the world is the resurgence of authoritarianism by governments and self-appointed militias and even church leaders. This worldview suggests that some exceptional, extraordinary individuals are willing to make the tough calls that ordinary folks are too afraid to face.  It is the worldview that conspiracy theories feed on. Jesus warns us that some like this will come in his name – “don’t be led astray” he says. 

Tara Isabella Burton is a 30-something best-selling novelist and a Christian.  In the current issue of The Hedgehog Review, she writes about the counter-narrative of hope.  She suggests that we might be better off understanding ourselves as ordinary people whose lives are entwined with one another.  Hope doesn’t sell newspapers or win political campaigns like fear does.  Burton writes, “There is nothing very sexy about hope. Certainly, there is nothing sexy about grace. The idea that we might be redeemed by an act of love—a wordless affirmation of something beyond the paradigms through which we are capable of understanding ourselves—is, well, a little mawkish, a bit cringe.”[3] 

Isaiah says that God is creating a new heavens and a new earth.  God is creating with flawed materials. “This is not creation out of nothing; this is creation out of the chaos of human endeavors, of ruined environments and everything in between.” [4] The glimpse of the world that God desires is so counter-cultural.  If only it could take hold among the conspiracy theorists. 

A church historian, who is a friend and former teacher of mine, says that the radical love of Jesus has always been a part of Christianity. It is too integral to Jesus’ teaching to be extinguished, but he says it has always operated at the margins of our faith.  We have compromised it and watered it down, so that we could fight against our enemies instead of praying for them. So that we could excite crowds and grow churches. So that we could win the doctrinal or political or denominational battles.  He says “the clear teaching of Jesus has suffered the death of a thousand qualifications.”[5]

So let us be clear about the clear teaching of Jesus in this passage.  Our calling in this moment is to keep dreaming God’s dream, to hold out for wholeness in a fragmented world, to be strong and courageous truth-tellers.   

 “Do not be terrified,” Jesus says, “when the earth shakes, and nations make war, and imposters preach alluring gospels of fear, resentment, and hatred.  Don’t give in to despair. Don’t capitalize on chaos.  Don’t neglect to bear witness.  God is not where people often say God is. God doesn’t fear-monger.  God doesn't sensationalize.  God doesn’t thrive on human dread.”  

“So avoid hasty, knee-jerk judgments.  Be perceptive, not pious.  Imaginative, not immature.  Make peace, choose hope, cultivate patience, and incarnate love as the world reels and changes.”  

“Expect things to get hard.  And then expect them to get harder.  Endure even when they do.  Know that God is near, no matter what the world looks or feels like.  Speak the truth, trusting that God’s Spirit is alive and present in our acts of bearing witness.  Be faithful until the end” [6] because, as Grandma and Little Man say, “God is always, always, always love.”

[1] Paul Hanson, Isaiah 40–66: Interpretation Series,  Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2012) p. 185

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2022/11/12/fake-eli-lilly-twitter-account-claims-insulin-is-free-stock-falls-43/?sh=6944c4d441a3

[3] https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/hope-itself/articles/on-hope-and-holy-fools

[4] Nelson Rivera in Feasting on the Word Year C, Volume 4, David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, general editors,  (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2010) p. 292

[5] Alan Bean, The Gospel of Universal Compassion, November 9, 2022 at baptistnews.com

[6] For these powerful words, I am grateful to Debie Thomas at https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2451-by-your-endurance

11/6/22 - Alive to God - Luke 20:27-38

Alive to God

Luke 20:27-38

November 6, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkPiQ46T5ZQ

The Sadducees don’t really care what Jesus thinks about resurrection.  They don’t believe in it.  Full stop.  Their holy book was the Torah – the first five books of our Bible – which contains no mention of resurrection.  Resurrection was just absurd.  They didn’t want to hear Jesus’ deep thoughts on the subject.  It was a question intended to trap him.

The question starts with the concept of Levirate marriage. Levir is a Latin word for brother-in-law.  Men’s status in ancient Israel depended on producing heirs.  If a man died without an heir, it was like he never existed.  So if a man died before he had a son, his brother would marry his widow and the first son of their union was considered the dead man’s heir. The Sadducees come to Jesus with a hypothetical scenario in which a woman was married in turn by seven brothers who each died without leaving any children.  They ask whose wife the woman will be in the after life.  They take this practice of Levirate marriage to the extreme to show how absurd they think resurrection is. 

This is the third in a series of public, trick questions posed by the authorities who want to put Jesus to death.  Jesus doesn’t fall into the trap.  He answers the question so skillfully that some of them even praise his answer.  And after this, they ask no more questions.  

What Jesus tells the Sadducees is that their categories are too small.  They cannot begin to entertain the idea of resurrection because they are not willing to imagine the possibility of an existence that is radically different from what they currently know. Jesus cannot answer their question because marriage is not a meaningful category in the resurrection 

Jesus rarely speaks of the after-life in the gospels.  He tells a parable about a rich man and Lazarus.  He says to the thief next to him on the cross that they will both be in Paradise together on that very day.  And he calls himself the resurrection and the life when speaking to Martha after her brother died.  It’s remarkably little to go on, even though some Christians may claim to know details about the “furnishings of heaven and the temperature of hell and the guest list of both places” as Reinhold Niebuhr once said.[1]

We might wish for more, but we will take what we can get.  Resurrection mostly remains a mystery but there are at least two important hints about it in Jesus’ answer.   He says that people do not marry in the age to come.  A man’s earthly status depended on leaving an heir.  A woman’s earthly status depended on being attached to a man.  None of that will matter in the age to come. 

As scholar Karoline Lewis puts it “it seems that the Kingdom of God has something more in mind than the patriarchy which imprisons women [and men] now.  Women will not continue to be property.  Women will not continue to be owned.”[2]  In the fullness of God’s reign, God’s children are not bound or restricted by sex, sexuality, gender, power, status, marriage, or childbearing.

For those who have lived through violent or abusive marriages, the idea that in the resurrection we will neither marry nor be given in marriage may come as liberating good news.  But for others, who have established faithful, loving and fulfilling partnerships, the idea that such marriages will end may be unthinkable.[3] It is very hard for us, like the Sadducees, to think beyond the categories we already know.

A woman was with her mother in the hospital. As her mother lay dying, the woman tried to reassure her. 

She said, “Mom, in heaven, everyone we love is there.” 

But her mother corrected her, saying “No, in heaven, I will love everyone who is there.” [4]

Do you hear the mother’s wisdom?  It is not that the ones we already love are in heaven.  It is that when we reach heaven, we know how to love anyone who is there.

I believe that in the age to come, we will love in ways too deep and compelling to understand now.  Jesus’ first hint is that the world to come is not merely a continuation of the best of this one.

A second hint comes when Jesus points out that when Moses encountered God at the burning bush, God said “I AM the God the Abraham, and Isaac and Jacob.”  Jesus interprets this in present tense.  God is saying “I am their God now.” Not “I was their God when they were alive.”  God is their God in the present tense because they are still alive to God.  The relationship with God does not end when this body dies. 

As the apostle Paul will write later “Nothing shall separate us from the love of God.”  Not even death. 

Resurrection is not just an abstract doctrine.  Questions about resurrection are deeply personal, relational and meaningful.  They are part of the wrenching pain of grief when someone we love dies and the fear that we may experience when we contemplate dying ourselves. These are questions which we cannot answer from reason or experience alone.

Death and resurrection are mystery.  Many spiritual writers use birth as a way to think about death.  That is the essence of a wonderful story Henri Nouwen told about twins having a conversation in the womb.

The sister said to her brother, “I believe there is life after birth.”  

Her brother protested vehemently. “No, no, this is all there is. This is a dark and cozy place, and we have nothing else to do but cling to the cord that feeds us.”

 The little girl insisted, “There must be something else, a place with light where there is freedom to move” She could not convince her twin brother.

After some silence, the sister said hesitantly, “I have something else to say and I'm afraid you won't believe that, either, but I think there is a mother!”

He shouted, “What are you talking about? I have never seen a mother and neither have you. Who put that idea into your head? This place is all we have . . . ."

The sister was quite overwhelmed. But she couldn't let go of her thought, and finally she said, “Don't you feel these squeezes every once in a while? They're quite unpleasant and sometimes even painful.”

“Yes,” he answered. “What's special about that”

“Well,” the sister said, “I think that these squeezes are there to get us ready for another place, much more beautiful than this, where we will see our mother face-to-face. Don't you think that's exciting?” [5]

If we can imagine birth as a transition between one kind of existence and another, might we also imagine death in a similar way?  Just as the infant in the womb has no categories with which to understand life after birth, we have no idea what happens when the body dies.

Henri Nouwen said “We can live as if this life were all we had, as if death were absurd and we better not talk about it, or we can choose . . . to trust that death is the painful but blessed passage that will bring us face to face with our God.” [6]

Jesus did not teach much about death and resurrection with words, but he taught it with his actions. He kept on living his calling, kept on proclaiming the reign of God, until, not long after this, the earthly powers couldn’t take it any more and they killed him.  Or we might say that Jesus entrusted his own life and death to the God of Abraham and Sarah.   

And then, he became the resurrection. He returned in a body that people identified as his by its scars.  They recognized him in his mannerisms, that particular way he had of breaking bread and of carrying on heart-stirring conversations.   “He ate fish, broke bread, cooked breakfast. He also walked through locked doors and vanished while people were looking right at him. He was the same, but he was different, and because he was both, our futures may turn out to be as astounding as his.”[7] 

Resurrection is not about our worthiness, but the power of God’s faithfulness and unspeakable love.  God is God of the living, for all are alive to God.  Thanks be to God.

[1] Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Volume 2: Human Destiny,(Hoboken: NJ, 1980)  p. 294

[2] Karoline Lewis at https://www.workingpreacher.org/dear-working-preacher/who-says-theres-no-resurrection

[3] Alan Culpepper, The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IX, (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 1995), pp. 389-90.

[4] Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace:  A Vocabulary of Grace (New York:  Riverhead Books, 1998), p 367

[5] Henri Nouwen, Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying and Caring (New York:  HarperCollins, 1994),  pp 19-20

[6] Henri Nouwen, Our Greatest Gift, p.20

[7] Barbara Brown Taylor, “God of the Living” in Home By Another Way (Boston:  Cowley Publications, 1997) p. 207

10/30/22 - Holy Currencies: Time, Place and Gracious Leadership - Mark 10:42-45; Hebrews 10:23-25

Holy Currencies: Time, Place and Gracious Leadership

Mark 10:42-45, Hebrews 10:23-25

October 30, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/kaUveMQ_t0Q

About sixteen years ago, I was a pastor without a church. I had resigned from the church I was serving and didn’t get another job. We continued to live in the same town, but I had no work to do out in the public world.  I lost my vocation and my worshipping community and almost all my social relationships all at the same time.  We started attending a church across town.  There we found a weekly Sunday School class. It was a rag-tag group of parents and single adults, of people barely making ends meet and high income households. The group included both a psychiatrist and a person with active schizophrenia – and no, they were not in a doctor/patient relationship.  That weekly class become a lifeline for me and not only for me.  One man, who was in the midst of a painful divorce said to me “this is the best part of my whole week.”  

We who are church people may take for granted the privilege of gathering with our faith community every week. 

But if we do so, we risk undervaluing the currencies of time and place that flow through our ministry.  We risk “neglecting to meet together” and therefore losing opportunities to provoke one another to love and good deeds.  The currency of time and place is so foundational that we may not give it much thought until something changes, as it did in 2020 when we suddenly could not gather in person on a weekly basis.  Or when the boilers fail or the tower starts leaking and we wonder how long this building can continue to shelter us.

The currency of place refers to the property and the building from which we operate. The currency of time refers to all the paid and volunteer time that staff and members offer to the church in ministry.

Like that man in the midst of divorce, like me as a newly unemployed person, new people often come to us in the midst of some life crisis. Because we maintain a regular time and place to meet, they can seek companionship and support among us, without needing to disclose anything about their current situation until they choose. And of course, long time members also show up to give and receive mutual support, to engage in worship, and to serve in a variety of ministries.  The currency of time and place extends beyond us to folks we will never meet like the senior citizens who benefit from the lobbying of Statewide Senior Action or those who find employment through the services of Pathstone or the hundreds of households who visit the food pantry every week.  Renting our building to non-profits is one of the ways that we seek to maximize the currency of this place.

Today, we reach end of our focus on holy currencies.  In 2009, Eric H.F. Law, an Episcopal priest and educator, was working with a variety of churches.  Over half were struggling with financial concerns, which might have been no surprise during the precarious economy of the times.  But other congregations didn’t seem to have those sustainability concerns.  They had energy and were attracting new members.  These churches often described their ministry as “missional,” which meant their focus was outward, not just on their own members and their congregation’s survival.  They directed time and attention to developing people rather than programs.  They were clear about being authentic and relational, and sharing authority. The struggling churches wanted some of that; they didn’t want to worry about money.

At first Law was at a loss on how to help with money issues.  He was not an economist, nor accountant, nor stewardship officer.[1]  But looking closely at what he did know, he saw that even in tough economic times and with very little seed money, his consulting business – the Kaleidoscope Institute - had increased its annual budget by 700% over 4 years.  Without charging set fees, they had graciously received contributions at whatever rate individuals or church organizations felt they could pay in exchange for leadership training and resources.  Law noticed that other currencies were being exchanged to create abundance: gracious leadership, wellness, relationship, truth, time and place, as well as money.  He named it a Cycle of Blessings.

You may jump into this cycle at any point.  You may remember that as we began this month, I shared the story of my colleague who formed the S’more Club out of a deep need for sustaining relationships.  The currency of relationship begins with our primary relationship to Jesus and his command that we love one another.  The currency of truth flows from healthy relationships where there is enough trust to share experiences that may differ from the dominant narrative.  That kind of truth-telling supports wellness because naming injustice and hurtful realities may result in reconciliation, healing and forgiveness. Wellness has to do with deliberate restorative practices like sabbath and it flows into our practices around money.  Money pays for the upkeep on this building so that we may gather at given times.  Money also pays for staff salaries as well as for opportunities to strengthen the gracious leadership of our lay folks and the cycle of blessings spins again. 

Jesus’ most clear understanding of leadership may be summed up in the few verses we heard from Mark’s gospel.  He was on his way to Jerusalem for the last time when James and John pulled him aside to ask a favor. When Jesus arrives, when he becomes a celebrity, when he has the power they think he deserves, they want first dibs on the places of honor beside him. They seem to think that Jesus is just going to take over the customary ways of leading.  He is going to become king or president or CEO and put his people in place.  The only difference will be that the good guys, i.e. the Jesus team, will be in charge.

But Jesus says it doesn’t work like that. Real leaders are those who serve like Jesus does. If you read carefully, you might get the impression that even in heaven, Jesus is going to be on the wait staff.  The good seats are not his to give.  He doesn’t even have one himself.  Even in the fullness of his glory, he will be asking “May I help you?  Shall I bring another chair or put another leaf in the table so that everyone can be served.” 

Barbara Brown Taylor says that Jesus “is not pretending to be a servant until the time comes for him to whip off his disguise and climb onto his throne; he is a servant through and through.”[2]

“Gracious leadership, in imitation of Jesus, is true service for the good of all.  It has to do with building relationships and empowering others.  It is about love and humility and curiosity before judgment.”[3] It is about using the skills and tools and processes to build gracious environments for mutually respectful relationships where the truth can be spoken and heard.  It is also about sharing authority and being willing to follow another’s lead.  “A leader does not lead all the time; neither does the follower always follow.”[4] A teacher is sometimes a learner and learners often also have something to teach.”

Most of you know that Dr. Ralph Elliott died last Sunday.  Dr. Elliott was pastor here in the late 60’s and early 70’s.  He was a leader in many ways, someone who held to his convictions despite public opposition.  Many of you have spoken to me about his pastoral presence and his care for you.  His funeral was led by Elmo and Cheryl, two pastors that he mentored. Both of them served as associate pastors during his time at North Shore Baptist Church in Chicago.  Elmo said that North Shore was his first place of service after seminary and that he learned much from Ralph. Cheryl spoke about Ralph’s empowering of her as he advocated for women in ministry, which was not so common in those days.  She also shared a story of an incident where she asked for a Sunday off to be with family.  At first Ralph declined, saying that she was needed in worship that day, but then two days later, he called her back and said that he had put his work above family too often and that she was right to order her life differently.  He gave her the time off. Sometimes a learner is a teacher. Gracious leaders have the humility to change their minds.

This summer, I met a young adult from another Christian tradition in another country.  In her home country, there is a great respect for the wisdom of elders and people are not ordained until they have served for a long time. In her tradition, only ordained persons may preside at communion or perform baptisms.  And so, the tradition about leadership place limits on the ways that she can serve. She says that there are many people in remote areas who wish to be baptized, but those who are authorized to baptize are older and not well enough to travel into those places.  Some are waiting two years or more for someone to come and baptize them.  Meanwhile, young leaders who could more easily make the difficult journey to those remote areas would love to be of service, but are not allowed.  As an outsider, I hesitate to question this practice, but she is challenging her  tradition from within.

I mention it because it makes me wonder what obstacles we may be putting in the way of some who would serve among us, obstacles of privilege or tradition which are hard for us to recognize. I want to think about that with you.

I also want to affirm the gracious leadership of so many here at Emmanuel.  We are blessed with folks who serve graciously with humility in a multitude of ways, often in behind-the-scenes ways that are essential to our well-being but for which there is no public recognition.  This weekend, Emmanuel’s servant leaders made possible Joy’s visit with us.  Joy’s presence led to a series of truth-telling events.  Some of you have participated or will participate in a group where you are invited to share your experience with Emmanuel in the past, your engagement in our present and your wonderings about the future.  You have already or will speak your truth in those sessions.

On Friday, various community leaders participated in similar sessions about the Albany. They spoke truth about homelessness, the needs of young people and seniors, about mental health and hunger, about a housing crisis and people’s yearning for a place to be themselves in relationship to God. 

These events depend on the circulation of the currency of truth and of relationship – our relationships with one another and with individuals and organizations beyond the church.  Our goal in these conversations is to articulate the mission and ministry that God is calling us to in this time, so that we will experience wellness as the holy currencies flow and circulate within and among us – and so that we may continue to experience and share with others the abundance of life and fullness of joy that God desires for us. Thanks be to God.

[1] Eric H.F. Law, Holy Currencies: Six Blessings for Sustainable Missional Ministries (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2013), p. 2

[2] Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Trickle-Up Effect”  in Bread of Angels  (Boston:  Cowley Publications, 1997), p.44.

[3] Lynn Carman Bodden in her sermon  Answering the Call delivered at First Reformed Church, Schenectady, NY on June 26, 2022

[4] Holy Currencies, p. 94

10/23/22 - Holy Currencies: Money - Mark 10:17-31

Holy Currencies: Money  

Mark 10:17-31

October 23, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/4zYfkO3UcHc

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a Potawatomi professor and scientist who writes lovely books about plants non-scientists. She is the author of the bestseller, Braiding Sweetgrass, and some of us have met her through her long-time friends, Kathy and Judy. During the first winter of the pandemic, she wrote a beautiful essay about a kind of fruit she calls serviceberry.  You might know it by another name like juneberry or saskatoon.

Robin’s neighbor, Paulie, invited Robin to come pick these berries on Paulie’s farm. Paulie had planted her serviceberry orchard as a pick-your-own place, a way to create another revenue stream for her farm. But during the first pandemic lockdown, she invited her neighbors to come and pick for free.

As the sweet, ripe serviceberries plunked into her bucket, Robin wondered what to do with this bounty.  She describes this as a gift economy. The orchard is not free – planting, tilling, irrigating, these cost real money – but the neighbor is giving away its abundance.  Kimmerer writes “Gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource. I accept the gift from the bush and then spread that gift with a dish of berries to my neighbor, who makes a pie to share with his friend, who feels so wealthy in food and friendship that he volunteers at the food pantry. You know how it goes. . . . .In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away.” [1]

First century Palestine did not have a gift economy. They had an extractive economy. The capital city, Jerusalem, was organized and ordered by the urban elites who were wealthy.  Their lifestyle depended on the labor of the lower classes in Jerusalem and on the peasant farmers in Galilee. [2]

Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem for the last time.  Many people are following him, asking questions, seeking healing for themselves or others.  And this one man comes with a religious question.  This story is familiar to most of us. We don’t know the man’s name, so we often call him the rich young ruler.  Mark doesn’t describe him as a ruler or as young and we only find out he is rich at the end.  I think maybe we identify him that way to distance ourselves from him.  We want to think that we are faithful, which we believe he is not, and we want to think that we are not rich.

Rich and poor are relative terms. To put them into some perspective, some economists suggest that an American household of two adults with an annual after-tax income of $40,000, is in the top 7% of wealth in the world.[3] That is hard to believe, I know, and this data is from a couple of years ago, so there’s a little wiggle room. But the point is that all of us here, even though we have a variety of incomes, we are among the most well-off people in the world. If we can’t consider the possibility that we are much like the man in this story, then we should probably ask why.

Barbara Brown Taylor says that Christians mangle this story in at least two ways. “First, by acting as if it were not about money, and second, by acting as if it were only about money.” [4]

It is definitely about money.  When the man leaves Jesus, the open question is what he will do with his wealth – whether he will keep it or share it. It is not only about money, because to give away money will be to give away some of himself.   We get money by investing ourselves in some mental or physical activity.  When we look at our bank accounts or the pieces of paper in our wallets, we are looking at our invested energy made tangible.  Our money represents our stored time and talent and that of our ancestors.  Money gets tied up with our own sense of worth and how we are valued by others and not because of the stacks of bills or numbers on a page.

When this man comes to Jesus to ask about eternal life, he comes as someone with a lot of wealth.  But that is not all he is.  He comes as a religious seeker, someone who wants to live the best life he can.  He comes as someone who has been morally upright.  He’s a good citizen, a faithful person. He is such a rule-keeper that he has undoubtedly given all the tithes that were required of him. The Temple probably had no complaints about him. He might have been one of their top donors. 

Jesus looks at him and loves him.  The gospels only describe Jesus loving two particular people.  One is the unnamed Beloved Disciple in John’s gospel. The other one is this man. Jesus looks at him and sees him, still looking for something he hasn’t quite found, still insecure in spite of his wealth, and Jesus loves him. 

Jesus reminds him of the short list of commandments, the ones that have to do with how people relate to their neighbors.  Jesus says, “You know the commandments, do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness.” 

“Check, check, check” – the man is ticking them off. 

And then Jesus changes one of them. Next in the list should be “do not covet.”  “Do not covet” means “don’t be obsessed with  what other people have.  Don’t be jealous of it. Don’t make it your goal to get it.”  But Jesus doesn’t say that. Jesus says “Do not defraud.” Or in the translation that Pat read, it says “Do not cheat”

Why would Jesus do that?  Why would he replace “do not covet” with “do not defraud”

Remember the man's question - "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" This man had no doubt inherited most of what he owned; and, since that made most people rich in those days was owning property, we can assume that when Mark says "he had many possessions" he meant that he had "many properties". This was an extractive economy where landowners became wealthy by acquiring the land of their neighbors who went into debt and either sold their land to pay the debts or had the land taken from them.  It is reasonable to assume that anyone who had many properties was wealthy at the expense of others. [5]

It was perfectly legal and not considered cheating or fraudulent, especially not by the religiously and politically powerful people who designed the system.

But I have to wonder if Jesus is inviting the man to step out of the system that made him rich at the expense of others.  The man can not single-handedly dismantle the economic system of Rome and Jerusalem, but he can choose to invest in Jesus’ alternative gift economy.

Jesus tells him to go, sell what he has, and give the proceeds away and then come back to follow Jesus.  I have always been led to believe that the man doesn’t do it, that his wealth has too big a hold on his life.  But here’s the thing, we don’t know what he does.  He goes away grieving. Maybe he is grieving because it will be hard to give up the surround-sound TV that his friends enjoy or the vacation home where his family made great memories.  Maybe it is difficult at this stage of his life  to re-evaluate his investment of time and talent.  He followed the rules. He provided for his family.  Maybe he grieves because he realizes that he has been clueless about his exploitation of others. 

In our anti-racism conversations, we have talked about how wealth and privilege often insulates white people from knowing how our actions affect others, and when we do come to realize it, some of us grieve.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but if we aren’t willing to consider the similarities between this man and ourselves, we might want to ask why not. 

He goes away grieving, but whether he does what Jesus suggests or not, we just don’t know. It remains an open question for him and for us.

In that essay about the serviceberry, Kimmerer writes “In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away.”

The cycle of blessings which we are exploring this month seems much like the gift economy that Robin Kimmerer describes.  Here truth and wellness and relationship flow along with money to enhance the well-being of the whole community.

A quick story -- many years ago, Joan Chittister attended an international conference in Asia on the status of women.  Most of the participants were women she describes as “well-funded activist types.” They were all there to professionally analyze various women’s issues around the world, especially of the needs of women in developing countries.  At the gathering, these professional women called for more education for girls, more birth control training, better health-care programs, and most importantly more participation of women at all levels of the political process.

As the conference was drawing to a close, a leader of one of the small group workshops, passed a piece of paper around and asked everyone to share her e-mail address so that they could all stay in contact and support one another in their work. One of the participants; a woman named Rose, was a Kenyan pastor of a Presbyterian church in Africa. When the sheet of paper came to her, she simply filled in her name and passed it on. The woman next to Rose passed the paper back to her and pointed out that she had neglected to put her email address on the form. Rose answered quietly:  “I don’t have email where I am.  It is too expensive for us.”

When Sister Joan and her colleague were getting into a cab to leave, her colleague said that she couldn’t leave without first seeing Rose. She asked Sister Joan to wait and rushed back into the hotel saying that she had promised to give something to Rose.  Later as they were waiting to check in for their flight, Sister Joan asked her colleague, what she had given to Rose. Her friend answered that she had given Rose her credit card.

“Your credit card? Why in heaven’s name would you give Rose your credit card?”

Her friend answered quietly, “So she can pay for her email every month.” [6]

The story is about money, but it is not only about money.  Next Sunday, we have two important opportunities. Within worship we will make financial pledges to this congregation.  You will receive a letter this week with a pledge card and instructions for how to pledge on-line. Either way is good. Next Sunday we will also be hosting conversations with our consultant. The conversations are framed as being about our future together, the future that God is calling us to, but it would also be accurate to say that they are about the cycle of blessings and how we circulate the holy currencies. 

We invest our money, our relationships, our gratitude, in Jesus’ alternate economy which we try to imitate within this congregation.  We do so in the hopes of embodying the reign of God among us, not perfectly, not all at once, but like a seed growing in a field or yeast hidden in a lump of bread dough. Because with God, all things are possible. Amen.

[1] Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance, https://www.globalonenessproject.org/library/essays/serviceberry-economy-abundance

[2] Walter Brueggemann, Money and Possessions, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2016)  p 187.

[3] https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i

[4] Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Opposite of Rich”  in The Preaching Life, (Cambridge, MA:  Cowley Publications, 1993) p.124.

[5] Barry Robinson, “The Only Way In”  http://spirit-net.ca/sermons/b-or28-keeping.php

[6] Rowan Williams and Joan Chittister, For All That Has Been, Thanks (Norwich, UK:  Canterbury Press, 2010) pp. 20-22

10/16/22 - Holy Currencies: Wellness - Deuteronomy 5:12-15, 15:1-2; Exodus 23:10-12

Holy Currencies: Wellness

Deuteronomy 5:12-15, 15:1-2

Exodus 23:10-12

October 16, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

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

October is almost the busiest month of the year for me.  It feels busier than December, busier than the March or April with Holy Week and Easter.  I noticed this a long time ago.  It took a break during the pandemic, but this year October has been as busy as ever. I hope that’s a sign that covid is in retreat. One day a couple of weeks ago, I got up from my computer and discovered that standing upright was not easy.  I had been sitting at my desk, reading stuff on my computer, answering emails, making phone calls and when I finally stood up, I realized I had been in one position too long. I had been productive. I had checked off a lot of things on my list, but my body was not happy.  My back was stiff and sending out a lot of pain messages. It was not well, and it wanted me to know.

Wellness has been hard to come by in recent years.  Even if we personally managed to avoid getting covid, it did not feel well with our souls.   Even if we stayed physically healthy, and many of us did not, things were out of balance all across the world.   It turns out that balance, a regular rhythm of work and play and rest is a key to wellness.  When that rhythm is disrupted, we become unwell. 

The Bible offers great wisdom about sustaining a rhythm of wellness. It is the rhythm of the Sabbath.  Sabbath-keeping is the weekly practice of rest.  Working six days but stopping work in order to rest and play on the seventh day.

The Sabbath was a marvelous gift for the formerly enslaved Hebrew people.  Enslaved persons are never allowed to choose rest.

In ancient Israel, this day of rest included women as well as men.  It included people of all social statuses, even the immigrants and foreigners.  Men were not allowed to have Sabbath rest at the expense of women; citizens not allowed to enjoy it at the expense of immigrants.  And it included the animals and the land, at least for a day, the fields were not to be worked or weeded or harvested.  There was rest for all of creation.

That was the seven-day cycle. There was also a 7-year cycle in which debts were forgiven and the land was allowed to rest from production. And there was a 50-year cycle called the Jubilee when the earth rested, and debts were forgiven and also families returned to land and homes they had lost.  The Sabbath cycles are all about maintaining balance for individuals and communities and the creation itself. 

Walter Brueggemann says that “sabbath concerns the periodic, disciplined, regular disengagement from the systems of productivity whereby the world uses people up to exhaustion.”[1]

Periodic, disciplined, regular – Sabbath doesn’t automatically happen; it is practiced with intention.

Disengagement – it is counter-cultural. Our culture encourages frenetic work, frenetic exercise, frenetic recreation all aimed at producing profit or better bodies or winning teams.  To disengage from those systems requires deliberate effort.  Not to do so may leave us used up and exhausted.

Many of you know this.  You don’t just know it in theory.  You put it into practice.  You step away from your computers regularly.  You don’t respond to emails 24/7.  You spend your day off work in the woods or in your gardens.  You engage in a weekly Sabbath.  Some of you extend the principle beyond that.   Some versions of the American dream would say that you work hard for decades, earning the right to rest and play in retirement.  But many of you have rejected that.  You plan and take vacations across the year.  You enjoy the life that is yours to live, balancing rest and play and work right now. Your Sabbath commitment has been instructive to me. 

This week I remembered someone for whom keeping Sabbath had been transformational. I asked Liselle if she would share about that.  This is what she said, “When I found my way to Emmanuel Baptist Church a few years ago, it was a very stressful period in my life, due to a fiscal crisis at Historic Cherry Hill, where I was Director, as well as a scary medical diagnosis of a progressive lung condition. Pastor Kathy’s sermons, benedictions and the supportive EBC community all gave me spiritual comfort.

I don’t quite remember when the topic of the Sabbath was explored during an Adult Faith Formation class, but that too offered me spiritual nourishment. It was then that I made a personal commitment to “keeping the Sabbath holy”, by not allowing myself to work on Sundays. Instead, I would focus on quality time with my partner Sheila, and our dogs Barney and Hermione, getting outdoors and enjoying the wonders of nature. There’s no better remedy for stress than experiencing the sheer joy of a dog romping through the woods and creek.

When Kathy emailed me earlier this week about sharing my perspective on the Sabbath and its role in maintaining a healthy work/rest balance, I realized I had lost my intentionality in keeping it holy, thereby losing its power of keeping me grounded and healthy despite new stresses of a now different professional position. When I do so, it puts everything in perspective, reminds me of what matters, and makes me grateful for every day.

Now, it’s just Hermione showing pure joy chasing after gigantic sticks in the creek—sometimes on a Sunday, sometimes on a weekday afternoon—but remarkably, despite the lungs, I’m able to keep up with her over hill and dale and experience joy right along with her.”

Sabbath has short-term and long-term implications.  The weekly Sabbath, the sabbatical year and the Jubilee year weave together to sustain healthy individuals and communities.  It is one of the most powerful ways for human communities to move towards physical, social, economic and ecological wellness.  That might be why Jesus chose to proclaim Jubilee in his inaugural sermon in Nazareth.

There is evidence of wellness here at Emmanuel. We practice Sabbath by showing up for worship every week.  There is a generosity of spirit as we share the concerns of our daily lives with each other.  Sabbath is for everyone, so we seek to make that experience available to everyone. We have invested in the technology for Zoom and for the hearing loop.   There are concerns for long-term wellness, so we work to maintain a building, a shelter for this community in the future.   And we give priority to teaching children, passing on our faith to the next generation. 

But feeling really and truly well has been elusive for us.  Many of us are tired. Some of us have been asking how long we can go on as we are since well before the pandemic.  On the other hand, some of us are feeling new energy and creativity.  One thing about Sabbath is that it is best practiced in community.  We grant to each other freedom to rest, encouragement to play, that we might not grant to ourselves.

I wonder how we might more intentionally engage Sabbath here at to balance our work and rest and play, to sustain a sense of well-being into the future.  I want to tell you how one congregation did it.  Please hear me carefully.  I am not suggesting that we need to do what they did, but I am inspired by how they applied Sabbath principles.

In 2008, the Rev. Kara Root was called as pastor of Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis. The church was not well, by their own definition.  Nobody had joined the Minneapolis church in seven years. It had no children's program, because it had no children. All the kids had aged out. On a good Sunday, maybe 30 people attended services in a sanctuary that once routinely held 300 worshippers. And the church's once-comfortable endowment had just enough funds to last two more years -- if they really pinched pennies.

The church believed that it was dying, and perhaps from that belief came a willingness to risk.  So, when Rev. Root made a radical proposal, they agreed to change their pattern and make Sabbath keeping the heart of their life.  This is their new pattern:  On the first and third Sundays of the month, they hold regular morning worship.  On the second and fourth Saturday nights, they gather for contemplative services which draw upon the same Scripture and sermon as the previous Sunday’s worship.  And on the second and fourth Sundays they practice Sabbath by taking a rest from work, from obligations and even from formal worship.  In months that have five Sundays, the congregation spends the extra Sunday participating in a community outreach event with a local nonprofit that offers mental health and educational services to children with emotional and behavioral issues.

It took a while for people to be OK with this pattern.  Some felt that they were shirking their church duty.  But within six years, the congregation had gained 18 new members and another dozen adherents.  Sunday morning attendance rose to 70 with as many as 25 in the Saturday evening services.  Their finances stabilized and they started donating 10% of their annual budget to neighborhood projects.   What was proposed as a 1-year experiment totally caught on. Fourteen years later, the church is alive and seems well, with the same pastor and a congregation of all ages that enjoys its own Sabbath worship and rest rhythm.[2]

That is how one church applied Sabbath principles.  I wonder what imaginative possibilities this opens up and how we might learn from them for our own well-being.

An archaeologist once hired some indigenous people to lead him to an archaeological site deep in the mountains. After they had been moving for some time, the guides stopped and insisted they would go no further. The archaeologist grew impatient and then angry. But no matter how much he pleaded and cajoled, they would not go any further. Then all of a sudden, they picked up the gear and set off once more. When the bewildered archaeologist asked why they had stopped and refused to move for so long, the guides answered, "We had been moving too fast and had to wait for our souls to catch up."

Friends, many of us have traveled too fast for too long. We are not well, and we need the deep rest and restoration of Sabbath.  May we find it together.  Amen.

[1] Walter Brueggemann, New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume 1, (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 1994), p. 846.

[2] https://faithandleadership.com/minneapolis-congregation-finds-new-life-through-the-ancient-practice-keeping-sabbath?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=A%20Minneapolis%20congregation%20finds%20new%20life%20through%20the%20ancient%20practice%20of%20keeping%20Sabbath&utm_campaign=faithleadership

10/9/22 - Holy Currencies: Truth - Luke 17:11-17; Ephesians 4:14-16

Holy Currencies: Truth

Luke 17:11-17; Ephesians 4:14-16

October 9, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church: Rev. Kathy Donley

Image:  The Healing of the Ten Lepers, James Tissot

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here:  https://youtu.be/HfHmy5Y20U4

There’s a conversation that has been cycling through this congregation for the last few years. Even before the pandemic, we were seeking to discern God’s call on us, God’s mission for us in this time. And now we do so with a new sense of urgency.  This month, I am using the concepts from Eric Law’s book Holy Currencies as a tool to help that conversation. 

I appreciate Law’s definition of missional.  He says that a missional church is a community of people who look outward and are able to connect with other people who are not already members of another church.[1]  A missional church is a community – which implies that there is a group which has formed, a group with its own internal life.  But, he says, that it’s focus is more outward than inward.  A missional church does not exist for self-preservation, but it is always seeking deeper connections with those beyond, those who may not yet have a community in which to share the good news of Jesus.

Law describes 6 currencies, six things which sustain the life of healthy missional churches.  We are attending to these currencies this month for two reasons.  The first reason is that October is usually the month when we lift up stewardship. Stewardship is that churchy word which means the ways that we share and manage our time, energy and resources.  The second reason is that all of these currencies become part of the conversation about how to understand and join God’s mission for us. 

Last Sunday, we focused on the currency of relationship.  Law defines that as the mutually respectful connections that church members and leaders have inside and outside the church. 

Today we explore the currency of truth.  The currency of truth is the ability to articulate wholistic truth internally and externally.  Internally, this currency recognizes that different individuals and groups within the church may have different experiences and understandings of what life and what matters. Externally, this currency values the knowledge and experiences of different individuals or groups in the neighborhood or the city in the nation or across the world.

One more point about this model.  Law describes a cycle of blessings in which the currencies flow and circulate in ways that support and enhance each other.  For example, healthy relationships often support truth telling because the persons within that relationship have enough trust to share experiences that are differ from the dominant narrative. And, in reverse, that truthful sharing may deepen the existing relationship.

Luke chapter 17 contains a story that is familiar to many of us.  This text is a reading on Thanksgiving.  It is usually lifted up as a story about gratitude or ingratitude.  It is often read as if those are the only two possible experiences of the people within the story.  Today, we have with us 10 people who suffered from leprosy until they encountered Jesus that day.  They each have their own story to tell. I invite you to listen for the truth that each of them shares.

Note:  At this point, ten readers from the congregation stepped forward and read through Maren Tirabassi’s script “Reader’s Theatre for the Ten People Healed of Leprosy” which may be found here https://giftsinopenhands.wordpress.com/2019/10/07/readers-theatre-for-the-story-of-the-ten-people-healed-from-leprosy-luke-17-11-19/

Many of us learned this as a story about the nine and the one.  Many of us were taught the story in such a way that it seemed like 9 people had the same experience and 1 person had a different experience.  Our friends have reminded us that it probably was more complicated than that.

None of us has complete knowledge or the whole unvarnished truth.  We all see through the lens of our experiences or within the narrative we have been taught. But when the currency of truth is circulating well, we recognize that a complex truth emergences as we seek to understand many different points of view.

I notice that there are not just two stories here.  Not just the story of one thankful outsider and nine unthankful insiders. It is more nuanced than that even though the narrator doesn’t relay those details. But I also notice that Jesus elevates the voice and experience of the outsider.

Jesus encountered ten people with leprosy and sent them to the priest.  Jesus was healing them, but the priest was the one with the authority to pronounce them contagion-free. It didn’t count until they got the clean bill of health from that authority.   They all had leprosy, but the Samaritan was in a category by himself. He couldn’t present himself to a Jewish priest.  He would have to go to Samaria and find a Samaritan priest.   We might think of him as a Protestant seeking absolution from a Catholic priest.  It doesn’t work like that.  Or to move to a health care metaphor, he might be someone who is not insured or whose insurance is not accepted outside of network. He is outside the dominant system. Part of his truth is that the system that works for the other nine doesn’t work for him.  Perhaps it is because of that, perhaps it is something else, that puts him in a different place from the others and enables him to come back to Jesus. It is his voice, his truth, that Jesus amplifies.

We do not have the whole truth unless we also listen to and seek to understand the experiences of those whose experience is different from ours, especially we need to hear the truth that comes from beyond the dominant view. 

The way we share and receive truth is significant to our life and identity as individuals and as a congregation. The author of Ephesians writes of telling the truth in love as a mark of mature faith.

Knox Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati discovered an unwelcome truth about itself.[2] The pastor heard rumors that a major gift given to the church 100 years earlier had some nefarious strings attached, so he and the church leadership went into their archives to find the truth. 

They were dismayed to discover that a church member had left a major gift in her will on the condition that it would be used “for the white race only, to build a church for the white race only.”  It was a gift of $22,000 which would be about $250,000 in today’s dollars.   Not only did the church accept the money at that time with those restrictions explicitly stated, they used it to help them build the building in which that congregation continues to worship. When the church understood the truth of this history, they also realized that the present-day congregation continues to benefit from the wealth that they were given in this gift.  They named it as structural racism which they stopped to confess and lament.

And then the leadership committed the church to a new racial justice ministry that has three components – listening, learning and action. They added $50,000 to the church’s annual operating budget to support the work of racial justice, which they are just beginning. The pastor said “It was our feeling if we tried to make this payment a one-time commitment, we might fall into the trap of saying, ‘OK, we did this, so we’re not racist anymore,’

They chose to make an annual budgetary commitment as a way of continuing to deal with the truth of their own complicity and their active engagement to dismantle it.

I’ve been told about a significant truth-telling that happened a few decades back in this church.  As I understand it, it was a valued member of the choir who spoke his truth. He shared that the church at large and this church in particular was not advocating for the full inclusion of GLBTQ persons.  He spoke from his own experience and he spoke from within a context of relationships. The currency of truth and the currency of relationships flowed together and from exchange came a new justice concern in this congregation.  His speaking of truth ultimately led Emmanuel to take a public stand articulating our convictions that all persons of all gender identities and sexual orientations are made in God’s image and loved by God and therefore welcome and loved in this place.

Friends, the currency of truth is strong here. One important opportunity to lean into that strength will happen in our work with Joy Skjegstad, the consultant who is meeting with us at the end of this month.  Please sign up for one of those slots. Come to speak your own truth and to listen to the experiences of others.  Let us continue to speak the truth in love as we carry out the mission of God in this place. Amen.

 
[1] Eric H.F. Law, Holy Currencies: Six Blessings for Sustainable Missional Ministries (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2013), p.1

[2] https://www.presbyterianmission.org/story/buried-in-the-church-columbarium/

10/2/22 - Holy Currencies: Relationship - John 15:9-17

Holy Currencies: Relationship

John 15:9-17

October 2, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/l4oy7Kv18oA

I met a remarkable woman this summer.  It was when I was at that training in Kansas City.  Elizabeth is a Disciples of Christ pastor and a graduate of Central Seminary where we were meeting.  She was also the person who coordinated a whole lot of logistics for the training. She organized rides to and from the airport for everyone who flew to Kansas City. She provided welcome packets that had essential snacks as well as detergent pods so we could do laundry. She set up daily transportation between the hotel where we stayed and the seminary where we met.  She personally prepared every lunch and dinner for all twenty of us and kept the snack table full of choices.  She had a treasure chest with special rewards just for the people who helped with set-up and clean-up each meal.  If it sounds like she was crucial to the success of the week, she was.

One of Elizabeth’s many gifts is hospitality.  In addition to anticipating our needs, she provided some fun that I didn’t even know I needed. Every day, she brought a dessert that was based on the national food day calendar.  So we had ice cream sandwiches on National Ice Cream Sandwich Day and root beer floats on National Root Beer Float Day and watermelon and chocolate chip cookies on their assigned days.  National Rice Pudding Day occurred during our time, but Elizabeth is apparently strongly opposed to rice pudding, so she informed us that we were disregarding that one. 

A different volunteer led our morning devotional every day.  On one of our last days, none of the participants had signed up, so Elizabeth stepped in.  I have her permission to share the story that she told. 

Elizabeth has a name for the years 2011-2017.  She calls them her Six Year Season of Suck.  Many, many bad events combined to give that season its name.  Elizabeth spared us the full list.  Here’s just the top five:

1.    Her husband left her, making her a single mom to a son and a daughter.

2.    The bank foreclosed on her house.

3.    Her mother died.

4.    She lost her job as a church secretary.  The church leadership told her “We’re cutting your job because we want to pay the men more.  They have families to support.”

5.    Her father died.

Elizabeth was about in the middle of that Six-year Season of Suck when something happened that she later saw as the beginning of the upswing, the beginning of the climb out of despair.  Her kids were with their father for several weeks at the beginning of the summer, leaving her more alone even than usual. At breakfast one day, she found herself reading an article that captured her imagination.  The article was about rats. 

You may have heard of these experiments.  The rats were put in two different environments.  In one environment, they were alone, separated from other rats.  In the other environment, they could go out and interact with others. In both environments, there were two water bottles.  One held plain water. The other had water to which heroin had been added.  The finding was that the rats who could go out and socialize with other rats chose the plain water almost all the time.  The rats which were isolated chose the drugged water almost all the time.  And a large number of those rats just kept choosing the drugged water until they overdosed and died.  That article moved Elizabeth to action.

She looked at her resources.  After all her bills were paid and all her groceries purchased, she realized that she had a whopping $11 left for the month.  $11 was enough.    She started calling everyone she could think of.  She invited her friends them to meet her in her driveway in a few hours.  She went to the store and made her purchases. 

That evening, she set up a lawn chair in her driveway and waited.  Nearby she had set up her grocery store purchases – marshmallows, chocolate, graham crackers and firewood. 

She waited . . . and one friend showed up.  That one friend who you can always count on.  So, they each had a s’more and enjoyed each other’s company.

The next night, that friend came back and one more person came. So, two of them hung out.  And the next night, the friend rounded up more friends who came to hang out and make s’mores and enjoy the evening.  Pretty soon, the S’more Club was born.  They started making gourmet S’mores on Tuesdays and added a potluck on Saturday nights.   It rained one night and the three folks who came moved indoors and had ice cream instead.

Her daughter’s friend lived across the street.  I’ll call her Kelly.  Kelly was allowed to go exactly two places on her own.  One was school.  The other was Elizabeth’s house.  Kelly’s parents are immigrants.  They don’t speak much English.  They didn’t come to S’more club, but Kelly did.  Then one day, Kelly’s Dad met Elizabeth on the sidewalk. He was carrying a bundle of firewood that he had obviously put together and tied up with his own scrap of fabric.  He handed it to Elizabeth and said just three words “For you.  Appreciate”.  Elizabeth said she wasn’t sure if he meant he appreciated that his daughter got to go to S’more Club or if he thought Elizabeth would appreciate the firewood, but it didn’t really matter. 

Elizabeth hosted S’more club for 71 nights in a row that year.  As many as 53 people showed up in her driveway and spilled into her yard.  People she knew and people she didn’t. Nearby neighbors and people from all over her metro area.  Friends of friends and family members of those friends. Adults talking. Children running around.  Sparklers on the 4th of July.  Other outdoor games at other times. There was no sermon, no hymn singing, no set liturgy of any kind, but one night, one of the adults sitting near Elizabeth, paused, looked around and said, “This feels like church.” 

It was not the end of Elizabeth’s 6 years of dealing with hard stuff.  But then the S’more Club friends were there to offer support when her father died.  And she was there as a listening ear for someone else going through a divorce.  And everyone celebrated when people enjoyed their first-ever s’more or you know, some other equally important life event.  She called together a community because she realized its power for healing, for herself and others. 

Elizabeth shared this story in the morning devotional time that day in Kansas City and then she announced that that very day was National S’more’s Day.  So, of course, our afternoon snack was s’mores.

This month we are exploring what the Episcopal priest Eric Law calls Holy Currencies. The word currency comes from a Latin word related to current, like the movement within a river.  It means to run or to flow.   Currency in our time most often refers to money, but Law uses it to identify other things which circulate with power. 

We begin with the currency of relationship.  In this community, our first relationship is with Jesus.  Jesus who re-named his followers, his students, as friends and commanded us, above all else, to love.  Individuals come together in this community because we have a relationship with Jesus or because we are seeking one.  Jesus is the vine, we are the branches. The relationships that we develop with others are all embedded in that primary relationship with Jesus who taught us to live, to dwell deeply within his love, so much so that it flows out and around us, even in the way we relate to our enemies. 

Law refers to the theory of three degrees of influence which holds that how we act, and what we say ripples through our network.[1]  It has an impact on our friends (that’s one degree) and on our friends’ friends (that’s two degrees) and even on our friends’ friends’ friends. (three degrees)

“We shape our network.  But our network also shapes us as actions, words and attitudes flow back over us.  Our friends affect us.  Our friends’ friends’ friends affect us, and we them.  The network has a life of its own. A network is formed and shaped in relationships.  It matters who we choose to affiliate with.  It matters how we reach out.   It matters where we invest ourselves, our time, our money.  It matters what kind of energy we bring.  It matters where we focus.  It matters who crosses our path and invites us into conversation or deeper relationship.”[2]

I’m wearing this beautiful and unusual jacket today in celebration of World Communion Sunday.  It first belonged to a woman I’ve never met. It was given to me by her daughter.  The original owner was married to a pastor.  She purchased this jacket on a trip across the world.  The trip was a gift from a church where her husband served as pastor.

The woman was Lois Klingbeil.  Her daughter is of course Barb Lahut.  I never got to know Lois, but many of you did. And the mention of her name has reminded you of her personality, her gifts, her influence on your life – the relationship that you shared.  Some of you, like me, didn’t know Lois, but you know Barb.  You know her personality, her gifts, her influence on your life and you know that some of who Barb is was undoubtedly shaped by her mother.  Some of you are new here.  You don’t know Barb yet, but you will if you stick around long enough.

Human beings are created for relationship, with God and with each other. We are called, even commanded, to be a network of love. We are called, even commanded, to follow Jesus on the path of vulnerability, to generous and joyful hospitality that notices and welcomes, that listens deeply, and shares boldly.  Relationships are a currency which has power to sustain, to heal, to transform lives. And not just our own, but the lives of people in this neighborhood and the neighborhoods in which we live and in fact, people we haven’t met yet or may never meet.  For our healing and for theirs.  That our joy may be full.  Amen.

[1] Eric H.F. Law, Holy Currencies: Six Blessings for Sustainable Missional Ministries (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2013) p.18.

[2] I am indebted to the Rev. Lynn Carman Bodden, who introduced me to the holy currencies concept.  The language of this paragraph came from her sermon “Oikonomia” delivered at First Reformed Church in Schenectady on July 17 2022.

9/25/22 - The Choice of a Lifetime - Matthew 16:13-25

The Choice of a Lifetime

Matthew 16:13-25

September 25, 2022

 Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/1c2zWMxyquo

About ten years ago, on September 4, 2012, a baby boy was born. When he was three months old, on a Sunday morning in December, his Moms stood in this sanctuary with many of us and together we said that we would do our best to nurture him in faith.  Of course, that baby boy was Judah.  And so across the last decade, Judah has developed relationships with a lot of the people at Emmanuel and he has explored most of the nooks and crannies of this building. He has been to Sunday School and worship and campfires and Easter Egg hunts and summer picnics and church retreats at Pathfinder.  Today, he stands as one of us, professing Jesus as his Lord. 

As we did ten years ago, we come together with a mood that is both joyful and serious. We hear Judah’s profession of faith, we witness his baptism, and we celebrate.  Any one who knows Judah knows that he is curious and compassionate. We know that he is “all in” on what he gives his heart to and so we are not especially surprised that he has chosen to follow Jesus in baptism.  We rejoice in that decision. But our celebration is also solemn, because in choosing this path, Judah has taken on something serious, something important, something that might come with a cost.   

Judah and I met together several times last spring.  We talked about a whole lot of stuff.  Some of it you might call religious.  Some of it you probably wouldn’t. But it was the stuff of our lives at the time which means it was holy.  We talked about different stories in the Bible and this passage from Matthew became very important in our conversation.

“Who do you say that I am?”  That was the question Jesus asked of his disciples.  It is a question about identity and relationship and loyalty. 

Matthew has been laying out the story of Jesus’ identity.  We might remember that Matthew’s gospel begins with a complex genealogy which includes Abraham and David, with exile and deliverance, with flawed kings and extraordinarily faithful women. We might remember that at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, he went out to be baptized by John the Baptist and the voice from heaven identified him as the Beloved One with whom God was well pleased.  “For Matthew, identity is not just about who you are, but who is around you, who is accompanying you, who has come before you.”[1]

Judah has chosen to identify himself with Jesus, to be baptized into a death and resurrection like Jesus.  Judah’s identity is also shaped by who is around him and who has come before.  He is baptized into a community of those who keep company with Jesus.  Judah’s baptism happened today, in part, because of the baptisms he witnessed in recent years, including his cousin’s and the baptism of Bill Mordhorst in this sanctuary just last year.  We promised ten years ago to nurture Judah’s faith and today, we are reminded of that promise. 

As we bear witness to Judah’s confession of faith, we may remember our own baptisms.  We may recall our own early desire that the way of Jesus would always take first place in our lives. It may be that some of that earnest zeal has dimmed with time or circumstances.  Just as our faith shaped Judah’s, so his can shape ours, calling us back to the path.

It's the choice of a lifetime, but it’s one we keep making over and over again in different ways, under different circumstances. It’s the decision that the young adult Peter made one day when he dropped his fishing nets and followed Jesus.  He was living into that decision when he made this bold proclamation and also that time when he tried to walk on the water, but had to be rescued by Jesus.  He was living it out when he followed Jesus from a distance after his arrest and also when he got scared in the courtyard and pretended not to know him after all.   Being baptized is not going to make you perfect, Judah. Or me.  It doesn’t work that way for anyone.  But what we see over and over again, is that God blesses and keeps us even when we mess up or doubt or get scared, and we learn to keep trusting and keep following for our whole lives. 

“Who do you say that I am?”  It is a serious question of allegiance for Jesus’ disciples and for us.

Matthew tells us that this conversation happens in Caesarea Phillipi. The location matters.  Caesarea Phillipi was named for two people – Tiberius Caesar who was the Emperor of Rome in Jesus’ time and Philip who was the son of Herod the Great.  So the place names means something like the City of Caesar and his loyal servant Phillip.  It is the seat of power, combining the political might of Rome and the city of the local ruler who reports to Rome.  It carries the significance of a place like Washington DC now. 

This is the place were Jesus asks “who do you say that I am?”

This is the place where Peter responds “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”

Against this backdrop of earthly power and status, Jesus asks “who am I to you?”  He’s asking his disciples why they are following him.  He’s asking what kind of power they think he has. 

Peter says that he has the power of God, which is greater than any earthly power, and Jesus says that he is right. But before anyone can start feeling smug or triumphant,  Jesus says “if you want to follow me, you have to carry a cross.”

At that time, there was absolutely nothing religious about a cross.  It had no connection with God.  In Jesus’ day, the cross was an instrument of torture and pain and death.  It was Rome’s version of the electric chair of the strap-covered gurney sitting by the lethal injection machine.  It was a means of execution and a device intended to bring fear and intimidation.

That is certainly not what we want to talk about today. Not on this day of celebration.  Not in front of a 10-year-old boy and other young people whom we have promised to nurture and protect. It wasn’t what Peter and the other grown-ups around Jesus wanted to talk about either.  “God forbid,” Peter said.  “That should never happen to you.”

But Jesus sternly told Peter to be quiet.  He said that to follow him was to “believe more deeply in the life-giving power of God than in the death-dealing power of fear.”[2]   To carry the cross is to follow a way which stands against the power of empire, against all the isms.  It is to challenge the ways that society structures power. It means washing feet, giving your stuff away, praying for your enemies, being the first to say I’m sorry.  It often means stepping out of safety in the shadows to stand in a long line of God’s faithful servants who were willing to stake their lives for the sake of God’s mission in the world.

I was nine years old when I first said I wanted to follow Jesus.  I didn’t know what bearing my cross meant then, and I still really don’t, because I have been spared much.  But I heard God’s call on my life and I understood enough to take that first step.  Just as many of you have done.  Just as Judah has done. 

I keep remembering the conversation that Judah and I had about this passage.  It was back in March.  We talked about John the Baptist who was executed by Herod Antipas. Side note – Herod Antipas is the half-brother of Philip for whom Caesarea Phillipi is named.  So the power of death and fear raises its head again.

Anyway, it was when Judah and I were talking about the death of John the Baptist that Judah said, “how come when you follow Jesus, it leads you to the path of execution?” 

Good question.  Young people understand so much more than we give them credit for.

And then I asked Judah one.  I asked “If Jesus were standing right in front of you and he said ‘Judah, who do you say that I am?’ What would your answer be?’

Judah said, “You are the Holy One, the Human One, the Living God, the True One.”

That’s a strong answer, but Judah wasn’t done.  He went on “You’re the one we know we’re safe with, the one we trust.”

Most sophisticated theologians can’t be that succinct.  If you follow Jesus, it can lead you to the path of execution, but somehow, at the exact same time,  Jesus is also the one we know we’re safe with, the one we trust.

Jesus said if you want to live a life that means something, let me show you the way.  Take up something great.  Yes, it might be heavy, but with my strength you can carry it.  Follow me, and I will lead you into something real and rich and demanding and beautiful.  It’s the choice of a lifetime. 

Thanks be to God.

[1] Eric Barreto, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-21/commentary-on-matthew-1613-20-5

[2] Rev. Shannon Kershner, The Cross and the Way https://www.fourthchurch.org/sermons/2018/091618.html

9/18/22 - The Lost and Found Department - Luke 15:1-10

The Lost and Found Department

Luke 15:1-10

September 18, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/XwZxJoi50s4

Jean and I spent time this week with some good folks at a Presbyterian seminary near Atlanta.  We were with representatives of the other nine churches that received ReKindle grants.  Our first two hours together were spent simply sharing why we applied for a grant and what we hope to do with it. We heard a lot of common themes, about fewer members attending worship these days and congregations that didn’t represent the neighborhood around the church building, about churches that are smaller than they used to be but still trying to do all the good ministry they used to, about leaky roofs and organs in need of repair, about feelings of burn-out and inadequacy and fears that the church might not recover from the pandemic. 

We heard about a church in New Jersey, a congregation of 160 people where 28 people died between March 2020 and April 2021.  Twenty-eight individuals gone from one church. What a loss.  We heard about the Synod of the Northeast.  That’s a region of Presbyterian churches in New England and New York which includes the Albany Presbytery.   In the last year, 72 ministers in the Synod of the Northeast renounced their ordinations.   For a variety of reasons, in the space of twelve months, 72 Presbyterian ministers in this area permanently left their vocations. That’s quite a loss. 

Some lost things are found, but others are lost and never recovered. That’s a fact of life which underlies these parables. Sometimes we experience loss which means that we grieve, we are sad, and feel less engaged with the purpose and meaning of life.  Sometimes we feel as though we are the ones who are lost and that makes us lonely or anxious or uncertain. We have come through a season of many kinds of losses and if we are still grieving or still feeling lost ourselves, then let us remember that God is the diligent shepherd, God is the careful woman who keeps on seeking us.

* * *

Many years ago, Tony Campolo was in Britain to attend Greenbelt, which is an outdoor Christian event like the Wild Goose Festival.  Traveling on the train, he noticed a guy who seemed kind of out of it.  Tony guessed that maybe he was returning from nearby raucous concert festival.  Tony said he looked down and noticed that the guy wasn’t wearing a shoe on his left foot.  He said to the man, “Excuse me, sir, but you’ve lost your shoe.” 

The guy replied, in a kind of stoner haze, “No, man, I found one.”

I guess it’s all a matter of perspective.

Have we lost a shoe or found one?  Do we see ourselves as the lost sheep and the lost coin or the found ones?  Each of us might answer that as individuals. But as I thought about it for us as a church, I realized that that much has been found here.

We have found money. I mentioned the ReKindle grant. We are one of only 10 congregations in the country to receive this grant in 2022. It is a grant of $10,000.  One of the grant’s administrators said that there are large churches for whom $10,000 represents a rounding error in their budget.  They know we are not one of those churches.  The fact that we received a grant is evidence that outside professionals believe that we at Emmanuel will make a difference with that money. They have hope for and faith in us.

We also have found opportunities.  One of them is the Thriving for Racial Justice program which includes just 26 other congregations across the US and Canada.  It is an opportunity which is focusing some of our energy and care on the sin of racism that is endemic to our culture. It is an opportunity which offers resources and encouragement for that hard work. 

We are one of the decreasing number of churches that have a full-time pastor.  In our American Baptist region there are 273 churches. This week I asked Jerrod how many of those have a full-time pastor.  His estimate is that 70-75 percent are part-time.  That means that Emmanuel is one of perhaps 70 Baptist churches with full-time pastors across the state. I say that not to toot my own horn, but yours.  It is your commitment which makes that a reality. 

If some of us are feeling the grief of loss, if some Emmanuel are still trying to find our way to a new rhythm, it is right and good to acknowledge that. At that same time, I want to recognize how much is not lost, to be aware of our “foundness” here.

On this occasion, Jesus was primarily speaking to those who were found.  He told these stories to the religious leaders, the ones who already had a place to belong and a role to play.  On this occasion, Luke says, the church leaders were grumbling about the company that Jesus was keeping. He was hanging out with tax collectors and sinners, those who might be seen as lost from a social and religious point of view. And the found ones, the religious leaders, strongly disapproved of Jesus’ welcome and hospitality. 

* * *

This lamb was found hiding under a creek bank. She was not making a sound and it took some careful searching to find her, according to Carl Glen Hinshaw, her shepherd.

He found this lamb with another one not visible in this picture. On the way to finding these two sheep, they had found evidence of mischief—the electric fence was lying on the ground with wool all over it. The hay feeder was flipped upside down.  The water in the waterer was all muddy. It looked like the sheep had been up to no good and after a series of bad decisions they had ended up in the creek in the rain. 

We might deduce these sheep are to blame for their predicament, but that’s because we don’t know what really happened. What really happened, Hinshaw says, was that a young sheep dog, was left unsupervised and got through a hole in the fence.  He got two other dogs to go with him and they entertained themselves by running the sheep.  They terrorized four of the sheep, running them to death.  This one and her companion escaped and hid. 

Reflecting on Jesus’ parable and his own experience,  Hinshaw says that sheep aren’t simply misplaced; they end up where they are by walking.

“Sheep don’t wander away from the flock. It isn’t in their nature. A sheep who has left the flock left because it was driven away. It was terrified and did not know where to look for safety, so it ran. And the reason it was terrified is usually due to poor shepherding — the shepherd has led the flock to a pasture where there are predators, or has left it out in a storm. Or the shepherd has neglected that hole in the fence and left unsupervised a young, inexperienced sheepdog, who is supposed to be a helper but has discovered that terrorizing sheep is darned fun. And then that shepherd went back to bed.”

“In other words,” Hinshaw says, “ very often the person we are to seek out is not ‘lost’ and is not missing because he or she made poor decisions. They left because we drove them away. They did not look or talk or think or love like we do, and we did not create spaces they felt safe in. We looked the other way when they weren’t admitted to school because they weren’t a “good fit”, or they were given a hard time because they were a woman in a man’s job or a man in a woman’s job. We did not invite them into our neighborhoods, or our clubs, or our churches. They were being abused by other members of the flock, wolves in sheep's clothing, and we did not protect them. They were being harassed by police and we told ourselves that it was their fault for being where they were, behaving how they behaved. If they would just make different choices, they could help themselves.”

“This lamb was hiding from a predator who terrified her and had killed one of her sisters, and that was not her fault. It was ours.”[1]

This story resonates with me.  I expect it resonates with you too.  You and I know people who have been driven away from safety by other Christians.  You and I know churches that have failed to protect, who have actively harmed the lambs in their care.  And so we receive Jesus’ parables and this modern story as important messages about welcome and care and inclusion and fierce protection.

But there’s more here. The accent in these stories is not being lost.  The accent is not on being found. The accent, I believe, is on joy.

The joy of finding what might have been lost forever. 

The joy of knowing that what we have, what we are is cherished and valued. 

The inherent celebration that should come in the presence of “foundness.”

It doesn’t always happen, does it?  Having found money and found opportunities, knowing about the harm that some have experienced, we take seriously Jesus’ call to rounding up God’s herd and recovering God’s treasure. We remind ourselves that to whom much is given much shall be required.  We try to be very good shepherds—hiking over hills, scrambling down creek bands, climbing through brambles because the lost sheep could be anywhere.  Or we seek that pesky coin – sweeping, moving furniture, rearranging clutter.  We are diligent, because we care. And then, maybe it happens. We grumble because we’re overworked. We complain because no one else seems to be responsible.  We convince ourselves that we may actually be the only ones who care, so we work harder and grumble more. . . .And we miss the intent of Jesus’ story.  The accent is on joy, Jesus is calling for everyone to join in the celebration.

Rev. Will Willimon was a Methodist minister and bishop, now retired.  For many years, he was a campus pastor.  One spring break, he took students on a retreat.  It was for those who were intrigued by Jesus and wanted to explore Christian faith. 

On the first night, he showed the students a video of an actor reciting the Gospel of Luke, the same Gospel from which we read today.  When the video ended, the group of a dozen students sat there in stunned silence.

Then one said, “It is a great story, a really great story. Jesus is cool. But there’s one thing I can’t figure out.” 
“Well, what is that?” Willimon asked. “Perhaps I can help you.” 

“Jesus is great, I just can’t figure out why all the Christians I know are so darn boring.” 
“Now I am remembering,” Willimon said, “why it was not a good idea to bring people like you on a retreat.” 
But at the end of the retreat, it was that young man who wanted to be baptized. After another month of conversations, on the weekend of graduation, Willimon baptized him. The rest of the group gathered to witness his baptism.

The day of the baptism, one of the members of the group telephoned and said, “Dr. Willimon, just to put your mind at ease, I want you to know that I have made the arrangement for the post-baptismal party.” 
“Party?” Willimon asked. 
“Sure. I’ve got the keg and everything.” 
“A keg of beer?” Willimon said.  “It never occurred to me to get beer for a baptism.”

“Why are you always calling us irresponsible?” asked the student. “See? We have to think of everything.”[2] 

Jesus’ stories end with an open question, an invitation to celebration. The shepherd calls his friends and neighbors to rejoice with him.  The woman calls her friends and neighbors to celebrate with her, but we don’t know if they do. 

Friends, we may be the lost ones. We may be the found ones.  Like the guy with one shoe, we may be half-lost and  half-found.  Nevertheless, we are the ones invited to celebrate.  God calls everyone to the party.  Because the lost ones matter and the found ones matter and joy must,  must be celebrated.  Thanks be to God.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/carl.g.henshaw

[2] Rev. William Willimon, in his sermon “Outrageous Parties” delivered at Duke University Chapel, September 13, 1998 https://repository.duke.edu/dc/dukechapel/dcrst003549

9/11/22 - Peace Be Upon You - Micah 4:1-5; Luke 10:1-9

Peace Be Upon You

Micah 4:1-5, Luke 10:1-9

September 11, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/1c2zWMxyquo

“They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more;”

Imagine a time when these words are true. Imagine a place where there are no standing armies, no stockpiles of weapons. Imagine a world when no one even knows how to wage war. 

On this twenty-first anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, on this 199th day of war between Russia and Ukraine, on this day when an average of 316 people are likely to be shot in our country, we yearn for Micah’s vision of peace to be realized. 

On the screen is a painting by the American artist Winslow Homer.  He was in his twenties when the Civil War broke out.  He worked on this painting for several months after the war was over.   In it he placed a veteran in a wheat field.  A Union Army jacket is discarded in the lower right corner along with a canteen.  The jacket has been abandoned presumably because the heat of the day makes it unnecessary.  But it is also a reminder that this man has quit soldiering and returned to his farm.  He has traded the battlefield for the wheatfield. 

The 1865 wheat crop is documented to have been a bumper crop.  Homer shows grain heads almost at the height of the farmer’s head.  It might seem that the artist is painting a positive outlook for the farmer and the nation. 

But there is more to see.  The farmer is harvesting wheat with a single-bladed scythe, a tool that was already out of date in 1865.  Homer chose the older tool because of its association with the Grim Reaper.  While this veteran has moved on, both he and the viewers would have been reminded of the cost of war.  Many of the bloodiest battles of the war were fought in fields, so fields had become associated with soldiers who were cut down in the same way that this farmer now cuts the wheat.[1]

I cannot help but think of the reports a few months ago of wheat fields on fire in Ukraine, reportedly set ablaze intentionally by Russian missiles. I think of those who were killed on September 11, 2001 and those who still mourn them. I think of the actions taken in retaliation – leading to some hundreds of thousands of casualties and some 38 million people who were displaced from their homes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and other countries. I think of the evacuees from Afghanistan who have only recently found a sort of uneasy sanctuary here because they provided help to the U.S. military. And I think of those who were not able to escape. If we feel sad today, if we lament, if we remember with pain, that is an appropriate and holy response.  War exacts a terrible cost and the trauma continues for generations.    

Micah speaks of days to come, days of peace and safety. Scholar Walter Brueggemann points to two conditions that are necessary for the transformation of weapons to tools for peace.

The first one is of reasonable expectations. “They shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees and no one shall make them afraid”  Micah says.  In the days to come, people will have one vine, one fig tree, not acres of orchards and vineyards, but what each needs. Agreeing to live within modest means and not seeking to accumulate more and more is a step towards bringing peace to the planet.

The second condition in verse 5 where it says “all the peoples walk each in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God forever and ever.”   While Yahweh’s people are to be clear in their devotion to Yahweh, they are also to give others the freedom to walk in the name of other gods.  “War comes among nations, in church, and in families,” Brueggemann writes, “when we think there is only one way and all must conform or be coerced to conform.”[2] Peace means making room for differences.  Two keys to serious disarmament, then, are 1) modest expectations where all have enough but none have too much, and 2) an acceptance of each other with all of our differences.

In days to come, Micah says, people will stream to Jerusalem to learn the ways of peace. Jerusalem, the city that stones the prophets and kills God’s messengers, even today. Jerusalem will be the place of profound peace.  It takes a strong imagination to envision that, a persistent hope. 

Not that our nation is any better. What if the prophet described  nations streaming to the United States to disarm instead of seeking to obtain better, faster, more destructive weapons?  They come for courses offered at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in Ft. Benning, Georgia.  Formerly called the School of the Americas, it is known for training dictators, death squad operatives and assassins.[3]  What if they came in the same kind of numbers with the same kind of enthusiasm to learn peace-making.  Could we begin to imagine that?

On our trip last month, we had the privilege of visiting the Cathedral in Cologne Germany.  This incredible structure survived the bombings of World War II while 90 % of the city of Cologne was destroyed, reduced to rubble. Our guide explained that it happened because the cathedral was a landmark that the pilots could identify from the air.  The church was spared, not because of its peacefulness or its holiness, but because it could facilitate future bombings. The cathedral is not to blame for that, but it is a troubling thought.

What if, in days to come, people could turn to churches to learn the ways of peace.  Not to determine who is in or out, right or wrong,  not to learn how to win control of your denomination, not to stoke fear and gain political power, but to learn how to turn swords into plow-shares and study war no more, how to sit under your own fig tree and not be afraid.  What if churches were the teachers and practicers of peace?  

That seems to be something that Jesus might have had in mind.  On his way to Jerusalem where he will be executed, Jesus sends out 70 disciples on a peacemaking mission.  He gives them very specific instructions.  They might be counter-intuitive.  He says to travel light.  No purse, no bag, no sandals. No snacks, no smartphone, no supplies. Do you know how hard this is?  You should have seen the unnecessary stuff that was in my backpack on my last trip. And I’m actually getting better at it.

Jesus tells them not to make reservations, but just to show up and offer peace. If things go well, someone in that house will respond in kind.  If things go well, then Jesus says to accept the hospitality that is offered. Sleep on the sofa bed or the floor.  Eat what is put before you. In Jesus’ day, it might have been Jewish food, it might have been Gentile food. Today your host might be vegetarian or really into smoothies.  Whatever it is, eat it without complaint.  And don’t shop around for better accommodations. Stay in the first place that receives you.  Imitate Jesus who was content to be born into a peasant family and who, as an adult, was dependent on the gifts of others.

This is counter-intuitive. If we are the ones taking the good news out into the world, we often think we need to arrive with all the things. We need to come with the food to feed the hungry and the medicine to heal the sick and the therapeutic tools for the traumatized.  But Jesus says “Go. Show up and be vulnerable.”

Presbyterian pastor Carol Howard Merritt describes peace as “a community-creating gift of God that requires a reciprocal response.” [4]

Peace creates community. Like the living sculpture demonstrated by our children, it involves an openness to giving and receiving.   It is “a community-creating gift of God that requires a reciprocal response.”

But we aren’t always open to what others offer and others don’t always accept what we want to give.  Jesus knew that when the disciples announced the reign of God, they would encounter rejection.  Baptist pastor Laura Mayo claims that “Jesus didn’t risk it all to keep the status quo. When he spoke against the religious authorities so entangled with the Empire that they forgot about the poor and the widows it was not to preserve the peace. Jesus was a peacemaker, not a peacekeeper and he clearly expects the same from us. Peacemaking, with its demands for change, can lead to disconnection, to rejection.”[5]

“When the peace you offer is refused, and it will be,”  Jesus says, “just shake off the dust and move on.”  It’s a ritual way of saying “I did my best.  What happens now is between you and God.”

Jesus expects his disciples to face hostility and rejection. When that happens, our job is not to change the message, not to water down the demands the gospel’s demands for change.  The message is the same to those who accept or reject it – “the reign of God is here.”

Sometimes we idealize peace-making.  Some of us are old enough to remember that old Coca-Cola commercial where everyone ends up singing together in perfect harmony.  We sometimes delude ourselves into thinking peace-making will be like that.  But this living into the reign of God is hard work, like beating weapons of war into agricultural tools.

We may feel overwhelmed by the depth of the divisions in our country, by the hostility we find among our neighbors and even members of our own families.  We may be distressed by the lack of unity on the major problems faced by the global community.  It may seem like Micah’s vision is further away than ever. 

What can we do to make peace in the face of all that?  I mean really.

We are a small congregation.  The typical church in America averages about 65 worshippers on a Sunday. That’s about where we are.  I notice that is close to the number of 70 disciples which Jesus sent out. Look what they accomplished. With faith and courage, they changed their world.  God has this habit of doing things with the most unlikely folks, even us. 

I also notice that Jesus didn’t send them out alone, but in pairs.  The peace of Christ is something we share, something we lean into with each other.  We are not called to go it alone. 

So I wonder, instead of accenting the message that the church is in decline,  instead of dwelling on what we think we have lost during the pandemic, what if we embraced the size we are and our sense of not having enough as evidence of the power of God.  What if we recognized our real reliance  on God, our genuine need for each other, and our dependence on strangers with whom we might share the good news?    

What if . . .

. . . In days to come and even now, people will be so hungry for the ways of peace that change will be possible.

. . . In days to come and even now, we will take on the responsibility and the vulnerability to be agents of Christ’s peace.

. . . In days to come and even now, we will risk rejection, but also welcome as we share the uncompromising love of God. 

In days to come, the prophet says,

they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
and their spears into pruning-hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more;
but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,
and no one shall make them afraid;
for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.

May it be so for you and for me and for the world.

[1] Lynn Miller at Art and Faith Matters http://artandfaithmatters.blogspot.com/2016/11/art-lectionary-swords-plowshares.html

[2] Walter Brueggemann, “A Resurrection Option” in The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann, Vol 1 (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox, 2011), p. 262.

[3]  Gill, Lesley. The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas. Duke University Press, 2004, pp. 137–138.

[4] Carol Howard Merritt  in Feasting on the Gospels, Luke, Volume 1, Cynthia Jarvis and E. Elizabeth Johnson, editors, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2014),   p. 286.

[5] Laura Mayo https://allianceofbaptists.org/peace-be-with-you/

8/21/22 - Bent - Luke 13:10-17

Bent

Luke 13:10-17

August 21, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Note:  Image is Jesus and the Bent Over Woman by Barbara Schwarz OP.  Used with her kind permission

Artafiregallery.homestead.com.

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/VOHWq0czGLM

If this were a group Bible study, I would ask us to divide into two groups – Group A and Group B.  For the next fifteen minutes, Group A would walk around the room as if they are the bent-over woman.  Group B would walk around as themselves.  The two groups would be free to meet and talk with each other, but Group A would have to stay in character. After fifteen minutes, we would sit down and talk about the experience. 

We’re not going to take the time to do that, but I’ll tell you how it usually turns out.  What often happens is that members of Group A, the ones who were bent over, complain that they couldn’t see very much of what was happening in the room; that they couldn’t make eye contact with anyone; and that they weren’t always sure whether someone was talking to them or to someone else.  And they say that their back hurts. Group B folks usually say that it was hard to have a conversation with Group A members because it was hard to make eye contact.  Every once in a while, someone will have tried to make eye contact, by sitting on the floor or bending alongside the person. That doesn’t occur to everyone, and even when it does, it feels awkward, so some people don’t even try it.

The woman in Luke’s story has been bent over for a lot longer than 15 minutes.  For at least 18 years, she has lived like this.   Is she bent over from a back injury or from a chronic disease?  Did it happen all at once, or by degrees?  Is it something with a physical cause?  Maybe it is a psychological burden – she’s carrying the weight of the world.  Or maybe she is bowed down by something real but invisible, like poverty or depression or misogyny.    Whatever the answers to those questions might be, we should notice that she is not the only one who is bent in this story. 

When the leader of the synagogue realizes what is going on, he becomes indignant – we might say that he is bent out of shape.  In the gospel stories, it is always tempting to make fun of Jesus’ opponents, his detractors.  But when we do that,  it becomes much easier to miss the part of the story that might hit closest to home.  So, for the moment, let’s give the synagogue leader the benefit of the doubt. Let’s treat him with the respect that we would give to a longtime Emmanuel member, maybe a trustee or moderator or a pastor.  He’s not a bad guy.  He’s trying to do the right thing, to maintain order in a worship service, and to keep his church together.

Do you remember the book Gulliver’s Travels?  In one chapter, there was a shipwreck and  Gulliver washed ashore on an island inhabited by the Lilliputians –They’re people about 6 inches tall. I think they’re related to Little Man.    They thought Gulliver was a cruel and mean giant.  So one moonlit night when Gulliver was asleep on a hill, legions of Lilliputians crept up and very quietly tied strings around each of his fingers. Hundreds of strings to each of his fingers and also to his wrists, elbows and arms. They put strings and threads around his chest, around his knees, and around his toes. Every hair on his head had a string. The Lilliputians tied Gulliver firmly down, and when Gulliver awoke the next morning, he couldn’t move.

I think that the synagogue leader has been immobilized by the strings of  thousands of rules and responsibilities.  He is trying so hard to get it right, to be pleasing to God, and yet, on this occasion, he misses it.  He’s so focused on his Sunday morning to-do list that he became oblivious to the needs of a person standing right in front of me. I’ve been there; maybe you have too – with my head in the bulletin, bent 180 degrees from the meaningful worship of a God whose love is always healing, redeeming, and liberating.

This woman and this man lived in a world that bent them.  It’s the same world we live in.  It’s a world where the demonic still has power, the same power that the demonic has always had, the power to corrupt and pervert, to twist that which is good.  And so, many of us may feel bound, bent over by strain and worry, by the pain of recent losses,  by the accumulated weight of life’s hurt and sorrow.

Remember that Bible study exercise I mentioned?  Remember how the bent-over folks complained that they could only see the floor and not much else of the room?  That’s what happens when we are bent over emotionally and spiritually.  Our view becomes very limited.  We start to focus on ourselves, on our narrow view. We find it hard to make eye contact, to reach out to others, to give or to receive help.  As this pattern goes on, we get more and more stuck.   We live only in the now. We cannot imagine a future that is different, a future in which we can stand straight and tall.

I’ve had conversations recently with a number of people who seem stuck. Some were folks I encountered on my various trips and some are here in our community.

Some are bent over from the pandemic.  The pattern of daily life has become so limited. There is a longing for fullness and meaning and connection, but no one seems to know what normal or how to find it again.  Some are bent by fear – fear for our way of life, for the possible end of our democracy, for the continued well-being and existence of the planet.  Others are bent with responsibility – trying to maintain jobs, relationships, and faith in a time that requires us to keep track of an ever-changing rule book and to adapt faster than we know how. 

At another time, in a different sermon, I might have asked us to consider what bends this woman over.  I might have asked us to put ourselves into the story as people in that worshipping community and wondered what we could have done to be part of her healing. 

But today, I invite us to consider ourselves as the bent over woman or the synagogue leader.  What is weighing us down?  It might be something physical, a pain or illness, that saps our energy.  Maybe it is anxiety or depression.  Maybe it is guilt or anger or grief.   Or profound disappointment.  Or on-going weariness. What is weighing you down, bending you over?

This is a place where we seek to be honest about our lives, about what bends us over and what helps us stand straight, a place where we seek to share each other’s burdens and offer encouragement.

Courage is the thing that strikes me most about this story. First, the woman’s courage.  As diminished in body and spirit as she is, she has not curled up to die.  She is still engaged with life enough to show up week after week in church.  When Jesus calls her, she goes to him. And when liberation finally comes, she grabs it with gusto. She stands up straight and loudly praises God.   She has the courage to believe that her future can be different from her present.

Then there’s the courage of Jesus, the human being. At this point in his life, he’s just the leader of a rag-tag group of followers, a person often on the wrong side of the law, the church and the status quo.  He was challenging, reinterpreting, reforming the rules of a culture that was at least 3000 years old.  That’s the weight of a lot of tradition.  The kind of weight that has inertia. The kind of weight that can cripple and bend you over and put you on the cross.  Jesus has already begun his final journey to Jerusalem, but all along the way, he continues to live courageously and compassionately.

You and I are heirs to a Christian tradition that is 2000 years old.  It’s a rich tradition with truth and power and love, but it also carries the kind of weight that can bring us down and bend us over.  When that happens, sometimes all we can think to do is to repeat what we know, what we’ve always done.

As we hear the story of this woman’s liberation, we might consider the rules that we’ve always played by: church rules, social rules, family rules, the obligations, the responsibilities, the things we think we have to keep doing. But what if Jesus is here in our midst?  What if we imagine Jesus calling each of us to him.  How would he encourage you or me?  He released the woman.  He liberated her from what bound her.  If you stood in front of Jesus today, from what burden would you seek release? Can you name that to yourself and to God?

The woman had been bent for 18 years.  She had probably been praying for release all that time.  I wouldn’t blame her if she had given up.  But she didn’t. She kept showing up and she was there when her liberation came.  May it be so for you and for me.

The story ends with this sentence: “The entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things he was doing.” The crowd got it. They understood what was going on. They knew exactly. Ordinary people, living their lives, doing the best they could, like you and me, taking care of business, working hard, caring for their families, trying to make the best of every day, and once a week gathering to be reminded of what it’s all about, that there is a purpose to all of this, that each small life matters, that human life all of it matters, all of it is precious to a God who loves passionately and whose love simply will not be confined, restricted, but will finally find and embrace each one of us.

Thanks be to God.

7/31/22 - The King's Sanctuary - Amos 7:7-15, 8:1-12

The King’s Sanctuary

Amos 7:7-15, 8:1-12

July 31, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/W6KtH9LzPKk

There was a sacred place in Israel.  It was called Bethel which means “House of God”.  It was the place where long ago, Abram built an altar and talked with God about the future.  Bethel was the place where Jacob slept, exhausted, on his journey to his uncle’s home.  It was the place where he dreamed about a ladder to heaven.    For some period of time, the Ark of the Covenant was kept there.  By the time of Amos, it was one of two primary places of worship for Israel. It was even more like a national cathedral because, of course, ancient Israel was not a democracy, but a theocracy. 

In most theocracies, the king or queen is in charge of the nation’s religion.  There is no separation of church and state. And so it was in ancient Israel – every time a king was crowned, it was claimed that he was chosen by God to rule.  However, unlike the nations that surrounded Israel at the time, the prophets felt free to call the kings to account, to publicly question whether they were really acting as God’s representative or merely a person in power doing what they wanted.[1]  Perhaps the best known example of that is when the prophet Nathan rebuked King David for sexually assaulting Bathsheba and for setting up her husband Uriah to be killed in battle.  When Nathan spoke to him, David could have continued to misuse his power. He could have had Nathan executed, but he did not. Instead, he acknowledged that Nathan was speaking for God and he sought forgiveness for his sin.  So, even though kings were believed to be chosen by God, they were not God and they could still be subject to the word brought by the prophets.

Amos stands in a long line of prophets who speak truth to power.  He prophesies to the northern kingdom of Israel during the reign of King Jeroboam. His reign of 41 years was marked by territorial expansion, aggressive militarism and unprecedented national prosperity.   Amos is concerned about the concentration of wealth among urban elites, because the prosperity being enjoyed by those at the top seems to have come at the expense of the poor. 

Worship has become a sham, a pretext.  Amos says that they can’t wait for church to be over, so that they can get back to gouging the poor.  He wants them to see that they have systematically crushed the poor and ignored the needy.  They take pride in their religiosity and their history as God’s favored people, but Amos says they are deluding themselves. In reality, they have completely abandoned God’s ways.  They are out of alignment with the covenant, untrue to God and to whom they believe themselves to be. 

Now some of the Biblical prophets offer words of comfort along with judgment.  In places, Isaiah and Jeremiah look forward to a time when God’s mercy and forgiveness will prevail.  Yeah, Amos doesn’t really do that.  Amos is uncompromising.  God is angry at the treatment of the most vulnerable, at the victimization of the powerless, and the collusion between religious and political authorities. God’s patience has come to an end.    There is no forgiveness, only judgment.

This is a hard word. It makes me uncomfortable.  But wiser theologians than I have taught that God’s love demands righteousness, and that violations of God’s repeated calls to justice cause God grief.  God is not indifferent to human suffering and oppression.  “God’s judgment, for Amos, is a manifestation of relationship with a living God, a God of passion who cares deeply.”[2]

This is a hard word. Amaziah doesn’t want to hear it.  Amaziah is the priest at Bethel, that ancient sacred space. He doesn’t want to listen to the truth that Amos is proclaiming so he tries to silence him. His strategies might come straight from a contemporary political playbook.  He tells Amos to go back to Judah where he’s from, implying that he is an outside agitator, come to make money by stirring up trouble. He has a specific name for Amos’ words – he calls them a conspiracy. Where have we heard that before?  And he claims to have the authority of Bethel, which he considers not God’s sanctuary, but the King’s sanctuary.  That’s where he gives himself away. His primary allegiance is not to God, but to the king.  His place of service is not the holy place where God and humans connect, but the halls of political power.  He occupies a cozy place in the structure of religious nationalism. 

The two prophets, Amos and Amaziah each claim to speak for God.  With the benefit of history, we know that Amos was the real deal.  We know that because his words are consistent with who God is as described elsewhere in scripture.  We also know it because his words came true – Israel was captured and taken in exile.

People who haven’t read the Bible may think that it is an old book with outdated, irrelevant ideas. But if you read it carefully, you know how contemporary it is, how much human nature hasn’t changed over thousands of years.

There are multiple prophets in our time.  Some speak the truth as best as they can discern it, as clearly as they know how.  Others twist scripture and use their religious credentials to gain political power.   And so, if we would be faithful, we have two tasks.  First, we must listen carefully to any who invoke God’s name in order to discern who is accurately representing God and who is a person with power doing what they want.  And second, in this age of deliberate misinformation and attempts to suppress inconvenient truths,  we must speak the truth more clearly than ever before.

I watched this play out not long ago on social media.  A member of a church had been the victim of gun violence.  In sharing their concern for that member, the church said “God forgive us for allowing our idolatrous support of violence and its weapons to continue.”

That is a theological statement.  It is a confession of sin. It speaks of idolatry.  The church is speaking its truth in its own wheelhouse.

But some people were offended by it.  They claimed that the church was trying to turn a tragedy into a political event.  They spoke of a “God-given right” to bear arms.  One person quoted Jesus saying “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” And then they interpreted that to mean that self-defense is biblically required. As if shooting someone and laying down your life for someone are the same thing. 

One person’s comments grabbed my attention.  Speaking to the church, he said, “your nonviolent messages are a breath of fresh air to me. It’s amazing to me how many are bothered by such messages because of their love of weapons of war.  I’m not a Christian any more for many reasons, but one of the most mortifying things for me to watch was the penchant “followers of Christ” have for violence, fascism, and weaponry.  I have yet to find in the Bible where Jesus encouraged violence against other people, even in the case of self-defense, so it’s pretty bewildering to see how so many “followers of Christ” live lives glorifying violence, lives that are completely antithetical to the teachings attributed to Christ.”

Amos was a truth-teller. Truth-telling is still an urgent task.  The things which provoked God’s anger then – the mistreatment of the vulnerable, neglecting the needy, and the collusion between religious and political authorities -- those things still provoke God’s anger now.

Christian nationalism is a blatant form of religious power at work right now. It is a fusion of Christian faith and American civic life. This particular form of Christianity carries with it assumptions about white supremacy, authoritarianism, patriarchy and militarism that are emphatically rejected by other Christians.  It carries fear and distrust of religious minorities and condones police violence towards Black Americans.[3]  Many scholars are saying that Christian nationalism is the greatest current threat to our democracy.  I think that’s probably true.

But even more troubling to me is the effect that Christian Nationalism is having on authentic faith.  Some otherwise faithful Christians are being led astray by these false prophets because the message is cloaked in God talk. And many others are abandoning faith altogether because they see prominent Christians endorsing positions completely antithetical to the teachings of Jesus.   

Those of us who have wanted to emphasize God’s mercy and forgiveness over God’s judgment, those of us who want to extend soul liberty to those disagree with us, we may have been slow to recognize this danger.  But it is just as destructive now as it was in Amos’ time.  Christian Nationalism is one of the forces that drives policy decisions and legislation by which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.  These are policies which quite literally lead to death.  Christian Nationalism is one of the forces that inspires acts of violence and intimidation, like the mass shooting in a Buffalo supermarket in May and countless others.

I have been slow to understand and slow to speak against this ideology. One of you asked me to talk about power and violence this summer.  I think what you had in mind was the war in Ukraine and whether violence is ever justified as a Christian response. That is an extremely important question which I didn’t attempt to answer. I am sorry to disappoint, but I am grateful for the question, because it led me to think about the corruption of religious power and helped me understand the violence of this ideology.  If you want to see an example of Christian nationalism beyond the USA, you might consider the Russian Orthodox Church’s endorsement of the invasion of Ukraine. 

Chris Kratzer is an author and pastor of 25 years.  He writes from his own experience within churches that embraced a nationalistic worldview.  He suggests that we might discern the truth by examining the methods as well as the message.  He says, “If [they] wanted to change the world towards the way of Jesus, they would be using the way of Jesus to change the world.  Instead, they are using the way of Empire . . . because they want the world to change to the way of Empire, not Jesus.” [4]

As we seek the truth, we can look at the methods of the message-bearers.  Are they speaking from the king’s sanctuary, employing the tactics of deception, intimidation and violence? What are the fruits of their words and actions?  Or do they follow Jesus who modelled compassion and service and self-giving love?  

Friends, we are called to speak the truth in love and to participate in the repentance that leads to renewal. The task is urgent.  The time is now. May we do so more clearly and consistently than ever before.  Amen.  

[1] John C Holbert, “This is the King’s Sanctuary” https://www.patheos.com/blogs/theperipateticpreacher/2019/06/proper-10-july-14-2019-amos-77-17-this-is-the-kings-sanctuary/

[2] Elaine T James https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-15-2/commentary-on-amos-77-15-4

[3] Information from Taking America Back for God:  Christian Nationalism in the United States by Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry (Oxford University Press, 2020) found at https://www.christiansagainstchristiannationalism.org/

[4] https://www.facebook.com/chris.kratzer/posts/pfbid0VsqQ4PrqmvNHGsRY6KBWdRdvPngouhfTi71LCmPShf4k381cGC3sTNEv4WBbC7yml

7/24/22 - Summer Hymn Sing

Our summer hymn sing was a joyful event. Michael Clement provided an extended improvisation on "How Can I Keep From Singing", to accompany the slide show of Judy Henningson's "joyful things".

A link to a recording of the service may be found here: https://youtu.be/GFhNq3MKkbI

7/17/22 - Woman on Fire - Judges 4:1-10

Woman on Fire

Judges 4:1-10

July 17, 2022

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/a-F8eRbhhio

If you only know one story from the book of Judges, it might be the story of Samson who was the strongest man on earth, until his girlfriend Delilah stole his super-power by cutting his hair and turning him over to his enemies.  Or you might know about Gideon.  He’s the guy who wanted proof that God was really calling him to lead.  So, he put a blanket out on the ground one night and asked God to make the blanket wet with dew, but the ground around it dry.  God did that.  But Gideon still wasn’t convinced, so the next night he put the blanket out and asked God to send dew on the ground all around, but leave the blanket dry.  And God did that too. 

The book of Judges is full of obscure stories like that.  It also contains stories full of violence and trauma which is one reason there isn’t a lot of preaching from this book.   Because we aren’t as familiar with this book, I’m going to remind us of the context. 

This is the time after the people have left Egypt, after they have moved into the Canaan.  This is a generation that didn’t know Moses or Joshua.  The pattern of Judges is this:

The people do something evil,  God abandons them into the hands of their enemies, they cry out for help, and God raises up a deliverer.[1]  This cycle repeats several times throughout the book with things getting progressively worse, until, at the end there is complete moral chaos and civil war.  

The Bible is in conversation with itself.  What I mean is that some stories seem to contradict other stories, and to get a complete picture, we have to recognize that more than one point of view is represented.   We often have the impression that the Israelites came into Canaan and annihilated everyone who was living there.  It was a total conquest.  They wiped out the original inhabitants and took over the Promised Land.  We get that impression from the book of Joshua, which contains the story of the battle of Jericho.  That’s the one where they marched around the city for seven days until the city walls collapsed and they took the city.  If we only had the book of Joshua, we might think that every battle was like that. But Judges tells another story.  Judges reports that many of the cities and territories supposedly captured in the time of Joshua are still in Canaanite hands. 

It is beyond the scope of today’s sermon to focus on the attempted genocide or holy war portrayed in the conquest of Canaan.  I am not going to defend a theology that justifies war in the name of God.  But I note that these stories come from the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age.  If human beings in our time have not yet figured out that God hates violence in all its forms, then I cannot expect our ancient ancestors to have done so. 

We enter the story at a time when one of the Canaanite kings has been harassing the people of Israel for twenty long years.  The roads are empty for fear of enemy soldiers who take whatever they want.  People who must travel do so fearfully and by cutting across the countryside. Normal life is disrupted. There are no market days, no trade between towns. 

It is at this time that Deborah emerges. She is a judge, someone who brings justice by resolving conflicts and offering wisdom to people who seek her counsel.  The text identifies her as a woman, but it doesn’t make a big deal of her gender. It seems rather matter-of-fact about it actually, as if it is not unexpected for a woman to play this role. 

It says she is the wife or woman of Lappidoth.  The Hebrew word for woman is the same as the word for wife.  Lappidoth can be translated as flames or torches. That word is found two more times in the book of Judges where it is translated as torch.  So she might be the wife of Lappidoth, Mr. Torch’s wife, but there is no other mention of a man by that name elsewhere in the Bible.[2]  Lappidoth might be a place name.  Or it could mean that Deborah is a woman of flames, a fiery woman.  I like that one myself.

Deborah is a judge, but also a prophet, someone who can speak for God.  In that role, she sends for Barak and tells him that God has heard the cries of the people and that God will empower him to defeat General Sisera.  Barak’s name means Lightning, but apparently he needs Deborah, the fiery woman, to light a fire under him.[3]  He says that he will go to battle, but only if Deborah goes with him.  Maybe he is scared.  Or maybe he trusts that Deborah embodies God’s presence so much that he can only go into battle if she goes too. 

If he hesitates, it might be because of the superior technology of his enemy.  The Canaanites were the more established, more powerful and richer army.  This is just the beginning of the Iron Age.  The Canaanites have 900 hundred iron chariots. The Israelites have none.  Reading this in 2022, I cannot help but think of parallels with the situation in Ukraine, a smaller nation continually oppressed by a larger and technologically superior military power, and yet the war has continued for almost 5 months now. 

Barak says,  “I will only go if you go with me.”  Deborah says “For sure I will go, but God will give General Sisera into the hand of a woman.”  We might think she is speaking about herself.  Barak and his ten thousand warriors prevail. They rout the army of Sisera, but Sisera himself escapes and hides in the tent of an ally.  Or so he thinks.  It turns out that a woman named Jael, whose tent it is, waits until he is asleep and then kills him.  Jael and Deborah and Barak share the credit for the victory, but interestingly, the author of Judges says “on that day God subdued the King of Canaan.”   

So what do we make of this story?  Does it have anything to offer to people who live in a time like ours? 

This text has a fascinating history of interpretation.  Deborah has been held up as a Biblical defense for women’s rights to vote and to hold political office.  In the nineteenth century, hundreds of American women felt called to preach the gospel.  Many men and women argued for the validity of that call using Deborah as an example. In fact, there are liturgies going back to before the fourth century which name Miriam and Deborah and Anna in the prayers for the ordination of women deacons. 

On the other hand, there is a consistent assertion that God only allowed women to prophesy in times when men were cowards or abandoning their proper role.  These interpreters say that women only acted as they did to shame the men into stepping up.  With a quick search of the internet, I found several contemporary sermons along those lines. 

The fact that the issues faced by Deborah are contemporary is demonstrated in this example.  In 2008, when Sarah Palin campaigned for the American vice-presidency, magazine and internet articles by Pentecostal and evangelical supporters valorized Palin as a Spirit-inspired leader who, like Deborah, was raised up by God to do battle on behalf of biblical values.

But not everyone agreed. Following the lines of those who argued that God had chosen Deborah as a reproach to the fearful, godless men of Israel who were not up to the task of leadership, Brian Abshire, a Reformed Presbyterian minister, argued that the candidacy of Sarah Palin was “living proof that the Republican party is gutless, effeminate and cannot find a godly man willing to take a stand on pivotal moral issues….”[4]

I don’t find anything in the text that suggests Deborah’s gender is out of the ordinary for leaders at her time.  But if we want to press on that issue, we might notice two things.  We might notice that the text says that God raises up a deliverer and that God subdues the king of the Canaanites.  The implication being that God works through people who respond with faithfulness, and those people may not be the ones we expect. We also might notice that, in contrast to some of the male judges presented in the book, Deborah is portrayed as wise and totally trusting in God, without the kind of personal agendas that lead to the downfall of some. 

God’s actions are largely portrayed through war and that is troubling, as I have already said.  But through Deborah’s leadership, the land has rest for forty years. When the people return to the covenant with God, there is peace for forty years. The people are continually called back to the ways of God which bring peace and justice.  It is when they abandon God’s ways that chaos and upheaval result.  What we see in the pattern of judges is God’s continued mercy.  God repeatedly forgives them as each generation seems to need to relearn the what the one before it did.  

Finally, I would suggest that this story is particularly relevant in light of the ongoing violence suffered by women and girls across the world.  Jacob Wright is professor of Hebrew Bible at Emory University. In 2008, he won the Templeton Prize, the largest prize for first books in religion. In other words, he has strong credibility as a Biblical scholar.  This is what he says about the book of Judges. The book “begins with a woman as a judge and after this woman’s reign as judge, her period of ruling, everything goes downward.  And, when we look through the whole Book of Judges, the downward spiral is mapped out on how these guys, how Israel actually treats their women.  Women are strong at the beginning and then they become the objects of violence at the end; and so they use women to show that in great periods of time, women were treated well, but also governed, were leaders of society and at the end, it goes down toward the masculinity, the typical chauvinistic type of attitude emerges and that goes hand in hand with an abuse of women.  And when the biblical authors imagined how Israelite society could be depicted in a bad way, they show women being abused.”[5]

When the biblical authors imagined Israelite society depicted in a bad way, in direct disobedience and violation of the covenant, they show women being abused.

Those with ears, may we hear.

[1] Mark McEntire, The Internal Conversation of the Old Testament, (Macon, GA:  Smyth & Helwys Publishing, 2018), p. 100.

[2] Douglas Knight and Amy-Jill Levine, The Meaning of the Bible: What the Jewish Scriptures and Christian Old Testament Can Teach Us, (New York:  HarperOne, 2012)  p. 60

[3] J. Clinton McCann, Interpretation Commentary: Judges (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox, 2003)  p. 107

[4] Joy Schroder, Deborah’s Daughters: Gender Politics and Biblical Interpretation (Oxford:  Oxford Unveristy Press, 2014) , p 220.

[5] https://www.bibleodyssey.org/tools/video-gallery/g/gender-issues-judges-wright#