Ecclesiastes 3.1–11 & Isaiah 60.1–6
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning,
Plymouth Congregational UCC Fort Collins, Colorado
 
I’m not usually one to make New Year’s resolutions, in part because I am no good at keeping them. But we find ourselves together as a church on this last day of 2017, and it seems important to reflect on the past year and also to look ahead. And today is also the seventh day of Christmas, and though you’ll have to go outside to see “seven swans a-swimming,” we in the church still get to ponder the meanings and the potentials of Christmas, even if the presents under the tree have all been opened.
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If there is -– as the writer of Ecclesiastes claims -– a time for all things, then what time is it now? For many of us it seems as if the bitterness of our political discourse over the last year has dominated our thinking and our action. It has imbued some of our daily lives with a sense of fear and anxiety. The threat of a nuclear war with North Korea, threats to deport Dreamers, creating physical or legal walls to keep immigrants out, American withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, the take-back of financial support for the United Nations, the roll-back of protected national monument lands in Utah, the revelation of sexual abuse and harassment by many women, the moral bankruptcy of the religious right, the new tax law that enshrines corporate tax cuts in the hopes that some of the wealth will trickle down, the emasculation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the diminution of the role of science in federal agencies, and the “seven dirty words” that employees of the Centers for Disease Control are forbidden to use in agency budget documents. I’m not forbidden to use them: “science-based,” “fetus,” “transgender,” “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” and “evidence-based.”

Feeling anxious yet? We’re actually seeing some of that anxiety here at Plymouth. I’m hearing it from some of you in conversation, and together we are experiencing it in the nervousness within our congregational family system…it is infecting our common life…how could it not?

Many of us have never lived through a major war…some of you remember World War II and Korea and Vietnam, but for those of us who don’t remember those wars, Afghanistan and Iraq and the Gulf War seem very far away, perhaps because they were not fought by middle-class draftees. But in some ways, this time of national anxiety seems like a time of war…except that not all of us are on the same side. It seems like the fabric of our nation is fraying, and many of us have only lived through “a time to sew” and now we seem to be encountering “a time to tear” and to rend. Perhaps it feels like we are part of Isaiah’s prophecy: “Darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples.”

It is a time like this that the world most needs people like you. It is a time to summon courage…the courage that you may not yet have had the opportunity to test. It is a time that the world most needs the ethical and moral witness of progressive Christianity. It is a time that the world most needs congregations like Plymouth that will stand up, using the life and teachings of Jesus to help steer our nation back toward compassion, justice, peace, freedom, integrity, honesty, selflessness, and generosity.

What are the lessons we might derive during this time when the fabric frays? I think one of the lessons for middle-class folks is that it’s not all about us, that we have to become more active in community life and political life if we want to affect change. I think that for many of us, especially we who are comfortable, it will mean sacrifice for the common good. I think, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy, that it’s time not to ask what Plymouth can do for you, but to ask what you can do for Plymouth… because Plymouth continues to be one of the most critical voices and forces for progressive Christianity and progressive community in the region.

You have been entrusted with the light and love of Christ. I don’t care if you have three advanced degrees or if you never saw the inside of a college classroom, whether you have a three-figure income or whether you are barely making ends meet, whether you feel too old or too young to pitch in, whether your ancestors came from Germany or Georgia or Korea or Kansas. You have been entrusted with the love and light of Christ, not simply so that you can feel warm and comfortable, but so that you can share that love and light with others. It’s time for us to stop worrying about the beauty of our remodeled kitchens and second homes and the newest brewery and instead to start thinking more about the needs of others, the needs of our community, the needs of God’s world.

None of us has the luxury just to bask in the glow of our own wellbeing…because that glow is actually not ours, it is God’s. And that glow isn’t just to help us feel warmth and light…it is to provide warmth and light for God’s world.

You know on Christmas Eve, those of us in the chancel have the best seat in the house, because we get to experience the wave of candlelight that spreads up and down the pews to create a sea of light. One flame makes only small a difference in a dark sanctuary, but the warm glow of hundreds of candles illuminate it in an almost magical way. So it is with the light that each of us has been given to bear. To be sure, we can illumine a few shadowy places on our own, but together, we can become a beacon of hope.

It is easy for us to give ourselves over to despair, fear, hopelessness, and anxiety. But that is not the path you are called to follow as a bearer of Christ’s light. So, let’s get courageous as we finish one year and begin a new one. Let’s not shrink back from the call of our God to make a difference in the world. Let’s not recede into fear, but rather let us empower one another with faith and with light.

We can live our lives from a place of fear and scarcity or we can live our lives from a place of faith and abundance…we just can’t do both with the same time.

I leave you today with the “Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem” by Maya Angelou (NY: Random House, 2005).

Thunder rumbles in the mountain passes
And lightning rattles the eaves of our houses.
Flood waters await us in our avenues.
Snow falls upon snow, falls upon snow to avalanche
Over unprotected villages.
The sky slips low and grey and threatening.

We question ourselves.
What have we done to so affront nature?
We worry, God.
Are you there? Are you there really?
Does the covenant you made with us still hold?
 
Into this climate of fear and apprehension, Christmas enters,
Streaming lights of joy, ringing bells of hope
And singing carols of forgiveness high up in the bright air.
The world is encouraged to come away from rancor,
Come the way of friendship.

It is the Glad Season.
Thunder ebbs to silence and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner.
Flood waters recede into memory.
Snow becomes a yielding cushion to aid us
As we make our way to higher ground.

Hope is born again in the faces of children
It rides on the shoulders of our aged as they walk into their sunsets.
Hope spreads around the earth. Brightening all things,
Even hate which crouches breeding in dark corridors.
 
In our joy, we think we hear a whisper.
At first it is too soft. Then only half heard.
We listen carefully as it gathers strength.
We hear a sweetness.
The word is Peace.
It is loud now. It is louder.
Louder than the explosion of bombs.
 
We tremble at the sound. We are thrilled by its presence.
It is what we have hungered for.
Not just the absence of war. But, true Peace.
A harmony of spirit, a comfort of courtesies.
Security for our beloveds and their beloveds.
 
We clap hands and welcome the Peace of Christmas.
We beckon this good season to wait a while with us.
We, Baptist and Buddhist, Methodist and Muslim, say come. Peace.
Come and fill us and our world with your majesty.

We, the Jew and the Jainist, the Catholic and the Confucian,
Implore you, to stay a while with us.
So we may learn by your shimmering light
How to look beyond complexion and see community.

It is Christmas time, a halting of hate time.

On this platform of peace, we can create a language
To translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.
 
At this Holy Instant, we celebrate the Birth of Jesus Christ
Into the great religions of the world.
We jubilate the precious advent of trust.
We shout with glorious tongues at the coming of hope.
All the earth’s tribes loosen their voices
To celebrate the promise of Peace.
 
We, Angels and Mortals, Believers and Non-Believers,
Look heavenward and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at our world and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at each other, then into ourselves
And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation.
 
Peace, My Brother.
Peace, My Sister.
Peace, My Soul.
​
Amen.
 
 
 
© 2017 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact hal@plymouthucc.org for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses.

Ecclesiastes 3.1-14
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning
Plymouth Congregational UCC Fort Collins, Colorado
January 1, 2017
 
I find it very interesting that the people who choose the texts for the Revised Common Lectionary include this verse for January   1: “It is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil.” I don’t know about you, but over the last ten days,    I’ve consumed far more calories and wine than I typically do, and  it’s nice to have overindulgence affirmed by scripture.

I’m also not typically a person who makes New Year’s resolutions, in part because I have usually found that they don’t  stick (or more truthfully, I don’t stick to them). And this year I’m also not making resolutions linked to the New Year, but I do have some changes that I’m making in my life after a too-close   encounter with my own mortality…but that is a sermon for another day.
Our family had dinner with friends last week, and we were reflecting together on 2016. My friend had  been  out of work  for much of the year and his wife required orthopedic surgery, but it    was also a year when one daughter began to really thrive in high school and the other daughter won a coveted Boettcher scholarship.

And for our family, it has been a mixed year as well, with wonderful travels, sons who are growing and learning, but also a year marked  by the specter of cancer. And I am profoundly grateful to be here today, and to have been here with you on Christmas Eve. You all lift my spirits; and I felt very well prayed for and cared for by you in the three weeks following my surgery. And I  feel  profoundly  grateful also for the medical community here in Fort Collins, and also for having really great medical insurance coverage. (I wish that all of us had both of those things available to us.)

Still, the other night I found myself saying “Thank God 2016 is over,” but a voice inside of me says instead, “Give thanks.” I know that I have more to be thankful for than most people who inhabit God’s Earth. And when reading Ecclesiastes, I also remember that days of sorrow and paired with days of joy. Those pairings are normative within the human condition, but we, most of us, live sheltered lives to a greater or lesser extent. Our culture doesn’t talk much about dealing with difficulty as much as it does insulating ourselves from it with material pleasure and technology.

I think the way most of us raising kids today think, we have bred them to not expect adversity, sorrow, death, or war. And we want to shield them from such things. Brené Brown, the wise observer of human behavior (and progressive Episcopalian) made

this observation: “Hope is not an emotion. Hope is a cognitive, behavioral process that we learn when we experience adversity, when we have relationships that are trustworthy, when people have faith in our ability to get out of a jam…. The most beautiful things I look back on in my life are coming out from underneath things I didn’t know I could get out from underneath. The moments I look back in my life and think, ‘God, those are the moments that made me,’ were moments of struggle.”i

Whatever we struggle with in 2017 will be a mixture of weeping and laughter, of mourning and dancing, of love and hate,   of healing and breaking down, of seeking and losing. That is the pattern of life as it is. One of the characteristics of the book of Ecclesiastes is that the writer tells it like it is, without too much sugar-coating. His vision just doesn’t pair up very well with what  we 21st century Americans are told in the media to expect…which is that we are entitled to be insulated, entertained, have access to cheap manufactured goods, really fast technology, freedom from body odor, and more calories than we need to survive.

2017 will be a different year for us as well with the change of administration on January 20. Regardless of where you find   yourself on the political spectrum, it is going to be different. And I don’t think any of us knows just what that will look like. (Think about it: who would have suspected that a Democratic president would be getting tough on Russia, while a Republican president- elect wants to sweep a Russian cyberattack under the carpet?) These are not normal times.

And I think that it is normal for us as a nation to be feeling some anxiety about how governance is going to play out both nationally and internationally. We have the threat of a renewed nuclear arms race, a black hole developing around not just the Affordable Care Act, but around Medicare and Medicaid, not to mention the perennial issues of global warming, peace in the Middle East, and terror that knows no borders.

But we also have some things going for us: a strong economy (albeit one that has not affected many blue-collar workers to the same extent it has information workers); an  environment  that  is rich beyond measure…if we can just learn to take good care of it; a Constitution that preserves the rights of free speech, freedom of religion, and freedom to assemble.

We should not take any of those for granted. And we may be called to put our faith into action more than we have in recent  years. We may need to re-read the Beatitudes from Luke’s account
— blessing the poor, the hungry, those who weep now, the hated, the excluded — and we may need to learn to love our enemies more fully and deeply, which is a tall order.

These are heady days for the mainline church, especially those of us who find ourselves in the progressive wing of the church. A recent article in The Atlantic claims that the election result “is bringing progressive Protestants back to church.”ii And I have sensed that here at Plymouth…but it goes a lot deeper than church attendance.

We are going to have to listen even more closely to the prophetic words of Jesus than we ever have. We are going to need   to be willing to make sacrifices greater than we ever have. We are going to need to come together more than we ever have. We are going need to build bridges better than we ever have. Because God needs us to stand in the gap between where humanity is and where Christ calls us to be as we work for the kingdom he proclaimed.

What I am talking about is not being a good Democrat or a good Republican. I am talking about becoming a better follower of Jesus. Maybe it is time for us not to make a resolution…but to make a difference.

It is not that this is a exactly a new course for us at Plymouth, nor is it a new course for the church, which is always truer to the gospel when we get closer to the Jesus of history and function, as Emerson put it, more as the movement and less as the  establishment. Think about the history of our Congregational and  UCC tradition and the history of this church…we have seldom   settled for the status quo. Throughout our history, we have been a church that unites people in personal faith and social responsibility.

For everything, there is a season. And the season for lackadaisical faith is gone. We are moving into a time when our mettle will be tested as Christians. Will we be up to the challenge?   I am confident that we will. And the good news is that we are not alone…other people of faith will stand with us, and God stands behind us. And whatever we do, we will do it with a sense of faith,  a sense of love, and a sense of joy. That is what it means to be God’s children.

I leave you on this New Year’s Day, the last Sunday of Christmastide, with the words of Howard Thurman, a 20th century Christian mystic:
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and the princes are home, 
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,
​The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken, To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner, To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people, To make music in the heart.
Amen.
 
© 2017 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact hal@plymouthucc.org for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses.
 
i Brené Brown. “Courage is Born from Struggle” on public radio’s On Being
ii The Atlantic, "Trump Is Bringing Progressive Protestants Back to Church," Dec. 11, 2016.