Glories Stream

December 8, 2024 - Luke 2: 8-20

Does it feel like Christmas to you?  I know it’s not Christmas yet, technically. In church time it’s still Advent.  And perhaps there’s something not wholly religiously sanctioned about it but that’s what I start asking myself sometime in mid-December. Does it feel like Christmas yet?  Do you know what I mean? Maybe you define it a little differently.  Maybe you have a special tradition that allows you to summon the “Christmas” feeling on demand.  But for me, I’m talking about a moment of deep wonder that sweeps me up and reminds me of my smallness in the vastness of creation. It’s an awe-filled reminder that despite my smallness, I’m connected to all that eternal infiniteness by an unbreakable love.  It’s a strange warming of the heart that usually catches me unaware and plunges me to the depths of what I understand Christmas to be about – holy, eternal, infinite God, made vulnerable infant flesh and come right down here to where we are then, now, and forever. 

I’ve met that moment while lighting candles and singing Silent Night.  I’ve met that moment while staying up too late and breaking too many rules with dear siblings with whom I may quarrel but who I’d also protect with my life.  I’ve met it while rocking a sleepless child.  I’ve met it while rocking my sleepless grief.  It’s not an assurance that nothing is wrong.  It’s the realization that while things are very wrong in very many places, that holy, eternal love and my mercifully sweet connection to it prevails. 

It doesn’t always show up when I’d like.  But it usually shows.  It doesn’t always look like a picture perfect Christmas card. In fact, it usually looks a lot more like a haphazard band of shepherds who’ve been watching their flocks by night for so long that they’ve started to look and smell a lot like the sheep they’re tending.  In the scripture story, that’s when the wonder shows up.  That’s when the angels light the sky.  To simple, wild, lowly places, God still sends God’s messengers to fill us with wonder and awe.  

Those angels tell us then and now, “Do not be afraid,” which is both an utterly necessary and utterly ridiculous thing for them to say.  Angels can be truly scary. In the Bible they don’t usually show up to deliver fast food or to tell you about their favorite new Netflix show.  They usually show up to let you know everything is different now and you are about to be asked to be very, very brave.  To Sara, Isaiah, Zechariah, Mary, and the shepherds the angels bring good news of great joy.  They also bring the admonition to believe them and to take courage for the road ahead. 

“Do not be afraid,” they say.  But maybe it helps to know they probably mean, “I know you’re really afraid. That’s okay. Be afraid for a while, if you need. But I’m asking you not to let your fear control the decisions you make. I’m asking you to be brave.”  Fear comes so naturally in the face of uncertainty or anytime we expect the possibility of pain, harm, or loss.

Some of us are experiencing a form of fear or at least concern about the change in presidential administration in the US.  Some of us are experiencing fear, worry, or stress about our own health or about the health of our relationships. Many of us are experiencing worry, concern, and grief about changes here at church – and I am among them.  As much as I am excited about this new role I will be taking on, I am experiencing grief as I say goodbye to you in the role of pastor.  But other things are changing, too.  The church is exploring increased rental partnerships.  The church is experiencing decreasing financial resources and increasing or at least unrelenting building needs.  In so very many ways, the church is not the same as it was in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and neither is the world. 

There are some resources, people, and ways of being together that some of those of us who lived through those times still grieve the loss of.  It is understandable to be worried, concerned, or even fearful about all these things and more. How can it feel like Christmas with these things on our minds? Maybe it helps to remember that even in the Christmas story, not everything was really calm not all ways always bright, and yet they found a way to be present to the glories still streaming by tenderly, bravely facing what was before them. 

After the angels encourage bravery, the next message they bring is “good news of great joy.”  The good news of great joy the angels bring the shepherds is that a savior has been born. It is a reassurance that their people are not forgotten. God is in their midst and cares deeply for each one. Despite the harshness and suffering of their world, God is with them.  And we, too, are not alone.  Knowing that doesn’t solve all our problems.  But it can make it possible for us to find the courage we need in the face of trouble and change. 

It’s why a simple card, phone call, or little text message of support can mean so much.  It’s why a meal shared can seem like holy manna.  It’s why it matters to address the systems–not just the symptoms of suffering in our world.  It may not house all the children, clothe all the naked, and feed all the hungry at once. But every time someone reaches out to us and we reach out to another we join in that holy work of being bravely with each other.  And as Mary who treasured and pondered all these things in her heart knows, it changes things not to be alone. 

This City of Elgin is pretty good at knowing how it changes things.  There was such an outpouring of material donations after the fire in “tent city” this week, that city leaders had to ask folks to stop bringing them.  And I know this is not the start or the end of the way people in our area do try to look out for each other, regardless of our income or housing status.  We know it changes things, not to be alone.  The shepherds knew it, too.  They left praising God and sharing the good news.  We are not alone. God is with us.  And because of that we need not be controlled by our fears. Because of that we can show up bravely and kindly, ready to face any challenges before us with creativity and care.

I don’t know if they looked or smelled like sheep.  But I hear that there’s a story behind the excessively decorated house on Monroe Street that goes back to a time when the owner suffered a devastating injury. It’s said his friends knew how much he loved Christmas lights and wanted him so much to feel not alone in his suffering that they did the lights for him and hung those big balls of lights in the tree so that he would know they were there, they were rooting for him, and it was okay to be brave. Every year the tree gains another of those big balls of light, celebrating one more year from that anniversary and one more year that he can return the favor to the rest of us in the neighborhood in lights that are as loud as shepherds shouting in the night. 

When will that Christmas feeling dawn on you this year?  I can’t guarantee it’s arrival or its timing.  But I can tell you that we are never truly alone.  And because of that we need not be ruled by our fear.  Because of that we can turn toward all that it is still calm and bright.  Because of that we can find the joy of the glories still streaming all around us, no matter what life brings our way. 

May it be so. Amen. 

Hopeful Joy

December 1, 2024 - Isaiah 2: 1-4

These days I wake up in darkness. Most days it is dark when I come home from work. No matter your particular schedule, you’ve probably noticed we are short a few hours of daylight now compared to those long ago bright and sunny July days. The bad news is. There’s nothing any of us can do to change it. We can take Vitamin D drops. We can hang our Christmas lights high. We can dream of sunny beaches. But there is nothing any of us can do to alter the fact that here in the Fox Valley of IL we are approaching the darkest time of the year. Now it’s much worse in countries farther North. I’m told my friend Maria in Denmark will have much less daylight on Christmas Day than we will here. However, do you know what I realized this week in a new way?  There are also countries along the equator who never change the amount of daylight they have. In Ethiopia for example, month in month out, they are enjoying 12 hours of daylight! Twelve hours of daylight! Twelve hours! That just doesn’t seem fair.  

Of course, there are a host of other things that are unequal in this world. There are things that are unchangeable and things that seem like maybe we could change if we worked together. Sometimes those unequal things move me to experience anger, an emotion that feels a world away from joy or hope. Isaiah sounds rather angry to me in the first chapter of this prophet’s book, which comes just before what we heard read today. He names in vivid detail all the wrongdoings of his people and calls them in no uncertain terms to get right with God.  

Anger can arise from the same conditions that foment stress. That is, anger can arise for us any time there is a distance between how things are and how we want them to be. The prophet sounds angry to me as he enumerates the many ways the people have gone wrong, some of which sound specific and obscure. Other misdeeds sound all too familiar indeed and can stir my own sense of anger and injustice. Anger is not necessarily good or bad. It’s just an emotion--a certain type of energy--we all experience. Anger can help us recognize when something is wrong. It’s when we hold on to it, suppress it, or get overcome by it that it begins to do damage.  

If we do not want to experience that damage, what are we to do with the distance between the way things are and the way we want them to be? How do we get right with the God who would have us beat our swords into ploughshares and our spears into pruning hooks? In the beginning of Isaiah chapter 2 we heard today, the prophet paints a beautiful picture of the way things will be one day. The day is surely coming, Isaiah proclaims, when all the nations will stream to God’s house on the Mountain so that we can all live the way we’re made. In that time, God will settle all things fairly. These weapons of war and violence we’ve piled up will be so unneeded and useless that we’ll all agree we’re better off recycling the metal into shovels, hoes, bicycles, and electric-powered tractors. 

Okay, I added the bicycle part.  But Isaiah’s vision conjures up a picture of the way we all want the world to be. It’s a world where everyone has enough and we all prosper being just the way we are made to be. Isaiah knew things were not all good around him. He saw something coming in the future he could not control. Yet, he trusted in God’s vision of a world made whole and he proclaimed it to his people with hopeful joy.

I love when the trees are in full leaf and the warm breeze blows over the green grass. But that’s not the way it is outside right now. Did you know though that in the winter months trees and other plants are still growing? Quietly, below the surface, those roots are growing deeper. My family learned more about it on a Magic School Bus episode once but there’s a Radiolab episode on it too for podcast fans. With Ms. Frizzle, we learned that in natural wooded areas the roots of trees and fungus can entwine and tangle into a system of sharing food and resources with each other. Advancing technology is beginning to reveal just how sophisticated this extraordinary underground network is.  Affectionately termed the “wood-wide-web” by researchers, this network of tiny tubes carries alarms when pests are on the way and shares pest-repelling resources to sustain neighbors amid the attack.  

I don’t want to be angry.  I don’t want to be stressed. At the same time, I know things aren’t as good as they could be and that I’m often part of the problem. What does it mean to hope in a way that acknowledges we’re not there yet and still somehow leads us to joy? Maybe it has to do with what we mean by hope. Hope is not beating ourselves up for not being better. Hope is not impatient wishing for things to change. Hope is not stressed out anger when things don’t go our way. Hope is confident expectation. Hope is cherishing a desire with anticipation. Hope is a feeling of trust. Where do we rest our hope?  

Hope is like knowing you are upheld by a wood-wide-web, so that no matter the season, you can trust your deep roots will find the nourishment you need. Hope is like knowing that happiness is a fleeting emotion that will come and go but joy is a deep abiding source of sustenance that will hold you strong and keep you well even when all is not as you wish it would be. Hope is like knowing that we don’t have to choose between accepting the way things are for right now and joining the work of bringing about all the good that could be.

When we rest our hope in God we can have both. When we rest our hope in God we light a candle for God’s deep abiding shalom to come on earth. When we rest our hope in God we can trust that no matter how bleak the season, those days are surely coming.  

Maybe your Christmas isn’t all you want it to be…  

For with God we don’t have to always get it right. With God we can shift our focus from perfection to genuineness, vulnerability, and compassion.          

With God we can recognize anger and stress more easily when they arise and let them go transform into compost for the fertile growth to come. For the light of God Isaiah invites us to walk in is available to us now, was born two thousand years ago in a manger bed, and will hold us strong no matter what the seasons bring until all is made well, whole, and holy.   

So, come thou long expected Jesus. We await your birth in our hearts and in our world once more with hopeful joy.

May it be so. Amen.

With Abundant Gratitude

November 17, 2024 - Matthew 14: 13-21

In the middle of the wilderness Jesus asked his disciples to feed over 5,000 people. The disciples said, “we have here only five loaves of bread and two fish.” He couldn’t expect them to feed over 5,000 people with that could he? But he did. “[He took] the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to the disciples and the disciples gave them to the people” (14: 19b).  

Limits are part of this human life it seems to me. There is even a limit to the number of days we have to draw breath in these mortal bodies. There is certainly a limit to the amount of food in our kitchens, cupboards, or refrigerators. Some of us feel some of these limits more keenly than others. Yet, biblical scholar Walter Bruggeman teaches that both testaments of the Bible are full of stories of God turning limits into generous abundance.  

When the Israelites wander hungry in the wilderness, God provides manna, bread that materializes each morning like the dew on the ground. In Psalm 23, God the Good Shepherd leads followers through the darkest valley to an abundantly set table with an overflowing cup. In both the old and new testaments, God gives children to barren couples. In today’s story Jesus takes, blesses, breaks, and shares a limited amount of bread and fish to feed over five thousand people. And the text says when “all ate and were satisfied, the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over.” This is because, Bruggeman claims, God is a God of abundance. While I suspect Bruggeman would agree that the limits and suffering of this life are very real, he argues believing there is “not enough” is a dangerous way to live.  

Believing there is “not enough” leads us into the trap of needing to hoard all the good things to ourselves and always try to get more and more and more,[1] which ends up hurting everyone, even us. It’s like my friend, who when his mom once and awhile brought home a six pack of soda in glass bottles as a treat, would sneak off with that entire six-pack as soon as he could, sit down, and drink every single one. Afterward he would be, as he would say, “sicker than a dog.”  

When Jesus takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, and shares it with everyone in this text I hear again the words of institution from the practice of communion. I am not sure but I am not willing to rule out that Jesus miraculously turned five loaves of bread and two fish into food more than enough to satisfy more than 5,000 people. Yet, I also wonder about the miracle that happened in the hearts of the crowd when Jesus stood before them, took, blessed, broke, and shared the limited amount of food he had been given. Perhaps that act opened up the hearts of those more than five thousand who likely would have traveled with their own food to share their little bits with each other and find that each little bit put together made for an abundant feast with twelve baskets full of leftovers.  However the miracle happened, I believe those four actions--take, bless, break, share-- revealed the truth that God is a God not of scarcity but of enoughness, of more than enough.  

I believe the God we follow is indeed the God of abundance. I believe that abundance can be found and known no matter what limits, changes, or uncertainty we may face, because the love of the God of abundance knows no limits of suffering, evil, or even death. Moreover, I believe those four actions, take, bless, break, share have the miraculous power within them to unleash the holy presence of the living God of abundance, turning what may seem like so little into enough to feed a multitude. Except one of those actions isn’t quite right.

In today’s story it doesn’t say he took, blessed, broke, and shared. It says he took the bread and gave thanks. He gave thanks for the little bit of bread they had. He looked at their limited amount and expressed gratitude. Even neurobiologists today are astounded when they study what happens to the brain when humans express gratitude. The regular expression of gratitude has a strong correlation with quick physical healing, significantly lessened depression, and strengthened social bonds.  

Gratitude I believe changes our perspective. It doesn’t take away the sting of the loss of a loved one but it can allow us to rejoice in the time that we shared. It doesn’t give us all the money in the world but it can allow us to see what we have as a treasure. It doesn’t cover up suffering and injustice but it can give us the strength we need to rise up. Perhaps it is the presence of God as known in the powerful force of gratitude that turns our limits into more than enough. Perhaps it is the presence of God as known in the powerful force of gratitude that gives us the courage to open our hands which can be so tightly closed around the good things in our grasp in order to share generously with others.  

It takes faith to open those tightly closed hands. It takes faith to open our tightly closed hearts. It takes faith to allow for enough gratitude to see that whatever we have to give becomes more than enough in the presence of God. For God will take, bless, break, and share what we have given and turn those gifts into enough--into more than enough.  

In the very next story that follows today’s story, we find Jesus walking on water and inviting the disciples to join him. Peter does. He gets out of the boat. He doesn’t do so well as Jesus. Maybe it takes practice.  But maybe he’s able to do it at all because the practice of sharing from his own limited resources and watching God turn it into more than enough has given him enough faith to get out of the boat.                  

Have any of you seen the video short out of Canada titled “Eat Together?” it opens with a young woman who sighs as she finds herself brushed by in the lobby of her apartment complex and ignored in the crowded but silent elevator, her face alone looks up as all others look down at tiny, glowing screens. Even as she enters her apartment she is ignored by her headphone wearing roommate who doesn’t even seem to notice when the young woman throws down her bag and keys in exasperation. But in the next scene both roommates come out into the narrow hallway dragging a long skinny table. They bring out chairs, table settings, food, and drinks. They smile awkwardly at each other. They’ve just done something truly weird. They’ve set up dinner in the middle of a hall where it seems strangers live side-by-side. In a moment the elevator dings open releasing a little girl and her family into the hallway, who at the child’s leading join enthusiastically in the all prepared hallway dinner. In the next scene apartment doors open and heads appear, checking out the commotion. Soon more people join, bringing more food, and more tables and more chairs, stretching down the corridor. The camera shows folks of different skin colors and wearing different religious dress then pans to the little girl who is now crawling under the table to get to the end of the hallway where she knocks on the last door. An older man appears, hears her, and then shuts the door. But in a moment, he reappears with a bottle of wine and a broad smile, as he is welcomed by the cheers of his feasting neighbors.  In the background a woman sings an updated version of the song, “What the world needs now is love sweet love. It’s the only thing there’s just too little of.”  

Dear Highland Avenue Church, you have more than a little love to give to the world and each other. You inspire me with your big hearts and your ever broadening sense of community. What is the wild idea you have? What is it you want to try? What is it you want to give? What is it you want to see the church give, do, or be? No, we’re not the biggest church in the city. No, we’re not perfect people or a perfect church. But I believe when we offer, give thanks for, break, and share what we have to give God will take it and perhaps do something with it we never even expected, somehow turning it into enough--into much, much more than enough.  

May it be so. Amen.

[1] Walter Bruggeman. “The liturgy of abundance, the myth of scarcity” The Christian Century. March 24, 1999, 342-353. 

Take, Bless, Break, Share

November 10, 2024 - Luke 24: 28-35

In the middle of the wilderness Jesus asked his disciples to feed over 5,000 people.  The disciples said, Look, “we have here only five loaves of bread and two fish.” He couldn’t expect them to feed over 5,000 people with that could he? But he did.  “[He took] the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves.  Then he gave them to the disciples and the disciples gave them to the people” (14: 19b).

Limits are part of this human life it seems to me.  There is even a limit to the number of days we have to draw breath in these mortal bodies.  There is certainly a limit to the amount of food in our kitchens, cupboards, or refrigerators. Some of us feel some of these limits more keenly than others.  Yet, biblical scholar Walter Bruggeman teaches that both testaments of the Bible are full of stories of God turning limits into generous abundance.

When the Israelites wander hungry in the wilderness, God provides manna, bread that materializes each morning like the dew on the ground.  In Psalm 23, God the Good Shepherd leads followers through the darkest valley to an abundantly set table with an overflowing cup.  In both the old and new testaments, God gives children to barren couples. 

In today’s story Jesus takes, blesses, breaks, and shares a limited amount of bread and fish to feed over five thousand people. And the text says when “all ate and were satisfied, the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over.” This is because, Bruggeman claims, God is a God of abundance.  While I suspect Bruggeman would agree that the limits and suffering of this life are very real, he argues believing there is “not enough” is a dangerous way to live. 

Believing there is “not enough” leads us into the trap of needing to hoard all the good things to ourselves and always try to get more and more and more, which ends up hurting everyone, even ourselves.  It’s like my friend, who when his mom once and awhile brought home a six pack of soda in glass bottles as a treat, would sneak off with that entire six-pack as soon as he could, sit down, and drink every single one.  Afterward he would be, as he would say, “sicker than a dog.” 

When Jesus takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, and shares it with everyone, all my professional church lady bells go off, because I have heard those words before.  They’re from the words of institution which I was taught to memorize so that when I was preparing the congregation and the elements for communion, I could look folks in the eye as I say, “After dinner Jesus took the bread, blessed, broke it, and shared it with them, saying, take, eat, do this in remembrance of me.”

Take, Bless, Break, Share. Four actions.  They are indeed the same four actions Jesus performs in Matthew 26 and in the other gospel accounts as he sets out the practice that we now call communion.

I am not sure but I am not willing to rule out that Jesus miraculously turned five loaves of bread and two fish into food more than enough to satisfy more than 5,000 people. Yet, I also wonder about the miracle that happened in the hearts of the crowd when Jesus stood before them, took, blessed, broke, and shared the limited amount of food he had been given.  Perhaps that act opened up the hearts of those more than five thousand who likely would have traveled with their own food --having no McDonald’s or Arabica Cafe on which to depend-- to share their little bits with each other and find that each little bit put together made for an abundant feast with twelve baskets full of leftovers.  

However the miracle happened, I believe those four actions--take, bless, break, share-- revealed the truth that God is a God not of scarcity but of enoughness, of more than enough.  I believe the God we follow is indeed the God of abundance.  I believe that abundance can be found and known no matter what limits we may face.  Because the love of the God of abundance knows no limits of suffering, evil, or even death. 

Moreover, I believe those four actions, take, bless, break, share have the miraculous power within them to unleash the holy presence of the living God of abundance, turning what may seem like so little into enough to feed a multitude. Except one of those actions isn’t quite right.  In today’s story it doesn’t say he took, blessed, broke, and shared.  It says he took the bread and gave thanks.  He gave thanks for the little bit of bread they had.  He looked at their limited amount and expressed gratitude. 

Even neurobiologists today are astounded when they study what happens to the brain when humans express gratitude.  The regular expression of gratitude has a strong correlation with quick physical healing, significantly lessened depression, and strengthened social bonds. 

Gratitude I believe changes our perspective.  It doesn’t take away the sting of the loss of a loved one but it can allow us to rejoice in the time that we shared.  It doesn’t give us all the money in the world but it can allow us to see what we have as a treasure. It doesn’t cover up suffering and injustice but it can give us the strength we need to rise up. 

Perhaps it is the presence of God as known in the powerful force of gratitude that turns our limits into more than enough.  Perhaps it is the presence of God as known in the powerful force of gratitude that gives us the courage to open our hands which can be so tightly closed around the good things in our grasp in order to share generously with others.

It takes faith to open those tightly closed hands. 

It takes faith to open our tightly closed hearts. 

It takes faith to allow for enough gratitude to see that whatever we have to give becomes more than enough in the presence of God. 

For God will take, bless, break, and share what we have given and turn those gifts into enough--into more than enough.  In the very next story that follows today’s story, we find Jesus walking on water and inviting the disciples to join him.  Peter does. He gets out of the boat.  He doesn’t do so well as Jesus. Maybe it takes practice.

But maybe he’s able to do it at all because the practice of sharing from his own limited resources and watching God turn it into more than enough has given him enough faith to get out of the boat.

Have any of you seen the video short out of Canada titled “Eat Together?” It opens with a young woman who sighs as she finds herself brushed by in the lobby of her apartment complex and ignored in the crowded but silent elevator, her face alone looking up as all others look down at tiny, glowing screens.  Even as she enters her apartment she is ignored by her headphone wearing roommate who doesn’t even seem to notice when the young woman throws down her bag and keys in exasperation.  But in the next scene both roommates come out into the narrow hallway dragging a long skinny table.  They bring out chairs, table settings, food, and drinks.  They smile awkwardly at each other.  They’ve just done something truly weird.  They’ve set up dinner in the middle of a hall where it seems strangers live side-by-side. 

In a moment the elevator dings open releasing a little girl and her family into the hallway, who at the child’s leading join enthusiastically in the all prepared hallway dinner.  In the next scene apartment doors open and heads appear, checking out the commotion.  Soon more people join, bringing more food, and more tables and more chairs, stretching down the corridor.  The camera shows folks of different skin colors and wearing different religious dress then pans to the little girl who is now crawling under the table to get to the end of the hallway where she knocks on the last door.  An older man appears, hears her, and then shuts the door. 

But in a moment he reappears with a bottle of wine and a broad smile,  as he is welcomed by the cheers of his feasting neighbors.  In the background a woman sings an updated version of the song, “What the world needs now is love sweet love.  It’s the only thing there’s just too little of.” 

What is the wild idea you have?

What is it you want to try? 

What is it you want to give? 

What is it you want to see the church give, do, or be? 

No, we’re not the biggest church in the city. No, we’re not perfect people or a perfect church.  But I believe when we offer, give thanks for, break, and share what we have to give God will take it and perhaps do something with it we never even expected, somehow turning it into enough--into much, much more than enough.

May it be so. Amen.

Grief And Gratitude

November 3, 2024 - Hebrews 12: 1-2

It had been a week or more since my friend and Elgin community leader Ron Raglin’s unexpected death, when I found myself overcome with a jag of violent sobbing. I thought I had processed that grief enough for now at least enough to go boldly out in the world and care for other people. But it took over my whole body without warning. It was all I could do to safely put down my bags, stow my bicycle, and crumple into a heap where I landed while parking here at church. I was slightly amused and comforted that I had fallen apart for a moment here at in this building, where we do come to meet God. Perhaps, even though it is my workplace, I also know deeply in my bones that it is a holy, thin place, where even I can meet God and bring to God my yet unprocessed grief.  

In the Bible, God is all powerful and beyond our understanding of time and space. “I am who I am, I have been who I have been, I will be who I will be,” God mysteriously tells Moses in Exodus. In Genesis we know God to simply speak the Creation into being. As big, mysterious, and powerful as God is, in the Bible, we learn God is also as close as our very breath, knows our every thought, and has a deep concern for the least powerful and the last, lost sheep. In the Psalms, we hear prayers of joy and prayers of lament. While the prayers of joy may be easier to read most of the time, we need the prayers of lament, too.

While we may have learned that it’s often easier to put on a happy mask because we can’t just trust all humans to witness our grief with respect and compassion, we can’t and don’t need to hide our grief from God. God is big enough, strong enough, and caring enough not only to celebrate our triumphs but also to meet us in our places of suffering, grief, and pain. When the church is at its best, one of the vital gifts we give to each other and to the world is to be a community who can embody a sacred kind of respect, compassion, and care.  

Grief, as you may well know, isn’t always pretty. In her 1969 book, On Death and Dying, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross famously coined her 5 stages of grief:  denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. While these stages don’t always come in a neat order, it may be helpful to understand that grief is sometimes expressed in sadness and tears and it is also expressed in other ways, too. And while the death of a loved one is one reason to grieve, there are many other things we may grieve, too, like the loss of a job, a relationship, a home, a level of independence, or even the dashing of an expectation, dream, or hope.  

Indeed, any major change may bring both good things and the loss of good things for which we may grieve. The church has experienced a lot of change - this church and the church at-large. Our whole world has experienced a lot of change as a result of a pandemic. Our ways of understanding how to be in community with each other are struggling with big cultural changes, too. Whenever I witness folks explode at the grocery store cashier, at each other on social media, or even come to violence in the street, I am reminded that anger is a part of grief. Often underneath anger and other related emotions, we may find a very real, deep, and urgent pain.  

Most of us humans could use a lot of help learning to feel, process, and name our anger without becoming violent with others or ourselves. I am reminded that it’s very possible that so much of our anger stems from the real pain of endings, limitations, and suffering. As I watch the leaves change, fall, and die, I am reminded that death and resurrection is the cycle of life. It is the way of this universe that God has created and called good. I am reminded that God can bring new life out of the compost heap. I am reminded that through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith,” we know we can trust that God will carry us beyond every ending into the new life that is to come.  

Perhaps that’s a kind of cold comfort for those of us in fresh grief. It’s okay if that’s not something you’re ready to hear. It’s okay to just sit with wherever you are today. Because I’m not sure anything really makes the grief less burdensome other than finding the space, time, and resources to let it process. But I also know that since our grief comes from the pain of loss, there was once something beautiful to lose. There was a loved one who maybe wasn’t perfect but had our back, made us feel special, or was everything to us.  

There was a job that put food on the table or gave us a sense of fulfillment. There was something we enjoyed doing so much but now it has changed, we can’t participate in the same way, or it is never coming back. There was a dream that we carried that won’t be achieved the way we imagined, but in it was so much beauty and hope. We don’t ever have to say that loss is a good thing. We can always mourn that loss. What we can do is be willing to feel our grief in order to also be willing to feel our gratitude for what or who it was that we so loved in the first place.  

I think that’s the “joy” for which Jesus endured the cross. It’s the joy of holy love and life that are part of this beautiful creation. It’s that joy to which Jesus calls followers. It's not a Pollyanna joy of ignorance but a joy that abides through suffering and puts us in touch with deep and holy gratitude. For the love, life, hope, and beauty we have experienced may come to an end in one sense. In another sense though, those gifts are what endures. Those gifts are part of the eternal life to which God invites us all.  

This fall I have begun to wear this Stetson that belonged to my grandfather. He taught me to play tic-tac-toe and to identify the birds at the window feeder. He always had a dish of candy to share. Mostly, he and my grandmother just made me feel like I was special and so loved. Now, I am doing my past to pass that on to my children and to the world around me, and when I taught my children the amusingly frustrating reality of mutually assured destruction for two evenly matched tic-tac-toe players, I remembered my grandfather and felt his love powerfully with me.  

These days we could all use a little extra wisdom, a little extra support, and a little extra love. I am grateful to be able to turn to God and to the ongoing support of our ancestors - genetic, spiritual, or chosen by us to honor. They may be gone from this earthly life. They may even have left imperfections from which we are still healing. But the gifts they left behind, those will never really leave. For that resource, for the unending love of God, and for the trust we can have in the life that is to come, I give grateful thanks and pray to be upheld in grief that gives way someday, some way to joy.   

“Therefore,” scripture tells us, “since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.”                                               

I trust that it is so, that has been so, and that it will be so for all time. Amen.

Uncommon Ground

October 20, 2024 - 1 Corinthians 12: 12-26

On Friday night there was a memorial service in this very space. The only members of this congregation present were Peg on the sound board and myself in the pulpit. But what happened here so epitomized our congregation at its best that I wanted to be sure to tell you about it.  

Julia Caise attended Highland Avenue infrequently a significant number of years ago. Better known to several of you longer time members would have been her father, Dale Kleinschmidt, who was a local United Methodist pastor and had close ties to local Church of the Brethren colleagues due primarily to their closely shared theological and social justice stances. Julia lived very nearby our church building with her husband Ron and two daughters, Rachael and Alexis. With Dale’s encouragement she made a connection here that though it never grew broad or deep, she still remembered fondly years later when I met her at a Downtown Elgin market this summer.  

We connected through mutual friends, and I recognized her name from our church records. She was delighted to know we now had a woman pastor and expressed appreciation for all this church still does in the community. She texted her daughter Rachael that night about meeting me. I had met Rachael weeks earlier. They shared a kind word about me. Rachael asked what church I was from again. And the last thing Julia ever texted Rachael before her unexpected death was “Church of the Brethren.” Rachael took this as a sign that her mom wanted her service here.  

Maybe you’ve heard me attribute stories like this to what I call the “Elgin Magic,” the way the thickly woven network of relationships in this town sometimes makes this 115,000 person city feel more like a mythical Mayberry. And I do believe there is something special about this geographical location–this region that we’re in. There is midwestern magic to it–an ethos of connection that has a particular flavor. But it’s also something that can happen anywhere with anyone, if we remember and cultivate our connection to each other.

The scripture we read today speaks of this connection.  “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” The Apostle Paul seems to have had communities of Jesus followers in mind. He wanted to underline the connection church members have to each other, despite their differences. But my opinion is that the same ethos applies to how we treat all of our neighbors. We are all members of a certain kind of body – the body of a community, a city, a state, a nation, a world.

Julia and her husband Ron seem to have been pretty good at remembering that. At her memorial service, my friend, their former neighbor, recalled how the day they moved in next door to the Caises, Ron rushed out and started moving furniture into the newcomers’ house before even introducing himself. Others recalled how Julia brought people together with over 30 annual Halloween parties and countless other get-togethers and ongoing rituals for friends to make and maintain connections. Her oldest brother named Julia’s strong political opinions and then made a full-throated endorsement for her presidential candidate of choice – something I have never before seen at a funeral or memorial service. But later, other friends and relatives felt welcome to –in good humor– out themselves as being from the opposite political party from Julia and celebrated the way that though she tried hard to win them over to her point of view, she never cast them out either.  

I could give you stories of how bigger players on the world stage were historically friends across differences – like the way Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia once cultivated a genuine friendship despite their consistently opposing viewpoints and decisions. But most of us don’t play on the world stage. And the truth is the relational skills employed by Supreme Court Justices are not so different from those employed by a local hairdresser and a carpenter in our own neighborhood. They can both learn how to be fully, genuinely, vulnerably themselves and still talk to someone who is not very much like them whatsoever with dignity and respect.  

It’s a skill that Paul called Jesus followers to cultivate. He thought the Corinthians could do this, and I hope we can, too, though it seems all too uncommon these days. “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’, nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’ On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect;” writes Paul. He wasn’t talking about Democrats and Republicans. They didn’t exist yet. But he was talking about having respect for those of different skill sets, backgrounds, and economic resources. He was talking about respecting how our different perspectives can add to our shared understanding and how nobody is really better than anybody else.

We are all welcome at God’s table – all welcome in the body of Christ.  This though, is how the table is set. Come as you are. But when you get to the table, the rule is respect each other. It’s great if you can find places where you agree with folks you don’t have much in common with – if you can find common ground and work together. But that’s not even what Paul is saying. No, Paul is talking about that uncommon ground, the place where we disagree but we don’t dehumanize each other. We actually do our best to protect each other and care for each other. We stand up for each other when someone tries to take away another’s rights and safety because we know what Paul says is right: “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.”  

That’s what Jesus taught and if you ask me, it’s how the world works. Our well-being is wrapped up in each other’s, and we are all better off when we remember and practice that truth. The movement that is the Church of the Brethren started at the turn of the 18th century in Schwarzenau, Germany. The folks who started this strain of Christianity had lived through a thirty-year long war where Christians killed other Christians over differences in belief. They saw lives, property, and communities destroyed by valuing dogma over human lives and relationships. Those who first baptized each other in the Eder River read in the Bible a clear call to a different way of living, where folks were not told what to believe but rather learned to live in respectful relationship with each other.  

We have the opportunity to carry on that heritage today. In this climate of polarization, loneliness, and isolation, we have the opportunity to bring people together instead of tear each other apart. We have the opportunity to protect instead of threatening each other. We have the opportunity to practice the kind of uncommon respect Paul called Jesus followers to in today’s scripture.

Friday night’s memorial service will stand out as unique in my memory probably for as long as I live not only because it included a political endorsement or because this sanctuary was packed to the gills by Julia’s family and friends but also because it ended with Abba’s famous song, Dancing Queen and an invitation to follow the family in dancing out the aisles just as Julia so often did with her daughters at home. And so many people did! This whole sanctuary was full of dancing, laughing, of still aching people. It was church as best I know it. It was a vision of what one of those gathered Friday called “the big party in the sky” that God is always throwing. It was a witness to the unbreakable love that knits us all together and continues even after death.  

It’s not that I think dancing or even partying through life is necessary. It’s that I think we are called to value and celebrate these lives we have been given and in so doing, value and celebrate the lives of all those around us, too. No matter our point of view, this season and every season may we strive to find that uncommon ground of love, respect, and dignity for all.

May it be so. Amen.

Kindness In The Kin-dom

October 6, 2024 - Luke 6: 31-36

The definition of political violence is hurting or threatening to hurt a person or group of people for political reasons.[1] Studies show that over the past decade, there has been a steady increase in political violence and threats against public officials.[2] Neighbors have turned against neighbors, too. Late last year, a Reuters piece covered the killing of Anthony King by his neighbor Austin Combs, because Combs suspected the man next door might be a Democrat.[3] There is of course another entire category of violence that is fueled by hatred of a person due to other identity aspects, including race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. This violence is ongoing, far too close to home, and I would argue very much political. One notable instance that captured local attention last year was the closing of McHenry County’s UpRising Bakery after it received near unrelenting harassment and threats of violence for its announcement that it intended to host a family friendly drag brunch.

Jesus too lived with the presence of political and identity-based violence. Citizens of Rome typically enjoyed exponentially more rights and economic advantage than the people in the Judean hillsides Jesus lived among. Jesus himself was killed in an act of state-sanctioned violence not because he himself threatened harm to anyone but because those in power feared his power. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” was not simply a comforting maxim he imparted to followers. It was disruptive to the way people typically behaved in this context of violence. And if you ask me, I think it is disruptive in our context of violence as well.      

Maybe you don’t feel that you face the threat of physical violence every day. Perhaps you can better relate to the threat of emotional harm that is too often carried out between family members, co-workers, or even strangers interacting in traffic or online.  It’s natural to respond to even the threat of emotional harm by reacting in equal measure or by completely cowering. Scientists who study humans are now often listing not just fight or flight but also freeze and fawn. When we’re stressed our bodies fill with hormones that often override our ability to respond calmly and rationally. In this state, we can end up hurting others or further injuring ourselves.

In order to “do unto others as [we] would have them do unto [us],” we have to step out of that typical way of responding to the threat of harm. We have to interrupt that cycle of violence that begets more violence. It’s disruptive to the status quo. It may sound like simple and sweet advice, something that is even passed around as a “golden rule.” But it has real power to change things. When we refuse to respond in violence or fear but rather meet people with dignity and respect even when they fail to treat us that way, we can change situations, relationships, and whole communities.  

Jesus makes very clear that he’s not asking his followers to simply be kind to those who are kind to them. No, he talks about loving enemies and about how hard but rewarding it is to be kind to people who aren’t kind to you first. Have you ever seen this in action? I have from time to time. The truth is it doesn’t always work. But sometimes it really does. And the truth is that I would rather see you be safe than kind if it comes down to it. I love you all too much.  

But I have seen it work. It wasn’t political but this summer the weirdest thing happened to me. I was driving down McLean. I must have moved from my lane somehow or did something erratic. It didn’t seem like much to me. But the car behind me took enormous offense. He began laying on the horn and pulled up right alongside me to swerve into my lane and sling curses at the top of his lungs. That was scary enough. But then he did the most dangerous thing – swerved right in front of me and came to an abrupt stop. I had to slam on the brakes and almost didn’t make it. He was still cursing at me by turns in the rearview mirror or leaning out his open window. I’m not exactly sure where what I did next came from because I was afraid. What if he decided to get out of his car? What would I do?  But I rolled down my window and said as loudly as I could, “Are you okay?” He stopped. “What?” he asked. “Are you okay? Did I hit you? Do you need something? Are you okay? You seem very upset.” He threw up his hands then, shook his head, and drove away.   

The thing is. Whenever someone is that upset. It’s really not about us. And whenever we are that upset, it’s usually about some deep hurt or fear that we’re not quite naming or holding as gently as we might. We can fight fire with fire. But it usually won’t solve anything. Instead, we can try treating ourselves and others with mercy and kindness. “Be merciful,” Jesus teaches, “as your heavenly parent is merciful.”

Eugene Peterson’s poetic rendering of this selection of scripture ends this way: “I tell you, love your enemies. Help and give without expecting a return. You’ll never–I promise–regret it. Live out this God created identity the way our [heavenly parent] lives toward us, generously and graciously, even when we’re at our worst. Our [heavenly parent] is kind; you be kind.”  Not everyone is going to be kind. We are not always going to be kind either. But there’s this other way of being – this God created identity as Eugene Peterson puts it – that calls us to see each other as part of a wider community – a family even.  

Jesus refers to our shared heavenly parent. We’re all kin to each other. And I know family is as hard to get along with as anyone. That’s not quite what I mean – that we’re related. It’s more that we’re all connected. What hurts you hurts me and vice versa. That’s one of the reasons some of us like to talk about the Kin-dom of God. It’s a gender neutral term for the realm of a being that has got to be way beyond bound by any mortal notions we have around human bodies. But it’s also a way of saying we are all “inextricably linked.”

No matter who we will vote for in November, No matter where we worship or if we worship or how we take communion, No matter if we are feeling particularly welcoming or grumpy today, No matter who we love or how much money we have or where we grew up, we are all connected. “Doing unto others” isn’t a cute maxim. It doesn’t mean we all like the same things either. It means we want to care for each other and we want to take the actions we can to make sure all of us have more of what we need. It means stepping out of the cycle of political violence not by not having an opinion or being a doormat but by remembering we are all part of the same family. And treating each other the best way we know how.  

Jesus calls followers to this. And scientists tell us it’s actually also contagious. Kindness that is. In their book, Good People: Stories from the Best of Humanity, Gabriel Reilich and Lucia Knell cite the way humans witnessing other humans being kind statistically tends to beget more kindness. Their book is filled with stories of kindness that they hope will only engender more of it in their readers, too. While the physical and emotional harm we see in the world is very much real, so is the power of the kind things we do to knit ourselves closer together.

It’s not in any book but the real life story I carry in my heart about neighbors loving neighbors comes from my own block. It didn’t matter much that we didn’t hold the same political or religious views. I wish I could say it was my idea but it wasn’t. It was my neighbor Toni. She’s got to be one of the most observant, thoughtful, and kind people I know. I’m glad she moved onto my block. You see she heard our neighbor Val one day, when she sighed and said how much she loved the porch swings three of the rest of us have on Rugby Place. She laughed then and said it was probably because she didn’t have one herself. But she hoped maybe she could get one.

It was a comment that could have been overlooked but Toni took action. She got on our neighborhood text thread and organized our financial, purchasing, shipping, and hanging coordination to surprise Val with her own swing. It took weeks to get it done. But one day there was a knock on Val’s door. Her husband, two children, and as many of us neighbors as could be mustered stood in her front yard with mischievous smiles on our faces, as her brand new porch swing rocked in the breeze. Later that night, I could spy Val across the street, still swinging late into the evening, a blanket wrapped around her, and a content smile filling her face. This act of kindness didn’t stop Val’s breast cancer from taking her from us less than a year later. But it made her heart glad and knit the whole neighborhood that much more closely together.  

I know it’s not always easy. I know that violence is real. But so is kindness and so is unbreakable connection to each other. No matter what the next few months bring in our world, nation, neighborhoods, and homes, may we remember that connection and do our best to treat others with the dignity, respect, and kindness we all deserve.  

May God help us to do so. Amen.

[1] Hardy Merriman, Harnessing Our Power to End (HOPE) Political Violence, 22nd Century Initiative and the Horizons Project, 2024. Online

[2] According to American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/why-political-violence-and-violent-threats-are-on-the-rise-in-the-united-states.

[3] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-politics-violence/

Hope’s Soft Strength

September 29, 2024 - Isaiah: 40

I don’t know about you but sometimes I feel pretty soft…At least that’s the way I’ve been describing my biking muscles. In the pandemic, working from home and doing most visits by phone, my usual opportunities to go places in town by bike dried up. Now vaccinated, I’m biking to more places, and I’ve found my sore muscles telling the story of a rather sedentary year.

We humans build physical muscle strength by resistance training. By using them over and over, soft muscles become denser, harder. When it comes to our physical wellness, those dense, hard muscles are related to strength. However, when it comes to our emotional and spiritual wellness, many doctors, therapists, researchers, and spiritual leaders agree, softness is our strength.  

In Isaiah 40, the second prophet who wrote under the name Isaiah tells the ancient Israelites in Babylonian exile about the strength of God. Isaiah 40 compares God’s strength to the strength of the gold idol gods of Babylon. Their hardcast figures, the prophet proclaims, are no match for the strength of the God who created everything in existence, “who stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them like a tent to live in.” Those brittle ideas of holy power that their overlords hold cannot compare to the one who in Genesis bore creation into being from the murky softness of God’s own body with an utterance of holy word and breath.   

I think there are plenty of ways I personally have made an idol of hardness, thinking it was the only way to be strong. There are plenty of stories out there that tell us that hardness is strength. That to show emotion, kindness, or love is soft and weak. What’s strong is to suppress our feelings, especially uncomfortable ones like anger, shame, or fear. There are plenty of stories that tell us it’s strong to never admit our weaknesses or our mistakes. We’re often told strength equals perfection. It means always having as shiny and flawless a sheen as an idol cast in gold.      

Sometimes though, it’s the softest things that are the strongest. It was the soft, wet water of the Colorado River that carved the Grand Canyon. Massively tall skyscrapers are strong because they’re flexible and can bend in the wind. Many mornings I enjoy backyard birdfeeder visits from my neighborhood’s red-bellied woodpeckers. In my backyard they enjoy the fruit and nuts from the feeder without needing to use their massive bills. But I have also seen them tapping at tree bark looking for yummy bugs. I learned one time that scientists are still learning about woodpeckers and how they can do such intense hammering with their beaks without damaging their brains. One theory is that the birds have extra space inside their skulls where they can coil up their long tongues that serve as cushions for their brains.  

When I see the woodpeckers now, I often think about softening up my life. How can I find a cushion in the schedule of my days, so that the intensity of my life won’t lead me to damage? How can I bring softness to my internal story about myself? How can I soften the lens with which I view people around me?

Isaiah 40: 21 asks hearers and readers, “Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?” This whole chapter of Isaiah is meant to be a balm. It is meant to remind the people that the comfort we find in God goes deep. It goes to the foundations of the earth. The presence of the Creator is in the DNA of creation.   

We can find the courage to soften. We can find the cushion to absorb intensity. We can survive and thrive even through hard blows because we are held up by the one whose presence goes to the foundations of the earth, moves through the molecules of every creeping creature, and extends far beyond the stars we can see in the sky. When our hearts are hard and brittle toward each other, everything is an offense. Everything is a threat.  When we soften, we can forgive ourselves and others. We don’t need to be doormats. Nor do we need to lash out in violence. Softness gives us the space to be flexible, to grow, and to love others while they grow too, despite any flaws or shortcomings.  

When we can be soft, we can be generous. We can be the kind of strong that doesn’t feel the need to return missile fire with more missile fire. When we lean into the gift of softness, we can find ways to de-escalate conflict and stand up for justice by standing strong in our own inherent worth and in the inherent worth of every single one of us.   

The strength of God in Isaiah 40 comes from God’s infinite ability to endure long after earthly rulers have passed away and from God’s ability to number the heavenly host. God calls each and every one by name and because of God’s great strength “not one is missing.” If God can number and name and find not one missing in the infinite, sparkling sky, how much more named, numbered, and found are each one of us on earth? That care for each one does not diminish God’s power. On the contrary, that tenderness is the very evidence of God’s strength.  

“Comfort, O comfort my people,” this chapter of Isaiah begins. It is the voice of God calling out to the prophet. They have been lost. They have been far from home, exiled from the land they love.  

Many of us have experienced what it's like to be stuck in places we’d rather not be or separated from people we love. As we yearn to emerge into new ways of being, we might find moments of tension, discomfort, anger, shame, or fear. We don’t have to get it right right away. We don’t have to harden ourselves or pretend things aren’t squishy and uncertain. We can lean into the strength of softness and accept our limitations as they are. Though challenges are a fact of life, there is reason to believe that good things lie ahead for each one of us and for all of us collectively, too.  

Violence is still a reality the world over, tragedy happens all the time, and many of the problems of our lives will persist with or without our permission. Trusting in God will not save us from heartache or trouble. It can, however, help us to weather difficulty and to find a soul deep peace that helps us stay soft, strong, and loving, no matter what comes our way. I think that’s what the prophet means by those oft quoted words, “but they who wait upon the Lord will renew their strength, they will mount up with wings like eagles, they will run and not be weary, they will walk and not faint.” Waiting upon the Lord or trusting in God who loves each one of us does not mean we will be perfect or limitless or without suffering. It means we can find a safety beyond suffering, that allows us to do hard things and to find hope, healing, and wholeness even still.  

Many of you will know the story of the hymn we sing next. Horatio Spafford wrote the words to this song after losing his four year old son in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 along with his Chicago-based financial prospects. He wrote the words to this song after he put his wife and four surviving daughters on a boat to England ahead of him while he stayed behind to sort the further fall of his business ventures in the economic downturn of 1873. The boat the women of his family were on collided with another while crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Only his wife survived. All four daughters were lost at sea. The story goes that Spafford was inspired to write the words to this hymn while crossing the Atlantic Ocean to meet his grieving wife. He wrote the words, “It is well with my soul” not because he did not grieve but because even in his grief he found comfort in the soft, loving strength of God that goes to the foundations of the earth and lifts us up on eagles wings.  

Whatever you are going through. Whatever sorrow or joy comes your way. Whatever the past season has brought for you in trial or silver lining, may you find yourself upheld in the soft strength of holy eagles wings. May you be nudged toward a future with hope.  

May it be so. Amen.

Planning For Justice & Joy

September 22, 2024 - Jeremiah 29: 10-14

You may be familiar with Jeremiah 29: 11 from myriad t-shirts, coffee mugs, and conference slogans: “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.” You have probably seen fewer coffee mugs emblazoned with the verse just before: Jeremiah 29: 10 that speaks of the long wait for that future with hope – 70 years in the case of Jeremiah’s people. Much has been made of the pervasiveness of our societal impatience. Our attention spans are shrinking. Delayed gratification is a muscle we have to learn and relearn. We want what we want, and we want it now.  

It’s not just waiting for the new iPhone to drop either. Many of us are impatient to learn about our health diagnoses. Many of us are impatient to change our housing situation. Many of us are impatient to heal from emotionally harmful situations. Many of us are impatient to see the climate corrected and the needs of our neighbors nearby and across the world cared for well. I suspect humans’ struggle with impatience is not new.  

In fact, Jeremiah’s message about the long wait for the promised prosperous future was not a popular one. Like many biblical prophets, Jeremiah lived in a time of political and social upheaval. Jeremiah’s people, having already lived under the military control of the Assyrian empire, now faced occupation by the Babylonians and the King Nebuchadnezzar-led exile that carried off many of the ancient Israelite elite to the land of Babylon.[1]  

Those in exile wanted to hear that it wouldn’t last long. They wanted to be told that they didn’t have to care about the land they lived on or the neighbors next door because, after all, they wouldn’t be there very long. Other false prophets offered promises of a quick return to Judah. Jeremiah said, it’s going to be awhile. So, while we’re here, God wants us to seek the welfare of this city where we are now, for in its welfare we find our own (29:7).   

This was entirely unwelcome news. Seek the welfare of your neighbors in this land that conquered yours. Get comfortable in this place – the last place you’d rather be – a place that is in between the home you were exiled from and the no doubt somewhat changed home you hope to return to one day. One understanding of stress that I have come to appreciate is the space between the way things are and the way we want things to be. In that space between how things are now and how we wish they were is where we so often find the stress, the pain, the uncertainty. I really don’t want to make my home there. I want to keep moving on to the place I want to go.  

But sometimes I find if I can notice and accept that what I’m experiencing is that kind of in-between place stress, then I can make a kind of home there. It’s not a home that lets me remain complacent or resign myself to the things that hurt always being that way. It’s a home that helps me understand my feelings better and to see better what I want to change and who can help me make that happen.   

Like Naomi Shihab Nye making a kind of community with strangers at an airport gate in the poem I read to the children, my prayer for all of us would be that in whatever uncertain, stress-filled place we find ourselves, we could experience that kind of communion. We could hear God in the words of Jeremiah we read today:

12 “When you call on me, when you come and pray to me, I’ll listen.

13-14 “When you come looking for me, you’ll find me.

“Yes, when you get serious about finding me and want it more than anything else, I’ll make sure you won’t be disappointed.” God’s Decree.

Some of you know that my father-in-law is an elected official on the national stage. He and I don’t always see eye-to-eye on politics or biblical interpretation. That doesn’t stop me from admiring a whole lot about him. In particular, I carry a certain memory in my heart of sitting with him in Elgin’s own Festival Park, watching his then much younger grandchildren run through the splash pad. He was delighted by the development of our city’s downtown even then, and he began to ask why couldn’t something like this be done in his own small town. He began to see it in his mind’s eye: the splash pad, the park, and a thriving commercial district in little Howard, Pennsylvania. Grants and community partnerships could lead the way. He knew just the ones. Just because it wasn’t like that now, didn’t mean it couldn’t be so in the future. And this is the line he uttered then that stuck with me so strongly. After proclaiming there was no reason his little town could have this beauty, too, he concluded, “All it takes is leadership.” 

12 “When you call on me, when you come and pray to me, I’ll listen.

13-14 “When you come looking for me, you’ll find me.

“Yes, when you get serious about finding me and want it more than anything else, I’ll make sure you won’t be disappointed.” God’s Decree. 

It was the leaders in Jeremiah’s time who were called to the in-between place. It was the leaders who made their home there and persevered until it was time to claim that future for which they long hoped. What is leadership if not calling forth help from our community and from the holy Source of all life, too, to make real the dream of our hearts? What is leadership at its best if not just that kind of prayer? What is leadership at its best if not prayer that gives way to planning and working each day to make the dream of a future full of justice and joy real?  

I have marveled at the leadership of this congregation over the years. I’m talking about the years since I’ve been here and about the past 125 years of this congregation’s history. Leaders from this congregation were involved in the starting of nearly all the social service agencies in this town in the later part of the twentieth century. Leaders from this congregation have touched each other's hearts in choir and Sunday School and wider church leadership, knitting us closer to each other and making opportunities to feel how closely we are knit to the heart of God.   

Just a few years ago, leaders from this congregation were part of saying “Yes in my backyard” and providing community organizing support to make the way for an affordable and supportive housing development at 1212 Larkin. And today, we need everyone to take a part in the leadership – to be an active member of the crew, not just a passenger – as we navigate with hope toward a future church that draws on its heritage to embody a fresh expression of Christianity for the time and place in which we live. I’ve never been very taken with the idea that God has an inerrant plan for us – that every incident is preordained. I find myself more convinced that despite the unpredictability, challenge, and suffering we face, God goes with us and nudges us toward our welfare, toward justice and joy for all.

“I’ll show up and take care of you as I promised and bring you back home. I know what I’m doing. I have it all planned out—plans to take care of you, not abandon you, plans to give you the future you hope for... 

I’ll turn things around for you. I’ll bring you back from all the countries into which I drove you”—God’s Decree—“bring you home to the place from which I sent you off into exile. You can count on it.[2]” 

We are planning together in a Congregational Business Meeting and in filing out pledge cards and in sharing time in Sunday School and over plates of treats during fellowship time and while holding each other in prayer and serving at the Soup Kettle. We are investing with hope in the future and the community and the world we want to build. We are sustaining each other and making a home here in our blessed and broken world, trusting that there is yet more beauty, justice, welfare, prosperity, and joy to come, if you and I and God have anything to say about it. 

May it be so. Amen.

[1] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/jeremiahs-letter-to-exiles/commentary-on-jeremiah-291-4-14-4

[2] MSG

A Future With Hope

September 8, 2024 - Exodus 13: 19-22 (NSRV)

There is a larger story around this tiny snippet of text we read from Exodus today, in which God calls Moses to lead the enslaved ancient Hebrew people from Pharaoh’s deathly grip to a land flowing with milk and honey after a long arduous journey. Before that part of the story though, Genesis gives us Moses’ ancestor Joseph’s story.  This character, now of Technicolor Dreamcoat fame, is the one who brought the people to Egypt in the first place, in order to survive a great famine and, for a while, to prosper there.

Our stories have history, too. Whatever we’re going through now –individually, as households, as communities, or even as whole countries– there is a longer story of which we are a part. Whether we know our ancestors or not, their story is part of how we got to where we are. And, whether we meet very many of those who come after us, our story is part of their story, too. How do we approach our moment in this greater history with trust that God does indeed lead us to a future with hope, as the Jeremiah text that leads us through this September worship series promises?

How do we become good stewards of the challenges and opportunities before us?  

Today’s snippet of scripture captures an odd detail in the greater story of the Hebrew people’s escape from Egypt. On the way out of slavery, before they even get to the Red Sea, they stop and take with them the bones of their ancestor Joseph, who according to the scripture asked his people to remember him in this way.  

Now, I live next to Channing Park and Elementary School, and I know well that decades before my feet ever touched those grounds they were the site of a large cemetery. When the city needed the ground for something else they opened Bluff City Cemetery farther west and invited the families of the deceased to move the bones themselves. Many families did. But either due to lack of contact information, lack of descendants, or lack of funds, some bodies did not get moved. They’re still there, including one marked grave in the corner of the park. It turns out it’s no easy task. And I can’t imagine it was an overly desirable one even in Moses’ day.  

But they stopped on their exodus from Egypt to gather up their ancestor’s bones.

It’s so remarkable to me. They didn’t leave the bones there. Neither did they decide that they couldn’t leave because that’s where their ancestors’ bones were. They went forth into a future with hope, carrying the very bones of their ancestors with them.

I moved from Pennsylvania across the country of my own free will. I was not being chased by an army bent on the annihilation of my people. But still, living so far from the place in which I grew up and my own blood family, I have had to chart my own future. I have needed to decide in what ways I would carry forward the gifts of my ancestors for the needs of the present and the hoped for future of my children. There are some traditions and foodways I have kept - like reading to my kids before bed or making German potato salad. There are others I have left behind. I parent a little differently than my parents and grandparents. And I just can’t seem to recreate my grandmother’s raisin-filled cookies. There are still others I have completely reimagined. Like reimagining holiday celebrations and learning to make gluten-free pancakes.  

There are of course immigrants, abuse victims, and displaced people around the world today who know too well the story of fleeing home because home is an unsafe place to be.  

Award winning Somali-British poet Warsan Shire once wrote,

“no one leaves home unless

home is the mouth of a shark

you only run for the border

when you see the whole city running as well…

…and no one would leave home

unless home chased you to the shore

unless home told you

to quicken your legs

leave your clothes behind

crawl through the desert

wade through the oceans

drown

save

be hunger

beg

forget pride

your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear

saying leave,

run away from me now

I don't know what i’ve become

but I know that anywhere

is safer than here.”  

That’s what Moses’ people faced leaving Egypt. They left generations of violence and trauma behind. They left in fear. They left hunted. Still, they left with hope that God would lead them to freedom. It may be difficult for those of us who have not faced such dire circumstances to fully comprehend such a reality. But who among us has not met some kind of heartache, challenge, or loss that led us to make a change that we could only hope would lead toward a happier, healthier future? In those uncertain times, I have heard person after person testify to me how important it was to remember they were not alone.  

That’s another important detail from today’s tiny text. In it, we receive the first description of God moving with the people in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Together they followed God toward that freedom-filled future. How do we, too, learn to face challenges before us with trust that we are not alone? How do we come together to listen for the ways God still moves among us, leading us to a future with hope?  I think church is a great place to do that. At its best, church can be a place where we remember our unbreakable connection to God, the Source of all Love and Life. At its best, church can be a place where we come together and remember our unbreakable connection to each other, allowing us to boldly respond to the needs, challenges, and opportunities before us.

There was no violence they were fleeing one hundred and twenty five years ago when a group of folks from the Mt. Morris Church of the Brethren moved to Elgin with the printing press. They came here because it was easier to ship these wares from this location. And when they came they started a new Church of the Brethren congregation. They bought this then relatively new church building from some Presbyterians and eventually called themselves the Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren. They responded to the changing circumstances and did a new thing in a new place, carrying with them the gifts, traditions, and faith ways that meant so much to them. Together, they followed God to this new place. They are part of our story. We get to be stewards of the gifts they put in place here in Elgin. But we don’t have to do everything the same way they did. Our dress has changed. Our music has changed. Our culture and structure and expectations have all changed. How many things can we name have changed about our lives, our families, our communities, and our church just since 2020?  

If we stop and think about it, how many things are we still trying to figure out how to do differently since the pandemic struck or since any number of other big changes in our individual lives? There is often something lost in big changes. But together and with God’s help we can be good stewards of the chapter of history we are writing now. Together and with God’s help we can carry forward the gifts of the past into the future with hope.

May it be so. Amen.

Growing Present

September 1, 2024 - Psalm 23

I stopped my car at Fitchie Creek Forest Preserve on a whim once. I noticed the sign for it on my drive out of town, and on the way back I scanned the horizon until I found the turn. It must have been about this time maybe later in the season, because I remember I parked my car and marched out onto the paved trail through the dried-up prairie grasses. Thinking about how annoyingly slow it seems to me to walk sometimes. I thought about how much faster I would go on a bike--let alone in a car. Just then I heard a familiar bird call, and I stopped in my tracks, searching the trees but finding nothing. The physical stopping though gave me a moment for my mind to stop too. My attention stopped racing ahead at that moment. Instead, it came to rest on the milkweed pods in front of me, on the sound of a helicopter whirring far over head, and on the feeling of the cold pavement soaking through the soles of my boots and the too-thin socks inside. I decided to turn back and drive home for a warm dinner. But when I turned back to my car I walked slower and I traveled lighter, as though that pause had been enough for now to salve and smoothe over the rough, worried, and hurried parts of my soul.

This Psalm 23 has been a salve for millions. It’s one of the most well-known scriptures there is. Those who have memorized it have been known to carry it with them and recite it to themselves in times of trouble.  

When Jesus likened himself to a Good Shepherd, he surely had this psalm in mind.  With its words of comfort, rest, and assurance, Psalm 23 has often been leaned on by those of us who are making the transition to the life beyond this one or who are saying goodbye to our loved ones for the last time.  

There is a salve many of us find in the whole of this psalm and perhaps especially in promises like: “I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” I keep using the word salve because it has expanded my understanding of salvation.  

My grandmother used to use a rosebud salve for every cut or complaint we had. Whether it was the actual product ingredients or the care of our grandmother’s wrinkled hands, my sister and I believed it did indeed carry special healing powers. Once, as adults, long after my grandmother had passed, one of us came across a supply and bought a small tin for everyone in the family. It wasn’t quite the same. 

Maybe that’s why though I like to think of salvation as an application of holy salve to our aching hearts, bodies, minds, countries, and planet. As Justo Gonzalez explains in his Essential Theological Terms, “In the Greco-Roman world in which Christianity was born, there were many religions offering salvation.” Most of these understood salvation mainly or exclusively as life after death... Given that context, it is not surprising that quite often Christians lost the fuller notion of salvation that appeared in their Scriptures, and came to think of salvation merely as admission into heaven…”

Gonzalez writes and I agree that “Salvation in its fuller sense, certainly includes eternal life in the presence of God,” AND it includes what I would simply call a healing, a wholeness-bringing, and an evil overcoming in the here and now.  Slipping into that holy healing doesn’t mean our lives will be easy.         

It means no matter what trouble comes, we can rely on the unending resources of God’s strength and peace. I am limited though, and it takes prayerful pauses to put me back in touch with that promised healing and wholeness --that promise that “I will dwell in God’s healing company my whole life long.”  

From this pulpit, retired Second Baptist Pastor Edmond once emphasized the word choice in that the King James translation of Psalm 23 verse 2: “He maketh me lie down in green pastures.” Pastor E underlined the maketh -especially.  Pausing is not optional. Pausing is ordained by God, he argued.  

How many of us have found that pausing is not optional. I know I have come up against my physical limits in ways that have put a full stop on anything I wanted to get done. We can choose to work ourselves to that limit, and there are times when maybe we need to. But maybe those times aren’t as often as so many of us think. We do have other options. Most of us probably can figure out a way to practice pausing. Many of us already have even if we don’t always give ourselves credit.        

Some of us are talking to God on our long commutes. Some of us are very mindfully brushing our teeth as we review all the beauty and wonder of the day that has just passed. Some of us have instituted a Sunday afternoon nap or an evening movie time. Some of us are reading devotionals. Some of us have a chair where we sit, read the newspaper, pray, and sip tea. Some of us allow ourselves to be mesmerized by the fabulous flow of 2% milk as it floods a child’s cereal bowl and morning chaos abounds around us.  

However it works for you, I invite you to pay attention to your pauses. I find God is there in the pausing. I find I can build up my connection to that safe, sound, sense of security when I can take those pauses in some regular way. I find I can build up my capacity for connecting with other people from those pauses, as though somehow remembering my connection to the Good Shepherd reminds me of my connection to all the other sheep. So many people seem to be writing about “self-care” in the past few years. If you’re in a professional church circle you may have had enough of that language to spit when you hear it. And if so, I’m sort of right there with you. I don’t think it’s that it’s wrong to take care of ourselves. I do think we can’t really do it well without support.

More than thinking about how to care for myself though, what has been most helpful for me is to think about pausing long enough to be really honest with myself. How is it with my soul? What is it I really need? What does it cost to be so busy? Sometimes the honesty that comes in those pauses is disturbing. Sometimes in those pauses we can be painfully reminded of how limited we really are in resources, energy, or time. The good news is God meets us there.  Indeed, God leads us there to those honest places beside the still waters and the green pastures.  

“Even when the way goes through Death Valley [we don’t have to be] afraid because [God] walk[s] at [our] side. God sets a six-course meal for all of us who find ourselves at odds to sit down at a table together. Even in the midst of our suffering, shortcoming, and limitation “our cups brim with blessing” because we are connected to the source of all blessing, love, and life. In pausing, we can connect with the saving, healing, grace of God right now in ways that give us a taste of eternity.  

In the words of Psalm 23: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” As The Message puts it “Your beauty and love chase after me every day of my life.”  

As the poet Mary Oliver puts it: When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they save me, and daily. I am so distant from the hope of myself, in which I have goodness, and discernment, and never hurry through the world but walk slowly, and bow often. Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, “Stay awhile.” The light flows from their branches. And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say, “and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.”  

No matter what valley you travel through, may you find a pause that lets all that holy, saving beauty and love chasing after you all the days of your life catch up to you and bring you home.

May it be so. Amen.

Listening For The Holy Heartbeat

August 18, 2024 - Ecclesiastes 3: 1-15

When Parker’s grandfather died, we inherited a clock from his watch-loving home that is over 100 years old. It seems content in the living room of our over 100-year-old house. And in the winter or the middle of the night or early in the morning or really whatever quiet moment I can find, I take solace in its steady beat, ticking the time away as its gravity pulled pendulum moving weight slowly falls. Not everyone likes the sound of a clock. It can remind us that our life is fleeting or that deadline we’re not looking forward to is approaching faster than we’d like. And sometimes I feel like that, too. But the steady beat of this antique machinery conveys a sturdiness to me that seems to have only a partial relationship to the way we humans measure time.  

Time and the fleeting nature of life are a major interest for the writer of Ecclesiastes.  “All is vanity,” this book claims over 25 times. The Hebrew word is hevel which can also be translated absurdity, meaninglessness, vapor. “All is vapor.” All our human efforts are passing, fleeting, changing.

That can be a scary thought. Many of us humans tend to like control. We want to know we matter, and we often like to reassure ourselves of that by assuring ourselves that what we do has a long-lasting impact. But I think the truth is it does and it doesn’t. Yes, it matters if we are kind and loving. Yes, our love endures beyond us for all time. Most of the Bible encourages humans toward a big expansive loving way of life. At the same time, at least if we buy into the wisdom of this particular book of the Bible, in the perspective of eternity, what we do has only fleeting impact and will blow away on the wind like the dust that we are made of.  

Maybe that’s scary. But I think it’s also freeing. Because, we are limited humans, bound to make mistakes. For any of us who tend toward overthinking so many of our decisions and actions, we may find a certain freedom in the perspective of eternity that Ecclesiastes takes.  

In remembering the shortness of my life in the scheme of even human history and remembering the smallness of my being in the scheme of a vast universe, I can put into perspective both my failures and my successes. There is a freedom and a comfort there for me that allows me not to decide nothing matters but rather allows me to serve what I do think matters to the best of my ability, accepting I have little control to make things happen just the way I wish they would.  

What does it mean after all if there is a time for all the things listed in today’s scripture text? Are they a bingo card or a checklist for living? Is it a prescription that we do all the things there is a time for? Or is it more a description of the way life seems to be? That’s where I’d put my money if I had to guess. What makes sense to me is that the writer is describing the way seasons change and how that is so often beyond our control. I’d also be willing to bet I’m not alone in this room in having enjoyed Marvel’s TV series Loki, in which the TVA or Time Variance Authority protects something called the Sacred Timeline. All variants to the prescribed timeline are pruned, destroyed, sent away. Everything must proceed just as ordained or else intolerable chaos will ensue. What a delicious story setting then for Loki, the God of mischief in both Norse and Marvel comic legend.  

Keeping things under control and proceeding in a prescribed way has had an allure for humans for millennia. The problem –in real life and this fictional universe– turns out to be loving places, things, and people that don’t fit the prescription or being places, things, and people who don’t fit the prescription either.

We are all some kind of variant whether we like it or not. Despite our best efforts, we will mess things up, we will not meet someone’s expectations –reasonable or not– and tragedies will befall us beyond our control. “What gain have the workers from their toil?” asks the writer of this text, “...I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil.”  

In the Church of the Brethren, where fondly remembered elder Dan West famously swore, he would not eat cake while others went hungry, maybe this line about eating and drinking and pleasure doesn’t land too comfortably at first. Does this writer not know about all the hardships in the world? Does the writer not care? I think it's more likely the writer had seen enough hardship to know it to be as inevitable as the end of life. I think it's more likely the writer is encouraging the audience to rejoice in life and be good to each other despite the reality of hardship. The very fact that life is so fleeting, reminds us that it is a precious, holy gift to be celebrated.  

Some of us may have been reminded of this at the start of the school year or by noticing how loudly the cicadas are singing about the waning summer or by hitting a limit of time, energy, or health unexpectedly.  It’s normal in those moments to experience grief or discomfort. What I think the writer of Ecclesiastes calls us to is also a sense of aware gratitude for these precious numbered days in the scheme of eternity. Oddly, I have so often found that in embracing that finitude I catch a glimpse of the infiniteness that surrounds us all – that so many of us call God.  

And I hear Ecclesiastes agreeing in lines like “That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already is; and God seeks out what has gone by.” I don’t know what this will sound like to you but somehow it seems to me when I can slow down enough to notice time passing or notice my smallness in the vastness of the universe, I can find comfort in the ways I am connected to the unending flow of time and the infinite wash of existence through all of which God surely moves – as if God is the one big heartbeat of being from which we can never really be separate.  

In times when I worry about things outside of my control or find myself reaching limits and realities I’d rather not run up against, I try to remember to listen for that holy heartbeat that holds us all. In doing so, I sometimes find I can regain my own healthy rhythm. I do this when I listen to the goldfinches singing in my elm tree or the clock on my living room wall or when I’m lucky, the crashes of Lake Michigan – so much bigger than me – washing up against its own rocky shore.  

God goes on forever, and I believe we will never truly be apart from that one big heartbeat. And yet, this life we live now is fleeting. I want to count precious each morsel of sand that falls through the hourglass of our own variant, flawed, and beautiful lives. I want to know that grateful attention to be a kind of prayer.

–the kind of prayer that Mary Oliver writes about in her poem,

“The Summer Day,” which I believe bears a strong kinship to the wisdom of the writer of Ecclesiastes and with which I want to leave you today.  

“Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean —

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?”

What is it you plan to do indeed?

Hallelujah. Amen.

The tree(s) of life

Written by Cheryl Brumbaugh-Cayford

August 11, 2024 - Revelation 22: 1-5 & 16-17

“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.... “It is I, Jesus, who sent my angel to you with this testimony for the churches. I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star.” The Spirit and the bride say, “Come.” And let everyone who hears say, “Come.” And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.” 

The tree of life stands at the very beginning of the Bible, and at the very end of the Bible.

In the second chapter of Genesis, which is the first book of the Bible, God sets the tree of life in the midst of the Garden of Eden, after creating the Earth and all its creatures including the first humans, Adam and Eve.

At the end of Revelation, which is the last book of the Bible, the tree of life appears in a vision given by an angel. This vision of the end times places the tree of life on either side of the river that flows from the throne of God, the river of the water of life that flows through a vision of the holy realm where God and Christ and their people will live in peace and in the eternal light of God.

But before we do more talking about trees in the Bible, I’d like to ask a question: Do you have a favorite tree?

Is there a particular tree that you like because of its beauty, its height, its shape, its color, or its placement in the landscape? Or is there a tree that has special meaning for you? Perhaps a tree where something special has happened for you or your family? Maybe you have a favorite stand of trees, or a favorite grove, or a favorite forest?

Here’s a picture of one of my family’s favorite trees, to inspire you as we explore the meaning of trees for our faith and for our lives in the world today. This is a picture my husband Joel’s sister Julie took of a tree that stands alone in a farm field near where she lives in State College, Pa. for enough years for this tree to grow large and tall, those who have farmed here have left the tree standing, while tending crops all around it. Julie found a prayer written by their father, Wilbur Brumbaugh, to print along with the picture. She made copies for each of their siblings, and Joel made the frames, so that they each have one hanging somewhere in their homes. Now that our son Chris has moved to State College, and also lives near this beautiful tree, it has yet more significance for us.

Every time we visit State College and drive by this field, I look for this tree—hoping that it is still there. I hope that whoever farms this field hasn’t decided to cut the tree down because it’s in the way. I hope that the farm itself survives the rampant “development” that is going on all around the area. I hope that conditions continue to be right for this tree to be healthy and thrive and stay green and alive.

This tree, like all trees, is vulnerable and at risk in our throw-away culture, our profit-motivated world where God’s Creation most often comes second or third—or even last—in humanity’s list of priorities. This picture of a very special tree is a continuing source of joy, but also a continuing reminder of the fragility of life.

When we review the Bible’s references to trees—and there are almost 300 references—we get a sense that the people of biblical times understood this fragility and vulnerability very well. We also get a sense of the deep significance of trees.

A tree was a symbol of eternal life—the great tree of life that stands at the beginning and at the end of time. A tree was also a symbol of resurrection, able to grow new life out of what seems to have died—as in Isaiah 11:1 where it says, “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” But also, in the Bible, trees are indicators of the general ability to maintain life, and the cutting down or destruction of trees is an indicator of the evils that destroy life.

When trees thrive, humanity lives and thrives.

Many of the Bible’s references to trees have to do with their ability to produce fruit and food. Some of the places where the word “tree” is used in a translation like the recently updated New Revised Standard Version, actually refer to olive trees or grapevines whose products of olives and olive oil, grapes and wine, were crucial foodstuffs and also were crucial for the economy. It would have been the wealthy landowners of the time who had large olive groves or large vineyards, as we see in some of the parables that Jesus told about the interactions of workers with their bosses, in what we today might call “an important industry sector.”

When the prophet Micah looked for a way to talk about the wellbeing that God gives to God’s people, he chose to talk about trees. Here’s that well-known verse from Micah 4:4: “But they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid, for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.”

But when trees are destroyed, something is going terribly wrong.

Unfortunately, too often in the Bible the thing going terribly wrong was warfare, and those suffering the wrong were one’s enemy. Destruction of trees was a part of warfare in ancient times—and today, if you look at media reports from current wars and pictures of the destroyed landscapes in Gaza, Ukraine, and elsewhere. War doesn’t value trees.

There are too many verses, especially in the Old Testament, where this type of warfare was made into a command—what we might think of as a plan for complete conquest of the people and their land and everything growing on it. In 2 Kings 3:19, for example, we read this: “You shall conquer every fortified city and every choice city; every good tree you shall fell, all springs of water you shall stop up, and every good piece of land you shall ruin with stones.”

It's in the context of this kind of warfare that the ancient Hebrew prophets sometimes imagined the wrath of God as a mass destruction of trees. A prophet might use this imagery to point out, in the strongest terms, when things were going terribly wrong among the people of God, or among neighboring nations. The people’s sins were pushing God to the limit, and it is the trees—the indicators of wellbeing in the world—that are cut down and destroyed. We read in Isaiah 10:33-34, for example, “Look, the Sovereign, the Lord of hosts, will lop the boughs with terrifying power; the tallest trees will be cut down, and the lofty will be brought low. He will hack down the thickets of the forest with an ax, and Lebanon with its majestic trees will fall.” The anger of a righteous God was imagined as a conquering army, using the same tactics to overcome evil and wrongdoing.

Receiving similar condemnation were the “green trees” that were places of worship for the pagan or indigenous religions that surrounded the ancient Israelites. These religions identified special places in nature, including trees, as places of sacred significance where they worshiped idols, made sacrifices, and more. Those who wrote the biblical texts saw this as a sinful use of trees, and it became another indicator that things were going wrong in general. The condemnation of King Ahaz in 2 Kings 16 is an example. We read that King Ahaz had been sacrificing and making offerings “under every green tree,” and it is an indicator that he was not doing “what was right in the sight of the Lord his God, as his ancestor David had done.”

But where trees thrive, and are properly respected by humanity, joy and hope and praise and blessing are also there.

The people of the Bible used trees and their fruit and branches to praise God during their religious festivals. We find an echo of this ancient practice when branches of trees were used to welcome Jesus into Jerusalem, an event we commemorate every year on Palm Sunday.

In poetic texts in the Bible, trees are symbols for steadfastness of belief, standing strong and ever faithful. The hymnwriter in Psalm 52:8 compares himself to a tree: “But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God. I trust in the steadfast love of God forever and ever.” Psalm 92:12 says, “The righteous flourish like the palm tree and grow like a cedar in Lebanon.” In Proverbs 11:30, righteous people are like trees of life for others: “The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life, and the wise capture souls,” it says.

These poets and psalmists went even further in extending their understanding of the life of trees. They imagined trees as having an ability to praise God that was comparable to that of humans. We read of trees praising their Creator, shouting with joy, clapping their hands. Here’s the text from Isaiah 55:12 that provides the words for the hymn we’ll sing to close our service: “For you shall go out in joy and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.”

In the biblical understanding, when trees thrive, that means life. When trees are cut down or destroyed or misused, something is terribly wrong.

Let’s turn a corner. Let’s shift away from trees in the Bible to the meaning and significance of trees for us today.

Today, we know so much more than the people of the biblical times did about the science of trees. We know so much more about how their biology works, how trees use chemicals to communicate, how under a forest floor lies a network of fungus—called the “mycorrhizal network”—that is supported by trees, how their lives interact with so many other organisms, how important is the role of trees in an ecosystem, how trees really are life for insects, birds, animals, and even us humans—in short, how trees undergird life on this planet. And despite all of the scientific advances in understanding trees we find, I think, that much of the biblical understanding is still valid, isn’t it?

We know now how interconnected all life on our planet is, and how crucial is the place of trees in that network, and how important it is that trees continue to thrive.

Just one example is how the largest of our forests—the rainforest in the Amazon, in South America; the rainforest in the Congo, in central Africa; the rainforest in New Guinea, in the Pacific islands; the Appalachian rainforest in the southeast United States (did you know we have a rainforest here in our country?) —these and others of our world’s largest forests actually “breathe” for us all. They also ensure a massive amount of biodiversity, serve as home to thousands of unique species, and do things like clean water and regulate our climate.

Using the word “breathe” very loosely, the trees of these great forests breathe in the carbon dioxide that we humans produce, and they breathe out the oxygen that we humans cannot live without.

In doing so, they store lots and lots of carbon, taking it out of the atmosphere. And just as the people of biblical times understood, when these forests are cut down or destroyed or mistreated, it means that things are going terribly wrong. Mass logging, clear cutting, out-of-control “development,” drought, wildfires—all these things that destroy forests today are releasing their stores of carbon back into the atmosphere and thus increasing the pace and scope of the climate crisis.

We have to remember that every tree—whether it stands in a forest or alone in a field or in our own backyard—is doing an incredible thing: it is helping to keep us all alive. Every tree is a necessary piece of the puzzle that is our human habitat, every tree is a precious piece of the solution to climate change.

In our world today, where trees are so fragile and vulnerable—from the tree in the farmer’s field near State College, to the trees of the Amazon rainforest, to the trees in the wooded lots that are up for sale along Randall Road here in Elgin—it is time to embrace the expansive understanding of trees that is the heritage of our faith. It is time for us to join in spirit with poets and psalmists of the Bible who knew so well that trees mean life. It’s time for us to adopt their poetic imagination and join with the trees as equal partners in praise to God. It is time for us to join with the trees in singing and shouting our praise together, clapping our hands alongside their leaves and branches. It is time for us to acknowledge and act on the deep significance and meaning that trees have for our lives, to honor trees as equally valuable parts of God’s Creation alongside humanity, to see the wellbeing of trees as a prime indicator for our own wellbeing.

This spiritual change can lead us to practical change. We can help protect trees—and plant new ones—on our own properties, and in our own neighborhoods, and in our own cities. We can advocate for legislation, local and state and national, that protects trees, especially old growth forests and native species. We can join organizations that are working for the preservation and protection of trees and forests around the world. We can even do things like use recycled toilet paper—it is a travesty how many trees are cut down to make toilet paper (my family buys recycled toilet paper at Jewel—really, it works fine!)

But right now, at this moment, let’s return to the question I posed earlier. Have you thought of a favorite tree? Or a favorite stand of trees or a favorite grove or forest? Can you bring that tree, or those trees to mind now? As we do, I invite us into a moment of silence, in which we may give thanks to God for these trees, and in our imagination, we join them in praising God together. Amen.

Bless The Lord, O My Soul

August 4, 2024 - Psalm 103

When a friend of mine adopted two children over three years ago, they and their partner realized early on just how angry these two small people were. Though they had arrived in a home full of love and stability, the lives of these children up until this point were deeply marked by pain, grief, and anger. Seeking for a way to appropriately release all that explosive energy, my friend began making a regular pilgrimage to the nearby Pacific Ocean. There, on that western-facing shore, the children screamed their pain and anger into the rolling water. My friend encouraged them and invited the children to imagine all their overwhelming emotions being thrown out over the water, washed away in the waves, and churned up into something else more helpful and beautiful.

Some of the Psalms in the Bible might match the emotion of those children. It’s Psalm 22 that Jesus quotes on the cross when he cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  

To my ear, today’s psalm does not ring out with the same sorrowful lament, though it names having traveled to the Pit. No, Psalm 103 is a much different psalm with a much different feeling. Indeed, there are a variety of kinds of psalms. There are psalms of praise, petition, lament, thanksgiving, wisdom, trust, and blessing. There are psalms that fit in more than one of those categories, and there are psalms that defy easy categorizing.         

When we pick up the book of psalms, we are picking up not a book written by one author in one sitting. Rather, in the book of psalms we find a library, a collection, a hymnal of songs, poems, and prayers of a wide variety written by many authors over the span of long ago centuries. The psalms not only evidence different emotions. They come from different perspectives throughout time. Indeed, the psalms differ even in their understanding of God and how God works.  

What all these psalms agree on however, is that God is one to whom we all may speak, regardless of what we have to say. If you have ever had an emotion that seemed too big to hold, be it pain, grief, anger, fear, gratitude, or joy, maybe you too can understand the psalmist’s yearning to write it down, sing it out, scream, laugh, dance, or cry.  

From where does all of that emotion come? We can certainly describe it in terms of the chemicals in our brains and the interplay of hormones governed by our heart with the microbes in our guts. That can be one helpful way. Another way might be captured in the Hebrew word nephesh, translated in Psalm 103 as soul. It can be said to mean vitality, life, pleasure, passion, beast, body, and breath. It can be understood to mean the entirety of ourselves. It can be understood to mean the well of our being.   

Bless the Lord, O my soul.

Bless the Lord, O well of my being, says today’s Psalm 103.  

This Psalm spills a good amount of ink describing who this God is to whom we all may speak.  The psalmist says, God is the one from whom all good things come. God forgives our every shortcoming and mistake, says the psalm. God heals our ills and saves our lives. God’s steadfast lovingkindness will hold us for all time. God is someone to be respected. God is ruler over all. God knows we are made of dust, for God was there at the beginning and has been throughout all time.

God is eternity and yet God is present in each passing moment. This psalm says, God is the one who sets things right and does so without punishing us for what we’ve gotten wrong. Rather, God, says this psalm is the one who grants each one what we need, lifting that weight of wrong from our shoulders that it may be as far from our hearts as sunrise is from sunset. With that same power, God renews our strength that, deep in our souls, we may soar like the eagle. Keeping a relationship with God, says the psalm, sets us free to rejoice in God’s steadfast lovingkindness and mercy. A relationship with God will set us free, says the psalm, to rejoice in the preciousness of all our days though the sum of those days may seem to bloom and perish as quickly as the wildflowers in the grass.   

All this I hear the psalmist say. And to all this at least today, my soul nods in agreement. And yet, my soul nods in agreement with souls who claim, to speak of God is to fail to name God. And yet, my soul nods in agreement with souls who claim, though we would spill all our words, we would never fully describe God.[1]  

For me, the longer I live, the more I learn, the longer I pray, the more I sing, cry, laugh, and dance, and the more I pay attention to the world around me, the more humbled I am at how much more there is to know, see, and do. What, who, and where is God are questions I hope I ask all my life. Days like today I remember, God is who and what saves my life. Like the psalmist, I believe God is who and what sets me free to be fully alive.

I believe God is the force through which I can touch eternity in the beauty of a single passing moment.  God is the one in whom we live and breathe and have our being. God is the one who reminds me how astonishing it is to be alive. In difficult moments or mundane moments that can be hard to remember. When the panic or the grief is too hard to bear. In those moments, I remind myself that God hears my every prayer even the ones screamed at the top of my lungs or cried into pillows or in sighs too exhausted for tears. In those moments, if I’m lucky, I remember that God is as present with me in grief as in astonishment. In those moments, with a little help, I can remember that even though suffering is real, so are the tiny miracles of this life like sandwiches, big dramatic clouds, cool breezes, fresh water, and opportunities to gather like this together in the presence of God. 

Life can be both and life can be hard and beautiful both. God is in both and in those hard moments, if I’m lucky, I can sometimes remind myself of when I remembered how truly astonishing it is to be alive. With a little help, I can take myself back to the moment eleven years ago now when I was standing pregnant in a field in Iowa at 5 o-clock in the morning watching a blood moon eclipse and listening to the nearby woods erupt with owls hooting and coyotes howling. In the presence of that rare lunar event, I thought about how valuing a single passing moment can be like slowing down enough to notice eternity shimmering behind the sands of time.   

I thought about Ecclesiastes claiming all is vapor, vanishing dust and yet it is all to be enjoyed. I thought about a slam poet who once crowed, “We’re every age at once and tucked inside ourselves like Russian nesting dolls.”  

Bless the Lord, O my soul. Bless, indeed, the Holy Eternal One who is a force much more powerful than me that moves throughout the universe and yet, counts each speck of stardust precious.                   

Bless the Lord, O my soul? Why would one such as that ever need or want my blessing? What does it even mean to bless?  

Maybe it means simply to kneel and say thank you. Maybe blessing God means connecting with God.  Maybe blessing God means trusting God with the honest state of our souls, whether they are in astonishment or in deep ache. Maybe blessing God opens us up to being fully alive. Maybe when we bless God, we are the ones who are blessed.  And our being blessedly more fully alive, blesses God, the one to whom we may always speak and the one in whose lovingkindness we are set free.   

I don’t know what opens up your heart. I don’t know what makes your soul sing. I don’t know what connects you to that deep well of gratitude that lingers even in the midst of suffering.  

All I know is there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. All I know is whatever we are going through, God is one to whom we may speak.

All I know is to Bless the Lord with all my soul.                        

MIBS. Amen.

[1] Here I’m thinking of the book I’m re-reading How (Not) to Speak of God by Peter Rollins.

What Is Right

July 28, 2024 - Matthew 20: 1-16

Half a century or more before Ghandi would lead his people to freedom from British rule, Queen Victoria declared herself the Empress of India. Although she was forbidden to travel there by her advisers,[1] who feared her assassination, the British queen was obsessed with all things India. In 1887, at the celebration to mark Victoria’s 50 years on the throne she was presented with a ceremonial gold coin, borne on a pillow by two Indian servants dressed in regal red outfits complete with turbans.

Their job for the rest of the celebration was to stand behind Victoria at table as grand Indian decoration befitting of an Empress. Throughout the day though the Queen and the servants struck up a conversation and one became her fast favorite when he quoted the Quran to her on the value of service. In the movie “Victoria and Abdul,” Victoria is played by Dame Judi Dench, who remarks in surprise that the Indian servant is not Hindu.

“I am a Muslim, your majesty,” he replies, “I learned the Quran from my father. He's my munshi.”

“Munshi?” the Queen asks.

“Yes, munshi,” he responds, “my teacher.”

“Well, we would like you to be the queen's munshi,” Victoria declares. 

On the spot she makes 24 year old Abdul Karim her teacher and a member of her royal court. The rest of the white-skinned, blue-blooded, royal court despises Abdul. Despite the queen’s instructions, he is met with a hostile reception from the court members on the basis of his religion, his race, his humble birth, and his, therefore, inappropriate closeness with the queen. Though the queen is able to protect him during her life and he gains a significant amount of notoriety in his own right, within hours of the queen’s funeral the munshi’s home is raided by order of the new monarch, King Edward VII. All of Victoria’s letters to Abdul are taken out into the street and burned in an enormous bonfire.  

When interviewed about the hostility his character faced, Ali Fazal, the Muslim Bollywood actor who plays Abdul said, “You know, the moment you get insecure, you start to look at the other person and find these faults, ...and say, ...you're lesser, and you're not qualified for this job because you're from that side of the world.” Trappist monk Thomas Merton once wrote about how insecurity turns into hostility and even violence. He wrote, “the root of war is fear.”  

In our scripture text for today the ones who worked all day in the vineyard grow hostile too. They grumble to the landowner however, instead of the other workers. And honestly, they have good reason to be upset, right? If I had worked all day in the hot sun of the vineyard and found that someone who came along at the end of the day got paid just the same as me, I might be pretty upset too.

The landowner asks, “Are you envious, because I am generous?” Of course they are! Why does Jesus tell this story anyway?  

If you open your Bible to Matthew chapter 19, you’ll see that the story we read today is fairly neatly sandwiched in between two stories that touch on the natural human desire to gain and maintain status.  

In chapter 19, we meet the rich young man who wants to gain eternal life and in the verses of chapter 20 that shortly follow today’s story we find the mother of James and John negotiating for her sons’ status in the coming kingdom. In between, Jesus foretells of his death and resurrection a third time and he tells them this odd vineyard parable.  

In each of these stories Jesus teaches that the ways of power, status, and honor they have known in the kingdoms and societies of the world are not the ways of God’s kingdom. Rather, he teaches, “the first shall be last, and the last shall be first.”     

When my son Noam had just learned how to ride a bike without training wheels, his new skill resulted in new speed. It also resulted in the sound of his voice calling out sing-song to the walking adults behind him “last one there is a rotten egg.” In that I heard my ploys at getting my children to the bathtub at night coming back to me, and I heard too a natural human tendency to vie for our place in line, even as a child’s game.  

Comparing ourselves to each other seems to be a common human past-time that has taken on a new pervasiveness in our time but existed long before the age of social media. Because judging our insides by others’ outsides doesn’t happen just on Facebook or Instagram, it happens on the street, in the office, and even in the church. It seems a common human condition to believe that if we can be first, have the most of something, or be the best of anything, then we can feel safe and secure.  

Jesus rips that false sense of security right out of our hands. All that striving to be first, most, and best cannot make us safe in the kingdom of God if “the first will be last and the last will be first.” The workers in the field thought working all day would see them paid best but instead they are paid just the same as those who worked very little.    

Even all their work did not put them ahead of the others. Is that fair? Is that just? Is that right? That is what the landowner says he will pay the ones who come later after all. He says to the ones he hires at 9 o’clock, “you also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.”                     

As the children pointed out, what is right is not necessarily being treated the same. Debbie Irving, the author of the book Waking Up White, talks about the two interlocking ideas she calls “evil.” The first is that the United States is a level playing field for all. The second is that there is a natural order and some people are more worthy than others. 

“If I think the playing field is level and I am repeatedly exposed to images of white men at the top of organizational hierarchy,” Irving once told a TedX audience,[2] “that sends a powerful message that white men are superior that’s why they’re in charge.” Of course, as Debbie goes on to enumerate in her talk, the playing field in the United States is not level and it has never been so. From the writing of the Constitution some people under the laws of this land have not been considered fully human.  

The GI bill, from which Debbie’s father gained significant wealth in terms of a house and an ivy league education that then translated into generational wealth he could pass on to his children and grandchildren all of that was largely unavailable by law to people of color. Could it be said then that Debbie’s father gained that wealth on his own by the merits of his own hard work alone? Could it be said that the reason he ended up in the high place of status that he did was because he was naturally superior and the people who did not end up with that status were naturally inferior?

Would that be right?  

What is right?

Is it right for the laborers who worked all day to receive the same wage as those hired near the end of the day?  

Let me ask it this way, do the families of those who worked all day need to eat more or less than those hired at the end of the day? Do the families of those who worked all day need access to healthcare more or less than those hired at the end of the day? Do the families of those who worked all day     need safe, stable, affordable housing more or less than those hired at the end of the day?  

What is fair? What is equitable? What is just? What is right?  

“At the root of all war is fear,” Thomas Merton wrote, then he went on, “Not so much the fear [people] have of each other but as the fear we have of everything.” Because so often we are afraid that we are not enough. Because we will never be first, the most, the best. There is always someone faster, better, and smarter. Therefore, Merton writes, “we must exaggerate the wrongs of others in order to feel better about ourselves,” which breeds hostility and violence. “We rationalize by destroying the other, we will free ourselves from our self-hatred.”[3]  Maybe the workers in the vineyard who worked all day need to get paid more in an economy that monetizes our time and that only grants access to healthcare with a pricetag.  

But is that right? Or is right for everyone to be given what they need?   

“Are you envious because I am generous?” the landowner asks. Should we be envious when others get as much as we do? Should we be envious when the first become last and the last become first? “The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire labourers for his vineyard,” so Jesus begins this story.  

If that’s true, then I believe the kingdom of heaven is generous and equitable. The kingdom of heaven is a place where the first become last so they can learn what it means to serve. The kingdom of heaven is a place where the last become first so they will have their needs met, centered, and cared for. The kingdom of heaven is a place where it doesn’t matter who is first and who is last because we know we are all loved.

We are all enough.

The kingdom of heaven is a place where it doesn’t matter who is first and who is last because we have all had our needs met.  Yes, we live in a world where all do not get what we need. We live in a limited world of time and resources. The kingdom of heaven is not that kind of world and it is not the kind of world we can know fully in this life but it is the kind of world that Jesus called us to embrace and to work toward and to witness for so that we may taste of it in this life and slip into it fully in the life that is to come.

For the love of God is the one resource to which there is no limit. The love of God will be granted to the laborers who toil all day and the ones who come late. The love of God will be granted to the first and the last and everyone in between. The love of God will be granted to the just and the unjust. The love of God will be available to queens and servants. The love of God will be granted to the saber rattlers and the peaceniks. The love of God will be granted to the documented and the undocumented. There is no getting ahead or falling behind in the kingdom of God. Because the unbelievably generous love of God has been, is, and will be available to every part of creation and beyond.  

We need not be envious because God is generous. No, all we need do is slip into the generous love of God that wipes away all our fears and insecurities and opens our eyes to what is right, just, whole, peaceful, healthy, equitable, and just like a taste of the kingdom of heaven.  

May it be so. Amen.

[1] http://upr.org/post/victoria-abdul-explores-colonialism-and-islamophobia-during-queens-reign

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD5Ox5XNEpg

[3] http://www.peacecouple.com/2012/05/08/merton-the-root-of-war-is-fear/

The Power Of The Story

Written by Sarah Wittmeyer

July 7, 2024 - Mark 6: 1-13

Finding the Extraordinary in the Ordinary

The lectionary for this week included this passage in Mark that my kids read for us.  I found it so powerful.  Let me read the last few sentences again.

“Then they were on the road.  They preached with joyful urgency that life can be radically different; right and left they sent the demons packing; they brought wellness to the sick, anointing their bodies, healing their spirits.”

The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines preaching as: to deliver a sermon, OR to urge acceptance or abandonment of an idea or course of action.  I have never preached in the first sense before, as in delivering a sermon in a church setting (except one time in a homiletics class long ago when I was attending Bible school).  But I have preached in the second sense (to urge acceptance or abandonment of an idea or course of action) many times as a wife (urging acceptance or abandonment of a particular plan), as a mother (urging a course of action), as a child (speaking to my parents about a particular idea, especially as an adult child to aging parents), as a sister, and even as a friend.  We may all have ideas of when we were seeking to sway another person to our own way of thinking.  Sometimes we might even say “Preach it!” in response to someone’s impassioned argument.

When we think we have the answer and know what is best, it is not hard to preach.  I love the idea that the disciples preached with joyful urgency.  Life can be different than what it is.  We can help.  We have the answer.  We can bring you wellness, both for your bodies and for your spirits.  They were enthusiastic.  They were bringing the good news about Jesus, the Messiah, the One Who could perform miracles, heal people, and cast out demons.

One of the nursing phenomena that I am interested in and that I attempt to teach to my home health nursing students is the therapeutic relationship between the nurse and the patient at home. It is not an easy concept to teach.  How does the nurse enter the patient’s home, respectfully, and offer services, skills, and knowledge while still honoring the patient’s current beliefs and lifestyle choices which may sometimes actually be the cause of their illness?   The nurse is in the patient’s territory, the patient’s own inner sanctuary, the place where the patient has the last say, the place where the patient lives.  This is not the hospital.  This is not an acute care setting where the nurse SAYS and the patient DOES because they have no choice. “Here you go, it’s time to take your medicine” Or “The cafeteria will be providing you this particular sodium-restricted diet” Or “I’m going to be changing your dressing now”. 

No, in the home, we give advice, suggestions, maybe it could even be said that sometimes we preach what may be (in our minds anyway) the best course of action. It is completely up to the patient to follow this advice or to let it slide.  “It would be a good idea if you took this medicine twice a day because we have seen this to be very effective in killing the organism that is causing your infection.” OR “Research has shown that if you keep this wound clean and dry and change your dressing every day, you have a better chance of healing.  I will show you (or your caregiver) how to do this.” OR “Make sure you walk around frequently throughout the day if you can and raise your feet up when you are sitting.  This will help keep your ankles from swelling and increase your circulation.”  All good ideas and suggestions, even research-based and proven.  But as nurses, we cannot make it happen. Only the patient can do that. 

One of the psychological terms for this concept is locus of control.  In the hospital, patient care is very much based on external locus of control (the system is set up that the patient has very little choice).  In the home, the best way for the patient to be successful is if they switch to an internal locus of control.  They have to make choices.  They have to decide for themselves if they are going to follow through on all those instructions.  The nurse offers the patient options, knowledge, and rationale, all the while being sensitive to the patient’s abilities and capacity, but leaves that power, that locus of control in the patient’s hands. Ultimately it is up to the patient to put their newly learned knowledge into practice.  This can also be called agency or self-definition.

I think that is the case with religion or spiritual teaching as well.  The Brethren say, “There is no force in religion.”  In the Scripture we read today, Jesus says “If you are not welcome, not listened to, quietly withdraw.  Don’t make a scene. Shrug your shoulders and be on your way.”  We can tell our stories, we can share what we have learned about living a life of faith in God.  We can describe ways we have been healed, ways we have experienced joy and wellness through following the teachings of Jesus.  We can share the times in our lives when we have felt that surely the particular series of events we experienced can only be explained by the moving and direction of a Power greater than ourselves. But it is up to those hearing our stories to respond, to disagree, to act, to embrace, to follow, or to ignore—that is not up to us.  We all have agency and choice—those who share the story… and those who hear the story.

Although there is no force in religion, I do believe there is a quiet strength and confidence evident in the lives of those who have lived by faith in God that is very attractive.  That faith we currently hold may draw others to God simply as they watch us live our lives.  Peter wrote to those he called “the elect exiles” in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia to always be ready to give an answer to anyone who asked them the reason for the hope that was in them; yet do it with gentleness and respect (my paraphrase), he said.  Always be ready to give an answer to anyone who asks you the reason for the hope that is in you.  I like that. What would you say if someone asked you that?  Or maybe another question is, do I live my life in such a way that people want to know what is the reason for the hope that is in me?  Does my life seem different somehow, faith-filled?

One of the joys of being part of the Gifted Hands and Sacred Stories group is being able to hear each other’s stories.  I believe that everyone has a story and everyone’s story is sacred.  Your story is unique to you.  One of the things I find so interesting is that almost every woman starts their story by saying it is not unique or special or grand or unusual.  And then they proceed to share lessons they have learned, difficult situations they have endured, or meaningful ways God has met them in their struggles.  Or sometimes the ordinary way in which they have lived their lives speaks to us as being extraordinary.  We talk about God moments, or God winks, those times when we are extra- conscious of the moving of the Spirit of God.  G.K. Chesterton said the most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.

Sharing our stories with others (no matter how non earth shattering you may think they are) builds relationships.  It builds up the community of faith. It gives us more reason to hope in the God Who has worked in others’ lives.  As we live our lives together, our individual stories become OUR story, a collective story.

I once told a friend that I wanted to be the type of Christian that would thrive on a remote island, just me and God, all alone.  That would be all I would need.  She looked at me quizzically and said “I don’t know, Sarah.  What about your brothers and sisters in Christ—do you not need them?”  Although I do still think that my internal private relationship with God, that faith in Him that buoys me and steadies me and guides me, is supremely important, I also now realize that, yes, I do need my community of faith.  I do not live well alone.  And just as I need you (my brothers and sisters), you all (yes, you are very much a part of my community of faith) need me. 

I heard Joanna Gaines (famous for the show Fixer Upper) say once “The world needs who you were meant to be.”  This means two things to me.  The world needs me.  And I need to live into the purpose for which I was created.  We need to be who we were meant to be (not just live on our own little islands) and that role we play is important to our entire community, maybe even to the whole world.

I want to close with a story about voice.  Sometimes it is really hard to use our voice.  Sometimes we use our voice too much.  Sometimes our voice is not heard.  And sometimes we would just prefer to be quiet.  But using our voice is part of telling our stories.  It is part of agency, part of internal locus of control, of becoming a defined genuine solid self.

It was a hot summer day when our kids were young.  I somehow had the brilliant idea to make water balloons and add them to the trampoline enclosure while the kids were jumping.  And it turned out to be a real hoot.  You can just picture it, right?  Brightly colored water filled balloons bobbing up and down, kids shrieking with delight, occasionally getting drenched with a burst of water as they popped one after the other.  I walked away thinking I was such a great creative mom, giving her children the joys of a well-played childhood.  Well, what I didn’t think about was how slippery that trampoline then became.  And how dangerous that actually was with four little wet children of various sizes bouncing around on top of each other.  Before I knew it, I heard the scream, the scream that was not joy, nor was it anger, not frustration or any of those other types of ordinary screams.  It was the scream of shock, fear, pain, distress.  That is the scream that sends any parent (or perhaps anyone within hearing distance) running to see what happened.  It was four-year-old Amity, using her voice.  As she dragged her body to the edge of the enclosure, trying to get away from the chaos, I knew something was really wrong.  I scooped her up and tried to figure out what body part was injured.  I had to take her upstairs and give her a bath before she calmed down enough to show me just what hurt.  It was her leg.  She would not put any weight on it.  I thought maybe it was just a sprain and maybe we could just wait and see but when she was lying on the couch, teeth chattering, trying to talk to me, Jay said “Nope that’s shock, we better take her in.”  Sure enough the x-ray tech showed me the clear break in her tibia, right below her knee cap.  They splinted it and sent us home with a referral to see the orthopedist on call the next day, after the swelling went down.  After a long night of little sleep, I showed up at the doctor’s office the next day with my distressed daughter, the one who not only used her voice to let me know when the accident happened but also all through the night to let me know she was not comfortable.  Strangely, when the very well-trained and highly recommended doctor looked at Amity’s x-ray, he said he didn’t think the leg was broken.  Maybe a tiny hairline fracture around the ankle.  But just to be sure, he would put her in a short leg cast for several weeks.  My jaw dropped open.  I had to politely and rather gingerly ask him to scroll up on the x-ray.  When he saw that he had missed the complete break of the tibia, he rather roughly said, “Oh, ok, we’ll put her in full leg cast, from toe to hip.”  I’m not sure if it was because he felt embarrassed or because he truly believed this, but when I then proceeded to ask for not just the full leg cast but also for something a little stronger for pain, other than Tylenol, (“she’s been screaming all night long, sir”), he said “Oh, she doesn’t have any pain. That’s just a learned response.”  Again, my jaw dropped open (at least it did in my head).  But I lost out on that one.  Amity managed to survive on Tylenol alone. 

But why do I tell this story?    The impact of voice.  Amity’s—in communicating her needs.  Mine—in advocating for my daughter.  The doctor’s—in diagnosing and treating.  My point is this: We can all live our own experiences, but we need voice, agency, self-definition, an internal perspective and processing in order to share those experiences. 

There is so much more to voice, in my opinion, than just the spoken word.  We can share stories in many many other forms….like music, plays, books, art, and on and on…… but that is a topic for another day. 

What is your story?  How are you living your life?  In a way that others notice and say, “Hey, I noticed this and this about you—why did you do that?”  OR “What floats your boat?  What’s your reason to live?”  Can you preach with joyful urgency that life with Jesus can be radically different?  How will you use your voice this week to share your story?

Known And Loved

June 23, 2024 - Psalm 139: 1-18

I once had a woman tell me her favorite time to pray was on her long commute to work in her car.  She told me she didn’t listen to the radio. She didn’t call her friends.  She talked to God.  In fact, this woman traveled for work by car. So, she drove a lot.  And, she talked a lot.  She would have quiet conversations.  She would tell God the story of her day.  She would scream and cry and demand of God to know “why?!”  all while driving down the road.  She would even crack up over the stories she told God or the ironic, dry humor she swears she heard come back at her. 

She talked so much that she started to get weirded out by how weirded out other drivers got by her when they saw her animatedly talking to herself in her car. She joked with a friend that maybe she should get a mannequin of some kind so that other passersby would assume she was talking to another person and not worry so much about the lady in the car talking to herself.  Well, her friend didn’t have a mannequin but they did have a huge, adult human size stuffed teddy bear.  The idea tickled both the friends so much that they set the bear up in the woman’s passenger seat, and as long as I knew the woman she traveled across the Midwest with a large stuffed bear riding shotgun. 

I don’t remember what she named the bear.  And I don’t know if it made people stare at her more or less as she chattered away zipping down the highway.  What I do know is that she had found a means of prayer that worked very well for her. 

Psalm 139 proclaims God’s all-knowing nature with the words:

“O Lord, you have searched me and known me.

You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.

You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.

Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.”

This may be so. God knows our stories without having to be told.  But for some reason, it really seems to help some of us to tell them to God anyway.  Whether we’re screaming our stories out in the car, whispering them to a trusted friend or counselor, or writing them down in a journal, there’s something about being heard that can lead us to powerful healing. 

If we believe God already knows our stories, when we prayerfully tell them to God, we aren’t saying anything God doesn’t already know. Rather, what we are doing is trusting God to help us hear our stories, to help us face them, to help us learn from them, and to help us experience God’s holy love and grace right there in the middle of our stories, too.

I have often found that prayerfully sharing our stories with God can also be a way of letting go of harmful stories: the ones some of us have about ourselves

–how we’re not deserving of love and kindness, and the ones some of us have about others

–how they’re not deserving of love and kindness either. 

Psalm 139 speaks to those last stories.  It does it in the last part of the Psalm in the words we don’t usually read in church because they take a lot of unpacking to be helpful.  There the Psalmist writes: 

“O that you would kill the wicked, O God, and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me—

20 those who speak of you maliciously, and lift themselves up against you for evil!

21 Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?

22 I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them my enemies.

23 Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts.

24 See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”

Is there any one among us who hasn’t had rage-filled thoughts?  The psalmists words here strike me as true in the sense that, yeah I’ve been there, too.  At the very least, there are people I find it harder to love than others. I suspect most of you can relate.  Usually though I find that challenge to love someone has something to do with the harmful and narrow story I have about them.  When I learn more about someone’s humanness it doesn’t mean I’m less hurt by anything that they have done but it does thicken their story for me.  It does help me to see how God can love and use us all.  Then, God’s Spirit often nudges, if I turn that kind of compassion on myself it’s easier to love my own less than lovable parts, too.  I find it easier to let go of these harmful stories I have about myself or others if I can remember we are all created and loved by God.  “For it was you,” the psalmist tenderly confesses to God, “who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” God created us, loves us, and is with us still. 

For me, stories have always been one of my favorite things.  Since I have been little they have been part of how I have understood my world. I’m certainly not alone in that. But I tend to enthusiastically embrace it, listening for others stories, writing my own, and reading voraciously.  Yet, only in the last few years have I come to think of reading fiction as a form of prayer. Maybe it’s different for you but what fiction does for me–especially imaginative fiction in which the normal rules of physics and existence don’t necessarily apply–is it helps me to expand my heart in ways that make it easier for me to grow spiritually.  

Reading stories about forgiveness–even fictional ones, help me to practice forgiveness in my own life.  Reading stories about different worlds in which everything I know is upside down help me to wonder why not all God’s children have what they need and if the less than ideal way things are really has to be that way forever.  Reading stories about hard times and hard-won triumphs help me to feel not nearly so alone in all the things I go through in my life.  Even stories whose conclusions or philosophical viewpoints I disagree with teach me something and can carry a powerful message to me.  In this way, I experience stories as an important means of prayer in which I often hear God speaking through the words of mere mortals. 

How many of us have turned to these stories in books or videos to help us through this pandemic? When they lift us up and help us feel closer to God and to each other, why not respect them as the means of prayer that they can really be? And if the stories we’re consuming aren’t helping us, why not wonder about why that is? After all, whatever stories we are telling, being told, or living through, God is right there with us through it all. 

As Psalm 139 asks God, “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night’, even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day.”

Wherever you go from here, may you know find God powerfully with you in the stories you tell, the stories you let go, the stories you are told, and the stories you are living through. 

May it be so. Amen.

I Did Not Know I Was Lost

Written by Blaine Miner

June 2, 2024 - Romans 12: 1-2

Two weeks ago, we flew to Kansas to begin our orientation as Co-District Executive Ministers in Western Plains District of the Church of the Brethren.  Our “guide” entered an address to the G.P.S. app of his phone and we were directed to our destination. Before G.P.S, there was the Rand-McNally maps to plan trips. I still occasionally pull out the atlas to review places I/we have been.

I frequently ask Nancy to put in our destination into her G.P.S. app. I don’t want to get lost. I don’t want to waste time. The G.P.S. function is great for not only direction, but how long will it take us if we drive straight through. No stops for meals, gas, bathroom breaks. But that is not the only way to be lost. Maps and G.P.S. are great if you have the correct information. A map of Illinois will not help me in Indiana or Iowa. G.P.S. coordinates entered for Des Moines, IA will not get me to Indianapolis.

The story of the rich young ruler addresses another form of being lost. “Teacher, what do I need for eternal life?” The young man is seeking something. The young man is out of sorts. He feels and senses that there is more to life than what he is experiencing. In spiritual direction he has hit a wall. He wants to know how to go around the wall. Can he scale it, dig under, circumvent the wall. He has done all he knows. He has kept the commandments, yet he knows there is more. And when he asks, Jesus tells him to let go of his possessions, give away his money, relinquish all that he has which defines him. I can imagine the young man deflates upon hearing those words. He is crestfallen. He cannot let go of all that defines him. He is afraid.

In our faith journey, we need to let go. Our fear is that we will be lost if we let go of that which defines us materially. Do we have enough faith to trust that God will see us through?

I grew up here. Some of you have watched me grow up here. There are those who were my peers as I grew up here. I have heard many sermons here. At one level I m the young man who asks what more do I have to do? This congregation is strong on Social Justice, trying to do the right thing, but in our drive to do the right thing, do we get what God is telling us to do?

The prophets of old would confront power and empire. Do we love mercy, do we walk humbly with God, how do we do justice? Does our road map of scriptures guide us clearly? Most of my ministry has been with those on the margin of society: the addict, the persecuted, the criminal. All are asking to be heard. Balancing my worlds of treatment centers, Mental Health Centers and prisons with the church has not been easy. I won’t get any easier as we move to Western Plains District. The challenge before ask are we using the right map?

The questions which we have before us are they the correct questions?

I needed to adapt scripture and theology for my sanity. Sin was a head game. The Alcoholics Anonymous language of powerlessness, I could relate to. Contrary to popular belief, we are not in control. We have lost our way when we try to control things.

Richard Rohr in his book Breathing Under Water speaks about our addictive behaviors. What do we rail against? What is our passion to protest, where is our enemy? What are we afraid of when we set litmus tests of belonging?

Are we ready to do a fearless moral inventory of our actions, our beliefs? Are we a peace church because of our beliefs or are we afraid of the violence we can inflict on one another? Do we fear one other being because it is different. And because it is different, unknown? Do we reject the maps of scripture because the path it might take us on? Are we afraid to change our path because we must admit we were wrong?

For those on a journey of recovery means doing and being different. Facing the harsh reality of believing lies, lived, and accepted. Owning past behaviors, the stigmas of wrong living. How would this congregation be different if more people perceived that they were accepted and valued for their personhood, their mental health status, their legal status, gender, and the list goes on. What are our boundaries, who do we exclude? Who is truly welcome?

I was lost. The language of the church did not help. The smugness of the church did not help. Part of my DNA forty years ago was not ready to be a pastor God’s crucible put me on the right path. Are we willing to be with those whose journey is not like ours? Are we willing to just listen to their story? Can we just be with the other person? Can we resist the need to fix? How do we be honest with ourselves? The path I found was an adaption of scriptures. As a result, I learned to be compassionate. Am I perfect? I have my moments. Telephone sales calls, poor customer service I can be downright rude and loud. I have had to apologize often and admit my error. Being powerless means a different way of living. Recognizing that my life truly belongs to my creator. The one who calls me into relationship, who loves me for who I am; foibles and all.

The freeing aspect of this is: I don’t have to worry if God loves me. However the map and rules set up by others, the intensity and the volume can cause doubt. I have experienced God’s grace more than I can count. The fact I graduated from college and seminary is enough for me to believe that God has a plan for me. Every time I think I am done; God says Not yet.

I need to stop and give thanks and work my program of letting go of being in charge. Philippians 4; Paul writes that we need to focus on what’s noble, honest, and pure because those things are of God. When I feel lost and bewildered, I go to that scripture to be encouraged and to stay on the path. On our journey are we willing to accept correction, can we refrain from being argumentative, are we open to listening to God’s whisper? Can we accept God’s voice when it is from an unexpected source, one we are not accustomed to hearing?

Being lost is no fun. Being lost is scary. Sometimes we do things because hey are familiar and comforting, but we are no less lost.

The good news is that if we recognize our powerlessness, we can move from being lost to being held in the arms of the one who has created us and redeemed us.

May it be so Amen.

Untidy and Unashamed

June 2, 2024 - Romans 12: 1-2

For me, living a spiritual life has meant living a life as open to ongoing transformation and renewal as possible. I still remember sitting with a young person once who asked me what I thought the Bible had to say about being LGBTQ. I told them then what I still believe to be true. That is that for me the Bible is a library of writings about God and what it means to live love-filled lives of faith. Therefore, there are a lot of things written there by a lot of different people over a long time - and all of them lived a long time ago from the time in which we live now.

The culture those people inhabited, the stories they told, the way they understood and experienced God has so much for us to learn from. And, it is also so very different from our reality, too. What’s more, when we read the Bible, we bring ourselves to it. There is no way to read it objectively. We bring our stories, our experiences, and everything we have been taught to how we understand the words before us.

So, for example, when I pick up Romans 12: 1-2. The line that stands out for me is the first part of verse 2. And I hear it in the King James because there is a powerful Dr. King sermon that lives in my mind in which he quotes this text this way: “Be ye not conformed to this world but be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds.”

What is it in this world to which we do not want to be conformed?  I told that young person that day who asked me about the Bible, that I have often heard preachers rail about the world’s culture that corrupts people. And these preachers often mean the corners of the culture where LGBTQ people find support. But in my mind it is entirely the other way around. The thing I don’t want to conform to – the problem with the culture I see is that it is laden with unnecessary expectations about how people are supposed to be in the world and who people are supposed to love.  

The metaphor that comes most easily to me is one of boxes. The culture hands out boxes to which we are meant to conform –inside of which we are meant to fit. Being a man looks like this. Being a woman looks like this. Being in love looks like this. And it happens with this set of people only. But what if we don’t fit in those boxes? 

Some of us find reasons for building those boxes in the Bible. I just don’t. I think the Bible has a lot more to say about love and mercy and the beauty of life than it has to say about punishing each other for not meeting rather arbitrary expectations of sexuality and gender. That’s what I told that young person that day. That I personally find readings of the Bible that denigrate anyone on the basis of who they are to simply be readings that conform to the cultural expectations some readers bring to the text.  

When that young person asked me about the Bible I assumed that they themselves were not accepting of LGBTQ people. I made this assumption based on the person’s cultural and religious affiliation. What I learned years later was that at the time this person was discerning their own identity. With me though, they simply nodded, asked a few questions, and moved on to other topics. Years later, I learned they found a same sex partner and made a new, happy life in a new place together.  

We are all always unfolding, if we let ourselves. We may not all discover we are LGBTQ ourselves. But what I think the LGBTQ community does for us all is refuse to live inside boxes that do not serve them, and therefore, sets a standard of freedom and liberation that I think is entirely consistent with the gospel of Christ and to which we are called in this chapter of Romans. I like the way Eugene Peterson puts it in the Message version: “Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out.”  

Being changed can be very scary. Allowing yourself to be who you are can be scarier yet. Even if it doesn’t have to do with your gender or sexuality, you may well have been told that there are only certain feelings that are acceptable to feel or there are only certain ways of dressing or acting that are acceptable to embody. Some of those ways can help us access the power in the culture. They can protect us. They can be means of surviving. But when they are all we are - an acceptable character we play that is only a slim version of who we really are - well, I’m just not sure that’s all the freedom, safety, liberation, or joy that God longs for us to experience in this life. 

I’m not saying that how we act in the world doesn’t matter. What I’m saying is that when we fix our attention on God, we do so often find ourselves changed from the inside out. And then the way we act in the world is governed by the things that really matter like love, justice, and peace. 

“God,” the Message version of Romans tells us, “brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.” That’s a more apt translation to me than the NRSV’s “discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.”  

I think it does a better job conveying the meaning of the Greek word teleios translated as perfect in the NRSV, and I think it does a better job describing what we can actually do in this life. We’ll never be perfect, and I don’t know that we should try. I’m not even sure how we’d measure it in a healthy way - perfection that is. But maturity, that sounds like a God thing to me. We can grow mature. We can grow deeper. We can grow kinder, wiser, and more loving to ourselves and to others.  

No matter what age we are or what we are learning about ourselves or those we love, with God’s help, we can, as the Message version of this scripture suggests, “Take our everyday, ordinary lives—our sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around lives—and place them before God as an offering.” We can come to God in all the wholeness and holiness of who we are and who we are becoming. We don’t have to have ourselves or each other all figured out. But we can present ourselves to God for continual transformation, unashamed and unconcerned about the world’s boxes and expectations that no longer serve us.   

Queer theologian M Jade Kaiser writes about this in the following poem at enfleshed liturgies, titled Untidy God:

What of a God who doesn’t believe in having it all figured out? In this idea of a single, tidy story. But instead a God who changes with the day and never stops asking you to learn how to love every messy, complicated, seemingly contradictory side of Themselves?

What of a God who has been so many different things. And ways. One that has always been transitioning. Taking on new flesh. Shedding what hurts. Claiming what frees. Finding a fresh way to show us the Divine that we’ve been. And everything that’s kept us from living it out. What of a God that is tired of being misgendered? Isn’t interested in excuses any longer. Gets a little rude about it. Doesn’t mind asking you to try a bit harder. To let go of everything you’re more loyal to than love.

What of a God who spends more time dancing [all night], cooking a hot meal for the turned-away youth, or protesting to abolish [injustice] then attending any worship on Sunday mornings?

What of a God whose inclusion is radical? One who calls from the fringes to the halls of power and the places of comfort saying, “come! There’s a place for you here. If you just lay down your life, your power, your privilege. You can be family. You will become alive again.”

What of a God who is queer? As in politically. As in strange and proud of it. As in about the things of love and bodies and liberation and solidarity.

What of a God who is found in the flesh of everyone you have denied a kind word, a safe bathroom, a marriage ceremony, a friendly smile, access to health care, a home, a faith community, asylum, or even just respect? Listen for this God today, you will find them in selfies and stories, coming out again and again in testimonies and silence, in gracious invitation, and fierce and radical calls to a different kind of living, a different kind of family, a different kind of love. Bring your offerings. Lend your hands. Whisper your prayers and wail your laments before all that is Holy and Gay. Holy and Lesbian. Holy and Queer. Holy and Bi. Holy and Trans. Holy and Asexual. Holy and Intersex. Holy and Still Finding Their Way.” 

Whoever you are and however you come today, may you continue finding your way toward the God who loves you just as you are and who wants to continue to transform you with that holy love, too.  

May it be so. Amen.

Raising The Level Of Our Relationships

May 19, 2024 - Ezekiel 37: 1-14

As we heard, in today’s text from Ezekiel “The hand of the Lord came upon [the prophet], and he was brought out by the spirit of God and set down in the middle of a valley full of bones. There were very many bones lying in the valley, writes Ezekiel, and they were very, very dry.

Can anyone here relate to the valley of dry bones?

Is there anyone here whose life has places in it that are far from flowing with life?

Beyond our individual lives, too, it may be easy for us to name places in the world that are touched by violence, natural disaster, poverty, and neglect. Maybe it won’t seem like such a big thing to you next to the realities of war and violence that exist in the world. But one of the dry places that I feel keenly and that I think keeps us from addressing other problems in our communities and our world is what the U.S. Surgeon General last May called "Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation."  The findings of his report include “that even before the COVID-19 pandemic, about half of U.S. adults reported experiencing measurable levels of loneliness, ...the physical consequences [of which have been found to include] a 29% increased risk of heart disease; a 32% increased risk of stroke; and a 50% increased risk of developing dementia for older adults.” According to this new advisory, the United State’s “epidemic of loneliness… can increase the risk for premature death to levels comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.” After also naming economic challenges, heightened social division, the fast pace of modern life, and the lack of mental health care access, the Surgeon General concluded, “we're seeing more forces that take us away from one another and fewer of the forces that used to bring us together.” Then he named faith groups among forces that bring us together and noted their decline contributes to a culture of loneliness that is hazardous to our health. 

How many of us can testify what a difference it makes in our lives and in our communities to be able to face those dry, dry valleys with a quality connection to God and to other human beings? How many of us can attest to the difference it makes knowing somebody has your back and that there is a faith-filled place and a people you can go to when you need to celebrate or lament? 

The prophet Ezekiel did not go to that valley of dry bones alone, and we need not walk alone, either.  There are times and reasons of course for feeling alone. There are times when we feel dry and out of breath. Those times, I believe, are part of life that come for all of us.  In that dry valley Ezekiel describes, it is the Breath of God, the ruach in the Hebrew that brings vitality back to the bones. The ruach draws the sinews and muscle and flesh and blood back together. It rebuilds a life.  Have you ever seen a life rebuilt? Have you ever witnessed that kind of resurrection? 

At our church over on Highland Avenue, I think we got a glimpse of that Breath of God this spring when we welcomed into church membership Daniel Cummings, an inmate on death row at Central Prison in North Carolina. He called in from his cell one Sunday morning. We put the speaker phone up to a microphone so that he could greet everyone and take his membership vows. Even though he wasn’t there among us physically, I felt a strong connection across the miles and through prison walls that for me attests to the new life bringing power of God’s love.  Daniel is 68 years old and has been in prison for 30 years. He has very little in the way of comforts in his cell and it sounds to me as if he is under near constant threat of violence. But when he gets on the phone his voice carries this shining, upbeat light. He remembers and cares about any trouble in the lives of us, his friends on the outside. He prays for us and follows up on the next call like I try to do when I am administering pastoral care. It just seems natural to him. And he is blown away by the love of our congregation. That love has been spearheaded by our member, John Lengle, and by the Men’s Breakfast Group that meets every Tuesday. 

In 2019, after reading about a program called the Death Row Support Project, John announced one Tuesday that he planned to become a pen pal with an inmate and invited the other breakfast goers to join him. They were assigned to Daniel and started writing letters. Then they started putting money in Daniel’s commissary account so that he could buy basic things like snacks, hygiene items, over-the-counter medicines, dental supplies, clothing, and stationery to write these letters back and forth. Then at some point, Daniel got access to a phone. And now he can make 15 minute phone calls, too, including to his new pastor.  

Daniel has told me what a difference it makes to know someone cares about him. He has told me it has renewed his faith and his hope. It has meant new life to him.  And the remarkable thing to me is how much it goes both ways. I have seen first hand how those of us who get to interact with Daniel are moved by his faith, his cheerfulness, and his hope. We often come away feeling we are the ones who are blessed to be a part of his life. I give thanks for the ways our church’s relationship with Daniel has blown God’s Breath of new life through our whole community.  

In Ezekiel, God commands this mortal being to prophesy - prophesy to the breath. With God’s help, Ezekiel is to speak new life into being. Ezekiel lived in a time when his people were scattered to the wind. The dry bones are a good metaphor for the conquered people of his day. Ezekiel had reason to feel dry and hopeless. And yet, with God’s help, he prophesied new life on the way – bone coming to meet bone and sinew and flesh. 

As we gather here today, on this Sunday that many Christians celebrate as Pentecost or the birthday of the church, I am so grateful to be here in a joint worship service among members of both Second Baptist and Highland Avenue Church. For more than 20 years we have shared in relationship building and praising God across the differences between us. 

Have we solved all the problems in Elgin? 

No we have not. 

Have we ended racism or eradicated any other challenges that hurt us as churches or as a wider community? 

No we have not.

But we have prophesied to a new life coming. 

We have done our best to show up as our uniquely made in God’s image selves and to praise God together both.

I remember when I first came to Elgin and met Pastor Edmond before the first one of these worship exchanges I participated in. His best advice to me was don’t try to be who you think we’ll like. Just be who God made you to be. And love God. And we will get along just fine.

I think that’s part of our loneliness epidemic. It’s hard to be who we are when we know not everyone will like it. We know we don’t always agree. We know we’re not all the same. We know we all too often hurt each other even when we don’t realize we’re doing it.

Sometimes it takes an act of faith to bring our whole selves into the world and risk connecting with another person we don’t know or don’t trust. Sometimes it takes an act of faith to take the existing relationships in our lives deeper by telling each other the truth even when it causes conflict. Sometimes it takes an act of faith to believe that by working together we may not be able to solve every problem before us but with God’s help we can do a lot of good. 

God asks Ezekiel, “Can these bones live?” 

And Ezekiel responds, “O God, you know.” 

Only God knows sometimes what we may do when we act in faith. 

Only God knows how the breath of new life will flow among us. 

Only God knows how the relationships we build may be the foundation to experiencing a whole new level of love, peace, and justice 

in all the communities where we live. 

Praise God that it is so. Amen.