Colossians 3.12-17
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning,
Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado
 
What do you think Jesus asked for this Christmas? It probably wasn’t a PlayStation or an X-Box. Seriously, what do you think Jesus wants from you this Christmas?

Micah provides a hint: “What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.” That’s a starting point, but those “requirements” are a fairly low bar, don’t you think? It’s almost as if the prophet is saying, “In order to earn a passing grade, you are required to do justice and so forth.” It seems to me that the incarnate Christ has more to offer and more to ask than just a passing grade.

The writer of the letter to the church in Colossae has a new take on that…that because of the redemptive power of Christ among us, we shed our old way of being and put on a new garment, clothing ourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. It’s actually a rather nice New Year metaphor, sloughing off the old clothes we wore in 2021 and instead putting on new garb that reflects the love of Christ.

We’re talking about transformation, that middle part of our Mission Statement that speaks of inviting, transforming, and sending. What would it look like in your own life — with your family, friends, church, community — to live more compassionately and kindly this year? As JT said in a sermon last month, compassion has its English and Latin roots in “to suffer with.” And in the Greek of the New Testament, the verb used for compassion — splagknidzthomai— isn’t just sympathy, it comes from “splagnon,” the Greek word for guts. You feel compassion in your body, in your guts. And it takes emobided courage, or as we say, it takes guts, to be compassionate sometimes.

Last summer in The Atlantic, Arthur Brooks, who teaches at the Kennedy School at Harvard, wrote an article called, “Love Is Medicine for Fear.” He writes, “Life, especially pandemic life, is full of threats and uncertainty. When we feel afraid, bringing more love into our lives can help…. The way to combat fear within ourselves is with its opposite emotion—which is not calmness, or even courage. It’s love.” He writes further that fear emanates primarily from our amygdala, the reptilian brain, that tells us to fight, flee, or freeze and that a neuropeptide, oxytocin, can help inhibit the automatic response of the amygdala, giving our neocortex the chance to catch up and think about the fear before jumping into a response. And you know what helps our brains to release oxytocin? You guessed it! Eye contact and physical contact with those we love. And what have we been missing through these nearly two years of pandemic? Looking one another in the eye, shaking hands, and offering a hug. I know that I miss hugs, and I’ll bet you do to. I remember how touched I was a few years back, when one of our older members told me mine was the only hug she got during the week. It’s heartbreaking to think of what missing those hugs has done to us. Brooks continues, “The math here is easy: More isolation plus more hostility equals less love; less love equals more fear. To reduce fear, we need to bring more love into our lives.”

We all know what Jesus said about loving our enemies and praying for those who persecute you…but are any of us very good at putting it into practice? I know some of you are…I’ve seen you do it. I wonder what it would be like if we each made a commitment, a resolution if you will, that for the next week or the next month, we are going to be intentional about being more loving to our kids, our parents, our partners, our friends, and even our enemies. I wonder if that would help us to release some of the fear that creeps into our hearts. I wonder if looking lovingly into the eyes of someone or giving a big hug to someone in your circle of pandemic intimates would give you an oxytocin boost.

Regardless of how being more loving makes US feel, imagine how it would make those people around us feel. Maybe they would get a little hit of oxytocin that might calm their fears. Maybe they would sense love instead of anxiety. Fear and anxiety are even more virulent than the Omicron variant; they spread from one person to the next even without physical contact or aerosolized breath. But love spreads the same way, from one person to the next. Maybe we could become part of the change we hope to see in the world.

I’d like to invite you to do a short guided meditation with me, only if you wish, and only if you haven’t had a traumatic experience that might return to you. Close your eyes if you wish. Take a couple of slow, deep breaths. Feel the weight of your body being borne in your seat and by your feet on the floor. Imagine yourself sitting next to Jesus, the model of compassion. What fears or anxieties would you like him to bear for you? Is it your own fear of dying or becoming ill? Is it your fear for our planet? Is it another fear? Imagine yourself holding that fear and physically handing it over to Jesus…taking it from your lap and putting it into his. He looks back at you tenderly with his warm, brown eyes. He accepts what you have offered, and it has unburdened you. He asks what you can do to alleviate someone else’s burden. You know someone who needs to feel an expression of your love. It could be a loved one, someone you’re in conflict with, or someone you barely know. Hold a picture of that person in your mind’s eye. Offer them the gift of a loving gaze or a warm hug. They receive it with gratitude and love. They will pass that love along to another, and another, and another. As you begin to come back into this place, feel the warm presence of God within you, and know that it will be with you on every step of your journey. As you are ready, bring your attention into the present moment. And when you are ready, open your eyes.

I started this sermon by asking a question: What do you think Jesus wants for Christmas? How might you answer that question? Do you think he wants your happiness? Your compassion? Your working to forgive? Your being a blessing to one another? Your love? What gift can you offer?

You know the lines from the poet Christina Rosetti, set to music and sung as “In the Bleak Midwinter.” “What can I give him, poor as I am? If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb. If I were a wise man, I would do my part; Yet what can I give him — give my heart.” Amen.

 © 2022 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact [email protected] for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses.

For the first Sunday after Christmas, the three pastors share stories and poems of Christmas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rev. Jake Miles Joseph
Plymouth Congregational Church, UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado
Luke 2:41-52
 
“Now every year, his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival. When the festival was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents didn’t know it.”
 
They grow-up so fast, don’t they?
 
Many of you have Christmas traditions and they are much like the tradition of Jesus family traveling in this story today. They help us mark the passing of time, they are filled with song, and they remind us how short life is and how important it is to love those around us. Christmas stands out among the holidays, for Christians and for secular celebrants alike, because its music, its colors, its symbols remind us of our loved ones, brings us back to our childhoods, and connects us with milestones in life more than any other holiday—for better and for worse.
 
Today, since we are focused on song and tradition of Christmas singing, in lieu of a long sermon, I am simply going to offer a simple reflection on this idea: There is a great importance to traditions like Christmas Carols and songs across different cultures as a way to take care of each other and to create milestones in life that remind us to slow down and to cherish our loved ones. Christmas music, like what we are singing today from around the world, is a deep connection to a sense of time and place.
 
These songs, the hymns of Christmas, serve as important reminders about life, love, and family—because, friends, life is so short!
 
Just a couple of days ago, after all, Jesus was born in a manger in Jerusalem. Just a couple of days ago the angels sang. Just a couple of days ago the Shepherds left their sheep unattended in the fields and went to worship Jesus. Christmas… Christmas Eve, Santa, the commotion, the presents, the tree, the lights, the family visiting. It all feels like it was just yesterday, doesn’t it!?
 
Today’s Scripture passage comes only verses after the Christmas Story, and yet time has accelerated to the point where Jesus has already started to teach, he has already claimed a sense of independence escaping from his parents, and as Scripture says, “Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.” Jesus is growing-up, and we can almost feel the subtext of the anxiety, the hope, the pride, and the many mixed emotions his parents must have had. How many of you are parents and relate to this? Our passage today is, in many ways, one of the human moments in the Jesus story—it is a moment when the Baby starts to turn into the man. It is the moment when all of Mary and Joseph’s joy starts to turn into fear, alarm, and change—fear for the future.
 
The irony or foreshadowing here is that Jesus gets lost teaching in the temple as a 12-year-old in Jerusalem—the very city and place where he will eventually be put to death for doing the very same thing as an adult.
 
Parenting, in my case gay uncling, or even watching your parents get older year after year… frailer perhaps… is part of life, but it is scary. Most of all, it means that we need to hold onto the sacred moments and the milestones in life like Christmas memories.
 
Christmas is different from Halloween, Easter, 4th of July, or even birthdays because it comes so close to the new year and is highly ritualized both by society and the church. Christmas, for better or worse, is how we measure our year and our memories of our loved ones. It is also how we measure our own adulting success. Are my cookies anything like grandma’s? Is my tree as beautiful as the one I remember growing-up?  
 
Watching your kids open their Christmas presents, decorating your first tree with your spouse after getting married, baking cookies with grandma, food, song, culture, family time around the fire are all milestones to help us know the distances traveled in life.
 
There is a great scene in the classical musical Fiddler on the Roof when one of the daughters is getting married and the parents sit and sing softly to themselves a very deep song. The lyrics go like this:

Is this the little girl I carried,
Is this the little boy at play?

(Golde)
I don't remember growing older,
When did they?

(Tevye)
When did she get to be a beauty,
When did he grow to be so tall?

(Golde)
Wasn't it yesterday when they were small?

(men)
Sunrise, sunset (x2),
Swiftly flow the days.

(everyone)
Seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers,
Blossoming even as we gaze.

(women)
Sunrise, sunset (x2),
Swiftly fly the years,
One season following another,
Laden with happiness and tears.[1]
 
Growing-up, growing old, growing wise, growing tall (in my case short), growing in faith, growing in hope, growing in love… all of the ways in which we grow can be measured from Christmas to Christmas. Whether we love this holiday or resist it, for all of us, Christmas is a time of making, maintaining, and renewing memories.
 
The hymns we sing today, some familiar to us and others new, are for different cultures and people their memory-makers and milestone reminders.
 
By singing together, like the people did at the Passover Festivals in Jerusalem in Jesus’ time from our story today, we create milestones that maintain our memories and help us to cherish our loves ones even more and even better.
 
Amen.

[1] https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bjthomas/sunrisesunset.html

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is Christmas time, a halting of hate time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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