Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Genesis 15:1-6 & Hebrews 11:1-3 & 8-16

Abram begins with a dream. It is the reason he leaves everything he has ever known and wanders into the unknown on a wing and a prayer. It is the dream given to him by God, a dream of a great nation born from him, and blessing and favor and the mighty hand of God on his side, and allthe families of the earth shall be blessed through him. We have to go all the way back to chapter 12 of Genesis to find that original covenant with God, but it surfaces again and again in Genesis, sometimes carrying forward that last line about all the families on earth being blessed through him, and sometimes more focused on the personal blessing to Abram, the uncountable number of offspring, the land given to him and the nation that comes from him.

That’s the dream that Abram believes so fully that he follows it in what would seem foolish to those around him, giving up safety and security for the path that God calls him to – and God, our text says, reckons it as righteousness to Abram. That righteousness from Abram’s faithfulness to this idea of being a blessing to everyone – to ALL the families, not just his own, or the ones who look and act like him.

As we contend with the variety of emotions and anxieties brought about by another week where what we think can’t get worse does, in fact, get worse, it’s important to remember what the call of our faith really points us towards. It is important to remember that our tradition teaches us of a God of covenant, active and participatory, responding to our faithfulness and reckoning it, as the text says, as righteousness.

In the Genesis story, from start to finish, the mark of “righteousness” is the willingness to see God’s call across social, cultural and geographical lines. It is the willingness to trust God’s directives when they cost you something, or take you to a place that is unfamiliar and uncomfortable. It is marked by how we treat one another, God’s children relating to God’s children. The same, one could say, is true of the Gospels, where Jesus is always seen crossing the boundaries of his time, telling his disciples to take up their cross and offering hospitality as purely and extravagantly as do Abraham and Sarah.

I’m not sure we appreciate how much of a “swim upstream” was being asked for by this religious practice, nor what it implies when we uphold it as foundational for the three of the largest religious communities in the world. It’s a pull against our natural tendencies. An adverse reaction to strangers, social scientists tell us, is hardwired into us, largely because during the biggest portion of our development as human beings, we lived in small tribes and rarely encountered a stranger. That was the way it was in both the culture that developed these Abram stories and during the time of Jesus. Now, of course, we see strangers all the time, heck we might even live next door to people who are virtual strangers. But that tribal mark still brands our interactions. Meeting a stranger, the research says, increases our heartbeat, raises our anxiety and changes our mood – even for the most extroverted among us – and our tribal functions are still hard at work developing and nurturing “the other” all around us. It’s almost as if it takes spiritual work for us to lift up God’s dream, like we have to develop and nurture things in us other than our natural inclinations, which we may have developed as survival techniques, not necessarily healthy, holy practice.

One very strong thread in our Bible is that our faithfulness, indeed our righteousness, is marked by how hospitable we are, how kind and generous we are with strangers and foreigners among us. That’s a complicated thing in our day and age, where boundaries are no longer several days walk away, but we routinely fly across the country, across the globe, and where we encounter “the other” everyday, even right in our neighborhoods. The practice then becomes learning how to get closer to one another, how to resist those natural inclinations as part of the journey of faith, a necessary and crucial part of getting closer to God by getting closer to God’s people. So, if we are, like Abram, on a pilgrimage of faith, seeking to follow God where God will lead us, then how we engage with this central question with all of it’s complications for us today is really important. After all, we can have the dream of a more peaceful and accepting world, a world that embraces rather than fearing the “other,” but it is awfully hard right now to see how we might possibly get there.

By the time we get to this “letter to the Hebrews,” a letter in the style of Paul, but not by Paul himself, written likely somewhere towards the end of the first century CE, this pilgrimage that Abram starts has taken many turns. Influenced by Jesus, we can hear the same call Abram heard, to reach outas an act of faith, and to trust in a vision that we cannot yet see. And then it famously defines faith – “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Faith is not so much a destination as it is a journey, a long walk along a path whose finish is not clear. I have heard people liken faith to driving along a country road on a moonless night, with no street lamps or light pollution, nothing but your headlights to guide you. It can be frightening and anxious, you can only see a few feet in front of the car, but you can make the whole trip home like that if you stay the course and trust that the road will be revealed to you – just a few feet at a time.

When you plant a garden, it is important to have the same kind of vision for what is not there yet, or what you can see only partially. You have to trust that what is not visible now will someday come to pass. If you drop seeds in the earth today and expect tomatoes tomorrow, you’ll be sorely disappointed. There are even some crops, like grapes for instance, that don’t produce fruit at all for years and years. And they’ll never produce if you don’t tend them and do all of the necessary work as if they wereproducing fruit right now. In the letter to the Hebrews, the pseudo-Paul writer tells us that Abraham and Sarah did not live to see their garden to fruition. “All of these,” the text reads, “died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.”

The confession that we are all strangers and foreigners on the earth, that we are all “the other” to someone, seems a very good confession to make right now. It feels like we are locked in a struggle for the soul of the United States, a struggle which seems difficult to envision will have good resolution. But it is not the time, despite how we may feel, to pull the car over. It is time, even with only the dim glow of our headlights, to keep headed down the road, to trust in compassion and hope when and where we can, to reach for the better angels of our nature and to lift one another up – every single other – for we are allstrangers and foreigners on this earth. Yet it can be so hard to stay that hopeful.

When I graduated from Phillips Seminary, the chair of the Board of Deacons was Chester Cadieux, the man famous ’round these parts for founding QT. Mr. Cadieux was a very approachable and generous man, deeply devoted to the education of clergy. That year, he gave every graduate a copy of Good to Great by Jim Collins. This book studies what has happened when one company has gone from “good to great” while others have been left behind.

One of the principles presented is the “Stockdale Paradox.” It was named for Admiral Jim Stockdale, who most of you remember having run as the VP on Ross Perot’s Presidential ticket, but who was also a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War. Asked how he was able to live through such a horrible experience, while others seemingly more fit wound up dying in the prison, Stockdale noted that the prisoners who were either complete optimists or complete pessimists had the most trouble surviving. It was the ones that combined a sort of pessimistic realism with a longer, more optimistic view that survived.

In his book, Collins outlines the principle in this way:

You must retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties.

AND at the same time…

You must confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

I don’t know about you, but I kind of feel the social and political environment right now feels a lot like the environment outside right now – thick, hot, and dense – a damp blanket that saps energy and motivation because everything feels so heavy. I may indeed have that dream somewhere in my heart, but the brutal reality has buried it like a seed in a garden.

*So the challenge for me in these scriptures today is to have a deeper reservoir, to lift up a more mature faith at a time in which we need some adults in the room. The challenge is to know that dream of God’s kin-dom is a seed, and if it feels buried, then we find ways to keep it watered and we pull out the weeds and we set the conditions so it will grow into something fruitful and real. We must believe that God will prevail. I’m not asking for us to believe in supernatural intervention or some kind of irrational cosmic rescue, I’m not asking us to believe that God cares about influencing the next election or smiting those we think are our foes. But I am asking us all to consider not swinging the theological pendulum all the way over to the other side and turn our faith into an entirely intellectual argument. God IS up to something, our faith tradition tells us in so many ways, and that’s really, REALLY important for us to hear and know and trust right now. It is important for us to faith like Abram faithed.

That kind of faithfulness will lend us the ability to say, “My life is disheveled and I can’t get ahead” — but God will prevail — and, in the meantime, I am connected to God. So I will do what I can for today and find my security in God.

It will let us assert that, “people around us are falling apart” — but God will prevail — and, in the meantime, we are called to bring the love of God into our world — so we will neither gloss over the issues, nor give up on the possibility of re-birth, but will seek to be a consistent source of love, openness, and honesty.

This kind of trust will let us announce that, “Our nation is morally suspect” – but God will prevail – and, in the meantime, we are called to be salt and light, to speak truth to power and to raise our voices for those who cannot, or will not, be heard.

May God give us strength for the journey. Amen.

*Parts of the final assertion in this sermon, the Good to Be Greatand “Stockdale Paradox” references, and some of the language, was heavily influenced by Bruce Maples and his work at brucewriter.com.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Luke 12:13-21

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but our liturgy and themes have centered on gardening. We’ve used the gardening metaphor as a way of talking about our growth in and with God. But what happens when the garden doesn’t grow? What happens when we fail to produce a crop, or even healthy plants, or when they are destroyed by pests or drought or storm, or any number of things that can wreck fragile creation?

I had my sermon already written by the end of the week. It was a good sermon about the economic powers that be and how important it is to be invested in the right things, including in the economy of the soul. But then El Paso. And I woke up this morning very early to finish this rewrite to the news of at least 9 dead in Dayton. And, of course there were two or three, maybe more, other mass shootings last week, but I didn’t change my sermon for them. And that makes me pause. I have to tell you that while I don’t always change my sermon in response to a mass shooting because, if I did, you would hear the same sermon every week, for we average more almost two mass shootings a week in the United States. But this morning I am afraid NOT to change my sermon because that might mean this is becoming normalized for us, like we’re not talking about that anymore out of resignation. I’m afraid that if I don’t say anything, if I don’treact, it helps to reinforce what I’m terrified is happening – that we have surrendered to this just being part of normal life. And it isn’t. It isn’t normal. It cannot be normal.

We’re not the only country with people on the edge. We’re not the only ones with people who are troubled, or convinced of racist and xenophobic ideology. We AREthe only ones who give those people easy and legal access to weapons of mass destruction and call it freedom. It is not mental illness. It’s not video games. It’s not polarization. It is easy access to guns. Period. And I know that there will be pulpits all across the country that will say not a word about this, or maybe offer up another prayer or light a candle. We don’t have enough candles here to light one for every victim over the past 24 hours, I don’t see how we can stay silent about it. I can’t stay silent about it.

There is a very good reason that this subject belongs in our churches and pulpits. Here in our so-called “Christian nation,” we have our orientations all messed up, our relationship to guns is as twisted as our relationship with money, just like the man in the parable that Jesus uses to teach the gathered crowd. The garden we are growing is full of dead plants and weeds, and is producing little fruit of the spirit that Paul lifts up in his letters. Where is love, peace, kindness, gentleness or self-control?

The 12th chapter of Luke opens with Jesus talking to a crowd of thousands, so many, the text says, that they trample each other’s feet. He takes the opportunity to teach the gathered masses some difficult lessons about hiding behind religious masks and whispering one thing in private but another in public. He warns them that when they make mistakes from ignorance or misunderstanding, that’s one thing…but willful insincerity, rationalizing away injustice, dismissing real impact with solemn moments of silence is devastating to your soul.

That’s when someone calls out from the crowd with this issue about his brother’s inheritance, maybe just to change the subject ’cause things are hitting pretty close to home, I’d imagine, with all the talk of integrity. They don’t want the introspection, just simple answers to simple questions that they get to ask. After dismissing the man’s request for a quick ruling on his family squabble by saying, “Hey, I’m not the judge of you,” he tells this story about a rich man who he calls a fool. Now, in our context the story doesn’t begin very strongly. After all, from a North American capitalism perspective, why is this rich man called a fool? He’s made a bunchof money, surely a self-made man, and he’s planning…SAVING…for his future. What in the world is wrong with that? We prize such behavior!

The pronoun used by the foolish rich man in all of his machinations about what to do with his vast wealth is the first-person singular. What shall “I” do? How do I protect “my” stuff? And therein lies the piece of wisdom that we are meant to uncover. It is not wealth, nor is it possessions that will bring us life. It is not a better brand of violence that will bring us security, nor war that will bring peace. Once our basic needs are met, social scientists note, we begin a bell curve moving farther away from life-giving things and into the realm of the soul-crushing world of things like greed and selfishness that mistake stuff for life, and money for love, just like we can mistake violence as security, or a gun as freedom.

It is not that God doesn’t want us to save, like for our retirement or for college or any other future needs. It is not that God doesn’t want us enjoy our lives and to celebrate, Jesus clearly like a party. It’s not that God doesn’t want us to be safe, to be free from violence. No, this is a wisdom lesson about how we achieve these goals, and whether or not stashing away more stuff than we could ever use can produce our security, or whether a good guy with a gun will ever truly prevent a bad guy with a gun. It is about how our lives are oriented: whether that is toward ourselves and our own narrow interests and fickle desires, or if it is toward God and our neighbor, toward God’s intention to bless and redeem the world.

Maybe now you understand how I see this parable connected to our gun-loving culture just as completely as I see it connected to our money-loving culture. Both things are about our orientation, they are about the things we say matching up to the things we do, they are about our personal interests and God’s intentions. Jesus uses the example of money, and I believe would use the example of guns today, to say that the way we see things and the way that God sees things just aren’t the same. He tells us of the futility of choices made in isolation from the love of God and neighbor. Those choices always get us off track.

It is perhaps too soon to know, and we want to gather facts and let the investigation work it’s way out. In these early stages, it appears that the shooting in El Paso is another lone, young, white male with a manifesto and a massive amount of ammunition. We may find out it was purchased legally, or mostlylegally, and we may not. We may get a glimpse of his motivation, and I suspect that we already have strong inclinations about them. But we do know at least one thing – we have seen time and time again people in places of persuasion make the same kinds of choices the rich man makes, using a lot of “I” pronouns, asking what’s best for them and their future, and leaving in the wake the impact of a collective good, the love of God and neighbor cast aside for personal gain. We have seen the cult of individual “freedom” trump the necessity of collective responsibility again and again. We know that there is a culture that sees us as in competition with one another, with the wealthiest and most heavily armed as the victors, and that mentality is absolutely fused with racial animosity, the lie of white supremacy and a twisted theology of God. Foolish, Jesus reminds us. That is foolish. This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, what good will they do you? That’s what happens when you fill your barn with self and not with God.

What have we stored up, here in the most “Christian nation on earth?” We have certainly stored up guns and ammunition, in an ideological dedication to a Second Amendment that we have turned into an idol. And we have certainly stored up silence about our original sins – the crime of slavery and the evil of white supremacy that fueled slavery, Jim Crow and now fuels a more underground and sinister movement. We can say that this young man acted alone, and it will be said. We will deny the connections when it is revealed that he sought to kill immigrants, brown-skinned people. We will spin and dodge and duck when we see how he went to the place that’s all over the news with a gun he can get anywhere, and carry anywhere, in the state of Texas fueled by the rhetoric from many public figures at the highest offices in the land about “dangerous invaders” and “rapists” who are taking our jobs. He didn’t go on his own, he went with with his marching orders in hand.

This is what we have stored up in our barns, so much so that we’ve built new ones, bigger ones, to hold the excess. We have so much of it that we can’t even see anything beyond it at times. We have all the money and all the power and all the resentment and all the rage and all the anxiety and all the fear we could ever need. And God comes to remind us, you foolish people. What do you think you’re going to do with all of that?

The whole of chapter 12 in Luke’s gospel is Jesus telling his disciples some hard truths about fear and trust, about what seeking a new way of life will mean to their existing relationships and patterns, and about the dramatic impact that can come about when you actually begin to do the things that you preach about. He tells the crowd, that I imagine dwindles with every word he says, that he has come to bring a fire to earth, to divide father against son and mother against daughter, that to whom much is given, much will be expected. He tells them hard truths, none of them easy. There isn’t an easy button in the way of Jesus, for the way of Jesus doesn’t just want a political revolution, it wants a transformation of our souls, and that means consistent and dedicated work. There’s no law that we can pass which will cleanse our hearts, but we need to pass some laws. There’s no funding that can secure our anxiety, but we need to fund lots of social services. There’s no sermon that can alter our cultural ethic, but we need to keep preaching. There is no magic fix, no single solution to the problems we face.

This is the work of the Kin-dom, the dream we evoke each and every Sunday through song and prayer. It feels very distant to me this morning, for my heart is saturated with pain and heaviness. We can mourn the lives lost, offer prayers and support for those in the impact zone, which I think might be all of us anymore. We can pray, and should, but we must also remember that faith without works is dead, and there’s a garden that needs tending. So don’t remain neutral, standing just outside the garden’s edge, for you cannot do anything there. Speak out in the ways you can, even when it makes you uncomfortable. Do some work on how you feel and why you feel that way. Make sure that you know your own heart. Keep asking why we cannot have safety measures at least equal to the ones that we place on driving cars – seatbelts and traffic laws don’t end car accidents, but they help. And can’t we just helpthe problem? Even a little bit?

God, I hope so.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Psalm 85 & Luke 11:1-10

In the 1970’s, a social science experiment was conducted in the subways of New York City, which are already a social science experiment on their own. Experimenters boarded crowded subway cars and asked able-bodied people who were already sitting to give them their seat, with no explanation given. 56% of those asked in this manner gave up their seats. Maybe that goes to support the adage that you won’t ever get anything if you don’t ask for it. However, I suspect if they had asked for their seat and $25 dollars, the positive response rate would have been much lower, not to mention if they had asked for their seat, $25 dollars and their rent-controlled apartment.

Sometimes it’s not only the asking, it’s what you are asking forthat matters.

In our Gospel reading this morning we heard the familiar refrains of the Lord’s Prayer, perhaps the single element of Christian worship that transcends all of our denominational division. It is spoken more often, and in more places, that perhaps any other element of Christian liturgy. And, if you’re a regular here, you might have noticed it sounds different in Luke’s words than it does in the way we will say it in just a few minutes.

Luke’s version begins, “Father, hallowed be your name.” We are, probably, more familiar with the King James language, “Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed by thy name.” And then we say, “Our Creator, who is in heaven, holy is your name.” Perhaps it’s just semantics, but what we say matters, for a prayer can be an ask, and asking ought to be specific. Since we don’t all identify with the metaphor of God as “father” here, but do, I think, commonly identify with “Creator,” we say the term with the broadest coverage, and then clean up the Elizabethan language a little.

That process continues through our version of the Lord’s Prayer, where we say “kin-dom” instead of “kingdom,” for a couple of reasons. One, kingdom is a pretty patriarchal image and, two, it’s an inert image. None of us know, I suspect, what it’s like to live in a “kingdom,” since we’ve never lived under a king, despite some elected officials’ best efforts. We say “kin-dom” to maintain some connection to the ancient language and also to reflect our ideal that community is what Jesus is asking for here, as he asks that the “kingdom come.” He is asking for rulers andrulingthat is far different than what exists now, motivated by new values, empowered by new ideals. It’s a good ask…one that echoes for us today.

You might notice that we keep the language of “debts” that you find in Luke’s version, despite the fact that some of you will have grown up saying “trespasses.” We do so because of what’s being asked for in the prayer…daily bread, the reassurance that we need not hoard nor fear, for God will provide for us. This is a claim of vulnerability and trust that few of us surrender to in our actual lives. Such a surrender would naturally produce debts, for we are not vulnerable without dependency. This prayer claims the reality of debts – social, emotional, spiritual and economic – debts that will be forgiven to the extentthat we forgive them. So, if you want forgiveness, forgive. The prayer actually asks for a system of vulnerability and trust, something like Christian karma. We’ll be forgiven to the same degree we forgive. We ought to be aware how that’s pretty different than what often happens in Christian prayer, where we ask God to forgive us, but to go after that other guy.

And finally we also change the last line. We don’t so much change it as add it. Please note that nowhere in Luke’s version does the more familiar, “For Thine is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory, forever,” appear. Luke’s version just asks for God to not bring us to the time of trial, the subtext of which seeks God’s Grace and mercy, something for which we all ought to ask. No, that line was added by tradition, and it’s full of the same “earthly ruler” language that sounds comfortable but doesn’t, I think, inspire us to seek something other than a really good King. And that’s not what Jesus is asking for here. He’s asking for a sea change, for a paradigm shift, a transformation of culture and control. He is asking for the love of power to be overcome by the power of love, and so that’s what we’ve changed that last line to reflect. What we ask for matters…and maybe HOW we ask matters even more.

Psalm 85, in contrast, represents some theology that may not match yours, and it is hard to “re-imagine” it in a way that doesn’t take that into account. It envisions a God whose anger has to be appeased, a world in which our maladies and tragedies can be blamed squarely on God’s vengeance. It imagines a transactional God, a very punitive parent model, who punishes us when we are “bad” and rewards us when we are “good.” It may not be yourtheology, but it is very, very prevalent. We might be able to say that it is the dominant framework for God.

But let’s read carefully, friends. For what it is asking is that God would forgive again... “Restore us again, O God of our salvation, and put away your indignation toward us.” It envisions a God who has shown compassion and grace and mercy before, and may do so again. Rather than imagining God to be a punitive parent, it recognizes God as the source of compassion and mercy and then, not experiencing that in their life, the psalmist does a very theologically Jewish thing, reminding God that God used to be a whole lot nicer. Do we ever consider thatas a methodology for our prayers…reminding God of who God is supposed to be? So when we don’t feel mercy, we ask God to show up…or when we don’t experience compassion, we look for the presence of a God of compassion?

When we plead with God, like the Psalms often do, or set about to remind God of who God is, or just go through the motions of a prayer we routinely say, like we do each Sunday with the Lord’s Prayer, we are asking for something. If we don’t think about that with some care and intentionality, and don’t listen for an answer with the same care and intentionality, we can miss the mark completely. We have to work at this, for God isn’t a cosmic vending machine where you put in the right change and, as long as you punch the correct number and letter combination, out pops your desire.

Ask, Jesus says to his students, for everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Of course, Jesus tells his students this after he tells them precisely what to pray AND he tells them this brief but critical story in which a person gets what they ask for because they persist. Not because they ask for the right thing, or because they say it the right way, but because they ask, and keep asking, and keep looking for the answer.

In Greek, Jesus says that the man in his little story about a bread-poor, bothersome neighbor, shows anaideia,(an-ah-ee-die-ah) a word that means persistence or shamelessness, it was the name of the Greek goddess of ruthlessness. Or it can mean simple boldness. Ask for what you need of our Creator with boldness. In many meditation practices the technique is to imagine the answer already exists and then seek it, be ready for it, leave yourself open to it’s arrival. Be bold, as if what you seek is already here, for we do not often find what we seek through apprehension.

Of course, you may be saying to yourself right now, what if it never shows? There’s not a person here, I’d bet, who hasn’t prayed for something only to have nothing delivered. This may seem like such a common outcome for some of us that we’ve given the whole practice up altogether. Perhaps we ought to ask ourselves how we are praying, or who this God is to whom we are praying? Our prayers, after all, reveal who we believe God to be. And maybe that’s why Jesus initially gave his disciples a script.

The Lord’s Prayer makes more than a claim on what we ask for or how we ask, it also makes a claim about that which our prayers are aimed towards. God is shown to have certain characteristics in The Lord’s Prayer… God hears us, God has an intention for God’s creation, God provides, God forgives, God protects, and God expects us to be generous, forgiving and gracious to one another. We might listen for that as we say the prayer together in a little bit, and we might imagine how such a routine, a rote, steady, constant recitation of a prayer we’re probably all so familiar with actually has a chance to open itself to us anew each and every Sunday. It’s not because it’s magic, but because ritual is meant to remind us, to solidify in us things that can be slippery and elusive. Who is God? What is God? You can get a thousand different messages about that every single day, most of them way off base. How do we know something that is unknowable, or touch something that is untouchable? Most of us, I would think, believe that the best example we have of an invisible God can be found in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. So this prayer is meant to help remind us of the claims that Jesusmade about God, claims that Jesus didn’t make up, but claims that were shaped by his life as a Jewish man in first century Palestine.

God, to Jesus, is present, as close as the sound of your voice. God is real and relatable and reliable. You can count on God for the very food you will eat tomorrow, the food you cannot see today. You can count on God for forgiveness and a lack of judgment that ought to permeate us so fully that we have no option but to pass it on to others. God does not promise us our every desire, but instead offers us fullness, wholeness and the kind of life that isn’t limited by our finite bodies or our limited capabilities.

Nowhere in the Lord’s Prayer, you might notice, is there a claim on God working things out the way that we’d like them worked out. The ask is, “Yourkingdom come,” not mykingdom come. Though we pray in classrooms and at hospital beds, in exam rooms and at our kitchen table over our bills, during tests of all kinds and in the middle of our worst times for things to play out in a particular way, it doesn’t always happen like that.

But that doesn’t change the reality that God hears us, God has an intention for God’s creation, God provides, God forgives, God protects, and God expects us to be generous, forgiving and gracious to one another. When life doesn’t turn out the way that we want it to, it might be precisely the time to remain bold in our asking…to continue to look for God’s revelation to us…to keep knocking and expecting the door to be opened, even if it wasn’t the door we wanted opened.

After all, God remains. Not the candy-coated, vending machine God who doles out trinkets and bling to the obedient, but the gracious and justice-loving God who continues to love us into transformation, residing just on the far horizon of our hope, resurrecting things that we think are dead. And our prayers, even the one we say over and over again, can help us to imagine, and to re-imagine, that God who stands beside us right now.

May God’s Grace be with us all. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed,
or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Genesis 18:1-10a & Luke 10:38-42

I remember the first marathon I ever ran. It seems like another lifetime ago, but it was mid-college, I was about 21, a lean 170 with a full head of curly hair. This is not a made up story. It is real. I had been a runner for years, but never 26 miles. It’s 26.1 miles to be exact, and as anyone who has ever run a marathon will tell you, it’s the .1 that gets you. Actually, it’s about the last third of the race that gets you. At that point you have probably fought off some cramps, surely had your second (or third) wind, and you have hopefully conquered what is affectionately called “the wall” by runners. It happens about mile 18 typically, and it’s the time where your body says, “Stop!” And then it says, “Stop,” loudly. And then it screams, “STOP!” And you have to be able to push through that, which is why marathon running isn’t for everyone, though the lessons it can teach certainly are.

We all have to learn to deal with adversity. We all need to build skills for coping with pain, struggle and hardship. And we all have to be able to push ourselves if we ever want to grow. At that “wall” in the marathon, the finish line seems impossible, so impossible that you probably don’t think you can finish at all. You likely consider stopping, and begin to wonder why you started in the first place, or how this could possibly be worth it. That is, as runners will tell you, the time you have to keep going.

I do have to confess to you that a little part of me hoped when I returned from my sabbatical that all the crap in the world, all the brokenness and heartache and evil would somehow be magically gone. Imagine my disappointment when it wasn’t. In fact, in some ways it’s worse. The separation of families at the border and the inhumane treatment of people seeking asylum is not only not diminishing on our southern border, it’s coming to our own state as Ft. Sill prepares to house detainees. Locally our own county apparently endorses this all as it re-ups a contract that keeps our sheriff in full cooperation with ICE, a subject he’s not only not avoiding, he’s actually running on! We have clearly racist tweets from a President – A PRESIDENT – who tells members of Congress to “go back to the country they came from,” which is not a racist dog whistle, it’s a racist tornado siren! That exact phrasehas been used for decades to disparage non-whites in the United States, supposedly the great immigrant nation. Xenophobia and racism still fester in our collective body, and manifest in our individual bodies, and human beings’ intolerance and hatred towards other human beings seems to know no bounds. On top of all that, we see drenching rains turn to blasting heat as climate change continues to map out a bleak future to decision makers who cannot see past their next paycheck.

I mean really, is it too much to ask to go away for 5 weeks and expect racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and all other injustice to be gone? Well, sure it is. Just as it is too much for us to think that it might all turn to justice and peace in our lifetimes, or our children’s lifetimes. We are in a marathon, friends, even if we didn’t realize it, and there’s so much work to do. We can’t run this like a sprint, or we’ll collapse. It’s a scenario that I’ve seen played out time and again, especially amongst people who seek peace and work for justice. The most ardent and zealous activists I have encountered are ones who burn out at some point, or burn down everything around them – relationships, trust, friendship, respect. Without something to sink their roots into, they grow quickly at first, but soon wither and fade.

When we encounter Martha and Mary, in Martha’s home no less, the visit, at least for Luke, comes just after a long trip, with Jesus giving the disciples some heavy instruction – they will be sent out like lambs among wolves, and they will be rejectedbecause of Jesus, not praised. They then witness Jesus confront a scholar with this parable of a Samaritan, a parable which would have been as shocking to them as it was to the scholar. After all that, and much more in the chapters before, they head to Martha’s house. Why is that context important? Because you need to know that there’s a dynamic here, a dynamic of change that could suggest to the disciples, as it often does to us, if they just work harder, the Kin-dom will arrive. If they just invest more energy, heal one more person, organize one more event, God’s peace will come.

It’s not a feeling that would go away. The anxiousness and sense of urgency would shape the early Jesus movement for decades to come. Paul’s letters are full of it, the later epistles written with those directives of necessity, the revelation of John written with powerful and dramatic images for all thought that the world was about to turn. Everyone thought they were in a sprint, when they were actually running a marathon.

The story of Mary and Martha is heavy with family dynamics that are all too familiar. It’s a story many of us will be familiar with, one of sibling rivalry, one where competition between sisters, between women, stands out. How often it is that the gender dynamic we have created in our own culture pits women against each other. Professor Karolyn Lewis reminds us, “Our society fosters and depends on the socialization of women toward competition, judgment, and expectation…It is a way to control women. To elevate and exacerbate our insecurities which are the result of unrealistic expectations of performance and beauty. To put women in a place where they are too busy competing against each other to rise up against the injustice of sexism.”

That’s what seemsat work when Jesus “compares” the two sisters, and supposedly claims that Mary has chosen the “better” part. Dr. Lewis continues, “The danger of this story is its invitation to what is better. To pit one expression of belief, of discipleship, of service, of vocation, against the other. We are exceedingly skilled in such comparison. Yet, when we make these kinds of moves and assumptions, we rarely stop to think about what we then assume about Jesus. To favor Mary is to say Jesus discounts service. Which, if you read the Gospel of Luke, makes no sense at all…To favor Martha would be to say service is all that matters. Clearly, both matter, if you read the Gospel of Luke carefully.”

The word translated as “better,” is agathos. Likely influenced more by this sexism-supporting “competition” that is not unique to our culture, that word has traditionally been translated as “better.” And that translation limits these two sisters’ place in the whole story. But agathosis used far more often to describe something as “healthy” than it is to describe something as “better.” It changes the whole story if Jesus is describing Mary’s actions as healthierthan Martha’s, especially if he is speaking in the moment. Now is the time for rest, Martha. I appreciate your hospitality, but now is the time for restoration. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Martha is, of course, only doing what is expected. She is being hospitable, she is doing what Abraham and Sarah do to the angelic visitors in our passage from Genesis. But that story, like this one from Luke, uses those cultural norms to express something else. In Genesis, theover-the-tophospitality – enough food for three days being prepared – is a precursor to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, where the sin portrayed is not homosexuality, as often claimed, but clearly the sin of inhospitality, shown in inverse proportion to these same visitors by the residents of that region. The expectations of hospitality are used to make another point, like Luke is doing with his story.

Surely both service and learning are part of following Jesus, action and contemplation, work and rest. It’s not that one is ultimately “better” than the other, but, like the famous passage from Ecclesiastes says – there is a time for everything. There must be balance, for if we work ourselves too hard, we won’t be of any use to anyone, and if we only sit and contemplate the nature of the universe, we’re not of much good to the person who is suffering just outside our door.

One of the great challenges of following Jesus is accepting what Jesus accepted. “Why do you call me good?”, he once responded to a questioner, “No one is good but God alone.” Jesus knew he wasn’t God, and in our following of him, we must know that not only are we not God, we aren’t even Jesus. There’s already been one of those. Instead, we must learn to operate in the manner the great Irish vagabond Oscar Wilde suggests – “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.”

We need Marthas and Marys, and we each need those capacities inside of us. We must be able to sit still long enough to actually learn something and we need to be able to roll up our sleeves and get some work done. And we need those characteristics because the race is long, and the road is twisted and hilly and we’re a long way from the finish line. It can be easy to think that it’s “all on us,” that we have been left alone to do the work of repairing this broken world all by ourselves. That’s a disheartening and lonely frame of mind.

The road is long, my friends. And maybe you’ve hit your wall. I think I’m on my fifth wall, and that’s just since 2016. But we need more who will resist the temptation to burn bright and hot and brief, and will instead join the slow, steady burn that deep change will take. For the race is not to the swift, it is to those who will develop all of the skills needed, who will work and rest, to learn to love themselves so they can love others, and who will tend the garden, taking time to remind ourselves that it isn’t all on us alone, it’s on us together, and, ultimately, it’s not on us at all. It’s on God. We are helpersin the repairing of the breach, what the rabbinic tradition teaches when it reminds us – you are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free from participating in it.

May God’s Grace and Mercy be with us all. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

This sermon is the first after a 5 week sabbatical for Rev. Moore

Deuteronomy 30:9-14 & Luke 10:25-37

Let me begin by expressing my deep appreciation for the people who filled the pulpit and for this congregation for not only granting me a sabbatical, but for holding down the fort as well, and during power failures and storms and broken air conditioners, no less…and that’s probably just the stuff I heard about. Thank you all.

It does feel kind of like it is the first day of school and I’m supposed to read my essay – “What I Did On My Summer Vacation.” I have been gone for 5 weeks, though not really gone. I’ve made a couple of drop-ins, attended a TMM function that I promised I’d attend, made a few meetings as I skirted the line between what was my ministerial duty (which I was taking a break from) and what was my social obligation as a citizen of Tulsa. The family did get away, a trip to Kansas City and on to Minnesota with some good time visiting college campuses, being tourists and seeing a thriving theatre scene in Minneapolis. We had a good break, and rested well. I also built a shed in my backyard, with much help from my father, brother and uncle, one of whom is a professional contractor and the others who are, like me, novices…very well equipped novices. We have all the tools and gadgets, but little of the actual know-how. So while the Moore boys got things “square-ish,” my uncle measured again and again, brought out the industrial level, took out some screws we already put in and, in fact, reworked the entire back wall of the structure because the roof wasn’t going to be level if he didn’t. In our defense, our attitude was always that we were building a shed, not the Taj Mahal.

So I guess you could say that I learned that working hard isn’t always better than working smart, that taking some time to breathe, or to measure again, is a good thing. And I learned that a shift in perspective can be more than revealing, it can be downright enlightening. But you all were never far from my thoughts and I did wonder how things were going with little way to check in, for I had made the smart decision early on to go on a social media fast during the sabbatical, which was as restful and rejuvenating as anything…so much so that you might notice a change in my social media presence. I’ll still post and make comments, but I plan on checking it a lot less. In fact, I plan on less “screen time” in general, and more time spent with people, actually engaging in real conversations…you know, the ones that don’t involve typing on a keyboard.

But mostly the time away let me shift my point-of-view away from the sometimes oppressive day-to-day to see with a longer vision. That gardening metaphor really does fit here, for tending to the plants and the garden, seeing the tomatoes actually ripen a little each day, taking the time to appreciate the flow from sunrise to sunset, and adjusting my daily routine, it all made me think about the concerns of this church, the weight of our plans and our struggles, differently. A change of perspective can be very good.

Fitting then that we find ourselves this morning with the parable of the Good Samaritan, perhaps the most famous of Jesus’ parable, with the possible exception of the Prodigal. We have probably all heard this more than once, or we have at least heard what is common vernacular now – the use of “good samaritan” to describe someone who helps a person on the side of the road. And we all know how the moral of the story – don’t be like the arrogant or hypocritical priest and levite, be like the Samaritan and help someone lying in a ditch for crying out loud.

Perhaps another perspective on this familiar tale is good for our enlightenment, too.

So what if we were see the story from the perspective of the priest or the levite? It’s not like it’s that hard to imagine someone from a church walking past another person suffering. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but the church isn’t exactly earning a lot of moral capital these days. So maybe it’s good for us to own up to the ways that we leave people in ditches, literally and figuratively. And maybe we’re too hard on the priest and the levite. We all make moral choices in life, and they often seem complicated. What if we’re headed to the hospital to visit a sick friend and we see someone broken down on the side of the road? I mean, visiting hours are almost up…sometimes it’s not as simple as it seems. What if we’re trying to be faithful, only what we thinkmakes for faithfulness isn’t on target at all? There’s a parable for that, you know?

Then again, maybe we’re actually supposed to see ourselves as the person in the ditch? Then the lesson is that we must be willing to see humanity in all other people…after all, we don’t know what the injured man thought about this Samaritan helping him. We can’t hear his inner monologue, knowing that his rescuer is someone who is supposed to be afraid of, someone who is supposed to be reported to the authorities, not lifting him out of the ditch. Perhaps he was hurting so badly that he didn’t care who it was, he was grateful. Or perhaps he was wounded so badly he couldn’t even protest, like he was yelling, “Go away,” in his mind, but the words couldn’t get out. Somewhere in those unspoken words is the directive to us that we ought to be careful about who we think we need and who we think is untouchable or expendable. After all, we might be in a ditch sometime and need help. There’s a parable for that, you know?

But I’d like to actually suggest another perspective this morning – one that I think Luke intends for us to take. It’s not identifying with anyone inthe parable, but rather the one for whom the parable is spoken – namely, the lawyer, or the “scholar of the Hebrew scriptures, as the text says. We are told that he comes to trap Jesus, but I’m not so sure. He refers to him respectfully as rabbi, or teacher, and he asks genuine questions with what seems like a real desire to hear the answers. And Jesus responds to him as if he thinks this is a genuine question. It is, in fact, a genuine question, one that we allask in one way or another – “what must I do to inherit, or to experience, the eternal life?” Now, maybe we don’t ask it like that. Maybe some of us have moved on from worrying about the whole heaven-versus-hell debate, but there is a deeper, more existential question here, for this is really a question about our ultimate sense of identity, even our sense of whether or not we matter. And there’s a parable for that, you know?

The first answer is produced not by Jesus but by the prompting of Jesus to have the scholar reveal what he already knows….“love the Eternal One your God with everything you have: all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind —and love your neighbor as yourself.” That seems simple enough, yet we all know that it might be the most difficult thing to do because we, like the priest and the levite and the man in the ditch, we harbor grudges and hold prejudices and bear bias. I’m not even sure the Samaritan in the parable to come was free of all that, we don’t know what he thought, how he might have debated the scene in front of him. After all, he was the one truly exposed there. That was not Samaritan country, he was the stranger. Lending aid might cost him more than a few days’ wages.

There are some scholars who think that Luke invented this story, or more likely he took a well known moral fable and adjusted it – like it was a priest, a levite and a person from outside of Jerusalem…edgy, but not shocking. Luke took the edge and sharpened it to a razor, cutting right through the cultural norms of his time and having Jesus lay it out right in front of us – our salvation, this thing that concerns us all, including this lawyer, this legitimate question to be asked of a rabbi like Jesus is what does it take? It’s not really a ticket to heaven that the lawyer is asking about, that’s our cultural lens not his. A Jew of that day and age would have not given a thought to an afterlife the way we think about it. No, his question is really about wholeness. How do I see life that is bigger than just my own 50, 60, 70, 80 years? How can I be connected to something beyond my own mortality?

Jesus’ answer? Well, first it’s to ask the lawyer what he thinks, and then, in true Jesus fashion, it’s to tell him a parable pointing out how he was wrong. Do the work, Jesus will tell us. Tend the garden. Living that “eternal life,” that life beyond our own, a life of love and trust…it isn’t something there is a six point cheat sheet for, it isn’t cut and dry. It is messy and uncomfortable and hard to pin down. There’s a reason Jesus tell us truth via parable, even more intriguing if Jesus is repurposing an existing story. If a Samaritan will help a foreigner in those circumstances, if a foreign, unclean, less-than-human reject can be moral, then all bets are off. All our assumptions are wrong. God doesn’t work the way we think God works. It’s almost as if our morality begins with the most moral foundation of all – God is everywhere, and our distinctions, our biases, our limited ways of seeing things aren’t moral. And while we’re at it, just because something is legal, that doesn’t make it moral. When we’re locking up people in cages again it seems a good time to remember that.

Jesus, in this parable, sets aside all of our excuses, he thwarts all of our loopholes, setting aside our resistance to the work asking us to just do, for “doing” outweighs all the titles and degrees, the positions of honor and the measurements of success. He reminds us that it’s not wealth nor privilege, not fame nor glory, not tradition nor legal authority that makes us righteous – it is compassion, mercy, kindness, justice. Luke gives us a Jesus who is not worried about our perfection, but our participation; hoping that we will see that we are not being asked to right all wrongs or fix a broken world, but rather to participate in it’s healing, and to be open to the ways that compassion will heal and change, but not without making us vulnerable, and exposing our narrow vision.

If we learn something from Luke’s parable, I hope that it is not how much smarter Jesus is than the scholars of his time, or how we’re supposed to help anyone we see on the side of the road, or that Jesus was trying to break down the barriers of his time, lifting up a Samaritan as the hero of the story. I hop we’ll go deeper to understand what word is there for us today, a word about what care looks like and how we can place so many things in between us, especially these days, instead of beginning and ending with a vision of “the other” as a child of God, created in God’s image just like you and me.

This isn’t a parable about being “good.” Nowhere in this parable does the word “good” appear, despite how much we make it about being good, for we all want desperately to see ourselves as good. It is a lesson about making our faith lives simpler, it is about the humility that always accompanies grace. This parable shows us that, “Love God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind and then love your neighbor as yourself,” which can seem hopelessly naïve and trite, is actually the foundation of our souls. The lesson becomes, rely on mercy.This is the messy work of living our faith, like the gardener, who cannot produce the fruit on her own, who misses weeds and forgets to prune and relies on the rain to replace her inconsistency in watering, but hopes for the harvest anyway. It is not, as our lesson from Deuteronomy tells us, some magical incantation only available to the really spiritually advanced. This practice of loving God and neighbor is not an instruction that is out of reach….

It isn’t up in heaven somewhere so that you have to ask, “Who will go up for us to heaven and get it for us that we can hear it and do it?” Nor is it across the ocean somewhere so that you have to ask, “Who will cross the ocean for us and get it for us that we can hear it and do it?” Not at all! The word is very close to you. It’s in your mouth and in your heart, waiting for you to do it.

May God’s Peace be with us all. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

John 17:20-23

Perhaps you know the story – about 50 years ago the Stonewall bar there was police raid that lead to six days of skirmishes between young gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals and the New York Police Department in Manhattan’s West Village. The New York Postreported on June 28, 1969, that hundreds outside the bar had been observed chanting “Gay Power” and “We Want Freedom.” It was a major milestone in the fight for LGBTQ rights. And while Stonewall is a symbolic “line in the sand,” it is only a part of the story.

Stonewall was more than a bar. As reported in a piece from The Atlantic by Garance Franke-Ruta, Stonewall, “operated as a sort of de facto community center for gay youth rendered homeless by familial and institutional rejection, who had taken refuge in New York City in hopes of finding a place where they could be in the world. This continues, decades later, to be a major problem…about 40 percent of clients served by 354 youth service agencies were gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, and…the top reasons they were homeless were that they ran away in the face of family rejection or were kicked out by parents who could not accept their sexual orientation or gender identities.” And we are now living in a time in which some very hard won victories are being reversed by the current administration – specifically for transgender persons, who are being systematically written out of protections for housing, employment and healthcare. Now is when we need each other more than ever. See, it was Stonewall that started something – not an LGBT rights movement, that had already started long before, but perhaps, at least for the people in and around the West Village, and it was the idea of an LGBT community. And it’s the memory of Stonewall that symbolizes that idea to this day. We are no longer going to just “take it.” And we’re NOT going back.

Now, I think that it’s fair to say that this is a message you won’t hear from many pulpits in Tulsa today, and certainly not the day after that same church drove it’s float in the PRIDE parade. And I probably don’t need to remind you all of that, you are quite aware of the church you attend, and maybe that kind of pro-LGBTQ+ stance is one of the reasons you come here. But I thought you might want to be reminded, or to know in the first place, whywe take this stance.

We could start with the 6 passages in the Bible that supposedly condemn same-sex relationships, the so-called “clobber passages,” often the primary reason that other churches give for their stigmatization, and sometimes persecution, of LGBTQ+ persons, but that’s another sermon altogether. Suffice it to say that we simply don’t read the Bible the same way that other expressions of Christianity do – we are not literalists, we look at translation issues with the text, cultural differences between us and the culture of the Bible and we acknowledge that whatever Paul or Leviticus “supposedly” said about gay people, Jesus said zeroabout it. And since we are followers of Jesus, then we try to live how he would live…and we don’t think that hatred of people for how they were created.

But that position comes from somewhere. The reading you heard today is part of a larger prayer that Jesus prays for his disciples, for his community. It is only found in John’s gospel, and it is much longer than the snippet you heard. It asks for God’s presence among the people, for protection even, and for the words and deeds that Jesus has left us to still be with us, guiding and shaping them so that they might not be part of “the system,” which exploits and abuses, but set free, instead, for Love…sanctified in truth. It is a lofty prayer.

The part that we heard this morning also contains, as luck would have it, the foundational passage of scripture for our denomination, the United Church of Christ. It’s chapter 17, verse 21 – that they may all be one. Yes, sometimes verses of the Bible spring up right in the middle of sentences. That’s because for a long, long time, the Bible didn’t have chapter and verse, they were added later, apparently by monks who had been sampling too much of the ale they were brewing. So, here’s our founding slogan, partof a sentence in a singleverse from a singlechapter of onegospel.

“That they may all be one,” is the prayer. Besides protection, presence and this amazing wish for us to be in this system but not of this system, Jesus prays also for unity. That Greek word there is a conjugation of henosis, a word that comes from Greek philosophy, Neoplatonism to be specific. It doesn’t mean just “one,” like the number, but is a word with lots of mystical connotation. It means one-ness or union. The reason I think that’s important is that when we form community, one of the pitfalls is that we think that the forming has a finish line. Often with good intent and justifiable need for identity, we close the ranks of the club and while that might be good for those who are already members, it often perpetuates the same exclusion that made the need for the “club” so important in the first place. And it doesn’t foster anything even remotely like unity, which ought to mean something more like wholeness.

The cry for “unity” , however, is so often used as a silencer of dissent, it is used against people as they raise the subject of injustice and get accused of being “divisive.” Why don’t we all just come together – without changing any of the power structures? This is what makes “unity” so difficult to achieve – it cannot be about agreement. People can disagree and still love each other, which is a kind of unity, but they can’t do that if the disagreement is rooted in someone else’s oppression, or the denial of their humanity. Too often the call for unity is just a chance to flex power or privilege.

Unity can also be used to say, “Well, you are welcome…you are welcome to come here and be just like us.” In other words, the unity is connected to your capitulation, to your ability to “fit in.” Unity, however, has to change everyone involved, or it isn’t unity, it’s uniformity, defined by the people who are already in. We can only find something as elusive and mysterious as “unity” in the journey, working together to seek something that none of us possess, having the courage to seek encounters outside of our bubbles, and the willingness to be changed by those encounters.

The UCC was formed in 1957 in order to seek this so-called unity by joining together different denominational expressions of Christianity, a task that made little sense on paper and proved to be much messier and more complicated than any of us imagined. It began and continued on this notion of drawing the circle wider. And, as it turns out, when you draw the circle wider you find out that you just need to draw it wider still. As the UCC drew new circles on race and gender and sexuality we kept finding the need to expand.

This prayer, in John’s gospel, is how Jesus leaves his disciples, at least in the physical sense. If he had wanted to, Jesus could have given us a bunch of structure, some set liturgy, rules and policies. But that’s not what he did. He gave us set us up to be flexible, open to the movement of the Spirit, searching for the work of a God who is still-speaking, still creating new things in a world that seems hell-bent on trapping God in the concrete of certainty. Jesus give us the gift of a life of faith, uncertain and forever changing, just like the boundaries of our circle should be – growing, expanding, forever becoming new.

If you ask me, that’s part of the joy of PRIDE. Sure there’s some celebration of freedom there, a chance for some to wear outfits out in public that they don’t get to wear any other time – and in a few cases, probably for good reason. It’s party time for some, time with friends and family, a time to sing and dance and be happy. And it is also a time in which that circle, drawn wider, is visible. Six city councilors marched in the parade yesterday, for the first time the city was represented. So many corporate and civic groups, churches and synagogues, temples and the organized atheist community all there to make claim on the wider circle. It is a chance, on a large scale, for people who are scared and lonely and hiding to see others telling them that they are not a mistake and they are not alone.

That is the same reason we are an open & affirming church, because we believe that message lines up exactlywith the message of Jesus. We are to be a place where people can feel loved, not judged, where people can be hugged and accepted, not shunned and rejected. We think that church ought to be a place where God’s Love is writ large, and God’s Grace known to everyone, inside these walls and beyond. We work here to give the rights to everyone that we claim for ourselves, because that’s what we mean by unity.

The dream of this prayer is still not real. We still have much work to be done on justice not only for the LGBTQIA+ community, but for so many other marginalized groups. And at a time in which there is much effort to move us backwards, so much violence and anger and hatred, we must first pay attention to our own circles, making connections when and where we can, seeking understanding and shared witness, coming again to the table where all are welcome, drawing our circle ever wider. For this prayer still works on us, pushing us to seek our wholeness in the wholeness of others, to build on a foundation of love…the love that exists beyond “like,” the love to which we are subject, like a discipline, that asks us again and again to look at what we create…where are the boundaries of our circle? Because here, at this church, we know that whatever border we establish, Jesus is likely on the other side of it.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

John 14:23-29

May 26^th, 2019

The word in Greek for peace is eirene.It means the absence of war, at least in the classic Greek. But it was used to translate the Hebrew word shalom, and in the process of language influencing language, eireneslowly showed the signs of shalom, which means something much more like wholeness, or right relationship. In the New Testament, the word eireneis not primarily associated with resolution of political conflict, good health, personal well being or even prosperity. It is associated with words like love, grace, glory, honor, righteousness and mercy. It is about you and your state of being, it’s about your relationship– in this case, to God.

Maybe this seems like a strange week to think about peace, for there’s been little peace as we’ve tried to calm down our pets during the last week of endless sirens and thunderclaps, or comfort children…or even ourselves. We’re all still pretty tired from a relentless week, from a scary and late night last night, even as we’re probably not ones who have lost houses and possessions, nor sat and watched as the flood waters inched towards our houses. We’ve all lost some portion of our sense of “peace” after days and days of wind, weather and water. PLUS we had an earthquake in there, right? I mean, when do the locusts arrive? Combine that with the threats of war, Constitutional and political crisis, the unknown impact of tariffs, churches in conflict, a broken immigration system, and what seems like another shooting every day and peace seems a LONG way off, probably just as long as it did for the disciples.

It is likely that we define peace the way the disciples do in this passage, as something external. This entire chapter in John’s gospel is the disciples reconciling the news that Jesus is leaving them, the source of their peace departing. Jesus tells them he’s not leaving them alone, and he sets before them a path to peace, while trying to emphasize that this can’t reside in him alone, they must internalize it. Thepeace that Jesus leaves is a gift of God, and it comes in the form of a process in which we give over to God a certain amount of control of all the things that we worry about. It’s a peace that recognizes our own limits to what we can affect or achieve on our own, placing ourselves, our loved ones, and our future in God’s hands.

Often that is a difficult task at best. How do we seek stability within the chaos, knowing that an end to the chaos is unlikely? Chaos is, at least in one way of looking at it, the natural state of things. Life is always in flux, moving, shifting, bending the rules with which we think we control the life around us. So when we look for peace only in the absence of chaos and conflict, we will find little peace. That’s what I think Jesus means when he says, “I don’t give as the world gives,” a phrase that actually, in Greek, says, “I don’t give as this systemgives.” The Greek word kosmosis always translated world, but really means the systems in place that shape our world. And our systems thrive on chaos, they need it…they seek and protect and even create it. Our systems commodify peace, selling it to us with the promise of a war that will produce it, a candidate who will provide it, or a product that will create it. It’s always external, waiting for conditions to change out there. But the peace that Jesus leaves is internaland it comes in a certain way.

First, you love Jesus. Now, not in a church camp, sing-songy kind of way, but by loving the things that Jesus stands for – compassion, justice, hope, trust. If you love those things, you love Jesus. And if you love Jesus, then you “keep” his “word,” meaning that you do the things that a love of compassion, justice, hope and trust would haveyou do. If you want peace, act peacefully. If you don’t know how to do that, then step one hasn’t happened yet, Jesus says. First you love me thenyou follow my instructions…for if you don’t love me you won’t really follow my instructions. They are too hard. If you don’t seek peace, you won’t find it. If you don’t follow the things that Jesus followed, you won’t find the peace that Jesus found.

Of course, the catch is that it can be very hard to know exactly howto show compassion or to seek justice, it’s a challenge to hope or to trust, particularly in a world so hopeless and untrustworthy. And it’s not like you can text Jesus when you’re stumped. So the formula has some addendums. First, we are not alone. That’s a really, really critical one. We are not alone. We have each other and we have been sent the paraclete…not the parakeet, the paraclete. I mean, a parakeet would be cute, but not super helpful during moral dilemmas. The paracleteis the Greek word for the Holy Spirit, at least from the way that our tradition has built this word up. It means consoler, counselor, or helper and the theological idea is that the Spirit resides with and among us to help us figure out how to live out the word that Jesus has left us. So, love + doing + help from the Spirit = Peace.

Jesus asks us to dohis word, not to listen and understand, but to do. For there is something in the practice of caring, in the discipline of loving someone or something you don’t wantto love that re-wires us and trains our hearts and minds for something new. Jesus, you might have heard, acknowledges that there are other voices. He says there are words that aren’t his, and the way that we love him is not to say those words, or offer endless praise songs, or get the right Hebrew phrase tattooed on our forearm. It is to behim – not in the sense of miraculous and larger-then-life, but in the sense of being like him as much as we can, pursuing justice and seeking peace. This is what I think Jesus means when he says, “Knock and the door will be opened.” He doesn’t say, “Stand there and pray really hard and the door will be opened.” He asks us to DO, to work for, to seek, to create, to hope and even to long for what we want in an assertive way that knows we are worthy of it. And the door will be opened.

Peace is not something you can achieve on a situational basis. You cannot decide to just turn it on when you think you need it and ignore it the rest of the time. Faith is the same way. You have to practice it, use it, and engage it…or it’s like me baking a cake, pretty much a complete gamble. Peace has to come from within, it cannot be generated by our situations, but must be generated despiteour situations. We can see this in discussions about the reduction of nuclear weapons, discussions which never include trying to reduce the things that make for war.

As the great Buddhist monk and teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh once wrote, “We often think of peace as the absence of war, that if powerful countries would reduce their weapon arsenals, we could have peace. But if we look deeply into the weapons, we see our own minds- our own prejudices, fears and ignorance. Even if we transport all the bombs to the moon, the roots of war and the roots of bombs are still there, in our hearts and minds, and sooner or later we will make new bombs. To work for peace is to uprootwar from ourselves and from the hearts of men and women.”

Uprooting is precisely what Jesus is up to with his work. He does not promise us that our faith life will end our suffering, nor will everything in life suddenly calm down and make perfect sense. Instead he offers us a way to keep steady during the tremors, a practice to help us keep our footing as the chaotic waters rush by us. Jesus gives us his peace for us to use, not to hoard or admire, but to use. It really is one reason that we start each service by passing the peace. I know that this sometimes seems more like a social engagement time, just a moment to say hi and then move on, but the practice is that we say, “Peace be with you,” and someone responds, “And also with you,” as a mantra of sorts…a social mantra said not in the embrace of meditation, but in the wide-eyed gathering of all of us, each bringing our own chaos to the mix of church and stating to one another what it is that we seek – peace. It may seem just a couple of minutes of small-talk, but particularly when we take the time to look in one another’s eyes and actually “stick to the script,” what it really does is defy the system of our own time, it reaches into the chaos and claims a solid rock on which we can stand…it asserts that in the end everything will be OK, and if it’s not OK, it’s not the end…it lays a claim on our hearts and minds in the search for peace, which we both give and receive in that simple moment.

Peace is a beautiful thing to seek…a challenging, elusive, frustrating thing that requires us to know ourselves, to learn to find our centers, developing an eye for the invisible and an ear for the silent, seeking the influence and guidance of the Spirit that works on us somewhere other than our rational mind, and remembering, always remembering, to breathe. The beauty of the physics of peace is that there really is no equation…working the equation is the equation…for there truly is no way to peace, peace is the way.

Peace be with you…

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Psalm 34:15-22 (The Inclusive Psalms translation)

Acts 11:1-9 (CEB translation)

In 2004, I was living in Edmond with Kathy and our then 20 month-old, Ian, and a brand new baby, Alec. I was working at Baptist Hospital as a project manager for a group of physicians and, inexplicably, had also started seminary. Soon I would be working 30 hours a week at the paying gig, studying for a Masters of Divinity, teaching a Bible Study class at Mayflower UCC, the church that was my home, and starting a new UCC church in Norman. I did also try to change some diapers and see my children from time to time. This was also the time period in which we had to hospitalize my mother during a mental health crisis.

This is not a story I have told from the pulpit before – the story of my mom’s struggle with depression that suddenly became a fight with mania – and I haven’t told it before not because there haven’t been opportunities, but because for the better part of my ministry, at every church I served, my mom was sitting on the second row. I didn’t want to tell that story with her there. Why is that? Well, in part I do think it would have embarrassed her, but it was also my fear for myself. Mental health is a very stigmatized thing in our culture, particularly in the church. What would it be like for people in the church to know that their pastor has a mother with “those” problems? Do they start re-reading my own eccentricities? Would I get branded and treated differently? And how did I process the shame that I didn’t want, but felt anyway? Of course, I was never ashamed of my mother, nor did I really think that little of the congregations I have served.

This month is Mental Health Awareness month, and the UCC, along with other denominations, is making an effort to spread good information and resources, as well as hope and strength. There is no way, of course, that I could speak on such a vast subject with any thoroughness at all without a sermon that would be, I assume, unacceptably long. There is, of course, the statistical reality that all of us will be touched by mental illness at some point in our lives, and that should be reason alone to educate ourselves. But there’s more. Part of our responsibility as an “open & affirming church” is to draw the circle wider, to open the doors that have been shut, so often by the very church culture of which we are a part, like it or not. We may think, “Hey, that’s not OUR church,” but the reality is that for many people out there, church is church. So we have to strive to make our difference known. And, truth be told, we are still somewhat reluctant to talk about mental health, even here at our church, whether it is our own, or that of a loved one. That reluctance makes it difficult to reach out, and perhaps keeps us from providing the kind of care we might with any other kind of illness.

We live, in some respects, in the same type of culture that Peter lived in, with hierarchies and the clear demarcation of “clean” and “unclean.” In Peter’s world, what gender you were, what physical characteristics you had, even what tribe you belonged to – all of which are out of your control – could make you clean or unclean. What food you ate, how you farmed, even what you wore could make you clean or unclean. Here in our world, any number of things can make you unclean – a second class citizen. Documentation, skin color, gender, gender expression, sexuality, class, prior convictions, to name a few…and, yes, mental illness.

If you are unclean, in this system we share with Peter, you are less than, discountable, even disposable. You might be unclean with a chance to get clean again, or you could be permanently unclean, meaning you were always less than, always discountable, always disposable. Think of felony convictions in our culture – do you ever really stop serving your time? Even after you are released from your sentence, voting restrictions, a curtailed freedom and an ever present “check the box” part of employment keep you from moving back into the clean category. When we don’t talk about it, when we don’t acknowledge how mistakes and bad decisions impact us all in different ways, we completely disable the process of renewal or reconciliation. And, in the case of mental illness or addiction, we don’t get a chance to acknowledge how our choices are impacted by the things that happen far beyond our control. In fact, we don’t get to talk about how little control we actually have, which is a much more difficult conversation to have.

That’s why it is so critical for us to talk about mental illness like we might talk about heart disease or cancer. While there are certainly choices we can make to decrease our factors in getting heart disease or cancer, when someone does get it, there are very few who would suggest that it’s their fault, or that they should just try harder. Yet we often do that with mental illness, in part because of our awareness – or lack thereof – of how it operates, and what can be done for treatment.

Maybe it’s more common to hear theology like we heard from the Psalm today, where God protects all those who need protection, and heals all wounds, delivers the endangered, defends the weak, but we know that’s not true. The Psalm is aspirational, not informational. It is a beacon to hope, not a descriptor of how things are. It helps us imagine a time in which things are better, one of the basic ingredients in healing. You have to have hope and you have to have truth.

Recently a colleague recounted a story about a pastor friend of his who served a big church and was a drug addict. It was secret for so long, and he tried to quit but never could beat it. Finally, more as an act of desperation than anything else, he admitted to his congregation that he had this illness, and it was only then that he found the support and ability to fight his addiction effectively. The quote from him that my colleague remembers is, “We are only as damaged as the things we keep secret.”

What happens for Peter on that rooftop is an eye-opening experience to say the least. It completely transforms his viewpoint, shifting his entire paradigm so fully that he almost sees a different God. He goes on to tell his fellow disciples that the work of Jesus is the work of disabling the clean and unclean system, understanding the extend of God’s Grace and the implications of that for us as individuals and for the world we create. It really is more than a simple re-classification of some things from one category to another. Peter’s dream – and his reaction to it – asks us to do our ownwork on the walls we bless and sanctify. For we might find out that they aren’t God’s walls at all. In fact, we might found out that God doesn’t build walls, we do, and God plays this whole game differently than we can even imagine.

The movement of the Spirit in the Book of Acts has an endgame, and that isn’t merely drawing the circle wider, though that it a good place to start. It’s about drawing it so wide that the circle becomes meaningless, thereby eliminating the circle altogether. It is that story which ought to shape our own hearts, and then, in turn, the way that we look at the world around us. Immigration, education, justice, healthcare, human rights, mental health – all of these issues ought to be shaped by the endless expansion of God’s Love, helping us see the world and each other as God sees us. As we move through this Sunday where we lift up those who struggle with mental illness, those who care for them and those impacted by mental illness – in other words as we lift ALL of us up – let this work be a chance to realize that the “them” we think are not “us” are one and the same – it’s just us.

Thanks be to God.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Acts 9:36-43 & John 10:22-30 (CEB)

The disciples, our stories tell us, were not saints from the outset. They made mistakes, sometimes HUGE mistakes. They tried, they failed, they learned. They learned by notknowing where they were going, what they needed to do, or how they would accomplish it…and going anyway. Peter – the one who was quick to deny Jesus when the pressure was on, and who was asked by Jesus if he loved him not once, but three times because of the uncertainty – that samePeter, in the Book of Acts, goes from, “Jesus? Never heard of him”, to performing miracles. He learns a lot.

In our passage today, Peter raises a woman named Tabitha. Tabitha is a woman of great prominence in Joppa, where Peter is residing at the time. She is a leader, and likely a woman of some means, for she is known for her charity and care for those in need. She is also the only woman in the New Testament referred to with the Greek wordmathetria, which is the term for a female disciple. This means that not only was she a leader and a model, she was a disciple, a term we don’t find used even for Mary Magdalene, though she is present with Jesus through the most difficult parts of his life and is the one person all our gospels agree was at the tomb on Easter morning. Tabitha, we can surmise, was kind of a big deal. But that’s not why she is raised. The women gathered around her deathbed, in their grief, pull out the clothing she made them, each tunic with a story of connection and support. Perhaps they told stories of her care during a crisis, or her willingness to give of herself, but it wasn’t because of anything that Tabitha had…it’s because of who she was.Tabitha used her privilegeto help people and that kind of willingness to be vulnerable, to stand in solidarity, that is what evokes God’s power, that is what gets “raised up,” bringing life beyond the life that we will all lead.

God raises her, our story tells us, through Peter, who calls her by name and tells her, quite literally, to get up. In Greek, it’s like asking her to go from a reclining position to a standing position. And it’s the same word that these Jesus followers in the Book of Acts will begin to use with one another, like in chapter 22 when they call on one another to “rise up, be baptized and call on the name of Jesus.” It’s the same word, in Greek, that you might yell to your teenager in the morning from the kitchen as you are trying to get all your stuff done and they’re still not up and you have to leave in three minutes so they won’t be late…I mean, I guess. So he says it, and Tabitha “gets up.” The text says that Peter presents her, “alive to them.” That word being translated “alive” iszao(dzah-o)and while it doesmean “not dead,” it’s not the same word you’d used to talk about something that is living. It’s the word that you’d use to talk about something that is active and powerful – something like what we might call the “essence” of life.

I’m not going to tell you what to think about resurrection here, whether or not Tabitha was dead and is now alive in a scientific kind of way like we insist on thinking about it. What I’m going to say instead is that the earliest followers of Jesus began to experience not only Jesus resurrected, but resurrection itself. Their post-Easter lives began to be marked by the sense of God resurrecting things. Tabitha is another thing on a growing list of evidence for the disciples that life is, in fact, stronger than death and that while someone – well, everyone, in fact – can die, the essence of their life can be quite alive. The real question about resurrection in these stories is not how does God raise things up, but rather, whatdoes God raise up?

In the Irish language there is a saying – Ar scath a cheile a mhaireas na daoine (er ska a chilay a mhar na deene’) – which means, loosely translated, “it is in the shelter of each other that the people live.” Yet Irish, an inherently loose language, much like ancient Hebrew, has more than one meaning for any given word. Scath can also be translated as “shadow,” meaning that it is just as accurate to translate this phrase as, “People live in each other’s shadows.” Either way, we are shielded from a hard sun by each other, we relyon each other for shelter, we live nextto one another…we do actually needeach other.

When Jesus is confronted by his disciples seeking confirmation, they ask him – just be straight with us, are you the messiah or not? It’s an understandable question, for at the core of theological questions is a comfort with the lack of answers…faith cannot be confirmed. That’s why it’s faith, not certainty. But we all want, in a very gray world, to have something solid on which to set our feet. Just tell us, Jesus – no parable, no zen koan, no deep, indecipherable moral lesson – just a yes or a no. And not only does Jesus refuse, he answers with what seems like a harsh response. “I have told you, and you do not believe,” the text says, and you can almost hear the frustration in his voice. And then the icy clincher: “You do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep.”

ButIbelong to your sheep, I can almost hear people crying out, from the disciples gathered around him to people right here in these pews, to this guy standing behind the pulpit. I’ve been baptized, I go to church every Sunday and know my Bible and love the liturgy and say my prayers. I’min the fold, right? At first glance, Jesus’s reply might appear to suggest that belonging to him depends on believing in him. But in fact, what Jesus says isexactly the opposite: you struggle to believe because you don’t respond to the belonging. In other words, belief doesn’t come first, belonging does. It’s as if realizing, really embracing that we need each other is the first step in our own personal wholeness.

Why is that? Well, I don’t know. I don’t makethe rules, I just slowly realize that I’m pretty sure that I think I possibly understand what they might be. But here’s what I think I know now – rightnow, as in 11 o’clock-ish on a Sunday morning in May: We do need each other. We belongto each other. And when we accept this little pearl of both curse and wisdom, it works on us. We begin to see things differently. Our responsibilities, our hopes, our dreams, our expectations, our possibilities – they all change. The deeper we accept it, the less we can categorize people away, the less we can dismiss them, the less we can dehumanize. Only if we belong to the idea that we belong can we actually trust in a Jesus who says that everyone belongs.

This past week I have been fortunate enough, along with some of you, to attend an interfaith iftar dinner, which is the ritual meal in Islam to break each day’s fast during the month of Ramadan, which is happening now for our Muslim siblings. It was another chance to sit in a room with a diversity of people from across our city – different faiths, different races, different genders and tribes and professions – and it was a stark reminder in days in which we see violence and hatred aimed directly at our differences, that we need one another…violence against one is violence against all. We belong to each other.

The aim of such interfaith dialogue and our own faith lives is not disconnected at all. In fact, they are one and the same. For learning to see our neighbor as our sibling, peeling back the scales of tribalism from our eyes to see that we are all God’s children is what our practice is all about. Jesus didn’t want to say “yes” to the messiah question because that would have put his followers right back in the same mindset – us versus them.

This is an important reminder as many of us will gather at the county commissioner’s meeting on Monday morning to voice our opposition to 287g, the contract that connects our county law enforcement to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of our federal government, deputizing our local deputies and incentivizing the kind of division and xenophobic policies that we have seen for decades in a broken immigration system. We do this because the borders we put up – this country, that country – are indicators of how we have not accepted that we need each other, beyond nationalities, beyond tribes. We do this because we know that we can no longer afford to see the world as us versus them. It is literally killing us all. The same is true of poverty, homelessness, education, mental health, immigration, crime and punishment and so much else– does our vision for those systems change when we begin with the belief that we belong to each other?

If Jesus had just answered “yes” to the messiah question, the gears would have begun spinning, because the people around him not only suspected strongly that he was the messiah, they also knew what a messiah does – and they would look to him to build an army, to fight the Romans and to sit on the throne in Jerusalem. And Jesus’ throne wasn’t like that at all. By refusing to “speak plainly” and simply claim that loaded title with all it’s implications, Jesus’ fuzziness instead asked them, and us, to look more deeply, to wonder about our role in the kin-dom, and to invest ourselves in this messy and uncertain thing called life. That’s the thin about the kin-dom that Jesus ushers in — one doesn’t simply profess belief in such a mysterious thing— one lives into it, questions into it…growsinto it.”

Sometimes it may seem like we’re more interested in a Christianity of certainty, with boundaries neatly drawn, protecting us from a world that seems strange or unfamiliar, where we don’t have to step into the muddy pasture, surrounded by these other sheep. But that’s not what Jesus offers. He offers us the holy work of inclusion and community, the work of the Gospel.

And it’s good work…especially when we do it in the shelter of one another.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

John 21:1-18 (Common English Bible translation)

My senior year of high school we did “Fiddler on the Roof” for the musical. I auditioned for Tevye, the overthinking, hyper-protective father role that I still feel destined for. My best pal got that role and I ended up doubly cast – as one of the bottle dancers in the big wedding scene and, you guessed it, the Rabbi. I guess my fate was set early on.

There are many songs in the production that are wonderful – “If I Were a Rich Man,” “Matchmaker,” “Sunrise, Sunset,” but I think that my favorite – or at least the one that holds a special place in my heart, is “Do You Love Me?” It’s a tender, short little song between Tevye and Golde, his wife. After all of the chaos around his daughter’s marriage and her rejection of tradition in the name of her heart, Tevye is overthinking about love and begins to wonder about his own marriage. “Do you love me?”, he sings to Golde as she’s simply trying to get her chores done. “Do I love you?”, she fires back. What kind of a question is that?

For twenty-five years, I’ve washed your clothes,
Cooked your meals, cleaned your house,
Given you children, milked the cow.
After twenty-five years, why talk about love right now?

Tevye presses her further – evoking images of their own wedding, steeped in tradition, and the promise of their own parents that they wouldgrowto love one another. So, he asks again – “Do you love me?”

For twenty-five years, I’ve lived with him,
Fought with him, starved with him.
For twenty-five years, my bed is his.
If that’s not love, what is?

Tevye breaks into a big grin – so, you love me? And he sits by her on that same bed, her unfolded laundry in her lap and they both say those words – I love you – as they sing together, with an appropriate bit of harmony: It doesn’t change a thing, but even so, after twenty-five years, it’s nice to know.

We should notice that at no point in Jesus and Peter’s little love song does Peter use the method Golde uses – why are you asking me this, Lord? Look at what I’ve done! Instead, Peter uses a much more common technique – look at what Isay, Lord! You want me to say it again? How about louder? When I marry people, I often say an adaptation of words attributed to St. Francis to the couple – be sure to say “I love you” often. Use words when necessary. See, trust and love are funny things. They both grow only with action. Saying, “trust me,” is only good if you are a person in whom I already have trust. And the same is true of love, which is like a bank for us where we store up capital and make deposits and withdrawals until, perhaps, at some point, we decide to close the account…or maybe we have so much, we open up a savings account to hold all our reserves.

Jesus replies to Peter by saying it again – do you Love me? He pushes Peter, asking three times not only, I think, because that’s a very biblical thing to do – things often happen in threes – but also because he doesn’t think that Peter is really getting it. Peter, is conveniently forgetting that the number of times Jesus has asked him if he loves him matches perfectly with the number of times he denied him at the cross. He thinks he has reserves, when Jesus is really asking him to make some deposits. So Jesu makes it clearer by switching his language from word to deed and says, “OK, I’ll take you at face value, Peter. I’ll trust you. So, ifyou love me…feed my sheep.”

Archaeologists and art researchers tell us that the earliest Christian imagery, the first art from the young Jesus movement’s development, depicts not cross or fish, not the table or the chalice or the crucifix, but rather the shepherd. It’s not a random image, but something straight out of the words of the prophet Ezekiel, who predicts in his oracles of comfort and hope to a Hebrew people in exile of a restoration of paradise, with abundant pastures tended by a shepherd. Jesus is marked very early on as the shepherd, which is not a familiar image to us. Anyone here know a shepherd? Anyone have an uncle or a cousin who’s a shepherd? If you said Jesus was a plumber, or an architect, or a blogger, we’d know what that was – but a shepherd?

A shepherd, to help us embrace this metaphor, seeks out the missing sheep, rescues those in danger, feeds them and leads them to life-giving water, cares for the sick ones and gives strength to the weak. These images from Ezekiel are used to inform the imagery around Jesus, calling him to Good Shepherd, and to make a claim on the followersof the Good Shepherd. At some point in the metaphor, we move from sheep to shepherd…weare to seek the missing, rescue the troubled, feed and give life, heal and give strength. There’s nary a piece in there about doctrinal purity or creedal accuracy.

But make no mistake. “Feed my sheep,” is not a soft ask. There are wolves and coyotes out there. And beyond that surface danger, the sheep of Jesus always seem to graze on the other side of the fences we’ve established. They live on the across the tracks, on the other bank of the river, on the other side of the wall. Barbara Brown Taylor says we turn this ask for love into a “lambs and rainbows” moment, as if Jesus is asking us to just be “nice” to each other. It’s a vague, beneficial feeling towards a generalized other. There’s no cost, no surrender, no change or transformation. It’s “don’t worry, be happy” on an endless loop, when it’s really be troubled a lot, by a Gospel that is both comforting and disruptive, grace-filled and demanding.

What Jesus is asking Peter for – again and again and again – is to give the kind of love he has given. He’s asking him to not only see “the other,” and to love “the other,” but to be willing to give, to sacrifice, for “the other.” It’s a dangerous and bold ask, which is why he asks Peter so many times. Peter’s yes, Jesus realizes, is to something different, and Jesus wants to make sure he knows what he’s saying yes to, for there is an important distinction between what Peter calls love and what Jesus calls love. When Jesus asks Peter, “Do you love me?”, he is asking him to showthis, not to say it.

Tevye and Golde have a lesson for us as well. Anyone can say, “I love you,” but can they show it. Can they say, “I love you,” without saying a word? And then, the lesson goes, you can also show your love over and over, and forget to say it. See, we need both. We live in a time in which a cultural Christianity makes a claim on the words – say you love Jesus and you can go on about your business, with nary a regard for the missing, the wounded, the hungry, the sick or the weak. It’s a claim on the power, without the vulnerability of need or weakness. For such a claim, Jesus would ask again, and again, and again – do you love me? Then feed my sheep.

And then there’s a progressive Christianity, one that leans very heavy on deeds, having no issue with trying to live out our faith, and yet that same progressive tradition has trouble with the words, “I love Jesus.” We shy away from that because we’ve witnessed it being so misused, so abused and twisted. We shy away from it because it gets us out of our heads and into our hearts, and it’s a vulnerable place. So, in the name of saying, “We’re Christians, but not like THAT,” we’ve set aside the very thing that might replenish our souls, weary from the work of the world. For we need both. We need the word and the deed. We need to be able to say, “I love you, Jesus,” AND to show it with the way we live our lives.

This is the beginning of trust, to know both sides of this – the word and the deed, the promise and the action, the Christ and the Christian. And Jesus knows that trust is a better compliment than love, so he seeks from his disciples that trust – which is only created when actions meet words. Jesus’ resurrection call is aspirational…we hear the words, we share the dream, we take the action. He has to ask Peter again and again and again because he wants to make sure that Peter – and by extension all of us – is connecting himself to Love – a Love that will make demands, a Love that will make us change our minds and hearts, a Love that we will be subject to, not the other way around. No longer, as he says with a metaphor of age, will we tie our own belt and walked around wherever we want, but instead we will stretch out our hands and another will tie our belt and lead us where we don’t want to go.

There is a wisdom in this seaside appearance of Jesus – that we, like Peter, might come to understand that we need both a rigorous, active faith that comes from within us and something to which we are subject, a Christ who has risen and a God who did the raising, so that there is a name to evoke against the power and evil and injustice in the world when it feels as though our actions alone will never prevail. Like Peter, we can understand that faith is something we live, to something we possess or wield or weaponize. Like Peter, we need to both love Christ and Love likeChrist. We must have both so that God’s miracles don’t become somiraculous as to be useless, vacuous…they must live inus and through us to be of any good. It’s the words that may connect and inspire us, butit’s the deeds that will transform us. When Golde says, “I love you,” it’s because of the work of those deeds on her own heart, and when Tevye repeats it back, it’s for the same reason. They have grown a love out of action, which is something that faith actually lives for…it is the work of faith.

Christianity lost a powerful voice for the work of faith this weekend – a voice which lifted up doubt and lack of belief, mistrust and the need for community as Holy things. Rachel Held Evans, a self-described “ex-vangelical,” who found a home in the liturgy and mystery of the Episcopalian tradition, died at the age of 37 – far too soon. She made a name for herself re-imagining her upbringing, embracing the #BlackLivesMatter and LGBTQ+ movements and taking on her tradition. She is known for her words, but the witness in the days since her death is as much to her deeds of kindness, inclusion and hopeful engagement. She once wrote, “I thought God wanted to use me to show gay people how to be straight. Instead God used gay people to show me how to be Christian.” And she also wrote,“Imagine if every church became a place where everyone is safe, but no one is comfortable. Imagine if every church became a place where we told one another the truth. We might just create sanctuary.” She reminded us that, “If you want to do violence in this world, you will always find the weapons. If you want to heal, you will always find the balm.” She spoke of this table as something to which we are subject, a table that she said was not my table or your table, but Jesus’ table – and all who are hungry are welcome. She connected words to deeds and while I will most remember her by her words, we can all remember her in our deeds, as we ought to remember Jesus who, in the words of Ms. Evans, “was ready to stop waging war and start washing feet.”

Thanks be to God.  Amen.