Online Worship Service

March 29^th , 2020

Lent V

WELCOME + ANNOUNCEMENTS

• I’d like to remind us all that while our church lives have been interrupted, the work of the church goes on, and that means helping to provide for the support systems that exist in our city. It is standard for us to gather non-perishable food for the Kendell-Whittier food bank on the first Sunday of each month and that continues. Please feel free, as you feel comfortable, to drop food off at the church. Our building is closed to the public, and has been for almost two weeks, but the church administrator, Scott Arnold, is here from 10-4, Monday-Friday and you can drop off food outside, call us and we’ll pick it up and deliver it to Kendell-Whittier. Physical distancing, friends…it’s what all the cool kids are doing.
• And speaking of that, here’s another reminder that you need to be sure your sources of news and information concerning COVID-19 are solid and reliable. The Centers for Disease Control website, the World Health Organization, and more locally the Tulsa Health Department are great sources. As the crisis expands, and I think we all need to expect the number to increase dramatically, having good sources of verified information will be important in helping to curb our fears. Remember, we’re looking for good data, not good opinion. Choose the head of the CDC over your cousin’s Facebook post, please…unless she’s reporting what the head of the CDC said.
• One last note – we still have Easter lilies being delivered to the church. Ordinarily we would decorate the sanctuary for Easter with them and then people would donate them or take them home. We’re going ahead with that plan, though it is almost certain that we won’t be holding in-person Easter services on Easter Sunday. We’ll still use the lilies for decoration and also then have them delivered to you at home, or you can drop by to pick them up – we’ll use them to remind us that Easter is upon us regardless of the circumstances. We are the church regardless of the circumstances. So, please – reach out in the coming week to the friends that you typically pass the peace to on a Sunday morning. We need physical distancing, but also need lilies and phone calls and emails to stay connected.

OPENING HYMN

#478 NCH I’ve Got Peace Like a River

Verses 1-3

WELCOMING LITURGY (responsive – based on Psalm 95)

One: The 40 days of Lent

urge us to remember our foundations,

to anchor our hope in something solid,

to restore our trust

in God’s Love and Grace,

ALL: Our souls wait for you, O God.

One: In the stillness… In the quiet… In all that rests on our minds and hearts…

ALL: Our souls wait for you, O God.

One: In everything moving too quickly…

In our feelings of helplessness before all the obstacles that surround…

As anxiety abounds and needs exceed our capacities…

ALL: Our souls wait for you, O God.

One: Though we cannot yet perceive the way from here…

We do not give up on each other. We do not give in to despair.

We trust in the One who has companioned life and love

through the troubles of every generation.

We’ve got peace, like a river, in our souls.

ALL: Our hope is this: through all things,

God is with us…

Peace like a river,

Joy like a fountain,

Love like and ocean,

and Faith like an anchor.

#478 NCH I’ve Got Peace Like a River

Verse 4

AFFIRMATION

Friends, in these difficult times, we are all doing new things, or the same things in new ways, all the time, every day. We are missing the mark, we are failing in commitments or breaking covenant relationships as we struggle in all of the newness. None of us are moving through life perfectly, or without error, even deep, profound mistakes.

In Christ, we are forgiven.

So hear the Good News. We are Children of God, beloved by God and accepted by God.

Thanks be to God. AMEN.

SCRIPTURE READING Ezekiel 37:1-14 (Common English Bible)

Following reading: These are words of our tradition.

God, grant us insight.

Thanks be to you, O God.

THE MESSAGE

THE PSALMS

Psalm 130 – from The Work of the People

PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE

Prayer requests to rev.gina.woods@gmail.com.

THE LORD’S PRAYER (using these or whichever words are closest to your heart)

Our Creator, who is in heaven, holy is your name. Your kin-dom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For you reign in the power that is love, now and always. AMEN.

CLOSING HYMN

#423 NCH Great is Your Faithfulness

BENEDICTION

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.

Numbers 21:4-9 & John 3:1-17 (Common English Bible Translations)

These are weird stories. I mean, let’s be honest. They’re just weird. And complicated. My goodness, there’s a reason that St. Augustine chose an eagle to symbolize John and his gospel – it’s language and imagery soars high above our heads, swooping in and out of our sight, and maybe poops on us every once in awhile. John’s gospel is incredibly dense and full of symbolic and metaphorical language, not to mention a complex theology that sometimes contradicts itself, as theologies often do. But, this is Lent – not a time to shirk theological quandaries or refuse to dig a little deeper. So, what’s left to us is to approach this as we might a picture of a pile of candy canes made into a 2000 piece jigsaw puzzle. Imagine that for a second…

We’ll start with the corners.

The easiest piece is that Nicodemus is an admirer of Jesus, but an admirer like a person who wears their “Black Lives Matter” t-shirt under a sweater and a jacket and only watches the rallies on Facebook live. He doesn’t really want anyone to know he’s an admirer, especially not his pals – the other Pharisees – who are having a really hard time with Jesus. So, he sets up this clandestine meeting, at night, where he sneaks in to talk with the person he wants to learn from, in secret, because he admires him so much, but doesn’t want anyone to know it. Change is always the hardest part of learning, or growth.

Jesus, as he often does in John’s gospel, knows everything and is expecting this action from Nicodemus. He doesn’t waste any time, meeting his praise with this – “Very truly, I tell you,” – in other words, pay close attention — “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Now, right away some of you might be thinking, did pastor say that right? Isn’t it – “born again?” I’m so happy you noticed. Here’s our first corner piece. The phrase, in Greek, is GennEthE AnOthen, which literally means “begotten from an up-place.” AnOThen is an adverb, and can mean: from above, or from a higher place, it can mean from the first, or from the beginning, or it can mean anew, or over again. Given those options we might think that we should of course translate it as “anew, or over again” because we are used to the choice the King James Version of the Bible made – “born again.” Yet this is not the only option, maybe not even the best option, and it is loaded. It leads us full speed into a particular theology, one that is quite prevalent here in our neck of the woods.

This flavor of Christianity says the Bible is inerrant, that the steps to becoming Christian are – focus on your sinfulness, on Jesus dying for those sins and your need to believe in him or face eternal damnation. Then there’s other things that follow, now including some political positions that one must have with equal certainty as a sort of sign of your “born again-ness.” This, despite its heavy saturation where we live, is a pretty recent theological invention and not representative of the richness of the Christian tradition.

Nicodemus, for his part, responds to this assertion from Jesus that he must have another birth of some kind with literalism, a big mistake with the Jesus of John’s gospel, who is always speaking in riddles and metaphor. “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” – a statement that is as ridiculous to hear out loud as it is gross to imagine. C’mon, Nicodemus – have a little imagination. Jesus does not let him off the hook but answers with even more cryptic language about water and Spirit and flesh and wind blowing where it will.

When I read John’s gospel, I am often reminded of the movie, Shakespeare in Love, where Geoffrey Rush plays Philip Henslowe a sort of producer of plays in his day and age, working with Marlowe and Shakespeare creating plays in the Globe theatre. He makes some rather shady business acquaintances along the way as he seeks whatever capital he can to get the plays made.

At one point in the movie, with Shakespeare in a writer’s block, he promises the local gangster, Mr. Fennyman, that the play will go on and he will get his money back. He pleads his case saying, “Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.” Fennyman responds, “So what do we do? And Henslow replies, “Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.” “How?”, Fennyman asks. “I don’t know. It’s a mystery.”

That’s the operative word in Christianity that has been lost in the shift towards fundamentalism. Where is there room for mystery…for stating that the resurrection is a reality, but being thin on details because it’s not something we understand with our heads, it’s something in which we trust with our hearts? How do we acknowledge that we understand there to be some kind of interaction between God and humanity, centered on Jesus and his life, something that involves his death on a cross, but we don’t fully comprehend it? How do we step away from the certainty of Jesus’ impact on what happens to us after we die and live into the mystery of what Jesus means for our lives before we die?

The passage today features heavily in the heaven-or-hell theology that fills much of the religious airwaves in our context. First corner is “born again,” and the second corner is, “For God so loved the world.” John 3:16. It’s in the top ten of Bible studies, always part of our memorization collection from Sunday School, and, of course, it’s been plastered all over major sporting events for decades. It is so prevalent that the “John 3:16” sign forms the basis for many people’s experience of Christianity. Many even claim John 3:16 as “the gospel in a nutshell,” as if Jesus’ death is the good news – and our afterlife the only reward, the only meaning that can possibly be ascribed and, likewise, a meaning that most of us cannot accept.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.” It’s not even the whole thought, the entire paragraph, which also says in the very next verse, the one that doesn’t get referenced on the signs – “God didn’t send his Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” When you add that, it makes it much harder to see the previous verse in the accusatory way that it is often presented. It sets forth Jesus as a cosmic rescue plan, rather than cosmic sacrifice.

This is a highly coded message in John’s time, and it is still coded now, only the codes are different, and working only with a translation doesn’t help this at all, for many of the concepts from the ancient Greek-speaking world don’t translate along with the simple word-to-word transfer. As an example, we read, “For God so loved the world,” and we hear this – “God loved the world so much,” as if the word “so” were a qualifier of degree. We hear it as a precursor to the claim that Jesus dies for our sins as substitutionary atonement, that cosmic sacrifice and it introduces for us this dilemma – dealing with a God whose supposed unconditional love is so big it requires very conditional penance. It makes no sense to claim this word “love” in the name of a God who sends his son to be tortured and killed because we owe God. If that’s love, you might rightly say to yourself, I don’t want any part of it.

But the Greek word outos, here translated as “so much,” can just as easily mean “in this way” or “in this manner”. So this can be read, perhaps ought to be read, “God loved the world in this way, he gave his only Son, etc.” Read this way, we might also see a theological model where God is sending Jesus for some other reason, with some other agenda, maybe Jesus as a messenger to announce God’s actual agenda for us as humanity, an agenda that includes mercy and compassion, the ending of hierarchy and the embrace of diversity. Then, this version of the story goes, WE kill him, not God, because that agenda is too threatening, too revolutionary. And, in the next turn, the resurrection means something else entirely, as well…but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We’ll save that part for Easter.

Except that this much should be said now – there are many different explanations of what happens to Jesus, both on the cross and after. John, for instance, uses this example from what he would have called scripture then, what we call the Hebrew Bible, or the so-called “Old” Testament. It is from Numbers, this reference to Moses lifting up the serpent in the wilderness. The Rev. Carl Gregg, from the Patheos website, describes it this way:

“…the Israelites are wandering in the wilderness following the Exodus from Egypt.
And they are growing impatient with year after year of hiking around the Sinai Peninsula. They don’t like the food and there’s not enough water. And in one of those classic Hebrew Bible moments, God responds to their complaints by sending “poisonous serpents among the people.” It’s kind of like treating a broken arm by smashing the patient’s toe with a hammer. Your arm may not feel better, but you’re too busy screaming about your toe to complain about your arm.

In this case, all those poisonous serpents biting people, gave the Israelites some perspective. They stopped complaining about the quality of the food, and started praying for God to contain the snakes. In response God told Moses to,‘Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.’ So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.” That is the immediate background the writer of the Gospel of John has in mind: just as Moses lifted up a bronze serpent to cure people bitten by the snakes, so God lifted up Jesus “that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

It is a story about remembering to trust in God for healing and salvation, to not squabble about minor inconveniences and remember the bigger pictures of freedom, justice and liberation. It isn’t confess your sins, say the right magic words and get water on you in the proper fashion. No, faithing is learning to see yourself and the world in a different way. Interestingly, later in 2 Kings, the story is told of King Hezekiah breaking this bronze serpent into pieces, for people had started praising it as an idol, turning faith into a formula, not a relationship…they saw the bronze serpent as an end in itself, disabling the purpose of religious practice, which is not to support orthodoxy, but to bring us closer to God and, therefore, one another.

Jesus calls on Nicodemus to walk away from the power and privilege of his leadership position and join what is seen by everybody as a lost cause for justice and liberation, to cast in his lot with outcasts, to move his believe from his head to his heart…and then to his feet and hands. Jesus is also pushing his followers to understand that new life emerges constantly from the old, that God sends new life from above and new perspectives to interrupt our old habits. This is what Jesus names as salvation, that we will finally pay attention to the ways that God has been trying to tell us that Love and Grace are the ways God intends us to live with one another. Maybe if we look upon Jesus lifted up, John tries to impart to us, we will finally accept that message. God sent Jesus so the world might be saved through him…not as an act of membership in a particular religious tradition, not as a competition, not as an act of exclusion, but through his message of love and the vision he bears an act of incredible inclusion, drawing the whole world to the Way of Jesus…not that we might all believe the same things about Jesus, but rather so we might act like Jesus. For whatever our theology, whatever construction we have created or accepted or internalized to explain to ourselves what happened on the cross or after, even if our strategy has been not to think about it at all, I know we don’t manage to think ourselves into a meaningful encounter with the Holy.

Some might call John 3:16 the “gospel in a nutshell.” I prefer Micah 6:8:
“God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does God require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Though we might indeed develop theologies, living our faith is where we encounter God, in the momentary meeting of the stranger, in the chance encounter that slowly seems not-so-chance, in the singing…what wondrous love is this…where our heads may fail, but our hearts know the way. For the mystery is where we find God, in faith we connect to the Holy, in trust we find our way home, our salvation tied to doing justice, loving kindness, (and our neighbor, and our enemy) and walking humbly with God.

May we learn to love the world in this way — as God so loves the world…so much that God gave to us Jesus…whatever that means.
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 2:15-17 + 3:1-7

Matthew 4:1-11

We enter into Lent this season courtesy of a lectionary set of readings that are kind of all over the place, an out-of-order, jumbled up mess…like life. It would make more sense if we read today’s passage from Matthew right after we read the baptism of Jesus passage a couple of weeks ago, but instead we jumped way ahead to the “transfiguration” last Sunday and now we’re back, hearing the second part of the story where the Spirit comes down upon Jesus, like a dove, pronouncing him the blessed Son of God, in whom God finds happiness.

The very next line, bereft of it’s drama since we interrupted it with a trip up a mountain, is this – “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit (the same Spirit who just anointed him) into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” The lesson apparently is – if you get baptized, be ready! The devil’s coming after you. And there may be some truth to that, though it’s not the Devil we might have in our heads. We’ll have to try really hard to set aside our sense of Dante and Milton or the Omen movies or TV shows, which work on us as much as anything that’s in the text about a “devil,” which isn’t much. What is important is the sense of temptation…or the tempter, to personify it, or the accuser, or the slanderer…all of which are descriptors of this character that pops up in the Bible, in the book of Job, in the gospels and elsewhere, always playing the role of temptation to misuse power…a temptation that is often present.

What if, for instance, I were to ask you what animal tempts Eve to eat of the tree, you would say? (snake) And if I were to ask you who that snake really is, you’d say? (Satan or The Devil) That’s not at all what the text says, of course. The text just says a snake. But those years of artwork and theological overlay and, if you’re like me, irrational fear of snakes has made the association. Of course the snake is the devil. The devil is gross, snakes are gross, ipso facto snake = devil. Yet even if we’re not talking about a “devil”, the temptation part still exists.

Adam and Eve, in one of the myths of creation in Genesis, are given everything they need. They live lives of plenty in a garden that produces in abundance with no participation from them at all, truly manna from heaven, free from toil, from planting or watering or harvesting. It is simply there for them. And, just like they will in the Exodus story, human beings rebel against this “freedom” that really isn’t freedom, and they seek choice every time, because the tyranny of having to choose all the time is better than the “freedom” found in being cared for like a child. It’s a story about maturation, the kind of maturation we all go through moving from child to adult…at least most of us go through it. The garden has been sold to so many of us as a story about the supposed origins of sin and shame, even the subjugated role of women, but the deeper Jewish and Christian tradition lifts it up as as story about what it means to be human, and what it means to be in relationship with the Divine. It is a story about how we relate to power.

There is the one commandment in the garden – don’t eat from that tree. It is the tree of the knowledge of “the good and the bad”, which seems to be an idiomatic phrase in ancient Hebrew, something that, in other places in the Bible, means “everything.” In other words, don’t eat of that tree that is supposed to let you know everything that God knows, effectively making you a god. And the snake doesn’t represent the devil, the snake represents the temptation of wisdom. See, in the ancient Mediterranean world, snakes were a symbol of wisdom, which is why, to this day, they intertwine on the symbol for physicians.

It is wisdom tempting Adam and Eve. Now, don’t get me or the story wrong, it’s not saying wisdom is all bad. After all, the rest of the garden is open to them, to learn from, to study, to engage with – it’s just this one tree that says they’ll know everything. And guess what? After they eat? They clearly don’t know everything. They use fig leaves to cover themselves after they eat of the fruit, and any listener from that era would grimace when they heard that. Fig leaves are like #2 sandpaper, the worst thing you could choose for loincloths. They’re not like God at all, the story reveals. It’s a humorous take on the willingness of human beings to think we know it all when, in fact, we are all too quickly exposed by our own limitations.

The garden is a deeply psychological and spiritual story that won’t let us stop with “sex bad, women bad, naked bad, fig leaves good.” That’s an easy out. Instead it asks us for something deeper, though it asks us in ancient Hebrew which really narrows down it’s impact here in 21^st century Tulsa. There’s wordplay at work here, the word for “clever,” used to describe the snake, is the same root for the word for “nakedness,” used to describe the couple. Those words are ‘arum and ‘arumim, a point that the hearers of this story in Hebrew would have immediately heard, something like one translator puts it – “The man and the woman were nude, and the snake was shrewd.” And, guess what? It’s also the same root for the word that gets translated as “cursed,” as in the “curses” that God places upon Adam and Eve post-fruit snack, as if all these things were connected.

Our cleverness, the “wisdom” that thinks we can “out-science” nature, is exposed. Our “wisdom” that thinks it can do things like split an atom and then we can control all that power. Our “wisdom” that thinks we can heal ourselves through pharmaceuticals, laying one drug on top of another and never considering the side-effects. It’s a cleverness that always thinks we know more than God, which always reveals a nakedness in us, a metaphor for the ways that we are exposed by our own cleverness. And there’s that curse – the consequences that we face for our lack of wisdom or for trusting too much in our own wisdom, so much that we reject God’s constant call on us to balance judgment with mercy, our knowledge with love and our power with compassion. And when we don’t do those things, when we don’t engage those connections, well, it can feel like we are cursed.

These are stories about how we use power. Our knowledge and wisdom are not things we possess, or things we own, or things we always have. They are fleeting characteristics which we must exercise and train ourselves in, gifts from God that we must be appreciate and hone, lest our tools fall into disrepair, or we lose them altogether. That’s the foundation of the idea of a covenant between God and human beings, an acceptance that the source of our power – all our different kinds of power – is, ultimately, God. Such a covenant begins with a humility, even a vulnerability, that we seldom practice as humans, particularly in our culture. We tend to do strength. And by strength, seen at especially high levels during an election cycle, we mean power, control, assertiveness, umph.

Yet, this is not what these stories model for us. The Eden story tells of innocence lost, and the move from vulnerability that is cradled in protection to vulnerability that is exposed and must be accepted by these first humans. And when Jesus is tempted in the desert, we ought to pay close attention to what he is tempted with, because this story also speaks of power. The accuser, the slanderer, this “devil,” does not tempt a man on a 40 day fast with bread, per say. He tempts him with the making of bread from nothing, the power to turn a stone into bread, the control of bread. The lesson for us, as theologian Douglas John Hall suggests, is beware of a theology which promises glory without sacrifice, resurrection without crucifixion, and cheap grace. Then, when Jesus refuses, he tempts him with spectacle, highlighting Jesus in the show of power, with angels lifting him high, for all to see. Beware of placing your trust in things that are all flash, but no substance. Finally, the adversary pulls out all the stops and promises power in that political sense – ruling over everything like a king. Beware of placing your trust in political power, which is all about domination and winning. Jesus’ way, this story reminds us, is about loving and forgiving. So we see in stark contrast – the way of empire is about consolidating and controlling power. The way of Jesus is about an emptying of power.

The way of Jesus is far more vulnerable than the way of empire. And right now, in the middle of a very pivotal election, with the strain of a potential worldwide pandemic on everyone’s radar, economic uncertainty, the chaos of climate change making weather not seem “right”…it feels like a good time to ask, which way are we going to follow?

The popular researcher-storyteller, Brene Brown, says that vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness…that’s what the data has shown her across her many years of studying it. But, she says with equal certainty, it appears that it is also the birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love. This was the beginning of her ow personal journey that the research led her to, not by her choice at all. She says, you know how there’s people who when they realize that vulnerability and tenderness are important, they surrender to that and walk into it? She says, “A – I’m not that person, and B – I don’t even hang out with people like that.”

This is how I think the disciples felt as they encountered Jesus, the whole-hearted person who walked toward vulnerability and tenderness, who embraced the struggle and the pain, who sought encounter with the things he did not understand and the things that were completely uncomfortable. And they watched with marvel and awe and maybe, at times, a little revulsion. What are you doing, Jesus? Don’t you know how things work?

For the next few weeks of Lent we will be moving through a section of the gospels that we could call, “Jesus and friends.” Today it’s Jesus and the Adversary, then it’s
Jesus and Nicodemus,” “Jesus and the Woman at the Well,” “Jesus and the Blind Man,” and finally “Jesus and Lazarus.” All of these will be a chance for us to discover Jesus again for the first time, with an offer for us to embrace the vulnerability he gives to us, to surrender those feelings of shame, fear and the struggle for worthiness to the way of Jesus, which offers us joy, creativity, belonging and love.

We will also begin studying The Book of Forgiving by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his Daughter, the Rev. Mpho Tutu on Wednesday nights, which will be a journey in and of itself. More than a book, it is an exercise, a workout on forgiveness, that will likely leave us a little out of breath and with some sore muscles, for we are not conditioned for this framing of our world. Yet, I’m pretty sure that in God’s wisdom this Lenten season is perfectly timed. As we witness a sea of ads promising all kinds of messiahs come to save us, the cacophony of promises and the litany of plans and strategies and legislation, as we wrestle with an impending viral spread that will threaten our social fabric, it is good for us to remember that we already have a messiah, and he has taught us that if we have all the political power in the world, if we’ve worked super hard to look good (and kind of ignored trying to actually be good), even if we have absolute control over the basic necessities of life, but we don’t cultivate trust and forgiveness, if we can muster all of the needed things for ourselves and our family, but don’t have love and compassion…then we are being tempted, my friends, tempted by something that may be compelling and enticing, but it isn’t the gospel.

So, let us study together, so that we might remind ourselves where we are going.

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.

Exodus 24:12 + 15-18 AND Matthew 17:1-9

It is Transfiguration Sunday – a high holy day in the Christian tradition, though you wouldn’t know it. There are no Transfiguration Sunday dresses or ties, no special Transfiguration bonnet, and no one, I suspect, is having the family over after this for Transfiguration ham. Or maybe you are – no judgment. We have poinsettias at Advent and Lillies at Easter, but what flowers do you choose for the bright radiance of this Sunday? What best symbolizes the blinding light of this mountaintop experience for the disciples? Maybe we just set this decoration on fire?

In the flow of the gospels, this story stands next to Jesus’ birth, his baptism in the Jordan, and his resurrection as the moments we are told, in no uncertain terms, who he is and, quite specifically, that we should listen to him. It may not be a parable, or a miracle, there’s no feeding of thousands or healing of a child, those are things we can grasp. Yet, it’s clear that for the gospel writers it is one of the markers of his importance as messiah-figure, made gloriously clear in this remarkable and mysterious encounter on a mountaintop, the seminal place in Bible-speak, for an encounter with God. But it’s just a weird story full of strange images and improbable experiences.

However, we really must begin the mountaintop story before they go up on the mountain, for the events in the previous chapter reveal a very odd scenario that we could help us see the transfiguration in a new light, pardon the pun. It is chapter 16 in Matthew’s gospel that finds the disciples gathered around Jesus and he asks them – who do you say that I am? And when Peter answers, “the messiah”, Jesus tells him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah…And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” Then he warns them not to tell anyone else about this whole messiah business, which seems strange since he’s just praised Peter and given him the “keys to the kingdom”, as it were, for his announcement of something that he now wants to keep silent.

Then, Matthew says, Jesus begins to show his disciples that he, “must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” And Peter – you remember Peter, the whole “rock on which I will build my church” guy – Peterpulls Jesus aside and rebukes him for this news, saying, “nope – can’t happen to you, Lord.” And Jesus jerks back, hand up and says, “Get behind me, Satan!” And in about two sentences, Peter goes from being the foundation of the church to being the antichrist.

My, how things change.

It is into this context that we hear that just six days later Jesus takes his three most trusted disciples up onto the mountain, including Peter, who is now out of the dog house apparently. And they experience this amazing, bizarre, even downright freaky thing. Supernatural, glowing light in the middle of the night…famous people like Moses and Elijah come back from the dead like Yoda appearing as a “force ghost” alongside Obi-Wan Kenobi…a voice speaking from inside a cloud, standing the hairs on the back of the neck straight up. It all makes, at bare minimum, for a pretty weird Bible story, supernatural and ghostly. Oh, we can recount it here, quoting the Bible, but don’t go saying that this happened to you on the top of Turkey Mountain, because you won’t get amazed interest from this congregation, you’ll likely get intervention. Things like that are best left to another kind of Christian, not us rational, intellectual types who know the difference between supernatural and real. We’re more likely to explain it away – much more probable that it was just a meteorological phenomenon, or maybe last night’s Thai food.

We rush to explain, to rationalize this story. But, like many in our Bible, it resists that. God comes to people in a cloud, obscured from clear vision often in our scripture. The bit from Exodus that we just heard, where Moses is also taking a trip up a mountain, and God comes to him in a cloud…everything is socked in for 6 days. In 1 Kings, Solomon dedicates the temple in Jerusalem and it is filled with a great cloud, so thick that the priests couldn’t see what they were doing, as if God’s presence didn’t require the priests’ ritual mechanics. Ezekiel has his visions of God’s presence surrounded by clouds with brightness and fire surrounding them. God digs the clouds. And if you have ever been on a mountaintop before, camping, and you wake up at a high enough elevation, stepping out of your tent into an actual cloud…not fog, but a cloud…you know what a powerful moment it is. It does feel “otherworldly,” like something else has arrived in camp, while you’re trying to get the fire going.

Again and again, our stories tell us that this is what God’s presence looks like – an indistinct, formless thing that obscures rather than revealing, light that blinds instead of illuminates, and an encounter with the holy that is upsetting, even scary, before it’s helpful, challenging before it’s transformative. We seem to think in so many ways that we have to know before we do, that we have to completely understand in order to move forward. Dr. King once wrote, “faith is taking the first step, even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” This from a man who was entrenched most of his adult life in a terrifying and confounding struggle for something that had never been in our country, literally making up strategies as they went along…actively trying to set aside their fear in favor of purpose.

That’s why I think this experience in the cloud can only come after the disciples have experienced the things they have on the ground – the Sermon on the Mount, the healings, the feeding of the five thousand, the embrace and the denial. Living the way of Jesus is very difficult, and I’m not sure we understand our way there. At best we experience Jesus’ upside-down teachings. I’d hazard a guess that most of us here can accept the rationality of “love your neighbor,” but living it is a challenge. We can intellectually accept “love your enemies,” until someone – you know the someone – replies to our Facebook post. Oh, the cloud is a distant memory then, the mountaintop giving way to the deepest valley, as far from the presence of God and holiness that we might be able to get, for knowing is one thing…but doing is another. And, Jesus reminds us again and again – doing is better. Doing, not understanding, is how we build faith.

Jesus has to take the disciples a few thousand feet up to pray and be subjected to a laser-light, fog machine, special-effects show in order to get them to some small measure of faith…he also immediately removes them from that experience, taking them back down the mountain, and telling them not to tell the others about it at all. This, Jesus is saying without saying it, is the center of faith…it comes without knowing. If you know, you don’t have any need of faith. And we need faith, especially in these days.

Peter, as he witnesses this magical apparition in front of him, surrounded by this glory, wants to stay there, enclosed in this cloud. He wants to build tents and stay as close to that Presence as he can, because it’s a close to understanding as he’s been. It’s a familiar feeling. We all want God to be clear and present and relevant – a tour guide for our lives who tells us precisely where to see the good stuff and also where the bathrooms are located. Neither Peter nor we get that. Instead, we get mystery. We get presence, but presence that only shows up in the corner of our eyes, before disappearing when we turn to look at it. We get support, as much from one another, we followers of the lit-up cloud, as from the cloud itself. For in my mind’s eye, the disciples don’t come down off the mountain and never speak of it again…they talk of it often, sharing with one another their deep rootedness in the presence, the stories of God being with us from generations past, of the interconnectedness of the human and the Holy, granting a peace that passes all our understanding.

It is our last Sunday before Lent begins – Fat Tuesday is a couple of days away and then we gather for Ash Wednesday this Wednesday. This marks the final moments of the Christmas and Epiphany seasons, this time of joy replaced with a time of reflection.

I’ll be here in the sanctuary to mark you with ashes from 7-8am on Wednesday morning, again from noon-1, and then we’ll have our full service at 7pm that night, with ashes and communion. Why invest so highly in this? Well, because, like the cloud, the ashes mark us with God’s presence, which is something we never fully understand. The ashes help us to hold onto what Paul set forth when he wrote that, “now we see through a glass, but dimly.” Not only do we not see God clearly, we don’t even see ourselves clearly. This Wednesday we remember our mortality as a way of reminding ourselves we aren’t the be-all, end-all. We are limited, even on our best days. Such humility is not meant to belittle our humanity, or to make us feel bad about ourselves. It makes us feel small in the very best meaning of that word – part of a a much larger whole, like witnessing the stars in the sky on a clear night, when you feel a tiny part of a vast universe. We say, “You are dust and to dust you shall return” because it brings some strange comfort to embrace our finitude, it centers for us how much we don’t understand, and that our forward movement isn’t dependent on our complete understanding, just like we were standing on a mountaintop surrounded by mysteriousness and hearing the voice of God telling us exactly what we should trust in.

The story today reminds us that we are to go back from our moments of connection with the Holy, to take those moments with us, remembering them when we have the more frequent encounters with the less-than-holy. It helps us remember that God’s presence is not something we can tie down, or control, or bend to our will, and that there’s no way to walk through life without fear. Life is scary…as the famous Breton fisherman’s prayer says – O God, your sea is so great and my boat is so small – which awakens in us our sense of faith, of holy dependence, of the good and meaningful need for one another. The voice in that cloud reminds us to listen to Jesus, who tells us in so many ways, almost as often as anything else – don’t be afraid. It is the same message of Joy – we sing the Christmas classic “Joy to the World” not because it mentions the birth of Jesus, it does not, but because it announces his world-transforming presence. By singing it we sing away the fear, embracing the teachings of Jesus, even beyond our understanding, welcoming in a whole kind of way, with truth and grace, Jesus showing us the wonders of God’s love.

As we enter the season of Lent, I hope that we find ways to focus on this, to remember, or even make room for, our own mountaintop experiences, and that we seek the one who stands in that great cloud of unknowing with us – for he is God’s beloved, and you are his, and whatever comes next, God is with us, our faith is strong enough, and we are up to it. Thanks be to God. 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.

Psalm 119 & Matthew 5:21-37

Often in our Bible study class on Sunday mornings we wrestle with the scripture because of what we have inherited. Some of us come from a more legalistic background, some of us were raised memorizing scriptures but not really studying them, and almost all of us were raised in an atmosphere where the Bible is the “word of God,” infallible and without error, a claim that holds a lot of water, until you actually read the Bible. Then you find things that are troubling, even appalling, written in it’s pages. You find contradictions and rules that seem, at best, archaic. And so many take the option that seems most logical – they throw it all out. Oh, they may still attend church, even read the Bible, but it’s power has been stunted.

Still, I don’t think that we can just jettison scripture. Jesus, after all, uses scripture.

Like any other rabbi of his time, Jesus holds to Torah, the “Law” as it is sometimes referred to in Judaism, and the Prophets. He quotes them and even says that he is not here to abolish the law but to fulfill it. And fulfilling the law, it would seem, means changing it to some degree. Jesus consistently and openly flouts seemingly sacred taboos, like not working on the Sabbath, not meeting with women, not eating with sinners and non-Jews, not touching lepers, and many of the so-called “purity codes” in general. He minimizes or even replaces commandments, as when he tells a rich young man that it is good that he has obeyed the Ten Commandments, but what he really needs to do is sell everything and give the money to the poor. And Jesus feels free to reinterpret the Law—like here, for example, when he says, six times in a row, “The Law says . . . but I say…”

It is a direct rebuttal to those in his own day and time who would say to the people that every line and word of every law must be explicitly and unwaveringly obeyed, or you have failed in God’s intricate and nearly impossible goal for your life. We, too, know of those who make such a claim today, even in the name of this same Jesus. They hold up the Bible as a rulebook, a measure, which they are only too happy to use as judgment against you and your “lifestyle” choices, wielding the scriptures as if they were a prosecutor in a trial lifting high the statutes of the district.

But before I totally disparage that approach, let’s take a moment and give some benefit of the doubt. If you have no rulebook, how do you play the game? It’s like trying to put together a piece of IKEA furniture without the directions, it is really hard…heck, it’s hard to put it together with the directions. Living by a set of inflexible rules may seem oppressive to some, yet can we allow that it might be seen as easier than living in the dynamics of relationship? If you have to feel your way through building that furniture – well, that’s just too challenging for some to imagine. Just think for a moment about a close relationship you have. Wouldn’t it be easier if you knew what to expect, if there were clear boundaries on everything and you didn’t have to spend time and energy communicating or interpreting, if you didn’t have to negotiate things because the rules were completely dictated? It would be easier. Not necessarily better, not more fulfilling…perhaps much more boring…but easier. And, Jesus tells us with his apparent disobedience of the Law, easy may not be our charge as disciples.

This living “outside” the law, or by the “law of love,” isn’t unique to Jesus. In many ways, Jesus is carrying on the rabbinic tradition, encapsulated by a famous saying of Jesus, that isn’t his at all. It is traceable to story from the Talmud, the compilation of Jewish rabbinic commentary. In this story, two first-century-BCE rabbinic sages, Hillel and Shammai, debate. Hillel is the Jewish archetypal tolerant “loose interpreter” of the Law, while Shammai models the exacting and inflexible “strict constructionist.”

A gentile comes to both, intending to provoke them, and asks to be taught the whole Torah while standing on one leg. Shammai is indeed provoked and gives the man an angry whack with a measuring rod. Yet Hillel replies, “That which is hateful to you, do not unto another: This is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary — now go study.”

This is not a dismissal of the Torah, not a belittling of the Law. Quite the contrary, it is asking for deeper study, for reflection, for an absorption that brings the law beyond a wooden rule into a deeply lived experiential guide. The letter of the law gives way to the spirit of the law in a maturation that is a critical part of spiritual development.

What Jesus offers us here is not oversimplified into spiritual anarchy – there are no rules!! Let’s go crazy and God’s Grace will cover us all. God’s Grace does cover us all, but not to release us from responsibility or consequence. At a time in which laws and traditions are being very publicly and visibly bucked in the name of personal ambition, we ought to make sure we understand what Jesus is modeling here.

In his brilliant letter from a Birmingham jail, Dr. King wrote, “One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” The trick, of course, is in the discernment. How does one know when a law is unjust? What is unjust to you may seem perfectly reasonable to someone else. And what is the disobedience meant to produce? Is it ignoring boundaries that are inconvenient or limiting to you personally, or disobeying unjust laws to facilitate the dismantling of systems that oppress and control entire groups? Those are very different things.

This, of course, presents us with a particular challenge. Psalm 119 couldn’t be any clearer –

“Happiness comes to those whose way is blameless,

who walk in Your law, Holy One.

Happiness comes to those who keep God’s decrees…”

The tradition seems to tell us unequivocally to obey the law, to be sticklers for it’s observance. If you read this alone, without context or interpretation, it might seem like the best way to be loving, since if you love someone you want them to be happy, is to enforce the rules, to get into the business of “sin management,” checking off the list and seeing who’s naughty and nice, like a sanctimonious Santa Claus. Yet that same tradition is full of stories of people who don’t follow the rules. Genesis has many accounts of the great heroes and sheroes of antiquity disobeying the standard practices, ignoring the traditions and rebelling against the rules that have been supposedly laid down by God in the name of God. Jesus is another in a long line of folks who see God leading them away from the tradition, expanding the limits of the time with the blessing of a God who is always saying, Behold! I am doing something brand new! Do you not perceive it?!

All of this brings to question the authority of scripture. Jesus is actually setting that authority aside, or at least taking it down a peg. And in our world of “The Bible says it, I believe it and that settles it,” this is a major stumbling block. Jesus has a willingness to claim scripture not as an ending point that “settles it” but as a beginning point from which we pull base-level values, and re-form them in our own context. Biblical authority then is not slavish devotion to a written word, but a dedication to the inspirational process, the engagement with the Holy Spirit, in our language, that began when that scripture was first uttered, but doesn’t stop there.

Here in the UCC one of our slogans is, “God is still speaking.” It is a quote from the famous theologian, Gracie Allen. Just to be inclusive in the references, Gracie Allen was once the comedic foil to George Burns, and his wife, for many years on radio, stage and TV shows. What it means has many layers. It means that we don’t just take the King James translation – itself a work of process and interpretation – and act as if that is the written word of God. It means that we understand that the Bible is a human product, or at least a divinely inspired product interpreted through human eyes, which means we have to approach it with care, study, discernment and humility about it’s authority. And finally, “God is still speaking” means that, like Jesus, we believe that God’s Grace and Power does not end with the Bible, it is at work right now, urging us to expand our own vision, to take the principles our ancestors left us and advance them when and where we are – right now!

What our slogan claims for us is that the Bible might indeed be the final authority if God were dead, or somehow removed from the lives of humanity. But we don’t see it that way. In fact, we see God as active and participating in our lives, and God’s Love as the creative and moving force that compels and inspires us to act in the world. We don’t reject the authority of scripture, we simply want to re-evaluate it’s position on the authority hierarchy. If we, “have prophetic powers,” the Apostle Paul wrote, “and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and…have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, [we are] nothing.” Love must be the operative law, the one that moves us forward, expanding the previous boundaries. Jesus’ words still ring true – “The point is not to be faithful to the Scriptures, but to be faithful to the living God who continues to be present among us.”

The Rev. D. Mark Davis, pastor at St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, California, says it this way – The accounts of creation, the Ten Words on Mt. Sinai, the stories of the people of Israel, assorted types of Psalms, proverbs, and prophetic utterances, as well as the words that Jesus is speaking in this text, are all ways of “scripturing” – a verb rather than a noun. It is not the written accounts themselves, but the real incarnation of God’s word through God’s people that is the point. “Scripturing” is the act of giving witness to that presence. As such, Jesus’ words here do not signify the ‘final revision’ of old Mosaic laws. They signify a way of “scripturing” God’s presence, which will always be a way of being faithful as long as God is living among us.

When Jesus says, You have heard it said, but I say,” he is not doing away with rules or boundaries. In fact, he just establishes new ones with his pronouncements. He makes the rules more challenging – asking us not to return violence for violence, but to reach for a better way…asking us not to judge others but to recognize the sin in our own hearts…telling us that loving the neighbors we already like isn’t enough – we must love even our enemies. God is still-speaking because God is, through our prophets and our discernment, still asking us to go deeper, to love more fully, to draw our circles wider and to offer the same grace that God offers to us, living our lives as an act of “scripturing,” giving witness to the living God who is still-speaking in our midst, the God who is making all things new.

This is the whole of our Law. The rest is commentary — now go study.

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.

Scripture: Matthew 5:13-16
Contemporary Reading: Walt Whitman’s poem, O Me! O Life!

If you are like me, then this last week has been a sharp slap in the face, reminding you that you are in the minority from an idealogical and political position, and that the values being lived out all around you, in the papers and on TV, are not the values you hold dear. Maybe it’s just been confusing, or off-putting, to see this kind of turmoil and division.  It might bring you here this morning feeling downtrodden, depressed, weathered and beaten up a little and the Gospel has good news for you this morning…
The word that Jesus has for you in the midst of your struggle is – good.

It’s good that you are feeling this way, not because it’s a good way to feel but rather because this is a sign that you have not lost your saltiness. Please remember that just last week in our time together the Matthew reading had Jesus saying…

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you
and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven,
for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

Now, maybe that doesn’t sound like what you wanted to hear when you came to church this morning…maybe it sounds like the exact opposite of what you wanted to hear. I can appreciate that. It’s been a long week and some deep despair about where it feels like things are headed, what sort of actions are becoming normalized, and how far we are drifting from any sense of accountability. On top of that, there is this casting of shade, this gaslighting that appears like it’s designed to make you think this is all in your head and you’re the unreasonable one with all of your talk of bigotry and abuse.
I’m not sure where you are, but I’m in a place where I don’t think that things are going to turn out very well. The faith I have placed in politics and the power of organizing feels spent, and I’m thinking about a future that looks pretty bleak. Then the message I hear from this past week of study is – yep, you probably should feel like that.

Thanks, Jesus. You’re a big help.

That could be the end of this sermon, the unhelpful Jesus delivering us equally unhelpful news about the certainty of our suffering. But let’s recognize that Jesus doesn’t stop there, with the admonition to be joyful for your persecution. He goes on, speaking this “Sermon on the Mount” to people beaten down, to those tired of the status quo, to a gathered collection of folks who understand, even if only subconsciously, that what the empire blesses and what God blesses are very different things and there’s something really wrong with the current state of affairs.

After Jesus has laid out the list of things that are blessed, a list that seems almost laughable given the world in which they live, he then turns (I imagine) and looks directly at those around him. Be joyous when you get persecuted for standing against the existing state of affairs, for you are in good company, with heaven applauding you. You are salt…salt for the earth. And you are light…light in the world.

Jesus uses metaphors that come from the lived experiences of the people he’s preaching to – images like salt and light. These days we use a little salt can bring the flavors of something alive. Chefs say on all those dedicated cooking shows that we’re supposed to season our food in layers, using salt and pepper with every ingredient we add. Meanwhile our doctors tell us to cut down on the salt, once of the two major ingredients that the manufactured food industry has been putting in everything. In Jesus time, salt was not so controversial. In fact, it held a high place of honor as a necessary food preservative, a part of the ritual butchering process for kosher food and even as a medicinal balm, though hopefully not on open wounds. So much more than a convenient source of flavor, salt was essential to life.

So, be the things that are essential to life, Jesus tells them. But there’s another component of salt that is important in this metaphor. Too much of it runs everything. Have you ever been in a restaurant where someone thought it was clever to unscrew the lid of the salt shaker, or have you mistaken the salt for the sugar? Both have happened to me and the meal that followed was…unpleasant.

Be salt – be the essential things. And don’t feel like you have to cover everything…don’t feel like you must be the entire seasoning, all of the essential things for the whole world. According to Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh, the go-to sources for New Testament era cultural information, the metaphor comes from stoves in the ancient Mediterranean which used dung for fuel. Palestinians from the first century placed flat plates of salt on the bottom of their earthen ovens to activate the fire. After some years, the salt plates in the earthen oven underwent a chemical reaction due to the heat. The result was that the salt no longer facilitated the fire, but rather impeded and stifled the burning of the dung…the salt “lost it’s saltiness.” Given that information, the people gathered to learn from Jesus might have heard that he was saying – be salt, be the catalyst to get things cooking, but don’t be only salt, or think that all of the cooking has to come from you. You’ll burn out.

Malina and Rohrbaugh also tell us that for first century people, darkness was a constant. We are not used to this at all because we have all kinds of artificial lights all around us…so much so that we forget what deep darkness is like. But then, when the sun went down, that was it. Most households had small lamps that burned olive oil, but produced only a small amount of ambient light. The typical way for such a lamp to be put out was under a bushel basket, since it would trap the smoke and fumes as the family went to sleep. Be light, but don’t hide it, let it shine. That greek word translated as shine is only used once more in Matthew, during the transfiguration, when Jesus is bathed in the light of God and connected, on another mountaintop, to the prophets who came before him. That shine we’re meant to have seems to have something to do with our rootedness, with our sense of being connected to something larger than just us – filled with the light of community, of tradition, and of God all at once.

All of that brings me back to this place – our church – in the midst of the turmoil I talked about at the start of the sermon. So we gather on our own hillside, listening for Jesus, longing for answers, for some solution to the problems that plague us and we have this same unhelpful answer staring right back at us still – be joyful that you are struggling. It means your values are solid. It means your hearts are in the right place. It means your humanity and your connections to the divine are still intact. And, just like 2000 years ago in the Holy Land, this advice follows, advice which I find increasingly helpful. Be salt. Be light. Not so much salt that you are considered “salty,” you know? Not so much that you ruin the stew, but enough to season it. And be light. Not so much light that you are just “lit,” chasing only the latest fad, investing only in things if they are entertaining…and not so much light that you blind anyone who gets near you, keeping them from being able to see their own path. Just enough light to light your own path, to be able to see what’s going on around you, to let it shine enough that you make a small hole in the deep night, whose shadow threatens us all.

I am pulled deeper and deeper into this metaphor because I am profoundly aware of how tired people are around me. Swimming against the current is exhausting, and when you live in a place where you have to swim not only against politics nationally, but politics locally, even down to the act of putting on your mask each day when you go to work, or hiding your opinion, biting your lip or holding your voice down in family gatherings, the board meeting, the holiday party, the table in the big, public dining room of the restaurant…it is relentless. And how, we might feel with heaviness and depth…how can we make a difference? How can we change the whole entire world?

And my answer this morning is not “do more.” And it isn’t “do nothing,” either. Here’s my own metaphor – the parable of the cyclist. We’ve probably all seen cyclists riding in great packs, one behind the other or maybe two abreast as they cruise down the road. There’s a rhythm and a routine to that. The lead rider sets the pace, expelling a lot of energy to do so. The rest of the riders enjoy “drafting,” where they can take the wind block the lead rider also provides and expend less energy. Then a shift happens – the lead rider will signal and drop back, pulling to the side and slowing so the line can pass her and she can drift into the back spot, the second cyclist now becoming the lead. And that’s the routine that follows. The only way that the strongest rider among them can truly have their best race is with the team. The only way that the best outcome can be achieved is if there is action and rest, participation and presence, word and deed.

The lesson we get from this morning is – you can’t change the whole world. At least not by yourself. But then again, that’s not your job. It’s not any of our jobs. That’s God’s job. Our job is to be salt and light. What that means here in our time and place has been made much more clear to me over the past few days. If we are to seek blessing, in the language of the Beatitudes, it won’t be in the regular venues, or using the same tools we’ve used. We can choose retreat into our echo chambers, which are prevalent and prolific, increasing the division by choosing to participate in the recipe that is set before us. We can choose to escape, to numb the discomfort with all kinds of distractions. OR…we can add a little salt to the mix. We can curse the darkness or we can light a candle. And those pinches of salt, those small flames from our single candles…they do matter. Just like the acorn that grows into a mighty oak, God takes the small and makes it the all.

So in this time of great turmoil and upheaval, I’m going to suggest something simple…so ludicrously simple that it may seem trivial to you. Write down the salt and light you see in the world. Like keep a journal where you jot down every instance of goodness and hope that you witness, even the tiniest thing. Or come to church each week and write those things on the gratitude slips that are in your pews and put them in the offering plate. It will serve two purposes – instead of numbing when you get stressed, you can read that journal or remember those slips and be inspired. AND – perhaps most importantly – you will develop your eyes and ears for the salt and light in the world.

Why do we need to develop our sense for that? Well, friends, we’re back to the start…because it is good that you feel this weight upon you. It means you still have a sense of what our scriptures call “righteousness,” an awareness that this is not the way things should be. Blessed are you to be salt seasoning the blandness of the status quo…blessed are you to be light in a time of darkness…ALL of you, because that’s what it takes. All of us, each salt and light where we are, with what we have, trusting that the small things we do bring great changes…

God be with us on the journey. 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.

Micah 6:1-8 & Matthew 5:1-12

This morning we are presented with a small section of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, one of my favorite parts of this gospel, and scripture as a whole, which we call “The Beatitudes. These “beatitudes” are not unique to Matthew’s gospel, nor the New Testament, nor even the Bible. They are a widely used literary form in the Greco-Roman world and within Jewish wisdom literature and apocalyptic writings. We often think this word, “blessed,” is a word that is equivalent to happy. “Have a happy day”, we might hear from the cashier when they say “blessed,” adding only that we probably assume they are Christian, maybe even that they attend an evangelical church, for this is found often in the lingo of such strands of Christianity. But “blessed” does not equal happy. The word being used, in Greek, is makarios, and it’s meaning is a little more nuanced than just happy. It’s not a feeling, it is a declaration – God announcing newness into the world, a hopeful promise connected first to certain people and then to certain actions.

Blessing is a mark, a way of indicating who counts…which is a sobering reality in a prosperity gospel where the shiny new Mercedes has a license plate that reads “blessed,” only with a vowel or two missing. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” “blessed are those who mourn,” “blessed are the meek” are not things that make sense as praiseworthy in our culture, nor did they in Jesus’ time. They run (and ran) counter to the cultural norms, as direct confrontations of the systems in which people live. Blessed are the poor “in spirit” is not a sentimentalized “poor,” (there is no “in spirit” in Luke’s version of this, by the way) not a declaration of blessing on those who are voluntarily poor or those who express deep humility. This is a claim that mirrors beatitudes from Isaiah that address those who have been made poor, those living in social and economic hardship. And the same is true of the mourners and the meek…this is a vision, an announcement of an era to come that will turn this oppressive time on it’s head. In Luke’s gospel he makes this point more sharply, having Jesus quote Isaiah in his first sermon ever, just before the Beatitudes, preaching Isaiah 61:

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me;
God has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners;
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn;

Jesus isn’t assembling a strange list of prescriptions to us, like you should be really docile and submissive, or get super good at grieving. He is not even talking about what heaven will look like, or what could happen if we were all “good enough” to earn God’s blessing. He is evoking a counter-cultural turn, a new kin-dom brought to reality by the power of God, lived in the here-and-now…a God whose love for us is so full and complete that it is justice itself…justice that will be visited upon the world, a vision which probably ought to induce equal parts anticipation and terror in humankind.

It can be easy to look at the last 900 years of human history and think the only thing that we’ve gained is a date on the calendar that is a palindrome – that’s today, 02/02/2020, read the same backwards and forwards. Cool, but not exactly high on the moral achievements list. Yet, what we might really need to lament is our vision. Scant few folks have developed the kinds of eyes that Jesus asks us to see with as he imparts the beatitudes…we are often too trapped in our cultural webs to break free enough to see the

kin-dom all around us.

In the New Testament world, the esteem you commanded was in large part a function of how important your connections were — your family members, your patrons, and your clients. If you were part of a very important family, whether by birth, adoption, or being a slave or freed-person you were important. If your family was less important, you were less important. If you weren’t connected to others with status, that didn’t make you “a self-made man”; it made you nobody. As you might imagine, this structure created all kinds of inequalities and an absolute iron curtain of haves and have-nots, with virtually no way to bridge that gap, no bootstraps, no boots, no “self-made” nothing. You were born into your lot in life, and that was about it…a system heavily favored and enforced by those at it’s top. Why would they want it to change? Religion and culture often supported these inequities, dictating social and tribal and gender boxes for people and enforcing the oppression with theology and ritual and tradition.

This is part of what made the Jesus movement so controversial. His followers, following his lead, began to step over those lines, eating with the unclean, refusing to participate in the economic systems of the time and lifting up the status of women in ways that really bucked the status quo. It was shameful, SHAMEFUL — like taking a knee during the national anthem or blocking heavy equipment at a pipeline construction site, or electing a gay bishop. Jesus’ followers did all of the things that weren’t supposed to render blessing at all, so you might understand how strange it was to hear him saying what made for blessing…declaring who exactly God was saying mattered.

What is really at work in the Beatitudes can be lost on us, or rather it can be too hard to see…like so challenging we don’t want to see it. And it was then, too. So we have a double issue – the beatitudes are like parables, hard to understand, AND they weren’t written for us…they were spoken to his disciples, who were right next to Jesus, learning directly from him and it still took them years to understand even in part.

Our biggest issue may be that we limit the Beatitudes, trying to force them into the framework of a personal message, something about our own piety, or how we live our life, when Jesus is actually subverting the entire structure. He grants people who are completely shamed in his culture with honor…and not only honor, but honor from God. In front of all the crowds, Jesus grants honor to them, declaring that these are the people whom the God of Israel blesses. Their own families may have disowned them, their culture may cast them out, but they are children of the God who created the universe, to whom all honor belongs. It is a magnificent and amazing declaration that turned the world upside down at Jesus’ time…and still does.

Just a few years ago, the Right Reverend Dr. Jeffrey John was nominated by the Anglican Church to be a Bishop, the first man openly in a same-sex relationship to be thus nominated by the Church of England. As you might imagine, he faced lots of scrutiny, many calls akin to his unworthiness, his uncleanliness, his shame. He still serves in the Church, though not as a bishop, despite numerous nominations, and is married to his partner of 30+ years, even though the church only allows clergy to be in a same-sex marriage if they are celibate.

In 2005, he wrote this prayer…

Lord, do something about your Church.
It is so awful, it is hard not to feel ashamed of belonging to it.
Most of the time it seems to be all the things you condemned:
hierarchical, conventional, judgmental, hypocritical,
respectable, comfortable, moralising, compromising,
clinging to its privileges and worldly securities,
and when not positively objectionable, merely absurd.

Lord, we need your whip of cords.
Judge us and cleanse us,
challenge and change us,
break and remake us.

Help us to be what you called us to be.
Help us to embody you on earth.
Help us to make you real down here,
and to feed your people bread instead of stones.
And start with me.

At a moment in which the church is making these same assertions about “purity” and the supposed claims of scripture…when it is reading the red letters of Jesus’ words in one moment and supporting the bloody actions of power, corruption and greed in another, it is perhaps time to ask ourselves again — what does God require of us?  For the answer is the same as it was to Micah, I think – not sacrifices of blood, not impressive buildings, not achievement or so-called “respectability.” Not power or wealth nor a seat at the highest table: just justice, and mercy, and humility…and a seat at this table, the table where all are welcome, where food and drink are offered without a means assessment, and in a small bite of bread and sip of juice, a table where we’re not just saying “let’s all get along,” we’re subverting the system. Maybe that sounds naively simple, but let me assure you…if we were to take seriously the implications of the Beatitudes…if we were to trust in communion’s claim on inclusion…if we were to simply seek justice, love kindness and take our steps with humility in the presence of our God….it would turn the world upside-down. Blessed are the marginalized, for they are extravagantly welcome in the culture of God…Blessed are the empathetic, for they heal the brokenness of the world…Blessed are those who organize, struggle and sacrifice for freedom and equality, for they bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice.

We know now that time of the great turning-of-the-world, the arrival of the kin-dom of God wasn’t then…

maybe it’s not now…

but, in faith, we believe…amen, amen, it shall be 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 27:1, 7-14 (The Inclusive Psalms translation)

1 Corinthians 1:10-18 (New Revised Standard translation)

Today we hold our annual meeting, a chance to revisit the year past and vision the year ahead, a time to enjoy good food and good company, another chapter in a tradition that has gone on for 70 years. Yes, 70 years! This year marks Fellowship Congregational United Church of Christ’s 70^th year of existence and while we’re saving the big celebration for year 75, it does seem like a good time to briefly discuss the history of this church. We began in April of 1950, officially according to the paperwork in my office, gathered together from a split of Second Presbyterian Church. The split, source of many new churches, came from a disagreement over membership. See, the founding pastor of Fellowship, The Reverend Dr. Jackson Smith, had moved to Tulsa from a place where segregation was not as prominent as it was here in Tulsa. So, when some black folks began attending Second Presbyterian, he welcomed them and the rest of the church – or at least a lot of the rest of the church – did not.

The Presbytery, the larger governing body of that church, asked Rev. Smith to resign, but the congregation, despite vocal grumbling, voted against his resignation. Some began to develop a plan “B”, in case these troubles continued and, soon after, the Presbytery vetoed the congregational vote and Dr. Smith was ousted. So, Plan “B” kicked in and on March 4^th, 1950, about 200 attended initial services at the Seventh Day Adventist Church at 9^th and south New Haven. In attendance was the Rev. Royal J. Gibson, Conference Minister of the Congregational Christian Churches. And on April 5^th, 1950, at an organizational meeting held at Temple Israel, at 16^th and Rockford, Fellowship was born. The charter roll had 300 names. At the second anniversary on April 6^th, 1952, the new church site was dedicated at 29^th and Harvard, the contract valued at $60,000. The rest, as they say, is history.

But that’s not all. After the initial split, and the reason that Dr. Smith left Second Presbyterian, you’d think that racial division would not be part of the rest of the story at Fellowship. And you’d be wrong. It wasn’t but 6 years after the initial foundation of Fellowship that membership for an African-American couple was brought up again…and denied. It almost split the church once more until foundational values were reasserted and, in 1957, the congregation voted (not unanimously, mind you) to open membership to all persons regardless of race or class…a vote that would have to be revisited as we drew our circle wider. We also in that same year took in a displaced European family, the first of many families we would protect as refugees to this country, later ones coming from Cuba and Vietnam and Cambodia. All of these acts let us see ourselves in a new light, and re-imagine what it meant to be church.

A few fun facts I uncovered when I found a whole bunch of historical documents…

• In 1963, FCC hosted First Baptist Church North at a dinner – the start of a long connection between our two churches across the racial lines of Tulsa, until leadership changed at First Baptist Church North and we became open and affirming. We’ll have to re-imagine what such connections might look like in the future.
• In 1979, the tower that used to stand above the entrance to the north doors at the main building was removed due to repeated lightning strikes. I will let you make of that what you will.
• Then in 1995, we voted again on an issue that was not unanimous – we became an open and affirming church, one of a tiny few in Tulsa at the time, welcoming what we then called gays and lesbians, later LGBT, then LGBTQ and now LGBTQ+ as we expand that circle, always re-imagining our welcome.

History matters. It tells us not only who we were, but reveals some of who we are. We can see in even a brief glimpse that we are a church that values justice and, like all human endeavors, is not immune to injustice. A glimpse backwards can help propel us forwards, affording us a chance to do some re-framing.

I spent the end of last week at my alma mater, Phillips Seminary, for the Remind & Renew Conference, where, amongst others, the good Rev. Dr. Ward was featured heavily as he rounds out his tenure at Phillips. I do have to say that I am glad that Richard was not my preaching professor because I would have had to have spent the last 6 years staring at him – or him staring at me – during every sermon. However, I have grown increasingly aware of how good a trade that would have been as I witness his teaching for friends and colleagues, as I see his great skill and wish I could have had more of it shaping me…at least in an official manner, for I think I’ve learned a lot from you by proximity alone! I say all of that to butter him up a little because I’m getting ready to steal a metaphor directly from his talk right now.

Richard spoke of trips back to his home in South Carolina to visit his mother and sister and to kind of “go through” things since his father died last year. As they looked through pictures that had been sitting on shelves, perhaps for decades, they noticed that the frames were cracking, or the glue was separating on the corners, or the glass was broken. Of course they wanted to keep the memories that the pictures represent, so they had to reframe them, to move them from one set of boundaries to another …not so the pictures could be done away with, but so that they could be preserved in a new way.

A metaphorical reframing can come in lots of forms. Paul speaks of reframing, without ever using the word or metaphor in his letters as a critical component of following Jesus. He calls it dying to one life and being born to another. The reality of reframing is not a new thing to us, some of us have lost someone dear to us and had it change our identity as partner, parent or caregiver. Sometimes we lose a job, or we are moved by our parents, or we get the diagnosis, or we find some other transformational impact visited upon us without our choice. What is reframing like when it is something we are choosing? I mean, let’s be honest. None of us have to be Christian…or, obviously, we can choose to call ourselves Christian and not really adjust our lives at all.

As Paul writes these letters to his churches, he is not building a new religion, but rather trying to help the Gentiles – all people who aren’t Jewish – to be in relationship with God in the way that Jews are, only through this path that Jesus has set forth. He’s teaching people who are fed up and oppressed by the culture in which they live. He’s telling them, like Jesus did, that in order for them to see this new world, they must first have to believe it. It’s not as simple as going to the crafts store, getting the right size and undoing those little pins or the turny-things that fit into grooves to hole the picture in place. It’s not changing the curtains or repackaging the old way of being. Paul speaks of re-framing as soul repair, as repentance, as transformation. You can’t continue with the status quo and be people of the kin-dom. Somebody has snitched on you Corinthians, Paul writes. They say you are building factions, making a big deal out of which person baptized you instead of realizing what baptism is for in the first place. It sounds, Paul says in so many words, like you don’t get it. There’s no re-framing going on at all…you’re just shuffling around pictures on the mantle.

I think we’d do well to remember that these “churches” Paul writes to in his letters are nothing like ours. They have no brick and mortar structure, no mortgage or insurance payments, no parking lots to re-stripe, no HVAC units to replace, no argument about pews versus chairs. They aren’t places that people come to once a week to hear a good word. They are social change engines. They are base communities in the midst of an empire that doesn’t want them around. They are the resistance. Only Paul is informing them that they aren’tresisting…they’re just doing the same stuff with a different name. He gets mean…Paul calls them out on their warping of baptism and literally thanks God that he did not baptize them, though he remembers mid-sentence that he baptized Crispus and Gaius…and then remembers the household of Stephanas…and then admits there may have been more. The angry retort is kind of muted at this point, but who can remember all those baptisms? He just wants them to hear that if they’re looking for wisdom the way the world sees it, if they’re measuring their faith with the same metrics as culture, if they’re trying to “succeed” at following Jesus the same way they succeed as a Roman citizen, they’ve come to the wrong place. Paul looks around Imperial Rome and he sees injustice of the highest levels, oppression, inequality, suffering, and he believes that the kingdom, the new age being ushered in by Jesus’ resurrection, will be a kingdom of justice and peace that does not come at the tip of a spear. But in order to establish that kingdom, we have to live it. To be faithful, in Paul’s estimation, is to be resistant.

I wonder what Paul would be writing now, with a church having so much distance between what it says and what it does, when the words in red in our Bibles have been taught as the guidelines for life, and yet are ignored when they are politically inconvenient. And here we are, at Fellowship, where, for the past 70 years, we, too, have wrestled with how to be a Christian and live in Tulsa, Oklahoma which, despite all it’s grandiose claims, governs itself much more with the power of Rome than the power of God.

That assertion alone is why we ought to strive to treat one another differently, if only when we are in the walls of this campus. Our meetings run differently, our conversations a contrast to what we hear beyond, our decision-making impacted by the realities of the world, but driven by another set of values…at least on our best days. For this is what our history (and our now) say to us – we must still be about the work of re-framing…our selves, our church, our world.

The psalmist writes, “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” It is an act of reframing, for the sentences around this statement reveal a person who is very much afraid, and likely for good reason. And here we are, with all of the uncertainty and angst around us, with the problems we can see daily running through our social media feeds or delivered on the news source of our choice, vying for our attention as we engage in a race to see who can be the most “woke” or the most outraged, and we often lose the chance to see the kin-dom all around us…a reframing that helps make the kin-dom real, and helps us be less afraid, for we have each other and a God whose promises are trustworthy.

This is what I see when I look at you, church. Not with precision or perfection…but with participation. I see you eagerly cooking food for the hungry, volunteering at the front desk of hospitals and shelters, collecting endless plastic bags to be woven into sleeping pads, talking with one another, building relationships with people who’ve never had a church that accepted them, visiting those who are sick or in prison, and seeking ways to talk about what matters.

The harvest is ready and the workers, it always seems, Jesus, are few. But we are here, at a place that has often sought a vision for the kin-dom, and been willing – albeit sometimes slowly – to draw it’s circle wider, to sacrifice for what is next and to look for the kin-dom all around us.

In his sermon on the 30^th anniversary of his pastorate here, The Rev. Dr. Russell Bennett asked from this pulpit that the people of Fellowship use this church as a place to awaken their spiritual gifts. He, too, used Paul for the sermon, only a different cut from

1 Corinthians, one about many spiritual gifts, but the same Spirit. He asked people to seek those gifts in themselves, and to consider finding a home for those gifts in the church, because they “serve God’s purpose to heal a fragmented world.” “It’s why the church exists,” he wrote, “to be an instrument of God’s peace and justice. It’s why we pray for, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth…And why we organize, have meetings, develop budgets and programs; it is that we might be a vehicle of God’s Grace in the world.” That, I would say, is reframing. We do the work here, the re-imagining here, the reframing here – so we can carry that out into the world and begin to see it there…so we’ll have the eyes for it.

This is a time for reframing, my friends. How will the reframing we have chosen help us to navigate the reframing that we are not choosing? How will we make meaning out of the noise that is going on around us and seek newness in the midst of turmoil? How will we seek the next chapter for us as a church, drawing our circle wider, growing in spirit and working for justice? I don’t know what the next year will bring for Fellowship, much less the next 70. But I do know that we will have to welcome again the Holy Spirit among us, teaching us, opening us to newness, showing us risks to take that, if we have the courage, will bring us closer to God.

May God be with us on the way. 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.

1 Corinthians 1:1-9 & John 1:29-42

It is this time of year that the words of Dr. King rise up again in the media, on posts and in speeches. Tomorrow, along with a predictably cold forecast, there will be a parade in his honor, remembering the man who helped usher in a civil rights movement that changed the landscape and, hopefully, will continue to change the landscape, for I dare say he’d believe the work is far from done. Yet this honoring often comes whitewashed – and I use that term deliberately. It gives us a sanitized King, like we often get an edited version of Jesus. So we hear the lifting up of “content of character” or “I have a dream,” but don’t hear, “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws,” or “freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed.” We will be handed images of people holding hands across color lines, or requests for a day of service at the food bank in his name, but we will likely not be challenged with King’s ideas that, “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

Often, especially as time goes by, we domesticate our prophets, lest their words convict us still. And what is true of Dr. King is true also of Christ Jesus and the Apostle Paul. There are lots of folks, some seated right here, who don’t hold Paul in very high regard because his words have some pretty terrible history to them. Interestingly, the latest research from scholars has shifted from work on the historical Jesus to work on Paul, and the discoveries reveal that what has happened to the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of Dr. King has also happened with Paul, maybe even to a much higher degree. It’s important clarification because, it could easily be said, the church is as much structured around Paul’s decrees, maybe even more, as it is the teachings of Jesus. This is why we’re joining in this “unpacking” of Paul in the adult Sunday School class on First Corinthians – 9:30am in classroom one, if you’d like to come.

What we do know is that Paul writes to churches struggling with their identity, which makes sense as they all live into the “way of Jesus,” something brand new that, at times, Paul seems to be making up as he goes along. But these churches are also fighting the culture around them, a culture that has many moral question marks, a culture that dehumanizes women and promotes the economic exploitation of people who are deemed “less than” through an elaborate and enforced societal norm. The bulk of Paul’s instructions, particularly to this church in Corinth, is to not engage with that behavior. Don’t start with the categorization, building hierarchies within the church. For when you do, you begin to reinforce all of the rest of the stuff in the culture you are rejecting.

It’s like trying to hate hate. It doesn’t work. You have to change the whole dynamic. You cannot drive out hate with hate, only with love. And when you do try to drive out hate with hate, then you bring all that stuff that comes along with hate – inequality, oppression, bigotry, injustice. It’s a system, Paul says without saying it, a system that requires us to re-wire ourselves, to not only have a baptism, where we die to one life and are reborn to another, but also to continue after that baptism, to keep going, to keep dying to that old life, challenging our assumptions and re-wiring all of these things we’ve been taught as part of a culture that is not the “way of Jesus.”

John’s gospel makes this same claim on us, first having John the Baptist identify Jesus as the “lamb of God,” a phrase we might think signifies a sacrificial symbol. Yet, in the ancient world, it is more likely an astrological metaphor, the beginning point of the cosmos is Aries, the ram…the point from which all other constellations are drawn…the apex, in John’s metaphorically rich gospel, of a cosmic Christ, come to set right the balance of the world with the redemptive work that God will be doing through him.

John writes at the uppermost level of metaphor, making Jesus and his story incredibly symbolic of a larger struggle between good and evil, of the literal restoration of the universe in God’s grand vision. But in both Paul’s case and in John’s gospel, the call is the same – come and see. Jesus encounters Andrew and Simon Peter and asks them, “What are you looking for?” They reply, strangely, “Rabbi, where are you staying?” And he says – come and see. And these two invitations – “come and see” and “stay, remain, abide” – they linger in John’s gospel, inviting us to a deeper expression of our faith.

This week we remember the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr…a pivotal and prophetic voice in all of our lives, whether we can remember the news accounts directly from the morning paper or we have learned from stock news reel footage, movie adaptations and the accounts of history. His name will be raised, as it always is at this time of year. And there’ll be people singing his praises who wouldn’t have uttered his name unless it was attached to an epithet during his life. For we cannot forget that this person who most corporations in the city will construct a giant float in honor of tomorrow was once the most hated man in America. What might happen if we stayed, if we remained, if we abided with his example and his words of moral meaning? What if we could actually see a thread from Jesus to Paul to Dr. King, woven through history asking us to take seriously those things which actually make for justice and peace?

As I do each year on MLK weekend, I re-read “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” a letter that I think deserves to be in our Biblical canon alongside Paul’s letters. Writing just like Paul often did, from a jail cell, Dr. King lays out his reasons for being in Birmingham, where he is labeled an “outsider,” and calls for justice in the most salient and, sadly, still relevant ways I can imagine. He writes,

“More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.”

Dr. King takes to task the clergy who are supposedly “supportive” of his goals, but who decry his methods, the ones he calls “white moderates.” Wait, they say…just give it time, as if people of color have not given their oppression time. They call him an extremist, which he writes was initially something that he wanted to refute. But then he wondered…

“Was not Jesus an extremist for love…Was not Amos an extremist for justice…Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel…

So the question is not whether we will be extremists,
but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?
Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?”

As we join in celebrations in his honor and hear politicians and pundits praise him, can we also remember that at the time of his murder, according to a 1968 Harris poll, 75% of those polled disapproved of him, largely because he was calling out the injustice of Vietnam and the cruelty of unfettered capitalism in what he called a “reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values,” one which would “look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation.” So, how does Dr. King enjoy approval ratings close to 90% today? Is it because we water down his message, numbing it with platitudes and much more easily digestible snippets? It’s easy to raise his call to love without recognizing that such love is by it’s nature costly and sacrificial. That love, just as Jesus told us, asks us to come and see, and, in this case, to notice how often we take the narrow remembrances of Dr. King’s successes and cast aside the ways that he called us to stay with that vision, to remain dedicated to social change, to abide in our awareness of injustice.

I often wonder, what would Dr. King be doing today? What would he be fighting for today? What would he be protesting? Would he be taking a knee during the national anthem? Would he have called for marriage equality? Would he have been at the front of the protest march shouting, “Black Lives Matter!?” Would he be lending his voice to the victims of police shootings, for medicaid expansion, for undrinkable water in Flint, or a pipeline through Standing Rock? Would he be calling for the ERA to finally be passed in every state, or seeking for money to be taken out of politics, for gerrymandering to cease? Surely he would be appalled at the setbacks in voting rights! And he would still have all of the same things to lament about our economic system, which exploits for the benefit of those at the top, without regard to a living wage or equitable sharing of profit.

“I have a dream,” he once famously said, “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Would he still have that dream, only expanded by drawing a circle ever wider, by “staying, remaining, and abiding” with the Love and Spirit given to us in Christ Jesus, the same Love that can open our hearts, expand our circles, ever calling on us to see a liberative God at work all around us?

Oh, friends…there is still much work to do. There is much work to do right here in Tulsa, where we see report after report indicate that our policing has serious racial disparities, something that communities of color don’t need a report to verify, and we’re getting ready to hire a new police chief. Right here our own county jail participates in the injustice machine that is our so-called immigration policy, making political, fear-based statements out of women seeking shelter from violence with their children, and families desperate for a better life. Right now, we see a total failure to adequately fund public education, a demand written in our own state constitution, while tax breaks are given to corporations and millionaires. We close hospitals and isolate families and even entire communities from access to healthcare because we won’t expand Medicaid. Criminal justice, LGBTQ+ rights, women’s healthcare, voting rights…the chances to stay, remain and abide in the lessons given to us by Jesus, Paul and Dr. King are plentiful.

But let us not make the mistake of thinking that our political lives are somehow separate from our faith lives. Let us not take these moments of political crisis as a time to leave our faith, but instead to stay, remain and abide in it. Now please hear me, I did not say anything about our partisan lives, for that is too narrow a definition. Too often we concern ourselves with the puny language of partisanship, looking to promote one party over another, turning politics into a competition, a zero-sum game. We lose out on the moral ground that ought to bolster our political lives and inform the work of politics, which is the method by which we live our morals and ethics into the public sphere, especially in a pluralistic society like ours. So I tell you again, like Jesus said to his disciples and Paul reminded his churches – come and see. Come and see what happens when you take the outrage you might rightly feel and focus it through love. Come and see what occurs when you see injustice and call it out with compassion. Come and see what comes to be when you realize that working to make the world a better place, whether that is feeding a hungry person a meal, writing a letter to the Mayor to express the qualities you seek in a new police chief, or standing together to demand better treatment of immigrants, it is actually participating in the redemptive work that God is doing through Christ Jesus. It IS our faith.

Dr. King’s letter ends like this, written in the vernacular of his time:

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil-rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

I think we’re still hoping, Dr. King…still dreaming.

May it come to be.

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 10:34-43 & Matthew 3:13-17

I picture it as a typical day, maybe early in the morning, before the heat has set in and people are gathered at the river Jordan. Only they’re not there for any baptism. They are there to wash their clothes or their bodies, to gather water for the stove at home, to give the baby and the grandfather something to drink during the afternoon. Whatever we might say about baptism, and this baptism in particular, it takes place in the same fluidity that marks our everyday life. The waters that wash Jesus and pronounce him “Son of God” are the same waters that will wash the scab on a someone’s arm, and provide a cup of tea, and clean the amniotic fluid and blood off a newborn.

Baptism comes right in the middle of the everyday. This life-changing, transformative, epiphanous event is acknowledged with the same substance that constitutes 60% of our bodies and seventy percent of the earth already. Water in Genesis is both deliverance and destruction, in Exodus it becomes the very presence of God in the desert. Isaiah and Amos use water in their imagery of God’s justice, that it might “flow like a mighty stream,” and all of that Hebrew imagery greatly influences the writers of the Greek texts, this “new” testament in whose words we find the basis for one of our sacraments – it’s like transformation is all around us, celebrated in our scriptures, already in us – baptism is just the ritual where we point it out.

There’s not a lot of compelling evidence that baptism is a big deal in the time of Jesus, except amongst a sect of Judaism that lives out in the desert called the Essenes. It is this sect from which John the Baptist apparently comes to the river seeking to baptize people for the forgiveness of sins. These Essenes seemed to have abandoned Jerusalem, opposing the way that the temple was being run, and established a community at a place called Qumran. They had been around for hundreds of years before Jesus, but something about the reign of the Herods and the Roman authority seems to have pushed Essenic membership way up. They still lived in the desert, far away from the city, and they had a code, a set of disciplines by which they all lived. There was an oath to enter the group, a set of dietary and religious practices, and a dedication to communal living, with all possessions shared with one another…oh, and there was this entry ritual that involved immersion in water…maybe this sounds familiar?

But elsewhere in Judaism, the story of ritual immersion is complicated. The tvilah is the act of immersion in a small pool or bath of water, called a mikva. Immersion in water for ritual purification was traditionally used for restoration to a condition of “ritual purity” in very specific circumstances. Later in Jewish development, immersion is required for any converts to Judaism as part of their conversion, something that is true even today. Immersion in the mikvah represents a change in status in regards to purification, restoration, and qualification for full religious participation in the life of the community.

When John stands in the Jordan, however, it is not for conversion for anyone, nor is it for that specific ritual purity. It is for the forgiveness of sins. Repent, he always cries alongside the call to baptism. Repent, or turn around in Aramaic, like you had forgotten your wallet and returned to your house to get it – turn around and head back to where you came from, as if this baptism is restoring people to something of which they are already a part. Then Jesus shows up and John’s first response is, “What are you coming to me for? I need to be baptized by you.” Now, we can read this as a mark of the “sinlessness” in Jesus, John recognizing the Messiah early on and admitting to his own unworthiness, OR we can also see this as Jesus teaching a whole new framework of power and strength, one that he will model right here, in one of the first public appearances, where he takes a chance to puff himself up, to publicly claim this title and “lord” it over people, pardon the pun. Instead Jesus takes the road of humility and weakness, not asking us to do something that he is not willing to do.

And that brings up another point. Christianity holds baptism in high regard. It is recognized almost universally as a sacrament by the thousands of expressions of the Christian faith across the world. And yet, Jesus never asks any of his followers to be baptized, nor does he ever baptize single person in any of the gospels. Paul, however, and the accounts from Acts, are full of baptism stories, often multiple baptism stories for the same persons. Acts has Paul asking people – into what were you baptized? When they say, “the baptism of John,” he tells them to be baptized into Christ Jesus, as if baptism marks the acceptance of something, even the full arrival of something in us.

One of the earliest Christian documents, The Didache, or “the teaching,” has a whole section on baptism that dispels our idiosyncrasies about the ritual and the “proper” way to baptize, a debate that has probably created most of our denominations themselves. It says baptize in cool, running water…unless you don’t have that. Then use standing water…unless you don’t have that. It wanders through about every example of baptism we use, finally saying that the point is the transformation, not the details of the ritual. So, what does it mean to prioritize a baptism that Jesus never performed, that comes in a zillion different versions, and which clearly wasn’t a “one-time” event, not an act of membership as much as an acceptance of something coming to live in us?

For the disciples, our scriptures tell us, baptism meant a whole lot more than they could now vote at the annual meeting of the congregation. It would completely change their lives and, as we heard from the passage read this morning, would bring about the work of the Holy Spirit on them, pestering, cajoling, almost haunting them with visions of God’s love without exceptions, until such a reminder of Grace caused them to question even their own previously held assumptions, their own cultural and implicit bias. That work of the Holy Spirit happens in our everyday lives, only we likely think of it as something else – a conscience, a desire to be a better person, or our ideological dedications guiding our actions.

“I truly understand,” Peter says to the gathered group of gentiles, “that God shows no partiality, but amongst all people anyone who honors God and works justly is acceptable to God.” This bold statement, made quite in opposition to the social customs and religious practices of his time, is a direct result of whatever it is that we call his baptism…in this case, Peter’s receiving of the Holy Spirit through the ritual of water…

a gift that keeps on giving, taking him to new places, opening his heart again and again to deeper love, stronger faith, more courageous compassion. It is the Spirit, accepted into his heart in a baptism, that keeps working on him. Because baptism, as we discover in the subtext of scripture, is not a single event, but a chronic condition, a transformation that takes the rest of our lives to unfold if we have taken it seriously. For God’s Love is never done with us. It is never finished in it’s task of reshaping our hearts and refining our souls. There’s always a way to draw our circle wider, to expand our understanding, to learn and re-learn and even un-learn as we are exposed again to God’s liberating Love.

The Gospel story from this point on in Matthew’s version will be the unfolding of that identity that Jesus has claimed in the baptism, the manifestation of all of the promises that have come up to this point in Matthew’s telling of the story – the visitation of angels, the promise, the dreams, the birth, the magi, the flight to Egypt, all of it part of who Jesus will be, just as our identity is part of who we will be both before and after our own baptism, found in the very real, daily events of our lives.

As a pastor, I have had the privilege of presiding over many baptisms – the baptisms of infants next to their wide-eyed parents, of children who were old enough to not want any part of the sprinkling, teens who had gone through confirmation and chosen a baptism…even adults, some whom late into their adulthood, who chose baptism as a ritual of personal modification. I have baptized people in swimming pools, and in a lake, and I have watched as my own children were baptized by clergy very close to me. We’ve had one right here, during a sermon on baptism. It was as much a surprise to me as it was, I think, to Jeff, who stepped up when I had the UCC version of an altar call. Each one has been unique, not so much because of the ritual itself, but because of the people involved and what it was that we are up to in this thing we call baptism.

We can talk about baptism as “washing away sin,” I suppose, or as the act that brings us into fellowship with the Christian community, but what happens to Jesus, waist deep in the Jordan with John, what he carried on in his ministry, what the disciples first found themselves claimed by and then set about claiming other with is identity. This is my son, the voice calls out from heaven. And it calls out again with every other baptism –

“This is my child, beloved and accepted.” David Lose reminds us in his commentary on this passage that, “We are at a time and place where so many would like to identify and define us by many, many names: Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal, American or foreigner, gay or straight, rich or poor, Black or White, and the list goes on.”

But that’s not who we are. Baptism claims in us an identity as a beloved child of God, which we often say, or sing, as if it is a healing balm. It can certainly be that, especially for those who have been taught that God hates them, or rejects them. Yet it is also a claim on our identity, a way to mark us in the everyday, so that the Spirit residing in us can be heard…so that we might be listening for – even expecting – that voice to whisper to us when the world comes at us with names that wound, or belittle, with names that challenge or limit, the voice reminds us that we have an identity that is more than just mitigating. It is inspirational, it is hopeful, it is powerful.

We ought to note that it is after this dip in the Jordan that Jesus is sent out into the desert to be tested…afterhis baptism that the adversary comes to tempt him with the shallow and shiny…after his identity is given to him that he faces the world knowing who he is –

a beloved child of God, created in and for Love, with malleable hearts that can grow to receive, experience and give more and more love. It’s an identity that allows us to know that God is at work in us, right now, and we are part of something much larger that just ourselves…we have been called into being by nothing less than the same force behind the Big Bang and the cycle of life itself.

As you leave today, I invite you to dip a finger in the water, to remind you of your own baptism…an event that might have taken place in a church, that probably involved water (but maybe not), a moment that you felt the presence of God surrounding you and lifting you up, an event that may have happened only once for you in your whole life, an event that you may struggle to remember, an event that may have happened when you were very young…you may not even remember it at all. That’s OK. It remembers you.

Amen.