Psalm 138
2nd Sunday of Pentecost
Outdoor Worship in the Park
Plymouth Congregational Church, UCC
The Rev. Jane Anne Ferguson
 
Psalm 138
I give thanks to you with all my heart, [Holy One].
I sing your praise before all other gods.
I bow toward your holy temple and thank your name
for your loyal love and faithfulness
because you have made your name and word greater than everything else.
On the day I cried out, you answered me. You encouraged me with inner strength.
Let all the earth's rulers give thanks to you, [O God,] when they hear what you say.
Let them sing about [Your] ways because the [Your] glory and [goodness] is so great!
Even though the [Holy One] is high, she can still see the lowly,
but God keeps his distance from the arrogant.
Whenever I am in deep trouble, you make me live again;
you send your power against my enemies' wrath;
you save me with your strong hand. [God] will do all this for my sake.
Your faithful love lasts forever, [Holy One]!
Don't let go of what your hands have made.
 
Bible, Common English. CEB Common English Bible with Apocrypha - eBook [ePub] (Kindle Locations 23853-23867). C

---------------------------
 
Look around you! Take a good, long look! Look at all your friends and Plymouth family. Here we are together again – finally!  Thanks be to God!

The ancient Israelite poet who wrote Psalm 138 in thanksgiving for the Israelites being delivered from exile and their return home to Jerusalem and their beloved temple. We, too, have been a people in exile and isolation from our beloved community. Jerusalem did not look the same. It had to be rebuilt, literally. And community had to be rebuilt with those who had been left in the ruins of Jerusalem to survive and those taken away to Babylon into exile.

Like the ancients we, too, stand on the brink of rebuilding. We come back together after living through so much unexpected trauma and grief. Some of us have been touched personally by Covid 19. Some of us have not. Yet we all hold the collective sadness and fear from this frightening time. Some of us experienced job insecurity, perhaps a lay-off or loss of a job. We have just experienced the fear in the pit of our stomachs of “what if” that were me and the sorrow for those who have been out of work. We all lived through the polarity and division of the election season. We all lived through the gut-punch of seeing George Floyd’s death and the ensuing reality of the devastation brought on by ignoring white privilege, white body supremacy and what it has done and continues to do to the soul of our nation. We all lived through season of the ash falling on our heads from the largest wildfire in Colorado history that was just over those hills. It has been a hot mess, people!!

As joyous as our reunion is today, these months of exiles have taken their toll on us as individuals and as community. We may be tempted to rush back to what we thought was normal as a way of dealing with our grief and anxiety. And then be disappointed that it is not the same and can’t ever be just like before the pandemic. We may be feeling exhausted and anxious, unwilling to jump back into what we think used to be normal. The time of isolation and slower activity has taught us that we may not want to be as crazily over-committed as perhaps we once were. I have heard friends and family members say that they are wandering who their community is after the isolation. Is it the same as it was before? Will they take up all the same friendships as before? What are the thoughts or feelings wondering around in your minds and hearts this morning along with the joy and gratitude of being back together?

Though our psalm is written in first person “I” statements, the poet is speaking for the community. I think the psalmist’s words hold so much wisdom for us right now as we begin gathering after these long 15 months of exile from being in person. Instead of just telling you what they mean to me I am going to invite us all the spend some time with the psalmist’s words individually as we sit here together in community. I will read the psalm three times and invite us to sit in moments of silence after each time to let the words and images work on our souls. This is an ancient spiritual practice called Lectio Divina or contemplative reading. We will sit for just one minute of silence after each reading – for some that will be enough, for those used to this practice it will seem short. In the silence, let the outside sounds flow over you like the breeze…let your distracting thoughts flow up into the sky and your breath return you to the psalm.
 
I give thanks to you with all my heart, [Holy One].
I sing your praise before all other gods, [things that distract me from following you.]
I bow toward you, [here in the holy temple of your creation] and thank your name
for your loyal love and faithfulness
because you have made your name and word greater than everything else.
On the day I cried out, you answered me. You encouraged me with inner strength.
Let all the earth's rulers give thanks to you, [O God,] when they hear what you say.
Let them sing about [Your] ways because the [Your] glory and [goodness] is so great!
Even though the [Holy One] is high, she can still see the lowly,
but the arrogant distance themselves from God’s presence.
Whenever I am in deep trouble, you make me live again;
you send your power against my enemies' wrath; [against the fears that assail me;]
you save me with your strong hand. [God]will do all this for my sake.
Your faithful love lasts forever, [Holy One]!
Don't let go of what your hands have made.
 
Questions for contemplation in silence after each reading.

• 1st reading - What word or phrase is shimmering in your mind, jumping out at you after hearing the psalm?
• 2nd reading – What question arises from the shimmering word or phrase? Lift it up to God.
• 3rd reading – Rest in this reading and in the silence…be aware that in your rest an  “answer” to your question might arise.

 
“Don’t let go, Holy One, of what your hands have made.” This was the phrase that jumped out at me the first time I read the psalm. In a different translation it reads, “Finish in us the good work that you started.” My friends, as we face the dangers of history – and we have faced them this year and they will continue to confront us – may we hold fast to all the good works that God has started and will start in us. We are what God’s hands have made. We are all made in God’s image…the whole of creation is made by God and holds God’s divine image in every blade of grass, every leaf, every bird, squirrel, bug, and garter snake. God will not let go of us. Let us not let go of God and of one another as we rebuild our community in these new times.

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

Psalm 38
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning,
Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado
 
This is an auspicious date for our congregation…not because St. Patrick’s Day is this week (hence the great Celtic music)…not because we should “beware the Ides of March” tomorrow…but because we have been worshiping remotely for a full year.

And even as some of us are getting vaccinated, before we rush to celebrate the light at the end of a very long tunnel, we need to take stock of what we’ve been through together as families, as a congregation, a community, a nation, and a species. For some of us, the pandemic brought us in sight of possible death for the first time. “What if I get it…will I survive?” For others among us who are dealing with serious illnesses already, you may have wondered if it was safe to get ongoing treatments at the Cancer Center or the hospital. And some of us are dealing with a double grief of the death of a loved one in the midst of so much death, which is compounded by not begin able to mourn in the company of family and friends in a typical memorial service.

You may or may not know someone who has died as a result of the novel coronavirus, but the figures are staggering. Estimates are that 1 in 3 Americans know someone who has died of Covid. More Americans have died of Covid in one year than died in the Second World War, which for us lasted four years. Novel coronavirus deaths in America have exceeded 9/11 deaths by 127 times. About 1 in 624 Americans has died as a result of the virus, and we know that people of color have died in even greater numbers. 225 people have died of Covid in Larimer County…to put that in perspective if they were sitting here today, they would be overflowing from our sanctuary here at Plymouth. The global numbers are very hard to imagine…2.6 million people have died. I don’t even know how to put that in perspective.

All of us grieve in different ways. Culture and nationality have something to do with it, and the current administration has actually tried to put grieving into the national spotlight on February 22 with lighted candles outside the White House to remember those we’ve lost. I think that we, as a society, will need to come to grips with the collective trauma we’ve experienced.

I don’t know if you’ve heard the verb, “to keen,” but keening is a wailing lament for the dead. It comes from the Irish Gaelic…and from a culture that knows how to weep and mourn more expressively and openly than most Anglo-Saxon cultures do. When was the last time you heard of a ripping great wake for a white Congregationalist or Episcopalian? Doesn’t happen.

At my father’s memorial service in 1986, my younger brother, who had been unable to shed a tear at the time of my dad’s death, wept with abandon. It was deep, true, and healing. And my mother told him to pull himself together. I’ve learned a thing or two about grief since then, and I often tell families coming to a memorial service that this is a place that welcomes your tears. And so, I say to you: this is a place that welcomes your tears.

One of the things the church does right is to acknowledge and provide a setting, a container, for grief and mourning. We have ritual moments for saying a final goodbye and sending off our loved ones. We have prayers committing their souls to God’s care. This is critically important spiritually and emotionally. If we don’t acknowledge our grief and work through it, it will fester…the wound will become deeper and not lessen.

The Psalms provide so many examples of lament for us with the broadest sweep of emotion, from anger to dejection to bitterness to sorrow to regret. Have you been through the loss of a loved one? Most of us have. See if this sounds like something you experienced at some point in the process of grief:

“But I am like the deaf, who do not hear;
like the mute, who cannot speak.
Truly, I am like one who does not hear,
and in whose mouth is no retort.” (Ps. 38.13-14)

The numbness of grief is a very common experience, when your emotions are so raw and in overdrive that you just can’t take another thing in. We are overwhelmed and silenced by our grief. I know that feeling, and perhaps you do, too.

But silence is far from the only way we experience grief. The Psalmist demonstrates to us that we can shout out to God for help.
“Do not forsake me, O Lord;
O my God, do not be far from me;
make hast to help me,
O Lord, my salvation.” (Ps. 38.21-22)

You’ve undoubtedly seen those British World War II posters that say “Keep Calm and Carry On,” as well as all of the take-offs. One of my favorites is on the back of a sugar packet I picked up in a café in Italy, which says, “Keep Calm and prendi un caffe!” (That is a good example of the ways in which Anglo-Saxon and Italian cultures are very different!) But maybe we don’t have to keep it together with God…maybe God is ready for us to weep and stamp our feet and cry out loud. Many of us are really good at keeping a stiff upper lip, but there is a time and a place for lament…acknowledging that this is all a bit too much to handle on our own (whatever this happens to be). Lament can involve wailing, weeping, groaning, crying over a grief, whether it’s the loss of a loved one, dealing with a serious illness, isolation during a lockdown, not seeing grandkids or parents for a year, losing a job, missing the normality of life…any situation that causes you grief. In a few weeks, you will hear Jesus quote Psalm 22 from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” If Jesus can lament using the Psalms, it’s okay for us to do that, too.

Every one of us has encountered something that is too heavy to bear on our own. The good news is that you don’t have to carry it alone! (And that doesn’t mean taking it out on your family or colleagues or kicking the dog!) The genius of a lament in our setting is that it opens dialogue between you and God. Crying out to God in distress is a great way to begin! Psalms of lament are the largest category within this collection, and with good reason: being human is difficult…it’s hard…it is riddled with losses and griefs…not just for a few of us, but for all of us. The Psalmist usually circles back in a psalm of lament to include confidence in the ability of God to be present and to turn things around with us. The most succinct form I know is from Psalm 30:
“Weeping may linger in the night,
but joy comes with the morning.” (Ps. 30.5)

Last week I was in Santa Fe with two of my UCC CREDO colleagues, and we talked at length about the experience all of us have been through with this pandemic. One commented that for us who live though the pandemic, it will be like our parents or grandparents’ experience of living through the Great Depression. All of us were concerned about the collective trauma we’ve experienced. What is it like for you to internalize the catastrophic number of Covid deaths? Every one of us has felt the impact of the pandemic, personally and by extension. And I don’t think we should discount our own experiences during this time, even if at first glance you think of them as trivial.

As we take baby steps at coming back together, and as we live into the next year, we’ll continue to talk about where you are, how relying on God can help, and ways we can learn from our pandemic experiences to shape the future.

This has been a very long year. I thank you for your patience with the changes in our worship and in the life of our congregation, a life which continues to expand in new ways and in new directions.
Will you be with me in prayer? How long, O Lord, how long? We are so weary of confronting things in new ways, that your constancy is welcome and make us feel at home in you. Help us to sense your presence in palpable ways…help bear our burdens…bind up our wounds…give us hope for a new day.
Amen.
 
© 2021 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact hal at plymouthucc.org for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses.
 

Rev. Jane Anne preaches on Psalm 149 for Hymn Sing Sunday.

“Singing for Dear Life”
Psalm 149
November 15, 2020
Plymouth Congregational Church, UCC
The Rev. Jane Anne Ferguson

Psalm 149
Praise the LORD! Sing to the LORD a new song;
sing God's praise in the assembly of the faithful!
2Let Israel celebrate its maker; l
et Zion's children rejoice in their the [Holy ONE, their ruler]!
3Let them praise God's name with dance;
let them sing [the Holy One's] praise with the drum and lyre!
4Because the Holy One is pleased with people of God,
God will beautify the poor with saving help.
5Let the faithful celebrate with glory; let them shout for joy on their beds.
6Let the high praises of God be in their mouths and a double-edged sword in their hands,
7t[for]revenge against the nations and punishment on the peoples,
8binding their rulers in chains and their officials in iron shackles,
9achieving the justice written against them.
That will be an honor for all God’s faithful people Praise the LORD!  [1]

For the Word of God in scripture, for the Word of God among us, for the Word of God with us, Thanks be to God!

It seems that many, many years ago, during the time of the great Rabbi Shneyer Zalmon, that there was an old man who longed to study Torah. He had been orphaned as a child and was not able to complete his Hebrew school. As a young man he married and had a family, so all his time was taken with working to provide for his loved ones. Now his children were grown and had families of their own. It was just him and his wife and there was time….time to study. So, after searching for just the right teacher, listening to many scholars, he began to attend Sabbath school with Reb Zalmon.
 
On his first day he was so excited. He listened so intently, but as the lessons went on he grew more and more frustrated. His brows knit together. Big tears came to his eyes and even began to drip down his furrowed cheeks. As the lesson came to a close, he hung his head, shaking it sadly. The Rebbe had noticed this new one, this stranger, among the other students. He noticed his frustration and sadness. So Reb Zalmon called the man into his study after the lesson was over. 

“Tell me your story,” said the Rebbe, kindly. And the old man poured out his longing to study the Torah, the obstacles he had encountered all his life, and his search for the right teacher to help him. “Many scholars have laughed at me for my inability to understand…but I heard that you befriend all men…so I chose you to be my teacher. I listened with joy today as you explained the Torah, yet I found that I still could not understand what you were saying. And my heart is broken. All my life I have been sustained by reciting the Psalms…but I long to understand the Torah. Tell me, what must I do to understand, Rebbe!” Tears were now streaming down the man’s face. Reb Zalmon put his hand on the man’s shoulder and said, “No more tears, my friend. It is the Sabbath and on the Sabbath we rejoice.” 

The Rebbe continued, “What you heard today were the teachings on the Torah from the great Rabbi, may his name be preserved forever, the Baal Shem Tov. Since the words have not hit home for you, I will sing you a song that contains Baal Shem Tov’s thoughts.” And Reb Zalmon sang a sweet melody with beautiful lyrics and the man listened like a pillar of attention. He didn’t move an eyebrow. When the song was complete, his face was glowing with joy. “My soul has been transported. I understand, Rebbe! And now I feel worthy to be your student.” 

And from then on Reb Zalmon always sang that melody at the end of his teachings as a way of clarifying the thoughts he had just shared on the Torah. And that’s the story of “The Rebbe’s Melody.” 

As a preacher and one of your pastors, I wish I had a special song to sing at the end of each sermon to clarify all I have just said. But really isn’t that what hymn singing in our services can do if we listen carefully…. to the melodies as well as the words. Some of us don’t think of ourselves as singers…yet we can all be listeners and ponderers of lyrics. I venture to say that of some form or fashion music moves us all. Music teaches us in ways that mere words cannot…because it engages our bodies with movement and engages our emotions. It moves us from our heads to our hearts. Each week we, as a worship team, carefully choose the music to illumine the scriptures that we hear and the teachings in sermons. And I believe the hymns and songs and all the worship music stand along as mini-sermons/meditations on the word from scripture.

This week we heard Psalm 149, a psalm of praise to God, the Creator, the ultimate leader of all God’s people in the faithful assembly. In my progressive Christian theology that means to me ALL the people of the world, no matter their religious practice or lack thereof. And in this psalm we are reminded that because of all the faithful and beloved people of God, the poor and oppressed are “beautified”….therefore the faithful are given a “double-edged sword” to vindicate God’s ways of justice and peace and abundance, to defeat the nations and rulers whose ways are oppression and injustice. The war language is startling to us and is unusual for a psalm of praise. But I dare to read it this morning – even as I acknowledge the devastation of too many human holy wars down through the century – to remind us of the serious connection of singing and working for God’s realm of justice on this earth revealed to us in the Hebrew scriptures and in Jesus the Christ. We do not take literal weapons to work for God, instead we are called to acts of justice and non-violent resistance, kindness and sharing that are counter-cultural, counter-intuitive to the warring ways of humanity. And we are called to this understanding of our calling as people in the faithful assembly of the Holy One by a psalm, a song, a hymn! 

What might the hymns we love, the hymns we sing – those familiar to us and those unfamiliar to us – be calling us to each week? How is God speaking to us, what is God speaking to us in our hymns? Comfort, yes….and also challenge! When we sing in worship we are singing for dear life! The dear life of God’s realm here and now among us and coming into being. I invite you as a preacher…if the scripture and the sermon do not make sense to you….look to the hymns! 

Reb Zalmon knew about the mystery of God in scripture and the call of justice for all people when he sang to the old man. He knew it was an act of justice to illuminate God’ word for every person, so all may understand the love of God, when he sang:

All the angels, all the seraphim
Ask who God, [the Holy One], may be.
Ah woe, what can we reply?
“No thought can be attached to [God]

All the people ––– every nation –––
Ask where God, [the Holy One] may be.
Ah woe, what can we reply?
“No place is without God.” [2]

May it be so. Amen. 

[1] Bible, Common English. CEB Common English Bible with Apocrypha - eBook [ePub] (Kindle Locations 24148-24157). Common English Bible. Kindle Edition.

[2] Yiddish Folktales, Beatrice Silverman Weinreich, ed., Leonard Wolf, trans.(New York, NY; Schocken Books, Inc., YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1988, 272.) 

Pastoral Prayer
Holy One, sing to us like a mother lullabies of peace and comfort in our troubled times of pandemic, conflict and division. Sing to us your song of challenge and courage that we may stand against injustice and hatred with your fierce love. As we pray this morning with the words of our mouth, with the longings of our hearts and the music of our souls, we join you in lament for lives of loved ones lost, for the millions of beloved lives lost to the Covid 19 virus. We lift prayers imploring you to stand with us as seek to keep all safe from this illness, to heal all who are struggling with it, to protect those on the frontlines of essential workers who risk their own health and safety to serve other. We lift our prayers of lament for lives lost to the violence of racial injustice. Turn our hearts, Holy One, toward your realm of courageous love that is already here with us on earth. Open our eyes to see the joy of your love in Christ Jesus that is always present in beloved community, in the beauty of creation, in the eyes of your people. 

All this we pray with the word of love Jesus taught us to use…
Our Father (and Mother) who art in heaven….

©The Rev. Jane Anne Ferguson, 2020 and beyond. May be reprinted with permission only. 

Psalm 139.1-18
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning,
Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado
 
In the 2009 science fiction film, Avatar, there is an alien race called the Navi, and one of the distinctive things about this movie is that a linguistics professor from USC created an entire language for the Navi. And the way this species said “hello” in that new language, Kal ti, literally means, “I see you.”

If you were creating a language from scratch, would you think of using “I see you” or I behold you” as a way of saying, “Hello”?

There are certainly moments in each of our lives when we feel unseen, even invisible, as if people don’t notice us or intentionally ignore us. If you are the new kid in class or you’ve just moved across the country, you want your classmates and neighbors to notice you, to connect with you, and to offer a friendly welcome. You want them to say, “I see you.” Even for those of us who are somewhat shy, we want to be seen. And that is especially true in a church — even more so in a religious tradition that is a little unfamiliar. We want to be seen and acknowledged and welcomed. As someone who is a bit introverted, coffee hour can be the most daunting part of a visit to a new church. Everyone else seems to belong, seems to know others, seems to have friends to connect with. It can be awkward, unless someone sees you, comes up, and engages you in conversation.

When I was serving as associate conference minister in Connecticut, and then realized that I needed to be back in parish ministry, I found a church in Vermont that was looking for a minister, so I drove up early on a Sunday morning to check it out…just to be an unannounced visitor there. Now, one of the things to know about archetypal New Englanders is that they a bit laconic…not known for interpersonal warmth, exuberance, or friendliness. In Maine, unless you were born there, you are “from away” and on Cape Cod, they call you a “wash-ashore.” So, attending the service in a lovely white meeting house in Vermont, I was able to walk in, worship with them, go to coffee hour, and drive home to Connecticut, and the only greeting I received was a cursory handshake from the interim minister. Needless to say, I realized that this church and I were not meant for each other.

When we in the church fail to say “Hello!” we are neglecting a big piece of what it means to be Christian, because we are missing the bond of fellowship and connection. When we don’t say, “Hello!” we are sending the message, “I don’t see you.” I hope the message that we send at Plymouth — especially our longtime members is that not only do we see you, not only are you welcome here, you belong! No one is “from away.”

For years, I have had an intentional practice of saying “Hello!” and smiling to people on the Spring Creek Trail behind our house as I walk Chumley, the golden retriever who owns me. I notice that most people will return the greeting. Sometimes runners with intense expressions on their faces won’t say “Hi” through their grimace. And the other group who I notice won’t make eye contact or say, “Hello!” is the cohort of children who have been trained not to — the kids whose parents have drummed “stranger-danger” into them for years. While we all want our kids to be safe, I wonder sometimes if we’ve overdone it and we are creating a self-isolating group of folks who will soon be adults. You’ve undoubtedly read about the loneliness epidemic in our society, and congregations like ours can be part of the solution as a locus of true intergenerational community.

Whether any person looks you in the eye and says, “I see you,” there is a greater force in the universe who, as the psalmist says, “has searched you and known you, and is acquainted with all your ways.”
So, here’s a question for you: Is it good news or bad news that God sees you, knows you from the inside out, really gets who you are? I suppose that depends on how you envision God and God’s activity in the world. Is your image of God like St. Nick? “He sees you when you’re sleeping; he knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.” And if that’s the case it may not be such good news, because we all mess up royally every now and again…and nobody wants to get a lump of coal in their stocking. But God isn’t St. Nick.

But what if you have a different image of God? In a large section of American Christianity people imagine God primarily as a judge. And if God is playing the part of the judge, your part is…well, the accused. The most famous sermon preached in colonial American was “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and we’re still trying to recover from the Calvinist notion of Total Depravity that ungirds it.

To be sure, all of us miss the mark with varying degrees of regularity, but that doesn’t mean that God gives up on us. I love the poetic section of this psalm that assures us that God is with us.

“Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascent to heaven, you are there;
If I make my bed in the underworld, you are there.
If I take to the wings of the morning
And settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
Even there your hand shall lead me,
And your right hand shall hold me fast.” vv. 7-10

We are not left on our own! God sees us, knows us, pursues us, and won’t reject us, even when we fall short.

†

There was a wise Jesuit from South India named Anthony de Mello who wrote beautiful parables and aphorisms. And one of my favorites has only six words: “Imagine God beholding you…and smiling.” Hear that again: “Imagine God beholding you…and smiling.”

Will you humor me? Take a moment and turn to the person next to you and really look at them — behold them! And once you’ve exchanged glances with your neighbor…by a show of hands, how many of you saw someone smile at you?

That person your neighbor smiled at is a beloved child of God. That person is fearfully and wonderfully made, a gift of God and a gift of Creation. That person is you. “Imagine God beholding you…and smiling.”

Maybe some of us have a little nagging voice in the back of our heads that says, “Yes, but…” Yes, but I’m not devout enough or successful enough or young enough or thin enough or old enough or physically able enough.”

You are enough. I see you. There is not a person in this room who is not enough. Each of you is “fearfully and wonderfully made by God, who right hand now holds you fast.”

Each of us needs to be seen and loved, and even when our human families fall short of our needs, there is a greater parent that says, “I see you. I know you from the inside out. You are fearfully and wonderfully made. I love you.”

I’m going to leave you with a question to ponder. And for some of us this is a real conundrum, so I hope you will write this down or remember it and pose the question several times this week: What does God see in you that brings a smile to her face?

Whatever your answer, do more of that, because God’s world needs it dearly.

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

Psalms 42 & 43
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning,
Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado

Blaise Pascal in the 17th c. wrote, “There was once in [us] a true happiness of which there now remains…only the mark and empty trace, which [we] in vain [try] to fill from all [our] surroundings…but these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself" [Pascal, Pensees, VII, 425, in The Great Books, vol. 33, p. 244].

How often have we, each of us, gone through a period in life feeling that something essential is missing and that there has to be something more to life. How often have we searched for that something more, only to try and fill up that God-shaped hole with something that is inadequate and not life-giving? The Psalmist was able to see what was really at stake here, saying that our hearts yearn for relationship with God in the same way that a thirsty deer longs for the cool, clear water of a rushing stream.

In one of his most recent books, UCC minister and biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann describes the countercultural nature of the Psalms. In fact, he goes beyond culture to describe what he calls the “Counter-World of the Psalms.” Brueggemann writes, “The psalms voice and mediate to us a counter-world that is at least in tension with our other, closely held world and in fact is often at direct odds with that closely held world. As a result, we yearn for a counter-world that is characterized by trust and assurance, because we know very often that our closely held world is not the best of all possible worlds. We are eager for a new, improved world that is occupied by the Good Shepherd, that yields help from the hills, and that attests a reliable refuge and strength. That is why we continually line out these particular cadences again and again. That is why we want to hear them at the hospital and at the graveside and in the many venues where our closely held world is known to be thin and inadequate. We want something more and something other than our closely held world can possibly yield" [Walter Brueggemann, From Whom No Secrets Are Hid, (Louisville: WJK, 2014) p. 9].

As we envision this counter-world, we hear the echoes of one who knew the psalms well, and we hear of his proclamation of a new realm, a new way of being, a new paradigm for how human life is organized and lived. We hear the strains of Jesus proclaiming the kingdom of God, which is what the world would be like if we lived in accordance with God’s intention. 

Brueggemann sets up seven characteristics of “Our Closely Held World,” and I would ask you to remember that it is our closely held world. And I would ask you to consider these seven characteristics when you recall the political rhetoric you read in the news every day:

1) Anxiety rooted in scarcity: “We worry that if the goodies and power are shared more widely, there will not be as much for us" [Brueggemann, p. 10]. Anxiety leads people to want to build walls instead of bridges.

2) Greed: which “requires fatiguing overwork, endless 24/7 connection, and insatiable multitasking, all in an effort to get ahead or in an effort to stay even and not to fall hopelessly behind" [Brueggemann, p. 11].

3) Self-sufficiency: When Ezekiel quotes Pharaoh’s claim that “My Nile is my own: I made it for myself,” (Ezek. 29.3) or when we describe ourselves as “self-made men and women” we engage in the hubris of self-sufficiency.

4) Denial: We believe the promises of Madison Avenue, even though “our closely held world cannot keep its promises of safety, prosperity, and happiness" [Brueggemann, p. 12]. We are willing to say that the emperor has wonderful new clothes, even though we know better.

5) Despair: “Because we cannot fully master and sustain such denial and from time to time gasp before the truth that our world is not working, we end in despair.” Have you given in to despair in recent years?

6) Amnesia: We think, “It is all too much. And so, as a result, we are all too happy to press the delete button labeled amnesia” [Brueggemann, p. 13]. Whether we need to forget the images of Auschwitz or Hiroshima or Columbine or children in detention centers on our border…we hit the delete key.

7) A Normless World: “The outcome of our narcissistic amnesia is a normless world, because without God and without tradition and without common good, everything is possible” [Brueggemann, p. 14]. The dystopian world projected in George Orwell’s 1984 and in so many recent films is possible.

I know that Brueggemann paints a horrific picture: Our “closely held world” is a frightening reality that we see on the news every day. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. A world beyond the death-dealing dystopian future is possible, and it is echoed by the psalmist. We long for a different realm, one that affirms the goodness of life and of God’s creation. We long for the promised kingdom of God, what Brueggemann calls the Counter World of the Psalms:

1) Instead of anxiety, we can rely on God’s Trustful Fidelity: The psalmist cries out: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” God’s fidelity, God’s covenant faithfulness, can “grant us courage for the facing of this hour.”

2) Instead of a greed, the psalmist proclaims a World of Abundance. “The ground for such an abundance that refuses greed is the glad doxological affirmation that God is the creator who has blessed and funded the earth so that it is a gift that keeps on giving. The doxological assumption is that when God’s creatures practice justice, God’s earth responds with new gifts" [Brueggemann, p. 17].

3) Instead of the delusion of being self-sufficient, we can acknowledge our Ultimate Dependence on God. We can see the miraculous nature of creation and life and know that we did nothing to create it, but that we are stewards responsible for preserving it.

4) Instead of denial, the psalmist embraces Abrasive Truth Telling. Whether “speaking the truth in love” or announcing an inconvenient truth, the psalmist calls out injustice and falsehood. “The entire genre of lament, complaint, and protest constitutes a refusal of denial” [Brueggemann, p. 20]. And truth-telling requires courage.

5) Despair – the hallmark of our times – can be overcome by A World of Hope. This is the world the poet portrays by repeating this refrain in Psalm 42 and Psalm 43: “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.” (42.11 and 43.5) “Hope in God! Hope in God! Which is to say: ‘Do not hope in self. Do not hope in progress Do not hope for luck.’” [Brueggemann, p. 23]. Hope is the great refusal to accept the shadowy culture of despair.

6) Lively Remembering sets aside cultural amnesia about the goodness and presence of God. The refrain of Psalm 136 echoes back the history of all that God has done: “for his steadfast love endures forever.” If we don’t take time for awe, that is to reflect and remember what God has done in the glory of creation, we lapse into amnesia.

7) The psalmist’s antidote to a Normless World is Normed Fidelity – our faithfulness to God through Torah, not meaning simply “the Law,” but as Brueggemann claims, the entire legacy of norming that is elastic, dynamic, fluid, and summoning….It is the Torah that yields identity and perfect freedom. It is indeed a gift to come down where we ought to be" [Brueggemann, p. 25-26].

Some would have us feel as though we are powerless to change the world, to change the course of our nation’s history, and to change ourselves. This is not so. We don’t have to slip into war with Iran, to launch global trade wars, to round up productive members of society as if they were animals, to accept gun violence as normative. And it isn’t because we are brighter or wealthier or have more followers on Facebook. We aren’t that self-sufficient! 

Another world is possible. The Counter-World of the Psalmist, the kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus, the world of hope. Remember the words of Paul, dear friends of God, “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” We can learn to fill the God-shaped hole not just in ourselves, but in the culture and fabric of this nation. Amen.

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

Psalm 23 and Psalm 13
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning,
Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado

Last Tuesday evening, I went to my 18-year-old son Chris’s last high school orchestra concert. Next weekend, we will attend his last performance with Debut Theatre at the Lincoln Center. And at the end of the month, we will celebrate his graduation from Rocky Mountain High School. These are the typical celebratory events for seniors in high school, and of course, they are tinged with both pride and melancholy as we see him grow up. That is as it should be. (And on this Mother’s Day, Chris will hopefully remember to buy a card for his mom.…Yes, I reminded him.)

Today will be a different kind of Mother’s Day for Maria Castillo, whose son, Kendrick, died in a school shooting on Tuesday in Highlands Ranch. I cannot imagine the pain his mom is feeling today, and that she will feel every Mother’s Day for the rest of her life. The day my son Chris was playing French horn, Kendrick Castillo, also an 18-year-old senior, threw himself into the line of fire as bullets flew in his high school. Chris will get to finish out his senior year and graduate, but there will be at least one absence in the graduation at STEM Charter School in Highlands Ranch. 

One day last month, every school in Poudre School District was closed because of what the FBI called a “credible threat” of a school shooting. Those of us with kids or grandkids in school, those who are or love teachers and kids, how long will we let this go on? 

How long, O Lord, how long? How long will we be part of a society that is rooted in the myth of redemptive violence? How long will people who call themselves Christians tolerate violence as a means to settle disputes? How long will we tolerate politicians who are addicted to the cash provided by the gun lobby? How long will we live in a nation that cannot acknowledge that we have an enormous mental health crisis? 

It’s not just about gun control legislation…but that’s a place to start. It’s not just about teaching conflict-resolution skills to kids …but that’s a place to start. It’s not enough for us to say “No more school shootings!” and to get out on the streets…but that’s a place to start. It’s not enough to try and remove the stigma from people who have mental health challenges…but it’s a place to start. 
How long will we as Christians tolerate the status quo? School shootings have become so common that this week’s tragedy wasn’t even the lead story on NPR or in the Washington Post or the New York Times. 
What is the first thing that comes into your mind when I say, “Columbine?” We live in a place that helped equate the name of our state flower with school shootings. We live in a state where the shootings at New Life Church in Colorado Springs in 2007 failed to put all Christians on notice that we need to address the prevalence of guns in our society and their use in violent crime. We live in a state where a movie theater shooting in 2012 left 12 people dead. And here we are again with another tragic shooting in a Colorado school. Fortune magazine identified the top ten Congressmen who have benefited most from NRA funding; among those ten are one of our two senators and the representative who serves Windsor and Greeley. 

Yes, I do want to cry out to God and say “How long, O Lord?! How long?!” And because I know that God acts through us, I want to say to myself and to each of you, “How long, God’s people?! How long?!” How long are we going to tolerate politicians who bury their heads in the ground when there is a shooting? How long are we going to tolerate the gun lobby calling the shots in Washington, DC? How long are we going to perpetuate an ingrained system of hyper-competitiveness and hyper-busyness for our kids? How long are we going to avoid talking about mental health and refuse to remove the shroud of shame from those who suffer from mental illness. 

Kendrick Castillo and his family are in my thoughts and prayers. But ours is an engaged faith; a faith in which prayer leads to commitment and commitment leads to action. So, by all means, pray for the Castillo family and the students and families of STEM Charter School…and pray for the families of the two young people who did the shooting. And don’t forget to take the next step and engage your faith in action. 

We are walking through the valley of the shadow of death, my friends. It is a valley where the stench of death should affect us on a visceral level. The stench is in the offices of lawmakers who refuse to open their eyes to what is happening, because they are being paid to look the other way. The stench is in an industry that wants to make more handguns and semiautomatic weapons available because they see that the fear of Americans can help them make a profit. The stench hangs on us who can use our influence to affect a change in our culture and in our politics, but we don’t because we are too busy earning a living, or we’re complacent, or we’ve given up hope. 

If Christian and Jews, who claim to believe in the message of the Psalms, are convinced that we have no reason to fear the shadow of death, because God and God’s rod and staff are with us, then why are we afraid to do something dramatic? Isn’t it incumbent upon us as people of faith, especially Christians in the majority faith, to do something to remedy the situation that confronts us? 

After the shooting in Parkland High School in 2018, we organized a Ministry Team and many of you went to a march in Old Town Square. And that was a great show of support, but it wasn’t sustainable, and here we find ourselves again. 

As your senior pastor, I’m issuing a challenge to the members of this church to do something. Yes, pray fervently! You who write letters to politicians, write! You who organize ministry teams, organize! Those of you who write checks, give! And we need to work with others in the community and nation to create a sea-change, because we cannot do it alone. Your clergy will empower you in whatever ways we can…but this has to have grass roots support within the congregation in order to be sustained. So, let’s get to work…let’s involve ourselves in ministry. If you want something concrete to do, go to a meeting of a community group, Moms Demand Action, at Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church on Lemay Avenue on Monday, May 20 at 6:30 p.m. And if you all want to form a Plymouth Ministry Team to support that effort, we can help make that happen. [pass sign ups and reminder]

I gave Chris an especially big hug on Wednesday night. And it is certainly because I’ll miss having him here at home when he heads out on a gap year. But as I looked at the big six-foot-three frame I thought to myself…it could have been Chris and not Kendrick.

Let’s work to end this scourge and help to create a culture in which the stench of violence is replaced by the bright light of resurrection. 

May it be so. Amen.

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

​
The Rev. Jake Miles Joseph 
Plymouth Congregational UCC,
​Fort Collins, Colorado

​A couple of days ago, a new friend told me why she loves Lent, and it was her insight which inspired the sermon I’m about to preach. “I love the Season of Lent,” she said, “because it is the time of the year when I reset, and I learn to pay attention again.” Lent is the Art of Paying Attention. Lent is reclaiming the power of the detail. Today, I would like to share a word on reclaiming Poetry in our busy modern lives as a way (one way) to, again, learn to pay attention to meaning, to detail, to ourselves, to others, and to God. It is time for us to reclaim poetry as Christians both for ourselves and for our world which is desperate for new language and new vocabularies for love. 

Let us pray together. May the words of my mouth, O God of All Creation, and the intimate thoughts of our hearts, help us to renew our ability to truly pay attention to our world. You are our reminder of the details we treasure—our rock and our redeemer. Amen. 

“O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” The Psalms have a way of speaking to us in ways that no other Scripture can. This is because, unlike the narrative or legalistic parts of the Bible, the Psalms have a way of being chameleons, changing color, metamorphosing, and somehow meeting us wherever we are in life. As we grow older, I’ve noticed now at 30, the Psalms grow with us, new details emerge, new hearing develops. 

“So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory. Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you. So I will bless you as long as I live; I will lift up my hands and call on your name.” Can you imagine how beautiful this poem is in the original Hebrew where it actually retains the stanzas and repetitions of the original poetry? Last week, Hal also preached on a Psalm, and he encouraged us to go deeper with them to pray the Psalms for lent. I love that! For that reason, I have chosen to also preach on a Psalm this week to help us with that going deeper together. I, like Hal, believe that the Psalms become part of us—they are able to become our own prayers in unexpected ways. When we don’t know how to pray or don’t know how to go deeper, a Psalm is usually in order. 

“My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.” 

​Two pictures of the mad-libs “Time with Children”
​and the Psalms they helped us write in worship at 9:00 AM and 11:00 AM. 

Today, I want to go deeper with a focus on the poetry of the Psalms and how they can help us rediscover the need for details in our lives. The Psalms reawaken in us an attention to detail. To claim the Psalms as our own is to reclaim the power of language from the powers now choosing to wield words as weapons. We shall not accept this abuse of the power of language. By looking for poetry in the Psalms and in our world, we may reclaim poetry and the power of words for good in our lives and culture. If ever there were a time for poetry, it is now. 

Friends, a world that doesn’t appreciate poetry is a world at risk of losing its very sense of the meaning of existence. A world without the Poets and the Psalmists is a world without love, or dreams, or visions, or hope. Humans need poetry as the food for our souls. Extending this metaphor, I would say the Psalms are like a tapas bar with something for everyone and every time. 

Academics tell us that, “Psalms or The Psalter, as it is often called, is a collection of prayers and songs composed throughout Israel’s history. Its title, Psalms, is derived from a Greek term meaning ‘song.’ The Hebrew title of the book, Tehillim, means more specifically ‘hymns’ or ‘songs of praise.’ The poetic character of the Psalms is manifest in the balance or symmetry of each line.” [Patrick D. Miller, “Psalms,” The Harper Collins Study Bible (San Francisco, CA: Harper One, 1989), 732.] The Psalms are the part of the Bible where the details, and how they make us see our own existence, matters most of all. 

In Seminary, I was your classic fish out of water. I came right from an undergraduate degree in French Literature analyzing Rimbaud and Baudelaire into Divinity School where I found myself surrounded by Religious Studies majors…analyzing Paul. They knew all the facts, could recite the books of the Bible backwards and forwards without error. They enjoyed, as a leisure sport, reciting quotes from long dead theologians with funny names to one another.  

It was when I discovered the Psalms that I found my place in Seminary and subsequently in ministry. Here is a part of the Bible where literary analysis, poetry, a love for language and words matters as much or more than facts about dead theologians and historic hypothesis theories. A “Psalmist Christian,” as I identify, is a Christian who is most interested in the details of how religion makes us feel connected with God and community. It isn’t about the facts of faith, but Psalms are about the feeling and connections of faith. With the Psalms, we are free to dream, wonder, and feel—even as Mainline Protestants. The Psalms help us to pay attention to the Spirit at work and at play. 

It is time to be Psalmist Christians…poets all. 

Friends, we are drowning in facts—both accurate and deceptive. We are floundering in a sea of useless language. Wikipedia, news alerts on our smartphones, press secretary pronouncements, publicity, advertisements, from dawn to dusk drunk on factoids. The over-abundance of trivia has made finding meaningful words difficult. It has made the Lenten art of really paying attention to detail all but impossible. There are more words in our lives than ever, yet there is less and less meaning that gets in here to our hearts! 

“O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water, [meaning, purpose, substance].” Like our Psalmist today, we are all thirsty for meaning beyond what we can memorize or google search. We are thirsty for lives grounded in meaning and purpose. Our purpose as humans must be greater than that of the news we aggregate or the revenue we generate. That is what the Psalms offer us for such a time as this. The Psalms offer us poetry and a chance to reclaim purpose and to see the beauty in the small details of life. 

Rose Marie Berger is a poet, a writer and staffer for Sojourners Magazine and a Christian who writes in what she calls “holy poetry.” She was recently asked in an interview, “As a Catholic, do you see poetry as a spiritual practice?” 

She replied by saying, “Because of my Catholic-ness, I see the world liturgically and sacramentally. The world is a holy place. Time moves in liturgical seasons. Poetry is an ancient form of speech for speaking about God and beauty, for witnessing and praising, for calling to account, for reanimating mystery. So yes, while not all poets write from a spiritual lens and not all poetry, even my own, needs to reflect spirituality, I do see poetry as part of my spiritual practice… Prose writing can convey lots of things–emotions, information, historical continuity. It can prompt intellectual insights and shifts. But long before prose was invented, birds sang poetry to small human communities and those communities learned to sing it back [Palms]. Poetry is what makes us human animals in the creation. It’s the language God uses to speak worlds into existence — and out of existence. Poetry is elemental, like earth, fire, water, and air.” ["Bending the Arch"]

“I love Lent,” she said, “because it is the time every year when I learn to pay attention again.” Poetry and the Psalms, then, are essential to Lent—they help us reclaim the mystery and the detail of the basic elements of life: earth, fire, water, and air…poetry.

Which Psalms or Poetry are speaking to you this season? I would invite you to pick a favorite poem (secular or Sacred), read it daily through the rest of this season and see how it reawakens deep meaning of language beyond the artificial divide between fact or fiction. What new details emerge and make meaning every day? 

This Lent, I invite you to pay attention with me again to the words and their meaning as a method to saving our souls from the cold and unforgiving facts of life we are dying to every day. Only Poetry can save us now. We need the Psalms in Christianity in 2019 (and certainly in 2020 with the certain vitriol of an election year coming) more than we need any other part of the Bible. We need to get back to the basics of reanimating mystery and discovering purpose in the details. 

Words matter and have power to destroy or heal. Tweets are not William Carlos Williams poems any more than every speech made from a little wooden box three feet in the air is a sermon. Poetry like preaching requires sacred intention. 

Those of you who have been at Plymouth for at least four and a half years had the joy of hearing my predecessor preach. The Rev. Sharon Benton, if you ever looked at her sermons, didn’t write sermons as speeches. No, she wrote them in the form of poems. Every single one of Sharon’s sermons over her ten years at Plymouth was a poem written for you in love and care. While some of my colleagues find it odd that I am serving my home church, I find a great beauty in the fact that I too was ministered to and formed by the one who held my job before me. Many days, I too really miss Sharon, her poetry, and her poetic attention to detail. 

This Lent, the poem I am reading every day is one of Sharon’s published Psalms. I am going to close by reading that poem, and I hope that in Lent and in the seasons beyond Lent, we all may rediscover the details in our lives—especially our great meaning and purpose that comes through Poetry. 

Thanksgiving by The Rev. Sharon Benton

Some gratitude comes hard, O Spirit: 
hard as a brick thrown through a strained-glass Jesus feeding his flock;
hard as teeth grinding their own enamel night after anxious night;
hard as fighting through Black Friday shopping crowds.
Sometimes gratitude comes hard, O Spirit:
when there is loss of relationship,
loss of abilities, 
loss of life, 
loss of hope. 

But when a wet nose nuzzles us awake in the morning,
or a stranger captures our wind-stolen scarf, 
or a single star stretched out in so much space reminds us--
we are not alone in this life:
we are one with each creature,
and with each other,
and with each part of your creation.

Spirit, our individual griefs are not small, 
nor are the world’s pains.
But grant us gratitude amidst them
so we may also overcome
addiction, depression, disease, or accident;
poverty and war and all that depletes life rather than sustains it. 

Even when gratitude is hard, O Spirit, 
soften us to see your love poured out upon all the universe, 
and help us give thanks. 

Amen. 

Psalm 27
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning 
Plymouth Congregational UCC,
​Fort Collins, Colorado
The Feast of St. Patrick

My name is Patrick. I am a sinner, a simple country person, and the least of all believers. I am looked down upon by many. My father was Calpurnius. He was a deacon; his father was Potitus, a priest, who lived at Bannavem Taburniae. His home was near there, and that is where I was taken prisoner. I was about sixteen at the time. At that time, I did not know the true God. I was taken into captivity in Ireland, along with thousands of others.
​
So begins The Confession of St. Patrick, which is thought to be authentic, unlike just about everything else we have been told about this fifth-century British saint. No shamrocks, no snakes, no green beer. Wait…British?! Though it comes as a grave disappointment to some, one of the three patron saints of Ireland came from Scotland or the north of England – easily accessible to Irish raiding parties. Britain had been a Roman province, and at the time of Patrick’s youth, Roman political influence had waned and their occupation of Britain had ended, so it was a time of political instability.

And we have an early manuscript of The Confession in the 8th-century Book of Armagh, which lives at Trinity College in Dublin. In this document, Patrick details how as a slave he came to embrace the faith of his father, a deacon, and his grandfather, a priest. He speaks of how after being enslaved he had a vision of how to escape, of his reuniting with his family, and his temptation by Satan. Even without shamrocks, it’s a gripping story!

Patrick writes of his difficulties and mission: “It was not by my own grace, but God who overcame [adversities] in me, and resisted them all so that I could come to the peoples of Ireland to preach the gospel. I bore insults from unbelievers, so that I would hear the hatred directed at me for traveling here. I bore many persecutions, even chains, so that I could give up my freeborn state for the sake of others.”

The Confession is one of the great spiritual testimonies of late antiquity, and we learn from it that Patrick, like so many prophets, sensed the divine call to speak on God’s behalf, and like so many apostles, was sent by God into an alien land as an exponent of the Gospel. Patrick’s mission to the Irish was not only surprisingly successful in introducing the Christian faith, but there was something distinctive from the mission to virtually every other country: it was bloodless. Patrick’s mission was nonviolent, which is especially striking given the circumstances under which he was taken to Ireland as a youth. 

But it isn’t just The Confession that I want to introduce you to, but another writing attributed to Patrick, a prayer called "The Breastplate." It takes the form of a plea for protection in troubled times. Here is an extract of the prayer…I won’t read the whole thing, because it does go on a bit:

I arise today 
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.
…
I arise today, through
The strength of heaven,
The light of the sun,
The radiance of the moon,
The splendor of fire,
The speed of lightning,
The swiftness of wind,
The depth of the sea,
The stability of the earth,
The firmness of rock.
I arise today, through
God’s strength to pilot me,
God’s might to uphold me,
God’s wisdom to guide me,
God’s eye to look before me,
God’s ear to hear me,
God’s word to speak for me,
God’s hand to guard me,
God’s shield to protect me.
…
I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.

Patrick, whether he wrote this prayer or not, certainly needed the protection of God as he re-entered the land of his captivity. He demonstrated his faith in, his deep trust in, the triune God, whom he sensed was within him, around him, and infinitely far beyond him. That sense of panentheism – God as close to us as our breathing and at the same time beyond the reaches of the universe – is central to the experience of Celtic Christianity then and now. God is not simply “in a heaven, lightyears away,” but near to us, and can be a help in times of trouble.

And that, too, is the expression of faith and trust in Psalm 27. God “is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” The confident faith of the psalmist is something that we can use today. I actually use the prayer in your bulletin every morning in my own devotional time, and it has echoes of Psalm 27: “The Lord is my light and salvation,” and “Christ as a light illumine and guide me.”

The horrific attack on the mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday was the latest chapter in the tragic history of terrorism by white men who feel threatened by the prospect of not being in control of a world of diverse peoples. And yet, as Christians, we have the example of Patrick, who not only didn’t attack those whom he could justifiably see as a threat…he loved and embraced them. That courageous ability to not be threatened, but to love one’s enemies is at the core of the real St. Patrick, and that is far more valuable to God and to us, than chasing a few snakes away.

I know that many of us are overwhelmed because we are living in fraught and dangerous times and that zero-sum politics are tearing our nation – even God’s planet – apart. I am concerned about you, the members of this congregation, because I see you working for justice and feeling a sense of oppression. I know that some of you are disheartened by the state of our republic and its politics…and with good reason. And I want you to be able to use the tools of your faith to keep on keeping on. I want you to be able to use the oaken staff of your faith to lean on as you go into the world. 

The Psalms, especially the 27th Psalm, can be a part of your toolkit for protection. The 27th Psalm can be your breastplate that you put on like armor to protect yourself from the dishonesty, avarice, and ill will that seem to dominate the news. 

Prayers for protection are an essential part of the literature of the Celtic saints, including Patrick. Here is the beginning of a prayer attributed to St. Brendan the Navigator: “Help me to journey beyond the familiar and into the unknown. Give me faith to leave old ways and break fresh ground with you.” And one of St. Columba of Iona: “Be thou a bright flame before me: be thou a guiding star above me; be though a smooth path below me; be thou a kindly shepherd behind me…today, tonight, and forever.” And a prayer from St. Columbanus, an Irish monk who founded monasteries in today’s France, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy: “Lord, kindle our lamps, Savior most dear to us, that we may always shine in your presence and always receive light from you, the Light Perpetual, so that our own personal darkness may be overcome, and the world’s darkness driven from us.”

“The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear. The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” The words of saints and the psalmist are the words of courage, of confidence, of reliance on the intimate presence of God. 

The psalm ends with a theological claim, which the Celtic saints would affirm, but it is more than that: it is a statement of what is in the heart of the psalmist, and I pray that it is in your heart as well: “I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!” As a newer paraphrase of this psalm says, “Stay with God!”

Many of you want to know more about how to pray, so here is one way to go deeper: Pray with the psalms. When you go home, pull out your Bible and find Psalm 27, make a space of five minutes, and open your heart and mind to God, and read this psalm with an attitude of prayer. Do it five times this week, and see what changes happen within you. (And you can have your pint of green beer first!)
​
The saints of old have stood up against fear of the other, against oppression, against tyrants, against injustice, and against violence. You can, too, because the Lord is your light and your salvation…you have nothing to fear.

Amen.

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

Last Sunday of Church Year
Plymouth Congregational Church, UCC
The Rev. Jane Anne Ferguson

Psalm 126
[Thanksgiving from returning exiles]

​1 When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion,
we were like those who dream.
2 Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
and our tongue with shouts of joy;
then it was said among the nations,

"The LORD has done great things for them."
3 The LORD has done great things for us, and we rejoiced.
4 Restore our fortunes, O LORD,

​like the watercourses in the Negeb.
5 May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy.
6 Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing,
​shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.

We come together this Sunday at the turning of the year. Today is the last Sunday of the church year. Next week we start Advent, the beginning of the church year. A time of anticipation and waiting in expectation for the feast of Christmas...when God restored the fortunes of humanity by sending God’s own son, Jesus, to live among us as a sign of God’s love. This week is like New Year’s Eve in the liturgical calendar. An appropriate time for looking back and looking forward, for reflecting on the turning spiral of time as we end fall and head toward the winter solstice. The days are shorter, the nights are longer, the trees have shed their leaves, we have put our gardens to bed for the coming months. This week we are in a liminal, in between, fallow time. A turning time.

I have learned to think of the turning of the seasons, the turning of the year more like a spiral than a circle. I know that many ancient cultures, including the ancient Hebrews who gave us this beautiful psalm, thought of time as a circle. There was no end to time. Everything was on the continuum of life’s circle and it was all encompassed by God. What was most important was the quality of life that was happening, the essence, rather than the quantity in straight line chronology.

For me this ancient circle is a little more three dimensional as a spiral. Every time we come round the circle of a day, a week, a month, a year there is growth and learning. We hopefully don’t just repeat the circle again in the very same way.

Psalm 126 teaches us that our relationship with the Holy is a circular or in my view a spiral movement. Traditionally known as a “Song of Ascent” scholars believe song is part of a collection of psalms sung by pilgrims going up to a sacred festival at the temple in Jerusalem. In the first turn of the psalm the pilgrims sing their remembrance of the past work of God in their lives, the ways God has protected and restored them after terrible trials in exile. Taught by the prophets that exile was a consequence of turning away in faithlessness from God’s ways of living, they discovered that even in exile God did not desert them. God kept them, never left them and then restored their fortunes in bringing them home. Literally and in their relationship to God. They rebuilt their homes still weeping for the destruction they had experienced. God sustained them in the rebuilding even as God restored their intimate relationship with God as God’s people. Their sweat and tears yielded to shouts of joy as they entered new homes and a rebuilt temple.

The pilgrims sing this remembrance, this story joyfully as they travel  perhaps to the Passover festival in Jerusalem. God did this for them in the past. They know the character of God through God’s actions. Therefore, God can be trusted to do this in the present and in the future. As they moved through the spiral of history and their own life experiences interacting with the Divine their understanding of God grew, their faith in God deepened. What they trusted experientially in the past can inform the present and future.

So “the Lord will again restore our fortunes, like the watercourses in the Negeb”.....the streams that come each year with the rains to water the crops. They may sow in tears....plant seeds in complete and terrifying unknowing of whether the crops will prosper this year.....yet they have hope, they put their trust in God who will bring the joy of harvest. They will come home with sheaves and shouts of joy.

God is with them even as life ebbs and flows in its circular, spiral movement....through pain and suffering....through joy and plenty. These experiences come around again and again. In each turning learning and growth happen that can be trusted in exile and tragedy and in harvest and rejoicing....God has worked in the past....God will work in the future...we will be restored....we are being restored. In Psalm 126, the people of God are literally praying and singing their life experiences.

So here we are at the winding down part of the spiral of our year, this particular liturgical year which began with Advent 2017 and moved into the new calendar year of 2018. And now we prepare for a new Advent that will move us to Christmas and then into 2019. Even in our sunny Colorado climate, this time of year can be a challenging when the dark closes in tighter and tighter and the weather grows cold. We know we are all challenged these days by the state of our country and the state of the world. Many of us feel in exile politically. There is still so much violence and hate, intolerance, mistrust, greed. Is our political system in Washington in exile from the ways of justice? How can God be in the midst of this? Where do we find the Holy? The stock market is turning in concerning ways...is this the beginning of economic instability? Where is God in the midst of this?

Some of us anticipate the holidays with grief and trepidation....there will be an empty place at the holiday table that was filled last year. Or maybe the loved ones can’t get home this year or you can’t get home. Where is the Holy One in the midst of the exile of grief? Is there a new and worrying diagnosis that threatens our emotional equilibrium as well as our health or the health of a loved one? There are “regular” stresses of job and school – and in gearing up for the holidays - that tug at our souls and drain our faith. Do we dare to dream the dreams those ancient Hebrew people who were restored to home from captivity and exile in a foreign land?  At this turning time of year do we dare to sing and pray our relationship with God?

Psalm 126 invites us into prayer no matter where we are at this turn of the year, whether we feel in exile or in return to God’s presence of renewal or somewhere in between. There is a simple prayer process I have been re-visiting in my life. It is the process of praying our life experiences. Not sending God a barrage of words about our experiences and how they do or do not measure up to our expectations. (I am very good at that process.) But actually praying our experiences. So I invite you to join me today.
​

• Get comfortable. Focus your attention inward with eyes closed. Or perhaps on the cross. Or on one of the candles.
• Pick an experience that is kind of niggling at you....a conflict, a conundrum, a stressor. Or a great joy! A thankful memory that is welling up in your heart these past few days. Pick something simple.
• Put yourself in the situation...sense memory. What happened?  
• If you picked a conflict what is welling up? Just observe. No judgments Regrets, embarrassment, anger, at self or another welling up? Remorse? Hurt? Forgiveness? Un-forgiveness?
• If you picked a thanksgiving, notice what comes up. Deep gratitude? Great love? A wider perception of the world? Very specific, small details to be grateful for? Forgiveness you didn’t think possible?
• Sit with your experience. Observe it by putting it in the presence of the Divine Presence...it is already there...but intentionally place it in the hands or the heart or the light of the Holy. Allow it to be.
• Mull over your experience for one more moment, nothing has to be resolved. No action is mandated, though one may come to you....this is prayer ... being with Spirit in the midst of your life.
• Relax and release the experience knowing that the only person you can change is yourself....what would you change about yourself that brings even more compassion to the situation? Listen to this prayer over the next week. Be creative and be attentive. Trust.
  
  

In this turning time of year, we may feel as if we are sowing seeds in tears, going through the motions, casting our lives into unknown soil and we cannot foresee the  outcome. You may be in a harvest time, joyfully moving toward the holidays with faith and remembrance. Wherever you are on the spiraling circle of life, trust the movement of the psalm. The Holy One is always moving us toward transformation and restoration. As our faith seeks understanding in life’s experiences remember our ancestors prayer. “Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.” Amen.

© The Reverend Jane Anne Ferguson, 2018. May be reprinted with permission only. 

Dr. David L. Petersen
Psalm 137:1-6
Plymouth UCC, Fort Collins

“By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down.” So begins Psalm 137, a psalm that refers to a momentous time in the history of the Israelites. Between 600 and 580 before the Christian era, many of the leaders and much of the population of Judah were forcibly removed from their land and taken to several cities in the Babylonian empire. It was a wrenching event, since the centerpiece of their religion, the temple in Jerusalem, had been destroyed, and many of their cities had been burned to the ground. Their religion had focused on, among other things, the offering of sacrifices, which according to their beliefs could only be offered at the temple.  Such religious practices were no longer possible. The people had lost their homes, their land, and their central religious shrine.

Fortunately, most, if not all, of us, will never experience that sort of exile. We know about other exiles, for example, the exile of the Cherokee people in the first half of the nineteenth century from their homeland in Georgia to what is now Oklahoma. But that is not something we’ve lived through. There are, however, other kinds of exiles, if we mean by exile "a prolonged and usually forced living away from our normal lives due to dynamics over which we have no control." We can be sent into exile by economic forces, by ill health, by social forces, and by psychological forces.

We can be sent into exile due to economic forces. This happened to my father’s family during the depression. My grandfather was employed by a woodworking company, which had lost much of its business. As a result, he moved his family to Arkansas, where they were able to live off the land and at much less expense than would have been the case had they stayed in Illinois. They were really in exile, away from all their family, away from their church, and away from the place that they knew as home. This wasn’t self-exile; it was a forced migration due to pressures against which they could not stand. We know people in that kind of exile.

We can be sent into exile due to the forces of ill health. A person can be forced to leave one’s healthy self and made to live with a compromised body. Last month, Sara and I visited a friend who is in the final stages of her struggle with brain cancer. We knew her as a terribly bright, energetic, and funny person. I worked with her on a number of editorial projects and within the context of our professional society. That was then; this is now. Now, she lives in exile from that former self, having suffered brain damage from the cancer and paralysis from a stroke. She is in exile, isolated from the person she formerly was. We know people in that kind of exile.

Social forces can drive people into exile. Children can be subjected to bullying and ostracism on social media and in person, so much so that they become suicidal. Jamel Myles, a nine year old who lived in Denver, committed suicide last month due to over a year of bullying at his grade school. He confronted social forces against which he could not stand; he lived in a social exile. We know people in that kind of exile.

Psychological forces can send us into exile. When a parent, a spouse or a child dies, the forces of grief batter us like a flood. We are moved away from the comfort of home to a land that is desolate, missing the person whom we had loved so much. Grief can move someone into a psychological exile. We know people in that kind of exile.

All of us are subject to these powerful forces that can drive us into various times of exile. How can we respond? The Old Testament offers at least three resources for how to live in exile and they come from three different biblical books.

First, the book of Lamentations. This brief book expresses the feelings of shock and grief that ancient Israelites experienced when their country was defeated, their capital and temple was destroyed, and much of the population was taken into exile. The poet uses the technique of personification, allowing us to hear how the city of Jerusalem, personified as a woman, responds to these events:         
                        “She weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks” Lam 1:1

She says, “For these things I weep, my eyes flow with tears…my children are desolate, for the enemy has prevailed.”(1:16).  “Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow, which was brought upon me.”  (1:12).

There is a clear message for us: Mourning and crying are a normal, even essential, response to exile. They help us cope with the deep emotions created by the experience of exile.

The message: Mourn and weep!

A second Old Testament response to exile occurs in Psalm 137. This psalm is a song about two cities: Babylon and Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the defeated city; Babylon is the city to which the Israelites had been exiled. We hear their voices from where they now live in exile:
            “By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.
            On the willows there we hung up our harps.
            For there our captors asked us for songs:
            And our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
            ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion.’
            How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?
            If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
            Let my right hand wither.” (Vv. 1-5)

Not only had the Israelites been taken into exile, they had been ordered by their captors to entertain them with songs that they had sung at home, before they were taken into exile. To this, the Israelites said "No way. We are putting our musical instruments up in the willows and we are not going to forget Jerusalem."

There is a clear message for us: One can resist the forces that have put us in exile. We may not get out of exile. But that doesn’t mean we give in. And we must remember what is like to be “at home.” 

The message:  Resist and remember!

The third Old Testament response comes from the book of Jeremiah. The prophet Jeremiah himself was not taken into exile by the Babylonians. Rather, he was forcibly moved to Egypt by some of his fellow Israelites. Before being taken to Egypt, he wrote a letter to those in the Babylonian exile, telling them how to survive.

            “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” (Jer 29:5-7)

Jeremiah knew that some of those who had been taken into exile expected to return soon. And he knew that others were despondent, living away from their home. We don’t often think of prophets as offering “pastoral” advice, but that’s exactly what Jeremiah did. He told those in exile: try to live productive lives, build houses, have families, and pray for the city where you live since your welfare depends on its welfare. Those may have been surprising, even shocking words for those who received his letter, but they were wise words. 

There is a clear message for us: when we are in exile, we should build and pray, especially for the welfare of where we have been put so that we can live and flourish. 

The message:  Build and pray!

Most of us live in some sort of exile at one or another point in our lives. There is no one way to respond when we are in exile. But our religious tradition offers us at least three cogent and compelling ways to respond:
Mourn and weep!
Resist and remember!
Build and pray!

Amen.

The Rev. Jake Miles Joseph
Psalm 24  
Plymouth Congregational Church, UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado
 
Will you pray with me? May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be good, pleasing, and whole to you, O God, our rock and our swim coach. Amen.
 
We live in a shallow world that is scared of the deep-end of life! Our world these days is terrified of truths about death and mortality, about the emotions we all share as humans, about the deep places: rage, fear, frustration, joy, confusion, wonder. The real stuff is out there, friends, in the deep-end of life, yet culture, technology, even how we travel in our isolated cars in this country (how most of us got to church this morning), all drive us towards the shallow, self-centered-end of the wading pool.
 
Nobody really wants to dive off the high dive anymore into the mysteries of life, of love, and of wonder. We are scared of the water. It is just too dangerous to be real with each other. What if we don’t have all of the answers? What if we might be seen as vulnerable? What if we make a mistake somewhere between the diving board and the surface of the water? What if we embarrass ourselves with loud laughter, with tears, or with honest confessions in public? What if someone doesn’t like us? No… no, it is safer to just stay in the shallow, thin, barely moving waters of the easy side, shallow end, of the pool.
 
Learning to swim spiritually and emotionally in the complexity of life and death and real feelings isn’t even necessary anymore anyway. We don’t have to actually live life to observe it.
 
We let the characters on TV and on Netflix do that “Olympic swimming” work of “feeling” life for us on the screen instead. It is safer to be an observer of others in the pool than to jump in ourselves. We stay in the bleachers either cheering or booing. We can just watch the world swim by on Facebook, on Instagram, or from the safety of our couches—we can watch the world treading water. But is that a Christian response to the deepness and mystery and wonder and possibilities of the gift of living? No.
 
Christians, Baptism is a deep-end sort of promise to God as community. It is a promise that springs from the deepest founts of our souls. It is a promise to jump in the pool together. It is a promise for when life is way over our heads. It is waterborne promise to accompany, to provide the swimming lessons, and to dive off the high dive of life with each other. Moreover, we are the lifeguards for one another in times of struggle. As a community preforming and administering the Baptism, we likewise promise, to each other, and the children brought to us to share in this ancient rite, to stay with each other in hope and togetherness. Likewise, and most importantly, God through Jesus the Christ also accompanies us as our swim coach for this swim team called Plymouth and wider Olympics of the Church Universal. We are not alone in the deep-end or on the high dive. We can rest assured that Jesus is with us.
 
Baptism historically and in most Christian traditions represents being buried with Christ when descending into the water and then resurrecting into a promise of eternal life with Christ. While this can be seen as morbid of part of traditional theology, there is a kernel of something reassuring and beautiful in that image isn’t there? There is something worth keeping. We are raised with Christ in Baptism: This is why Baptisms traditionally happen on Easter Sunday. In our progressive tradition, we think of this in a broader sense than that older theology of a sacrificial atonement and burial. We think of it as a promise of God to be with us through every step of life and into death but also the community’s call to stick with each other through the good, the bad, the ugly. Amen?
 
It may not surprise you to learn that our denomination’s official statement on the question of, “What does Baptism Signify?” is only two sentences long! “The sacrament of baptism is an outward and visible sign of the grace of God. Through baptism a person is joined with the universal church, the body of Christ. In baptism, God works in us the power of forgiveness, the renewal of the spirit, and the knowledge of the call to be God's people always.”[1]
 
This is one of the gifts and beautiful things about the United Church of Christ: our simplicity in explaining what we believe. We are sort of the United Church of Elevator Speeches. In Baptism, in joining each other and Christ in the waters of Baptism, we claim a new and deeper connection, an ongoing renewal, and an understanding of our sense of purpose to be God’s people and to do God’s work of justice and inclusion in this short life on earth. In Baptism, according to the UCC, we are given a promise of purpose, of hope, and of togetherness. This is indeed a great gift from God. [So many are looking for a sense of purpose these days, and Baptism really is the root of that sense for us.]
 
Why talk about this symbol like Baptism on a Sunday when so much preaching is needed on social justice issues in the world and in the news? What a deep-end time we live in!
 
Because we are in a time, friends, when words have failed us. We are in a time when it is hard for us to measure how deep, how VERY deep the waters have become around and under us. We are in a time when we seem to be treading water socially more than swimming forward in community and God’s call for liberation. In short, we are in a time when our Baptisms and the ecumenical, connectional, timeless, promise of Baptism is more important than ever. We are in a time when we can reach out for that reliable “floatation device”/ “life saver” of God that is hope, togetherness, and purpose. Baptism can be our buoy in the deep end. We are in a time when words have failed us. We are in a time when words have reached their limit of usefulness, so symbols must keep us afloat.
 
We are not communicating well in 2018 with words, so maybe it is a time when symbols, Holy Gestures of Blessing, like Baptism and Communion, matter more and offer us understanding in ways that words cannot right now.  The Sacraments can help us keep the faith!
 
I am convinced that the least important part of a Sunday Christian service in 2018, not always but right now, is the sermon. This makes me a very VERY bad Reformed/Calvinist Christian—which is our UCC history. That is a difficult thing to admit as a minister, especially in the UCC where our hiring process and retention is measured by this sport of preaching, but it is what I believe for right now. [Imagine if you hired clergy based on sending a couple members into a mock pastoral care session and then had the congregational vote based on their experiences!?]
 
2018 is not a time for words because nobody is listening. It is a time for symbols. That is because we are talked at (not with but at) all week, all day, all night (if we let it). You are talked at all the time from the alerts on the phone, from the computer, from the TV, etc.
 
People can only hear so much of even a good sermon like love and inclusion and absorb it, BUT I believe that symbols like Baptism can be reclaimed and refocused to give us the meaning and feeling and truth that words are failing to provide. The problem, as my colleague The Rev. Sean Neil-Barron from Foothills UU once told me during a conversation about 21st Century Church Communications, isn’t that people aren’t getting information or communication or publicity—it is that they are sinking from the weight of too much information. As the church thinks people aren’t hearing, rather than retreat to our symbols of meaning-making, we talk faster and more.
 
When the words fail us or are drowning us, let us allow the symbols of buoyancy float us until such a time as we can swim again. I believe the progressive church and all church is drowning in words, in blogs, in newsletters, etc. We need our symbols like Baptism, the water, the waves of love more than ever.
 
Speaking of words, let’s look at the Word from Scripture this morning:
 
Our Scripture today, Psalm 24, is an ancient hymn that predates our Christian tradition by about some 1,100 years and comes from the Ancient Israelite Hebrew book of Psalms or songs. It also speaks to a community looking for the meaning of community and how to find truth in a confusing time. It is a classified by scholars a “Festival Celebration of Faith”[2] Psalm regarding the question of entrance into the temple. It is a song of praise to God for God’s enduring presence and power in their lives, but it also has a specific purpose. It is intended to name what matters in community. Verses 3 and 4 have a question and response about this: “Who shall ascend to the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in God’s Holy Place? Those who have clean hands and pure hearts, who do not lift up their souls to what is false, and do not swear deceitfully [tell lies]. They will receive blessing from the Lord.” The word of God.
 
“Do not lift our souls up to what is false.”
 
Today, friends, we are being called to the deep end, to waters over our heads, to live life with fullness, with truth, and with togetherness in community and with purpose. We are not permitted by the Gospel to stay in the wading pool or walk around the shallow waters.
 
Together, we dive into the deep, real, true stuff. The Psalm for today tells of the importance of not giving in and giving up to what is false or untrue in the world. If we take it a step further, it would also mean that we cannot give into the easy way out of the water called pessimism. Pessimism isn’t learning how to swim… it is a submarine of deception. It is a faulty and temporary flotation device that guarantees an eventual floundering. Hope in our Baptisms is what keeps us afloat. In a time when lies seem more commonplace than truth, when words threaten to overwhelm us in confusion, backtracking, and deception we know that God is with us in the pool of life through the Baptism promise of Jesus Christ to teach us to swim and then to swim with us. We do not have a God who watched us from afar. God is with us in the pool.
 
Words might not be our salvation in this time, for words have proven to be unreliable at best. Symbols, however, offer us something to hold onto. In this deep end of the pool with Jesus and with each other, we can rely on the silent beauty, the assurance of hope, and the call to authenticity, realness, and truth that comes through Baptism.
 
We are Baptized with Christ into new life. We are baptized into lives of authenticity. We are Baptized in the deep end, over our heads, wild, emotional, real life we live together. This is what Church is at its best: we are a swim team moving through life together, following in the wake and the waters of the greatest one to ever live.
 
So, when my sermons get boring, as this one definitely did [joking], remember that what matters isn’t the words we share but the symbols we embrace as we swim forward in uncharted waters as this swim team of Christ.
​
Amen.

[1] http://www.ucc.org/worship_baptism

[2] Bruce C. Birch, Walter Brueggemann, Terrence E. Fretheim, and David L. Petersen. A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 2005), 119. 

​April 15, 2018
Psalm 24: 1-7 and Job 12:7-10
The Rev. Jane Anne Ferguson

Psalm 24
1 The earth is the LORD's and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it;
2 for he has founded it on the seas, and established it on the rivers.
3 Who shall ascend the hill of the LORD? And who shall stand in his holy place?
4 Those who have clean hands and pure hearts, who do not lift up their souls to what is false, and do not swear deceitfully.
5 They will receive blessing from the LORD,
and vindication from the God of their salvation.
6 Such is the company of those who seek him, who seek the face of the God of Jacob.
7 Lift up your heads, O gates!
and be lifted up, O ancient doors! that the King of glory may come in. ...
10 Who is this King of glory? The LORD of hosts,
he is the King of glory.
 
Job 12
7 "But ask the animals, and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
8 ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you.
9 Who among all these does not know
that the hand of the LORD has done this?
10 In his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being.
 
Let’s begin today with a reminder of the place we live in.
Will you pray with me?

Holy and Creating God, we are grateful to be gathered here in the Big Thompson/Cache le Poudre watershed, which we share with a diversity of plants and creatures. We celebrate our neighbors here on the foothills and the prairies – Barn Owls and Northern Pygmy Owls, Prairie Falcons and Red-tailed Hawks, Red-winged Blackbirds, American Goldfinches, Great Blue Herons and Canada Geese, Single leaf Ash, Western Catalpa and CO Blue Spruce trees, butterflies to numerous to name, crickets, praying mantis, bees, black-footed ferrets, coyotes, fox, prairie dogs, greenback cutthroat trout, bears, soapwort, bittersweet, Indian Rice grass,  _______ (name a few species). We acknowledge that this land is the traditional territory of the Ute, Arapahoe and Cheyenne peoples with visitations from the Comanche and Apache. We celebrate our Plymouth ancestors in this valley, the industrious Russian German immigrants. May we nurture our relationship with all our ancestors, all our neighbors, and our shared responsibilities to this watershed where we gather today." Amen.

I want to acknowledge that I am well aware on this Environmental Sabbath day that here at Plymouth I am preaching to the environmental choir. Our congregation is chock-full of environmental scientists and activists. I do not have to convince the majority – maybe any – of you that climate change is real, that we are one with our environment, part of a great web of life, that we have major, perhaps dire, environmental challenges facing us. So this is not a sermon about convincing or consciousness raising. I hope this will be a sermon of inspiration and support for the journey of activism and healing of creation that we are all on together.
“The earth is the LORD's and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it,” sings the psalmist. “In God’s hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being,” Job explains to his doubting friends. The question before us today is how will we live taking these faith affirmations of the psalmist and of Job to heart? Yes, we will recycle, reduce, reuse, etc....but how will we live in the deepest places of our hearts and souls? How can our faith sustain us in the struggle?

The faith confession and affirmation of our scriptures is that everything belongs to God, was created by God, is animated and sustained by the Holy Spirit of God. Perhaps, as people of faith and science, you get stymied by the image of an anthropomorphic Creator God, an image that can be easily reduced to a puppet master of the world. This is not the image of God I claim. Acknowledging the amazing laws of physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, and geology, etc., that keep the universe in motion my image is that God is the Mystery behind all the laws, rather than an old white  guy with a beard in the sky orchestrating everything. Yet this Mystery is not aloof from creation. Mystery does not stand back and merely observe. It is intimately in relationship with the workings of the universe, infusing atoms and neutrons, cells and mitochondria. It is in dark matter, as well as stars, in hurricanes as well as life-giving showers. In the tiniest insects and the largest mammals and all shapes, sizes and species in between. In the smallest of newly planted seeds and the oldest of trees. The Mystery of God is in every human being. The created universe and all its beings are not God...but all are infused with God.
John of Damascus , a 7th and 8th century Eastern Christian theologian and patron saint of icons, wrote, “The whole earth is a living icon of the face of God." Now a religious icon from the Eastern Orthodox tradition is not a painting, it is a prayer writing. Its intent is to be an meditative opening, a window, onto the face of God through the face of a beloved saint, the Virgin Mary and Holy Child, or Jesus the Christ.  Think of this for a moment. Because creation is infused with God’s Spirit .....“The whole earth is a living icon of, [a window onto,] the face of God.” “The earth is the LORD's and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.” “In God’s hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being.”

The confessions of faith made by Job and the psalmist in our texts today can guide and inspire us spiritually as well as in our religious, environmental, and political practices. Confessing that all belongs to God leads us into God’s righteousness, God’s ways of living, and into blessings for all creation, including ourselves. Trusting that all of the universe is animated and infused with the Mystery of God we can affirm that we are One in creation with God. Being one with God we come into God’s presence as the psalmists invites with the blessings of clean hands, hearts and souls, living in the ways of truth. I believe this includes coming into God’s forgiveness as well. Forgiveness for ways we have to lived in that are not accordance with God’s love and justice. Blessed by God as clean, pure and forgiven we work for the goodness, the purity of God’s creation.

It is a circle of oneness...as we seek God and God’s ways we are empowered by the same energy of the animating Mystery that empowers the laws of the universe to find God and to work for God’s creation. We cannot do it all on our own, We can only work for God’s creation in co-creation with the power of God. This is righteousness and blessing. This is living in faith in its largest context. These are affirmations of spirituality and guiding practical principles.

Confessing our faith with the psalmist and Job informs how we live in the Body Politic, within our cities, counties, states, nations. It challenges how we live operationally in the world. Revered Hebrew scripture scholar, James May, wrote, “To whom do we think practically and operationally the world belongs? To a roster of nations? To the state? To corporations? To whoever has money to get title to pieces of it?”[1] No! Ultimately and existentially it does not belong to corporations, to individual nations, to individuals. It is not for the exclusive use of whichever generation of human beings happens to be in power. The world and all that is in it belongs to God, the Creator and the Mystery, behind and within everything.

This is the affirmation of faith that sustains our stewardship of creation and activism for environmental justice. Ask the animals of the earth, the birds of the air, the growing plants of the fields, the fish in the lakes and streams ,rivers and oceans – they will tell you. Ask the red-tailed hawks and great blue heron, the cutthroat trout, the sage brush, the blue spruce, the white-tailed deer and raccoons and coyotes that share even our urban areas with us. “In God’s hand is the life of every living thing!” And is not everything living in some manner of speaking as it is infused with the Mystery – even Horsetooth, its reservoir and its rock formations in our foothills, even the prairie soil where we grow food, even infinitesimal quarks that energize all matter and the deep energy of black holes. “In God’s hand is ... the breath of every human being.”

How will we live?

In fear of all that is happening around us? Or in faith that the empowering Mystery of God behind and within creation will lead us to healing action for the world and all that is within it?
​
            Lift up your heads, O gates
Lift up your doors, O ancient Ones
That the Compassionate One may come in!
Who is this Compassionate One?
            The Beloved, Heart of your heart,
                        Life of your life,

This is the Compassionate One.[2]
​
Amen.
 


[1] Mays, James L., Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching Psalms, (John Knox Press, Lousiville, KY, 1994, 120.)

[2] Merrill, Nan, Psalms for Praying, (Continuum Publishing, New York, NY, 1996, 41).

The Rev. Jake Miles Joseph
April 8, 2018 (Lectionary)
 
Will you pray with me? May our meditation on the idea of sacred community together, the words of my mouth, the silences we share, the music we sing, and our time together today help us all to live in unity and compassion with all your people. Amen.
 
How very good and pleasant it is
    when kindred live together in unity!
 It is like the precious oil on the head,
    running down upon the beard,
on the beard of Aaron,
    running down over the collar of his robes.
 It is like the dew of Hermon,
    which falls on the mountains of Zion.
For there the Lord ordained his blessing,
    life forevermore. -Psalm 133
 
A meditation is different from a sermon in much the same way that today’s Psalm is different from other lectionary readings of Scripture: it is shorter and more focused...purposeful. Rather than being a long, showy narrative, a meditation has the simple goal of helping us unfold a specific image, word, or idea for our spiritual wellbeing and nourishment. Today, I want us to meditate on this one sentence and to allow it to empower our living: “How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!”
 
I want to tell you the story of one place on earth that has striven to turn Psalm 133 from a poem into reality: a place of living Biblical poetry. In the wake of one of the darkest periods of human history, The Second World War, a monk named Brother Rodger returned to a small village in France to begin a grand experiment in grace. It was the same village where he had with his sister, during the war itself, helped rescue refugee Jews and others from the grips of the Nazis and the Vichy Regime. After being found out to be part of the resistance, he was forced to flee, but after the war he was called back to that small hilltop rural setting to start something new: The Taizé Community. It is a place that I call a grand experiment in living grace. Brother Roger was raised in the Protestant tradition in Switzerland, but he had discovered his true faith in ecumenism—a word that is the living out of the idea that it is good and pleasant when kindred live together in unity. He is reported to have said when visiting with the pope that, “I have found my own identity as a Christian by reconciling within myself the faith of my origins with the mystery of the Catholic faith, without breaking fellowship with anyone.”
 
Brother Rogers’s vision started small in nothing more than a rural French farmhouse in an extremely isolated corner of the country. Believe me, the only thing within an easy distance is a small farm that sells cheese and bread to pilgrims. This small vision for a place of meditation, of welcome, of poverty, hard work, and radical grace started on the smallest of scales, but then it grew into something that has changed the face and sound of Christianity the world over. On Easter Sunday of 1949, Rodger and 9 others committed themselves to lives of mercy, hard work, and simplicity. Now over 100,000 pilgrims (mostly young adults under the age of 30) make their way to this small village in Southern France every single year. They sing simple, joyful, corporate, deep, amazing a cappella songs, work hard, and engage in meaningful Bible study and conversation with each other and the monks in what seems like 100’s of languages and traditions.
 
I was one of those pilgrims once. I took my spring break from university on the other side of France to journey on an all-day train and bus ride from Nantes through Paris and down… way down to Macon-Village and Taizé. I arrived in the middle of a March rainstorm during evening prayers. I remember standing outside the giant pilgrimage-church and hearing the chants flow through the open doorway… the flickering of candles lighting the way inside. Once inside, I was immediately surrounded by a sense of peace and welcome. “This place is your place. This is a place where all kindred live together (eve if only a week at a time) in unity!” Oh, friends, how good and pleasant it is!
 
It is like God, through the tradition of the lectionary, knew exactly what we needed on this Second Sunday in Easter in the year 2018. Even as it is now Easter, I have to admit with the news around the world and in our own community (on campus); it still feels very much like Lent—a time in need of prayer and reflection. We need this reminder both in scripture and in collective song that a better world where people live in harmony is in fact possible and promised. We too are called to begin small experiments of radical grace and mercy in our own time that sometimes looks very dark and cruel indeed. This vision of a world where all live together in unity should inspire us, yet our pessimism has gone from being occasional and short lived to chronic and epidemic. Today, as we continue on our Eastertide Journey of hope and resurrection with Christ, let the story of Taizé, its music, and its legacy give you hope. May the vision of a place where all God’s people gather in peace give us pause to look at how we are seeking to create those spaces in our lives and in this congregation.
 
We need this reminder both in scripture and in collective songs together that a better world where people live in harmony is in fact possible. That is if we believe in the promises of God. I know it because I have seen it, and I don’t mean in a dream or as a metaphor but in a real place. I have seen this vision enacted on a hilltop surrounded by cows… and this time I am not (for once) talking about Iowa.
 
Picture yourself deep in the countryside in the smallest of all imaginable towns perched on small hill: farms, barns, cows, lots of cows, sheep, goats, and all of the smells associated with them. Picture yourself on a hill in the French countryside. Picture an old church. Picture now a tall gate with a bell tower perched at its peak. This is where God’s dream is possible.
 
Now picture yourself in your own home, how can you start small to create your own communities of peace and hope? What are you doing at Plymouth or in your own life that welcomes diverse people into your space? You don’t have to be a French monk to live a life of Taizé. You simply have to be ready to experiment with mercy and take risks with grace. This is also where God’s dream is possible.
 
How very good and pleasant it is
    when kindred live together in unity!
Amen.

​The Rev. Jake Miles Joseph
Plymouth Congregational Church UCC of Fort Collins, CO
Psalm 100
Noise, Gladness, Singing OR EveryDay Miracles (EDM)
 
Will you pray with me? May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be good and pleasing to you, O God, our rock, sometimes our rock band soundtrack, and our redeemer. Amen.
 
One of my favorite parts of attending a Methodist divinity program was the weekly chapel service: the noise, the singing, and the gladness of it all! Now, I was lucky because when I was at Emory it was a high point for that seminary as a place of music and noise. At that time, one of the heads of liturgy and music was Professor Don Saliers. Some of you may know of his daughter Emily, principle member of the Indigo Girls, who would sometimes appear in chapel as a surprise soloist! What made Emory’s chapel services great wasn’t only Rev. Dr. Saliers, Emily Saliers, or even the fact that every other seminarian (except for me) actually could sing really well, but that everyone sang with reckless abandon, conviction, and NOISE! This might have had more to do with Emory being a southern seminary more than a UMC seminary.
 
It was at my first chapel service that I discovered perhaps some of the theological rationale for this robust singing when I opened to the first pages of the red UMC hymnal and discovered John Wesley’s “Directions for Singing,” (which would be my reading during many a sermon for the next three years), and I have never been quite the same again. How many of you know what I am talking about? There are seven rules in total, and they vary from rules about singing in tune to keeping time and rhythm (basically… pay attention) to others about not turning yourself into a soloist in the midst of a congregational song, but by far my favorite two rules are numbers 3 and 4, which are as follows:
 
3. Sing All – see that you join the congregation as frequently as you can. Let not a slight degree of weakness or weariness hinder you. If it is a cross to you, take it up and you will find a blessing.

4. Sing Lustily – and with good courage. Beware of singing as if you were half-dead or half-asleep; but lift up your voice with strength. Be no more afraid of your voice now, nor more ashamed of its being heard, than when you sang the songs of Satan.[1]

Setting aside that last part about the songs of Satan, John Wesley has a point! What are we so scared of? Is it the judgment of the person next to us? Is it the judgment of the music director? I promise Mark is nice guy. Is it the judgment of the choir? No, it is usually a lack of confidence in ourselves. Sing with good courage, Plymouth! What I love about what the Methodists have in the front of every hymnal is the reminder of what worship is all about. It is about not being dead (amen/praise God)! It is about being fully alive, embodied, and awake to what God is doing moving in our midst.
 
As Hal said last week in his sermon, quoting Irenaeus, “The glory of God is in a human being fully alive,” or as Wesley would say… please don’t sing as if you were half dead! Live life abundantly in each moment, especially when we are gathered in worship to praise God. Today’s Psalm is a classic and archetypical “Psalm of Praise!” This is the type of song, I see through reading the national news, that is most difficult for the UCC these days, and it is why we need to talk about it. We cannot because the denomination that only knows lament. Nobody want to join into that.
 
That is exactly what is happening today with Psalm 100, friends. This is a Psalm, a hymn, and a concert of praise at its very best: noise, gladness, and singing.
 
Scholars often describe the Psalms as ancient “hymns.” This gives us the unfortunate and false parallel to conveniently and comfortably think that the Psalms were used in a context that looked much like Plymouth. When we quietly sing Psalms or hymns, we feel like we are engaging the ancient. For my generation, and I bemoan this fact because I love hymns, the word hymn is often associated instinctively with something quiet, mumbled, spoken at memorial services and staid and quiet and sad. [Sing slowly while stomping foot in slow rhythm in the pulpit] “I went to the garden alone… while the dew was still on the roses”, and by the time the dew is on the roses you are asleep.
 
There is no passion, no noise, certainly no praise… and no heart in the word hymn anymore. Now before you jump to conclusions or stop listening, this doesn’t mean we should stop singing hymns (I love them), but we need to reclaim the passion of the Psalmist and bring back the fractured parts of our lives. The Sacred (on Sunday) and the Embodied (the rest of the week) should not be mutually exclusive.
 
100:1 Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth.

100:2 Worship the LORD with gladness; come into his presence with singing.

100:3 Know that the LORD is God. It is he that made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

100:4 Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise. Give thanks to him, bless his name.

100:5 For the LORD is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations. [even the millennial]
 
Do we believe this radical statement about the universe and its meaning, church? Or is it just something we say at funerals and in bereavement seminars, church?
 
Verse 1: The word in Hebrew translated as, “Make a joyful noise,” is used 42 times in the Hebrew Bible. It is translated often as “shout, cry, scream, vocalize, raise a sound, give a blast…have a blast!” We are talking about embodied experience of being Christian not just acting like it on Sunday… and praising a God, a creator, beloved, giver, lover, essence, breath, sustainer, redeemer, healer.
 
It is completely in line with our Mission Statement here at Plymouth: “It is our mission to worship God [praise God] and help make God’s realm visible in the lives of people, individually and collectively, especially as it is set forth in the life, teachings, death, and living presence of Jesus Christ.”
 
The Psalms, in their ancient context, would have been used in the cultic, ritual, communal ceremonies and parties of the time that looked very little like our Sunday morning worship. In fact, they would have felt more like Red Rocks Concerts complete with the smoke effects coming from the offerings. Unlike today where we have created an artificial boundary between “high, church, sacred culture” on one hand and “low/ popular/ worldly culture” (a 19th Century Victorian distinction and construct we are still enduring today)—our lives lived on Sunday mornings on one hand and our lives lived singing at the top of our lungs in our cars on the highway on the other hand is false. It makes praise from the gut difficult or awkward. It is this artificial line and compartmentalization (in French Cartesian) that is killing the mainline churches. The worship settings where the Psalms were used were the concerts, the center, the pilgrimage, and the collective hope and aspiration settings—not ethical historical lectures.
 
Not only do we keep our church to ourselves proudly as Fort Collins’ “best kept secret,” but we also sometimes keep our passion for life and living and thereby our overwhelming praise for a God who makes all things possible a secret from ourselves…on Sundays.
 
This being the Sunday when Thanksgiving is now past, I want to ask a question. How many of you married, partnered, or have dated people whose families have different Thanksgiving traditions from your own? A ham instead of a turkey or perhaps lasagna? Vegetarian? Pickled watermelon? Stuffing vs. dressing in or outside of the turkey? Should Thanksgiving “dinner” be at lunchtime, midafternoon, or during the normal supper hour at night? Compromise and learning is a big part of being married. Amen? Aside from thanksgiving, this can also happen with music taste. While I am sort of a bluegrass guy, my husband is very much a fan of something called Electronic Dance Music or EDM. This is not a kind of music I have ever had a lot of tolerance for, but it matters a lot to him, so he will come with me to bluegrass concerts and folk music events… and I will go with him to his concerts. I do have a secret weapon though—these are earplugs [show congregation bag of earplugs used for concerts], because I need to hear you for my profession…even if I don’t always want to.
 
Aside from learning to appreciate a genre outside of my comfort zone, I have also learned something else. My generation has a lot of heart but not a lot of patience for BS! We are good, naturally connected to one another in some obstinate quiet hope. I have witnessed at Red Rocks 1000’s of young adults my age, many your doctors and lawyers and ministers (or soon will be), singing together. The lyrics are often about life, love, meaning, and even heaven. “Don’t forget about a thing called love.” “In your love I’ve built a home.” “We are all we need.” "On my way to heaven.”[2] Like a spy in enemy territory who learns to love, I have witnessed that we in the church are trying to ignore what has happened for too long—cultural surgery of heart and soul, soul and mind, body and essence. We have forgotten, especially in the UCC, the language of praise in the midst of our lament for a world and a realm that we can’t control with even the best intellect. There is so much need for crying out together in joy and passion in this universe.
 
Radiohead, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, Daft Punk, The Colorado Symphony Orchestra, The Grateful Dead, John Denver, U2, Metallica, Rodrigo y Gabriella, Above and Beyond, Pretty Lights, Brandi Carlile, X Ambassadors can be messengers of good and have all played Red Rocks over the years. I think that Red Rocks might be the cultic center of Colorado that Psalm 100 refers to—it binds this place together in ways the churches haven’t managed to do yet.
 
But there is hope for the church yet to reclaim praise. I see evidence of it still:
 
When you are at Presbyterian gathering (General Assembly, etc.) and someone comes marching in with bagpipes—the frozen chosen… melt… and are suddenly transformed into embodied praises of God’s goodness over the hills and valleys of Scottish embodied, collective memory.
 
When you are at Plymouth on Easter morning and we get to the Halleluiah Chorus, we are all moved in the same way, choked-up, spirit-overcome that George the II of England was during its first performance when he was called to stand!
 
At Worship 3.0 [Sunday evenings] at Plymouth when we sing with passion the songs of Iona or Taizé, releasing our worry and looking up to heaven and singing the Celtic and ancient repetitions.
 
On this Christmas Eve, when we will sing in darkness… “Silent Night…[PAUSE]  Holy Night [PAUSE]”—you know the feeling, right?
 
We don’t need to imitate the Evangelicals (some of the best and most embodied worship praise I have ever experienced have been Episcopal services) and change anything about our worship service to get there—we just need to remember our mission statement and the intent of the hymns and the Psalms and the call to sing as if we are indeed alive. We should bring our car singing, poetry reading, improve workshop, beer garden, rock concerts, conversations selves… whole selves to worship.
 
[Minister leaves pulpit and goes to the middle of the congregation asking everyone to please rise, as they are able and willing. Everyone stand looking to the middle, close eyes, singing together at full voice Amazing Grace verses 1, 2, and 3.]
 
Now, that was Thanksgiving! Amen!

[1] https://exploringchurchhistory.com/john-wesley-hymns-directions-singing/

[2] All of these are part of the Above and Beyond (http://www.aboveandbeyond.nu/about) label. Above and Beyond is a radio show and a collection of DJ’s in the EDM genre. All of this is new to me, and it is like learning a whole different language. 

Psalm 40.1-5, 9-10
Plymouth Congregational Church, UCC
August 13, 2017
The Rev. Jane Anne Ferguson
 
1 I waited patiently for the LORD; [God] inclined to me and heard my cry.
2 [God] drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, 
and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure. 
3[God] put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God.
Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the LORD.  
4 Happy are those who make the LORD their trust,
who do not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after false gods.   
5 You have multiplied, O LORD my God, your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us; none can compare with you.
Were I to proclaim and tell of them, they would be more than can be counted.  
9 I have told the glad news of deliverance in the great congregation;
see, I have not restrained my lips, as you know, O LORD. 
10 I have not hidden your saving help within my heart,
I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation;  
I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness from the great congregation.  
 
Here in CO we don’t have too many miry bogs. Lots of rocks to climb, but not too many bogs. From my understanding of the Hebrew word translated here in Psalm 40:2 as “bog,” the Middle Eastern equivalent to a bog would be clay....more of a mud hole. Perhaps we can relate to that image better especially after our weather the last week or so. Perhaps we can relate to it given the state of our country and world, with violence and hatred erupting in VA in place of free speech and civil discourse, with our nation tense with the threats hurled between North Korea and the White House. We may feel more like we are stuck in quick sand this morning. Still I think we can relate on some level to the psalmist who was in a desolate pit, a miry bog. 

There are a lot of bogs in Scotland. Between my sabbatical in 2009 and our pilgrimage this spring I have logged a lot of time bog walking. Bog walking is interesting and tricky as many of our Scotland pilgrims can tell you. The tricky part is that what may look like a solid piece of ground can suddenly sink you in squishy mud up to your shin.. The bog ground is springy, a verdant green of bog myrtle, covering hidden streams that make the squishy mud. One has to learn to move carefully, but also quickly and lightly between the tufts of solid ground. If you stay too long in one place you start to sink. Its not quick sand....you will not sink into oblivion. But you could momentarily lose a hiking boot. And as you seek to avoid the squishier places, bog walking does not happen in a straight line....sometimes you can follow winding sheep trails. Sometimes you have to blaze your own trail. There are no little cairns for rock set up to follow. Sound anything like life?  

Yet in the midst of squish and winding trails there are beautiful wildflowers, wild yellow iris, bog cotton and tiny pink bog orchids, in the spring. Heather and gorse blooming purple and gold in the fall. The outcropping of grey rock and solid ground are welcome sites even if it takes a bit of effort and some high stepping to scale them. On the Isle of Iona they might be the foundations or remains of Neolithic forts or houses or a hermit’s cell. And there the bog can be the gateway to incredible views of the wild seas surrounding the islands of the inner and outer Hebrides leading you to the places saints prayed. Bog walking is beautiful but quite strenuous, even tedious at times. I have learned to love it. And it a metaphor for life.

I think the writer of Psalm 40 understood the metaphor I experience even if Middle Eastern bogs are different. The psalm begins with remembering how God has answered the psalmist’s pleas for help in the midst of troubles. I waited patiently and you drew me up from the desolate pit, the miry clay and set me on solid ground. Then the psalmist moves to thanksgiving and praise for that help. God has put a new song in her heart! And she pours forth praise about the wondrous deeds of God too numerous to count. She testifies, witnesses to God’s grace and mercy and deliverance in the presence of the great congregation! The curious part about this psalm is that if we were continue with it past  the portion we read this morning we would discover that after this great song of praise, the psalmist returns to asking for God’s mercy. “Do not, O LORD, withhold your mercy from me; let your steadfast love and your faithfulness keep me safe forever. For evils have encompassed me without number; my iniquities have overtaken me, until I cannot see; ... Be pleased, O LORD, to deliver me; O LORD, make haste to help me.“

Life is like this....it moves from triumphant, exhilarating beauty to sinking into feelings of despair or overwhelm. We are walking along with energy and confidence. We feel close to God, walking in God’s ways. Then we are suddenly something changes and we are slogging through mud. And we wonder where God is! We go through life up hill and downhill, under sunny skies, then clouds and sometimes even pouring rain. We reach great heights and give thanks and praise. Then we are in the valley of the shadow again, in the miry bog, the desolate pit. We are moving along with ease and then suddenly the boggiest parts of humanity, the boggiest of our own souls present themselves. Still we affirm that life is a place of great beauty as well as uncertainty. I have found that to get to the best spots I often have to risk walking through a bog. Its always good to listen for God’s songs when you are feeling overwhelmed with the mud and twisting path.

While we were on the Isle of Iona this spring I took two bog hikes in one day. One early in the morning to following our archeologist guide to the site of a Neolithic fort. This one was finished in a downpour of thick Scottish rain. And the other was in the afternoon was a pilgrimage walk to St. Columba’s Bay, the legendary site of the saint’s first landing on the island. On this walk, we moved in and out of cloudiness...mostly in...we got lost a time or two and had to choose a new path. But we made it home together.

Being one of the leaders it was my job to keep spirits up when the way became rough. And to stop at times to introduce a moment of worship, prayer and some song. I had found on my sabbatical that walking rough terrain always seem to bring up a song in my head. Usually a prayer song....not always...sometimes a song from childhood....but often that was even a hymn. One of the songs I led the pilgrims to sing as we walked along was John Bell’s “Take, O Take Me as I am, Summon up what I might be, Set your seal upon my heart and live in me.” We often sing it more lyrically or meditatively in our 6 pm service. But it makes a great walking song, especially if you are trying to get home before the rain or in the midst of the rain or with wet squishy boots. “Take, O take me as I am, Summon up what I might be, Set your seal upon my heart and live in me.”

I like to think the psalmist would also delight in John’s song. It’s a song to get you through the toughest, darkest places. It can be sung in meditation or in defiance or in despair or in great wonder and joy. Like the psalmist’s song. “Draw me up from the pit of despair, from being stuck in the mud! Deliver me from evil and iniquity! Use me to proclaim your wondrous deeds and great mercy!” Both are songs for our times and our lives.

I asked you before the service began to pay particular attention to the words of the hymns this morning. Literally songs for this time of worship. I hope you ALWAYS pay attention to the words of the hymns because we choose them carefully to facilitate worship. They are always intended as God’s songs to lead us in whatever situation we find we are in midst of in life. But today the hymns we sing are some of Jieun’s favorites. I asked her to pick hymns and then I would find a scripture. Usually it works the other  way around. Like the composer of Psalm 40 Jieun is leaving us with words of witness  and testimony to God’s deliverance and grace for this “great congregation.” And I know they come from her heart of deep faith. Do you remember what we have sung?

“Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices; Who wondrous things have done....in whom this world rejoice....And keep us still in grace and guide us when perplexed and free us from all ills in this world and the next.” “All my hope on God is founded. Who else can my hope renew? Still through change and chance God guides me, only good and only true.” And in our last hymn, the one to come, a prayer for peace in these troubled times...”O day of peace that dimly shines through all our hopes and prayers and dreams, Guide us to justice , truth and love Delivered from our selfish schemes...Till by God’s grace our warring world shall see Christ’s promised reign of peace.”

Jieun has walked with Plymouth through the heights and depths of life....through mountaintop experiences and boggy mires. Joyfully and with great sensitivity she has offered musical testimony of God’s grace and love in our worship week after week. So as we part company, the best thanks we can give her is to continue to sing God’s songs, literally and figuratively, no matter where we find ourselves in life....one smooth paths or rough terrain. To testify to all we meet...in our own words, humble though they might be... of God’s saving grace, particularly the grace we know in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. To remember that “all our hope on God is founded” as “we gather together to ask God’s blessings, to give thanks and praise” and to pray for “Christ’s promised reign of peace.” To sing with the psalmist....”You have multiplied, O LORD our God, your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us; none can compare with you. ... they [are] more than can be counted. We will not hide your saving help within our hearts. We will speak of your faithfulness, your steadfast love and your salvation to the great congregation of your beautiful, but hurting world!” Amen
​
©The Rev. Jane Anne Ferguson, 2017 and beyond. May be reprinted only with written permission of author.

Hal preaches on Psalm 31. 

The Rev. Jake Miles Joseph
April 30, 2017
Plymouth Congregational UCC of Fort Collins, CO
Psalm 116: 1-4 and 12-19
 
Won’t you join with me in prayer? God of all of the movement in our lives, I pray that the words I speak and the meditations we share will all be good in your sight, O God, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
 
Many scholars identify Psalm 116 as something they call a “Psalm of Reversal.” One such scholar writes in the Women’s Bible Commentary, “The mood of the book of Psalms moves back and forth from assurance to doubt, from contentment to pain, from joy to despair and back again. But those who speak from peaceful secure, and prosperous settings in life often have different things to say to God and different ways to say them than do those who are in the midst of crisis, trouble, pain, or struggle. A significant portion of the book of Psalms consists of songs of reversal…sung by survivors who attribute their present wellbeing to God’s intervention in their lives…acknowledging that their survival is a gift of Grace from the hand of God.”1
 
In my preparation for this sermon these past weeks, what stuck with me from my research is this idea that many of the Psalms, like#116, are Psalms of Reversal sung by survivors. The grain of blessing in this is the idea that God’s blessings are not linear or unidirectional. Rather, like life itself, God moves with us both when we feel like we are going forward and when we are stuck in reverse.
 
Have you ever taught someone how to parallel park? On one of my first dates with my now husband, I taught Gerhard how to parallel park back in Georgia. I knew that we were on the right track after even that task went well! In parallel parking, we are only successful when we are as grateful for the reversals as we are for the forward movements. We cannot only go in one successful direction without also accepting that reversals and changes of direction are also forms of success and surviving. Only when we learn to go in reverse with determination, with precision, and with God’s help can we find our comfortable and well-spaced parking space in life. Today’s Psalm is a Psalm of celebration for God’s help in that successful parallel parking exercise of life. Today’s Psalm is a Psalm of a reversal -- a situation turned around in healing and hope.
 
Psalms are by definition communal, liturgical, ritual, songs and poems that came from worship settings used by the ancients of our faith and their ancestors to say to us: “No matter who you are or where you are in life’s journey of GREAT Reversals, there is a Psalm/ a Song and a way to speak to God for you. REMEMBER, “…those who speak from peaceful secure, and prosperous settings in life often have different things to say to God and different ways to say them than do those who are in the midst of crisis, trouble, pain, or struggle.” Unlike Parallel Parking, there is no wrong way—the Psalms are our assurance of this. The Psalms and their diversity of moods and tones remind us: You are a survivor; I am a survivor, we are survivors by the grace of God.
 
If the world “Psalms” were a verb (to Psalm), it would mean, “to express oneself in fullness and authenticity before God and with the support of your community.” Our goal then as church is to Psalm effectively and regularly. How are you Psalming today?
 
The core message of our Psalm 116 is one of survival and reversal. “You have loosened my bonds. I will offer to you a thanksgiving sacrifice and call on the name of the Lord.” These words have the same fundamental feeling and purpose as the famous anthem and declaration by Dianna Ross and others who popularly sing, “I will survive… as long as I know how to love… I know I’ll stay alive…I’ve got all my life to live and I’ve got all my love to give. I’ll survive. I will survive.” As long as I live by God’s grace, I will be a survivor in all things. Is this your Psalm today? How are you surviving by love in this life of reversals? Anxiety and hate don’t work for successful survival—regardless of how we are tempted by culture and our friends to rely on them. Only love and grace can bring true survival.
 
“Those who speak to God from a place of assurance and hope have different things to say and a different structural way to say them than those who are in pain, crisis, loss, tragedy, confusion, denial, or graduation and retirement.” We are entering tomorrow, May Day, into the great month of reversals and changes. The month of May is the month when the world and community turn upside down in Fort Collins and towns like it every year. [Remember the feeling of being a student and what May meant.] The assurance that comes to us first is that while we may have different Psalms to sing and different ways to say a prayer to God at different points in our lives of reversals and changing directions, whether in crisis, love, pain, or pleasure… there is no wrong or inferior Psalm. All Psalms like all prayers and different needs for God at different times of life are created equal.
 
Our Psalm today is a Psalm of a survivor. “What shall I return to God for all of his bounty to me?” It is a song of gratitude and grace and hope to God from someone who made it, someone who lives, someone who is a survivor. Think of this as the Biblical version of Destiny Child and Beyoncé’s “I’m a survivor. I’m not going to give-up! I’m gunna make it. I will survive. I won’t give up.”
 
Psalm 116 is Beyoncé’s Psalm—as a survivor who has embraced God’s great reversal in her life. Psalm 116 is the Psalm of the Survivor. I love this part of the Bible for exactly this reason: There is a Psalm for every season. God is a non-linear God who is with us in the times when we cannot even seem to find God in our lives, when we are celebrating, when we are surviving, and when we have survived—survived an unfulfilling or political job, survived a divorce, survived an illness, survived the death of a child, survived depression, survived whatever it is we are faced with by God’s presence and grace. God is a God of Great Reversals—life is not linear leading to Stepford Perfection! The same scholar I quoted earlier also writes in the Women’s Bible Commentary, “[The Psalms] represent the full range of human emotions in conversations with God. In all but a few cases, these deeply human (DEEPLY HUMAN) utterances are addressed directly to God.”2
 
Many of us who grew-up in the church were led to believe that the Bible was monochromatic. We have all seen or heard of churches and times in history where and when, in the name of Christ, the Sacred texts were complicit with the ways and methods of the political Church, the Bible stories became silent bystanders to abuse, and Scripture became a bland affirmation of what we already new and experience as life without responding for our need for God’s assurance of survival. Today, we reclaim the text as our survival guide.
 
In fact, the Bible screams out with you in pain, jumps with you in joy, questions with you in times of discernment, asks the universe for salvation with you when you feel like all is lost, and lifts up to God Psalms of Reversal and gratitude when the world turns and God shifts in new and totally radically wildly unexpected ways! Expect the unexpected, Christians. God is a non-linear God of Easter.
 
What sort of great reversals are happening in your life right now? Moreover, how have you prayed, sung, or otherwise engaged God in those reversals. By reversals, again, I mean those big shifts both good and bad in life—or sometimes both—the full range of human emotions. Retirement, graduation, promotions are all reversals (shifts) that require prayerful joy and careful discernment. I would offer that the Psalms might act as a resource and a guide in all of that. I would even say that it is the reason for religion, for church—to be together in vulnerability, authenticity and to reclaim the stories of survivors of the past for our needs here and now.
 
In this Eastertide, this season after the story of the resurrection and before the ascension, we celebrate, in many ways what I think of as the Season of Survival—survival even past the point of death and at the doorstep of the unknown sky of possibility. That is why the creators of the lectionary have given us this particular Psalm for today.
 
One of my greatest mentors, teachers, and my and your last associate minister, The wonderful and compassionate Rev. Sharon Benton, was published in 2013 in a book of liturgy called, From the Psalms to the Clouds: Connecting to the Digital Age. This was a publication of the Pilgrim Press of the UCC of some of the best and most creative liturgy writers from across our denomination. The book is billed as a retelling of the Psalms and worship resources for our time. Sharon is one of the major contributors to that book like how was a major contributor to many of our lives, and it was this book that she chose to leave on her desk when she left her office for me to move into as her mentee and successor.
 
In that book, she wrote a Psalm of her own for Eastertide that I believe responds to Psalm 116 with words of our time and meaning for today as we all discern, celebrate, and wonder how to be survivors in God’s world of reversals and all forms of human emotion.
 
From Rev. Benton:
 
From deep within our tombs we hear you call, O God: Rise up!
Rise up from death into new life.
 
We have found new life in this spring season, In children joyfully squirming among us,
In each deep breath we breathe.

We have found new life in people’s struggle for Just government throughout the world,
And in nations’ continued support Following natural disasters.
 
From deep within our tombs we hear you call, O God: Rise up!
Rise up from death into new life.
 
We follow your voice in our hope to overcome Illness, grief, addiction, fear.
We follow your voice in our hope to heal your creation, Make whole our connection to all that is.
 
From deep within our tombs we hear you call, O God: Rise up!
Rise up from death into new life.
 
Resurrecting God, you call us to follow Christ, To rise up from our tombs that hold us in death— But you do not expect us to do so alone.
 
It is you who fills us with life beyond all our daily deaths. It is you who strengthens us to bring life to others.
 
It is you, Holy One, who we hear call within our tombs: rise up! And so we do. We have. We are here. Amen.
-The Rev. Sharon Benton
 
Pastoral Prayer:
God of Great Changes, Reversals, and Survival, Like our Psalmist says this morning, we will praise you before your people this day for all of the ways that you are with us in our lives of survival. Help us today to bring you gratitude for grace, thanksgiving for healing, and hope for surviving even the most dire and scary times of life.
 
Bless, O God, today the hearts and souls of those for whom we pray with the same rooted hope, the same determined and ageless sense of your workings in and through our lives… bring them courage, give us strength, we pray God.
 
Non-linear God of Reversals bring your strength to…these your beloved who are looking for survival of different circumstances:
[Names of those for whom we pray]
 
Non-Linear God of Peace… we offer likewise gratitude for the survival shown by saying the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray: Lord’s Prayer

1 Kathleen A. Farmer, “Psalms,” Women’s Bible Commentary, Carol Newsom and Sharon H. Ringle, edit. (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 147.
2 Ibid, 145.

Hal preaches on Psalm 24:1-6 for Environmental Sunday. ​