Matthew 4.12-17
7th Sunday after Pentecost
Plymouth Congregational Church, UCC
The Rev. Jane Anne Ferguson
 
Intro: Our text today from the Gospel of Matthew comes after Jesus has been baptized by John and has spent his time of retreat and trial in the wilderness. He has just emerged from that experience to discover what is happening with John and to begin his own ministry of preaching and teaching and healing.
 
12Now when Jesus heard that John was arrested, he went to Galilee. 13He left Nazareth and settled in Capernaum, which lies alongside the sea in the area of [the ancient tribes of] Zebulun and Naphtali. 14This fulfilled what Isaiah the prophet said:
15Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, alongside the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles, 16the people who lived in the dark have seen a great light, and a light has come upon those who lived in the region and in shadow of death.
17From that time Jesus began to announce, "Change your hearts and lives! Here comes the kingdom of heaven!"
Bible, Common English. CEB Common English Bible with Apocrypha - eBook [ePub] (Kindle Locations 37965-37972). Common English Bible. Kindle Edition.
For the Word of God in scripture, for the word of God among us,
for the Word of God within us…Thanks be to God!
 
I was in high school when David Bowie’s “Changes” came out in 1972. I’m sure I heard it but didn’t really notice it. I was listening to Loggins and Messina, Carole King, John Denver with a little Allman Brothers thrown in. Now, thanks to our Director of Music, Mark Heiskenen, I have finally fully encountered and read the lyrics to David Bowie’s “Changes.” And watched him perform it live on YouTube. I’ve always been a late bloomer.

Ch-ch-changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-changes
(Don't want to be a richer man)
Ch-ch-changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-changes
(Just gonna have to be a different man)[i]

So goes the first refrain. The literature nerd in me wants to analyze the meaning of all the poetry in Bowie’s song, but I will spare you. Suffice it to say…. the song is about facing change and facing it within ourselves before and along with facing it in culture, in the world we live in. Facing change within to create change the without. And there’s a bit about the resistance we face from the world when we face into change.

Jesus could have sung along with Bowie as he faced into ministry and headed out of the solitude of the wilderness into the chaos of society. “Don’t want to be a richer man; turn and face the strain; just gonna be a different man; ch-ch-changes.” He was getting ready to face off with the powers of empire and establishment as he called God’s people to the vision of the kingdom of heaven. Other gospel writers use the phrase, the kingdom of God; Matthew, good Jewish Christian that he was, defers to kingdom of heaven instead because Holy One’s name is too mighty to even pronounce. Either way, Jesus is proclaiming a new vision of God being in the world and with the world. It is at hand, its near! It’s not a place…it’s a way of being in God’s ways, a way of living, and the time for it is now!

Now we know from family systems theory that when one person in a system decides to change, to grow up, to mature and to be as healthy as possible, to stop enabling the dis-ease of the family or the community, that resistance occurs. Oddly, the system, the community resists healthful change at first, before it can spread its healing power throughout the whole system. Jesus certainly experiences that resistance throughout his ministry. He is proclaiming God’s ways “to those who have treated God’s sovereignty with disdain.”[ii] John the Baptist has experienced that resistance as he proclaimed Jesus’ coming, preaching the new vision of the kingdom of God. He has been arrested and we know he will be executed, a foreshadowing of what is to come for Jesus. The powers of the worlds, those who disdain God’s ways, do NOT like change, do they? They like to move comfortably in their habits of greed, oppression, patriarchy and fear without challenge. Too Bad, says Jesus! Those are not the ways of God! There is a new way of justice, compassion, healing and love! It is God’s way and it is here! Time to change!

Too Bad, we say as the followers of Jesus. Bullying, lying, excluding others, scarcity thinking, greed these are not the ways of God! Poverty, hunger, homelessness, lack of healthcare, these are not the ways of God! God’s ways are compassion, inclusion of all, abundance, enough resources, food and shelter for all, listening to every voice! Things need to change! And as we proclaim God’s ways we too meet/ have met resistance.

Change…..we are weary of change and of proclaiming change in so many ways. Yet it is the stuff of life.  How do we come alongside the changes God is calling us to proclaime in life-giving ways rather than life draining ways? I recently Octavia Butler’s sci-fi novel, The Parable of the Sower. Published in 1993 and set in the years 2024-2027, it is powerful and prophetic. Times are apocalyptic, climate change and destruction, political upheaval so devastating that people must live in walled communities for protection, unchecked violence is everywhere, water is precious and expensive. As the protagonist, a Black teenage young woman, observes civilization crumbling around her, she begins to write verses of observation to stay hopeful. “All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.”  “We do not worship God. We perceive and attend God. We learn from God. With forethought and work, We shape God. In the end we yield to God. We adapt and endure…. And God is Change.”[iii]

Now I’m still chewing theologically on the assertion “God is Change…. Shape God.” Yes,…. and I’m not sure I can or want to sum up God in that one word. However, it got me thinking about the change that we are facing in our world here in 2022. Climate change, political upheaval, gun violence, pandemic…. scary changes. AND there are miraculous changes at work in our world as well, some made by human hands and some within the very systems of the natural world. So how do we live and work with the changes of our world proclaiming and manifesting the kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed? How can we come alongside change so that even if it feels like upheaval, it is life-giving, full of justice and non-violent truth-telling?

Pondering these questions, Spirit led as Spirit does in sometimes circuitous routes to a system of “social change work” that is vital and happening in our country called, “emergent strategy.” Emergent strategy has been developed particularly by women and people of color as well as our sisters and brothers in the LGBTQ community. I think its time we let those who have been marginalized take the lead. I want to learn from them. I am learning from the book, Emergent Strategy, Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown. brown, a social justice facilitator of twenty-five plus years, healer, writer and doula, asks: “what can [the natural world] teach us about how to be humans and how to be humans in a better relationship with each other?” What emerges from brown’s question is “emergent strategy,” ways of change for our time. Ways of change that, I believe, go hand in hand with the ways of the kingdom of heaven which is at hand and among us!” Indulge me as I briefly explain her work a bit more because it this way of change-making will be informing my preaching in the months to come.

“Emergence,” says brown in a podcast interview, “is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of relatively simple interactions. Strategy is the ability to adapt to changing conditions, while still moving towards our vision of freedom and the future and being in [the practice of emergence.] … how do we get in a right relationship with change that allows us to harness and shape things, towards community, towards liberation, towards justice?”[iv] And the strategic practices of change are taken from creation.

What if we look at the marvel of communication that happens in flocks of birds, such as a murmuration of starlings which can be huge, upwards of over a million birds at a time. I’m not sure I have seen one live in the world, but I have seen videos. “They move in synch with one another, engaging in clear, consistent communication and exhibiting collective leadership and deep, deep trust. Every bird focuses attention on their seven closest neighbors and thus manage the larger flock cohesiveness and synchronicity.”[v] Wow, it’s all about relationship, not policy! Or perhaps, the policy is in the relationship! The kingdom of heaven is at hand and is like a murmuration of starlings! How can we work like that as church?

Or consider a stand of oak trees surviving the fiercest hurricane winds, such as Hurricane Katrina, because their roots are so intertwined underground in life-giving care for and communication with one another? Or the underground mycelial network of mushrooms that not only creates communication, but food for the growing mushrooms above ground as it also detoxifies the soil? The kingdom of heaven is relationship like oak trees and mushrooms! So, I ask myself, how can we learn emergent strategic systems of change from these miraculous, yet ordinary, beautiful relationships of nature to be a better outpost for the realm of God, a better church community turning to face the strain of change as our friend, David Bowie prompts us?

Change is within us, upon us and we cannot hide, can we? God has given us the leadership of Jesus’s call…. “Change your hearts and lives! Here comes the kingdom of heaven!" God gives us the spiritual imagination and social justice intelligence of change leaders such as adrienne maree brown, the prophetic imagination of writers like Octavia Butler. The world is at a tipping point, longing for relationship leadership, ripe for the justice of non-violent change-making that works with creation not against it. God’s realm is at hand, upon us, we are in it NOW!

So, I leave you with this challenge, look and see how Spirit is among us transforming our hearts and lives through relationship and communication for the challenge of the kingdom of heaven. It’s already happening! And how can we strengthen our changing community in new and vital ways, such as emergent strategy, so that we focus on the kindom of heaven rather than majoring on minor issues that can pre-occupy our time out of fear and lack of vision?

Ch-ch-changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-changes

Jesus is calling, calling us to be the change we want to see! The kingdom heaven is coming!

Amen.

©The Rev. Jane Anne Ferguson 2022 and beyond. May be reprinted only with permission.

[i] David Bowie, “Changes” on YouTube
[ii] Douglas R.A. Hare, Matthew: Interpretation Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, (Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville, KY, 2009, 29.)
[iii] Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower ebook, (Open Road Integrated Media: New York, NY, 2012, 10, 63.)
[iv] https://onbeing.org/programs/adrienne-maree-brown-we-are-in-a-time-of-new-suns/
[v] adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy, Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, (AK Press: Chico, CA, 2017, 67.)

Isaiah 11.1-10 & Matthew 3.1-12
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning
Plymouth Congregational UCC,
Fort Collins, Colorado
Advent II
 
Repent! That is the key message we hear from John the Baptizer. That would certainly make him popular at a church potluck or an upscale cocktail party, wouldn’t it? I’ve sometimes thought it would be really awkward to have Jesus at Thanksgiving dinner with all of our celebratory excess, but he doesn’t hold a candle to his cousin, John.

Many of the paintings and frescoes I’ve seen of John portray him as something of a wild man, looking disheveled and unkempt. One of the very early frescoes labels him in Latin: Ioannis Precursor, literally the forerunner of Jesus. The funny thing for me is that I find those images appealing, because they are often so human in their portrayal. John looks like he bears the sadness of the human condition on his face. His expression seems to acknowledge that humanity is in need of a radical turn-around, and the best way he knows how to do that is to be provocative and to offer a baptism for the repentance of sins, and it is a cleansing ritual not unknown in Judaism.

In last week’s sermon, I claimed that John was just the precursor and that Jesus was the one really doing a new thing, not by baptizing with water, but with fire and the Holy Spirit. The idea is that Jesus’ baptism will be transforming us, refining us, not just cleansing us…that it will instill in us a new sense of God’s presence, what Dom Crossan calls a different kind of heart transplant – not of the pumping organ in your chest, but a radical transplant of the spirit within you…that your old spirit is done and gone and that Christ’s spirit is implanted into you.

And it would take something incredibly radical to disrupt the food chain Isaiah describes: Let’s face it, if you ever watched Wild Kingdom or Sir David Attenborough on TV, you know that the natural order means that wolves are meant to eat lambs, and that leopards are meant to eat goats, and that lions are meant to eat calves. It is nature, red it tooth and claw. All of us understand that the natural order is less likely to change than human behavior. Unlike the rest of the animal kingdom, we have the ability to choose our responses and our behaviors. But that is a tall order.

So, what about disrupting our assumptions? Don’t most of us assume that self-interest is normal and ethical? Don’t we assume that the “invisible hand of the market” is and should control our economy? Don’t we assume that “the poor will always be with us?” and that even though we tried to end homelessness in Fort Collins by 2020, it was something of a pipe dream? (I was told as much by an older Presbyterian clergyperson back when I was on the Leadership Team of Homeward 2020.) Every year for the past 15 years, I have seen our teens sleep out to raise funds and awareness to prevent homelessness, and I’ve slept out with them three or four years…and I’m still waiting for one of my colleagues to do the same! What if one of the young people who participates gets the idea that maybe things don’t have to be the way they are? What if one of them threw everything they’ve got into dreaming up a new way to work on the root causes of homelessness and came up with a solution? With all due respect to the focus on STEM in our educational system, our ethical and social structures need more emphasis, because science and technology are clearly out-pacing economics, social relations, theology, politics, arts, and literature, and as a people, we’re suffering from it.

What if parents like me did less to encourage our kids to play competitive sports and get the highest grades and spent more time inculcating the kind of values our faith espouses? What if we stopped trying so hard to make them “successful” and focused on compassion instead? What kind of world might be created if we allow ourselves to be baptized with fire and with the Holy Spirit?

Nobody is going to force you to change, to repent, to engage in deep inner transformation. And the reason is simple: nobody can do that for you. Transformation is an “inside job.” And it’s right in the middle of Plymouth’s mission statement of worshiping God and making the kingdom visible by inviting people into our faith, transforming ourselves deeply, and then sending us out into the world. All of us need to work on becoming better citizens of God’s realm, and that will require some realignment of our priorities and it will require some sacrifice of the things relatively affluent Americans love most: recreation, time, privilege, and money. A few weeks ago, I saw a meme on Facebook that said, “Sometimes being a good Christian means being a bad Roman.”

And what we stand to gain is what Americans talk least about — you know…the Mr. Rogers values — loving relationships with others, being spiritually and emotionally grounded, relying on neighbors, having a sense of security that does not depend on a stock portfolio, gated communities, or carrying a firearm. And most of all, it means being connected to the presence of God.

Being baptized with water? That’s easy. Not so much with fire and the Holy Spirit.

Imagine if you heard this prophecy:
“The business magnate will support the homeless man.
The Democrat shall embrace the Republican as a sister or brother.
The gun manufacturer will build tools with the smithy.
The Russian oligarch and the Andean farmer will work as one.
The refugee and the white supremacist will be at home with one another. And a little child shall lead them.”

What would you add to that list of unlikely, but desirable, events? What enemies do you wish would become lovers? What circumstances would you love to transform? God knows there is so much to be done…and there is a place to start.

In 1780, John Adams (who considered studying for  the Congregational ministry at Harvard before he opted for law) wrote to his wife Abigail from Paris: “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, Navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary and Porcelaine.” That is what Adams envisioned as transformation and progress, and he risked his life for it.

Though you and I know that we cannot change the world overnight, with God’s help we have a place to start: with prayer. The first step is to open ourselves up the transformative power of God…to pray, to talk about, to work for a world that Jesus would recognize as God’s realm. And doing so, we must avoid falling into the traps of despair or hopelessness or lacking trust in God’s presence in the world. We have to keep the faith…just as the Hebrew people did when they were in captive exile in Babylon.
You and I have the amazing privilege of getting to pray for and to work for the kind of nation and the kind of world that God would be proud of, and it starts in here. It is a nation, it is a world, that is full of pain, but those may be the birth pangs of coming into a new way of being. You and I are called to be the agents of transformation in ourselves and in God’s world, so in this Advent season of active waiting, let us keep the faith.

There is a voice in the wilderness calling, so keep awake, listen deeply, and pray fervently, because the kingdom of God is at hand.

Amen.
 
© 2019 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact hal@plymouthucc.org for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses.

Luke 3.7-18
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning
Plymouth Congregational UCC
Fort Collins, Colorado

There is a part of me that wonders why the Senior Minister always has to wear the black hat…why I always seem to get the tough passages…Last week, Jake gets the song of Zechariah, “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he hath visited and redeemed his people.” And next week, Jane Anne gets the Magnificat: “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit doth rejoice in God my savior.” So nice. And what do I get this week? [cue theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly] “You brood of vipers!” I actually realize that part of my call at Plymouth sometimes is to tell you things you would rather not hear…it just goes with the territory, even though I don’t always get to use the theme from the Clint Eastwood’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. 

So, when you hear about this fella, John the Baptizer (unlike Jane Anne’s family, he wasn’t Baptist; he was Jewish), he often gets to wear the black hat. He is out there in the wilderness, subsisting on a diet of locusts and wild honey, clothed in a rough garment of camel’s hair (very scratchy in all the wrong places), and probably smelling a lot like a camel as well. Perhaps that’s why he was so into ritual bathing in the Jordan…it wasn’t just sin that he was trying to wash away.

John gets to challenge those who have followed him out into the wilderness -– a place of danger and testing, as we know from the biblical narratives –- to move out of their comfort zones and not simply to rely on their Abrahamic ancestry, but to “bear fruit worthy of changed hearts,” changed minds, and changed lives. John is out on the margins, living a physically and mentally difficult, rigorous, ascetic life, which strips away the less important aspects of life to get down to the basics: to live a fruit-bearing life. 

He challenges those who are there who have two coats to give one to the poor…this does not mean just bringing an extra coat in the back of your front hall closet and donate it to Homeward Alliance like I did two weeks ago. It means if you have two houses, give one to somebody who hasn’t got one. [Cue The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly theme.]
​
John’s message and ministry were distinct from that of Jesus, and as you learned last week from Jake’s sermon, John was the son of Zechariah and Elizabeth (Mary’s cousin), so Jesus and John were first cousins once removed. And Jesus was initially a follower in the John movement, but after John lost his head and Jesus went into the wilderness for 40 days, Jesus started a new movement that was focused on healing and  proclaiming the kingdom of God. 

I had never been a big fan of John the Baptizer. He was rough around the edges and seemed obsessed with purging people of their sins by washing them away ritually. And I have seen Jesus’ primary message as different. But in reading this text, the three examples of repentance that John spells out all involve economic justice. Giving your coat to someone without one. Tax collectors should only take the amount prescribed by the government (which was not the general practice). Roman soldiers should not extort money but be satisfied with their wages. 

​Sometimes, you have to look harder to see how figures of the past might emerge. About six years ago, I was with Dom Crossan and Marcus Borg on a pilgrimage in Italy, and one of my favorite places that we visited is far off the beaten tourist path outside the town of Nola near Naples. After wandering through the tiny village of Cimitile and attracting surprised stares from the local residents, we arrived at a Paleo-Christian church. (Paleo-Christian is not a diet plan…it just means that it’s very early…from the 4th century.) Going through the complex we saw ancient frescoes of early Christians, who seemed to look out at us postmoderns from a different millennium. Even through the disrepair of these ancient frescoes, their eyes of our Christian brothers and sisters seem to convey a longing to connect. And as we moved to a different part of the room we saw a few remaining representations of different saints and biblical figures, including this one of John. 

You cannot see his eyes or his facial expression, but you can see the coarseness of his hair, and that fits in with the impression we have of John: the wild man who lives on the fringe of society who has a message to proclaim in the wilderness. And you can also see the Latin inscription, “Johannes Precursor,” literally John the forerunner.
​
I’ve noticed that there is something of a visual trope...

...​in paintings of John, as the bearded guy with tousled hair and a doleful expression on his face. And one of the things this does is to project an image of John as a real, full-blooded human being (and unlike some beatific images of Jesus, looking fully divine, but not-quite-human). John looks like he’s carrying an emotional burden, as if the cares of the world are on his shoulders. For me that makes him more than a guy who wears the black hat and more of a real person who sees what is wrong with the world he lives in and tries to do something about it. John is the challenger, the confronter, the voice crying out in the wilderness. 

This John is perhaps a little more like us, one who understands God’s justice and sees the disconnect between that vision and the world-as-it-is. Jesus was part of his cousin John’s movement. And though it is only in Mark’s and Matthew’s accounts, the death of John the Baptizer comes after he called out Herod, saying that the king’s marriage to Herodias, his brother’s wife, isn’t legitimate. And the wife and daughter of Herod literally request John’s head on a platter, and Herod delivers.

Criticizing the empire and its petty kings is dangerous business. John is the precursor, the forerunner, the messenger who proclaims that the messiah is coming. John’s demise led Jesus to reframe John’s message and to recast it into a proclamation of an alternative vision for the world: the kingdom of God. And as we know, the demand for economic justice is at the center of that realm that Jesus proclaimed, the kingdom that he said is within us and among us.

The call to a change of heart is central to message of both John and Jesus. It is a call away from the narrowness of self-interest and into something far greater than our own lives. It is a call to give of oneself and to become part of a world order that is grounded in faith, in hope, and in self-giving love.
John offers each of us a challenge this Advent, in terms of how we can help live out economic justice, which is especially important in our current political reality. It is a challenge to ask ourselves how we can contribute to the realm of God, rather than simply to ask, “What’s in it for me?”

As we walk through these final days of Advent, I leave you to consider the question that the crowd around John asked him: “What then should we do?” What can you do to help as a cocreator of God’s realm today?

Amen.
 
© 2018 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. All photos by the author. Please contact hal@plymouthucc.org for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses.