Transfiguration Inspiration
A Transfiguration Sunday sermon related to Matthew 17:1-8
 
CENTRAL FOCUS:
That the transfiguration story is s source of inspiration amidst struggle, a theophany of Light and Renewal to "Get up and be not afraid" as we head back down the mountain.
 
Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. 2 And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became bright as light. 3 Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him.
 
4 Then Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I[a] will set up three tents here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” 5 While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son, the Beloved;[b] with him I am well pleased; listen to him!”
 
6 When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. 7 But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” 8 And when they raised their eyes, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.
 
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
 
They were young and in love (at least 23 and 18 seem young to me now). So they married. She was pregnant and they were happy about it. They loved each other and wanted to be married. The baby came and eventually two others. Young love is not an unusual story, but this love does have an unusual twist of context. You see it was 1958 and husband Richard Loving was what our society calls white (European American) and wife Mildred was what our society called back then "colored." (Her lineage was African American and Native American.) And, in the State of Virginia in 1958, interracial marriage was forbidden, a felony, and punishable by significant jail time.
 
After marrying quietly in the District of Columbia and returning to Virginia to live quietly, someone tipped off the police who then raided their bedroom in the middle of the night and arrested them. They plea bargained for a sentence of one year in jail to be suspended, provided they left Virginia for 25 years, never in that time to return together. These country people lived in DC for years away from family and the country life they loved before Mildred appealed to Attorney General Robert Kennedy who referred them to the ACLU. The ACLU provided free legal support that over several years finally landed their case in front of the Supreme Court who overturned Virginia’s and all such state laws in 1967.
 
My wife and I watched the dramatized version of this story some years ago in the feature film titled simply and appropriately, Loving. That cinematic way of telling the story allowed me to see and feel the love between these two and the anguish, pain, and struggle that these two people, these two citizens, endured. Born of fear and systematized into law, the injustice of white supremacy caused these two to be sometimes separated from each other, separated from family, and to be exiled from their home.  It was an inspiration to witness their love, their perseverance, their strength, and their courage in staying together and in finally finding a way to publicly and legally resist.
 
It is appropriate to uplift such stories of courage and justice making, even more so during Black History month. And there are other such stories brought to film. Selma is the dramatized version of the story of seeking voting rights in Selma, Alabama and of the events and efforts of 1965 at the end of this long campaign that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 13th is a documentary film outlining the historic pattern of turning the racial discrimination of slavery into the racial discrimination of criminalization, using the 13th Amendment to the Constitution which forbids slavery, but allows an exception when one is duly convicted of a crime.
 
Difficult stories these are, yet inspiring in their witness to those who put their lives and bodies on the line for the truth of justice, the truth of liberation, the truth of the dignity of the human person, all persons.  Feature films are one of the common ways we tell stories today.
 
Our tradition of faith is also gifted with stories, ancient stories. Their distance of time and culture can make them seem less accessible than the movies which are a primary form of storytelling in our age, but the effort to overcome that distance can be worth it. These sacred stories are meant as teaching, reflection, and inspiration just as they were for the early Christian communities.
 
This morning’s story can seem particularly distant, especially if you are not a mystic and not inclined to imaginative prayer visions. It can be easy to classify this story as very "religious" and simply a story to support some kind of high theological and doctrinal view of Jesus as Divine. But, this morning, I offer that, looking closer, we can see something more, something more for Matthew’s community and something more for our community.
 
Context is important always to shape our imaginations in getting the story’s fullest impact and import. Matthew’s author is writing to a community still wondering what it means to follow the lineage of Judaism now that the Temple has been destroyed by the Romans after another failed revolt. Matthew’s author is writing to a community wondering if they will be safe, if they have a place, in this new version of Roman Empire occupying their land.
 
My UCC colleague Rev. Anne Dunlap offered insight into the context of this story of Transfiguration in an online sermon on this text and I gratefully follow her lead here in further understanding the context of this sacred story.  The baby Jesus, visited by the Magi, subsequently has to flee for safety south to Egypt. After returning, Jesus has grown up, been baptized by John in the Jordan River, and has begun teaching and healing. He has spoken his Sermon on the Mount (much longer than any I would give!), gathered and sent out disciples, and has made his way to many towns and cities.
 
But something significant happens in chapter 14 that subtly changes the tone of Matthew’s Gospel: the incarcerated John the Baptist is executed. Another movement leader killed by the empire. The one who baptized Jesus, to whom he was related in blood and in a message of Holy resistance and change, murdered by the state. We notice that Jesus from this point on seeks refuge regularly in deserted places like mountain tops. And, just prior to our story in Chapter 17, he begins to talk about the suffering he is to endure, even having to forcefully rebuke his close disciple Peter who discourages the path of suffering.  Immediately after our story of transfiguration, Jesus speaks of John the Baptist and his fate.
 
So it appears the context of the Transfiguration story is of a Jesus under duress of the system, under a growing threat as his movement grows, under the shadow of the cross. And where does he go in such a state? He goes to the mountain to pray. He takes the support of community with him. He seeks and finds the support of the ancestors.  He listens for and hears a Divine Voice of Affirmation. Faced with his mortality and vulnerability, he seeks the Divine Light. And while Peter offers to build dwellings to stay there and they all respond with fear to God’s presence and message to follow, it is Jesus who touches them and says, “Get up and do not be afraid.”

“Get up and do not be afraid.”
 
The story of Transfiguration is a story for our difficult stories, for our difficult times when Herod or Caesar, the one out in the world or the one inside of us, is on our trail. The Transfiguration Story is a story for us, an invitation to experience the Divine Light and hear Divine Affirmation so that we can be like those who persevered in their love for each other amidst hard times,

so that we can be like those seeking voting rights who got up after being knocked down by State Troopers,

and be like those who see the painful path of injustice and have the courage to seek and even suffer another path for justice. 

Transfiguration is a story of Spirit’s power to touch us, bless us, and send us back into the world as it is so we might witness with our lives to how it can be.
 
One of the possible translations here is that Peter wanted to build three sanctuaries. Jesus’ message to him was that, with the power of Divine Light and Truth, and of the ancestors, we must overcome our fear, get up, and come down the mountain to be sanctuaries in the world. Transfiguration is a story of the Divine Light that has the power to sustain us in the difficult times. We can be like the disciples focused on the power of the Christ Mystery. We can be like Jesus and become infused with God’s Light. We can know Transfiguration Inspiration so that we can come down the mountain and become sanctuaries in the world. May this be so. AMEN

Yes and No
A sermon based on Matthew 5:33-37 (The Message version)
 
Central Focus
Being clear about our own truth and our own boundaries, allows us to be more loving and is more of a service to God, to the other person, and to God’s Realm.
 
And don’t say anything you don’t mean. This counsel is embedded deep in our traditions. You only make things worse when you lay down a smoke screen of pious talk, saying, ‘I’ll pray for you,’ and then never doing it or saying, ‘God be with you,’ and not meaning it. You don’t make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true.  Just say “yes’ and ‘no.’ When you manipulate words to get your own way, you go wrong.
 
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
 
Think of a time when you said yes to someone, but you really wanted to say NO.  Or, a time when you said NO, but realized you really wanted to say yes. It might have been a small thing like going to a movie or getting ice cream or a big thing like taking a job or buying a house. You might have known your true answer in the moment or perhaps later.
 
This morning we are moving into our Annual Congregational Meeting and will be asked to say yes or no on matters of the congregation. So it seems appropriate to name and to know that Jesus speaks to us about matters of discernment and declaration. He seems to want us to be truthful and clear and to know ourselves as we declare our yes and no.
 
My sense is that Matthew’s Community has Jesus teaching about this in the important Sermon on the Mount because being clear about our own truth and our own boundaries actually allows us to be more loving which is more of a service to God, to the other person, and to God’s Realm. The Beloved Community is a place where community building covenants are made, and made well, and therefore kept. I think Jesus understood that community, real and worthy community that finds its way to justice and peace, is based on truthful, sincere and appropriate covenants. And relationship covenants are based on good boundaries of yes and no.
 
In a church I used to pastor, one of the three simple questions of new members that I asked during the ritual of membership was “Are you willing to say both yes and no?”
 
I must admit that I have often not been free and willing to do that because I was afraid that my authentic answer would affect the relationship negatively. Jesus challenges me and us in calling us to be authentic and in a way that builds relationships and strengthens community.
 
I have an idea about that and a process I want to share with you. Here’s what we often don’t realize or remember:

• Saying Yes means saying No to something. 
• Saying No means saying Yes to something.
• AND that there is such a thing as a positive NO.

William Ury of Boulder has written a book about just that, The Power of a Positive NO.
 
I believe that this positive No is at the heart of how we clarify and ground the oaths and covenants that build loving and just relationships.  A positive No serves relationships by building them on the clarity and truth of what is and by minimizing the likelihood that whatever covenant has been made will be broken because a lurking unexpressed resentment or disagreement or disrespect.  Let’s explore….
 
What do people do that is not a positive NO? Or, you could say, what is a negative No? Three things: accommodate, attack, or avoid.

• When we accommodate, we agree to something we really don’t want.
  
• When we attack, we say No, but in such a way as to not be good for the other person.
• When we avoid, we find a way to say nothing at all.

 
A positive no honors both parties in that it empowers you to be true, to not hurt yourself or the other, and it keeps respect for the other and openness to the possibility of another agreement and to the ongoing relationship. 
 
So how can one do this?
In most sacred traditions, including ours, there is the presence of a symbolic Tree of Life. That Tree can serve well as an image for how we can find our positive No which empowers us to follow the teaching of Jesus in being clear about our yes and our no. 
 
Let’s divide that tree into three parts; roots, trunk, and upper branches and leaves. There are three parts to a positive No that can correspond to the tree image; an internal yes, our external No, and another external yes.
 
Let’s start with the roots. 
If we are to have a positive No, we must go inward, down into our own roots and know what is important to us. What do we truly want? Where are we trying to go?  What are we trying to do?  What vision is calling to us? This taproot is our deep yes, our basic values and commitments.
 
For those following in the Christ Way, we are asked to say yes to some basic understandings

• that at the very beginning God as Creator created a world blessed in its origins, and we are part of it
• know that we are made in the image of God
• That our neighbor is made in the image of God
• that we have been made with the power to choose
• that we are called to the love that makes for peace, justice, and the integrity of Creation

 
This place of the Yes, of the “roots” is the also the place to know who we are individually, uniquely, deeply.
 
What are my values? What do I want ultimately? What is mine to do? How is my unique life going to express God’s Yes to me and to all life?
This is the place to find our deep yes!

We can often miss what is true here because we are unaware of our unconscious motives and commitments. This inquiry into our deep roots is critical to working through our yes and no.
 
OK, now to the trunk of that tree. 
This is the No that we identify and express. Out of our roots where we find our deep yes, comes the identification of what then does not serve that Yes. If I have made time commitments and affirm that I am only one person with limits of time and space, I might have to say NO to a request for volunteering or working overtime or giving my time up to television or continuing a destructive behavior like an addiction. 
 
Setting a NO boundary is being faithful to our deeper Yes.
We might disappoint someone else, but we cannot really agree to something with integrity that we are asked unless we actually see the yes in it. Saying yes to things that we know are not the right thing for us in that moment leads to resentment and sabotage of that covenant later on, even unconsciously or passive-aggressively, or it leads to a loss of self-respect or a depression that hides anger. We can punish ourselves or another person (often both) for not being true to our deeper Yes.
 
When discrimination or hatred or insult come, if our deeper Yes to God’s Grace and our making in the divine image is to be served, we must reject messages or treatment that says we are less than that. The civil rights movement was and is a giant positive NO movement.  Speaking up and saying Black Lives Matter is a positive No to all that does not honor equally the lives of black people. Speaking up and acting against the discrimination and hatred of gay or lesbian or transgender people is positive NO to all that does not honor equally the lives of LGBTQ people. These positive No statements are based in a deep Yes to seeing all of us as God’s children and worthy of love and respect.
 
OK, now the third part of the tree, the canopy of the upper branches and leaves.  After expressing our positive NO, we not only honor and protect our own deep Yes, but we can then be open to another positive Yes in relation to the other. We can come from a place of self-knowledge, self-respect, and self-confidence to offer what is an acceptable agreement in relating to the other.  Like those branches, we can reach out to the other, offering other possibilities, not this but that. I can’t go with you now or volunteer now, but perhaps I can reconsider in two months when my schedule changes. We can make an offer to the other person that honors our true connection or commonality with that other.
 
So there are three parts to a positive NO; a deep Yes, a specific No, and the offer of another possible yes. 
 
Here’s how it might look.
A boss comes to you and asks you to work on Saturday on an important project.  You know that this would score points with the boss and possibly advance your career, but you are also the coach of your daughter’s soccer team and promised that you would spend more time with her. What do you do?
 
LET’S REVIEW
To the roots: Where is your yes? 
How does your career figure in what you want in life? Is it most important? Is family life and presence more important? Can advancing your career support your family life or have told yourself that before only to see it doesn’t work out this way? Maybe your boss has a way of using people in this way and doesn’t really come through or return the favor. While life is complicated and we might want to know more about how family is going in terms of money and relationship, and more about the boss and your history with her, let’s just say that you know inside that the thing you really know you want to do is to be there for your daughter and to coach the soccer game. You want to say yes to more family time. It will lead you to the life you value, to living out a value of children and family that you believe in. You may see that God calls you to human relationship more than money, and that you are called to respect yourself as much as the other person.
 
To the Trunk: Expressing your No.
Now you have to draw on the inspiration of connecting with your deep yes to family and to self-respect.  This is the time to express your NO and say to the boss, “I can’t work this weekend. I have a commitment to family time that I want to honor.”
 
To the top of the tree: Another yes to the relationship.
Adding another possibility to the equation that would work for you and showing respect and appreciation for the other keeps the relationship open and keeps you from a negative no.  It might sound like this:
“I can’t work this Saturday. I have a commitment to family time that I want to honor, but I really appreciate you thinking of me with this important project. I can hear that you would like to get it done ASAP. I know that the project is important for the company and I would be willing to work on it Sunday evening from 6-9pm.  How would that work?”
 
How did that feel as I was telling it? Did anyone feel any butterflies in the stomach or anger when the request was made?
 
You may already see where this process is most difficult for you:

• knowing what you want in the moment
• having the courage to say no and not accommodate
• having the calmness to say no without reacting and attacking
• being able to see forward to other possibilities and tend to the relationship while saying no

 
Mahatma Gandhi said
A ‘No’ uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a ‘Yes’ merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble.”
 
While there is much to learn of this process and more that could be said, I hope the tree image is a helpful way for you to remember and to identify your true yes and no. 
 
Jesus teaches that it is important to have your yes be yes and your no be no, to be true to others requires being true to yourself.  This is one Way to the Realm of God, to Beloved Community. 

This, I believe, is what Jesus teaches.

This is the Path we are challenged to follow.

Remember Your Baptism
A sermon related to Matt 3:13-17
Rev. J.T. Smiedendorf
 
CENTRAL FOCUS:
That baptism represents an immersion, a rebirth, into the living, loving Way of Jesus.
 
Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. 14 John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” 15 But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. 16 And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw God’s Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him. 17 And a voice from the heavens said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
 
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
 
Inspired by the presence of water in this morning's scripture story, I'd like to share with you one of my favorite stories of water.
 
In southwestern South Dakota there is a First Nation reservation called Pine Ridge, the home of the Oglala band of the Lakota Nation. On my first visit there a number of years ago, I was privileged to meet Duane, a middle-aged Lakota man. As a part of our day’s work with Re-Member, a nonprofit group on the reservation started by some UCC people in Michigan, we were sent to help Duane garden. 
 
But Duane was no ordinary gardener. 
He had three large gardens that covered more than an acre. And the garden’s produce of beans, squash, corn, and melons was meant for the elders in the nearby village of Porcupine. Knowing the scarcity and the preciousness of water on the reservation, Duane had written a successful grant proposal to purchase drip irrigation equipment. We were there to help lay it out and to plant. Duane showed me how it worked and how to repair it. I even planted corn for the first time, a novelty for a city kid like me.
 
Duane was utilizing the gift of water, wisely, for the greater good and life of the Lakota people.
 
Our sacred story of water this morning comes from Matthew’s early Christian community.
For Matthew, the story of Jesus’ baptism certainly helps accomplish his purpose of showing Jesus as a true Jewish messianic leader. Jesus, like so many Jewish leaders and the Jewish people before, entered the waters of the Jordan River and was deeply affirmed by God’s Presence there in an experience of the Holy Spirit. The esteemed Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann noted that this scene is a kind of endorsement reminiscent of those of the Davidic kings and that the Matthew story affirms God's blessing for the coming rule of Jesus.
 
It is that coming rule of Jesus or the Realm of God that Jesus proclaimed that is the deeper purpose of baptism. Baptism is a kind of initiation and immersion into that Divine Realm, a transformation into a new way of life where one experiences one’s true Divine affirmation and blessing and, like Jesus, leads a life guided and sustained by Spirit that serves Life, a life of love and integrity and service and generosity and community. Indeed, in Luke’s version of this story, John the Baptist’s call was to prepare for a new age, to become part of a movement to prepare the way for it, and when people asked, ‘What then should we do?’ John said to them, ‘Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.’ he told tax collectors to collect no more than was proper and soldiers to give up their racket of extortion and simply do their jobs.
 
Baptism in the water of the Jordan certainly celebrated and sealed this new way of living for the individual, but it clearly had a goal of changing society, redeeming it from its ills of selfishness, poverty, violence, and corruption.  John’s invitation called people to prepare the way of God by changing one’s life, preparing the way within, seeing and acting differently, living in the world and with others differently.  Baptism meant there would be relational and social change leading toward the fullness of God’s Realm and that we each would need to choose, to act to immerse ourselves in this new reality.
 
Do you remember your baptism?
I don't remember my baptism in late 1963 because I grew up in a family in the Methodist Church and Methodists do infant baptism. While I do appreciate and truly love the welcome and the blessing that comes with celebrating a new life in our community through infant baptism, baptizing babies does miss a profound adult experience of consciously choosing faith not just in Jesus and in the God of Jesus, but in living into the Way of Jesus and toward the vision of the Beloved Community. Baptism is meant not only to be a profound reorientation of the inner world, but to be a profoundly countercultural choice. Baptism is a big deal, change of direction moment for youth and adults.
 
In fact, for the apostle Paul the ritual of baptism was such a big deal that it was imaged as a form of death, death of the old and rebirth into a new life in Christ. Indeed, there could be no better symbol than that of water for baptism, the waters of birth. And, despite the common church practice of sprinkling water on babies and sometimes adults, there could be no better symbolic act than full immersion into the water to re-emerge anew. It was not uncommon in the early church for those wishing to follow Jesus to study for months and then to be stripped of their clothing before experiencing a full immersion baptism, often on Easter, to initiate their new and full life in Christ, rising from the water to clothed anew in all white.
 
This morning I'm not here to propose a change in our practices of baptism, but I am here to call us again to immersing ourselves in the Way of Jesus, to be in the practice of becoming beloved community.
 
I am calling us to remember our baptism, to remember that life we are initiated into and who goes with us on that journey and how important it is. If you have not been baptized, I invite you to consider a conscious choice to follow the way of Jesus and to consecrate that choice in the ritual of baptism.
 
Remember your baptism.
The Way of Jesus is a profound way of love where there is a deep intention, a free will choice to love in a way that brings healing and justice that moves us beyond cycles of despair and bitterness, of violence and revenge. Baptism is acknowledging the choice to love in a way that goes beyond a judgment as to whether others deserve love, goes beyond simple tit for tat and eye for an eye, goes beyond the focus on what the other did or did not do. It goes beyond a reactive reality about the Other to a creative reality of the Self that simply asks, “How can I manifest love here and now? Love for myself and other, love for community and the whole earth? What form of love would serve the life in me AND the other now and moving forward?”
 
Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount summarizes the vision of what baptism initiates us into, the Realm of God, life in the Beloved Community where cycles that drain life are replaced by intentions and actions that give life.
            Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you
            Turn the other cheek
            Blessed are the merciful
            Blessed are the peacemakers
            Blessed are the humble
            Store up treasures of the Spirit
            Seek first the Realm of God and do not worry
            Treat others as you would like to be treated
           
Remembering our baptism is remembering that we are called to choose this kind of love.
The fact the you and I often fall short is not as important as remembering our baptism and choosing again the Way of Jesus.
 
Remember your baptism.
And remember you are not alone on that imperfect journey after baptism to live into this kind of love and service of Life.
 
I think of Duane still as someone who inspires me on that journey after baptism.
 
Some years later, I asked about Duane, and found out that he had died. 
It was a sad reminder that like many on the Pine Ridge reservation, living to your late fifties is actually better than average. Measured by certain statistics, Pine Ridge is the second poorest place in the Western Hemisphere (after Haiti). In a land area the size of Connecticut, there is one grocery store and one hospital.  Alcoholism and diabetes are rampant. Duane knew that most of the food that Lakota people can get is of poor nutritional value so he tried to do something about it.
 
So when I remember my baptism, and what I am to live for, Duane is one of those in the communion of saints who goes with me. Duane goes with me and helps me remember my baptism not simply because he was a kind and delightful man, but because even amidst the wilderness of poverty and discrimination, amidst a system of injustice and oppression that creates conditions for despair and death, Duane chose to love, to embrace a vision of life, to have a faith in action, to commit to the life of the people. He chose care for the elders and the children.  Maybe he found his transforming sacred waters in the sweat of the prayer lodge, but I believe Duane was a baptized human, whether he ever did a Christian ritual of baptism or not, because he immersed himself in a higher sacred purpose beyond himself, a purpose to serve compassion and justice, a lifegiving purpose in the Realm of the Great Spirit.
 
Who can help you remember your baptism and what baptism is for?
Who in your communion of saints can whisper in your ear, when life for you or your family or this church is difficult, “Remember your baptism.”
 
Later in worship, during the passing of the peace and the last hymn or even after worship is ended, you are welcome to come forward to the bowl to dip your fingers into the waters and touch your forehead or back of your hand to remember your baptism.
 
Whether we are at life’s end or closer to its beginning or in the middle, it is wise to pray to God, “May we know Your Presence, May your longings be ours.” This is what Jesus sought and experienced in baptism and this is what we seek when we Remember our Baptism.

Unexpected Peace
An Advent sermon related to Isaiah 11:1-9 and Dalai Lama quote on peace
 
CENTRAL FOCUS:
To uplift the unexpected possibility/emergence of peace
and to connect it with the realization of justice.
 
Isaiah 11:1-9 (The Inclusive Bible)
 
Then a shoot will sprout from the stump of Jesse;
    From Jesse’s roots, a branch will blossom.
2 The spirit of YHWH will rest on you,
    a spirit of wisdom and understanding,
    a spirit of counsel and strength,
    a spirit of knowledge and reverence for YHWH.
 
3 You will delight in obeying YHWH,
And you won’t judge by appearances,
    or make decisions by hearsay.
4 You will treat poor people with fairness
    and will uphold the rights of the land’s downtrodden;
With a single word you will strike down tyrants,
    With your decrees you will execute evil people.
5 Justice will be the belt around this your waist
    faithfulness will gird you up.
 
6 Then the wolf will dwell with the lamb;
    And the leopard will lie down with the young goat;
the calf and the lion cub will graze together,
    and a little child will lead them.
7 The cow will feed with the bear;
    their young will lie down together;
    The lion will eat hay like the ox.
8 The baby will play next to the den of the cobra,
    and the toddler will dance over the viper’s nest.
9 There will be no harm, no destruction anywhere
    in my holy mountain,
for as the water fills the sea,
so the land will be filled with the knowledge of YHWH.
 
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.
 
In January of 1915, in Great Britain, the Wellington Journal & Shrewsbury News published a letter of a British military officer. Captain Robert Patrick Miles wrote home on Christmas Day from the Great War’s trenches, the front lines of World War I. He wrote:
 
We are having the most extraordinary Christmas Day imaginable. A sort of unarranged and quite unauthorized but perfectly understood and scrupulously observed truce exists between us and our friends in front. … The thing started last night – a bitter cold night, with white frost – soon after dusk when the Germans started shouting 'Merry Christmas, Englishmen' to us. Of course, our fellows shouted back and presently large numbers of both sides had left their trenches, unarmed, and met in the debatable, shot-riddled, no man's land between the lines. Here the agreement – all on their own – came to be made that we should not fire at each other until after midnight tonight. The men were all fraternizing in the middle … and swapped cigarettes and lies in the utmost good fellowship. Not a shot was fired all night.
 
The letter was published posthumously.
Captain Miles was killed 5 days after he wrote this letter on December 30, 2014. 
 
Unexpected peace broke out that Christmas during the First World War. 
The tragic fact that it did not last is, of course, reason for deep disappointment, sadness, and grief. Yet, the fact that this unexpected peace occurred is soul food for our imaginations. It is manna in the wilderness of violence and violent expectations. The story’s unexpectedness, the fact that we call it that, unexpected, points to the expectation of a lack of peace in our collective imaginations and even the cynicism that can make a home in our hearts, especially in the light of mass shootings like Club Q in Colorado Springs, King Soopers in Boulder, others around the country, and in light of the Jan. 6th insurrection at the Capitol building.
 
Yet, the prophetic voice we hear in the passage from Isaiah this morning has no such limitation of imagination and expectation.  Isaiah’s prophetic poetic imagination offers a vision, a hope, even an expectation for his people who stand in their time also amidst the darkness of deportations and war. Even in such a time, the prophet Isaiah offers a vision of peace that comes about by justice. In this case, justice brought by an ideal sovereign whose connection to God imbues humility, wisdom, compassion, and a sense of equity. Amidst these qualities, there is a reconciliation in the land so profound that even the lion shall lay down with the lamb.
 
In the story I shared, the War to End All Wars resumed and Captain Miles was killed because, of course, nothing changed in the systems in which these humans lived.  No policies or orders were changed, no heartfelt connection and conversation was had by the warring nations’ leaders.  They would not make room in their imaginations for another vision. These leaders, and many of their citizens, were prisoners of their limited sense of self and of the other, captives of their nationalistic, competitive worldview and its expectations.
 
As a Peace with Justice church nationally and here locally at Plymouth United Church of Christ, we uplift an understanding that what makes for peace are conditions of justice. 
 
The Dalai Lama said it this way:
 
Peace, in the sense of the absence of war, is of little value to someone who is dying of hunger or cold. It will not remove the pain of torture inflicted on a prisoner of conscience. It does not comfort those who have lost their loved ones in floods caused by senseless deforestation in a neighboring country. Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free.
 
Indeed, what makes for justice are peaceful actions of justice-making by peace-filled nonviolent people like Rosa Parks, Dolores Huerta, Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, and like First Nation youth and elders at the Standing Rock Reservation a few years ago. And many unnamed others. All of these people made room for a dream of peace based in justice, made room in their imaginations in such a way as it led them into actions for that vision of Just Peace.
 
This also can be the case in our personal lives where our conscious imaginations fail us and we set expectations, often unconscious, based on our internalized family systems that demean or inflate ourselves and/or the other, that make no room for a new vision of what might be possible, of making a way to inner peace and healing, unexpected though it might be.  In that world of habitual confinement and conflict, there is no room for imagining reconciliation of lion and lamb, no room for the advent of a light of peace amidst that darkness. The status quo expectations of our internalized family system and the status quo expectations of culture and history can and often do keep us captive.
 
Is it too much for us to make room for a story like the Christmas truce of 1914, to make room for something unexpected, something beyond our usual expectations of age or situation or personal or historical habit? 
Is Isaiah an unrealistic dreamer with all his lion and lamb talk? 
Are such stories and visions all just wishy-washy, touchy feely, cotton candy Christmas talk? 
Dr. King and others didn’t think so.
Their communities of faith trusted Isaiah’s prophetic vision of an unexpected peace, let it embolden their prophetic imagination.  Then they directed their hopes and charted their actions toward that unexpected vision of a just peace, even as they waited for it amidst the darkness of injustice.
 
“You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”
When John Lennon penned his lyric for Imagine and said he imagined no religion, no possessions, no heaven and hell, he was naming the toxic forms of religion and possession that limit us, divide us, and lead us to injustice and violence.  Indeed, we are better off without them.  He was encouraging us, from the darkness of our limited cultural expectations, to imagine differently, to make room for an unexpected vision of how there could be peace.
 
As we now come together at the Banquet table of God, let us faithfully imagine differently, like Isaiah, and make room for an unexpected coming of peace. AMEN.

The Land of And…
A sermon related to Matthew 14:13-23
 
CENTRAL FOCUS:
The inward contemplative life must be integrated with the outer life of expression and service (and vice versa).
 
When Jesus heard about John, he withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself. When the crowds learned this, they followed him on foot from the cities. 14 When Jesus arrived and saw a large crowd, he had compassion for them and healed those who were sick. 15 That evening his disciples came and said to him, “This is an isolated place and it’s getting late. Send the crowds away so they can go into the villages and buy food for themselves.”
 
16 But Jesus said to them, “There’s no need to send them away. You give them something to eat.”17 They replied, “We have nothing here except five loaves of bread and two fish.”
 
18 He said, “Bring them here to me.” 19 He ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. He took the five loaves of bread and the two fish, looked up to heaven, blessed them and broke the loaves apart and gave them to his disciples. Then the disciples gave them to the crowds. 20 Everyone ate until they were full, and they filled twelve baskets with the leftovers. 21 About five thousand men plus women and children had eaten.
 
22 Right then, Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go ahead to the other side of the lake while he dismissed the crowds. 23 When he sent them away, he went up onto a mountain by himself to pray. Evening came and he was alone.
 
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
 
Some of you know the elder Roman Catholic Priest Father Richard Rohr who was the founder and driving force in establishing the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He once offered this illustration……
When people ask me which is the more important, action or contemplation, I know it is an impossible question to answer because they are eternally united in one embrace, two sides of one coin. So I say that action is not the important word, nor is contemplation; and is the important word!
 
I’ve read Father Richard Rohr’s books in past years and he is an increasingly important teacher for me, particularly as an articulate voice and presence for evolving Christianity, for the kind of Christianity that takes the best from our tradition and moves it forward with articulation and depth that is accessible.  Like Father Rohr, I don’t find the essence of Christianity problematic, I find that too often our way of understanding it over the centuries has been problematic and immature.  Our faith has too often been captured by the Empire and used for its purposes.  Conveniently for the Empire, this capture psycho-spiritually involves the ego and its fondness for splitting things into two and confirming its bias.  The ego thrives on either/or; my way or the highway, I’m in and you are out, heaven or hell.  Taken as a whole, and in its highest and deepest teaching, the Gospel and our spiritual lives are meant for more.  The Realm of God, of which Jesus spoke so often, is a big enough circle, a wide enough vision to include all, even paradox.  In short, the Realm of God could also be called the Land of And.
 
Father Rohr quotes Charles Péguy (1873–1914), French poet and essayist, who wrote with great insight that “everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.”  And Rohr says that everything new and creative in this world puts together things that don’t look like they go together at all, but always have been connected at a deeper level. Spirituality’s goal is to get people to that deeper level where the Divine can hold contradictions and paradox. (Some call this place the unified field or nondual reality or wisdom.)
 
This creative work of living in the Land of And is the creative work of a lifetime and a sign of maturing faith and psychology.  (It’s harder when we are younger.)
 
We could spend a long time exploring all those seemingly opposing poles of life in which we move, like continuity and change, structure and flow, accountability and mercy, planned and emergent, and countless others. Today, I invite us to travel in ‘the Land of And’ by focusing on the two important poles initially mentioned: action and contemplation.
 
Did you notice the integration of these two in our Scripture story today?
 
Just below the plot, just below the surface, Jesus is in the dance of action and contemplation.  He seeks solitude and prayer both before and after his communal feeding of the 5000.  Just before our story, Jesus hears of John the Baptist’s cruel execution at the hand of Herod, and he seeks solitude. And after his action with the crowds, showing them compassion and healing, offering them food, he seeks solitude and prayer time once more. This is a deep pattern, contemplation and action and then contemplation again and so on, each feeding and informing the other.
 
You might say that Moses was in this cycle on Mount Sinai, first having a mystical experience of the burning bush and having that lead to his actions for liberation of the people. It’s as if the bush burned before him, then in him, and then through him in action in the world.
 
You might come to the Land of And from either side of this or any polarity. You might be a person of action like Simone Weil, an activist who fought against totalitarianism and worked for the French Resistance based in England during World War II.  What you might not know is that in the 1930’s as a young activist, her atheist, communist sympathies soured and it was no longer religion that she considered the opiate of the people, but revolution. A mystical experience in the Church while on a visit to Assisi changed her life and the framework and fuel of her activism. She realized that activism without a spiritual framework, a framework capable of getting beyond the ego, was deeply limited and even dangerous. Said Weil, “God is not present, even if we invoke God, where the afflicted are merely regarded as an occasion for doing good.” Weil began in action and found her way to the inclusion and integration of contemplation, of inward spiritual practice, which in turn altered and inspired her continued activism. She found her way to the Land of And where action and contemplation were one dance, indispensable and interdependent elements.   
 
Others have journeyed the other direction from contemplation to action. Saint Oscar Romero might be one example of this. The quiet studious priest earned his doctorate after ordination and then eventually served in parishes and as a church official in various capacities including running a conservative Catholic publication. He certainly got things done in his early ministry, yet was considered a conventional and conservative choice years later when he was selected as Archbishop of San Salvador, selected as someone to preserve the status quo.  It was Saint Oscar’s contemplation of the assassinated body of his activist friend and fellow priest, Rutilio Grande, that transformed Romero, transformed him into a prophet of action who led actions of liberation for the people, actions borne of compassion that came out of his wrestling in prayer, his inner spiritual contemplation.
 
The invitation to the Land of And begins when we draw the circle wide, including both energies. As simple as the inbreath and the outbreath, we come back to the necessity of each and their interdependence. Any energy pole can polarize, distorting the other side and suffering the consequences of focusing too much on one side. In most congregations like this one, to oversimplify, there will be fans of action and of contemplation, people who lean one way or the other.  
 
Let’s do a quick polarity map of those.

A polarity map is a way of understanding where we are in relation to any given poles and how the two can be integrated.  Each pole can have an upside and a downside. When we are really preferring one pole, we tend to be suspicious of its interdependent pole, judgmental about the downside of that interdependent pole.  If you are preferring action, you might be suspicious of those who talk about prayer or meditation or mysticism. What are your concerns? (I’m one of these people. I have this voice.) Pie in the sky, all talk no action, hypocrisy, insulated, not real.  Breaking through this polarization involves trying to see the other pole’s upside and your preferred pole’s downside.  So, let’s say we guarantee that the action pole will be served, what could one gain by also serving contemplation? Energy, inspiration, insight for better actions, care for the self and inner life, integrity of spirit when engaging action, etc. 
 
Reverse it.  If you prefer the inner life, the contemplative life of Spirit, you may have been suspicious of those always in action. What are your concerns?  Burn out, reactivity, not strategic, act in inconsistent manner (ie not peaceful peace marchers), etc.  But what could be the gain in adding action to one’s contemplation?  Integrity of doing what you say you value, new learning from engagement, connection to others, grounding in the tangible world.
 
Are we, like Jesus in the story we heard this morning, involved with self-awareness, with checking our egos and supporting our souls with a regular life of connecting with Spirit through prayer and/or yoga and/or other spiritual disciplines like Lectio Divina, poetry, or journaling, or walking the labrynth, or participating in vital worship?  Are we, like Jesus, then filled with enough courage and compassion to answer the call to act, to incarnate the Spirit into acts of service and healing and justice-making, to put our bodies and checkbooks and time into faithful actions for the coming more fully of heaven to earth?
 
In a distracted world of the 24-hour news cycle, of Facebook and emails, of constant cable news crawlers and tweets, my friends we are challenged to keep in touch with God, with the deep still point of the circle.
 
And, in the midst of a world of such constant noise and so many opportunities to live only in a chosen private manufactured reality, we are challenged to connect in community, and to act in wise, effective, and meaningful ways that are grounded in the embodied reality of earth and guided by the vision of all God’s people and all Creation in a just relationship. 
 
If we are to see the possibility and then miraculously deliver such abundance satisfying the hunger of body and soul as Jesus in feeding the 5000, we will have to imitate Jesus in the cycle and the integration of action AND contemplation.
 
It’s worth remembering that both King and Gandhi considered their movements spiritual movements, fueled by prayers of song and speech. Gandhi once said, "I have so much to accomplish today that I must meditate for two hours instead of one." That’s a human being living in the land of And.

Let us go and do likewise. AMEN

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

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

Active Hope
A summer sermon related to John 1:1-12
 
Central Point: To introduce Active Hope as an expression of a faithful inspiration and integrity-based form of hope and action, especially necessary in difficult times of anxiety
 
John 1:1-12
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.
6 There was a man sent from God whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. 8 He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. 9 The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.
10 He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him. 11 He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. 12 But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God…
For the Word in Scripture,
For the Word among us,
For the Word within us
Thanks Be to God
 
When I was young, I kept hoping that the Chicago Cubs would win; they would win that day and that they would win the World Series. But that hope was difficult to maintain, particularly in the 1970s and even in the 1980s when they would win more, but still break the hearts of Cub fans like me in stunning fashion during the season or in the playoffs. But now that I've lived a lot of years and given the Cubs plenty more seasons to try, I lived to see my hope realized in 2016. (It only took 108 years between championships.)
 
This is hope that is based on outcomes. It is based on the prediction of a favorable outcome. Now this year with the Cubs, I have no hope for that kind of favorable outcome. They will not win the World Series nor even make the playoffs. I can always hope for another year in the future for a more likely favorable outcome.
 
But mostly these days I'm not thinking of such things very much, such objects of hope or even this form of hope. Although it was nice to finally have the hope of a Cubs World Series win realized in 2016, it happened while I was at the Standing Rock Lakota Reservation with my wife, Allison. We were with the Lakota people protesting the Keystone XL pipeline which was unjustly routed through their reservation and near their water supply. Getting the news of the Cubs winning the World Series while I was at standing rock was such an instant teaching of perspective. That win just didn’t matter that much in the scheme of life. Though I had hoped for this event in my life for many, many years (involving baseball which I love), receiving it while at Standing Rock was a profound teaching that not only was hope was better focused on other matters, it would also need to be formed in a different way.
 
At the camp in Standing Rock, entertainment like baseball was, of course, not our focus.  Our mantra was “water is life,” mni wiconi. That gathering was a prayer meeting where the prayer fire never went out and the hope was always to protect the water and therefore to protect life.  The likelihood of success was low. The legal system had conspired against the Lakota and the law enforcement was well funded and equipped with vehicles, personnel, and arms.
 
Yet, that gathering at Standing Rock was a living example of active hope. And that’s what I want to lift up today: active hope.
 
I'm taking this term active hope from a book by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone titled, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy.
 
And, if you haven't noticed, we are in a mess aren't we?

Business as usual has been and is leading us into what's been called a great unraveling of environmental systems not to mention income inequality and the rise of authoritarian movements in the world. Macy and Johnstone get us right to the point of their book with the subtitle “how to face the mess we are in without going crazy.” For if we really face the truth of it, it could drive us to madness, certainly heartbreak. Our collective behavior seems crazy.
 
If you don’t know her, Joanna Macy is an elder (93 years old now) and a Buddhist teacher. I find her trustworthy for that reason and also for the reason that this teaching about active hope resonates with the stories of faith in our Scriptures and in the lives of so many of our Saints. It is in these Scripture stories and the stories of the Saints that I see a kind of active hope that Macy talks about.
 
What is active hope?
Well, it's not hoping that the Cubs will win.
In fact, active hope is not based on the likelihood of an outcome, rather it is hope rooted in a vision of what we long for, or in the case of the people of faith, what God longs for. You could call it the Realm of God or the kin-dom of God or the Beloved Community (as Dr. King was fond of calling it), but it is that vision of blessing and fullness and wholeness, that vision of justice and peace and the integrity of creation of which God dreams and to which God calls us.
 
And while one side of active hope is rooted in this vision, the other side of active hope is rooted in our action, action that is in integrity with that vision. Not unlike the way that Jesus so often taught that the Realm of God is already here, practicing active hope means that we are living out the values or participating in the energies of that Realm here and now. Through our presence, our choices, and our actions, we can live in that Realm already. Active hope then is a practice, something we do with our imagination and actions. It is not passive and it is not based on the likelihood of external outcome (like hoping that the Cubs win or that it's going to be pleasant weather).
 
Active hope means we connect with the vision of the Realm of God, the beauty and value of it, of life and community in its blessing, and act from it and for it. We act to bring it further into being, not calculating the likelihood of a short term or even an ‘in our lifetime’ outcome.
 
It is not about how we feel things are going or might likely turn out. It is about what we do.  Active hope is about vision, the vision of what we long for to become manifest in the world and how that draws us into life and action. It is that connection to the vision and values and staying true to it, no matter the situation, that keeps us from becoming hopeless or even lifeless in the face of this mess.
 
Says Macy, “Of all the dangers we face, from climate chaos to nuclear war, none is so great as the deadening of our response.”
 
A few moments ago, I read the first 12 verses of the gospel of John. What might that have to do with active hope?
 
This poetic prologue from John’s community is a wondrous, mystical presentation of the coming of the intangible divine into the tangible Incarnate world. In this case, through the person of Jesus. This miracle of incarnation may be the greatest genius of Christianity, having the Word, the Living Wisdom, the deep invisible life-giving wisdom of all things somehow become flesh, become Incarnate, become real in human life and the life of the creation.
 
We can talk about high theory and mighty ideals and about grand design and expansive patterns, but that does not matter much to the life of Creation unless it is embodied and expressed and lived out in this complex messy world. It is one thing to talk about love and another to live it out, to incarnate it. In John's prologue we have this amazing poetic summation that the Word became flesh and lived with the people. “And the darkness could not overcome it,” says John.
 
Active hope is like that. Incarnate. Fleshy. Earthy.
It's like bringing these great aspirations right down into the messiness and even the darkness of the world in our lives. It is about choosing faith, choosing a trust in the way of Jesus and the good news of God even though the outcome is uncertain at best and doubtful at worst. Our tradition is full of situations where it seems there is no way, but somehow God makes a way when the people act. There were the Hebrew people chased by pharaoh's army and pinned up against a great body of water with nowhere to go, but, as the Jewish interpretive story says God made a way after someone went into the water up to their neck. There was the story of Jesus surrounded by an angry mob in his hometown intent on throwing him off a cliff, but somehow Jesus moved and passed through them. There was a woman named Rosa who sat down on a bus where she was not supposed to sit, where they said she would never be allowed to sit, yet somehow she sat, Spirit moved, and the people of color found a way to act into their hopes and, indeed, did sit in the front of the bus, and then vote, and go to any school.
 
Learning and practicing active hope is timely for there are many reasons to not hope if one is basing hope on the likelihood of a good outcome. Yet, our faith tradition doesn’t say that life is easy or that life unfolds with simple, predictable steps of linear progress toward goodness and liberation, especially in times like these.
 
The irony here is that finding Active Hope, facing problems, those seemingly intractable difficulties, asks us not to focus first on the problems, on what is wrong, but on what is right, what is worthy, what is beautiful, what is of value that is already present. 
 
Active Hope invites us to build the base of our reality with gratitude.  And like Active Hope itself, gratitude is a practice, a learnable way of seeing and living.  Gratitude is a basic spiritual practice across traditions.  It is the valuing of what is already present that inspires us to protect it, to act for it, to make the changes necessary to nurture it and preserve it. 
 
How important is acting for that vision now? How urgent?
The environmental activist Bill McKibben had a cover story on Rolling Stone magazine a few years ago and then went on what he called a Do the Math tour around the nation.  He proclaimed the simple math: according to climate researchers at that time, we could burn 565 more gigatons of carbon and stay below 2°C of warming — anything more than that risks catastrophe for life on earth. Fossil fuel corporations then had 2,795 gigatons in their reserves, five times the safe amount. At the known rates of consumption, McKibben and others, calculated the years we had left to act decisively. Now it would be only about 8 years or so in which to make significant change.
 
We need hope, my friends, to respond faithfully to our situation and we need it to be active hope.
 
Oh, and in case you might have forgotten, in July of 2021 the company sponsoring the Keystone XL pipeline declared the project dead.
 
So remember, our stories of faith are full of people wondering how they would continue, how they would find a way where there was no way, how they would get through a tight spot.  Our stories of faith are full of ordinary people just like us, doubting and limited, but who found a way through by sharing God’s hopes and then acting them into being such that the darkness could not overcome their active hope.  

AMEN.

Comma Faith
Sermon related to Exodus 3:13-15
 
CENTRAL FOCUS:
We are a tradition of continuing revelation. Spirit comes to us as an unfolding of new understandings of faith, new expressions of faithful living, and the opening of possibilities for compassion in action.
 
But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” 14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am.”[a] He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’ ” 15 God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord,[b] the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’:
 
This is my name forever,
and this my title for all generations.
 
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
 
The Rev. Otis Moss the III stepped to the podium. Over 3,000 of us at our 2009 national UCC gathering quieted ourselves to listen. Starting off slowly, as is often the case with the style of preaching common in many African American churches, the Senior Minister of Trinity UCC in Chicago, picked up speed as he spoke of punctuation.

That’s right, punctuation. Isn’t that inspiring and exciting? Yes, punctuation; Semi colons, quotation marks, apostrophes, parentheses, and….hold on to your seat….. brackets! 
 
But punctuation can be relevant and inspiring when the dominant story, the status quo power or culture or system insists on a period while the Good News of God insists on a comma.  To the drug addict to whom the incarceration system says ‘three strikes and you are out,” period, the Good News of God says, comma, change your direction, comma, "God is making all things new."  To the Hebrews enslaved, Pharaoh says work without rest or wage for the Empire, period, but the Good News of God says, comma, "together you shall walk out of bondage," comma, together you shall journey to liberation and a new way of community. To the teacher and healer and prophet Jesus, the Roman Empire said, your way is ended, period, the Good News of God says, comma, not so fast, comma, there is life and resurrection stronger than death, comma, stronger than violence and the desire to dominate. To the broken spirit whose inner critical voice says, that’s it, there’s no hope for you, no meaning, period, the Good News of God says, comma, “my Grace is sufficient,” comma, “nothing is impossible for God.”
 
This is the kind of proclamation by the Rev. Moss that had us on our feet by the end of his sermon as we felt the Spirit flow through his speaking that our God is in the comma business of making things new, healed and hopeful, and resistant to the period makers of the world, those who choose and serve a status quo of fear, hard-heartedness, injustice and cynicism.
 
I recently thought of that message delivered by Rev. Moss because it still lives in me, especially when I feel or I see the drift toward hopelessness and loss of possibility. I feel and see that drift now. Climate change marches on, women’s rights to control their bodies is curtailed, aggressive war mongers on the march, the weapons of war sold to angry and hopeless citizens and then tragically used for mayhem and mass death.
 
Over twenty years ago our national denomination, the United Church of Christ, was looking for a phrase to define itself. They found the perfect words from the late Gracie Allen, the wife and comic partner of the late comedian George Burns. A brilliant and perceptive woman in her own right, she left a message in her papers to be discovered by her husband after her death that has become the motto for the United Church of Christ: “Never put a period where God has placed a comma.”
 
Gracie was encouraging George to remember that life had many chapters. George was 68 when Gracie died. Rather than place a period after his career, Burns went on to star in a number of movies, including playing God, twice. He died at age 100, having lived the life of the comma.
 
Our faith is that kind of faith. Our church is that kind of church. Because many of us come from other kinds of churches or may have few connections with the larger network that we are as UCC’ers, I’d like to share about how a characteristic way of being together as the United Church of Christ embodies more of a comma faith than one of periods, one where Spirit writes new chapters, where Spirit comes to us as an unfolding of new understandings, new expressions of faithful living, and new possibilities for compassion and justice in action. 
 
There are threads of this comma faith woven into the UCC fabric from all the branches of our family tree that came together in 1957 to become one network. And it comes right out of our ancient faith stories in Scripture.
.
Our Scripture story today has Moses at work. Perhaps Moses just wanted an ordinary day at work, a simple day of watching and wandering with the sheep, period. But Spirit seemed to have a different plan. The bush that was burning, comma, but was not consumed, appeared to him and he turned aside to an encounter with God. In this encounter, Moses asks the name of God.  In these ancient stories, having the true or secret name of the deity, gave power to the namer to invoke and use the deity’s power. And, here, God refuses to be boxed in by a simple title, a single nature or power, or even by time.  The Hebrew wordplay here can be translated as “I am what I am,” “I will be who I will be,” or, most simply, “I will be whoever I will be.”  God even refuses to box God’s Self in with a name. No periods here, just a commas. God is free to become and be.
 
This is all about commas, all about an openness to the Divine Mystery of what might be coming, what might emerge, what might be needed, what might be chosen, what new thing might be revealed.
 
While reflective and rational Greek philosophy leaned toward a more static even impassive understanding of the Divine (the all everything list), and that strongly influenced Christian tradition in the reading of Scripture, Hebrew understandings of God actually were more about the lived experience of God and were open to the Divine as moving, morphing, and changing. Like the Hebrew people themselves journeying to the Promised Land or back from exile, or like the families of Abraham and Sarah, or Ruth and Naomi, or Joseph and Mary, or like the Wise Ones from the East following a star, it seems the people were on an unfolding journey, discerning the new place that Spirit called them to go in order to serve life at that time, in that situation.
 
In Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, where he is portrayed by Matthew’s community as the new Moses, you can hear the new being indicated by the phrase, "You have heard it said, (comma) but I say……" There is innovation here, going beyond something like "eye for any eye," which in its day helped stop escalating revenge cycles, to something that went into the inner work that stops cycles of revenge and separation altogether, "love your enemy."
 
You see, although our Bible has a back cover, and the tradition has not admitted new books into the Bible for over a millennium and a half, that does not mean that God is mute, that Spirit stopped moving or speaking at the time of Jesus or the time of Moses.

God is still Speaking, we say. 
And we, as the UCC, are trying to listen. We have done it before.
 
In 1620, on their way to North America, pilgrims seeking spiritual freedom heard their pastor, John Robinson, say “God has yet more light and truth to break forth out of his holy Word."   This is a statement of the continuing revelation that is characteristic of the UCC, the assumption that there is more understanding to come. It is a way of seeking and holding truth that keeps us open to reading our Scriptures and mining our tradition in new ways as our understandings and experience change. This kind of way has encouraged us, not exclusively, but characteristically to be on the cutting edge of social change in the church.
 
Congregationalists were among the first Americans to take a stand against slavery. In 1700, the Rev. Samuel Sewall wrote the first anti-slavery pamphlet in America, "The Selling of Joseph" laying the foundation for the abolitionist movement that came more than a century later. In 1773, five thousand angry colonists gathered in the Old South Meeting House in Boston to demand repeal of an unjust tax on tea and inspired what might be called the first act of civil disobedience in U.S. history—the "Boston Tea Party."

In 1773, a young member of the Old South congregation, Phillis Wheatley, becomes the first published African American author. Poems on Various Subjects was a sensation, and Wheatley gained her freedom from slavery soon after. In 1785, Lemuel Haynes is the first African American ordained by a Protestant denomination. In 1839, enslaved Africans broke their chains and seized control of the schooner Amistad. Their freedom was short-lived, and they were held in a Connecticut jail while the ship's owners sued to have them returned as property. But Congregationalists and other Christians organized a campaign to free the captives.  The case became a defining moment for the movement to abolish slavery as the Supreme Court ruled the captives are not property, and the Africans regain their freedom.
 
In 1840, a meeting of pastors in Missouri formed the first united church in U.S. history—the Evangelical Synod. It united two Protestant traditions that had been separated for centuries: Lutheran and Reformed. In 1846, Lewis Tappan, one of the Amistad anti-slavery organizers, organized the American Missionary Association--the first anti-slavery society in the U.S. with multiracial leadership.  In 1853, Antoinette Brown became the first woman since New Testament times ordained as a Christian minister, and perhaps the first woman in history elected to serve a Christian congregation as pastor. In 1897, Congregationalist Washington Gladden was one of the first leaders of the Social Gospel movement—which denounced injustice and the exploitation of the poor amidst a new industrializing and urbanizing society. 
 
In 1959, Southern television stations impose a news blackout on the growing civil rights movement, and Martin Luther King Jr. asked the UCC to intervene. Everett Parker of the UCC's Office of Communication organizes churches and won in Federal court a ruling that the airwaves are public, not private property. In 1972, the UCC's Golden Gate Association ordained the first openly gay person as a minister in a mainline Protestant denomination: the Rev. William R. Johnson. In 1976, General Synod elected the Rev. Joseph H. Evans president of the United Church of Christ, the first African American leader of a racially integrated mainline church in the United States. In 1995, the United Church of Christ publishes The New Century Hymnal—the only hymnal released by a Christian church that honored in equal measure both male and female images of God. In 2005, the General Synod called for full Marriage Equality, marking the first time that one of the nation's mainline churches expressed support of marriages for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons.
 
I share these not to boost our UCC egos, but to en-courage our spirits with so much of the country and some churches wanting to go backward, to fix the faith and the culture in a less inclusive and less just past with a period. I share this list to encourage us that the God of commas has been and is at work even amidst the current appearance of reactionary, restrictive, and violent forces.
 
And what about us? How is our comma faith? Where have we placed a period where God would place a comma? Where have we precluded possibility, or sidled up to cynicism, or jockeyed into judgment, or given in to impatience in such a way that we placed a period where Spirit was seeking a comma, a new way through, a re-visioned path, a resurrection?
 
My guess is that often we protect our hearts with the period placing energies of judgment or criticism, or of cynicism and passivity. Or we protect ourselves and calm our fears in the midst of the anxiety of change by focusing on too much order. We forget that God can work through all of this, even the right kind of chaos (“good trouble” the late John Lewis called it). We forget that God may have another timeline or another way to get where we are going.
 
I have not been here long enough to know the full history of Plymouth church and how you have found ways to do something and become something that others would have thought not possible. But, I did see a video on our website where the late Ray Becker narrates the story that recounted the German speaking ancestors of this church escaping Czar Alexander II leaving their familiar homes in Russia to come all this way, that showed them starting a church without a pastor, that showed them coming together with only 64 members to build a church building and then the faith years later to sell that building and move all the way out of town to Prospect Avenue where they built the whole shell of the church themselves, where we now worship, when they had 184 members. And now, to meet a challenge to support our comma faith ministry, we raised last Monday over $75,000 to meet that goal on Plymouth Gives Day.
 
My friends, I know some of you have had difficult days and there may be more for you and for this country and the world. But somewhere just after the necessary, appropriate, and healthy grieving of the disappointments of our world and our lives, there is a time, there is a choice to faithfully punctuate our stories with a comma, to re-envision new possibilities of manifesting God’s Realm here on earth in your life, in northern Colorado and in Plymouth church, in the world, and then to act into the new.
 
As our UCC promotions often say, God is Still Speaking. Our call is to be listening and discerning and following the Still Speaking God calling us into a faith where we are placing the life-giving commas of compassion, of courage, and of creativity, where others would place the death dealing periods of complacency and complicity and resignation.  We are invited into an adventure of faith where the comma is always opening us to the renewing of our minds, the reconciliation of the alienated in ourselves and others, and a re-visioning of any way of being that is less than Shalom for all Creation.

As Gracie said,
Never place a period where God has placed a comma.

Liberation into Life
A post- Pentecost sermon related to Psalm 146:5-9
 
The person whose help is the God of Jacob--
    the person whose hope rests on the Lord their God--
    is truly happy!
6 God: the maker of heaven and earth,
    the sea, and all that is in them,
God: who is faithful forever,
7     who gives justice to people who are oppressed,
    who gives bread to people who are starving!
The Lord: who frees prisoners.
8     The Lord: who makes the blind see.
    The Lord: who straightens up those who are bent low.
    The Lord: who loves the righteous.
9     The Lord: who protects immigrants,
        who helps orphans and widows,
        but who makes the way of the wicked twist and turn!
 
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
 
 
Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen is a physician, an elder, and an author known by many for her books Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather’s Blessings.  She shares the story of a story, a story of her grandfather, a Jewish mystic, who told her on her 4th birthday a story of the birthday of the world from the Kabbalah, the ancient Jewish mystic text.  As the ancient story goes, there first was only the Divine Presence as the Holy Darkness, the ein sof. Then this Holy Darkness birthed a great ray of light…. But, as she tells it, then there was an accident and the light was shattered and scattered into countless shards which fell into all things and all events, though deeply hidden. Humanity is here to find that light, to lift it up and restore the innate unity and wholeness of the world.  This great project of purpose is known in Judaism in Hebrew as tikkun olam, the restoration of the world. Tikkun olam is a collective task in which all humanity is called to participate. Tikkun olam, the restoration of the world. Beautiful.
 
Woven into the stories of humanity and even into our some of our Scriptures are stories that forget the original and ultimate unity of Life, and therefore the unity of humanity, the unity of Creation, and instead act out a story of separation, an illusion of separation where the unlikeness, the differences, become primary and set the stage for preferences, ranking, and suspicion and put us on the road to de-humanizing or objectifying the other or even ourselves. We forget who we are as a part of a great circle, and what the world is as a whole.
 
Indeed, there are many expressions of the illusion of separation and several are mentioned in our text for this morning, Psalm 146. Did you hear them mentioned? Oppression, imprisonment, hunger, burden, estrangement.  
 
This is where God and where the activity and invitation of the Divine come in to meet these degraded and life-draining conditions with something else, with the antidote from the consequences of separated living: liberation. Liberation back into freedom and dignity of being a Divine spark of Creation. Liberation into the enlivening connection, blessing, and responsibility of Life’s unity as we serve and honor that of which we are a part. Liberation leads to Life.
 
Here’s another ancient Jewish story to help us along.
 
The water started at his ankles, but then he went further in.
Up to his knees……. and then thighs….. and then waist.
Behind him, his people stood watching, curious and anxious. And behind them, close enough to see in the distance, the Pharoah of Egypt and his troops in pressing pursuit.
 
And here he was, Nachson ben Aminidav, walking into the water. You see he had been told that God would act, that there was a way through, even though there seemed no way. Despite the inspiring victory of his people leaving their slave camps just a while ago, they were a long way from their hoped for Promised Land. And now, faced with the sea in front of them and the pursuing slave masters behind them, the people were trapped, in a tight jam, you might say.
 
In fact, that is what is implied in Hebrew where the word for Egypt, Mitzrayim, is a sound play with the word meitzarem which means a tight space, narrow straits.
 
So the people found themselves in a tight jam, with seemingly with no way through. But Moses had said that God would act and the waters would part, yet the waters hadn’t parted, and so Nachson went into the water, faithfully, hopefully. Further in he went, waters rising, ever rising. Past his waist, up to his chest and over his shoulders. But he kept going, right up to his nostrils the waters came. And then, only then, when the waters threatened to cut off his very breath of life did the waters begin to separate, allowing the people to cross and find a way through their tight jam into the spacious liberation on the other side.
 
This Jewish story from the midrash, the ancient Jewish commentary on the Scriptures, illustrates that acts of initiative that involve risk and discomfort are part of our co-creative task if we are to realize liberation that gives life.
 
Psychotherapist Estelle Frankel draws on her Jewish heritage in her book Sacred Therapy and sees in the Exodus story a description of the psyche’s journey to liberation. And on that journey, we come to places of particular tightness and narrowness, of seemingly no way through, places of constriction and contraction. And so we, too, like those Hebrews, in order to further the passage of life from bondage and contraction and restriction into freedom and dignity, into love and life will sometimes need to get in up to our nostrils before Spirit’s liberating movement is evident, before the signs of passage or transformation even begin to emerge. Making those steps is a creative act of trust, of faith. 
 
It’s not possible to faithfully engage our tradition and teaching without engaging the great myth of the Exodus story. Foundational for Judaism and for Christianity, it is a deep human story reminding us of the deep longing of life for liberation and the journey that is taken to realize it.
 
And that liberation in the Scriptural saga is both internal and external.  As the old Hasidic saying goes: It was not enough to take the Jews out of Egypt. It was necessary to take Egypt out of the Jews. There is an ongoing internal journey to liberation for all of us.
 
And, liberation is external. Our tradition and certainly the Divine teaching and witness of Jesus was to alter the situation of suffering that a person was in.  Whether through healing an illness or injury, or through bringing someone back into community, or teaching a freeing truth to affect a situation, Jesus liberated people from the external situation they were in, helped to change their external circumstance. So often, the internal and external are linked. In the Jesus stories and in the Exodus saga, those liberating changes came with actions born of faith, born of an internal orientation of trust and vision, a willingness and a kind of courage to step out in faith. So often Jesus would say, "Your faith has made you well."

In the midrash story we just heard, one wonders what was it that led Nachson into the water, all the way up to his nostrils. I might imagine that in him somewhere deep down there was a vision of what liberation might feel and look like, and a desire, a determination, a longing to taste it.  My spiritual hunch here is that this comes from the piece of the Divine planted in each of us. Maybe it’s like an image, or a spark, or as the ancient Jewish story says, a shard of Divine light. 
 
In these times, do we still have that vision alive in our hearts? Do we lose our heart of vision, our faithful imagination?
Is it too painful to remember God’s Dream for us all, too easy to be cynical rather than vulnerable to being broken hearted?
Theologian Robert McAfee Brown notes that one of the core elements of liberation theology is hope, the hope that generates the sense of possibility that things can be different, that we are not fated to a forever of injustice and suffering. The poet Wendell Berry’s says “be joyful though you have considered all the facts.”
 
I think Spirit, when we really tap into her flow, inspires that kind of knowing and joy.  I think that kind of faithful inspiration is what is coming through the Psalmist of our Scripture reading today. Psalm 146 begins with praise, high praise that comes from that flow of joy in the vision of liberation; prisoners set free, sight to the blind, food to the hungry, justice for the oppressed, inclusion for those pushed out and forgotten. Ah, what joy that is and will be!
 
The Psalmist bears witness to the GodMystery whose business is liberation.  The Spirit whose enduring presence and movement and love opens up space, makes a way in the midst of tight straits, in the midst of our contraction of disappointment and anxiety, or fear and hard heartedness.
 
Poet and great elder Maya Angelou said simply that “love liberates.”
She ought to know. Maya was sexually assaulted as a child by a man. When she told, that perpetrator was found dead some days later. Some say her uncles did it. She thought she had killed him by speaking. So she didn’t speak. For six years. And while other children called her dumb and a moron for being mute, her grandmother just kept telling her, “Sister, I don’t care what they say. When you and the Good Lord decide it’s time, you will be a teacher.”
 
It is the God of Love, the Spirit of Love that comes through people like Maya Angelou’s grandmother, that liberates, that sees hope and possibility, and, like Nachson, the one who entered the sea up to his nostrils, that has the courage to act and to endure in faith. We all have that Divine Spark in us, that place that already knows what liberation is, what our deep Divine unity is. And every time we nurture, magnify, and listen to that place in us and in others and in Creation, we will have the vision and heart and Resurrection faith to walk into the waters of our liberation and our re-union.
 
Today is a holiday of liberation. It’s June 19th aka Juneteenth. Juneteenth commemorates the occasion of some Africans’, and their descendants’, enslaved in America, learning of their emancipation on a June day in 1865 in Galveston, Texas. Juneteenth was proclaimed a federal holiday in 2021 by President Biden. This designation introduced the Juneteenth holiday to a wider American audience, although the holiday has been celebrated for over 150 years among some African Americans. 
 
Racism is one of the most effective ways to keep us in a story of separation, to keep us from God’s Liberating, life-giving Presence. It’s bad for people of color and for white people. And racism doesn’t have to look like burning crosses and crazy people with guns, though we know all too well it is still violent and lethal for people of color.
 
Sometimes racism works effectively by simply sidelining and ignoring. I had never heard of Juneteenth until a few years ago because Eurocentric, white culture was so deeply centered in so much of my education and exposure and relationships. Racism also works in subconsciously. Only in retrospect did I realize, in my hometown where there were a number of people of color, even a few in positions of authority, that our town probably would not have stood for any more in leadership and probably expected them to be more perfect. Nobody told me this explicitly, but, somehow I absorbed it. I knew it. This is racism and a form of oppression, holding down, holding back, a form of separating.
 
There is not enough time this morning to go further in this specific form of painful separation known as racism except to say, my friends, that for most of us there is a lot more wading into the waters of awareness about the subtle and powerful ways that white supremacy continues to live in us and in our community. And, let us be clear, white supremacy is in opposition to the liberating God of Jesus and to the ongoing project of Liberation that God is ever about. I’m happy to be in the ongoing discussion and practice of liberating ourselves from racism and to recommend further resources.
 
One practice is simply to acknowledge what has not been acknowledged: Today is Juneteenth and to learn about it. And tomorrow is World Refugee Day. Both days are about liberation, aren’t they? Like those enslaved who sought refuge from it, all those seeking refuge whom we call refugees are those in a tight space seeking enough security and enough resources to be liberated for a new life. I am so glad that we as a congregation are joining others in supporting the Jan family who came to Fort Collins from Afghanistan. As mentioned, COVID visited the Jan household this previous week so we will postpone our reception for them until this fall. But our work of serving their lives and liberation continues. May they travel further on the path of liberation.
 
So this morning, the invitation of faith, the way to being an Easter People, a people of the Holy Spirit, offered is to celebrate the Liberating Spirit of God, the Maker of Heaven and earth, and to firmly hold the Divine vision of liberation and deep unity. And then to act, to follow Nachson right into the waters, up to your nostrils, if necessary, so that Creation and all people might reach the other side, so that we might participate in tikkun olam, the restoration of the world.
 
On this Juneteenth Day, let us ask ourselves how we might participate in God’s liberating movement and let us pray for the guidance, vision, vulnerability, and strength to do so.

An Easter Vision for All
A sermon related to Rev. 21:1-5a
 
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a wedding partner adorned for the wedding. 3And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals. God will dwell with them; they will be God’s peoples, and the Holy One will be with them; 4 God will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.’ 5 And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new...’
 
For the Word in Scripture
For the Word among us
For the Word within us
Thanks be to God
 
When things are tough, how do we know it’s going to turn out?
How do we stay the course and keep hope? 
When problems seem so large, how do we keep going?
When you are young and wondering how to find your place and deal with the big world, how do you keep confidence and seek direction?
When you are old and life is short, where do you look for meaning and possibility?
 
This year, I’ll turn 59.
Might sound young to some, old to others.
But it sure makes me reflect on more than half a century of living;
highs and lows, mistakes and learning, growth and gratitude. 
Yet, in all my years, I’ve never seen a couple of years like our last two.  What about you?
We’ve had a new worldwide pandemic, the old pandemic of racism unveiled anew to many, the increasing effects of climate change seen in hurricanes and wildfires, armed white vigilantes in the streets and the Capitol, even in grocery stores.
 
But if you think the last couple of years have been tough to view, it can’t compete with the biblical vision we know as The Revelation received by the anonymous author we refer to as John. John’s vision has beasts, a sea monster, plagues, horses of multiple colors, the archangel Michael fighting a red dragon, a giant pit, a pregnant woman, and a day of God’s wrath.
 
Likely in a trance or non-ordinary state of consciousness, John saw and recorded this vision. It is not for the faint of heart nor is it for simple literal interpretation. And there is a lot of lousy interpretation out there that claims The Revelation of John as its verification; end of the world stuff predicting dates and events and such. It’s generally poor Bible analysis and bad theology.
 
The Revelation is best approached with humility and a good understanding of Hebrew symbols and Hebrew prophecy.  Seen this way, Revelation can become what it was for the people of John’s time and for many Christians over the centuries;
an inspiring, encouraging vision that helped them in bad times to keep going, to faithfully resist empire and the false gods of society.
 
Indeed, The Revelation received by John was an underdog story that served them as they faced tough challenges and big questions of history and of their lives.
 
As the last book of the Bible, it is a kind of symbolic end, not necessarily in the sense of time ending, but of purpose, the telos, the end toward which we travel, the meaning of history and life.  Of that which is symbolic of that time, we know that John was referring to the Roman empire as the beast and anti-Christ Presence. The Pax Romana, the dominating peace of Rome, that way of empire was not the Peace of Christ. John knew that. The early Christians knew that.
 
So those early followers and communities of Christ were called to live differently, to resist the way of Caesar and choose the way of Jesus.  But when Rome is so big, when the system seems so pervasive, or even when life takes an unexpected and unwelcome turn, how do you do deal with that?
 
Many of the faithful looked to The Revelation of John as an alternative vision of what ultimate power was at play and trusted in that Divine power.  Through this story, they rejected the conventional menu of what was inevitable and cultivated an alternative consciousness of what was possible. In this, they found hope.
 
Hebrew scholars like Walter Brueggemann and theologians like the late great James Cone will tell you that Pharoah and Caesar’s greatest power is the belief in their ultimate power and the limitation of possibility to change the status quo. There is nothing new in the empire. There is no different future, only anxiety about a different future (which might inspire something like Make Rome Great Again).
 
Maybe that is the genius of the Medieval Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart when he wrote: "God is the newest thing there is, the youngest thing there is. God is the beginning and, if we are united to God, we become new again."
Sound strange, God as the newest thing?
 
Maybe being part of a historic Protestant denomination and a congregation with institutional history and a solid brick building makes it harder for us to know the God who is always new.  Maybe we relate more to God as a fixed external absolute, as the Ancient of Days.  Or maybe we can attribute it to the repeated habits of heritage. (It is said that the last seven words of the church are “We have never done it that way.”)
 
Yet like the new births of that come to our congregation, God comes, too. Not just as the birther, as the mother, but as the new birth itself, as the new itself.
 
And new in Revelation means different.
Did you hear it in the Scripture passage read?
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; John said.
 
Both for those of the first centuries of the ancient near East and for us, the new heaven and the new earth has not come.  This morning’s news from Buffalo, New York, and many mornings’ news tell us that. Pharoah, Caesar, demonic conscious and unconscious systems of domination still have power.  And they take root in human souls such that violence against another person or group or country becomes a siren song, a tragic temptation, an illusion of solution: if only we or I could just get rid of or control this ‘other.’  Projecting inner tensions and fears and insecurities onto the ‘other’ and making them an enemy, a dehumanized object is as old as Cain and Abel and at the core of what keeps humanity alienated, in conflict, and out of step with Divine Love.
 
The Revelation of John is not without its troubling aspects, yet ultimately tells a new, alternative story where empire is not the last word nor the only possibility. Connecting with that Divine alternative vision is the beginning of liberation for us all. Through song, ritual, prayers, or art of this liberating story of reversal, where empire is not ultimate or final, we can connect to the power of the story of a new heaven and the new earth. We can anticipate its full coming by tasting and expressing and living it now. We can participate in its emergence now. We can live the new now, and in so doing allow its call to stay rooted in us and sustain us in the long arc of history.
 
And for those being crushed and exploited by the empire, whether the oppressive empires of history or the inner oppressions of the wounded soul, Good News comes when a new vision of possibility is made visible and, like communion, taken in, even if only in part. When this taste of inner liberation comes, hope comes, affirmation comes, and fortifies the spirit for endurance and for liberating action.
 
As Choctaw nation music artist Red Eagle raps in his song, “Still Here,”
Wounded Knee And we still here
Sand Creek And we still here
Cortez And we still here
Slavery And we still here
Small Pox And we still here
Boarding Schools And we still here
Damn it feels good to be a native
Damn it feels good to be a native
 
Good News comes to those who hear and trust the God who says ‘See, I am making all things new...’ even in the midst of empire, injustice, and violence. 
It comes when you truly hear Jesus say ‘the first shall be last, and the last shall be first.’
It comes when you know that, even if in the short term of history, it looks like the forces of death and oppression are winning, you know the story of the Resurrected One who came in a lowly stable, lived with, taught, and healed the lowly ones, and who, dying with the lowly ones, conquered even the power of death.
 
As we continue in the resonance of Easter, our sacred image from John’s Revelation reminds us that we arrive together in the end in a New Heaven and a New Earth.  It is an Easter vision for all people and for all Creation.
 
In the words of Lyla June, Navajo Nation artist in her song All Nations Rise
“this time, it isn’t Indians versus Cowboys. No. This time it is all the beautiful races of humanity together on the SAME side and we are fighting to replace our fear with LOVE. This time bullets, arrows, and cannon balls won’t save us. The only weapons that are useful in this battle are the weapons of truth, faith, and compassion.”
 
Truth, faith, and compassion. The alternative way of Jesus.
Cultivating and living in these ways are how we participate in the coming of this Easter Vision for All, God’s Beloved Community, a New Heaven and a New Earth. This is what we do to be an Easter People amidst times such as these. This is what we do to allow God to dwell with mortals, Immanuel.
 
Finally, a brief word for our graduates from Sister Ilia Delio, a Sister of St. Francis and Professor at Georgetown University who says,
God is always new; life is always new. Every end is a new beginning and every arrival, a new departure. There are no dead ends in life unless we ourselves die in despair.
 
For you graduates, I say do not despair, but have faith in the God who says
 ‘See, I am making all things new...’
 

An Eastertide sermon related to Genesis 2:4b-10a, 15
 
CENTRAL FOCUS:
That the Easter vision of resurrection is an Anastasis of Creation as well as all humanity.
 
Genesis 2:4b-10a, 15
In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, 5 when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground;  but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground—  then the Lord God formed an a-dam from adamah, and breathed into its nostrils the breath of life; and the a-dam became a living being.  And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there God put the a-dam whom God had formed.
Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
A river flows out of Eden to water the garden…
The Lord God took the a-dam and put it in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.
For the Word in Scripture
For the Word among us
For the Word within us
Thanks be to God.
 
As I’ve mentioned before, the Hebrew word play here is missed in English. As I’ve said before, it is not Adam, a male human being with a personal name that is formed, but, in Hebrew, an ‘a-dam made of the ‘adamah, ‘an earthling made of earth.’
 
You and me, we, are earth.  All that is here on earth is of earth, a family of earth, relatives. As the Lakota say: Mitakuye Oyasin, “All my relations.”
 
My friends, to be faithful to this sacred story, we must acknowledge that the relationships among earth relatives are troubled, due mostly to the number of humans and the nature of the activities of human beings. I won’t belabor the data, but the picture is deeply troubling and with each re-evaluation, like the recent one from the UN panel on climate, we see that our window for action to alter or mitigate the damage grows smaller by the month and year. The predictive models have not overestimated the speed of this undesired change, rather they have generally underestimated it.
 
Science and technology are not lacking here.
We know enough to act effectively for positive, life-giving change.
Adaptive cultural and political patterns are lacking.
Spiritual and psychological wisdom is lacking.
There is trouble on the inside of our personal and cultural psyche. There is a spiritual malady, a deep infection of spiritual dis-ease that keeps us from being loving neighbors to our earth relatives.
 
Theologian Thomas Berry says,
The difficulty is that with the rise of the modern sciences we began to think of the universe as a collection of objects rather than as a communion of subjects….The world about us has become an it rather than a “thou.”
 
Or as the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner said,
“To those who followed Columbus and Cortez, the New World truly seemed incredible because of the natural endowments. The land often announced itself with a heavy scent miles out into the ocean. Giovanni da Verrazano in 1524 smelled the cedars of the East Coast a hundred leagues out. The men of Henry Hudson’s Half Moon were temporarily disarmed by the fragrance of the New Jersey shore, while ships running farther up the coast occasionally swam through large beds of floating flowers. Wherever they came inland they found a rich riot of color and sound, of game and luxuriant vegetation. Had they been other than they were, they might have written a new mythology here. As it was, they took inventory.”
 
As I said, it is not the science that is lacking.
The cultural and religious stories related to the earth that we in the West have held in the modern centuries and that are still largely in effect are not life giving, but life taking and life draining. They are so because they largely objectified and commodified the rest of Creation. We must reclaim the Genesis story of our sacred origins as the story of our earthiness, our earth-being-ness. Religiously true, scientifically true. We are earth.
 
The spiritual shift invited here is the shift to an earth identity and story of relationship, of communion.  With such a shift, our favorite earthly outdoor place is not merely an it, an object, but becomes another earth being like us, and then can become a friend, a sibling, a companion, or maybe even a teacher, an elder, a cherished relative that our sacred story asked us to care for and to keep, to be in loving and balanced relationship with so that the garden might flourish. 
 
And, in this Eastertide, we must reclaim the full sacred story-truth of Resurrection which we have largely lost.
 
Anastasis. Do you know the word?
It’s Greek. It means ‘up rising.’
Above murals depicting the resurrection story of Christ, on the walls of many ancient churches of the East, written in Greek, is the word anastasis, up rising. These images show Christ breaking down the doors of the land of the dead, standing atop and subduing Hades, and grasping the wrist of Adam and Eve and leading other saints in an uprising, a jailbreak triumph over death.  In his book Resurrecting Easter, John Dominic Crossan documents these images and what we in the West, Protestant and Roman Catholic, have lost;
 
the sense that the Resurrection is a universal resurrection for all humanity and all Creation. 
 
Recognized in the mythic language of its time, it is a vision of triumph as a Christ-led countercultural way of life and its power to overcome ‘the soul and body death’ way of being of the empire.  In the West, we too often limited the Resurrection story to an individual story of Jesus and maybe as a story of individual hope, while in the Eastern side of Christianity, the Resurrection was an anastasis, an uprising, a universal uprising at that, not against mere individual mortality, but against the imperial and cultural powers of death, the power of Caesar, of Pharaoh, of all those internal siren voices and external fear-filled forces that claim life and peace is served by a law and order of violence, of domination, of intimidation, of punishment, of separation, including separation from Creation (as if we are not also of earth).
 
We have forgotten that Resurrection is about rising up, together with Creation, throwing off the powers and principalities of death, the systems and values of domination. 
 
To truly be an Easter people, a people who sing of and have a trust in the story of Jesus and the power of Resurrection, we are called to rise up like the A-dam (earth creature) and Eve (mother of all living), taken by the wrist by the Risen Christ rising up with Creation and all of our earth relatives into another way of acting, another story of what is possible.
 
Another story of what is possible.
We must have a story that leads to action. Yes, we can act effectively, especially if we act together as a body, reducing the carbon and water footprint of our church property, voting together for policies and candidates who support the environment, teaching our children and learning from them. Indeed, if you can’t quite feel the passion to act here maybe you can feel it if you focus on the children, grandchildren, and the seven generations to come.
 
It seems it is easier to act against a short-term drama like Pearl Harbor or 9-11 than it is to comprehend and act in the case of this slow-moving emergency of environmental crisis. But that does not mean that it is impossible to do so nor that it is not imperative.
 
I have seen the depth of that imperative at Standing Rock.
The Lakota Reservation that borders the Dakotas rose up in 2016 to fight in the courts and on the land against ‘the black snake,’ the Keystone XL oil pipeline that was deemed too risky to put upstream of the white community of Bismarck, but not too risky for the First Nation Lakota peoples water supply. When my wife and I spent a week there at the camp in late October of 2016, we were impacted by the determination of the people to protect the water and the life of Mother Earth. In Lakota, it was spoken simply, mni wiconi, water is life. And we were impacted by the clarity that this encampment was a prayer meeting where the sacred fire never went out and where the prayers that supported their actions never ceased.
 
My friends, I believe that we at Plymouth Congregational as a community of faith are well meaning and well-meaning toward God’s Creation. What I have not yet seen is that intention cultivated into the fullest fruit of collective action for the earth. I have not yet felt what Dr. King would have called the ‘urgency of now’.
 
It is time, time for our prayers and actions to strengthen.
We have, in our faith, the spiritual resources and impetus to support this intention. And we have stirrings in our congregation to do just that. I believe Spirit is moving now at Plymouth for earth action, not only through the strategic plan calling for concrete action for the earth, but in the passions of those in our midst. We had/have a Forum today to move us forward as well as sign-up sheet for a new earth action oriented team, and a handout detailing actions that you can take now.
 
The 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai, the late Kenyan environmentalist and political activist said,
 We are called to assist the earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own -- indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty, and wonder.
Oh, and lest you think this is some new-fangled recent fad of faith, hear the words of none other than John Wesley, the 18th century founder of Methodism.
 
I believe in my heart that faith in Jesus Christ can and will lead us beyond an exclusive concern for the well-being of other human beings to the broader concern for the well-being of the birds in our backyards, the fish in our rivers, and every living creature on the face of the earth.
--John Wesley (1701-1791)
 
On this Earth Day Sunday, in this Eastertide season, we are called as an Easter People of the Resurrection to rise up with the Risen Christ against the powers and systems of Death. That means honoring the earth story that we received from our ancestors of faith: that we are earth beings, a’dam from the Adamah, and therefore kin to all other forms on the sacred earth. As the Lakota say: Mitakuye Oyasin, “All my relations.”
 
The New Creation envisioned in faith is a place where love of God and love of neighbor IS love of all our earth neighbors and God’s precious earth. Following the Risen Christ, it is time we at Plymouth deepen our faithful action for Creation on every front; prayers, votes, messages to government, purchasing and consumption habits, everything within reach and maybe a little beyond that. Like the Risen Christ, let us rise up so that together we can do something faithful and meaningful!
May this be so. AMEN.

Sabbath as Perspective
2 of 2 in a series on Sabbath, related to Luke 12:13 – 21
 
CENTRAL POINT:
Sabbath time is different in its awareness and valuing of time, the blessing of now, the focus on non-commercial relationship, and an appreciation of kairos.
 
Someone from the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.”
 
Jesus said to him, “Man, who appointed me as judge or referee between you and your brother?”
 
Then Jesus said to them, “Watch out! Guard yourself against all kinds of greed. After all, one’s life isn’t determined by one’s possessions, even when someone is very wealthy.” 
 
Then Jesus told them a parable: “A certain rich man’s land produced a bountiful crop. He said to himself, What will I do? I have no place to store my harvest! Then he thought, Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger ones. That’s where I’ll store all my grain and goods. I’ll say to myself, You have stored up plenty of goods, enough for several years. Take it easy! Eat, drink, and enjoy yourself.  But God said to him, ‘Fool, tonight you will die. Now who will get the things you have prepared for yourself?’ This is the way it will be for those who hoard things for themselves and aren’t rich toward God.”
 
For the Word in Scripture,
For the Word among us,
For the word within us,
Thanks be to God.
 
Fill in the blank: Time is _____. (money)
 
Not if you were W.K. Kellogg in 1930. It was then that he decided his cereal factory would move from three 8 hour shifts to four 6 hour shifts. Amidst the Great Depression, immediately there were 30% more jobs available at Kellogg. Kellogg paid his six-hour shift workers for 7 hour shift the first year, and for an 8 hour shift the second. Productivity rose significantly not just from new technology, but from new work incentives and these new hours. When the US Dept of Labor surveyed the workers after a couple of years of these shorter shifts, the workers overwhelmingly preferred the time more than the money they might have made. Nothing could replace the time with family, for taking care of the home, and for leisure and civic activities. Relationships and the freedom of time were more important than money. After the Depression was over, Kellogg workers consistently voted to stay with the six hour shifts for the freedom it provided them. (Not until 1984 did the workforce vote to return to an 8 hour shift.)
 
Time is NOT money.
 
In this morning’s story from the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is confronted by a man wanting money from an inheritance. As he so often does, Jesus does not respond with a simple answer or even agree to be in the role he is asked to be in. He chooses instead to tell a parable about a rich man who was having a banner economic year. This man says to himself, ‘I will tear down my barns and get bigger barns to hold it all! I’ll never have to worry or be anxious. I’ll have enough stuff, enough money.’ I think he was saying ‘I’ll be secure.’ 
 
But what money and goods can’t buy him is time. His time for death comes and all the money in the world will not give him more time. Jesus follows up this parable in Luke’s Gospel by telling people not to worry about their material security, and that worrying does nothing to make it happen by using the story of the birds and the lilies of the field where neither birds nor lilies worry, yet they seem to do just beautifully. Somehow God and God’s Creation supports them.
 
A few weeks back I talked of Sabbath and how it is a sacred exhale, like God exhaling on the seventh day.  Indeed, we must exhale in order to fully inhale, both are important to the rhythms and cycles that make for vitality.
 
Likewise, our vitality comes from the perspective that Sabbath time can bring. After that sacred exhale, a different quality of time can be realized where we can appreciate what is truly worthy, what true riches are.  An illustration about time can be helpful here. The Gospels and letters we have in what we often call the New Testament were written in Greek.  While the English translation can come out the same as simply ‘time’, Greek language can talk of both chronos, measured chronological time on a watch or calendar, and of kairos, or God’s time or sacred time.  Kairos doesn’t go in a straight line or at an even pace. Kairos is a time like the seasons, moving in cycles, dependent upon the relation of things to the whole, waiting until the time is fulfilled, until its own conditions have come to be, until it is the ripe and right time.  You can sense kairos time by the way something feels, by the length of shadows, or by color and shade, or by how soft or firm a fruit is in one’s hand.  Kairos certainly doesn’t respond to our measured schedules or personal plans and wishes. Kairos time certainly cannot be bought.
 
Jesus says to not hoard things, or to worry or be anxious. Allowing ourselves to be in kairos time of Sabbath means we have faith amidst the present unfolding of things. We rest in God. We let go of production time and getting more done or making it happen. We get out of social media and the news cycle and repetitive cycles of anxiety. Instead, we rest underneath the fruit tree and trust that things will ripen in time. We let go of obsessing about tomorrow’s outcome and let ourselves be held by God in the now, releasing the anxiety and worry of tomorrow. In this sabbath “Kairos” perspective, we remember and live not as chronos and commodity, but as a child of God and as an earth and human community. We remember our relationship to life and each other, grateful and humble. The keeping of Sabbath time, whatever day or time one does that, can bring one into the quality of the Divine perspective, sacred rhythm, and relation to the whole, to what is really important and deeply true from the perspective of Spirit.
 
This practice helps us resist the cultural flow toward only busy-ness and distraction, toward narrow and limiting frames of reference where we no longer see the forest, but only the trees.
 
During World War II, the British wanted to know how they were doing in producing enough stuff to fight the war. They decided to measure the sum of all goods and services produced. They called this the ?????. That’s right, the Gross Domestic Product. The U.N. and the rest of the developed world adopted this standard. Whenever we hear on the news that the economy grew by 2% or shrunk, it is this measurement to which they are referring. And we all seem to cheer when it goes up as if this is good for us all. But the GDP doesn’t discriminate between social activities. Indeed, you could make more bombs, or build and staff more prisons, or clean up after disasters, and the GDP would go up. There could be more income equality though the GDP goes up. More is better as far the GDP is concerned and it is only more if it can be measured in money and more stuff in bigger barns. The GDP is not necessarily just, or healthy or, as our story says, "rich toward God."
 
And what about the things that money can’t buy? 
What about the effort of any volunteer or family member who takes the time and energy to care for the home or family member, to help a neighbor, or to serve the community? The GDP won’t recognize this, let alone value it. 
 
Wayne Muller’s book, Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest, references those who bemoan the lost values of our society. Muller notes, “All these ‘lost’ values are human qualities that require time. Honesty, courage, kindness, civility, wisdom, compassion – these can only be nourished in the soil of time and attention, and need experience and practice to come to harvest.”
 
Keeping Sabbath time means taking the time to honor and nurture these kinds of values. Money is of value and the chronological time that is related to money has its place, but it is keeping Sabbath time that can maintain our perspective, can keep us from forgetting the other kinds of value and time and rhythm that are not as valued by the capitalistic, individualistic, materialistic culture at large.  This is Sabbath as perspective, helping remember the whole and what is truly of value in God’s Creation.
 
As our story suggests, one of the great interrupters of chronos and business as usual is mortality, death. It is on my heart and mind this morning because just last night we helped our 16-year-old cat to take her last breath. With family gathered around and with many tears, we did the right thing to end her suffering and it put us in a different sense of being and time.
 
And, just as those humans nearing death will say, that transition moment with death near put things in perspective.
Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Ware writes of phenomenal clarity that people gain at the end of their lives.
Here are the top five regrets of the dying, as witnessed by Ware:
1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard. Missing their children's youth and their partner's companionship.
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier. (They did not realize until the end that happiness is a choice. Old patterns and habits got in the way.)
 
I invite us all in this Lenten journey to look at our lives and see if there are practices that regularly connect us to what is deeply true so we don’t have these regrets, so we don’t forget what is most important. Jesus called it being rich toward God. This is Sabbath as perspective, practices of sacred exhale and shifting out of our everyday habits of doing. Maybe it is….

• Time off work and doing
• Time away from mass and social media and cell phones
• Rituals, prayers, weekly or daily worship (a home altar)
• Sabbath moments in each day.

 
I invite us all to enter more deeply a Sabbath time and space, like sitting on a mountaintop vista, where we can see the big picture and wonder, let go of our burdens and trust in the unfolding of this moment (no matter where our lives are), where we can focus on relationship with Creation and with each other, where we can value all those things that money can’t buy and be grateful for the blessing of life.
 
We can practice being in a Sabbath time that has a taste of God’s time, that has a Sabbath perspective of what is truly rich toward God and is truly life giving. 

AMEN.

Part One of series on Sabbath, related to Genesis 2:1-3
 
CENTRAL FOCUS:
Sabbath practice is a core practice of the soul; rest, quiet, slowing, appreciating, blessing, enjoying, celebrating, intentional remembering and focusing, valuing, re-creating
 
Genesis 2: 1 – 3
 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on the seventh day God finished the work that God had done, and God rested on the seventh day from all the work that God had done.
So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that God had done in creation.
For the Word in Scripture,
For the Word among us,
For the Word within us,
Thanks be to God.
******
Breathe. That’s all.
Let’s all take a breath together: inhale…….exhale.
Two more:  inhale………exhale……… inhale……… exhale.
It’s a cycle, isn’t it?
Both parts are important.
 
On the seventh day, God rested, says the first Creation story.  We just heard that in our morning’s Scripture reading. What you didn’t hear was that the Hebrew word for refreshed “vaiynafesh” literally means exhaled.  The Hebrew text is saying that on the seventh day God exhaled.  Our culture is more inclined to inhaling, to taking in; do more, want more, gain more, be more, take in more information, more data.  Being busy can even be seen as a sign of importance. 
 
But are our lives busy or full? Did you know that the Chinese pictograph for ‘busy’ combines heart and killing. The Christian mystic Thomas Merton actually went so far as to equate activism and overwork with violence.
Are our lives structured not just to inhale, but to exhale?
Do we know how to exhale and rest in the arms of God, in the cradle of Creation?
 
A big part of the first Creation story in Genesis is the teaching of the importance of Sabbath to the Jewish community.  It was a characteristic practice to stop all work on Friday at sundown when the traditional Jewish day ends and to enter into Sabbath time until the next sundown.  There is a story told of Jesus walking with his disciples on the Sabbath.  They plucked some heads of grain to eat.  The Pharisees, who tried to protect the people’s piety and to respect Torah law through lots of rules, accused them of sinfully breaking the Sabbath.  Jesus’ wise response was that the Sabbath was made for the people, not the people for the Sabbath.
 
So how can Sabbath as an exhale be for us? 
How might we learn from and be served by this teaching?
In the Lenten journey at this church, we have been invited to seek being Full to the Brim.  I suggested at our Ash Wednesday service that, like our cycle of breath, we cannot be vital and ‘Filled to the Brim’ without the whole cycle. Likewise, we cannot be whole and vital without rest. And our first sacred story of rest is the Seventh Day story of the first Sabbath, the first great exhale.
 
I’m not talking about a return to dour restrictive rules of Sabbath that drain life; no dancing or card playing or visiting with people or frolicking and such. I’m talking about the wisdom and the necessity of exhaling in the service of the cycle of life.  Go ahead, inhale fully again and then feel a long exhale again. Let it bring you to rest and ever closer to stillness.
Exhale, that’s Sabbath.
It completes the energy cycle of life, re-balances it.
 
In that first Creation story, we are given an image of the earth as without form and void.  It is a kind of chaos that seems empty.  Creation happens out of a kind of emptiness.  We have to exhale in order to make room for the inhale.  The womb has first to be an emptiness in order to be filled with the growing creation of a new life.  This emptiness is not so much a denial of life as it is a letting go and a letting be. It is a kind of re-balancing.  In our human body, it is a chance to blow off CO2 as a part of our life-giving cycle of respiration, in preparation for bringing in more O2. The first Creation story begins in emptiness and ends in a kind of emptying, a resting, a stillness, an exhale, a Sabbath.
 
Like a hibernating animal, like a planted bulb or seed in winter, there is an appropriate and necessary time to rest, to lie fallow, to not do.
I was trained as an exercise physiologist after college. It is a basic principle of exercise training that the process of becoming more fit and healthy requires rest after we challenge and exercise the body.  It is in the rest time that the rebuilding to a better state happens.
 
How many of us trust that cycle?
How many of us here are practicing Sabbath rest?
I’m not talking about just laying down on the couch, although that could help. I’m not talking about kicking back and watching TV, although some quality viewing occasionally is renewing.  We are invited into a Sabbath space and time that has a sacred intention, a certain quality of delightful exhale that puts us back in touch with the blessedness of Creation, the part of the first Creation story when God says, “It is very good”.  
 
Pastor Jane Anne, before her recent sabbatical suggested that all church committees take time in our Lent season meetings for forms of Sabbath, not doing tangible committee work, but sharing in Bible study, prayer, and connection. She was inspired by the book Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives, in which Wayne Muller suggests we embrace “Sabbath as a way of being in time where we remember who we are, remember what we know, and taste the gifts of spirit and eternity.”
 
Our worship celebration here could be a Sabbath practice if it helps us remember who we truly are…
as images of God made of the dust of the stars,
as humble mortal beings of made of mud,
as a people called to Grace and to justice,
as part of a wondrous Creation with other wondrous Creatures and features.
Our worship celebration or any practice that we have can be a Sabbath practice if it slows us down enough, focuses us enough toward Spirit that we remember and feel again in our bodies and souls the Grace of God and the gift of life. Any practice could be a Sabbath practice if it truly re-creates in us a sense of rest, renewal, gratitude and connection to the GodMystery.  It doesn’t have to be Saturday or Sunday, or a particular ritual or prayer, though those things might help.
 
In our Gospel stories, we often have Jesus going not toward the people and crowds, but, after his healing work, away from them to solitude and prayer. One way to translate what is translated as prayer is “to come to rest.” Jesus had the practice. He went to rest and renew.  (And the disciples came after him, “hunted” him some translations say.)
 
It’s not that Sabbath time is superior to work time.
It’s that our work time is served by the wisdom and energy of balance and wholeness, Sabbath rest and its intention to be in a different way of being serve balance and wholeness. The spiritual paradox of this Sabbath rest and not doing is that it does create in its own way.  The Rabbinic tradition says that on the seventh day God created menuha; tranquility, serenity, peace, and repose. The Jewish tradition also says that on the Sabbath we are given an extra soul, Neshemah Yeterah, a Sabbath soul which more fully appreciates the blessings of life and the fruits of our labor.
How are we nurturing our Sabbath soul?
I watched my Dad for years come home from work, empty his pockets and often change his clothes. It was a simple ritual of shifting from work to home.  Now, I love the moment I get home and empty my pockets of keys, cell phone, and all the things I use in the outside world of work and marketplace. I empty my pockets and exhale. This can be a Sabbath moment on any day if I use it to really slow down, breathe, and pause to appreciate the gift of the day, of life, of the whole Mystery.
 
And even if you are not working outside the home, or are not ‘doing’ as much as you once did, you are not exempt from the call to Sabbath, for it is possible to fill all our not doing time with things that don’t help us exhale, rest, and renew in the whole-making Spirit of the Divine.
 
That’s because Sabbath is not just a time or even space that we reserve. It is also a quality of presence or consciousness.  It is effortless, nourishing rest.  It is stillness that can produce a unique kind of renewal and insight.  It is an awareness, a return to perspective, a sacred perspective that is about depth and delight, about re-balancing and re-creating, about remembering and feeling that we belong to God, to the Mystery, and that we are to love ourselves, each other, and all Creation.
 
There is a poem by Jane Kenyon that may help us feel into Sabbath time and space.  The poem is related to the traditional Jewish day beginning in the darkness right after sundown.
 
Let Evening Come
 
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
 
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
 
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
 
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
 
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
 
Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
 
As we continue in a Lenten journey of becoming Full to the Brim, I invite to us to remember that there are rhythms and cycles that make for life, ultimately, that make possible our coming back to acting for compassion and justice, to acting in service and offering a helping hand.  No matter our age or stage, in our lives and in our culture, we can distort those rhythms and cycles and then distort and compromise the life force that sustains us and Creation, not allowing ourselves or the Earth to exhale, to rest, to renew.
 
God exhaled on the seventh day, resting and savoring the blessing that is Life. Today, the sacred invitation is simple. Remember the Seventh Day and exhale.  AMEN
 

"The Welcome We Offer"
A sermon related to Matthew 25:34-40
 
CENTRAL FOCUS:
The unity of humanity and life (non-dual consciousness) is the Good News and our realization of this Good News (salvation) is illustrated by how we engage the margins.
 
Then the Sovereign will say to those on the right, ‘Come, you that are blessed, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me,  I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’  
 
Then the righteous will answer, ‘When was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing?  And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the Sovereign will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.’  
 
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.

----------
 
This scene of the Last Judgment portrayed in Matthew, Chapter 25 is familiar to many in our tradition.  Like most Biblical stories and scenes, it is not literal, but is a collage of symbols and images. It is a teaching vehicle. Such end time or final moment scenes are a way to teach about ultimate values, a way to say when it is all added up, in the end, this is what matters, this is what is true, this is what is of value to Life. 
 
So what is Matthew’s Jesus trying to show us, to teach us? Apparently, it involves the margins of life and our relationship to that. The sick and the imprisoned, the thirsty and the hungry, the naked and the alienated. These are the people and realities at the margins of life, aren’t they? These are those who are suffering and struggling for what is necessary to live. They seek the life-giving realities of health and freedom, clean water and food, shelter and a place to connect and belong, a place to be welcomed.  
 
In one sense, Matthew’s Jesus is teaching a simple faith of compassion that is known in its simple concrete compassionate actions. There are those in need, meet their need; visit them in prison, care for them in their sickness, provide the basics of clothing, shelter, and food. Participate in giving directly to another in their need.

If that is all you get from this story, that is good and faithful. That is an important part of the way of life.
 
And … we can go further. This can be an image also of social, systemic justice.  To use another image, we can give people fish, and can even teach them to fish, yes, but we can also ask why there are so many without fish. We can ask why the waters are not plentiful with fish or why only certain people get to fish in the waters that are plentiful? This systemic understanding also is a worthy and faithful teaching of this story. We can extend this story to the collective common good and be faithful with our communal and political actions to serve that good; we advocate, we vote, we act in large blocs and seek to organize our society differently.

A second layer of this teaching. Go and do likewise.
 
And there is yet another truth level to this story. There’s a deeper layer, a paradoxical spiritual truth of the unity of Life, a mystical reality where we include ourselves in the marginalized possibility, where identity of self and other is not so distinct.
 
Over the years, in churches like ours, we may have gotten used to hearing this story as the one in which we are the givers always, the ones with water and food and shelter and clothing, always the ones visiting. But in Jesus’ identification with those on the margins, The Christ Voice is acknowledging the whole condition of life as including the margins. In Jesus’ life, as one who was willing to be at the margins, to be the suffering one, to be the one in prison, he is including the margins as part of the whole for all of us. As it is said in the wisdom traditions of the East, “I am that.” At the level of spiritual paradox, beyond individual egos and individualism, we are each humanity in all its forms. Indeed, we are that.
 
The root spiritual knowing of the unity and interdependence of humanity and all life is the taproot for the welcome we are called to offer, a welcome of compassionate engagement with the margins. It draws the circle wide and wider still.
 
Let me clarify: This does not erase the difference in our social locations. The damaging fiction of race and the realities of unequal wealth and education and opportunity and healthcare are real and have real world consequences. But even as that is true, the good news from Matthew’s community is that the way through this injustice and inequality, this separation and hardheartedness, requires also the mystery of unity so that we are always engaging the margins with a compassionate egalitarian welcome as partners, as kin, as compatriots in the situation and miracle of life. 
 
The spiritual truth of Christ being there, of us being there as humanity, keeps us from a sense of superiority and separateness. We cannot be a gated community of secure givers, seeing ourselves only as havers and helpers. We also must have a humble identity of sameness, equality, and solidarity.
 
As Lilla Watson, Gangulu nation woman, professor, and activist of Australia says….“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
 
As the hymn we will sing today at the end of our service says,
 
In Christ there is no East or West,
in Christ no South or North;
But one community of love
throughout the whole wide earth.
 
Christ Presence is on both sides of the equation because ultimately there are not two sides at the deepest level. The Christ Presence is the one that meets the needs, alleviates the suffering, is in solidarity with those on the margins and, at the same time, is the suffering one on the margin receiving care and experiencing relief and liberation. I wonder if we can stretch our spiritual imaginations to imagine that.
 
Perhaps you are one of the people who has seen themselves as resourced, as having those things that people on the margins do not, and you see yourself as a person trying to meet those needs of those on the margin. Wonderful. That is one of the good and simple teachings of the story.
 
And it is also in our Bible story that the very conception of giver and receiver breaks down as Jesus in the role of the Christ slips into the mystical identity of the other.
 
Just as God-with-us, Immanuel, became the imprisoned one, the naked one, the suffering one, the vulnerable one, so we too know this can be true for any of us, literally or spiritually, and that at a deep level, we are all in this being human together.
 
Perhaps another story can help us. Once upon a time there was a wise abbot of a monastery who was the friend of an equally wise rabbi. This was in the old country, long ago, when times were always hard, but just then they were even worse. The abbot’s community was dwindling, and the faith life of his monks was fearful, weak and anxious. He went to his friend and wept. His friend, the Rabbi, comforted him, and said “there is something you need to know, my brother. We have long known in the Jewish community that the Messiah is one of you.”
 
"What,” exclaimed the abbot, “the Messiah is one of us? How can this be?”
 
But the Rabbi insisted that it was so, and the abbot went back to his monastery wondering and praying, comforted and excited. Once back in the monastery, he would pass by a monk and wonder if he was the one. Sitting in chapel, praying, he would hear a voice and look intently at a face and wonder, ‘Is he the one?’ The abbot had always been kind, but now began to treat all of his brothers with profound kindness and awe, ever deeper respect, even reverence. Soon everyone noticed. One of the other brothers came to him and asked him what had happened to him.
 
After some coaxing, the abbot told him what the rabbi had said. Soon the other monk was looking at his brothers differently, with deeper respect and wondering. Word spread quickly: the Messiah is one of us. The monastery was suddenly full of life, worship, love and grace. Their prayer life was rich and passionate, devoted, and services were alive and vibrant. Soon the surrounding villagers came to the services, listening and watching intently, and many joined the community of monks. After their novitiate, when they took their vows, they were told the mystery, the truth that their life was based upon, the source of their strength, the richness of their life together: The Messiah is one of us.
 
The monastery grew and expanded into house after house, and the monks grew in wisdom and grace before each other and in the eyes of God. And they say still, that if you stumble across this place where there is life and hope and kindness and graciousness, that the secret is the same: The Messiah is one of us.
 
Welcome has been named as core value of this congregation, a radical and abundant welcome. The very first strategic goal listed in the recently approved strategic plan. The welcome we offer will need to come from that place of compassion that meets the concrete needs of those on the margin, yet also calls us into the deep place of nonduality where we are no different from and even identify as humanity marginalized and in need, each seeing that we can be The Christ giving and The Christ receiving.
 
What if we welcomed each other and anyone as The Christ?
What if we welcomed ourselves as having Christ within us, both the humble Christ in need who receives and the Christ of compassion who responds?

This is Good News that is offered to us. Let us welcome it.

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