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 8:14-17
Luke 3:15-17 & 21-22

It is no longer a safe assumption to think that when you say “baptism,” everyone will know what you are talking about. Just look at the sanctuary this morning. I’d wager a fair amount that we have people in here who don’t remember much about their baptism. I was baptized as a baby, maybe like you, and I don’t remember a thing. 

I’ll also bet that we have people here who remember it fondly, some who remember it less than fondly, perhaps alongside some degree of coercion, some who have never been baptized, and perhaps even some who haven’t the faintest idea what I’m even talking about right now. 

So when we tell the story of the baptism of Jesus, we can’t just gloss over the baptism part. Even if we are part of that fond memory, meaningful part of our history group, what does it mean for us now, beyond the nostalgia? What doesbaptism mean? Does it mean the same thing for us that it did for Jesus when he waded into the Jordan? Jesus wasn’t joining a church, right? He wasn’t securing hisown salvation, or accepting himself into his own heart, was he? So what is really at work when we talk about baptism? Let me explain.

The English word baptism is derived indirectly through Latin from the Greek noun baptismawhich is a neologism in the New Testament derived from the masculine Greek noun baptismos, a term for ritual washing in Greek language texts of Hellenistic Judaism during the Second Temple period, such as the Septuagint. Great, everyone clear now? No? How about we unpack this a bit more?

In orthodox, ancient Judaism, there existed a ritual called tevilah,which was the purification of a person via full body immersion in a pool of water. Such a ritual bath is called a mikveh, and Tulsa has one at B’Nai Emunah. One of the oldest ones in town is no longer in use but resides in the basement of what is now the Tulsa Garden Center on Peoria, formerly the Travis residence, a Jewishfamily. Tevilahwas a repeatable event, whereas Christians often think of baptism as a singular event, though maybe we ought to reconsider…more on that later. These ritual baths are all over Israel and ritual bathing was apparently used routinely by a Jewish sect called the Essenes, who lived in the desert outside of Jerusalem in a place called Qumran where the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls was made in the late 1940s. The scrolls revealed much about this community that stood outside of mainstream temple Judaism at the time and from which, it is speculated, John the Baptist might have come.

For the Essenes, the ritual bath seemed to be about not only purification, but also transformation. The Baptist’s not-so-subtle phrasing in the prior verses to the people who have come to the riverside is, “You children of snakes! Who warned you to escape from the angry judgment that is coming soon? Produce fruit that shows you have changed your hearts and lives.” Inexplicably, John still draws a crowd, maybe not because of his charm, but because he offers this transformation through this act of repentance which means, in Greek, to turn around. Who doesn’t want a second chance? Who doesn’t know and feel the sting of the things that we’d like to take back, or the ways that we know we fall short of the mark that we set for ourselves? One of the trademarks of the many “anonymous” groups that meet over in our main building each week is a contention with this very issue, a realization that we have faults and weaknesses and, ultimately, we are powerless to control our lives so much that we achieve perfection. So, the “big book” says, we surrender to our higher power, we release, we repent and turn around and do it over and over. By the way, that’s what our “big book” says, too.

In the act of baptism we get what John does not offer with his words…Grace. And once we get that Grace into us, it can grow and mature and build so that we learn to come back to it again and again, using it not as a crutch, but as a foundation. 

So let’s stop right there and notice that John himself, the origin of the baptism ritual, suggests that there is more than one baptism. There’s the water one and then this other one. He says that we baptizes with water, but Jesus will come to baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire. The word in Greek is puri, and while it does mean “fire,” it also is the root for purify, meaning that something about the baptism with the Spirit has a distilling effect on us, making us better. And apparently we need this baptism just like the water one. Remember the Acts passage read first this morning which says, The two went down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit (for as yet the Spirit had not come upon any of them; they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus). That descriptor, baptized only in the name of the Lord Jesus, might very well apply to us, right? That’s the ritual we all went through, as an act of church membership most likely, and often with a strong overtone of salvation. 

The community described the the Book of Acts, which we have been studying in the Sunday morning Bible study (at 9:30am in classroom one in the main building, everyone is welcome) gives us the reality of this two-fold baptism, and suggests that one isn’t enough. Sometimes, Acts says, people have this “Holy Spirit” baptism and then get baptized in water, other times it is the reverse, but one won’t cut it. It’s like you have to have both the transformational event AND THEN the transformation. We have to accept the premise, that we need to turn around, and then we to accept the thing that helps the turning, inviting the Spirit in to keep that process going, infusing Grace into our lives until the “turn around” is how we live. The Spirit, particularly in Acts, comes to knock us off our pedestals, to re-wire our outlook and tear down all of our carefully constructed walls. Just read Acts and you’ll see people selling all their stuff to give it to the poor, the healing of the chronically sick, every boundary being busted in the name of a God who says “Yes” to everyone, making the apostles deeply question all of their assumptions. Is that what we expect out of our baptisms? Is that what you were told when you got baptized, that it would tear your world apart and change everything completely? I suspect not.

Baptism is a big deal in the Christian community. It’s a church-fracturing, denomination-generating big deal. How you baptize seems far more important to us than why we baptize, or the implicationsof our baptism. Maybe that’s because it’s easier to focus on the details than it is to recognize that this ritual is really meant to transform us, to change us in ways that the very language used to describe the ritual calls a reversal…a complete 180, as we might say. It does so, the tradition also tells us, because it is the indwelling of the Spirit in us, God working on our lives, not just our New Year’s resolution willpower writ large, but rather the direct impact of God’s love and light changing us from the inside out. It’s not something that we wield, like a super power, but something that wields us, something we are subject TO as we make our way through life, being refined, sharpened, shaped by the Spirit that has descended on us as well. Baptism is about our identity.

The identity that baptism conveys has nothing to do with our worthiness, our success or our failure. It is Grace-driven mark on us, identifying us as God’s beloved, just as God said to Jesus in the Jordan. No matter how often we fall short or fail, nothing that we do, or fail to do, can remove the identity that God conveys as a gracious gift. We can neglect this relationship, we can deny it, run away from it, ignore it, but we cannot destroy it, for God loves us too deeply and completely to ever let us go.

That identity, that baptism identity, is precisely what Jesus and the tradition call on us to remember, not just as a ritual or a mark on the calendar, but as a way of making sure, of remembering, who we are and whosewe are. Only when we accept God’s Grace and Love are we able to consistently give that same grace and love out to others. Such a Grace speaks to our deepest longings, our cravings to find meaning and stability in a world chaotic and cynical. Now, in our times, when we are slowly finding more space and honesty to discover who we are as human beings, who we love, how we present and live and identify, our baptism can also remind us of a deeper identity, a foundational identity as – God’s beloved children. 

As we remember the baptism of Jesus today, we also remember our own. As you leave, the baptismal font at the front of the church is filled, as is a special font setup on your way out. If you wish, dip your fingers in the water, touch your forehead, a wrist, a hand, and remember…let that water remind your soul of the claim that is on you, of your identity as God’s beloved child. If you have never been baptized, if you want to be baptized in a way that you can remember, talk to me. Let’s talk about how we can shape that and what it might mean for you. Baptism is not about membership here at Fellowship, it is about foundation, about transformation, about identity. It’s not about joining this family, but accepting that you already are (and always were) part of God’s family. This is as close as I get to an altar call, so if you want to talk with me about ritualizing that acceptance of the Spirit into your heart, we’ll find some time to grab a coffee and talk about baptism.

For now, know this, and remember it each time that water contacts your skin – with every washing of your hands, every shower, every bath, every drink on a hot day. You are God’s beloved child, in you God is well-pleased. 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.

Isaiah 60:1-5

Matthew 2:2-12

What you heard is only part of the story. Matthew continues with verses 13-18, often called the “slaughter of the innocents,” in which King Herod’s fear of this newborn child, foretold to him as the messiah by the magi, turns into dangerous aggression. Mary and Joseph, hearing of the danger to their baby, flee to Egypt while Herod launches a campaign to protect his power by killing all the children under the age of two in his kingdom. Matthew closes out this awfulness by quoting from Jeremiah, and the lamentation of Rachel after the murder of her own children. I know, I know – killing children…Happy New Year to you too, pastor.

Epiphany is supposed to be, after all, the arrival of the light, the celebration of the dawn of God-with-us. And yet Matthew follows it with this tremendously dark account. But we don’t typically read it. We don’t read it on Christmas Eve, and it’s not saved for next week in our liturgical calendar. It’s just edited out. Why in the midst of the presents and food and lights and champagne and fireworks do we want such a story? Let’s talk instead of the gifts the wise men bring and the fulfilling of the prophetic words of Isaiah – Arise! Your Light is Come! – and the light and the dawn. That’s much nicer, of course, but Matthew doesn’t leave it there. What is Matthew trying to tell us this morning? What word in the very earliest part of this new year, does Matthew send to us – people he never intended to write for – 2000 years later?

Matthew knows something that we all know, too. Darkness and light are not opposites, they are dance partners. And hope is something that we develop, it’s something that we sometimes have to manufacture, drawing on light from the past and the expectation of light to come…a light that is often revealed because ofthe darkness…a light we couldn’t see without the darkness…a light which is actually let intoour souls, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, by our imperfections and wounds.

Matthew’s story of Epiphany does reveal God in Jesus, but it does so with what I would describe as almost a warning. The magi arrive on the scene and alert King Herod to this child that the stars have revealed to them. Unbeknownst to them, it is their arrival foreign people of a different religion, the very intersectionality of the religions and the nations coming together in the birth of this child that threatens the status quo which grants Herod his power. In reaction, Herod does what power does and creates a great threat to the holy family, a threat so profound that they will have to flee because the message of God. The presence of God-with-us in Matthew’s Epiphany story is so profoundly, publicly, and politically threatening to the way things are that it cannot be allowed to stand. This baby, or more importantly what this baby stands for, is too invasive. It changes all our rules, our norms and our comfortable labels that we have which we think help us define our world. We have darkness over there and light over here, good and evil neatly divided, male and female, black and white, it’s all categorized by us, whose organization gets interrupted by the God who walks among us stepping across our well crafted walls.

Is there a way this Epiphany to consider how God’s message might be threatening to us? We know that following the Christ child can put us at odds with the world around us, but are we also aware of the ways that the Way of Jesus also interrupts our own stories, asking us to reconsider, to re-evaluate, to renovate and restore? It what ways is the Spirit calling to us right now and we are looking to silence Her call, to protect our own status quo, to cling to the ways that we have always done things?

As we enter a new year as Fellowship, it’s probably more than just chance that we start with Epiphany. One of the things that church ought to do for us is to encourage us to think theologically, to take what we believe about God and God’s creation and apply that to our lives. If God is a God of love, then seeking ways to be more loving ought to be important to us. If God is a God of hope, then working on our capacity for hope, both personally and corporately, ought to matter to us. If God is a God of inclusion and hospitality, a God truly of allpeople – all faiths, all tribes, all genders, all labels, a God who seeks to draw us all together across our borders, then making sure that our church models that ought to be important to us as well.

2019 is our year, Fellowship, to think theologically about who we are and how that shapes our space, the way we organize ourselves and what we do. We are, as you no doubt know, a place that thinks theologically with a pretty different lens than most of Tulsa. That’s good, but so what? If we can’t articulate that or, better yet, demonstratethat, then what does it matter? We are one of a handful of “open & affirming” churches in our city, which is important, especially in a time in which many LGBTQ persons still find only rejection and shame from church. IF, though, our “openness and affirmation” stops with a slogan or a rainbow flag on our sanctuary, then we may need to think more deeply about that. Thinking theologically means you continue to press on those places where the Gospel is urging us on, that our values are always aspirations, not finish lines. So we must remember to stay open to the voice of the Holy Spirit, calling us to new things, to be willing to engage in discomfort, to questions our assumptions and certainties so that we might see God’s light still breaking forth, taking us to newness and wholeness that we hadn’t even considered. For God, in our theological thinking, always lies just on the horizon, never quite in our grasp, and never precisely what we expect. We don’t get a clear map, my friends, we have to follow the stars and our dreams.

As we come to share this holy meal for the first time in 2019, may we welcome the presence of the God who still walks among us, still speaking to us, still teaching us of God’s ways, which are not our ways, and seeking our partnership in creating a new world. May we know in this feast a sense of newness, a willingness to leave the past behind, to learn from the darkness and the light, which dance within us all. May we be fed with this morsel, quenched by this sip, by a meal of quality, not quantity, filling our hearts with love, saturating our bones with strength, nourishing our muscle and brain with willingness and intention. Let us pray:

God of newness and change,

You have loved us so much that you have walked among us, knowing deeply of human experience. Feed us in this meal with Your Spirit, that we might risk, that we might hope, that we might work to reveal more of You and Your will for our lives.

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.

Matthew 1:18-25

Lost in the triumphal language of Christmas time, “The Lord is Come” and “Behold! A Savior is Born,” is the less regal way that listeners of Jesus’ day and age would have heard his story. Spoiler alert – it’s not an account of triumph and majesty, rather a pretty meager tale of people born on the absolute margins of the era, in the lowliest of places, amongst the outcasts. We lose sight of that so often in the age of Jesus the King, holy and mighty and God incarnate.

I think we have to go straight to the glory, for if we really examine the situation of his birth then it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the veneer of praise and piety while enabling lots more Jesuses to be born in lots more lowly places. As you all know we took the step this year of placing a chain-link fence around our nativity scene in an intentionally provocative commentary on the current wave of immigration ugliness. It was up for nearly three weeks before I posted a picture of it on social media and the floodgates opened. Since then the post has been shared hundreds of times, we have had “a couple” of phone calls and social media posts, and I have done several interviews, including one with the New York Times. And, to be clear, all that the nativity scene endeavors to be is a theological art display, a commentary on the intersection of our moral and legal lives. I appreciate the praise that is coming our way, but I think taking an asylum seeker into your home is much more worthy, as is work along the border caring for those human lives impacted by legal decisions made from thousands of miles away, or the one-on-one, heartbreaking work of legal representation for people locked away in our own county jail. I think that the challenging role that border patrol agents can play, often having to make difficult and complex moral decisions in a moment, is much more worthy of praise and support, as I think the dedication with which many of you serve our community, trying to make your faith have hands and feet, ought to be lifted up in countless tweets and posts and articles.

Some of the criticism we received has been from people who claim that this is apples and oranges, that the Holy Family weren’t migrants at all and the comparison is false. In keeping with the ways that we want Christmas, and really the whole Gospel, to comfort and reinforce rather than challenge or provoke, let me say that it’s true – this isn’t a straight comparison. There are many differences in our world and Jesus’ world. Rarely does our biblical instruction match perfectly with our culture, for our holy scripture was written for a different people, in a different time and place. We have to extrapolate, to make parallels.

It is Matthew who uses the exodus to Egypt as part of his birth narrative largely to get his audience, stepped in the Jewish tradition, to reflect on the original Exodus story, making sure that Jesus is attached to another great prophet and leader, Moses. At Passover, Jews to this day are asked to not only reflect on the Exodus story, but to actually claim it as their own. They are asked to know themselves as once being slaves in Egypt and knowing the price and value of freedom, so that they might have such empathy for others. The same is true of the story of migration, which we ought to connect with from both our faith traditions and our own human story. The story of humankind is, after all, always a story of migration. And our religion(s) ought to (and do for that matter) appeal to our empathic imaginations to welcome the outcast and the stranger, to support the refugee and the prisoner and the downtrodden…for there, but for the grace of God, go all of us.

The Bible cannot speak directly to our circumstances in 21^stcentury America. It can, and does, speak to values that lie at our moral center. Rev. Dr. William Barber, the new voice of moral authority in our nation in my opinion, tweeted this last week: “What’s going on in America today looks too much like what was going on during the 1st Christmas: ego maniac on the throne, taxes to benefit the wealthy, kids killed by government policy, families forced out of their country, health care & housing denied to poor folk having babies.” Neither Dr. Barber nor I are suggesting that this is a perfect mirror, that the analogy is pure, for analogies never are pure. What I think we are suggesting is that there are still the same struggles at work in our world that faced the Holy Family. There is still much danger for the poor, for the marginalized, for those who, save only the misfortune of their birth locale, face oppression, poverty and exploitation. Jesus came to save our hearts, which would change our policies, but it would seem that we often still resist even the basics of his teachings. Love your neighbor seems a fine platitude, until it costs us something or makes us feel uncomfortable. And love your enemy? Well, that didn’t go over even as the words came from Jesus’ own mouth.

In Matthew’s version of the Gospel story, we are to understand that God’s incarnation comes amidst homelessness, migration and oppression. The Holy Family lives a fragile existence, much like the families that come to our border, seeking the safety and stability of home somewhere away from their home. And then there’s also the stress within the Holy Family. After all, Mary and Joseph were engaged but had not yet married or moved in with each other or consummated their union when Mary comes to him with this news. Or perhaps even more scandalously, he finds out the news of her pregnancy. It’s a safe assumption to think that Jospeh concluded only one thing: that his espoused wife had been unfaithful. Perhaps this is why Matthew describes Joseph as a righteous man — he lives according to the law, which says divorce in such a situation, but also showing compassion beyond the law, for Joseph has two options — public stoning or quiet break up. He opts for the latter out of a sense of kindness, perhaps, to avoid exposing her to public disgrace and brutal punishment, though that option is legally available to him.

Jesus’ birth story in Matthew ought to remind us of how often pregnancy, or even more broadly, the development of “family”, which comes in many forms, can be a situation full of turmoil, fear, even scandal. Matthew’s version de-sanitizes the typical Christmas portrait of the pious holy family and their angelic newborn child, reminding us instead of the messiness of it all, and how God chooses this entry into the world rather than the gold and silk room of a palace. Shouldn’t the “how” and “where” of Christmas matter to us as much as the “why?” At minimum it ought to suggest to us that we really have no idea where God shows up for we continue to read this story in the confines of climate controlled, plush seated, well-lit sanctuaries – edifices to the God who came to us in the straw and dirt of a manger.

The whole of the birth narrative in Matthew’s account is about one-and-a-half verses. That’s it. You’ll spend more time on a tweet. If you get distracted easily, you might just gloss over it, which could be the point. This story is so everyday, so commonplace that we must knowit wasmissed. There were no announcements, no baby showers, not a notice in the Jerusalem Times. It took place in the back of an inn, full of travelers with their own agendas, while the Holy Family took refuge amongst the livestock. It was a lowly story, unremarkable in every way save one. This is the beginning of the story of the everyday made holy, the mundane and plain used by God to show us grace, love and salvation. This is the beginning of the story that frees us from fear.

Fear, you see, takes many forms. It’s not just the boogeyman, or spiders or snakes, both of which are gross and should be feared. No, it’s the fears that paralyze and stymie us, like the fear of failure, the fear of success, the fear of change, of forgiveness, or being forgiven. And it’s the more insidious things, the other things we attach the suffix “phobia” to, like the fear of the unknown, the fear of people from other places, the fear of the stranger, someone with a different religion or custom, someone who looks different, someone whose skin is a different color, or who speaks a different language…the fear of difference. This story of the baby born just like all of us, in the most mundane and ordinary way, is the story of the beginning of the end of fear. For he will teach us a different way. He will teach us that love is better than fear, that hope is better than apathy and that God is a God of abundance, not scarcity.

It won’t be an easy lesson. That should be really clear to us now. Even in today’s story, it takes a visit from an angel to convince Joseph that he need not be afraid. Flowing robes, blinding light, harps and choirs – the whole shebang…direct, divine intervention. “Don’t be afraid, Joseph,” the angel says. And Joseph, his fear masked by culturally accepted behavior, relents to this plan, the same plan surely told him by Mary when she explains herself to him.

It is fear, I think, that keeps us from doing the very things that Jesus came to teach us about – to love wastefully, to see the plank in our own eyes before the splinter in another’s, to forgive seventy-times seven. What might happen if we actually did those things? What might happen if we really tried to forgive that person who wounded us so? What might happen if we really sought to understand someone else’s position before blasting them with our own? What might happen if we simply decided, in each and every situation, to love? I know what you’ll tell me, it’s what I tell myself. It’s more complicated than that, Chris. And I agree…It’s the angel who doesn’t.

See, I think that it’s fear that gets in the way of faith. For despite all of our desires to use the arrival of Jesus for our own benefits, we’re afraid to actually walk with Jesus, while we continue to claim that walking with Jesus is to our benefit. We’re afraid to give up our outrage or our sense of manufactured righteousness. We afraid to stop keeping score, or to believe that our task is to acquire, consume and compete. We’re afraid to lose a grip on feeling that we’re “right,” though Jesus doesn’t come to make winners and losers. We already know that system. In fact, we know it so well that we are afraid to leave it to follow the grace-filled Way of Jesus. After all, it won’t be the right social policy platform that will save us, nor the gross national product or the stock market. It won’t be walls or bridges or Presidents or Congress. It will be living like Jesus lived, accepting the grace he died to show us, having the salvation of Jesus Christ be born in each of us.

It’s almost Christmas and we can debate what baby will be born again – is it the one who’s birth is only a necessary step for his death, a planned execution from the first angel’s visit to Mary, a plan, we might note, that is completely undisclosed to Mary? Or is this the birth of the baby who comes to announce such a revolution of the heart that he offends many, including, at times, his own disciples? Is it the birth of the baby who comes to shine a light on our own souls, asking us to embrace the morality of God’s Love, which will set us free from all of these fears that keep our souls imprisoned? I mean such a claim would be revolutionary, even dangerous. I don’t know if I’d buy it. I might need divine intervention, like an angel, saying directly to me…do not be afraid. God is with us.

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.

Advent III: Singing Resistance

Luke 1:39-56

before the sermon a portion of Earth, Wind and Fire’s Sing a Song will be played…

It’s hard for me not to feel joy when a song like that is playing…I don’t know if you’re like me, but a certain song can change the trajectory of a day, at least for a little while. It can cast out the gloom, sharpen up my soul and make me ready for the next challenge. A song can the the antidote for hopelessness…

Well, you may not have noticed, but songs feature heavily in Luke’s Gospel.Mary sings when she is greeted by her cousin Elizabeth. Zechariah sings when his son John is born and his tongue is finally loosened. The angels sing of peace and goodwill when they share their “good news of great joy” with the shepherds. And Simeon sings his song of farewell once he has seen God’s promises to Israel kept in the Christ child. Singing is all over the place, and it is often singing about Joy…maybe joy that is already here, maybe joy that is expected, joy that is coming. It is singing to change the scenario, singing to bring about change, singing as resistance.

In this passage today we hear what is often called “The Magnificant.” It’s a song, known also as the canticle or the song of Mary, and has often been sung throughout liturgical history. In fact, it is widely recognized as one of the oldest hymns we have. Though we tend to read it now, it used to be sung, just the Psalms. Luke knows this long history of singing, and the role that it plays in communities that are struggling and seeking God’s help. It could even be argued that Luke mirrors the language of Hannah from 1Samuel, where Hannah sing her own song of longing and promise. In both cases, these mothers lament the world as it is, seek a child and through this child they see God’s action in the world bringing transformation. Both Hannah and Elizabeth are too old to bear a child, and Mary is so young she is not yet married. They probably knew how little account the world would pay them, likely had experienced it already. And there, tucked away in the hill country of Judea, far from the courts of power and influence, they bear witness to how hard life is under Roman oppression. And in the face of this despair and oppression, they sang. They sang of their faith in God’s promise to transform the world, to upend the powers that be, and to lift up all those who had been knocked down. When things look bleak, one of the most unexpected and powerful things you can do is sing, for it helps usher in joy. Joy is very different than happiness, you understand, not even necessarily what we might call a “happy” emotion. Joy is the awareness that pain is necessary, suffering is part of life and that it is the struggle which helps us create meaning.

Singing often comes from this place of deep joy, an understanding that beyond the storm cloud lies a rainbow. Many of the Psalms are sung by a people conquered and imprisoned in Babylon, yearning for something else. The songs of the slaves in this country echo these calls for justice and freedom, reaching for liberation as a dream which was clearly far from becoming reality. The civil rights movement to come would embrace song as well, singing, “We Shall Overcome” like a mantra as they marched amongst water cannons and attack dogs. That is the same spirit that fills Zechariah and Simeon and Mary, hope coming out of their lungs into the world carried on a melody.

Sometimes when words alone fail us, when actions are hard to determine and the path forward is unknown at best, when joy seems a distant possibility, and hope feels lost, a song can accomplish what we cannot otherwise determine. This may be why we often get nostalgic round this time of year and we sing songs that contain theology or language we’d never use any other time, but which convey something beyond those words…for there is something in the combination of melody and lyric, harmony and rhythm, that expands our souls. There is power in the Christmas carol that awakens something warm in us during the frozen days of winter. The music helps us to imagine newness, to awaken hope and to bring forth some brightness in a dark time. And that music is all around us, sitting right next to us in church every Sunday.

So, rather than a long expository unpacking of the words of Mary, I thought we might peruse our hymnals for signs of this protest music hidden in the familiar. If you will turn with me in the New Century Hymnal to #116, a hymn we sing all the time around Advent. “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” derives from the same effort that Luke used to get Mary’s words. The words of Isaiah are often used to describe Jesus, as if Jesus was who Isaiah was predicting would arrive when he said, “The Lord will give you a sign: This virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Emmanuel, God with us.” It isn’t. Isaiah was speaking to his time and his people, but when Jesus came around and the disciples could not make sense of who he was and what he was up to, the words of Isaiah came to mind, maybe they even sung them one day, and they made a parallel – Jesus is just like whoever Isaiah was speaking of…he is “God with us,” he is Emmanuel. This announcement was revolutionary…listen to the words of freedom and liberation as we sing together, verses 1, 6 & 7.

Did you hear it? Did you hear the melody of resistance?

Now let’s try #119, which is a catchy little tune but the words are direct and confrontational. It was written by a physician, Dr. Miriam Therese Winter, who has traveled the world, ministering with her medical skills to homeless and helpless people in places such as the Thai-Cambodian border and to starving children in Ethiopia. She knows something of injustice and suffering as she writes these lyrics. Let’s sing together verses 1, 4 & 5.

The lyrics sing of a turning of the world, of a time in which the things that seem to plague us as human beings — many of which we do to one another — plague us no longer for God’s love has intervened.

And, finally, though Christmas is not yet here…a Christmas song. #153 in the hymnal, written fairly recently from the Iona community in Scotland, this hymn speaks of this same promise that fuels all our hopes and dreams. It announces joy by announcing the unexpected, the arrival of heaven on earth, born in a baby, unlikely and small. It might be strange to think of this as a protest or resistance song, but what could be more resistant to the pull of American Empire, to the surge of hyper-individualism and the era of the “self-made man” than such a fragile image? What could be more of a protest to racism, sexism, xenophobia and fear than the presence of love in a baby, the announcement of God’s vision and kin-dom in a manger, born to the poorest of couples in the smallest of places? Let’s sing together…

We sing our joy. This Advent season as we wait for heaven to come to earth, we sing our joy. This Christmas as we will announce again the baby born to save us all from ourselves, we will sing our joy. Hallelujah. 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.

Luke 1:26-38

Mary, Mary, Mary…like so many women today, we expect you to be it all in the ultimate “lean in” moment, at once virgin and mother, saint and sinner. We have buried you under so many layers of theology, piety, and politics, it’s nearly impossible to excavate. Some Christians exalt you so highly that they pray directly to you. Others ignore you on principle alone. Some call you a victim of divine coercion, like some sort of example of a cosmic #MeToo. Others grant you the title “Mother of God,” which seems quite a thing to live up to. You represent a troubling model of pious femininity— ever sinless, ever virgin, ever mother, woman, but only in the purest sense of that term, encompassing a patriarchal ideal of a feminine honor that is wrapped in conflicting paper. 

As for me, I’m not sure what I feel about Mary. Her exaltation doesn’t work for me because my theology doesn’t claim her as the mother of God. She’s the mother of Jesus, who is the closest example we have of God’s love and power lived out, but not God. And the whole “virgin” motif I understand more as an example of lifting Jesus up than it is commentary on Mary herself. See, virgin births were a way, in the ancient Mediterranean culture, to claim the importance of someone. Caesars were born of virgins, Greek and Roman gods, heroes of renown all born of virgins in a claim of the strange dichotomy that patriarchy still makes on women – be virginal and yet also alluring because sex is dirty and wrong, but “oh, so right” and patriarchy heaps all of it’s anxieties about sex onto women, which is why 100% of the arguments against birth control are aimed at women, though 50% of the problem is men…maybe more.

And then there’s motherhood. This is where I give Mary lots of cred. I know that I am who I am, in part – a BIG part – because of my mother. So, could it be that Mary’s reluctant agreement to this plan the angel presents…is THIS where Jesus learned his own faithfulness in the improbable, even the impossible? Maybe we turn too soon to claiming God’s hand on Jesus and ignore Mary’s hand on him. When she agrees to this motherhood thing, I suspect she does so like lots of women I know – full of high ideals and hope. For if we ever knew beforehand what birthing and raising children was reallylike, the species wouldn’t survive. It’s a strange chemical that invades the heart and mind that allows those subsequent children to come along, too…a holy amnesia that grants grace enough to take that road again. We could say that when Mary says, “Let it be with me just as you have said,” she doesn’t really have any idea what she’s saying.

I have so many questions to ask Mary: When did you tell your parents you were pregnant? HOW did you tell your parents you were pregnant? Did you tell Joseph yourself, or did the gossipmongers of Nazareth take care of that for you? Did anyone in the village believe your story? After Gabriel departed, did you doubt his visitation? At some point, with the stories in the local paper and the constant whispering as your rounded the corner, did you question your sanity? In a culture where “honor killings” are a real thing – did you fear for your life?

We get only ten verses for this whole story, the most tangible origin story of Jesus. This story reminds us that God’s favor isn’t necessarily the analgesic we often think it is…divine favor may not equate with wealth, health, comfort, or ease, an assertion which might surprise some churches that spend about 10 seconds on Mary, her dream and the ramifications of the angel’s announcement before racing to her son, the one who may have been more influenced by his rebellious, faithful mother than we often say. Often this story is portrayed only as Mary’s quick yes to the angel’s offer, yet painters and poets across time have produced art in between these ten verses, giving midrashic meaning to a critical and imminently human experience. In her commentary on this passage, Debie Thomas writes, “The danger in idealizing Mary’s consent is that it distorts her humanity, and keeps her story at arm’s length from ours. For better or for worse, I can’t relate to a person who leaps headlong into obedience. I can relate, however, to the one who struggles, to the one whose “yes” is cautious and ambivalent.”

This is, after all, what I think is the more salient message for us this morning from Mary, visited by an angel in a direct line from God that few, if any, of us get to experience. And yet she doubts. She questions. She wonders and ponders and discerns what it is exactly that she will do next. At some level she knows that her “yes” in this instance means she will give herself over to scandal and ostracism. It means putting her reputation, her family’s honor, her future marriage, even her very life on the line. So she asks some specific questions about God’s intentions for overcoming what she considers impossible and, in the end, says yes only when the very last thing that has to be addressed is her willingness…her own overcoming of her own uncertainty. For God can do much, this story reminds us, but God cannot faith for us. It is we who have to engage with the mystery that is life, with all of it’s twists and turns and inconsistencies. We have to take that first step on that dark staircase when it seems like we have no idea how things might work out or what it is that we will do tomorrow. It might mean saying yes to something even when it seems like it might cost us something.

I don’t think that Mary is meant to be the model of faith for us. I think that she is meant to be the model of faith for Jesus, the example that we see influencing him to take some risks and make a stand, even when it might cost him something. And I’m not suggesting that you have to give birth to the Christ child or die on a cross to be faithful, but rather that you do have to be willing to listen to where God is leading you and trust that you can follow…that you arepreciselywho God wants in that place and time. Mary didn’t know how this would all work out and perhaps if she had, or if Gabriel had told her the whole plot to come, she would have said no. Sometimes it’s good that we don’t know the whole story, for often our best moments in life come from things that are so immensely difficult and trying that we’d have said no straightaway if we could have seen the road ahead. It is this Advent road, friends, that reminds us that in the waiting, in the darkness and doubt there is much blessing. Advent teaches us that light and darkness are not binary opposites but rather dance partners and our wounds are often the very places that light gets into our lives.

I was struck by the words of one commentary writer on this passage where he said, “Having got through [reading of her] Questioning doubt we then stand with Mary on the edge of mystery and miracle. All that remains is the “Let it be.” This is the ultimate wording for an agreement to partnership with God and Life.” He continues, “[A] great song it was by John Lennon, “When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, ‘Let it be.’ John Lennon was not an obvious Christ follower, but he knew enough to know that Mary would know what to do in “times of trouble” [She would] “Let it be.”

Only it wasn’t John Lennon who wrote that song, it was Paul McCartney. And it wasn’t Mary the mother of Jesus who McCartney was referring to, it was his own mother Mary, who died when he was young. Lennon and McCartney always shared songwriting credits, even when the majority of the work was done by only one of them, like Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Lennon actually didn’t want “Let it Be” on the same-titled album, what ultimately became the last studio album the Beatles ever produced. Lennon thought it too “religious”, too “Catholic.” He called it, quite sarcastically, “Hark the Angels Come” and then insisted that a song titled “Maggie May” about a Liverpool prostitute follow it on the original album. 

McCartney later recalled why he wrote the song. One night when he was paranoid and anxious, he had a dream where he saw his long dead mother, come to him in his time of trouble, speaking words of wisdom that brought him much peace when he needed it, peace that passed his understanding. That light came in through his wounded heart, teaching him that he could move forward without knowing how everything would work out. It was this sweet dream that got him to begin writing the song and later genuinely became a way to live his life – development of a comfort with being out of control.

In a way, Mary announces Advent – or rather Advent as a way of life. She listens, she considers, she debates and discerns and questions and then she says – “I’m here, God.” And that’s a pattern we can all use, right now, today. That is an Advent way of life that we can use, for God is still speaking and the incarnation – the visitation of messages from God – they are still happening. Perhaps not as neatly and dramatically as our stories tell, those, I think, would be easier to see. But they are happening. God is all around us, whispering words of wisdom, asking us to engage with God’s great plan of Tikkun Olam, the healing of the world. I don’t know about you, but I need to know that. I need to know that the incarnation matters, that God becoming flesh and living here among us matters, and that Christmas is not just the story of a baby born 2000 years ago, but the story of God born to us each and every day. It is true if we will let it be true. 

Let it be.

After the sermon, Aretha Franklin’s rendition of “Let it Be” was played:

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.A

Luke 1:5-24a

Telling a story can make all the difference in the world. I think of the two most profoundly jarring events of my lifetime, the Oklahoma City bombing and 9-11 and in both cases what was sought and generated and clung to almost immediately were the stories. Where were you? Who did you know? What happened to them? What happened to their families? How many times have you had a great book or movie, a song or poem move you to deep emotion? Story is what defines us and sets us apart. It’s what allows us to connect with each another, to see ourselves in someone else, to truly know and to be known. Stories are how we seek and make meaning. 

This is why this story that we will tell over the next 4 weeks, in song and word, in image and action, is so powerful. It is the story of hope, born amidst crisis and turmoil, born in the unlikely, in the improbable, in the impossible. It is the story of Jesus, the one we call the Christ, and the mythic cast of characters around him that tie his story to a bigger story and that bigger story to us.

You might have heard me say a particular word just then – mythic. And I don’t want to just skip over that. I chose that word on purpose because the story of Jesus is mythic, not mythic as in false, but mythic as in something larger than reality, and much, much bigger than we can place into words. The preeminent scholar of myth, the late Jospeh Campbell, once said that “Myths are public dreams, and dreams are private myths.” It was his obscure way of suggesting that our dream world is one in which we search for meaning from things we don’t expect to be logical, yet we sometimes don’t allow our storytelling the same freedoms. So we, especially we rational liberals, want the stories of Jesus to not reflect anything supernatural, like virgin births or resurrections or miracles. Myth doesn’t really care about all that, it’s trying to make a bigger point than whether something actually happened, like historicallyhappened in a way that a journalist with a camera could have captured.

This story, the story of Christmas, is a collection, really, just like almost all else in our scriptures. The most meaning-making stories in the Bible come in versions, there are twocreation stories in Genesis, the story of the exodus gets told several times, and there are 4 gospels which tell the story of Jesus – and those are just the gospels that made it into our canon. Christmas isn’t just one story, it is a multitude. So as we wait for Christmas, here in this season of Advent, we wait not just for one thing to unfold, but for many things to unfold. Advent is, after all, the season of waiting.

Waiting is a very spiritual exercise. You know how I know that? I don’t want to do it, that’s how. Patience, loving your enemies, trusting in something despite the evidence, hope in times of darkness, these are all things at which I have to labor, sometimes mightily. That’s why they are practices. You practice things you aren’t good at so you’ll get better at them. Thus far this hasn’t happened for me and waiting. I don’t like it. I don’t like lines, I don’t like crowds, I don’t like busy places, in part because I think that means I’m going to have to wait.

And yet, this is the core of my spiritual life as a pastor. I sit with people as they await the diagnosis, the outcome, the verdict. I wait with families for the baby to be born or the loved one to die. I wait with one half of a nervous wedding participant as the other half gets situated, and I wait with a grieving family as they prepare for that awkward walk down the aisle while others watch their grief laid out in public. I wait for answers that never come, for resolutions that don’t resolve and for solutions that never arrive. 

I have spent the last few days waiting for my mom to die. I don’t intend for that to sound so harsh, but the reality is that her cancer was spreading rapidly and making her increasingly uncomfortable. It was time, and she knew it, too. I think she still knows it, though she has stopped verbalizing her communication. So we wait, we no other options. And I’m no better at it in my own life than I am with any of you. Waiting is still a practice, and I’m not sure that practice ever makes perfect in this case.

So, why wait? Why do we put ourselves through this? Well, in part because we have no choice. Life does not happen on our terms. Practicing the art of waiting helps put us in touch with the humility that a good spirituality awakens in us all. It helps us be in touch with the reality that we do not orchestrate the world, nor can we control it…though that might be news for some of you. It reinforces that we live most of our lives in the in-between. It gives us time to write our stories, to hear other people’s stories unfold and to seek God in the midst of all of it.

Rather than think of our Christmas stories as histories, I prefer to think of them as the in-between stories, the making of meaning in the midst of things we don’t understand or control. And what can be more human than that? For our stories not only help us make meaning, they also help us see possibility. After all, who, without storytelling, would imagine something like hope in a baby born to a family from the margins, on the lowest rung of the social ladder? This Christmas story helps us hope in the improbable and to know that God is the God of the marginalized and left behind, the ones that society calls unimportant. And that is a hopeful story.

Even today we hear a lesser known story, the ones that isn’t told as often. It’s the prequel, you might say, of the Jesus story, the miraculous birth of John the Baptist who is not “the one,” as we think of titles, but rather the one who points out the one. The names of the parents of John the Baptist, and Jesus for that matter, were arguably created from the imaginations of the Gospel authors working from the ancient Hebrew stories, the same passages we call scripture, for inspiration. The names were fabricated, they were borrowed, they were used because of the theological messages they conveyed. The writers knew that this story would be important and how it flowed would be important. They needed a John to show the way to Jesus, portraying him as kind of a wild man of a prophet perhaps on purpose. You have to look for God in the world, sometimes from unlikely places, to have an eye out, an expectation that God’s action is at work, for when we fail to look for God’s presence in the world we always fail to see it.

See, the amazing thing is not the miracle of pregnancy in the so-called “advanced” years of their lives, nor the striking mute of Zechariah, nor the remarkable scene of John kicking in his mother’s womb at the sight of Mary. The amazing thing is not that these stories get told again by Zechariah and Elizabeth, themselves surely aware that their own story was mimicking that of Hannah, that their son was foretold to be like Samuel, a forbearer of a messiah, and that they see in Mary the same story that Isaiah casts before his audience asserting hope coming to them in the form of a baby. The amazing thing is that as they reach into their own holy stories to find meaning in their lives that they are willing to let God’s story, trapped in ancient stories, to become their story. They find in what is happening to them now not the fulfillment of a prophecy, but rather the affirmation that God worked among us then and God is working among us now.

A good story makes us wait for that. If Murder on the Orient Expressjust told you the culprits on page two, or if Hamletneatly resolved in the first act, we’d scarcely remember them. The tension and complexity with which they are written mirror our lives, which don’t work out neatly and rarely get resolved…at least not in a single chapter.
As we head into this Advent season, there is a story I hope that we can hear, though it may seem hard to hear it. There is a voice in the wilderness calling to us, my friends, a voice telling us to prepare a highway for our God, a God who will level the rough places and raise the low places. Our work made fade, the old hymn sings, but the work of God – compassion and justice, generosity and love – that work will endure. We have much darkness before us right now, families separated at the border, children in tent cities with an unknown future ahead of them, violence, war, famine, terror and the heavy price of our industrialism that will come due soon, if it isn’t already. Yes, much darkness. But listen…can you hear the voice? It’s not Zechariah, he could not speak of it he was so incredulous…it’s not Elizabeth, she is in seclusion thinking people won’t understand…it’s John, from the side of a river, calling to us in John’s not-at-all subtle way, repent, which means to turn around. Stop the direction in which you are walking and hear the story, YOUR story, whispered from a God who loves you more than you can possibly imagine and loves this world enough to take on human form, our mythic story reads, to share in our lot, to bear our burdens and see creation through our eyes, giving us a chance to learn that we can hope our way through the life that God has given to us, to trust in holy waiting as a practice, a way of life…knowing that God is indeed with us, pleading for us in a shattered world, giving us loving arms to hold onto and bringing us peace again.

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.

Apocalypse Lullaby

(prior to the sermon, the song Apocalypse Lullaby by the Wailin’ Jennys was played)

Revelation 1:4b-8 & Luke 21:25-36

What’s the deal, pastor? I just barely got done digesting the meal from Thursday and I’ve come here to settle into Christmas, not hear about the end of the world! And yet, here we are. I’m not manufacturing these scripture lessons, you know, this is what the long tradition of the big capital “C” church, in all of it’s wisdom, lays out for us in the series of readings churches all over the world are using today – the lectionary.

It is the Reign of Christ Sunday, actually new year’s eve for us in the church calendar. We start a whole new year, from the point of view of the lectionary, next Sunday, December 2^nd, the first Sunday of Advent. Christmas is just around the corner. I wonder why then, in the mass of holiday shopping, the office parties, the family gatherings, the special dinners, putting up decorations and turning on lights – all the excitement the seasons generates – that the lectionary organizers want us to hear these apocalyptic words about vengeance and foreboding? Now, you might be thinking to yourself, have you ever been to the mall on Black Friday, pastor? How about the 3^rdoffice party in as many nights? You might be seeking the end of something after all that!

These words are here to remind us, just before we begin the 4 weeks of Advent before Christmas, that the birth is only part of our story. There’s a little drama that’s going to be played out over the next 4 weeks, and it’s an episode you’ve seen a thousand times. It’s like those handful of movies – Field of Dreams, Silverado, Tombstone, the Hunt for Red October – that I always watch if they come on, though I’ve seen them a thousand times. We already know the story of Christmas, we know the stable and the wise men and the baby born in the manger. It’s not a surprise, but we listen to it each year because it helps us to remember that our tradition makes this strange claim – that God loves us so much God came to us in the flesh, as the most vulnerable thing, to live lifewithus. It helps us to remember that hope can come in the smallest and least likely of places, and that is very good news, indeed. And it fills us with the sense that we are not alone still – that justice and righteousness are shaping our world, as if a ruler, some kind of king, were dictating it. This king sure seems quiet, I know.

We often avoid these apocalyptic stories, I know, because of how they’ve been warped and manipulated to support a single interpretation heavy with the implication that Christ is coming again to smite the bad guys, who are always the same people we hate. But that’s not the whole story. We also wait, the tradition tells us, for Christ to come again and to rule over us like a benevolent king, exchanging the kingdoms we know with the kin-dom of God. In fact, the tradition calls this Sunday “Christ the King” Sunday. It was a term decreed by the Pope as dictators were rising to power at the turn of the last century and the Roman Catholic Church wanted to remind it’s adherents that their allegiance was to something bigger than the authority of the state. Boy, did that end up being more radical an idea than I’m sure the Pope intended.

We don’t use “Christ the King” here at Fellowship, not only because it’s a very patriarchal metaphor, but also because it is an inert one. We live in the United States which has never had a king and kicked the only one to rule over these lands out in a revolution. Why would we want to name Christ King? But I do want us to pay attention to the metaphoric mechanism at work here. The framework of Revelation and Luke are both from a world that knows all about kings, some better than others. It’s a world that knows power through the office of king, and imagines what it might be like to have someone with Jesus’ integrity and love in that position of power. It imagines a king like none they have ever known, a power greater than they have ever known. And while we can’t just pick that up raw, because metaphors are contextual, we can identify with a power greater than our own political systems…at least I hope we can. Because now, back in our own context, we still have to understand power, how it works, and from where it comes. And we can still make a claim on God’s power, known in weakness, and how different it’s demand is on our lives, our actions, on how we treat ourselves and one another.

This is why there are these titles for Jesus. We say it different ways – God incarnate, the Son of God, part of the Holy Trinity, God of true God, all of that and more. We say Christ, though we most often say it like it’s his surname – Jesus Christ, like Walter Johnson. It’s a title, given to someone at a time in which titles really mattered. They mattered so much that his followers, giving us what we call holy scripture, chose to use the same titles found all around them – Son of God, King, Savior of the World. Those were titles that belonged to Caesar. They were the titles of a dictator, a King with a powerful army whose motto was, “Peace through Victory.” The Roman Empire was built on control, dominance and authority by despotic rule. Caesar fought hard to keep a class system in place, to control borders and dominate wealth in the hands of a few, lifting up high ideals with rhetoric and failing to demonstrate them with actions. It was a “my way or the highway” approach, with little regard given to how it looked or whether or not there was even the appearance of integrity. The strategy was accumulation, at any cost to other human beings. The rule was by fear – and if you crossed Caesar, then you were attacked. Period. Unfortunately we do not have a current political example to give of such tyranny. That would be very useful as Christmas rolls around again and we witness once more the birth of the system that was put in direct confrontation to the Roman Empire.

See, I know what Christmas means out there, but I’ll tell you what it means to me in here. This is the announcement again of a new world, one where love has come to live amongst us, justice is breaking out all over and peace means something far more than the absence of conflict. It means the baby is being born again, hope arrives and the world is about to turn, but I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s easy to do when you already know the story. When Field of Dreams comes on, I start tearing up before Kevin Costner ever turns to his father and says, “Hey dad, wanna have a catch?” Hits me every time, though I know it’s coming. Maybe that’s why the lectionary organizers wanted to distract us with powerful images this morning. Maybe they know that we’ll be already on the downhill run towards Christmas, before December ever starts. Maybe they know that the lights have been up in some place since before Halloween, that some gifts have already been stuffed under the beds and deep in the closets. Maybe they want us to be aware, for we live in a post-Christmas world, despite the fact that we put on this little show each year, acting like this is all new. The baby has been born. The love has lived among us. This reign of God’s justice and righteousness has begun.

On Friday, I stopped by the New Sanctuary vigil at the county jail downtown, now in it’s 76^thconsecutive week at noon on Fridays, to bear witness to the people being held at David L. Moss on ICE holds. Many of them are not even from Tulsa, but housed here because of our county’s agreement with ICE to be a detainment center. We sing and we pray as we see injustice done in our names and it can be difficult to find hope, for the system is quite broken. But we tell stories of people impacted by ideological and political decisions. We make connections and lend aid and sometimes even purchase a bus ticket or a phone that makes all the difference. A tiny gift. And hope is born again.

I then went a few blocks away to a celebration of the life of Dr. Olivia Hooker who died on Wednesday at the age of 103. She was the last known survivor of what is often called the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, but which, as Dr. Hooker said many times in her life, better referred to as a massacre. No one rioted, she recalled. They were targeted, terrorized, massacred. Hundreds dead. Thousands homeless. Arguable the most prosperous black community in the nation burned to the ground in what many speakers recalled as an act driven by economic and social motivations, with a layer of racism used to justify, to excuse, to warrant. Dr. Hooker managed to survive that attack, to thrive in a world that did not want her to thrive, and to live a life of distinguished dignity, always demanding justice and seeking reparations for a great crime visited upon her, her family and her community. Her life might seem small to some, but it was not. And in her voice, hope is born again.

These are not texts of prophecy forecasting the end of the world. They are announcements of a new world – here and not here. They are defiant, steadfast, even foolish declarations in the face of often overwhelming evidence, that there is a greater power, and it isn’t Caesar, it isn’t the King, it isn’t the Dictator or Chancellor or the President. These hard words are often dismissed by us because they’ve been warped like so much of our Bible to serve the very thing they resist. But they can inspire us just as they have the liberation movements in Central America and the solidarity movement in Poland. They are examples of how the idea of hope, generously and extravagantly spread around, can actually generate hope in the darkness.

If we can picture something that isn’t here yet, to reach for something that does not seem real at all, and to imagine ourselves guided, even supported by something larger than just us, then perhaps we can locate ourselves on this long arc that is bending towards justice. Maybe not in our lifetimes, nor our children’s, but bending nonetheless, as if guided by a force that is unstoppable, that is unavoidable, that is setting the course from someplace bigger than where we are. For there are times we must expand our lens out to it’s limits – the widest angle possible – while we engage with the critical and seemingly small task of being light, entering the world as a small spark of that divine energy, a small gust that is part of a larger front, one heart in the middle of a brutal world. What difference could that make? What could your small act of kindness possibly do in a world so broken? It’s a tiny gesture, meaningless, weak and fragile….like a baby, born in a manger.

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.

Mark 13:1-8

“Nosotros trabajamos por ustedes”

We were coached on what to say as we prepared to cross the pedestrian bridge from El Paso to Ciudad Juarez, a short, steep walk from one world to another. A literal line on the sidewalk marks the international boundary, a line covered by a metal awning, fences on both sides of the walkway and the words in graffiti on the sides of the concrete drainage basin below, barely visible through the slats of the metal barriers – La frontera vive en nosotros…the border lives in us.

We were told that our very brief journey into Mexico, long enough to gather together, cross the street and walk back into the US, was designed to help us see how a person seeking asylum would walk, and the expectation was that we would see people encamped on the bridge, on the Mexico side, waiting for their turn to “legally” claim asylum, something that is legal for anyone to do anywhere on US soil, but which new policy makes “legal” only at approved ports of entry like the El Paso Bridge, where the main street of El Paso and the main street of Ciudad Juarez literally connect, a physical sign of the ways that these two cities have been connected for centuries. The new policy has been to “cap” entry, a random number each day, and many are choosing to stay on the bridge – to live there rather than risk their chance to get to what they consider safety and hope.

“What should we say to them?”, a person asked our guide. What should we say to these people awaiting their fate, families huddled together on the side of a cold metal bridge, stating clearly that they’d rather wait for years on this bridge than to return to their home and face the fate they know awaits them there?

Nosotros trabajamos por ustedes. We are working for you. Our guide, Diego, born in El Paso, raised in Ciudad Juarez and schooled back in El Paso, gave some of us a quick Spanish lesson, saying that phrase slowly over and over again as the Border Patrol helicopter flew in circles over and over again in this little city park just blocks from the bridge, checking up on the group of interfaith leaders that they had been told were coming.

We are working for you.

We never saw people on the bridge. The Mexican police cleared them out a few days before we arrived, we were told later. The impending arrival of US troops, the escalation expected as the so-called “caravan” arrives was threatening to make a volatile situation explosive. So we paid our 50 cents, walked across the bridge with dozens of others who make this trek everyday, amidst a flow of cars in both directions, as people live their lives that exist somewhere in between this border that is equal parts hard, steel reality and soft, abstract illusion. It’s only 25 cents to come back, another component of a border system that makes no sense, seems pieced together over decades, some parts functional, most parts barely working, held together by duct tape and bailing wire by people who are trying to make things work, not decide large existential questions or fight ideological battles. We stood in line, but a different line, as the privilege that comes with a passport in my hand makes it impossible for me to really experience what an asylum seeker experiences, not to mention that I have come from my safe, comfortable home to this place, not fleeing violence and threat, but instead claiming this well intended but sometimes plastic mantra – nosotros trabajamos por ustedes.

Tornillo is a town about 35 miles east of that bridge, where farm fields give way to another bridge connecting one country to another over an imaginary line that we have drawn, sometimes literally, in the sand. Tornillo has all the prerequisite parts for a “solution” that is being developed in pieces. Those who seek asylum, the “solution” says, are just gaming the system anyway. So we have to discourage them. The overly simplistic approach to that perceived problem has created a different problem – as children are separated from their families, either sent here on their own as the only option ofdesperatepeople, torn apart by the journey itself or, intentionally divided by our own government as a cruel tactic meant to warn others. Tornillo is away from the big city. It is out among the fields, off the highway, the GPS can get you close, but there’s not even an address, just a road. And there, just beyond the fences and the gates, are the tents.

We stood just beyond the main gate on the rocky, dusty soil – clergy, activist, student…the well-meaning, the good- hearted, the outraged and the wounded…singing and praying and denouncing this solution. For many in the crowd, wearing kippah and prayer shawls, the idea of a “solution” for the plight of human beings was all too real…all too traumatic a thought. Is this how it begins? Does a pogrom, an internment, a holocaust begin by declaring that some lives are worth more than others?

At several points in the vigil we stopped and went silent as buses drove by, buses we assumed held immigrants seeking refuge and finding a kind of prison. We stood in silent vigil knowing that we were not there to stand in front of those buses or to lay down our lives for theirs, that is not the solution to this “solution.” The activists on the ground, who had been there long before we arrived and would stay long after we left, told us as much – the local Jewish temple had already begun to receive hostile messages. Thank you for being here they said, but the best thing you can do is witness with respect and courtesy and then go back home and let people know what you have seen.

Nosotros trabajamos por ustedes.

Are we working for them? Sometimes I wonder, because it is easy in the world of social justice activism, to get your own emotions and needs wrapped up in the emotions and needs of people you are trying to help, with very good intentions. Sometimes I wonder if we are trying to help others or trying to assuage our own guilt, or contend with our own outrage? We are all, after all, neck deep in a system that exacerbates this injustice, and others. We eat produce and meat, have roofs and lawns and like to catch a bargain where we can. I was congizant that we drove a big car down to El Paso, a car likely assembled in Mexico before coming across one of those border bridges where we drove it back near it’s birthplace and stayed in a hotel where my bed was made by people who might walk back that night across that same bridge I walked earlier – nosotros trabajamos por ustedes. De veras? Really?

On the way home my major conspirators and I talked, a Muslim woman born and raised here in Oklahoma who knows something of the hierarchy of human value and who counts and who doesn’t according to our system, and a Christian woman, herself a bridge between two theological worlds, one in which she grew up and would never be allowed to preach, and the one now, a UCC world like this one that has very good intentions, not always great impact. We talked about injustice and fear, about intolerance and hatred and how very, very dark the world seems. In fact, we told those stories only with one another because I think if we told them in some other setting we’d lack the strength to keep going. So we helped one another, just as we had done the day before, delivering freshly laundered towels to grateful shelters where we saw more faces of migrant children than our own government wanted us to see at Tornillo. Because you can’t…YOU CAN’T…see the faces of children and fear. So we hide those faces away. Because fear is what fuels this solution machine.

We talked of many things, of desparation and sorrow for a world that feels like it’s crumbling, though the stories of people on the border would tell you that it’s been crumbling for a long time, maybe always. We spoke of our traditions, of the great Jewish dream of tikkun olam, the healing of the world in which we participate with God to bring peace, hope and justice. We spoke of al-amin the Islamic phrase that is attached to so many prayers that speaks of Allah’s love for ALL people, and the ultimate embrace of the divine arms for everyone at some point in our futures. We talked of the kin-dom, the beloved community, that is here and not yet here, as tikkun olam and al-amin are dreams, realized and not, present and not, reality and completely absent, seemingly at the same time. Our hope, such as it is, is a fragile thing.

When Mark wrote down these words in the 13^thchapter of his gospel, I wonder if we was feeling much the same of what we were on our trip home? You have to read the stories around this part of his gospel, a part often called the “little apocalypse” because it is so foreboding. It is full of judgment set in an ominous tone as Jesus predicts that this building, the temple, will be destroyed. It’s not so much amazing prophecy for Jesus as it is embellishment by Mark, writing after the destruction of the temple by Rome, decades after Jesus would have set on her steps. But maybe it’s not even meant to be prophecy. Maybe it’s meant, like all apocalyptic literature, to be a voice of hope in the darkest of times. It lays out the brutality of the moment in stark detail, the earthquakes and wars, nations against nations, and then offers a promise that this is the birth pangs…and anyone who has given birth can tell you, those can be excrutiating and seem to go on forever. It is the clarion call of our own involvement in a world of injustice as we seek a world of justice, and our scriptures are full of stories about how difficult it is to be in this world but not of it, how much an act of faith it is to long for something that you get only brief glimpses of, if that.

We rode back with no answers, save one. We can’t treat each other this way. We can talk of sovereigntyand national security all day long, but it really is this simple to me – ethically, morally, theologically it all boils down to what you heard sung at the start of this sermon, we are how we treat each other and nothing more. That is why we will continue to care for the people who somehow make it up here from the border and find themselves incarcerated in our jail, in our county, in our city – often without a single charge against them for they have committed no crime by seeking asylum in our country. Still we hold them. We hold men, women, children, entire families – and often not together. It is a sign of great darkness in our land, perhaps every bit as dark as the times that pushed Mark to write these difficult words about the shaking of the foundations. And that great tikkun olam/al-amin/kin-dom that we seek means that we must look for the ways that we can bend the moral arc a little towards justice. I’m very clear after this journey that I cannot fix a broken immigration system, nor can I make life right for the thousands who are caught up in it. But I might be able to make it better for one, or two, or even five. I may not be able to help anyone on the border of Juarez and El Paso, or Tijuana and San Diego, but I can help someone here in Tulsa. I can give money to organizations that are helping on the front lines, I can advocate for people here in our own jail, I can work to end the programs that keep them here, dismantling the system one piece at a time, I can send in my comments on “Public Charge” as your bulletin indicates, I can write or call my representatives, I can use my voice.

So, this morning, I think I hear God calling me through these dark, apocalyptic stories and the witness of a week. I think that I can understand how we might need grand visions of God’s perfect justice in unjust times, the unsettling visions helping us refuel when everything feels settled and set. I think that now I can hear God’s still small voice saying to me – try. Just try, where you are with what you have, with heaven on your mind.

Nosotros trabajamos por ustedes – we are working for you, and the “you” in that statement has to be everyone, every single other. For the border really does live in each of us, and as we have said so many times in this sanctuary, on street corners, at the halls of power, in planning meetings, with our voices, our hearts, with our hands and our feet – either all of us matter or none of us do.

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.

Diamonds and Rust

Selections from Ruth, chapters 3 & 4

In 1974, Joan Baez wrote one of the few top-40 hits she ever had, a haunting and beautiful song called “Diamonds and Rust.” Though she wrote it in 74, it wasn’t released until 1975, and it wasn’t until years later that she, perhaps accidentally, revealed that the song was written about her affair with Bob Dylan. In the opening lyrics she refers to a phone call Dylan made to her from a phone booth in the Midwest, where he read to her the lyrics to a song he was working on, which inspired her to write Diamonds and Rust. She lied to him for years that it was written about her former husband, but it was her obsession with Dylan, the rising superstar, the media darling and the musical genius that forged not only the affair that pulled apart her marriage, but also created this incredible song written about an inequitable relationship that was perhaps never going to last.

She writes of diamonds and rust, as this phone call breaks her heart again. She later wrote that the diamonds and the rust are her memories. “Time turns ugly charcoal into diamonds,” she said in an interview decades later, “and shiny metal into rust.” It’s funny how the worst things that can happen to people, their most painful incidents, can become our favorite pieces of art. Perhaps it is because we can hear that pain, identify with it and since something beautiful has come from it, we hope that we too can have beauty amidst our pain. It’s a more likely scenario, I think, than the one we usually seek, where our pain is magically and instantaneously relieved, replaced with sunshine and rainbows. But time has an odd way of changing our outlook on things that are devastating to us. We often learn, we appreciate, we grow from pain and struggle.

Though we may want pure experiences, life rarely happens in clean lines, with all the loose ends sewn up, “i’s” dotted and “t’s” crossed. More often it is messy and incomplete, complex, uncertain and even contradictory. This is one reason I appreciate the Hebrew stories so much, they are full of complexity and contradiction. And they present us with the awareness that we must seek God in that messiness, rather than expecting God to only show up in the brightest of light, the clarity of perfection. They give us both the diamonds and the rust, all in one story, leaving us to wrestle with the pieces that don’t quite fit together – the parts we like and the parts we don’t.

The Book of Ruth has been critiqued by feminist theologians as both pro and anti-woman, both the story of the power of women and the oppression of patriarchy revealed. In the heavily edited selection today we wrap up this story of women left in the most vulnerable of places finding hope and safety through their dedication and, as we will hear, their participationin an unjust system that is their only avenue. Ruth, at the coaching of her mother-in-law who knows the ropes of this system, goes to Boaz and, depending on your perspective, either (a) this nice love story unfolds; or (b) she submits herself to a patriarchal system in which she is property, and defined largely by her sexual identity.

This is, after all, what is going on with all of this business about lying on the threshing room floor, dressed in your best and, of course, the phrase that gives it all away to the ancient Hebrew audience, “uncovering his feet.” It should be said uncovering his feet,wink-wink, with giant “air quotes,” accompanied by some kind of slinky, wah-wah guitar adult film soundtrack. It’s a euphemism. His “feet” ain’t what’s being uncovered, folks. The stomach isn’t necessarily, the story suggests, the way to the man’s heart. So now how do we feel about this story characterizing Ruth as the heroine? Now how do we feel about the words of Boaz, praising her as a “worthy woman?”

The rest of the story is Boaz dealing with the other relative who holds the “next-of-kin” title over Naomi and her property. See Naomi, as the wife of Elimilech, “owns” this property, but she doesn’t really. She can’t sell it, nor can she hold the profits for women are second-class citizens in the culture at this time. All those resources have to go through her husband, or son, or an uncle or father or some other male – in this case a kinsman never identified but who is apparently next in line for this “ownership” of the claim Naomi has, and Ruth has in connection to Naomi.

That kinsman refuses his claim and Boaz, true to his word, takes up the claim and marries Ruth. Ruth bears a son and we might notice a couple of details that make this story even more subversive. It is Naomi who nurses the child, not Ruth. It is as if Ruth’s dedication this whole time is to Naomi, Boaz is just a means to an end. The child is named Obed, which means “servant” in Hebrew, and he begins the line to King David through this foreign woman’s commitment. But neither Ruth nor Naomi name him. Rather, the text tells us, it is the women of the neighborhood who give him the name Obed.

In all kinds of literature, from the Book of Ruth to Little Women to The Color Purple, we see women group together, with dedication and determination, to manage and, at times, to resist, a system not built for them. Ruth and Naomi both lament this way of life, with their safety and grief tied so closely together, and knowthis system, working around it to create a future for themselves amidst a strange combination of love, commitment and survival. It is a common story for women, one we have heard from the experiences of women of color during slavery or incarceration, from the lives of Nicaraguan women we have come to know and the complexity of seeking life and love outside the “norms” of patriarchal gender and sexuality definitions in the lives of people right in this church. All stories of the desire for freedom and identity in a world that seeks life, but only with a particular set of characteristics.

Is Ruth the story of one woman’s dedication and determination, or is it the story of how women, when faced with few options, get praised for staying in their lane? Should we lift up the Book of Ruth as an example of how the larger Biblical narrative, including the genealogical line of Jesus himself, pays attention to the outcast and marginalized as part of God’s vision, or should we highlight it because it shows, once again, that exceptionalism for women is seen most often through the lens of patriarchy? Is this a Biblical example of God’s love, which stretches across our boundaries and makes life where we typically try to squelch it?

The story of Ruth may indeed be a story of a woman trapped in a system that devalues her in almost every way save one, and it is also a story of perseverance and dedication in the face of injustice. It can be both. In the same way we can hold up the stories of people coming to this country fleeing poverty and violence as stories of determination and hope as we also cry out against the injustices that cause such stories to be written. This kind of complexity is the ground in which God stands, never the simplistic, heroic figure come to set all things right, God’s power flows up through the cracks in our lives, making meaning and creating light from the dark and seemingly vacuous places. It’s the complexity present as we acknowledge the sacrifice given by so many veterans today while we also decry the predisposition towards the glorification of war, often by those who haven’t been in a war. We can love soldiers and hate war.

The story of Ruth is not a simplistic claim that you should somehow be thankful for your suffering, nor happy about injustice, pain or the conflict we often feel about complex moral issues. What it does reveal for us is the possibility that at some point in the aftermath of struggle we can find gratitude for the journey, and that justice, or some semblance of it, can come in the most unjust of circumstances. Our greatest strengths can develop from our deepest wounds, our most beautiful songs sung from our broken hearts as we bear witness to the presence of a God who protects us from nothing but sustains us in everything.

Something happened this week, and maybe we missed it in the deluge of election postmortems and the bitterness of more wildfires and another mass shooting – this time in the exact same place. As we struggle with just how routine the reaction is becoming to such tragedy, and the slow, hard realization that we do have a “new normal” when it comes to gun violence and climate change, we may have missed the presence of that God who sustains us. It’s easy to do, because God doesn’t deal in the dramatic very often. Instead of arriving in one fell swoop, descending on us in an instantaneous display, God settles in, like a cold front, like the autumn that has both turned our trees into fiery beauty and sent those same leaves down to the ground like an auburn snowfall, all in the matter of a few days. You could have missed it if you weren’t looking.

In this week, almost 90 women were elected, including the first two Muslim women, one a Somali refugee and one the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, and the first two Native American women ever elected to Congress. We sent the two youngest women to Congress in the nation’s history and while we may not have changed party control here in Oklahoma, we have changed the complexion considerably. That’s really not a partisan statement, for these women came from all parties. It’s a statement about who is going to be making the decisions. It’s a statement about change. Maybe not a universal one, maybe not even one that will be immediately sustained and transformative. I don’t claim that simply having a woman in a position of power is a guarantee of more just and equitable governance, or of meaningful change. I do claim that the chances just went up a lot.

Maybe that’s why I think that this story that shifts the genealogical track of the Bible matters so much. This survived all of the edits, after all. They could have jimmied the family tree, and made it work out another way. Something was compelling or maybe even important enough to keep this tale of the line that Matthew tells us goes all the way to Jesus marked, shaped, changed, by the influence of the outsider, herself seeking survival in a place not built for her – in fact, built againsther – and calling that story holy. Perhaps there’s a lesson in there for us – not syrupy sweet, romanticized love story about the kindness of Boaz, who really does the basics of decency here, but the roll-up-your-sleeves, deep love of Ruth, who will not sit back quietly, nor be satisfied with the gleanings, but who stands with this God who she is just learning about, seeking a better future not only for herself, but for others, too.

The world is changing, my friends. I believe it and I hope you do, too. It is changing slowly, like a river flowing towards a sea, bending, curving, slowed by dam and lock, bridge and levy, but flowing nonetheless, replenished by the blood, sweat and tears of the people carried along in it, seeking that new day. Our story is connected to this story, from thousands of years ago, full of the complexity of justice and injustice, darkness and light.

The election is over. The struggle continues.

May we have strength and courage for 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.

Ruth 1:1-18 & Mark 12:28-34

When the book of Ruth comes up in the lectionary, you preach on it. That is advice that I have been given by lots of preachers because Ruth only comes around every three years, and even then only a snippet or two. It’s one of the rare books in the Bible that features a female protagonist who is even named…like out loud and everything!

It’s more likely, of course, that you will hear this passage read at a wedding than in church. Like the section of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians on love, reading this at a wedding takes it way out of context. I know that it’s read because of Ruth’s declaration of dedication, as Paul’s words are read because they describe love, and, of course, love and dedication are part of marriage. But Paul is speaking of the kind of love we all need, married or not — the connective, benefit-of-the-doubt, compassionate love that ought to rule our world as much as our marriage. And this passage from Ruth, though it has lovely words about commitment, takes place in the shadow of devastation and grief, not celebration and promise. These words don’t come in the “best of times,” as we think of weddings, but rather in the “worst of times.” Famine forces the move of Elimelech, his wife Naomi, and their sons, Mahlon and Chilion, to search for food in Moab.

Another way to say it would be that Elimelech and his family were immigrants, refugees in a land not their own, seeking not just a better life, but fighting for survival. Somehow they made it through. Then, just as it seems that they have “made it,” Elimelech dies, leaving Naomi and her two sons to make it on their own. The boys marry local women, Orpah and Ruth and they seem to have adjusted to their “new normal.” Then both the boys die. The losses were devastating.

For Naomi, it meant not only grieving the death of her husband, but also not once but twice, feeling the interminable loss of her sons. No parent expects to bury their children, and the unanswerable question, “Why God, why?” lingers in the subtext of this story, adding to it’s bitterness. Naomi even changes her name…call me “Mara,” she says, which means bitterness.

There are certain moments, often shocking and heartbreaking moments, which imprint themselves on the memory with improbable vividness and clarity. That is surely true for many of us after this week, as we sit here on our own sabbath, remembering sharply the images and the news of the eleven who were murdered in their own synagogue. They were there for shabbat services, for a bris, the naming ceremony of a child. They were welcoming in new life as a man stepped inside to end life. It is the clarity of the moment, the vividness that strikes us as we struggle to accept the worst anti-semitic attack on US soil in our history. And we cannot absorb it alone without thinking also of 9 people gunned down after a bible study at a church in South Carolina by a man wanting to start a race war; or 6 people murdered in their Sikh gudwara by someone who wanted to kill Muslims and just didn’t know the difference; or 26 killed in Texas, during church, while they worshipped. These are not unrelated events, and our response to them is a clear indication of what we affirm. An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us. We are bound together with both our siblings of faith, and our siblings who do not practice a tradition – where THEY go, WE will go; we say together…where THEY lodge, WE will lodge; THEIR people shall be OUR people, and THEIR God OUR God.”

It is the only way that I know how to be faithful, in community and across as many boundaries as I can manage, and I know after this week that I’m not alone. We stood, almost 1500 people, at Congregation B’Nai Emunah on Tuesday night, many of you were there. We were there because of what happened in Pittsburgh, but also because we know something of tragedy in Tulsa – as Marlin Lavanhar of All Souls reminded us. Here was the end of the Trail of Tears, the site one of the worst race massacres in US history, the state where the worst domestic terror attack happened. All powerful trauma residing in us, even if only by association, by cultural osmosis. I think, deep down, that we KNOW we need each other, but that need is such a vulnerable admittance, it rarely reveals itself. It comes out when the tornado hits, but we quiet it with talk of our self-made-ness, by shaming ourselves and other with the rhetoric of hyper-individualism or the fallacy of machismo. We can have it during the crisis, we just can’t seem to sustain it when the policies get made or the candidates line up.

One week before we make decisions about our future together we made some claims about our present – here and now. Our mayor spoke of what we ought to be, of the Tulsa that he loves, referring to that room of gathered, united, diverse and intentional people. Leaders from all over spoke of our religious instruction to be faithful by being loving, and my pal Rev. Alexis Carter, associate at The Met, brought us all to our feet by calling on us to have good mourning (m-o-u-r-n-i-n-g), by being the change we wish to see in the world, seeking more humility than homogeny, waking up to the voices and realities of others. It was the clarion call of people of good faith, dedicated to working together for a world that is headed in a very different direction than we seem to be being pulled right now.

That’s why we gathered Tuesday, because we have the fabric in place. I was not there amongst acquaintances, nor even colleagues. I was there amongst friends, because of the strong interfaith work that is done daily by people who care about creating and maintaining that social fabric that we rely on when the crisis hits but cannot manufacture during the crisis. We heard powerful words of commitment and connection, even from people I do not agree with or, frankly, trust as of yet. But perhaps, like Ruth, new connections can be made in the turmoil, new possibilities from the grief, new hope and dedication in the bitterness – FROM the bitterness.

It is all we have left. It is, perhaps, all we ever had. To be faithful is, after all to practice the basics. ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ To this Jesus adds, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” and the scribe, nodding in agreement, declares this, “…much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

As Robert Bowers, the man who shot those guns at the Tree of Life, was brought into the hospital, the nurse to take charge of his care was Ari Mahler, the son of a rabbi. A Jew saved Bowers’ life. What Mr. Mahler says is that when he looked into Bowers’ eyes, he didn’t see evil. What he saw was, “a clear lack of depth, intelligence, and palpable amounts of confusion.” After reflection, Mahler sees him as a man who, “probably had no friends, was easily influenced by propaganda, and wanted attention on a sociopathic level.” Such people, he reflects, are easily swayed by people with multiple agendas and a microphone. His care for him wasn’t an act of good versus evil, that’s far too simple a narrative, my friends. Don’t buy that kind of simplicity. Not good versus evil, Nurse Mahler’s care for Bowers was an act of dedication, like Ruth to Naomi, an act of love, which, as Mahler later wrote, gives meaning to life, and reaffirms why we’re all here.

And now the words of Paul drift back into my mind – love is patient, kind, forgives all things, bears all things, not arrogant or rude, always protecting, trusting, hoping, persevering. What do we know of this love, we might ask in the wake of the violence and hatred we see played out in brutal acts and in brutal words, in the realization of hate and the language of hate, the participation of ferocity and the polemic of political fear, spread before us like a self-serving weapon used to gain and maintain power at any cost? What do we know of love?

Well, I’m here to say that I have seen more love and care in the past week than I can effectively share with you this morning. Dedication that rivals our heroine, Ruth, as a collection of people step up to protect and hope for and trust in a young transgender woman from Honduras, swept up by ICE on our border and placed here in Tulsa, who is trying to make a live with the help of DVIS and a network of people who stand against the culture of fear and hatred of the immigrant. It is found in the actions of a nurse in Pittsburgh, amidst the pain and the fear – not as a solution to it, but as a way of being in the world…not as magic elixir that takes away all suffering, but as a way to stand next to the suffering and give meaning and hope. This is the love that practices what Jesus asserts, love I have witnessed from Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Unitarian, Sikh siblings that is more Christian than anything I see from so many Christians. Hope that settles in as the winter approaches, giving us the glory of leaves that burn brightly as they die, leaving us with the promise that there is a spring on the horizon, that hope endures and love perseveres, and that death, no matter how difficult to take, is not the final answer. That dedication springs up once again, as improbable and foolish as Ruth’s declaration to Naomi, as ridiculous as a mother’s choice to leave her homeland and walk with her children across a thousand miles to a place where she may have no chance, either.

My friends, I’m afraid that we have dark days ahead of us. The politics of fear loom larger seemingly each moment and if we can survive the election cycle without tearing ourselves apart in the process, perhaps we have some chance to actually work to create a future together. I have less and less faith that we can do that politically, but I have more and more faith that we can do that collectively. Community organizing through ACTION is helping people understand the power of working together. Interfaith actions are peaking, attorneys turned out in big numbers yesterday to train themselves to be pro-bono advocates in a legal system that will stand against hateful policies, and the city is launching “resilience dinners” to engage Tulsans in meaningful discussion around the issues that divide us.

On this Sunday after All Saints Day, we can remember all of those who have come before us, striving as we have, imperfectly and partially, for the kin-dom, for wholeness and the kind of love that Paul lays before the church in Corinth, knowing, I think, of how daunting a directive it is, but longing for it so much that we step forward, vulnerable and dedicated, towards a new world – here and not yet here – as Ruth did. For we must be dedicated now, my friends, the stakes are too high and the costs too great, for us to be anything else.

Let us remember – and be very aware – that we do have what we need, right here and right now. The roots are established, the soil is rich, the light is good. It does not assure an easy growing season, nor even a plentiful harvest. It means that the tree is alive, and so are we – together, regardless of what happens on Tuesday, no matter what the next tragedy may be – and there will be one – we are firmly planted. For the promise is not the things we call success, the promise is that the practice – the planting of hope, the watering of trust, the nurture of love – these things produce life, in ways we could never plan or strategize or scheme. As we gather to eat this meal, a commemoration of what we call the “last supper,” eaten when Jesus knew how the world of his disciples was about to be shattered, let us do so with that same awareness. We eat, we rejoice that the tree of life lives, and we dedicate ourselves to one another – to those who will stand with us, and with whom we stand, in the darkness with our candles held together. For the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.