The Rev. Jake Miles Joseph
I Corinthians 12: 12-31
Plymouth Congregational UCC,
Fort Collins, Colorado

Will you join with me in prayer? May the words of my mouth and the sparks of joy of all of our hearts be good and pleasing to you, O God, our rock and our curator. Amen. 

Happy Congregation-Reorganization Day! I think of Annual Meeting as when we decide to be congregation again. Since this is our 116th organization day for Plymouth as church, I want to borrow some best practices from a different industry to help us better understand own commitment as the Body of Christ. 

Now, I am a self-proclaimed “conference escape artist!” Do any of you know what I am talking about? Whenever I get the advance schedule for a conference I will be attending, I always look for the gaps, the unscheduled lunches, or the “optional” evening plenaries. I do this for one very specific reason—I need to find time in the schedule to visit the local art museums. Out of principle, as a matter of traveling ethics, I refuse to visit a new city and only see the inside of hotel meeting rooms. While I will always attend and be totally present for all of the meat and potatoes of the conference as the reason for being there, I make a point to find the time somewhere in the schedule that allow me to visit the most sacred space in any major city—the art collections and flagship museums. 

Think about this with me. Even when Detroit was bankrupt a couple of years ago, the citizens of that city refused to talk about liquidation the Detroit Institute of Art. Denver is renovating its art museum as a way to communicate to the world the value it places on art. The Walker or MIA in Minneapolis, The High Museum in Atlanta, The Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City (even saying its name makes me weak at the knees), LACMA or the Getty in LA, the Met in New York, The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, The Art Institute of Chicago... are all the Sacred Spaces/Chapels in their respective communities. They represent community spirit, organization, and hope. 

I learn important lessons about God, ministry, and how to do the work of church well from art museums. Next time you visit one, see how these very old institutions are doing cool programing, changing their hours, and reinventing themselves to be relevant and attractive to everyone in ways that the Church hasn’t yet! There is no institution the Church can learn more from than the field of art museum management. 

I have already shared this analogy with the three boards I work with, but I want to share it with all of you on this our Annual Meeting Sunday. I view being a minister like being a curator of a prominent art museum (or in my case one of the assistant curators responsible for certain rotating exhibits). I understand you, the members, as the artists through whom the Holy Spirit works, expresses God’s will, and communicates the needs in and of the community here at Plymouth, in Fort Collins, and around the world. You are the Holy Spirit-artists painting and sculpting with every color and medium imaginable (social justice, worship, fellowship) to form an oeuvre or a Body of Work that we call the Body of Christ. You are the Body of Christ forming a great body of spiritual art. 

As a minister, my role is to curate. This is the act or process of organizing and looking after the art of the people. It is to organize, to promote, to systematize, to find the right lighting or the funding or the arrangement to showcase and make your Holy Spirit artwork visible, known, and possible. Yes, ministry at its best is the art of curation of community. 

Let’s start over this morning: “Hi, I’m Jake. I am one of the assistant curators here at the Plymouth Gallery of Fine Spiritual Art!”

Describing my job as spiritual curation has changed how I relate to you and your vision. The way in which you define your job for yourself, changes how you approach and execute the work, right? Being clergy in terms of curation has given my visits and escapes to art museums a new theological purpose. It begs me to ask: What are the best practices or the promising practices out there in the curation industry, in the organization world, in the tidying industry that I need to pay attention to as I care for this Body of Christ and help make it even more visible and understood in 2019? How can we as church do a better job of making the artwork of the spirit visible and known and well preserved? 

How can we better curate your incredible Spirit-Driven artwork as a congregation? 

Our Scripture today, in my opinion, is Paul’s way of telling the Christians in Corinth that all of their gifts, their different skills and styles of Spiritual Artwork are welcome, needed, and positively contribute to the masterpiece collection of Christ. A good art museum, as I have learned through my travels, is a well-diversified collection. The Christians in Corinth had been fighting about who was the greatest and who had the most important gifts for Christian ministry. Is it the Egyptology Collection, Impressionists, or the Expressionists… certainly not the Surrealists?! Friends, they were fighting over which ministry teams had first right of refusal for the Corinthian Fellowship Hall, right? Whose artwork of the spirit should be exhibited most prominently in the space provided. Paul comes back to them with this magnificent letter that has set the tone for the last 2,000 years of Christianity: All are needed and, in fact, essential. It is one body of work in Jesus Christ. Just as the body is one and has many members, so is it with the Body of Christ. The collection that is the Body of Work in Christ is as indivisible as the Detroit Institute of Art’s collection—it constitutes a Sacred Whole in diversity. 

One Scholar wrote, “The well-known analogy between the human body and the body politic illustrates his argument for the diversity of the Spirit’s manifestations for the common good…The argument opposes the ‘honor’ values of hierarchical aristocratic Greek and imperial Roman culture, in insisting on the solidarity of the interdependent and equally valued members.” 

Paul is a curator of the Spirit in a living art gallery of Christian Community! And this act of treating power, leadership, and authority of community with a sense of equality, which we continue here in the United Church of Christ, is radically countercultural. It is an act of rebellion both in Paul’s time and today. 

As your one of your ministry curators and organizers, I would like to point out that today is very special in the life of our Body of Christ. Today, we gather to decide to contribute our masterpieces to this Art Gallery of the Holy Spirit again in 2019. Today, we agree as a congregation, to do this whole thing over again for what…the 116th time? Every year on my wedding anniversary, I get down on one knee and re-propose to Gerhard. He always says, “yes,” but the point is to reaffirm the covenant. That is what we do, as community and congregation, at Annual Meeting. 

This is the Sunday when we do more than pass budgets and follow Robert’s Rules of Order (much to the joy of our former Presbyterians), but we also reaffirm our desire to be artists together, a Body of Christ, a gathering of Spirit-artists together for another year-long art show. Today, we claim the calling of Paul in 1 Corinthians, Chapter 12 as our own calling to be community in diversity. Today, we say “yes” again. 

So, as we organize today, as a living art gallery of spiritual art, I would like to draw your attention to a pop-culture, worldwide phenomenon on the topic of personal curation and organization: Japanese Organizing Expert Marie Kondo. 

How many of you already know who I am talking about? 

Marie Kondo has become my favorite modern theologian in over past couple of weeks as I have read her book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. First with her books and now with her Netflix Series, Marie Kondo is changing how people and communities place value on things and learn to treasure what actually matters. I believe that Paul and Jesus would approve! The KonMari Method, as she calls it, is a doctrine of rebellion against a society that tells us to hold onto everything: resentments, revenge, rage (the three R’s), stuff, junk, and belongings. We are conditioned to hoard out of fear. We fear forgetting, not having enough, or being in a state of needing something we once had and have lost or given up. In this age of selfishness and monochromatic (look-alike) printer ministries, this is a reminder to our call to let go of habits of hoarding so we may rediscover the full palette of possibility. 

Today, as we reorganize our life of church, as we prepare ourselves for a year’s worth of new artistic ministry curation and gallery openings, I would like for us to think of 2019 as the year of KonMari Christianity. 

As the Body of Christ, we owe this to ourselves as community. Here are a couple insights from Marie Kondo that are relevant to our organization day as a Body of Christ and maybe also have resonance for you in your own lives. 

1. Lesson 1: Don’t live for yesterday or fear next year! “We can only transform our lives if we sincerely want to. Small changes transform our lives. There are two reasons we can’t let go: an attachment to the past or a fear of the future.”  Friends, as we assemble as a congregation again for 2019, how do we hope to transform Plymouth, Fort Collins and the world? In your own lives, friends, what are you holding onto that is an attachment to the past but doesn’t give you life right now? “There are three approaches we can take towards our possessions: face them now, face them later, or avoid them until the day we die. The choice is ours…If we acknowledge our attachment to the past and our fears for the future by honestly looking at our possessions [or systems] we will be able to see what is really important to us…If you are going to put your house in order do it now.”  The first lesson on community curation is face stuff directly and don’t hang onto stuff or structures because of an unhealthy attachment to the past or a fear for the future. To be the best church we can in 2019, we need to live fully for ministry in this year! 

2. Lesson 2: “Cherish who you are now!” How many of us use the word cherish mostly in reference to memories, to keepsakes, or to that which we no longer think we have? Do you cherish who you are now? Do we as a congregation cherish (adore and celebrate) the amazing, generous congregation we are on this very day? As your associate curator, I cherish who you are now. Marie Kondo brings up this topic in terms of those boxes of pictures of unopened photo albums we all have at home and here in the archives. She observes that most of the joy of having pictures is mostly found in the moment of taking the picture not in the storing of the pictures. This gets at a bigger and deeper spiritual point: “Cherish the things you love. Cherish yourself: Find what you truly cherish in life. Cherish who you are and what brings you joy and fulfillment.”  As congregation, let us learn to cherish all of the Body Parts of Christ and celebrate them in the now. 

3. Lesson 3: “Spark Joy!” The idea of "spark joy" is by far the most popular and most important contribution of Marie Kondo. And it's why I think, no matter if you have Netflix or not, all of us need to become KonMari Christians. In a time of darkness and fear, Marie Kondo has brought millions of people two important theological questions. What is joy? & What does joy mean to you? She doesn’t offer a definition of joy, but she demands that we answer this question in the deepest part of our hearts. Where is your joy? She then asks, “What sparks joy in your life?” You are Holy Spirit artists, but you need more creative freedom! Marie Kondo tells us, “When you do this, you will be surprised at how clearly you can tell the difference between those that touch your heart and those that don’t. As always, only keep the ones that inspire joy!”  (Or see this New Yorker cartoon...)

As a young ministry curator in a very old and sometimes dusty art museum of ministry, the United Church of Christ, I am almost daily asked in one form or another why young people aren’t in church and to diagnose what is wrong with Church in general in 2019. That is almost fitting since the etymology of “to curate” comes from the same root as “to cure” meaning to attend and stay vigilant to those who are ill. The world eventually evolved from healthcare to vigilance in attending to art collections…and today we extend it to ministry. 

It does make me wonder how my age (30 years old) is somehow a credential to wisdom on this important topic? I have struggled to answer this question until now. The number one thing that church has forgotten, especially in the midst of our campaigns of all sorts and systemic internal anxieties is that our primary purpose is to help people learn how to find joy again! We are called to help re-spark joy in living in the midst of death, depression, loss, and fear. It is the Church’s job to always spark joy in in community in the midst of toxic politics. It is our job to spark joy and ALWAYS point to the dynamic-artistic-creative relationship with Jesus Christ and God. The Christian Church should, at its best, spark joy everywhere it is found and every time anyone encounters our touchpoints or presence. This is the primary call of Church Community: Spark Joy! 

The world, friends, needs a macro organizing expert. Our systems for categorizing, ethics for doing collective laundry, our patterns for decision making are not working. Christianity and all of the big world religions need a revamp and a KonMari Closet Emptying! Like our Sabbatical Interim Senior, The Rev. Ron Patterson, said in his sermons last year for Reformation Sunday, we need a giant garage sale as church! We need to ground ourselves again in the sparking, lit, burning joy of communities of sparking joy in a depressed world. 

In the words of Marie Kondo: “If we acknowledged our attachment to the past and to our fears for the future by honestly looking at our possessions, we will be able to see what is really important to us. This process in turn helps us identify our values and reduce doubt and confusion in making life decisions…

"If you can say without a doubt, ‘I really like this!’ no matter what anyone else says, and if you like yourself for having it, then ignore what other people think…All you need to do is get rid of anything that doesn’t touch your heart…As for you, pour your time and passion into what brings you the most joy, your mission in life.” 

It is one of the greatest honors to be an associate curator here in your Art Gallery of the Holy Spirit called Plymouth. Today, as we reorganize for yet another year, my prayer is that we truly remember our purpose to be a place that we all say, ‘I really like this’ no matter what anyone else says and to spark joy in the hearts of our members, our visitors, our community, and the world. Mostly, we Pray that, as always, we Spark Joy in the heart of God the Creator and Great Curator of life. 

Spark Joy, friends! Let’s do this 2019 thing!

Amen. 

John 2.1-11
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning,
Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado

I spent much of the day on Thursday reading a volume of sermons by an eminent mid-century theologian. And though these sermons were written 50 or 60 years in the past, there is still a freshness and relevance to them. And that is unfortunate in some ways, because the moral and religious failings these sermons address are still with us.
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When we celebrate Martin Luther King Day tomorrow, most of us in America will think of Dr. King as a great civil rights leader, which to be sure, he was. But that is not all he was.

Clayborne Carson, a professor of history at Stanford, writes, “The world saw him as a marching protest leader, but Martin Luther King, Jr., was first and foremost a preacher. ‘In the quiet recesses of my heart,’ he once remarked, ‘I am fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher.’” [1] And we know that Dr. King was a great preacher, but when you begin to read his sermons, you come to an understanding of the theology and the faith that informed who he was as a leader. 

“As a young man with most of my life ahead of me,” King proclaimed, “I decided early to give my life to something eternal and absolute. Not to these little gods that are here today and gone tomorrow…. I’m not going to put my ultimate faith in the little gods that can be destroyed in an atomic age, but the God who has been our help in ages past, and our hope for years to come, and our shelter in the time of storm, and our eternal home.” [2] No one knew that King would not grow past middle age before being killed by an assassin’s bullet.

The other thing that was new for me was to understand his theological progressivism. I knew, of course, that he was steeped in the experience of the African-American church and its commitment to social and economic justice, but when you read Dr. King’s sermons, you learn that it really was about justice…not “just us.” His concern was not only for African-Americans, but for all people. Dr. King was also shaped by Colgate Rochester Divinity School, where a half century earlier the theology of the Social Gospel was enunciated most clearly by Walter Rauschenbusch, standing as a counterpoise to fundamentalism, and in many ways, King was the transmitter of the Social Gospel in the mid 20th century.

Like progressive Christians now, King identified a “widespread belief in the minds of many that there is a conflict between science and religion. But,” King writes, “there is no fundamental issue between the two.” [3] He was in no way a biblical literalist; in fact, many white Evangelical preachers in the South who stood against the civil rights struggle were literalists who used the Bible as a bludgeon, rather than as a source of grace and light. 

King speaks in his sermons against materialism and in favor of a lived faith. “It’s possible to affirm the existence of God with your lips and deny his existence with your life,” King claimed. “We say with our mouths that we believe in him, but we live our lives like he never existed.” [4] You probably aren’t going to hear that quote on the news tomorrow, because it’s “too religious” for our secular society. But if you don’t understand Dr. King’s faith, you cannot understand Dr. King in any deep and meaningful way.

“We just became so involved in getting our big bank accounts,” King preached, “that we unconsciously forgot about God – we didn’t mean to do it. We became so involved in getting our nice, luxurious cars, and they’re very nice, but we became so involved in it that it became much more convenient to ride out to the beach on a Sunday afternoon than to come to church that morning. It was an unconscious thing – we didn’t mean to do it. We became so involved and fascinated by the intricacies of television that we found it a little more convenient to stay at home than to come to church. It was an unconscious thing – we didn’t mean to do it.” [5] Thank God his parishioners didn’t have the temptations of the internet, Netflix, and skiing! Seriously, he was calling his congregation out to remind them of what it means to be faithful. In another sermon he claimed, “You are more concerned about making a living than making a life.” [6] Think of the contrast between Dr. King’s theology and today’s “prosperity gospel.”

I also discovered a short sentence that hit me like a rock. I want you to listen to this sentence and don’t think about the situation in the late 1950s…I want you to think about what it means today. “Social problems and racism in particular are moral and spiritual problems that create political and economic consequences.” Listen to that again: “Social problems and racism in particular are moral and spiritual problems that create political and economic consequences.” [7]

That we have a president whose administration imprisons children on our border…that is a moral and a spiritual problem: his and ours. That we have a shut-down government denying work to federal employees and contractors…that is a moral and a spiritual problem: his and ours. That we are witnessing a rise in hate crimes…that is a moral and a spiritual problem: his and ours. Do we have a moral and spiritual problem to address in this country? 

Dr. King said, “One cannot worship the false god of nationalism and the God of Christianity at the same time. The two are incompatible.” We call the worship of false gods idolatry, and it is a violation of the first commandment. Can you say “America First” and call yourself a Christian? 

The economic and political consequences that we live with today are the manifestation, the consequence, the result of the undealt-with moral and spiritual problems that haunt this nation. We need to deal with our national obsession with material things, with the avarice that drives our economy, with ongoing racism that eats away at our nation. These are moral and spiritual problems.
And one of the consequences that Dr. King didn’t live to see is that we are killing God’s planet as well as God’s people. We need a church that is willing to speak out as the conscience of our society, and we need a government willing to get tough, work across the aisle, and make hard choices that address the moral and spiritual problems that cause such suffering. “The church must be reminded,” King preached, “that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state.” [8] Congregations like ours must claim that mantle, but it means we need to focus not just on charity, but on the work of systemic justice, as we are doing on the border, with our police, with affordable housing. 

One of the things that Dr. King knew and experienced is that doing the work of social justice requires risks and is incredibly taxing. It exhausts those who stand up for the oppressed. And he knew in the depths of his soul that his faith in God was what gave him and the movement the kind of spiritual resiliency that made change in the long term possible. Without roots extending deep into the soil of faith, the tree of social justice will wither and blow over in a strong wind.
 
When Mary tells her son that the wine has run out, Jesus says to his mother, “My time has not yet come.” In other words, his time to die is not yet arrived. But then he asks the steward to bring the jars and fill them with water. And he changes them into wine.

Jesus shows up at just the right moment, and even though time seems out of joint to him, he proceeds because he sees what is needed: the people need to taste and see that God is good. Sometimes situations call forth leaders who are needed in the moment, and I sense that God called Martin Luther King, Jr., into the moment when America needed him most. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a mystic, scholar, and activist said, “The whole future of America will depend on the impact and influence of Dr. King.” The man had incredible gifts, talents and abilities that were ripe for that Kairos moment of American in the 1950s and 60s. He was not Jesus turning water into wine, but he was a prophet, showing this nation and the world a third way, a nonviolent path toward spiritual, moral, and social transformation.

Who will turn water into wine for our nation today? 

There is much we can do today as the heirs of Dr. King’s spiritual legacy. We can use our faith as our bedrock as we lift our voices to speak out against racism, police violence, white nationalism, jingoism, economic injustice, and unjust immigration policy. But we need to lift every voice and sing…we need to stand up and let our voices be heard, in the halls of Congress, in the voting booth, in the public square.

“Taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are those who take refuge in him. O fear the Lord, you, his holy ones, for those who fear him have no want.” [9]

Amen.

Notes:

1.  Clayborne Carson, and Peter Holloran ed., A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons on Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (NY: Warner, 1998) from the introduction.
2.   MLK, “Recovering Lost Values,” in Carson and Holloran, op. cit., p. 17
3.   Martin Luther King, Jr., “Three Essays on Religion,” held in Chester, PA.
4.   MLK, “Recovering Lost Values,” in Carson and Holloran, op. cit., p. 15
5.   Ibid.
6.   MLK, “Paul’s Letter to American Christians,” Carson and Holloran, op. cit. p. 28
7.   Ibid., p 22.
8.   MLK: “A Knock at Midnight,” in Carson and Holloran, op. cit., p.72.
9.   Ps. 34.8-9

© 2019 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact [email protected] for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses.

First Sunday in Epiphany
Plymouth Congregational Church, UCC
The Rev. Jane Anne Ferguson
 
Luke 3.15-17, 21-22
15The people were filled with expectation, and everyone wondered whether John might be the Christ. 16John replied to them all, "I baptize you with water, but the one who is more powerful than me is coming. I'm not worthy to loosen the strap of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 17The shovel he uses to sift the wheat from the husks is in his hands. He will clean out his threshing area and bring the wheat into his barn. But he will burn the husks with a fire that can't be put out."18With many other words John appealed to them, proclaiming good news to the people.  ...  21When everyone was being baptized, Jesus also was baptized. While he was praying, heaven was opened 22and the Holy Spirit came down on him in bodily form like a dove. And there was a voice from heaven: "You are my Son, whom I dearly love; in you I find happiness." 

“Take me to the water, take me to the water
Take me to the water to be baptized.”
(Baptism spiritual)

How many of you remember your baptism? How many remember stories of their baptism? Any one remember confirming the baptismal vows their parents made for them at a confirmation ritual? How many of you –- baptized or not -- wonder what the heck IS this baptism thing? And why is it so important anyway?

Is it essential to your faith?

As we gather around Plymouth’s baptismal font this morning we are unified in our remembrances and in our questions. I remember my baptism. I was ten. I was fully immersed in the baptistery of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas. It was at the beginning of a Sunday evening service. Dressed in a white robe I had come to this moment after a significant amount of earnest prayer during the times of silence in our worship services. I had walked down the middle aisle of the church during the final hymn of a morning service to signify that I wanted to profess Jesus as my Savior and join the church officially through baptism. A week or so later I had a private conversation about my understanding of this with the kindly, older pastor. Then came the evening of baptism. I remember the instructions in detail. I remember the moments of immersion and being led out the other side to dry off and get dressed. I remember entering the worship service already in progress wearing my wet hair slicked back in a pony tail as a badge of honor. I was one of the newly baptized. In times of doubt I have remembered this ritual of commitment as one might remember marriage vows. I made this decision at 10, and even though I may be confused, discouraged and despairing, even mad at God,  the commitment pulls me back into mysterious relationship with the Holy One known in scripture, worship prayer, in Spirit and in the person of Jesus. Any details of your baptism story coming back as I share my story? Any remembrances of a time when a hot shower felt literally life-saving, or the plunge in a cool pool or a bottle of water? When has water brought you new life?

Baptism per se does not make you a Christian. Baptism is a visible and outward sign of an invisible and inward faith commitment made by a person or on behalf of a person. It is a sign, a marker on the journey that we begin at birth towards wholeness in God, maturity of faith and our soul’s search for meaning. The water is not magic. Yet we know the power of water in our everyday lives. We all have experienced water how cleans dirty hands and faces, how it revives a dying plant, how it can quench our thirst. With these sense memories, the ritual act of baptism holds the vivid imagery of being cleansed, of beginning again, of new life and revival from the dead. Potent imagery we can hold on to throughout our lives as a foundation for starting anew time and again in faith through confession and forgiveness, through immersing ourselves deeper in prayer during times of dryness or despair, through sensing a call to spiritual growth and new work in ministry which is the provenance of every Chritian.

I suspect that Jesus needed the ancient Jewish ritual of cleansing from sin that was the meaning of baptism in his time as a marker for himself, for his own faith, as he began his formal ministry. It was also a sign to the people on the riverbank that were followers of John. And I’m sure the story of John’s announcement of Jesus’ ministry spread rapidly throughout his followers and beyond.  How could you forget the words of the your teacher, who has brought you to new faith, when he says, "I baptize you with water, but the one who is more powerful than me is coming. I'm not worthy to loosen the strap of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

Each year in the church season of Epiphany we celebrate Jesus’ baptism by John in the water of the River Jordan. As we have remembered together, it’s imagery is rich and palpable.....however,  the gospel writer of Luke tells us that Jesus didn’t baptize with water. John did, and we are united with Jesus in the experience of this powerful ritual. Yet according to John, Jesus came to bring the baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire. I don’t know about you, but those sound a lot more dangerous than the ritual of sprinkling or pouring water over someone’s head or being intentionally and carefully immersed in water. A lot more out of our control!

John’s description of Jesus’ baptism of Spirit and fire as a winnowing process could be interpreted as separating the good people from the bad people, in the present or in the end times. During Jesus’ time the religious establishment would have thought it was separating the Jews from the Gentiles....fortunately our earliest Christian sisters and brothers discovered this separation did not need to be kept. Jesus broke that barrier himself as he healed Gentiles in several stories throughout the gospel of Luke. And the story of Pentecost in Acts (brought to us by the same writer as Luke) shows that Spirit has no prejudices! God’s spirit is for all!

So what if John was not invoking such a literal meaning as separating people good from bad? What if the imagery of winnowing is about a kind of baptism in itself? John says of the one who is coming, “The shovel –- the winnowing fork -- he uses to sift the wheat from the husks is in his hands. He will clean out his threshing area and bring the wheat into his barn. But he will burn the husks with a fire that can't be put out."

The action of winnowing is separating the wheat seed where all the growth potential, the nutrition, is stored from the outer protective covering of the chaff which is not necessary for food or planting after the wheat is harvested. Winnowing involves wind and fire. The seed is thrown up into the air with the shovel and the lighter chaff blows off while the heavier seed falls to the ground to be gathered. The waste product of the chaff, the unnecessary protective covering which would prevent the seed from sprouting or being useful in food, is eventually gathered and thrown in the fire.

Baptism with water is about new life, about coming into the community of Christian faith, about turning toward the ways of God as a new direction on the journey in life. What if baptism through the winnowing process of wind and fire can be seen as a baptism of liberation for individuals as well whole communities of faith? After his baptism by water, Jesus entered his ministry of proclamation and healing and calling people into relationship with God and one another. Jesus’ earthly ministry was a dynamic movement to reclaim and build God’s realm of justice and love. According to John, Jesus’ baptism brings the cleansing wind of Spirit that blows away protections and obstructions that are no longer needed so we may see clearly the realm of God.  Jesus’ baptism of Spirit and fire takes our communal and individual protective habits of scarcity, fear, greed, and pride that separate us from our fellow human beings and throws them into the fire of God’s forgiveness! They are toast! Trash that we no longer need. And the Spirit not only blows them clean away, but also burns them up so we can’t even reclaim them. We are rid of all the old stuff, the chaff,  that weighs us down. We are new, fresh, seeds of God’s power and growth in the world.

In Jesus’ baptism through the Holy Spirit and fire, we are invited into the whirlwind of God’s love, a process of winnowing that will literally change our lives, forever. And just as we can remember the church’s sacrament of baptism by water every year and all that it’s life-changing meaning, we can also remember that Jesus’ invitation into the winnowing of Holy Wind and Fire. We can join anew the movement of building God’s realm of justice and love here and now.

Here at Plymouth baptism signifies participation in God’s Movement, God’s realm. The movement Jesus remembered and re-established in his times, the movement of God’s refining Love blowing through our lives, ridding us, cleansing us, of all that is not an essential part of who we are created to be in God’s image. Reminding each one of us as Jesus was reminded through the message of the dove.... "You are my Son, you are my Daughter, my Beloved One, whom I dearly love; in you I find happiness." 

God finds happiness in you, in us! Isn’t that amazing! And isn’t it something to witness to and share with the world!

Take us to the water, Let us feel your Holy wind.
Bring us through your cleansing fire
So we may be baptized.
Amen and amen.

©The Rev. Jane Anne Ferguson, 2019 and beyond. May be reprinted with permission only.

Matthew 2.1-12
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning,
Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado

What did you expect to find the first day you walked into Plymouth? (I know that a few of you were carried into the church in your parent’s arms, but for the vast majority of adults, we made a decision to come here.) Were you expecting to find a church just like the one you grew up in? Or maybe you weren’t raised in any particular religious tradition and thought it might be like a church service you’d seen televised. Perhaps you were expecting a praise band and projected PowerPoint during the sermon. What did you expect to find?

What were you seeking when you came? Sometimes people come to church in the midst of a personal crisis, after a divorce or as part of their sobriety or as a response to illness. Maybe for you, it was an effort not to be alone, to find community, to find a way to educate your children about spirituality in a progressive context. Maybe you had a not-so-positive experience in another church and were giving Christianity one last try.

For me finding a church was something of a pilgrimage. I remember when I was in my 20s and living in Santa Barbara, I felt the need to find a harbor where I could safely ask the questions that still floated around like flotsam from my childhood faith. I needed a more adult faith. A college friend and I did the rounds of churches together: we went to All Saints Episcopal, which has now grown into a wonderful congregation, but was then pretty staid. I then tried First Congregational UCC, and I was far and away the youngest person in the church. (I had just returned from graduate school in London, and the elderly man sitting next to me chatted about the last time he was in London…after the war…in 1918.) And finally at the invitation of one of my colleagues at the university, we found our way to the Unitarian Society of Santa Barbara, which looked like a Spanish mission church, had a great pipe organ, a choir that robed and processed, and a minister who had been a United Methodist clergyman. And they welcomed my spiritual quest.

That was what I was seeking in my 20s, having rejected the Protestantism of my youth and the Buddhism I tried to practice in college. (I was what one Buddhist abbot calls a “Barnes and Noble Buddhist:” one who reads books and practices without the benefit of a sangha or community.) And the Unitarians were a great home for me for a while. I loved the liberality of their approach…but for me there was always something missing. (And I don’t mean this as a slam against our Unitarian cousins in any way.) I wasn’t able to identify the absence at that point. It was as if, just at the time I had arrived in a crowded room, someone else had just walked out …and somehow the dynamic changed…the person who was the life of the party wasn’t there.

A few years later when we moved to Boulder, my former wife and I didn’t find a good fit with the Unitarians, and so I convinced her to try First Congregational UCC. Here is what I expected: plenty of men dressed in suits and women in dresses, an order of worship unchanged from my New England Congregational roots, and a sense of propriety and decorum. And their building – a big turn of the century stone edifice – contributed to that sense that this would be a church of the establishment, not the movement. What I found instead was a vital, engaged, non-artificial Christian community that really celebrated the sacraments, and I discovered that one of the missing elements for me had been communion: sharing the living presence of Christ through the elements that represent his body and lifeblood. And in the midst of the freshness of their approach, the church maintained enough tradition in the service to keep us connected with our roots.

Things are not always what they seem. And our expectations are not always so closely in line with what we hoped or feared. So, I invite you to take a moment and consider what you were seeking when you first came to Plymouth and what you expected to find. … Were there pleasant surprises? disappointments? differences? What are the elements you found here that keep you here? Are there friends you couldn’t bear to leave? Is there a point of access to the sacred, to God, in your experience here at Plymouth? Is there a sense that this is a place where people are still trying doggedly, faithfully to help change the world and bring in the kingdom of God here and now and still unfolding?

Our souls yearn for something…what does yours cry out for?

These miraculous, trouble-filled, joyous, frustrating, fascinating, struggling journeys that we call our lives are best when we listen deeply — beyond the blare of the television or the constant diversion of our cell phones. If we don’t take time to look at the wonders of light within our lives and the light that shines from the lives of others, we will miss it…miss the meaning and the depth of life, in all the pain and the joy of it.

We will miss the light of the Spirit.

Do you imagine that there was some hunger, some deep driving force that led three ancient astrologers across the desert sands and into a foreign country? Was their pilgrimage meant to satisfy their intellectual curiosity? What political reality did they hope to uncover? After all, they came to pay homage to a new king. What passion drove them into the court of Rome’s puppet king, Herod, and then to the manger in the animal stalls where an unwed mother laid her baby?

One of the things that motivated the magi is probably something that drew you to this place. No, you didn’t have to cross a desert to get here and your trip to church was not likely as arduous…but yours in a pilgrimage nonetheless.

Perhaps these journeyers, these unlikely heroes, these gift-bearing foreigners are a model for stepping out of our comfort zones in our pursuit of finding “the more,” “the holy,” “the divine,” God, in our midst.

Their expectations may have been to find the establishment, but instead, they helped to found the movement. It is ironic that the church over the millennia has often struggled to become bedfellows with the political and temporal power of government; when all the time, those who follow Christ are doing something very countercultural. Even these astrologers from the East knew divinity when they saw it…not in Herod, not in Caesar, but a helpless peasant, an infant in a coarse bed of straw.

What were the hallmarks of their pilgrimage? To seek new light? To find a different way of seeing the divine in our midst? To share the gifts not just of their wealth but of their very presence?

The magi undertake a classic mythic journey of being called, setting out on a quest, encounter, and return. That is a cycle that we see in our own pilgrimages: we yearn for something more than our affluent culture has to offer; we have an encounter with the sacred and engage a process of transformation; and we go out beyond as changed people who have something to share with others.
We know that they magi “left for their own country by another road.” But we never get to learn what became of them, how their lives might have been transformed once they had gotten home or ways the lives of these pilgrims touched others. One tradition allows that one of the magi started the Coptic church in Egypt, but we really don’t know for certain. What we do know is that their pilgrimage has inspired our creative thinking for 2,000 years and continues to do that today.

In a sense we embody much of this cycle in our mission statement: inviting (being drawn into the quest), transforming (being changed by an encounter with the sacred), and sending (going beyond and sharing).

Sometimes, we start off on a journey of faith not knowing what it is we are seeking…perhaps we just know that something is missing. And then we begin to change…our priorities, our ethics, our concerns shift. And then we are called to risk and to go out beyond ourselves.

As we walk into this new year together, may it be a time of transformation for you, a time of finding deeper wells of faith from which you draw the waters of wisdom, presence, and grace. And may it be a year of transformation for our congregation, as together we follow Christ and seek the realm he proclaimed.

Amen.

© 2019 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact [email protected] for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses.