Comma Faith
Sermon related to Exodus 3:13-15 CENTRAL FOCUS: We are a tradition of continuing revelation. Spirit comes to us as an unfolding of new understandings of faith, new expressions of faithful living, and the opening of possibilities for compassion in action. But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” 14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am.”[a] He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’ ” 15 God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord,[b] the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations. For the Word of God in Scripture For the Word of God among us For the Word of God within us Thanks be to God The Rev. Otis Moss the III stepped to the podium. Over 3,000 of us at our 2009 national UCC gathering quieted ourselves to listen. Starting off slowly, as is often the case with the style of preaching common in many African American churches, the Senior Minister of Trinity UCC in Chicago, picked up speed as he spoke of punctuation. That’s right, punctuation. Isn’t that inspiring and exciting? Yes, punctuation; Semi colons, quotation marks, apostrophes, parentheses, and….hold on to your seat….. brackets! But punctuation can be relevant and inspiring when the dominant story, the status quo power or culture or system insists on a period while the Good News of God insists on a comma. To the drug addict to whom the incarceration system says ‘three strikes and you are out,” period, the Good News of God says, comma, change your direction, comma, "God is making all things new." To the Hebrews enslaved, Pharaoh says work without rest or wage for the Empire, period, but the Good News of God says, comma, "together you shall walk out of bondage," comma, together you shall journey to liberation and a new way of community. To the teacher and healer and prophet Jesus, the Roman Empire said, your way is ended, period, the Good News of God says, comma, not so fast, comma, there is life and resurrection stronger than death, comma, stronger than violence and the desire to dominate. To the broken spirit whose inner critical voice says, that’s it, there’s no hope for you, no meaning, period, the Good News of God says, comma, “my Grace is sufficient,” comma, “nothing is impossible for God.” This is the kind of proclamation by the Rev. Moss that had us on our feet by the end of his sermon as we felt the Spirit flow through his speaking that our God is in the comma business of making things new, healed and hopeful, and resistant to the period makers of the world, those who choose and serve a status quo of fear, hard-heartedness, injustice and cynicism. I recently thought of that message delivered by Rev. Moss because it still lives in me, especially when I feel or I see the drift toward hopelessness and loss of possibility. I feel and see that drift now. Climate change marches on, women’s rights to control their bodies is curtailed, aggressive war mongers on the march, the weapons of war sold to angry and hopeless citizens and then tragically used for mayhem and mass death. Over twenty years ago our national denomination, the United Church of Christ, was looking for a phrase to define itself. They found the perfect words from the late Gracie Allen, the wife and comic partner of the late comedian George Burns. A brilliant and perceptive woman in her own right, she left a message in her papers to be discovered by her husband after her death that has become the motto for the United Church of Christ: “Never put a period where God has placed a comma.” Gracie was encouraging George to remember that life had many chapters. George was 68 when Gracie died. Rather than place a period after his career, Burns went on to star in a number of movies, including playing God, twice. He died at age 100, having lived the life of the comma. Our faith is that kind of faith. Our church is that kind of church. Because many of us come from other kinds of churches or may have few connections with the larger network that we are as UCC’ers, I’d like to share about how a characteristic way of being together as the United Church of Christ embodies more of a comma faith than one of periods, one where Spirit writes new chapters, where Spirit comes to us as an unfolding of new understandings, new expressions of faithful living, and new possibilities for compassion and justice in action. There are threads of this comma faith woven into the UCC fabric from all the branches of our family tree that came together in 1957 to become one network. And it comes right out of our ancient faith stories in Scripture. . Our Scripture story today has Moses at work. Perhaps Moses just wanted an ordinary day at work, a simple day of watching and wandering with the sheep, period. But Spirit seemed to have a different plan. The bush that was burning, comma, but was not consumed, appeared to him and he turned aside to an encounter with God. In this encounter, Moses asks the name of God. In these ancient stories, having the true or secret name of the deity, gave power to the namer to invoke and use the deity’s power. And, here, God refuses to be boxed in by a simple title, a single nature or power, or even by time. The Hebrew wordplay here can be translated as “I am what I am,” “I will be who I will be,” or, most simply, “I will be whoever I will be.” God even refuses to box God’s Self in with a name. No periods here, just a commas. God is free to become and be. This is all about commas, all about an openness to the Divine Mystery of what might be coming, what might emerge, what might be needed, what might be chosen, what new thing might be revealed. While reflective and rational Greek philosophy leaned toward a more static even impassive understanding of the Divine (the all everything list), and that strongly influenced Christian tradition in the reading of Scripture, Hebrew understandings of God actually were more about the lived experience of God and were open to the Divine as moving, morphing, and changing. Like the Hebrew people themselves journeying to the Promised Land or back from exile, or like the families of Abraham and Sarah, or Ruth and Naomi, or Joseph and Mary, or like the Wise Ones from the East following a star, it seems the people were on an unfolding journey, discerning the new place that Spirit called them to go in order to serve life at that time, in that situation. In Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, where he is portrayed by Matthew’s community as the new Moses, you can hear the new being indicated by the phrase, "You have heard it said, (comma) but I say……" There is innovation here, going beyond something like "eye for any eye," which in its day helped stop escalating revenge cycles, to something that went into the inner work that stops cycles of revenge and separation altogether, "love your enemy." You see, although our Bible has a back cover, and the tradition has not admitted new books into the Bible for over a millennium and a half, that does not mean that God is mute, that Spirit stopped moving or speaking at the time of Jesus or the time of Moses. God is still Speaking, we say. And we, as the UCC, are trying to listen. We have done it before. In 1620, on their way to North America, pilgrims seeking spiritual freedom heard their pastor, John Robinson, say “God has yet more light and truth to break forth out of his holy Word." This is a statement of the continuing revelation that is characteristic of the UCC, the assumption that there is more understanding to come. It is a way of seeking and holding truth that keeps us open to reading our Scriptures and mining our tradition in new ways as our understandings and experience change. This kind of way has encouraged us, not exclusively, but characteristically to be on the cutting edge of social change in the church. Congregationalists were among the first Americans to take a stand against slavery. In 1700, the Rev. Samuel Sewall wrote the first anti-slavery pamphlet in America, "The Selling of Joseph" laying the foundation for the abolitionist movement that came more than a century later. In 1773, five thousand angry colonists gathered in the Old South Meeting House in Boston to demand repeal of an unjust tax on tea and inspired what might be called the first act of civil disobedience in U.S. history—the "Boston Tea Party." In 1773, a young member of the Old South congregation, Phillis Wheatley, becomes the first published African American author. Poems on Various Subjects was a sensation, and Wheatley gained her freedom from slavery soon after. In 1785, Lemuel Haynes is the first African American ordained by a Protestant denomination. In 1839, enslaved Africans broke their chains and seized control of the schooner Amistad. Their freedom was short-lived, and they were held in a Connecticut jail while the ship's owners sued to have them returned as property. But Congregationalists and other Christians organized a campaign to free the captives. The case became a defining moment for the movement to abolish slavery as the Supreme Court ruled the captives are not property, and the Africans regain their freedom. In 1840, a meeting of pastors in Missouri formed the first united church in U.S. history—the Evangelical Synod. It united two Protestant traditions that had been separated for centuries: Lutheran and Reformed. In 1846, Lewis Tappan, one of the Amistad anti-slavery organizers, organized the American Missionary Association--the first anti-slavery society in the U.S. with multiracial leadership. In 1853, Antoinette Brown became the first woman since New Testament times ordained as a Christian minister, and perhaps the first woman in history elected to serve a Christian congregation as pastor. In 1897, Congregationalist Washington Gladden was one of the first leaders of the Social Gospel movement—which denounced injustice and the exploitation of the poor amidst a new industrializing and urbanizing society. In 1959, Southern television stations impose a news blackout on the growing civil rights movement, and Martin Luther King Jr. asked the UCC to intervene. Everett Parker of the UCC's Office of Communication organizes churches and won in Federal court a ruling that the airwaves are public, not private property. In 1972, the UCC's Golden Gate Association ordained the first openly gay person as a minister in a mainline Protestant denomination: the Rev. William R. Johnson. In 1976, General Synod elected the Rev. Joseph H. Evans president of the United Church of Christ, the first African American leader of a racially integrated mainline church in the United States. In 1995, the United Church of Christ publishes The New Century Hymnal—the only hymnal released by a Christian church that honored in equal measure both male and female images of God. In 2005, the General Synod called for full Marriage Equality, marking the first time that one of the nation's mainline churches expressed support of marriages for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons. I share these not to boost our UCC egos, but to en-courage our spirits with so much of the country and some churches wanting to go backward, to fix the faith and the culture in a less inclusive and less just past with a period. I share this list to encourage us that the God of commas has been and is at work even amidst the current appearance of reactionary, restrictive, and violent forces. And what about us? How is our comma faith? Where have we placed a period where God would place a comma? Where have we precluded possibility, or sidled up to cynicism, or jockeyed into judgment, or given in to impatience in such a way that we placed a period where Spirit was seeking a comma, a new way through, a re-visioned path, a resurrection? My guess is that often we protect our hearts with the period placing energies of judgment or criticism, or of cynicism and passivity. Or we protect ourselves and calm our fears in the midst of the anxiety of change by focusing on too much order. We forget that God can work through all of this, even the right kind of chaos (“good trouble” the late John Lewis called it). We forget that God may have another timeline or another way to get where we are going. I have not been here long enough to know the full history of Plymouth church and how you have found ways to do something and become something that others would have thought not possible. But, I did see a video on our website where the late Ray Becker narrates the story that recounted the German speaking ancestors of this church escaping Czar Alexander II leaving their familiar homes in Russia to come all this way, that showed them starting a church without a pastor, that showed them coming together with only 64 members to build a church building and then the faith years later to sell that building and move all the way out of town to Prospect Avenue where they built the whole shell of the church themselves, where we now worship, when they had 184 members. And now, to meet a challenge to support our comma faith ministry, we raised last Monday over $75,000 to meet that goal on Plymouth Gives Day. My friends, I know some of you have had difficult days and there may be more for you and for this country and the world. But somewhere just after the necessary, appropriate, and healthy grieving of the disappointments of our world and our lives, there is a time, there is a choice to faithfully punctuate our stories with a comma, to re-envision new possibilities of manifesting God’s Realm here on earth in your life, in northern Colorado and in Plymouth church, in the world, and then to act into the new. As our UCC promotions often say, God is Still Speaking. Our call is to be listening and discerning and following the Still Speaking God calling us into a faith where we are placing the life-giving commas of compassion, of courage, and of creativity, where others would place the death dealing periods of complacency and complicity and resignation. We are invited into an adventure of faith where the comma is always opening us to the renewing of our minds, the reconciliation of the alienated in ourselves and others, and a re-visioning of any way of being that is less than Shalom for all Creation. As Gracie said, Never place a period where God has placed a comma.
0 Comments
Exodus 3.1-15
Plymouth Congregational Church, UCC The Rev. Jane Anne Ferguson Friends, this week we decided as a worship team to see if we could do something a little different this Jubilee Sunday. Thus, our intergenerational sermon. Back in March, when we had to close the building due to the pandemic, I don’t think any of us ever expected to be where we are this Sunday…still worshiping together by livestream. Yet here we are. Some of us grownups have been able to go back to work in sort of normal ways. Others not. My Plymouth children and youth friends, it makes me so sad that you are still not able to go back to regular school to see your friends and teachers. Or to come here to Plymouth and see one another and see us. We really miss ALL of you and it is tough to know that we are in this pandemic thing for a much longer haul than we ever expected. It makes for a weird Jubilee Sunday, doesn’t it? Jubilee Sunday is usually a time for us to greet one another after being gone on vacations and trips during summer. It is a Sunday we come back to get ready for the programs of the year, the classes, the service, the worship. The Jubilee year in the Bible way back in the times after Moses led the people out of Egypt and back to their homeland promised to them by God was a year in which the land was not planted with crops. I imagine people had stored enough food to get them through the year. So the land was given a rest because it had been working so hard for the people for 49 years. On the 50th year it rested. And any land that had been taken from people because of a loan or debt payment was returned to the original owners. It was a do-over year. It was a time-out kind of year. Not for punishment, but for a time to calm down and maybe think about what was really important in the community. 2020 and into 2021 is an unexpected Jubilee year for us to rest, to reconsider and think about what’s important, even if we didn’t think we needed that or wanted it. It a time to reflect on how we can start again in new ways when we are able to be back together in person again here at church and at school. I think during this kind of year stories are really important. Maybe we have more time to hear and deeply listen to them. Hopefully, during a Jubilee year the ancient people of God told one another stories about their lives with God, remembered their history. Our story today is about Moses, the Hebrew people’s first prophet. I think it’s one of the stories they might have told and remembered. I invite you to listen to it together. It has something for all ages. Exodus 3. 1-15 Moses was a Hebrew boy who was adopted by the daughter of Egypt’s Pharaoh, king, and was raised as a prince in the palace. It’s a great story about how he hidden as a baby in a basket in the river by his sister to save his life; how the princess found him and then hired his real mother to take care of him till he was old enough to live in the palace and be adopted by the princess. When Moses grew up he saw how his Hebrew people were mistreated as slaves by the Egyptians and he was very troubled. He tried to help, but his anger at the mean treatment of his people caused a situation in which he accidently killed an Egyptian boss who was mistreating Hebrew slave. So he had to leave Egypt in a hurry or face arrest. This is why, in our story, he is living out in the wilderness away from Egypt. There he found a new tribe and family, married, had children. And went to work for his father-in-law as a shepherd. That’s where our story for today begins. Moses was taking care of the flock for his father-in-law Jethro, Midian's priest. He led his flock out to the edge of the desert, beyond the known wilderness, and he came to God's mountain called Horeb. 2There the Holy One’s messenger appeared to him in a flame of fire in the middle of a bush. Moses saw that the bush was in flames, but it didn't burn up. 3Then Moses said to himself, Let me check out this amazing sight and find out why the bush isn't burning up. 4When the Holy One saw that Moses was turning back to look, the Holy One called to him out of the bush, "Moses, Moses!" Moses said, "I'm here." 5Then the Holy One said, "Don't come any closer! Take off your sandals, because you are standing on holy ground."6He continued, "Moses, I am the God of your father Abraham [and your mother Sarah], your father Isaac [and your mother Rebecca], and your father, Jacob [and your mother Rachel]." Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God. 7Then the Holy One said, "Moses, I've clearly seen my people oppressed in Egypt. I've heard their cry of injustice because of their slave masters. I know about their pain. 8I've come down to rescue them from the Egyptians in order to take them out of that land and bring them to a good and broad land, a land that's full of milk and honey, a place where the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites all live. 9Now the Israelites' cries of injustice have reached me. I've seen just how much the Egyptians have oppressed them. 10So, Moses, get going! I'm sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt." 11But Moses said to God, "Who am I to go to Pharaoh and to bring the Israelites out of Egypt?" 12God said, "I'll be with you. And this will show you that I'm the one who sent you. After you bring the people out of Egypt, you will come back here and worship God on this mountain." 13But Moses said to God, "If I now come to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,' they are going to ask me, 'What's this God's name?' What am I supposed to say to them?" 14God said to Moses, "I Am Who I Am. So say to the Israelites, 'I Am has sent me to you.'"15God continued, "Say to the Israelites, 'The Holy One, the God of your ancestors, Abraham's [and Sarah’s] God, Isaac's [and Rebecca’s] God, and Jacob's [and Rachel’s] God, has sent me to you.' This is my name forever; this is how all generations will remember me. After we hear a story it is good to think about it for a few moments. What are the pictures in your imagination that you saw as you listened to the story? Desert much like the high plains desert where we live…the grasses, the low trees, the taller ones by streams of water, the sand and rocks. Did you smell sage brush like we have in our wilderness? Were you daydreaming with Moses as he led the flock, your mind wandering as your feet wondered? I have had hikes like that. What a surprise to see this strange bush! What did the bush that was burning but not burning up, look like? Are there green leaves in the fire? Crackling sounds? What did it smell like? Is it hot or not hot? How does the ground feel on bare feet when you take off your sandals? Does holy ground feel different than other ground? What makes the ground ‘Holy”? If its God’s presence, doesn’t that mean that all ground is holy? If I asked my young friends where God is in the world….I think they would answer, “Everywhere!” Even in you! What does the voice of God’s messenger coming from the burning, but not burning up, bush sound like? When you found out Moses was talking to God were you surprised again like Moses? Nervous? Scared a bit like Moses? Excited? I invite any of my young friends to take their paper and crayons or colored pencils and draw what you experienced in this part of the story. At lunch you can talk more about it with your family. Maybe your parents want to draw to! You can draw and continue listening. When God can tell Moses is really listening in spite of being nervous and scared, God asks Moses something very startling and important. God asks – well, tells - Moses to stop hiding in the wilderness and go back to Egypt to confront Pharaoh. About how the Hebrew people are treated so badly, how they are suffering and even dying. God says…I see and I hear the suffering of my people. I suffer with them. :Go, Moses and free them from Pharaoh’s bullying, his keeping them for slaves. Lead them out of Egypt to live in a land I will show them.” Now Moses knows if he goes back to Egypt he could be arrested for killing the Egyptian boss who was hurting the Hebrew workers. How do you think Moses feels when God tells him to go back to Egypt and confront Pharaoh? (pause) Yeah, that doesn’t sound good. Moses would have to be really brave to do this. I don’t know that I could be that brave. What about you? What if you were asked to do this? To stand up to the President about the mistreatment of people in our country? Would you be scared? About being arrested? I think I would ask like Moses…Who am I to do this? How can I do this? I might feel all alone…and very small and very powerless. Did you hear what God said to Moses? “ Don’t worry! I Will Be With You. How will you know? When you return to this very place with all the Hebrew people!” You’ll know once you have done what I am sending you to do. Hmmm….I might want a better sign than that….Has anyone ever said to you, “Act like you are brave even if you are afraid. That is what courage is. But, God, says Moses, how will the people even know to follow me? They don’t know me. Who will I tell them has sent me? And God does something very important…God tells Moses God’s name. When we really want to be friends with someone, when we want them to trust us, we tell them our name, don’t we? Maybe, if we want to be really good friends we tell them our special name, “I’m Harry, but you can call me Hal. I’m Jane Anne, but you can call me Jane or Janie. I’m Carla and you can call me….well, Carla!” God says, “Moses, the people will know me by this name, “I Am Who I Will Be/I Will Be Who I Am.” And my Being is with you and the people. This God’s name is “I Am And I Am with You.” I have seen and heard you and suffered with you. I Am With You is my name. So get going, Moses! Tell the people and the Pharaoh my name and I will be with you and you will bring my people into freedom.” So this is how God called Moses to be the first prophet for God. Inviting him to stand on holy ground….which could be anywhere and everywhere. Telling him God’s special name and saying I hear and see and suffer when my people suffer. And I will be with you always. The first big job of prophets is telling the truth. We want to tell the truth, don’t we? Prophets tell the truth about injustice…which is a big word for being mean, selfish and not treating people as you would want to be treated with fairness and with kindness. Like the Golden Rule, “Do to others as you want others to do to you.” None of us want to be treated with meanness and unfairness. And all of you from preschoolers to grown-ups know how it feels to be treated meanly. And all of us know what it’s like to be bullied, to be called names, to be treated unkindly. Yes? At school, in the neighborhood, at work. Children and even grown-ups in grown-up jobs are bullied sometimes and treated meanly. The boss or a friend might not really see them, then say or do something that hurts so bad. And that makes us mad! Kids, I will tell you a secret, sometimes we are All – even grown-ups - tempted to do the same thing to others because we have been hurt so bad. Even when we know this is not the way the God wants us to act. God called Moses to go to Pharaoh and say, “Stop bullying my people! Stop being so mean to them that sometimes they don’t have enough food. Or they have to work so hard or you punish them so hard that they get sick and die. Stop it, Pharaoh! Let them go free! If you have ever stood up to a bully at school or in your neighborhood so that a friend of yours can stop being mistreated or even imagined doing this, you know it is a very hard thing! Scary thing. It’s also a God thing and God is with us when we do this really hard, scary and good God things. You are not in school right now, it’s a Jubilee time, so now is the time to think about Moses and his story while you are at home. It prepares you for when you might need to stand up and tell the truth to a bully and about bullying. Grown-ups, the Black theologian, James Cone tells us, “… it is impossible to do Christian theology with integrity in America without asking the question, “What has the gospel to do with the black struggle for liberation?” That is a grown-sized question to wrestle with during this time of Jubilee. It a big God question and its in our faces and we can’t ignore it even if we can’t protest in crowds. We all stand on the holy ground of our lives because God is with us and wherever God is…there is holy – wholeness and love. As you go into this week….this strange Jubilee fall…remember you are whole and holy is God’s sight, so God will ask Big things of you, just like God asked of Moses. May it be so. Amen. ©The Reverend Jane Anne Ferguson, 2020 and beyond. May not be reprinted without permission. AuthorAssociate Minister Jane Anne Ferguson is a writer, storyteller, and contributor to Feasting on the Word, a popular biblical commentary. Learn more about Jane Anne here. The Rev. Jake Miles Joseph Plymouth Congregational UCC, Fort Collins, Colorado Exodus 16: 2-4, 9-15 August 5, 2018 Will you pray with me? May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be good and pleasing to you, O God, our great chef and manna baker—who provides in the wilderness. Amen. Isn’t it interesting when the stories we remember from when we were all kids as “Bible Stories” have almost nothing to do with the actual stories we find printed in the Bible? This happens so often! Christmas, Easter, Noah, Jonah… all are not what we expect when we actually read Scripture, but today’s story of manna particularly deviates from the actual text in the way we popularly tell it. When we think of the idea of “manna,” we think of God’s blessings, of easy bread falling (pre-baked) from the sky, and we think of something appetizing, delicious, and obvious. We tell ourselves a story about ease, about answered prayers, and about grateful community living in abundance. All of these things come to mind with the utterance of the word “manna.” This is the myth that has been derived from our Scripture this morning: a myth of contentment and the image of the manna story looking something like a Panera Bakery counter. Croissants, banquettes, and pastries… O my! When we think of manna we think of fulfillment, but the real story is a lot less delicious. There is blessing and there is abundance, but it comes at a cost and it comes in the form of a surprise from God. God rarely behaves in the way we prescribe or expect. God loves surprises. The reality of the story goes more like this: God leads the people out of servitude in Egypt and into an extended period of discernment, of wondering, of aimlessness and starvation (physical and spiritual) in the wilderness. This feels like a betrayal of the people by God. Have any of you ever felt betrayed by God? All of us have had that experience in some form or time. A job/ opportunity that wasn’t what you expected? A spouse who didn’t live up to covenant? A family member who died too young? A home that was flooded out or burnt down? That is the kind of feeling of “WHY GOD!!?” that we are talking about today. The Israelites have a rightful sense of frustration with God, and so they cry out for meat, for bread, and really for survival. They wonder what all of this freedom and liberation business is about anyway when it only leads to death in the dessert! What is the point of being free is there is nothing to eat, no help, no sustenance? Amen? Often, when we tell this story as a happy narrative, we get mad at the congregation of the Israelites for daring to complain so soon after liberation, but in my reading of the story—they had every right to complain to Aaron (their minister) and to Moses (their tour guide). While we cast ourselves as Aaron and Moses in the story with a righteous indignation about the complaining, really, we are more like the crowd than we know! All of us for our own good, deeply personal reasons. It is only human to cry out, “Why God?” What in your life needs a surprise from God right now? What makes you cry out, “Why God?” We are all Israelites in this story. The people need food, need support, need manna. They took a leap of faith to leave Egypt, the Status Quo, the norm, “the way its always been done,” and now the new adventure isn’t providing better results as promised. They are tempted to turn back. The word found three times in this text, translated as “complaining” in Hebrew also means murmuring or nervous talking. If read in Hebrew, one can almost hear the people shaking. They are literally quaking in fear. What we find in this story is a people in the midst of confusion, starvation, and estrangement from God… all for good, valid reason. The repetition of that one word shows us that through Biblical form analysis. The repetition makes the text itself seem unstable. We really shouldn’t blame them for being upset, for that is where it gets interesting! What is God’s response to our worries, our fears of change, our murmuring for our lives? How does God respond? Does God simply end the time of discernment and lead them out of the wilderness. No, God provides nutrition in the time and place of the unknown. This is where we start to learn something. Aaron and Moses intervene with God, and God sends manna from heaven to sustain the people in the wilderness. Let’s look to the text because this is the part I want us to focus on this morning in our own time of great change: “In the evening, quails came up and covered the camp; and in the morning there was a layer of dew [slime] around the camp. [If I didn’t know better, I would think that we were reading an excerpt from the screenplay for movies like The Fog or The Mist… its creepy!! We can call this a hermeneutic of Stephen King.] Anyway, “When the layer of slime lifted, there on the surface of the wilderness was a fine flakey substance, as fine as the frost on the ground. When the people saw it, they said to one another, “What is it??” [Can be read either in a grossed-out voice or a fearful, trembling voice.] For they did not know what it was. Moses said to them, “It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat.” Bon Appetit! O Manna! What is it? For they did not know what it was? Friends, manna, relief, and God’s blessings in the wildernesses of our lives never take the form we ask for or expect. Additionally, the manna (the relief the new sustenance for the new emerging church) we are looking for might already be all around us, but we haven’t yet identified it as the bread of God. We haven’t named it manna yet. The solutions are here already, but we haven’t named them as our manna. For example, we haven’t claimed the manna of the heart, mission-driven patterns, change-focused character of the millennial generation as manna yet. It has that potential energy to change us for good and the better! We likewise haven’t leveraged the full potential of data systems and online communication yet as manna for a new and different reality of church. Sometimes, manna looks to us, at first, like bird (poop) shit. Yes, that is what the story shows—sometimes manna is not at all what we want—like an election that really wakes us up and alerts us to the seriousness of our cultural issues and apathy, like a rain on a wedding day that eventually yields rainbows, like church pledging pattern changes that makes us pay more attention to theology and mission than history and status quo. Manna is what we get -- not what we ask for. This is such an important theological lesson for our time—maybe the most important! God is alive and active with us, but the manna we seek (the relief, the blessing, the affirmation, the resources) are already here, and we simply need to name and claim them as such. This is a tough time and a difficult process. The manna might not be easy to swallow or understand, but the needs of the people of God are being met in new and unexpected ways. Here at Plymouth that means new relationship with the campus next door. It means new apartments being built all around us. It means seeing the changes in attendance as something to celebrate as church goes from a Sunday social sport to an everyday lived practice. The manna is here, and it is abundant, but it isn’t like the bread in Egypt. It isn’t the flesh pots of the 1950’s, 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s of the church. It is new and looks and tastes different. Personally, as individuals, this might look like God having brought you a new friendship (potential manna) that still needs an infusion of time and care to nurture into the sustenance it might become for you. Institutionally, it might look like the process next month of implementing the new database portals for the congregation members. One more note is that manna is also mentioned in the Book of Numbers in chapter 11. The story in The Book of Numbers picks up the story a little bit later after the Israelites have been eating the manna for a while, and it reads, “ We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; 6 but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at. 7 Now the manna was like coriander seed, and its color was like the color of gum resin. 8 The people went around and gathered it, ground it in mills or beat it in mortars, then boiled it in pots and made cakes of it; and the taste of it was like the taste of cakes baked with oil. 9 When the dew fell on the camp in the night, the manna would fall with it.” So, two more lessons about manna that are different from our childhood remembrances. First, manna isn’t always exciting, and it isn’t delicious, but most importantly--manna and blessings sometimes come with hard work. Manna is like buying something awesome from Ikea, but then learning that you have to assemble the darn thing. Batteries not included. In Numbers we learn that the manna wasn’t pre-baked. In fact, the manna was simply a ground coriander-like powder meal on the ground that took the work of the community [again, the full and engaged effort and work of the community to turn from the preliminary blessing of God into something actually sustaining and useful.] Manna won’t save us, even in abundance, unless we do our part to make it into food. Let me make a prophesy of sorts: God is sending manna again in our time. We are living in the age of the second coming of the gift of manna. The technologies that connect people offer so much blessing for community and the Gospel, but it won’t be easy. Thanks be to God! We are living in the age of manna, but the blessing and renewal and hope of God in our time and in the time of children and our children’s children won’t be easy, it won’t always be tasty, and sometimes it might appear unappetizing. It takes work to transform the grains and flour from heaven into a bread of community and communion. It takes work of everyone living with purpose to overcome the wilderness places in all of our individual and collective lives. It takes coordinated work to identify, transform, and stomach the changes in our world and to bear witness to those changes as potential blessings rather than curses. What is it when the nominating committee asks you to join or chair a board of the church? It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat! What is it when a new opportunity emerges in you or your spouse or partner’s life? It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat! What is it when we are asked to connect with the campus in new ways that change our normal relationships? It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat! What is it when the church launches a new online portal for the church database (as we will be doing in September)? It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat! What is it when a new and challenging neighbor moves in next to your own home [and immediately violate all of the HOA covenants]? It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat! What is it when you are forced into conversations with conservative evangelicals or fundamentalists? It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat! Isn’t it interesting when the stories that have become so familiar to us, still have something new and different, weird, and life affirming to teach us? It is weird, but O Manna, it is also reassuring that God provides manna yet today, yet in our midst, yet in ways we are still striving to understand! Oh Manna, I know, feel, and sense God is sending manna in this place here and now. Look around, find it, taste it, and live into the promises of God. What is it? It is the gift of community grounded in the Word of God. Amen. AuthorThe Rev. Jake Miles Joseph ("just Jake"), Associate Minister, came to Plymouth in 2014 having served in the national setting of the UCC on the board of Justice & Witness Ministries, the Coalition for LGBT Concerns, and the Chairperson of the Council for Youth and Young Adult Ministries (CYYAM). Jake has a passion for ecumenical work and has worked in a wide variety of churches and traditions. Read more about him on our staff page.
The Rev. Jake Miles Joseph
Exodus 20: 1-4, 7-9, 12-20 October 8, 2017 at Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ Fort Collins, CO. Good morning Plymouth! Thank you this morning to our many volunteers who make worship possible: Sound, Deacons, Choir/Music, and our wonderful liturgists. While the minister preaches, these volunteers have the job of invoking the Holy Spirit through their work. Now, would you pray with me? O God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be good and pleasing to you, our guide, our teacher, and the ultimate mouse-catcher! Amen. Plymouth, I have something to confess to you as my employer this morning. Since I started working for this church as one of your ministers (three years ago November 1st), I have been hearing voices. Now, I know that sounds really bad coming from your minister. So, don’t get the wrong idea. I am not hearing God (at least not audibly), angels, or ghosts—this is the month leading into Halloween so one must be very careful about invoking such things. No, no…I am hearing voices because the way the minister office area over here is insulated, and the way the hallways are shaped and surfaced. Because of the architecture of this church, I can hear voices emanating from the conference room if the door is open, as far away as the front door and even the back of the sanctuary from sitting at my desk answering emails (which as Ron and Jane Anne will tell you is a significant part of working here—you all LOVE emails). Yes, Plymouth, if you are in this building, it is likely that your ministers can and do hear you. We hear all voices emanating from the walls and corridors. So I hear lots of voices from my office, and usually I politely ignore them unless addressed to me. A week ago, however, though I heard a voice down the hallway asking a rather odd question: Do you often have mice here at Plymouth? Never having seen a mouse at Plymouth, although the previous associate minister Sharon Benton did warn me about their existence, I ran out of my office to find both the mouse in question and my interim boss, The Rev. Ron Patterson, in a staring contest in a corner down the hallway. The mouse looked at Ron. Ron looked at the mouse. I looked at the mouse. Ron and the mouse looked back at me. What should we do? I have never had to catch a mouse before. Now mind you, this was a very small and incredibly adorable and reasonably terrified little baby mouse. It was about the size of your thumb from its head to end of its tale. Cowering in the corner, not running fast, Ron suggested it was probably dehydrated and lost. Friends, let me say the other time I have seen that look of fear and confusion on someone’s face is almost every Sunday when a new visitor arrives and doesn’t know anyone. So from now on when I do trainings about how to welcome people to church— just remember how scary a new church can be for human and mouse visitors alike. By the time I had finished zoning out and turning that last metaphor about first time visitors over in my head, Ron had created an actual plan. “Get a cup and a piece of paper,” Ron said, so I went running for a small clear glass cup and a piece of sturdy paper. I also grabbed a small manila folder for me to use as a temporary wall to assist the effort from the corralling side of things. Then we were off! As Barb and Daisy barricaded themselves in the front office, Ron chased the mouse with the cup as it took off down the hallway. I herded the mouse with the folder into another corner where Ron promptly dropped a glass over the mouse. [Produce an actual glass cup like the one we used and drop it down on the pulpit.] We had caught it! He then gently slid a piece of paper under the mouse to create a floor. Voila--we now had a mouse airplane! Imagine that mouse’s surprise as Ron lifted the mouse in the cup off the ground went swiftly out the door into the rain and safely deposited it by the far fence across the parking lot. The mouse had reached freedom and a state of liberation! And that, my friends, is how you catch a real, live, church mouse with a lot of care and teamwork. Today’s lectionary reading from Exodus, Chapter 20 is one of the passages in the Bible (and there are several) that deal with the Ten Commandments or what academics call the Decalogue. No, there isn’t a commandment telling us step-by-step how to catch a mouse (I wish there were), but often we feel like a lost mouse when we encounter these ancient texts and rules and try to navigate the complex passages of Scripture and our lives in community. The Ten Commandments are, in their basic form, the outline of community covenant that ideally would help us to navigate lives in which we often feel like lost mice. A lot of life is, after all, feeling like a lost mouse in God’s universe. This part of Exodus is a very ancient part of the Hebrew Bible. It is also a complex part (the scholarship surrounding Exodus from historians and accredited Biblical scholars is often rejected by our Evangelical sisters and brothers) because at closer look we can see the complexities of the text. The story of Moses bringing them down off of the mountains is important but so is the historical-critical scholarship. In the UCC, we take both the history and the narrative seriously. Exodus, and this version of the 10 Commandments in particular, incorporates and directly quotes very VERY ancient portions of a pre-Biblical fragments called the Code of Hammurapi from the Ancient Near Eastern Babylonian context that predates the rest of Exodus by several hundred to a thousand years and also a 1,000 years after the original version it incorporated later edits and revisions from the later Priestly period. The Ten Commandments, contrary to an anachronistic literal interpretation of the story, represent around 2,000 years of human history, covenant, legal code, and the necessary changes there within. [The Bible is most powerful when understood as communities wrestling with God.] In non-academic talk, Exodus is an ancient narrative that draws upon much earlier legal codes (pre-dating the Bible) and like all relevant and good law was revised and edited much later to meet the needs of the Priestly era communities. This shows that the Ten Commandments were like all good and practical laws and good understanding of cultural covenants meant to be contextual, updated, and relevant for the society they governed. The Ten Commandments were written based on older laws and the version we know today, scholarship shows comes from a redacted version from a later period. So what happened to this ancient understanding of law and Bible as something that needs to be reinterpreted anew in the contexts it meets? Where did that go? When did we get stuck in that mousetrap of interpretive death? When did we, as a country, then start using bad interpretation of Biblical law (seeing it as frozen in time) to interpret our Constitutional Law? Which is the cat and which is the mouse here in this interpretive choice? Vs. 4, “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the sea…” For the word of God in Scripture, for the word of God among us… for the word of God within us… friends… what have we done with the Ten Commandments in modern America? Politicians have turned them into an impractical, meaningless idol—a totem replacement for God’s good and dynamic presence. “If only we keep the old sculpture of the Ten Commandments in courtrooms,” says many rightwing politicians, “then we will surly have favor with God.” Even better, as long as we defend stone monuments to God, we don’t have to think about love of neighbor or what the monuments actually say or funding programs that support God’s people! Ironically, this is the definition of an idol (written on the very stone monuments they are defending to avoid)… a static representation of the will of God that ignores the realities of the needs and issues of the time. It denies a living God whose presence we experience and know and replaces God with stone scriptures of laws that were always meant to be reinterpreted for every new generation since they were taken from the Babylonians for the early drafts of the Talmud and revised by the Priestly governors. As a country, we have done the same thing, applied the same flawed written in stone logic with the Second Amendment—BUT we need to understand it for a new time and new issues and new technologies that were not here at the writing. The weapons and violence we saw this week means that we need to re-understand again the meaning of both Biblical and Constitutional law. This modern, anachronistic worship of the Ten Commandment—changing the commandments from living/ dynamic/ covenant relationship into a sculpture to be fought over is idolatrous. It is “Conservative” Blasphemy. Currying favor with political base, stoking hatred against minorities, ignoring starvation and housing issues, missing the point of God’s love but…BUT coming to the defense of a statue with old laws written on it instead of the defense of those in need, the poor, the abused, the LGBTQ minorities around the world, the desperate… is blasphemy and misses the point of the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments were created from a process of meeting the covenant needs of the communities that wrote and reexamined them and made them a useful covenant in society. I believe the mouse’s journey represents the different ways that we get stuck in our faith journeys and our relationship to church, to Scripture, and to law in general. Here are the three stages of catching a mouse as shorthand for how we move from fear and entrapment to freedom and Grace through covenants both with God and society:
Fear, Entrapment, Freedom—the different ways to relate to life, community, covenant, and the difficult parts of Scripture and relationships are all choices we make as people and society. We can run away from community, we can become too comfortable in clearly defined houses and rules, or we can join the world and learn to be free. The arc of the Biblical Narrative and the Life of Christ shows the way towards liberation, but first we have to let go of stone carvings of ancient laws and learn how to love freedom once again. And that, my friends, is how you catch… and release... a mouse. Amen. AuthorThe Rev. Jake Miles Joseph ("just Jake"), Associate Minister, came to Plymouth in 2014 having served in the national setting of the UCC on the board of Justice & Witness Ministries, the Coalition for LGBT Concerns, and the Chairperson of the Council for Youth and Young Adult Ministries (CYYAM). Jake has a passion for ecumenical work and has worked in a wide variety of churches and traditions. Read more about him on our staff page.
Jane Anne preaches on Exodus 3:1-15.
AuthorThe Rev. Jane Anne Ferguson, Associate, Minister, is a writer, storyteller, and contributor to Feasting on the Word, a popular biblical commentary. She is also the writer of sermon-stories.com, a lectionary-based story-commentary series. Learn more about Jane Ann here.
Ezekiel 37: 1-14
April 2, 2017 The Rev. Jake Miles Joseph Plymouth UCC, Fort Collins, Colorado Will you pray with me? Lord God, rattle our bones and bring us to life. Shake our understanding and our hopelessness from slumber and transform it into your wondrous love. May this sermon and our togetherness today bring us new hope and love, Oh God who is our rock, our life-maker, life-restorer, and our life-keeper through love. Amen. Today, God brings Ezekiel to the Valley of Bones (a place full of dead and decomposed bodies) where they are then reanimated into living people again. I always thought that today’s lectionary passage should fall at the same time as Halloween—it has a Zombie movie sort of a tone to it, don’t you think? At the beginning of the story, before we get to the bones walking around again, God brings the prophet to this valley of death, right? And then God asks a weird rhetorical question… or is it a trick question? April Fools? It is hard to tell. “Mortal, can these bones live?” I [Ezekiel] answered, “O Lord God, you know.” You know IMMEDIATELY that something wild, weird, and possibly dangerous is about to happen whenever God addresses you by the ONE title that all humans throughout all of history and time share in common, “Mortal.” This title and address means, “a being that will die and cease to exist, or one with a finite lifespan.” We know that God is up to something big when we are addressed by the fact that we are temporary— “O Mortal, can these bones live?” This is the question God asks Ezekiel. Even stranger perhaps is Ezekiel’s headstrong, somewhat flippant, and almost exasperated response: “O Lord God, you know.” I picture him saying this with a valley accent. Why are you making me look at the reality of the situation for the house of Israel, God? Why have you brought me all the way to face this place of tragedy and loss only to ask me about the impossible and the hopelessness found here, God? We both already know the answer to this silly question- “O Lord God, you know!” Ezekiel doesn’t need a reminder that things are tough for his people and his calling as a priest. So who was this prophet Ezekiel with such a direct and confrontational form of communication with the Divine? One of my favorite scholars, Michael Coogan seems to be a big fan of Ezekiel and this passage in particular. According to this scholar, Ezekiel is a special prophet for a couple of important reasons. The first is that he was the first prophet in the Bible to be called to the work of being a prophet outside of the Holy Land. He is a prophet in exile who started his ministry while far away from home. He only received his call once already far away from Jerusalem in an unfamiliar context. While his contemporary, Jeremiah, saw the destruction of the temple in person before being exiled to Babylon, Ezekiel was taken to Babylonia in 597 and only learned of the destruction of the temple secondhand, through what others told him while already in exile as a priest far from his sacred spaces to which he was called as a priest. So Ezekiel has to rely on imagination and stories to survive in ministry. Secondly, Ezekiel speaks in the first person and offers one of the most orderly and linear accounts of any prophet in the Bible. This makes Ezekiel the favorite prophet of all of us who came out of the Presbyterian tradition- all in good order indeed. This is important because the story we are hearing, near the end of the Ezekiel narrative is the culmination of a life of prophecy—and it ends, linearly and purposefully, in hope rather than despair. Nothing is accidental or chaotic with Ezekiel—our Presbyterian-like prophet. Lastly, Ezekiel is a prophet who has nothing left to lose. He has lost his home, his calling as a temple priest, and never even got to say goodbye. Coogan says something that sheds light on this prophet’s text and Valley of Dry Bones when he writes that, “[This] passage is symbolic and does not mean actual resurrection of the dead, a concept that will not develop for several centuries.”1 So when conservative Christians misread this text as having something to do with Jesus and resurrection, it is a blatant misreading of the story. Ezekiel is a surrealist operating from a place of profound metaphor for a renewal of hope in a time of exile from power and complete and total despair. This vision is a symbol of hope for Israel in a time when all seems lost and despair prevails. Verse 11 and following: “Then he said to me, “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act,” says the Lord.” We are living in a time where the bodies are piling up in the valley. The body of our work in environmental stewardship and climate change awareness for God’s environmental justice is before us today in the Valley of Bones. We feel the pain of the decay and what feels like death as progress is reversed and the planet and leadership itself seems to be running now boldly towards peril and ecological and climate collapse. The body of environmental stewardship is at our feet. The body of our work in socially sustainable and just communities, affordable housing, homelessness advocacy, and fair housing policy is piling up body upon body upon body upon body upon body with every new news cycle in the valley of bones. The body of healthcare for all, equality and access in medicine, HIV/AIDS research funding, access to insurance, falls slowly at our feet in the valley of bones. 1 The bones and vestiges of the body of civil discourse and the marketplace of ideas, and democracy itself seems to teeter on the edge of a cliff overlooking this valley of bones. Are they too about to be pickings for vultures of commerce and greed. We see the bones of our work to end racism and to start sacred conversations on race… bones of education as school funding is stripped and curricula are replaced with convenient alternative facts… bones, bones, bones, bones,…bones of LGBTQ and especially Transgender equality and access to safe spaces and restrooms that match gender identity… bones of elder services… bones of Christian love… bones of mental healthcare…. “The Lord set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said, “Mortal, can these bones live? I answered… Lord God, you know” the answer to that question. Why this torment? This is a passage, a symbolic, surrealist image (sort of a Salvador Dali painting), that draws every lost generation and people and place and time back in because… while called the Valley of Bones… really it is better understood as the Valley of Hope, the Valley of Renewal, the Valley of God’s power to change hearts and minds… the Valley of Empowerment… and especially the Valley of Love. I had my own vision of sorts based out of this Scripture passage. The past two summers I have driven down to a place for continuing education which has a name that sounds about as comforting and hopeful as “Valley of Bones”—a sacred, thin place called Ghost Ranch in Northern New Mexico in the land of the Shining Stone Land Grant between Chama and Santa Fe. This is the land that captured the heart and person of Georgia O’Keiffe, a place that has seen legends of evil, a dark history of fratricide, crime, and murder… but that place of legends and ghosts has been transformed by the Presbyterians who inherited it in the 1950’s into a desert place of renewal, hope, learning, and peace. One dry clear morning, this past summer 2016, I sat alone on a mesa called The Kitchen overlooking desert openness, colors, and the mountains that Georgia O’Keiffe loved. I was reflecting on the pain and deserted place in the world, the fear of the ongoing election cycle, and also the beauty of this planet and hope for renewal I found in Christ and Christian fellowship. I remembered that even in the when things are bleakest; rays of sun and experiences of deep hope and love can change everything! I remembered, as I do now, that what makes Christian faith unique is our stubborn attachment to hope… stubborn, indignant, unyielding, unrelenting, irrevocable hope that love conquers hatred, ignorance, and oppression. Suddenly I burst into a song I didn’t even know I knew (have you ever started humming something without knowing what it is?) It came from somewhere in my soul, overlooking that desert of Ghost Ranch… the Valley of Bones… I heard myself utter the first couple of words… [SING CAUTIOUSLY] “What wondrous love is this, O my soul! O my soul! What wondrous love is this, O my soul! What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss to bear the heavy cross for my soul… for my soul… to bear the heavy cross for my soul!” I feel the same way looking out at you this morning… what wondrous love! That hymn has been my anthem in these dark times when our beloved projects, departments, and beliefs seem to be stripped down to their bones- and I think connects us to that vision of dry bones some 2,600 years ago in the deserts of Ezekiel’s Babylonia. What wondrous love is this that caused a community to rally and be present and show-up to support our neighbors at the Islamic Center in a matter of hours after a violent gesture threatened their community—over a 1,000 of us showed-up in love and care and pure humanity. Dry Bones were covered again with flesh. What wondrous love is this that will be present this afternoon as many from around the community gather to the ordination of my colleague Sean at the Unitarian Church to ministry. Dry Bones are covered again with flesh. What wondrous love is this that shows-up when Fort Collins strategizes together from ALL traditions and background to build 48 new Habitat for Humanity homes in the next couple of years at Harmony and Taft? Dry Bones are covered again with flesh. What wondrous love is this in the morning when we look-up and see that God has given us a new day and we see the light of the sun reflecting back… winking at us from the rock faces of Horsetooth and Long’s Peak! Dry Bones are covered again with flesh. What wondrous love is this when Plymouth hosts a civil, polite, and constructive conversation with council and mayoral candidates in our local election as part of our Forums? Dry Bones are covered again with flesh. What wondrous love is this as our denomination partners with the Disciples of Christ to bring relief efforts to those around the world in need of help and support. Dry Bones are covered with flesh. What wondrous love is this… oh my soul… oh my soul… Can these bones live, asks God? YES! Yes, God they can and they will and they must—our faith and our love—and our hope demands it. We see the beginnings of the bone rattling and waking again! So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude… They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act,” says the Lord. Amen. AuthorThe Rev. Jake Miles Joseph ("just Jake"), Associate Minister, came to Plymouth in 2014 having served in the national setting of the UCC on the board of Justice & Witness Ministries, the Coalition for LGBT Concerns, and the Chairperson of the Council for Youth and Young Adult Ministries (CYYAM). Jake has a passion for ecumenical work and has worked in a wide variety of churches and traditions. Read more about him on our staff page. |
Details
|