“What Are You Waiting for?”
Jeremiah 33.14-16 & Luke 21.25-36
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning, Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado
27 November 2022 (Advent I)
 
You have not heard me preach a lot about the Second Coming or the end times, because neither is a particularly large part of our theology. But that was not true for many of our earliest forebears in the faith, who thought it was coming right around the corner.

The earliest followers of the Way of Jesus, most of whom worshiped with Jewish communities, had some sense of apocalyptic literature from The Book of Daniel (where we hear that mysterious moniker, “The Son of Man”) and from sections of the major prophets like Jeremiah and Isaiah. And the words from Luke’s Gospel, likely written at the end of the first century, 50 or 60 years after Jesus’ crucifixion, point toward the Second Coming.

Jesus’ followers soon realized that his execution was not God’s final word, that there had to be a next chapter unfolding with the empty tomb and post-resurrection experiences. Jesus had come proclaiming the kingdom of God: a new world in which life would be organized the way God intended, rather than the way normal path of civilization and the resulting Empire ruled things.

Many Jews in the first century anticipated the coming of the Messiah as a military leader who would restore Jewish home rule in the homeland and eject the occupying Romans. They didn’t get the Messiah they were expecting, instead they got a subversive sage who proclaimed an alternative to the violence, greed, and injustice that were normal in that civilization. I wish I could go back and sing a few lines of the Stones’ song to them: “You can’t always get what you want…You can’t always get what you want…But if you try sometimes, you just might find…You get what you need.” They wanted a generalissimo and instead they got nonviolent Jesus, which is actually what the world needed.

Luke quotes Jesus as saying, “There will be great earthquakes and wide-scale food shortages and epidemics. There will also be terrifying sights and great signs in the sky.” Doesn’t that sound a bit like what is happening today? We know all about epidemics! And climate change is upon us. We have distressed the earth and it is resulting in rising sea levels and all kinds of chaos that it is difficult to foresee.

Wouldn’t it be great if God would just do a big clean-up and let us start over in a world where we cared for Creation and for each other? That’s the underlying message of the tale of Noah and the great flood, and I’m not so sure how great that would be for us. Or God could send Jesus back for “The Kingdom of God, Part Two” (for those who didn’t get it the first time). That is what Luke describes when he writes, “When you see these things taking place, you know the Kingdom of God is near.” For first-century Jews, religious and national crisis was writ large by the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD by the army of Rome.

There was expectation among Jesus’ earliest followers that something radical was going to happen to clean up the injustice of Empire.

Christians have waited for more than 2,000 years for the Second Coming. Was it just that the timing was off when Luke writes, “this generation won’t pass away until everything has happened?” Maybe. Advent is all about waiting, but, my friends, 2,000 is a very long wait.

I don’t think their timing was off. But I think they missed something that Jesus said while he was still teaching and preaching in the Galilee. It’s a radical little nugget of truth that is so volatile (kind of like, say, a mustard seed) that it isn’t even included in the Revised Common Lectionary.

I don’t think the early Christians’ timing was poor. I think that some of their eyes were closed, and their ears stopped up. They missed it! The Kingdom was right there in front of them all along. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, they could have gone home to the Kingdom of God anytime they wished, and they didn’t even have to click the heels of their ruby slippers. They just had to live into it, even under the boot of Roman oppression.

Here is what they missed, which we find earlier in Luke’s gospel. “Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed [like earthquakes, epidemics, or changes in the sky]; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.”[1]

The Kingdom of God is among you. Have Christians been waiting for something that has been available to them for 2,000 years? We have been shown the wisdom and the way to live out the kingdom or kin-dom or realm of God. We’ve had this knowledge for two millennia, so why are we not willing to live into it? What do you think: why haven’t Christians, why haven’t WE, lived into the Kingdom of God and created the Beloved Community? I think I know at least one answer. Being a part of God’s Kingdom is costly. It requires self-giving love. It requires putting the needs of the community above the needs of the self. And as Jesus shows time and again, it can even mean putting the needs of the new family in Christ ahead of the needs of one’s biological family.

Advent is a season of waiting, of longing for a world that is closer to what the God of justice and peace intends for us and for all of creation.

The earliest Christians were waiting the Second Coming, yet that may not be a big part of your faith journey. Isn’t it time we paid more attention to the “First Coming,” rather than waiting around for the Second? For a few thousand years, emperors and bishops, priests, and pastors have often considered the message of Jesus too hot to handle. If Jesus is Lord, doesn’t that imply that Caesar is not? If we pledge allegiance to the Kingdom of God, where does that leave our patriotism? If we live out self-giving love, where does that leave the market economy on Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

In 313, Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, legalizing Christianity. A short 12 years later, in 325, he called the Council of Nicaea to institutionalize and unify the doctrine of the church, and the creed that emerged from that council says only this about the life and teachings of Jesus: He “became incarnate and became man, and suffered, and rose again on the third day.” There is no mention of the kingdom of God. No reference to the Beatitudes or to what Jesus did. Nothing about the message of parables. Nothing about love. The church, which had been counter-cultural, became the establishment instead of becoming a movement. That is what happens when Empire melds with and supersedes religion. And it fuels Christian Nationalism in our country today.

So, what are we waiting for? The Second Coming? The Rapture? I suspect that none of you are waiting for those things to happen. Are we waiting for somebody else to “do” faith for us? Do we wait for “somebody else” to step up and step in when we share ministry and mission in this place? We are the movement!

The Kingdom of is among us, here and now and still unfolding! Even though we may never see the reign of God in its fullness, I deeply appreciate the way our congregation acts for justice, peace, and inclusion and engages in acts of compassion with one another. That gives me tremendous hope. At Plymouth, we do our best (however imperfectly) to keep Jesus at the forefront, rather than Caesar or doctrine, dogma, or ancient creed. In the final analysis, love wins. During this Advent season, may each of us deepen our journey as followers of Jesus. And may every heart prepare him room. Amen.
 
© 2022 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact [email protected] for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses.

[1] Luke 17.20

Grief & Change & Joy
Jeremiah 4.23-28a & Psalm 31.1-5,9-10,14b-15a
Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Plymouth Congregational Church, UCC
The Rev. Jane Anne Ferguson
 
The images in our scripture texts today echo the inner landscape of grief as I have experienced and while everyone’s experience of grief is different, I’m guessing that some of these images may resonate with you. The sorrow, despair, and anger, the need for solace and help that grief brings are held in these texts. This day in September, 9/11, has held cries and echoes of grief in our nation for 21 years. Each year we remember when terrorist extremists attacked the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington, DC and attempted to attack our nation’s capital. We have each experienced many kinds of grief since then or before then. and acutely so in the last two and a half years. New grief brings up old grief. Grief is more a part of the landscape of our lives than we want to acknowledge, and it has always been so for human being. Listen with me to these ancient words of scripture from a prophet grieving for his nation, Israel. And from a poet, a song-writer, singing a grieving prayer for protection from the sorrows of the world.
 
Jeremiah 4
23I looked at the earth, and it was without shape or form; at the heavens and there was no light. 24I looked at the mountains and they were quaking; all the hills were rocking back and forth. 25I looked and there was no one left; every bird in the sky had taken flight. 26I looked and the fertile land was a desert; all its towns were in ruins before the [Holy ONE], before [the] fury. 27The [Holy ONE] proclaims: The whole earth will become a desolation, but I will not destroy it completely. 28Therefore, the earth will grieve …
Bible, CEB Common English Bible with Apocrypha - eBook [ePub] (Kindle Locations 29664-29676). Kindle Edition.
 
Psalm 31
I take refuge in you, LORD. Please never let me be put to shame. Rescue me by your righteousness! 2Listen closely to me! Deliver me quickly; be a rock that protects me; be a strong fortress that saves me! 3You are definitely my rock and my fortress. Guide me and lead me for the sake of your good name! 4Get me out of this net that's been set for me because you are my protective fortress. 5I entrust my spirit into your hands; you, [Holy ONE], God of faithfulness-- you have saved me. … 9Have mercy on me, [Holy God], because I'm depressed. My vision fails because of my grief, as do my spirit and my body. 10My life is consumed with sadness; my years are consumed with groaning. Strength fails me because of my suffering; my bones dry up. … 14… [Yet]I trust you, [GOD]! I affirm, "You are my God." 15My future is in your hands. …
Bible, CEB Common English Bible with Apocrypha - eBook [ePub] (Kindle Locations 20310-20340). Kindle Edition.
 
It came as a shock to me at the age of twenty-four that grief would be a part of my whole life. I guess I thought that grief was something you could avoid if you worked hard at having a happy ever after and worked hard at being a good person, a good Christian. But at twenty-four, I learned that, indeed, bad things happen to good people when my youngest sister died in a car accident at the age of sixteen. Not her fault or the fault of the teenage driver who was her friend. Someone else’s mistake. Still, it happened and could not be undone. Big grief, in my face.

We all come to a reckoning with individual grief at some point in life – through a death, an illness, a job loss, a relationship loss. If we are lucky, we first learn as children surrounded by loving companions, parents, family to grieve through the loss of a pet. This teaches us in a very real but gentler situation the ways of sorrow and how to mourn, how to externalize the pain in our hearts through ritual and words. Beyond our individual griefs are our experiences, like today, 9/11, of communal grief. You can probably each name your first realization of communal grief. My first was as a second grader on the playground in Fort Worth, Texas, when the announcement came that the president, John F. Kennedy, had been shot and killed in our neighboring city, Dallas. Our children and youth today have witnessed with us too many of these communal/national/worldwide events of grief in the last several years.

Grief is a part of life. Sorrow is a part of life. Do any of us like this? No. Our culture considers grief to be the enemy of joy in our lives. How can anything be right, be okay, be normal when we are grieving? The pain is too great. It hurts too much. So, if you are anything like me, perhaps, you sometimes try to deny the grief, compartmentalize it, to move through it. You push it aside to find meaning in your work or in helping other people, or in your family, your hobbies. We can focus on anything, even to the point of addiction, to avoid grief - work, entertainment, volunteering, exercise, relationships, substances from coffee to sugar, to alcohol.  Anything to not feel the pain. So that we can make it through another day. We may run from grief, but we cannot hide because we hold grief in our bodies no matter how hard we try to ignore it. And grief comes with every change in life, every change. Even good change.  

The prophet, Jeremiah, whom scholars call the “weeping prophet,” lamented all the changes coming to the people of Israel, with their idolatrous ways, as Jerusalem was invaded, and temple torn down. His world was drastically changed…we might being feeling the same as we grieve with the people of Ukraine and as we come to grips with climate change. “The mountains are quaking; all the hills were rocking back and forth. … there is no one left; every bird in the sky had taken flight. …the fertile land is a desert; all its towns were in ruins…the earth is grieving.” The psalmist cries out for us, “Holy ONE, listen closely to me! …. Guide me. … I entrust my spirit into your hands… My vision fails because of my grief, as do my spirit and my body. [Yet]I trust you!  … My future is in your hands. …” The psalmist’s Hebrew name for God in this song is,” el emet, the God who can be relied on and believed in, trusted in.”[i] When I feel my deepest moments of grief, I cling to trust in this same God, trusting that she will continue to be who she has steadfastly been revealed to be through the changes of millennia.

Change is always with us. Grief at some level is always with us. What are we to do but soldier on, gritting our teeth? I have felt this way….have you? So much so that I was surprised to read an essay by social activist leader, Malkia Devich-Cyril, former executive director of MediaJustice, inviting me to befriend grief.  What if grief is not the enemy? What if we can learn about change and joy in the very middle of grief?  This is what Malkia learned about the death of her mother from sickle cell anemia and the death of her wife from cancer, both at ages way too young.[ii] 

Prompted by the experience and work of Malkia Devich-Cyril and adrienne maree brown, her colleague and friend, I am learning that grief is holy and necessary for real change. “To have a movement that breathes,” writes Malkia, “you must build a movement with the capacity to grieve.”[iii] These two women of color have been working for and in social change movements for over twenty-five years, so I trust their observations along with the words of the ancient prophet and psalmist. We live in and work with this beloved community of faith, which is also a social change movement. We are the movement of the kingdom, the kin-dom of God. Jesus, our movement leader, knew that grief was a skill for change. He wept at the death of this friend, Lazarus. He wept over Jerusalem, the City of God, that struggled with oppression, with greed, with poverty. Jesus knew that grief is holy. Grief is a friend of God. And grief can be our friend, if we allow it to move through our bodies, teaching us to embrace change, to love and serve with more compassion, to see each other and the earth as God’s beloveds.
To begin, we remember that grief is non-linear. It is a time-traveling emotion that appears again and again in our lives in new and old forms, for new and old reasons. It is iterative and repetitive. It spirals through life even when things are going great, even when we are rejoicing, even in our joy.[iv] Joy is not the opposite of grief. It is a beloved sibling of grief. The opposite of grief is indifference. If we truly do not care, we will not grieve. Grief is a profound out-pouring of love and in love there this always joy, even if it is sitting right next to grief.

If understanding grief is a skill for understanding life, for understanding change, for understanding more about faith, what do we need to know?

• We need to know it is okay to feel the sorrow of loss….to really feel it in our bodies, in our bones, in our broken hearts. It is always okay to feel grief. And to pay attention to it in our physical beings.
• We also need to know it is okay and necessary to seek solace and comfort when we are feeling grief, rather than isolate in our grief. We must learn to tell, to confess, our grief and not to hold it in with no outlet. We must learn to mourn, which is the outward expression of grief. This is why we have rituals and services to express our grief.
• As we learn to mourn, we will learn from others who grieve. All the great artists, the poets, the musicians, the writers, the dancers, the painters, the sculptors, and the social change activists…those who work for social justice… offer us inspiration. For they express grief, as well as joy, through their work….we can mourn and rejoice with them in theaters and galleries and concerts and at protests and at soup kitchens and Habitat builds and working to advocate change. We remember with them that “only those who grieve profoundly, love deeply.”[v]  
• Then grounded in safe grief that is expressed, that seeks solace and is not isolated, that finds inspiration from others… we will be led to take our own actions that lead to change in our lives, in the lives of others, in the world. [vi]
  
  

The poet Kahlil Gibran wrote, “Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper your sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”[vii]

This is what we learn when we befriend our grief. We learn that If you don’t really care about something, if you are indifferent to it, you don’t grieve when you lose it. So, I suggest to all of you in this room that because you have chosen to come to worship in a faith community, to be in community, if only for an hour, that you are not indifferent to Life. You love Life. You are working to love yourself in God’s image and to love others. You are not indifferent. And so, you are most likely bringing your grief here with you, large or small, personal and/or communal. And you are bringing your greatest joys which may be closely bound to your grief. A community of faith is a safe place to become grounded in our grief. This is a place where we learn with others to grieve, to lament, to rejoice and to give thanks. I’m glad you are here today.

That was a lot of information about a subject that we don’t like to talk about – grief. Take a moment and let whatever you need to hear, sink in. As the psalmist reminds us, this is a place of refuge in the presence of the Holy and one another. Remember that you are breathing. (pause)

After the service today, as a way of continuing this service and grieving together, you are invited to make a prayer flag and place it on our tree there in the yard. You will find the flags or streamers and markers in the Fellowship Hall. Write your grief, your prayer, your lament, your joy on the flag and place it on the tree. This is an act of mourning that can take the grief you feel and move it through your body. It can be an act of memory and thanksgiving that we do together on this day that we remember grief.

Let’s pray together: Holy ONE, you are with us before we call your name. Teach us to grieve so that we can in turn give and receive your love. Teach us to befriend the grief of life’s changes that we may be agents of your change for justice and love in our world. Amen.


[i] James L. May, Psalms, INTERPRETATION, A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, (John Knox Press, Louisville, KY: 1994, 143).
[ii] Malkia Devich-Cyril, “To Give Your Hands to Freedom, First Give Them to Grief,” ed. adrienne maree brown, Holding Change, The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation, (AK Press, Chico, CA: 2021, 64-79).
[iii] Ibid., 79.
[iv] adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy, Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, (AK Press, Chico, CA: 2017, 105-107).
[v] Devich-Cyril, 78.
[vi] Ibid., 75-78.
[vii] Ibid., 78.

Heartbreak That Leads to Hope
A sermon related to Jeremiah 8:18-22 and 31:2-6, and to Prophetic Imagination
 
Central Focus:
The Prophetic journey through grief to hope.
 
Jer 8:18-22
I drown in grief.
    I’m heartsick.
Oh, listen! Please listen! It’s the cry of my dear people
    reverberating through the country.
Is God no longer in Zion?
    Has the Sovereign gone away?
Can you tell me why they flaunt their plaything-gods,
    their silly, imported no-gods before me?
The crops are in, the summer is over,
    but for us nothing’s changed.
    We’re still waiting to be rescued.
For my dear broken people, I’m heartbroken.
    I weep, seized by grief.
Are there no healing ointments in Gilead?
    Isn’t there a doctor in the house?
So why can’t something be done
    to heal and save my dear, dear people?
 
Jer 31:2 - 6
This is the way God put it:
 
“They found grace out in the desert,
    these people who survived the killing.
Israel, out looking for a place to rest,
    met God out looking for them!”
God told them, “I’ve never quit loving you and never will.
    Expect love, love, and more love!
And so now I’ll start over with you and build you up again,
    dear young and innocent Israel.
You’ll resume your singing,
    grabbing tambourines and joining the dance.
You’ll go back to your old work of planting vineyards
    on the Samaritan hillsides,
And sit back and enjoy the fruit--
    oh, how you’ll enjoy those harvests!
The time’s coming when watchmen will call out
    from the hilltops of Ephraim:
‘On your feet! Let’s go to Zion,
    go to meet our God!’”
 
 
For the Word of God in Scripture
For the word of God among us
For the word of God with in us
Thanks be to God
 
What is breaking your heart right now?
What is breaking your heart right now?
 
Or if that doesn’t resonate for you today:
What has really broken your heart in your life in the past?
 
What is breaking your heart is a question we use in the Inner King Training that I sometimes take time away from church to lead (like this past May). It turns out this a potent question in helping people experience unconditional love and blessing in their lives. That includes being a portal for people of Christian faith, especially a people professing the social Gospel, the prophetic Gospel, a Gospel that might change lives and our collective life as humanity.
 
If you have been able to keep feeling during these times of pandemic, of rising inequality, of authoritarian vitriol and violence, and of the earth’s struggle to bear the burdens we humans put on her, you likely have experienced heartbreak. If you are part of a historically marginalized group, you have known it most, if not all, of your life. There are so many opportunities for heartbreak in this life.
 
We just heard the prophetic voice speak of heartbreak. 
In the first part of the Scripture reading we just heard, Chapter 8 of Jeremiah, the prophet channels the voice of God, broken-hearted for the 6th century BCE siege of Jerusalem that led to the downfall of the southern realm of Judah and the exile of many into Babylon. The Divine pleads like a parent over the bed of her dying child, heartbroken that there is no balm in Gilead, no physician to stem the suffering and death. Jeremiah speaks of drowning in grief and wondering if God has simply left their land. Jeremiah is expressing heartbreak, plain and simple, as he sees destruction coming for the people.
 
The prophet who is sees with the lens of the Divine, feels with the heart of the Divine, encounters the reality of the day with the sense of the Divine. And, so often, what is seen and felt and sensed is the reality of the empire system of Pharaoh or Caesar or Putin or Mao or Trump or whichever representative of the domination system is current. For those who are in touch with the love and justice of God, with the Good News of Jesus, or with the loving and liberated state named in another faith tradition, this encounter with the system of empire is painful and truly heartbreaking. Instead of grace there is harsh judgment, instead of freedom there is bondage and oppression, instead of connection and community there is alienation and suspicion, instead of cooperation and solidarity there is accusation and fear, instead of peace there is violence, instead of the growing and life-giving power of the earth there is a sense life draining away as the earth is dominated.
 
A powerful book, The Prophetic Imagination, by Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann reminds us that the Prophetic Imagination begins with the willingness and ability to feel anguish and to express grief in the face of and the experience of empire or empire consciousness, the consciousness of domination and of fear and separation by "isms." Simply put, in the face of this encounter, for the faithful prophet, there is heartbreak.
 
Have we allowed ourselves to feel the heartbreak of that gap, the gap between life and history as we’ve so often known it and the Beloved Community as God has dreamed it?

That heartbreak is our connection to our yearning for God’s intended vision of justice and peace and freedom.  And that kind of yearning is a source of life-force, soul-force, Spirit-force. It is our deep tunnel to hope, our birth canal to new hope and life in God, to the alternative consciousness of God’s faithful community.
 
For the Hebrew tradition, this yearning life-force feeling generates prophetic vision and prophetic proclamation.  The prophets were the ones to herald God’s dream, God’s activity and coming, not as fortune tellers/future predictors, but as voices of the present moment seeing into the deeper currents of God’s longing and God’s activity to liberate. When God heard the cry of the Hebrews, Moses was called to proclaim another reality amidst the darkness of slavery and Pharoah’s way of thinking. When the Israelites had established themselves in Palestine, even to the point in Solomon’s time of building a temple for God to live in, the prophets eventually spoke against the regime, seeing that now Israel had become like Pharaoh, content with a status quo that tried to domesticate God and ignore the cries of the oppressed and ignore the imbalance and injustice of such unequal sharing of the blessings of life.
 
As Brueggemann notes, it is the prophets’ job to bring forth a new consciousness, an alternative to the imperial consciousness of Pharoah, of the established monarchy, of the Roman Empire, and, more recently, of the European colonizing powers including, eventually, the United States. For us, in the USA, our dreams of freedom and justice for all have been imperfect, unevenly distributed, obstructed, distorted, and blinded because they were contaminated by colonial, empire building consciousness. Our self-evident truths cannot be realized in this state of mind and heart. We need God’s alternative consciousness, the alternative sacred vision, the Divine Heart that we witnessed in the Good News proclaimed and lived by Jesus.
 
Prophets old and new bring forth God’s alternative consciousness in two ways; by speaking another truth to the current colonial or empire consciousness and then by energizing those open to the new way, the new Light amidst darkness. But prophets critique the old most effectively not by moralizing, but by presenting their heart break and the heart break of God for what is happening.  Amidst the illusion and trance and numbness of the empire’s status quo that says, "Everything is all right. Just go shop. Watch TV. Cruise the internet. Just let us have more authority and we’ll make it all great again," the prophet instead remains vulnerable to wounding, remains compassionate and therefore awake, and from that place voices the heart break of God, expressing the grief of those whose cries refuse to be heard. 
 
The wise elder, scientist, and earth advocate Jane Goodall years ago, upon realizing the profound intelligence and heart of chimpanzees was heartbroken to know these kin of ours were locked up in research labs. She set about to get the social, intelligent, and feeling chimps released from isolated 5x5 iron bar research cages. But she did it, not by yelling and pointing fingers, but by staying close to her heart break, telling stories of intelligent, feeling chimpanzees to those organizing such research. Her storytelling powerfully proclaimed another story, another narrative of what chimpanzees were and what a respectful relationship to them would be.
 
The cautionary tale here for those of us open to the prophetic and to worthy causes is to make sure our voices do not merely become brittle, partisan, moralizing voices pointing the finger at the evil "other." The prophets instead rooted their voice in the Divine heartbreak of the ones crying out.  They broke the spell of the dominant status quo, not with white papers or resolutions or character assassinations, but with images and voices of the grief of those unheard and unseen, of the pain of the inconvenient truths of the empire, and with the proclamation of the Presence of the God of compassion and justice.
 
It is only after the prophet proclaims Divine heartbreak and acknowledges the felt cost of the imperial consciousness, the injustice built into colonial achievements, and pain exacted by those illusory values that enslave or dominate or discriminate against some for the purpose of others that the prophet can bring the energy of hope to those poor in Spirit, to those crying out, to those broken-hearted ones.  So in the second part of the reading we heard today, Jeremiah, in the midst of the darkness of Exile, after naming the grief and heartbreak, can proclaim God’s faithfulness in a new day, a day of justice when those who plant shall enjoy the fruit, when those who have been crying shall sing with joy again.
 
Grief is a way of connecting. The heartbreak we allow ourselves to feel if we acknowledge the suffering of those shut out of history’s voice, those left behind in globalization, those impacted by global warming, those discriminated against, is a way to reconnect with those marginalized people of the human family.   And this applies to ourselves and our inner life as well. Remember, last week, Pastor Jane Anne spoke of the macro and micro, of the patterns that repeat in large and small forms in the world. So, too, for our collective and individual lives. The prophet speaks to society and the empires of history, but also to the ways of empire we internalize, dominating and neglecting some parts within ourselves.  Then we shut out God’s Grace and justice within. That is also worthy of grief.  But feeling heartbreak for those parts of ourselves that are dominated, neglected, wounded, or silenced is a way of re-connecting to those parts within. For the world and the worlds within us, heartbreak is the prophetic way of acknowledging what is not right or well and beginning the process of the re-igniting the hope that brings it back from Exile and death to healing and life.
 
Following the Divine Heart through heartbreak, Jeremiah is able to find hope. Did you hear it in the reading?
God told them, “I’ve never quit loving you and never will.
    Expect love, love, and more love!
And so now I’ll start over with you and build you up again,
…
You’ll resume your singing,
    grabbing tambourines and joining the dance.
You’ll go back to your old work of planting vineyards
    on the Samaritan hillsides,
And sit back and enjoy the fruit--
    oh, how you’ll enjoy those harvests!
 
The time’s coming when watchmen will call out
    from the hilltops of Ephraim:
‘On your feet! Let’s go to Zion,
    go to meet our God!’”
 
How beautiful!
What good news for the poor of the world and for the poor parts within us!
 
I invite us to be a prophetic community of faith like this, honoring the prophetic way of knowing and expressing the Divine heartbreak and grief of what is not well, what is in Exile, what is worthy of tears in the dark places of history and society, and of the self and soul.
 
In the way of the faithful prophet, heartbreak is the beginning of the journey to Divine Hope. Let us have faith in both the heartbreak and the hope. AMEN

Jeremiah 33.14-16
First Sunday in Advent, Year C
Plymouth Congregational, UCC
Fort Collins, CO
 
Welcome to Advent! And Happy New Year! You may remember that the first Sunday in Advent is the first day of a new liturgical and new lectionary year. We begin anew each Advent in our journey through the stories of our lives with the Holy in scripture, worship and community. The Hebrew scripture lectionary text for today sets us on this new journey following the ancient and trusted paths of God. Our text comes from the prophet, Jeremiah, who is speaking to the people of Jerusalem as they are once again threatened by the Babylonians with colonization and exile. The people are living in fear, not sure how to respond to another looming threat - yet again. Times are very uncertain. Where is God in the midst of this crisis? Is God in the midst of it? Jeremiah brings the people a word of hope.
 
14The time is coming, declares the HOLY ONE, when I will fulfill my gracious promise with the people of Israel and Judah. 15In those days and at that time, I will raise up a righteous branch from David's line, who will do what is just and right in the land. 16In those days, Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is what [Jerusalem, the city of God,] will be called: YAHWEH, the HOLY ONE, Is Our Righteousness. - Common English Bible with Apocrypha - eBook [ePub] (Kindle Locations 31226-31231).
 
Jerusalem, the city of God, the dwelling place of the Holy in the temple’s Ark of the Covenant will be called: YAHWEH, the HOLY ONE, Is Our Righteousness. Jerusalem, will be a place called “God is our righteousness.” I find that intriguing! The time is coming! In those days, there will be a place called righteousness led by one who is part of the righteous branch of leaders descending from God’s chosen king, David. In fact, in some translations this leader is synonymous with Jerusalem and is also named, “God is our righteousness.” This was a word of great hope for our ancient ancestors in faith. There will be a place called righteousness! Hope in this place that you already know and call home.

When our Advent candle lighting liturgy asked us to ponder where we find hope, where did you go? Was it a hard place to find? Did you go to an event? A person? An activity that you participate in regularly? A community? Did you look for God? Outside of yourself? Or did you go inside where the Holy dwells in each of us?

I did not find this an easy question. And I was the one who put the question into our liturgy for today, knowing it was uncomfortable question and that I did not have a ready answer. The outcomes of the two trials that have held our national attention in the last few weeks came to my mind, the trial of those convicted of killing Ahmaud Armery and the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse. One of those outcomes gave me hope. But the other did not.

Then I wondered why I was always looking outside myself for evidence of hope. Do you do that? I think it’s a common practice. Then, I thought, perhaps, it would be best to begin my search for hope by going within to rest in the presence of God, then look at the world through the lens of the Holy. Isn’t that what I profess and preach and counsel - living within the steady, abundant, forgiving lovingkindness of the Holy One who lives within all of us, within all of creation and whose very being we live within?

Advent prompts us to live with this uncomfortable question: where do we find real Hope? Are we always waiting for it? Is it always in those days that are coming? Or can we claim it in the present of our lives? The prophet, Jeremiah prompts us to have hope in the coming of a “place called God is our righteousness.” His geographic and metaphoric place was Jerusalem. Obviously, Jerusalem, that holy and fractured city of God, is not within our immediate geographic landscape. Where is our “place called God is Our righteousness” where we find the hope of Advent?

Righteousness is a funny, old-fashioned kind of word in our times. We most often hear it used in combination with the word, “self.” No one likes a self-righteous person, someone who thinks they know better than the rest of us how to live, what decisions to make, what is definitively and ethically right or wrong for everyone else. A judgmental kind of person whom we would hope follows their own advice, yet sometimes we are not sure if they do.

In the Hebrew scriptures, “righteousness” frequently used to describe God’s faithful people in contrast to the “wicked” who have departed from God. In that context righteousness does have ethical implications that can direct our lives. Yet these are encompassed in something bigger that right and wrong rules. Righteousness is the Hebrew scriptures is following the path, the way of the Holy ONE through all of life’s inner and outer journeys. As one contemporary Hebrew scholar writes, “A righteous person is not one who lives a religiously pious life, the common interpretation of this word, he [or she] is one who follows the correct path, the path (way) of God.”[i] What is the pathway of God? Scripture gives us so many images and instructions, The prophet, Micah, tells us, “To do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with our God.” Jesus showed in his living, as well as in his teachings, how to love God, neighbor and self, how to live within the unfolding and ever-enlivening realm of God’s justice, peace and love. He followed God’s pathway through life to death and beyond to new life.

Each Sunday we gather in worship to hear and to respond to another way to follow in God’s path. Each Sunday, we celebrate God’s ways are challenged by God’s ways as God’s beloved community of faith named Plymouth UCC in Fort Collins, CO. Could it be that we are already living into a place called ‘God in Our Righteousness,” our right path?

In this moment of worship? This moment of worship on the first Sunday of Advent in 2021, begins a new journey through a new liturgical year. What does it mean for us to seek God’s hope in our place called “God is Our Righteousness” in our internal lives of faith and in our external life of faith in community?

Lutheran pastor and author, the Rev. Heidi Neumark, loves Advent and loves to write about it. She has been the pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Manhattan, NYC since 2003. Prior to that she spent nineteen years as pastor and community organizer at Transfiguration Lutheran in the South Bronx. She writes prophetically from the experience of working with the poor and disenfranchised. Her words on Advent stir me. She writes, “Probably the reason I love Advent so much is that it is a reflection of how I feel most of the time. … Advent unfailingly embraces and comprehends my reality. And what is that? I think of the Spanish word, anhelo, or longing. Advent is when the church can no longer contain its unfulfilled desire and the cry of anhelo, bursts forth: … O Come, O Come Emmanuel.”[ii]

On this first Sunday in Advent we can say with longing, “Come, Holy One who became Emmanuel, God-with-us! We long for your presence to transform us and then through us to transform our world that still bends toward the violence and greed of empire, of the ruling Babylons of our day. Come, lead us to the place, the life, called “God is Our Righteousness!” Lead us to live within God’s ways and remember that God’s ways live within us. Come! We long to stand confidently within Jeremiah’s prophecy, the days are surely coming! Without reservation, we long to rejoice in the coming of God-With-Us, which has already been, yet is now, and will be again and again and again!

As the days in the season of Advent literally grow shorter and hold darkness, we realize that the “dark”, often a place of unknowing, is the place that holds the mystery of God’s presence. We do not always know how to hope, yet we dare to hope for we live together God who is our right path. We do not always have the light to transform injustice into justice, but we stand with Emmanuel, God-With-Us, in the Jerusalem of this beloved community, that promises to be a place of God’s righteousness. We do not, and may not in our lifetimes, see all the transformation and renewal of our broken, yet beautiful, world that we long to see, to experience. Yet we stand in the hope of Advent, of longing, of the promises of the prophet, together with the Holy ONE and we are not alone. Others have gone before us, many others long with us and others will follow as we “trust in the slow work of God.”[iii]

The Jesuit scholar and lover of God, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, reminds us, “We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—and that it may take a very long time.”[iv] Our longing is holy. It “trusts in the slow work of God.”[v] It anchors us, grounds us in the place within and without called “God is Our Righteousness.” It is the Advent Hope that can carry us through all seasons. Thanks be to God. Amen.

©The Reverend Jane Anne Ferguson, 2021 and beyond. May be reprinted with permission only.

[i] Jeff A. Benner, https://www.ancient-hebrew.org/definition/righteous.htm.
[ii] Gary W. Charles, “Homiletical Perspective”, Jerimiah 33.14-16, Year C, Feasting on the Word Lectionary Commentary, edited by David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, (Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, KY: 2009, 5).
[iii] https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/prayer-of-theilhard-de-chardin/.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Ibid.

Jeremiah 31.31–34
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning,
Plymouth Congregational UCC,

About 15 years ago, a member of our congregation had a problem with his heart…the rhythm of his heartbeat wasn’t quite right, and it turned out that the issue had to do with the electrical impulses that were being sent to his heart. And so, he had a process called cardiac ablation, in which his cardiologist inserted a catheter through a vein in his leg and into his heart and used laser light to create scarring on sections of his heart, which fixed the problem. The Sunday he returned to Plymouth, I happened to preach on this text, and he said, “I feel like that passage from Jeremiah was for me: as if I literally had something written on my heart, and only now do I know what the message was: that God’s love is with me wherever I go.”

Of course, the heart is also metaphor for all kinds of things, as it was in Jeremiah’s day as well. I’m quite certain that Jeremiah was not expecting cardiac ablation by God! For us, the heart is metaphorically the center of feeling and emotion. So, God is saying that she will inscribe her covenant at the core of our being – in our center of feeling and emotion – so that we don’t need to think so much about it…we just have a visceral remembrance of it, a bodily knowing of the covenant…sort of like muscle memory that becomes part of what you do.

When we speak “heartstrings,” we’re describing a tug on deepest emotions or affections. We even say, “Oh, that makes my heart ache,” even though there is probably nothing going on with the organ in your chest that is pumping oxygen-rich blood throughout your body.

I would imagine that many of us have experienced some heartache in the wake of Carla’s resignation. Clergy hold a unique relationship with our parishioners…we aren’t cardiologists going in to perform a procedure, and then we leave and maybe see you for a follow-up visit. We develop ongoing relationships, especially when we are able to be face-to-face, that can run deep. On my first day in Colorado, I was at the deathbed of one of our members; those connections sometimes build fast and deep. It is normal to feel confusion, grief, and abandonment in the wake of a pastoral departure. But one of our staff members put it well last week. She shared a story about being on the staff of a Presbyterian church whose senior minister left after being with congregation for 20 years to take a similar position at a larger church. The congregation was grief-stricken and wondered what they had done wrong to bring about their pastor’s departure. Our wise staff colleague told them, “She still loves us, and God still loves us. It was time for her to go to what’s next on her journey. And don’t worry…God will send us someone to guide us next.” I hope that you know that, too: that Carla was crazy about Plymouth and that God loves us and will send us the right person for the next step in our pilgrimage.

We’re also at a point in the church year that is emotionally intense. When was the last time you heard a story in scripture that pulled at your heartstrings or that made your heart ache? If you can’t think of anything off the top of your head, stay tuned, because Holy Week begins next Sunday. From the triumphal parade on Palm Sunday to the night of desertion and betrayal on Maundy Thursday, to the desolation of the cross on Good Friday, there will be plenty of opportunity for deep feeling. And I encourage you to tune into our Maundy Thursday service, which includes the dramatic service of Tenebrae with readings by our ministers and laypeople. On Good Friday, Mark will present a noontime organ concert, and at 7:00 we invite you to tune in for an ecumenical Good Friday service that includes Plymouth and other mainline congregations. It’s moving, not morbid, and if we don’t live through the abandonment of Maundy Thursday and the tragedy of Good Friday, the triumph of Easter loses its meaning.

Another way we speak metaphorically about this thumping muscle in our chests is to know something by heart. Most of us know the Lord’s Prayer by heart…but are there pieces of scripture or other prayers that you know by heart? Perhaps when you were young, you learned the 23rd Psalm by heart. It’s good to have memorized and to deeply know a few things by heart…to have internalized them so deeply that they are with us wherever we go.

When God tells Jeremiah that he will write the law on their hearts, I imagine it means that they will know it by heart, not just through memorization, but by internalizing the new covenant in the core of their being…that it becomes something not just to know, but to feel deeply.

+ + +

Many times, when I am celebrating communion and am serving the wine, I will offer the words “the cup of the new covenant,” which reiterate the words of Jesus at the Last Supper: “This is the cup of the new covenant in my blood.”[1] That language is covenantal and visceral…the lifeblood is pumped by the heart carrying oxygen to all parts of the body.

The prophet Jeremiah talks about this upcoming new covenant with the Hebrew people, but it doesn’t get mentioned again at all in the Hebrew Bible, but we do find the theme getting picked up by the writer of Luke’s gospel and by Paul.

You no doubt recall the covenant God made with Noah, the covenant with Abraham and Sarah, the Sinai Covenant (or the Ten Commandments), and now we have the promise of a new covenant.
But this one is less well defined: it’s not a clear mandate from God that she won’t flood the earth and wipe out humanity again, or that he is going to make great nations from one family, or even a set of codes etched on stone tablets. God is saying, through Jeremiah, that this new covenant is going to be an internal agreement: written on the hearts of God’s people. This new covenant is going to be “an inside job.”

Another really important idea we can derive from Jeremiah’s prophecy is that God can continue to write new things on the hearts of people. And what if God wants to write different teachings on the hearts of different people?

We hem God in and imagine a very small deity when we think that God stopped operating in human history with Noah or Abraham and Sarah or Moses or Jeremiah or even Jesus. Our God is not a small God. You and I are integral parts of God’s unfolding story; we are a continuation of the stories of faith we read about in scripture.

So, what has God written on your heart? And how do you know that it’s God’s handwriting, not the calligraphy of your superego or a message from the culture in which you’ve been raised? I would ask whether there is also deep congruence between what is written on your heart and the life and teachings of Jesus.

You may find that God is calling you to go places you’d rather not be – pushing you beyond the limits of your comfort zone. I am not an activist by nature, but for many years, I have felt obliged to speak out against gun violence. And I will continue to do so, even though it undoubtedly offends some people, and causes others to struggle with what I say.

The way I perceive speaking for peace and justice is as something God has written on my heart. It isn’t an action I always want to take; it’s something I am called to do. And it’s what I think Jesus would be doing – and maybe is doing through us. And I will keep on praying for wisdom and discernment as I try to detect the loops and ligatures of God’s handwriting. And I will continue to voice what I perceive as the way God is leading us as a people.

+ + +

As we walk together toward Holy Week, I would ask you to consider carefully two questions: what has God written on your heart, and how can you tell it’s God’s handwriting?

In The Little Prince, Antoine de St. Exupery writes, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.” Perhaps that is why God has written a message on yours.

Amen.

[1] Luke 22.20 and I Corinthians 11.25

Jeremiah 31.7-14
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning,
Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado
 
Did this text have to end with that sentence: “I will give the priests their fill of fatness?” Having just come through the Christmas season and nine months of pandemic, I can tell you that this pastor has had his “fill of fatness” in the form of shortbread, spritz cookies, bourbon balls, and cinnamon bread. The pandemic has not been kind to me or my bathroom scale. But this text isn’t about any weight loss resolutions you or I may have made in this new year. It’s about something else: abundance, joy, peace, prosperity…in short, it is about physical and societal salvation.

It’s important to know that the prophet Jeremiah is writing in the context of the Babylonian Exile from 597-538 BC, when the Babylonian Empire extended itself to include Judah, destroying the First Temple, and killing or carting off some of Jerusalem’s best and brightest and keeping them in captivity for a generation. You probably know the lament from Psalm 137 that describe the exile: “By the rivers of Babylon — there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.” Jeremiah, though, initially stayed in Jerusalem, though he was later exiled in Egypt.

I would imagine that you and I both have a better feeling for what exile is like than we did last year at this time. For almost 10 months, we’ve been in a form of physical exile from one another as a worshiping community, albeit with small excursions of outdoor vespers, the sleepout vigil, and three or four drive-thru experiences in our parking lot. Thank God we are able to livestream! I don’t know about you, but I long for the day when we will be back in this sanctuary together, singing, praying, greeting, and sharing communion. My heart aches every time I think of you all coming forward to receive elements.

So, imagine yourself as one of those who have been taken away from security and home and loved ones and your place of worship…but 2,500 years ago, not in 2020. Take a moment and picture that in your mind’s eye. [pause] And now imagine that another ruler has defeated the Babylonians and that you get to return home. Not everyone survived the years of exile. Things will surely have changed, and there is much to rebuild. Think of the liberation after years of captivity! Imagine what that feels like.

“See, I am going to bring them back…a great throng will return here. With tears of joy, they will come; while they pray, I will bring them back. I will lead hem by quiet streams and on smooth paths so they don’t stumble…They will come shouting for joy on the hills of Zion, jubilant over the Lord’s gifts: grain, wine, oil, flocks, and herds. Their lives will be like a lush garden; they will grieve no more. Then the young women will dance for joy; the young and old men will join in. I will turn their mourning into laughter and their sadness into joy.”

I don’t know how it is for you, but I am more than ready to receive such good news. The other day, the first time I wrote “2021” I got a bit of a thrill. We will get to return from exile. When I saw the first Facebook photo of a friend, a chaplain in NYC, getting vaccinated, it gave me chills. And then when I saw pictures of Anne and Bill Thompson from Plymouth being inoculated, it became even more real: we aren’t going to be in exile forever!

In another sense, some of us have felt as though we have been in exile for four years. Have you had the experience of turning on the news or opening the paper or your iPad and steeling yourself, preparing for the outrage or big lie of the day? It has been an especially tough four years for the most vulnerable in our nation. Real wages for most workers have hardly budged since the 1960s.[1] Unemployment has been brutal during the pandemic. And those who thought that America was approaching a “post-racial” future have been shocked by a further spate of police killings of Black men and women. Before the pandemic, 2.3 millions lost their health insurance, and since Covid arrived on the scene a further15 million Americans have lost health insurance coverage.[2] In the U.S., 350,000 people have died as a result of the virus this year, and 20 million Americans have been infected.

As a nation, we need salvation…physical rescue and recovery…to return from exile. We need deliverance from the forces of ignorance, avarice, bigotry, self-centeredness, and lies. We need to be saved from a virus that has done the unthinkable to God’s world.

Here’s the good news: it’s within our ability as people, as a nation, as a world to make it happen. We need a change in political culture that moves from cronyism, corruption, and deceit toward character, honesty, and servant leadership. We need to revisit our assumptions about what constitutes basic American morals and values. We need to re-examine the “givens” in American society: institutional racism, a tax system built for the rich, corporate taxation that lets industry giants like Amazon pay no tax at all, health insurance that is based on where you work rather than the fact that you are a human with basic physical needs, that human-caused climate change is someone else’s problem. Morality has far less to do with what happens in the bedroom and more to do with what occurs in the boardroom and in the halls of government.

As I said, the good news is that we can help change happen. We can continue to make our voices heard, not simply as good Democrats, Republicans, or independents, but as people of faith. Our faith tradition has a lot to say about the way we treat the widow, the orphan, the alien, the indebted living among us. It says nothing positive about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

Part of our challenge in this new year is to come to grips with the places we can be most effective agents of change. When we act on God’s behalf, salvation can happen, not simply on an individual level, but on a societal level. When you read Jeremiah, you understand what that kind of salvation means, and it’s the kind of salvation this nation needs.

Today, we are seeing glimmers of hope. We have an incoming government that is more interested in building international bridges than constructing physical walls…with a cabinet that looks more like America and less like me…with a commitment to work on climate change…to accelerate the delivery and distribution of Covid vaccines. And it isn’t just the members of one party who give me hope…it is people who stand on character and integrity on both sides of the aisle.

I think most Americans want what you and I want. Not all of us agree on how to get there. We must relearn to have civil discourse not from a rigid, doctrinaire stance that considers compromise a betrayal, but from a place of character and integrity and the common good. We must stop thinking so much about “me” and start to concentrate on “we.” (Have you ever noticed that the Lord’s Prayer is offered in the first-person plural, not singular?)

It is time to come in from the cold. It is time to return from exile and captivity. It is time to work for and to embrace abundance, joy, peace, prosperity…in short, it is about physical and societal salvation.
One day this year, I will see you return from exile and walk through the doors at the back of this sanctuary, and I will dance with joy. I will offer you the bread and the cup and look into your eyes when I do. Our “mourning will turn into laughter and our sadness into joy.”

Stay hopeful and keep the faith, dear friends. This will be a decisive year, and we all have a part to play in rebuilding.

Amen.
 
© 2021 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact [email protected] for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses.
 
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/
[2] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/nearly-15-million-americans-lost-employer-based-health-insurance-heres-how-to-get-health-coverage-again-11604407656

Jeremiah 31.31-34
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning
Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado
Reformation Sunday

In some churches, Reformation Sunday was a time to bash our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters as being superstitious, naïve, corrupt…and the church as a whole, whether Protestant or Catholic or Evangelical or Orthodox has plenty of sin to confess. So often, we are not able to see the log in our own eye when we castigate others, and I’m not going to bash anyone today (especially since I’m going to spend four days in a Jesuit retreat center this week). Instead, I want to talk about parts of our tradition that still are informed by the experience and understandings derived from the Reformation: not just Luther’s break with Rome, not just Calvin and Zwingli’s experience in Switzerland — all of which informed our Evangelical and Reformed tradition in the UCC. And I’m not going to talk too much about the English Reformation that was kickstarted by Henry VIII’s withdrawal from the Roman Church and the formation of the Church of England, though that is where our Congregational forbears have their roots. 

Instead, I want to talk about newness and transformation. Many Christian’s read this morning’s passage from Jeremiah and think, “Oh…a new covenant…he must be foretelling Jesus.” Jews obviously don’t read the prophecy that way. Isaiah relays the information that God is about to do a new thing (Is. 43.19), and again Christians may read that as a prophecy of Jesus’ messiahship, but Jews don’t read it that way. Perhaps what these two passage are saying to all of us is that God doesn’t stand still…that God is about finding new ways of being in relationship with God’s people…that there will be new ways that God’s people are faithful.

Reformation is about course-correction. When the armada of the church has steered into a storm, some ship captains recognize that it is time to take a new tack and get into clearer weather. Reformation is not just something that happened on October 31, 1517 when an Augustinian priest nailed 95 theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany. It wasn’t the first reformation and it wasn’t the last. In the Congregational tradition, it happened in conjunction with the continental reformation, accelerated with Henry VIII and the birth of the Church of England, and with the idea that the state church, of which kings and queens were and are the head, was still stuck in the storm with the rest of the armada.

Even under the more Protestant reign of Elizabeth I, some thought that the extent of religious reform in England still had not gone far enough. They objected to religious vestments (surplices, robes, and other priestly garments), to making the sign of the cross, and to the observation of saints’ days. Another major objection was the use of prayer books at all and the Book of Common Prayer in particular. Instead, they thought that prayer should come only from the heart, not from the printed page. They wanted to do away with bishops and church courts, replacing them with consistories and synods as a means of church discipline. A recent history of the Plymouth pilgrims says that “around the turn of the 17th century, puritan became a common epithet in England,”  [John G. Turner, They Knew They Were Pilgrims (Yale: New Haven, 2020), p. 9.] and the name stuck. Most puritans wanted to stay within the Church of England and to work on reform from within. Other more fervent puritans wanted to “tear down the Church of England and start from scratch” [Turner]. These were the Separatists, some of who eventually made their way to Plymouth, Mass.

As you can imagine, this was not well received by either Church authorities or the monarchy, and while some Separatists had the means and good sense to emigrate to the Netherlands, others stayed in England…some at their peril. Authorities raided Separatist congregations, arresting men and women. On one occasion in London, 21 Separatists were arrested. More than a dozen died in jail, and their two ministers, John Greenwood and Henry Barrow were hanged in 1593. What was so threatening was the idea of Christian liberty in the formation of local congregations that would preserve the freedoms of the laity in the admission of members, election of officers, calling ministers, and the exercise of church discipline.

Those early Separatists, who became Plymouth Pilgrims and later Congregationalists, had ideas of reform that challenged the status quo not just in their ecclesiology (their theology of what the church is and ought to be), but it also rubbed up against royal power. James I said succinctly, “No bishops, no king.” 

Since this is the 400th anniversary year of the Pilgrims arrival in Plymouth, Mass., I’ll be saying more about them at the end of November, but I hope that this glimpse at our Separatist forbears in England helps you to understand some of the things about this congregation, and that ways that we keep transforming and reforming. If God is still speaking, we ought to be listening and responding. 

During the Second World War, Swiss Reformed Theologian Karl Barth said that the church is always reforming (ecclesia semper reformanda) through self-examination and transformation, and that is certainly true for our UCC today. Can you imagine what the Pilgrims would have thought about being Open & Affirming? Or me wearing an alb and a stole? Or Carla and Jane Anne being ordained ministers? Part of the genius (and I use that in the classical sense, not meaning wicked smart) of the Congregational tradition is that it is willing to morph and transform. Think about it this way: The Puritans of Boston and the Pilgrims of Plymouth became the Congregationalists (now UCC) and the Unitarians, perhaps the two most progressive churches around today. Continual growth and reformation are in our denominational DNA.

I want to go back to Karl Barth for a moment. In the days leading up to World War II, the German church became nazified, wedded to the prevailing politics of hate, and some theologians, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, stood defiantly against the state controlling the church…and he died for that conviction. Others, including Barth, formed something called the Confessing Church and they wrote a statement called the Barmen Declaration, which is an integral part of the denominational heritages of the UCC, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and of course the EKD, the German Protestant Church. Hear these words, and see if they ring true at this moment in history: “We reject the false doctrine that the Church could have permission to hand over … its message and of its order to whatever it itself might wish or to the vicissitudes of the prevailing ideological and political convictions of the day.” I wonder if you can see these words, written in 1934, having any applicability to American Christianity that is so often in its history institutionalized racism and white privilege…that is co-opted by radical individualism and the prosperity gospel…that neglects the words and actions of Jesus in favor of empty slogans like “family values” and “pro-life,” while separating immigrant children from their parents, putting them in cages, and then being unable to reunite them with their families. These are “the vicissitudes of the prevailing ideological and political conventions” of America today. May God give us strength to stand up and make a change.

Last week, our strategic planning team had its first meeting, and you’ll be hearing more about that as we schedule online focus groups. We’ll be looking especially at who is our neighbor and what God is calling us to become as our congregation continues to reform itself and move forward. Even before the pandemic, I asked you to begin praying about and wondering about this question: What is your dream for Plymouth? And I ask you especially to think about that in terms of who Plymouth is called to become ask we ask the question, “Who is our neighbor?” 

If you ever wonder why the role of the church in society is important, I hope you will remember our history, and that you will become a part of shaping the history our own time. May God’s law of love and compassion be written on all of our hearts. 

Amen.

© 2020 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact [email protected] for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses.

Pentecost 16 C
Rev. Dr. Mark Lee                                                                  
Plymouth Congregational UCC     
Fort Collins, CO 
                                                                           
It was the worst of times. No, really the worst –  it was 586 BC,  and the trauma ripples through to this very day.  Ask any Jew.  Ask any Palestinian. The kingdom of Judah was being swallowed up by the Babylonian Empire. Armies surrounded Jerusalem. The ruling elites were split; some favored submitting to the Babylonians, others wanted to hold out, hoping for Egyptian intervention. People could come and go to a degree, but no equipment, food nor water could enter the city. Would God deliver them? Was this punishment for their sins? Who knew where God was in this? Hope was drying up faster than the last supplies of three year old grain. Hunger was spreading, desperate cannibalism was soon to come.  Has your world ever totally fallen apart?  Yeah, it was like that.
 
Jeremiah the prophet had been predicting this day for years.  He saw how the royalty – the house of David, who claimed an eternal covenant of God’s favor and were supposed to be God’s good earthly ruler – how they squeezed the common people for every shekel, every bushel of grain, every acre of land. He saw the way the whole country turned from God to idols.  Sure, the priests kept the Temple sacrifices running, but the temple had become a symbol of nationalistic political power rather than service to God.  So it was easy to work other values into the program. They hadn’t yet heard Jesus’ teaching, “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” Jeremiah loudly pointed out that their path would doom them. His message is not unlike Greta Thunberg’s: staying on the present course will certainly mean disaster.
 
But people don’t want to hear that, they didn’t want to change. The king put Jeremiah under arrest in the barracks of his bodyguards. This is where this story takes place. Jeremiah hears the crazy, weird, unexpected word of God. Amid the shouts of, “Incoming!” as rocks and arrows came flying over the city walls, amid the scorn of the king and his court, amid his own depression and uncertainty, he thinks he hears God. “Your cousin Hanamel’s field is going into foreclosure. Buy it and bail him out.” Jeremiah was from a suburb of Jerusalem, Anathoth.  He was the closest kinsman to Hanamel, and the law of redemption in Deuteronomy gave him the right  and obligation to buy the field if Hanamel was in danger of losing it to creditors and it passing out of the family forever. Those of you from farming families might have that sense of ancestral connection to the land; it was built into the system in ancient Israel.
 
This is not a good deal. Jerusalem and the legal structure of the kingdom are doomed. The Babylonians already occupy Anathoth. Tragically, the modern Palestinian village is practically encircled by the Israeli separation wall. Hanamel’s offer is like buying beachfront property in the Bahamas just as hurricane Dorian was making landfall. Has God ever led you to do something that seemed to make zero sense?  What then happened?
 
Hanamel shows up at Jeremiah’s prison, deed in hand.  “And then I knew it was the word of the Lord,” Jeremiah says.  That’s sometimes how God’s leading works – we have an intuitive, instinctual sense of something, and then the right person shows up and says the right thing, not knowing what has been going on in our minds and heart. So Jeremiah buys the field. At closing, everyone sees Jeremiah weighing out the silver, signing the deed, witnesses notarizing it, Jeremiah’s secretary Baruch filing one copy publicly and something unusual with another copy:  putting another in a clay jar, a jar that can be hidden and preserved --- like the Dead Sea Scrolls were – until after the present disaster has passed.  
 
What does this all mean? As a real estate investment, it’s the worst. The battering rams of the enemy army are at the gates. Really, what is Jeremiah doing? Crazy prophetic action.  What is God doing?
 
Jeremiah lifts up his voice: “The Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, proclaims: Houses, fields and vineyards will again be bought in this land.” “I will bring Israel back to this place to live securely. They will be my people and I will be their God.  I will give them one heart and one mind so that they may worship me all the days of their lives, for their own good and for the good of their children after them.  I will make an everlasting covenant with them. I will put in their hearts a sense of awe for me so they won’t turn away from me. Fields will be bought, and deeds will be signed, sealed and witnessed. For I will bring them back from their captivity.”  (Jer. 32:34-44, summarized).
 
Hope. Not a cocky-eyed optimism that things will get better. Not a surprising shift in the political scene. Not replacing a bad king with a good king. Hope isn’t denying reality. The Babylonians did destroy the city, temple, monarchy.  As the psalmist says, do not hope in princes, in political events, in the invisible hand of the economy, but in God. Hope is rooted in God’s promise, God’s action, God’s love. As the apostle Paul said, “Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.”
 
What does hope look like? That’s a great question, a question that invites us to look closely at the world, to become attentive to and aware of the often small sprouts of green breaking through the concrete. What is a situation you know that seems hopeless, yet you have seen people hope in God even in the midst of it?
 
Among the souvenirs of my trips to Israel and Palestine have been different websites to follow. One is called “The Good Shepherd Collective.” It is a tough page to follow, for practically every day, there is some new encroachment documented. In just the last couple of weeks, an access road from Palestinian villages to their fields has been trenched and destroyed, a shepherd’s goat herd shagged and scattered, homes searched in the middle of the night, water tanks punctured, and I don’t know how many houses demolished. The reasons given are variations on the theme that the Palestinians lack deeds, travel documents or building permits, and that Israeli colonists need land, roads and water.  While many places in the world experience oppressive situations, Palestine is one I’ve seen first hand, and weighs on my heart.  So I was surprised to read from them:

“In the aftermath of a day like today, when the Israeli military utterly dismantled large sections of the South Hebron Hills, homes were razed, people were beaten and arrested, children traumatized - we are challenged to maintain hope in the face of darkness. People ask us: How do you keep the faith that a better tomorrow is waiting upon the horizon?

“We have enough humility to maintain hope. This is crucial. Far too often, people confuse being hopeful for being naive. We fully understand the matrix of control Israel has methodically constructed around us; after all, it is the corrosive thread shot through the fabric of our lives. But we also understand the movement rising up around us. We see diverse movements of justice joining in solidarity in ways that weren't happening decades ago. Black and brown voices are pushing the plight of Palestinians onto the main stage. Our Jewish friends are taking real risks and making real sacrifices to usher in a new future of liberation. We see all of this because we choose to have hope. We don't let cynicism creep in and masquerade as wisdom. We don't minimize the efforts of those around us. We are courageous enough to have hope. We don't worry that people will think that we are silly or misguided for knowing that a better tomorrow awaits us.  Good Shepherd Collective  September 11 at 2:29 PM · “

What is your hopeless situation?  Political cynicism, overload or despair?  Whatever the doctor told you at that visit you had?  The negative balance in your checkbook?  The cold cup of coffee from the friend who walked away, not crying?  Bulldozers flattening your home?  Babylonians battering down your gates and burning your temple? 

Take courage, God sees you.  Grasp your neighbor’s hands, for God will use them to buttress your heart.  Don’t curl up in fear, but open yourself to all the tiny signs of God’s faithfulness to you:  food on your table, an apology tendered, a gorgeous sunset, a demonstration supporting asylum seekers, a friendly face greeting you in the fellowship hall, a wrong made right, a satisfying grade on an exam, another day of sobriety or a courageous vote.  File these signs away, build up a stock in your heart.  Share them with others, and file away the ones they share with you. Use them as the building blocks for a future world where peace is normal, caring is public policy, and love binds neighbors and strangers together through God.

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Call to worship (from Ps. 91)

Leader:  Living in the Most High’s shelter, camping in the Almighty’s shade, I say to the Lord:
People:  “You are my refuge, my stronghold!  You are my God – the One I trust!”
Leader:  God will save you from the hunter’s trap, snares for your soul and body,
People:  God’s faithfulness is a protective shield, guarding us like a hen guards her chicks. God will protect us with his feathers, we’ll find refuge under God’s wings.
Leader:  Don’t be afraid of terrors at night, or arrows that fly in daylight; monsters that prowl in the dark, or destruction that ravages at noontime.
People:  God tells us, “Because you are devoted to me, I’ll rescue you. I’ll protect you, because you honor my name.  Whenever you cry out to me, I’ll answer.”
Leader:  Hear, O people, the help of our God:
People:  “I’ll be with you in troubling times.  I’ll save and glorify you, even through your old age.  I will forever show you my salvation!”
 
Invocation prayer:
 
You have gathered us, gathered us to you, O God, in the midst of a world that seems to have gone crazy.  So often, the news of oppression against your children, of destruction of our environment, of corruption in high places, of wars and rumors of war, weighs hard on us.  We come to this place seeking quiet from the din; we come to one another seeking a warm heart of comfort; we come to you seeking meaning and hope for the future.  Though your grace, grant us peace for today and hope for tomorrow.  Amen.
 
Prayer of thanksgiving and dedication
 
Thank you, God, for giving us hope when all seems hopeless! Thank you for being faithful even when everyone around falls away!  Thank you for being with us in our darkest nights, our deepest pits, our loneliest deserts!  Thank you for drawing us together as your people in this time and place.  In gratefulness, we offer our selves and our work, trusting you to do amazing things through all of us.  Amen.

Jeremiah 33.14-16
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning,
Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado
 
I’m going to let you in on a secret…when we offer silent prayers, the shortcoming I confess most is impatience. I wonder if God gets tired to hearing “Lord, help me to be more patient” from the occupant of that chair behind me. I am not someone who is great at waiting, anticipating, and knowing that things will fall into place in due course. And maybe you’re like that, too.

Our consumer culture is based on faster technology and immediate results, and short-term profitability. Immediate isn’t always better…think about how communications and diplomatic relations might improve if someone in the West Wing took the president’s Twitter account and said that any messaging had to come through consultation with the cabinet or communications office of the White House. Immediate isn’t always better. Sometime delayed gratification yields greater rewards.

Back in the last millennium, when I was working with Apple as a communications consultant, there was a huge shift in corporate culture when Fidelity Investments became a major stockholder in Apple, and they wanted to show positive earnings each and every quarter, which meant that Apple was more risk averse and didn’t take as many chances. When Steve Jobs came back as CEO, Apple shifted their vision to risk short-term profits for longer-term gains. The long-game has worked out pretty well for Apple. And as Christians, we play a v-e-r-y  l-o-n-g game.

The other message our culture sends us is that “it’s all about me.” Look at the first-person pronouns in trade names of apps: MyHealthConnection, MySwimPro, MyFitnessPal, MyRAC, iPhone…and those are just what’s on my smartphone! It’s all about me and my needs and wants. If you want to do an experiment, see how many apps start with “my” and how many start with “our.” You’ll see my point.

So, you and I find ourselves on this first Sunday of Advent in a culture that says fast is good and immediate is better and that it’s all about me, my needs, my wants. And we find ourselves in a spiritual tradition that says emphatically that it’s not all about me — it’s about all of us — and it’s a tradition that especially during Advent relies on waiting, anticipating, longing, yearning for a promised future and a change in God’s world.
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Martin Luther King, Jr., quoting Theodore Parker, said, “The arc of history bends toward justice.” But, dear God, does that arc bend slowly!

The text from Jeremiah comes from a period when many of the best and brightest of Judea were taken captive and exiled in Babylon. Jeremiah, though, stayed in Jerusalem, but eventually fled to Egypt. The Babylonian exile is a story about refugees, immigrants, and exiles, and a prophet who declares that things will get better. (I know that sounds totally unfamiliar…) Jeremiah conveys the words of God in declaring, “The days are surely coming, says, YHWH, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah.” Jeremiah is adamant; there are no “mights” or “maybes” in his prophecy…the days are surely coming!

The characteristics of this new ruler from the lineage of King David will be justice and righteousness, which are nearly synonymous. That rootedness in the Davidic line must have seemed like dreamy wishful thinking to some of the Israelites, perhaps like the vision of the kingdom or realm of God seems unattainable to some of us.

You and I find ourselves in a nation that seems quite different that it did even five years ago: a nation in which truth gets branded as false news, in which journalists are labeled as traitors, in which demagogues abroad are seen as friends and our closest allies are treated as enemies, in which federal immigration agents have shot tear gas across the border at refugees and children. This is not the America many of us know and love. And the death of President George H.W. Bush on Friday underscores the contrast. We yearn at the core of our being for something different than what we currently have.

“The days are surely coming, says the Lord,” when we will get a new branch of the Davidic line, who will be a voice for justice and shalom. That new branch stems from the root -– radix in Latin, from which we get the English word, “radical” –- that stem is Jesus…that’s why Matthew’s gospel has that enormous unpronounceable genealogy of Jesus –- to show that he has descended from David. Jesus came to proclaim the good news of God’s kingdom, a realm of righteousness and shalom, an alternative reign to the empires of this world. That is a radical notion.

Sometimes, you hear me use a phrase, “the kingdom of God, here and now and still unfolding.” The kingdom we pray for twice in the Lord’s Prayer was initiated by Jesus and was central to his teachings and his presence with us today, even though that kingdom is not there in its completeness. The kingdom is still unfolding.

I grow impatient for the coming of the fulfillment of the reign of God. I see too much injustice, too little peace in the world. Too much greed, to little generosity in the world. Too much violence, too little love in the world.

I spent a night last week at a Jesuit retreat center near Denver to have some quiet time to reflect and write about Advent, and I found the words of a wonderful Jesuit who died in the 1950s, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and it helps me to balance my sense of urgency with these words of wisdom:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something new.
And yet it is the law of progress that it is made by passing through some stability --
And that it may take a very long time.

Really meaningful, isn’t it? Yeah, well, Teilhard was a paleontologist, and using his timeframe, Jeremiah’s prophecy seemed like it was just yesterday and Jesus was born this morning. Impatient people like me have a lot to learn from paleontology.

I yearn deeply, I long for, a day when families no longer have to sleep in churches, because everyone has a home; when teens no longer sleep out on the front lawn of Plymouth in the winter, because there is no homelessness to make people aware of. And in the meantime, those hosts and cold teenagers give me hope.

What do you yearn for, long for most deeply this Advent?  What do you long for to come about in God’s world and with your help? I invite you to reflect on that in the time you spend in prayer this week: What are your deepest longings?

The kingdom coming requires our faith to know “it is surely coming.” It requires our full participation…every one of us…it requires our hands, our voices, our prayers, and our imaginations. We need to be able to envision a new world order that Jesus proclaimed is we are to be co-creators for the new realm, a kingdom radically rooted in Jeremiah, in Isaiah, in Jesus, in God, and in you.

As we begin walking through Advent together, I leave you with these words of longing and waiting from UCC minister and theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr:

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime;
therefore, we must be saved by hope.
Nothing which is true or beautiful or good
makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
therefore we must be saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone;
therefore we must be saved by love.
May it be so. Amen.
 
© 2018 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact [email protected] for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses.