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.

Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15

In his remarkable book, This Land is Our Land, Professor Suketu Mehta writes about Friendship Park, what used to be a small patch of land adjoining the Pacific Ocean between San Diego and Tijuana, inaugurated by First Lady Pat Nixon as a place for families on either side of the border to share picnics together. In 1994, the Clinton administration erected a 12-foot high barrier for the first time. In 2009, the Obama administration shut down the U.S. side of Friendship Park and put a second fence behind the first one.

The park remained open, but contact between family members was reduced to reaching across the expanse of the fences and touching fingertips together. Mehta writes, “Friendship Park is at once a monument to bureaucratic stupidity and the absurd rules that lawyers make as well as to the power of love and family to surpass them. It is the cruelest and the most hopeful place I have ever seen.”

It is strange how often those two things are dance partners – cruelty and hope, pain and promise, struggle and possibility. One often follows another, as if there is some interdependent dance at work, where we can define the day only because there is night, or heartache only because we know what it is to love. For Jeremiah, these two sides of the same coin are meeting in a prison cell in the court of King Zedekiah, who has had Jeremiah tortured, beaten and thrown into a sewer before locking him away. But there is a surprise today from Jeremiah, who we know already from the past few weeks of readings is not the prime example of hopefulness.

Seems like a really good morning to bring this up. Climate change is front and center, thanks to some very young activists who should be home in school, not having to lead us so called “responsible” adults into making changes, immigration and refugee stories continue to break our hearts, the Amazon is burning and we seem unable to stop it, and one other thing…what is it? Oh yeah, we’re actually having impeachment hearings on a sitting President! I realize that this is a process which some of us may applaud, maybe something for which some have been actively praying and hoping. AND I do hope that we realize how terribly damaging this will likely be to whatever vestiges of democracy we have left. There are many here in this room who remember the last couple of times we’ve had impeachment proceedings…the atmosphere was not calm, nor did it resonate an abundance of hope. Impeachment is, in many ways, a lose-lose scenario, no matter the outcome, and it is because whatever action is taken is taken upon all of us. We are in this together.

So here we sit once more, faced with a world outside that feels more and more perilous, locked in our own dance of struggle and expectation, maybe feeling metaphorically trapped in our own prison, helpless, standing on the sidelines and watching as things that seem to big to do anything about collapse all around us. Maybe this morning we might actually identify with Jeremiah’s lament and surrender to a bleak future. We know that the world is on the brink, in many ways, and we also know that there is no plan B. It is in the midst of such despair that Jeremiah offers us a way forward: we lament, we express our rage, we do not allow ourselves to be numbed or silenced by the enormity of it all, and we evoke our faithful imagination for rebirth, for renewal, for resurrection. It has taken a long six weeks of harsh speech, but here in this last passage something pretty well hidden in Jeremiah’s angry, fiery rhetoric all along is revealed…hope.

The symbolic representation of this hope is found in today’s passage. Jeremiah is told by God in his prison cell to purchase his cousin Hanamel’s land. In verse eight, Hanamel visits Jeremiah in prison, and asks Jeremiah to “redeem” the land, meaning that he couldn’t support it anymore and it might fall out of the family’s hands. So, Jeremiah purchases this land, but he does so very publicly, in front of a group of witnesses he weighs out a certain weight of money and signs two copies of the deed, a kind of elaborate version of what needed to happen. And then he takes the deeds, places them in earthenware jars and buries them, “in order that they may last for a long time.” Jeremiah makes sure that this act is done as publicly as possible so that everyone will see this demonstration, supposedly of faith in his family, but actually a prophetic display of faith and redemption of the people and the land of Israel…hope for the future.

For whatever reason, maybe it’s the prophetic nature of God, I have had several meetings with people who make a dramatic impact on policy and social justice causes in our city and beyond over the past couple of weeks. And these haven’t been strategy or planning meetings, though some of them started out that way. They have been meetings about hope. We didn’t say that, didn’t even use that word, but all of the people I have talked to, myself included, are wondering how things really might change. They are feeling worn out, beaten down and are lamenting the prospects for meaningful change. What is the next step? If this doesn’t work, if another well-reasoned argument, another press of social conscience, another display of people power doesn’t convince the leaders to change direction to avoid the impending conflict, what will?

In verse fifteen, God promises Jeremiah that “houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land,” placing again the image of rebirth into the imaginations of the people. God does not abandoned Judah to its fate, but promises to remain among them, providing them with the kind of salvation that we can only see generationally. So trapped have we been by the fundamentalist interpretation of salvation – YOUR salvation as an individual in some heaven to come – that we have never been told the word is not singular, it is plural. It is OUR salvation, the redemption of humankind, not a momentary thing, but a long game, more like an old-growth forest than a fast-food drive-thru. The way of salvation means that we plant seeds for things we will never see grow to fruition, you and I. But WE will…I mean the bigger “we,” the we that must be an increasing part of our conversation because we can no longer afford to simply think only of ourselves or just the next generation. We, like Jeremiah, must consider seven generations from now, stocking away dreams in earthenware vessels to bear fruit at some other time, in some other place.

Jeremiah wasn’t going to plant any crops on that land. He wasn’t going to build a house there or raise a family, no sheep to tend, no harvest to secure. But someone would. He wasn’t going to change the world, or heal the rift, or bring about salvation with a single act like this, but he was going to make a step – his step – towards a better world.
Jeremiah takes his hope and buries it in a piece of pottery, still imagining a future that is not here, a future that will be for someone else.

The time is here friends, for such a shift in our understanding as well. We must strategize out for the long game. We, too, must make investments towards a promise, even when we won’t get to taste the fruits of such work. This is a time for our moral imaginations, for considering not only what we want to build right here today, but also what kind of world we want to start for our grandchildren, a world which we may not be able to give them with house and farm and family already intact. Perhaps we can only give them the land on which to grow, the foundation on which to build. That means it’s time we do the same thing that was done for us, working through a process to remodel our church space which we were given as a trust, imagining what the next generation might need, re-thinking what it means to welcome people with the very infrastructure itself, so we might setup this church, OUR church, with the foundations for the 21st century church that none of us can fully imagine, but which all of us know starts with radical inclusion born from a spirit of interconnectedness. It means re-thinking about who we are partnering with, making sure that our connections, our ministries, our missions build connections that dream the same dreams of equity, of justice and compassion, of a new theology and a new culture for a nation and a big capital “C” church that both must change. And all of this means that we’ll have to think less about what we are comfortable with, less about the familiar and the traditional and more about what our traditions, all of which were born from radical change, call us to do and to be…not only in what it might gain us today, also what we can enable for the next generation as we take part in this dance of pain and promise, struggle and possibility.

This we can do, Jeremiah shows us, even as we doubt and lament and express our anger about the ways that God seems to not be present, when any kind of protection feels wanting, or absent all together. That is not a lack of faith, it is the awareness of right relationship, the consciousness of covenant that can set us back on track, helping us remember our focus, with the help of another prophet, Amos – do justice, where we are with what we have; love kindness, nurturing it in ourselves and others; and walk humbly with your God, with a strong emphasis on the humility.

Our six weeks with Jeremiah has been rough sledding, harsh words and convicting, prophetic language that may have been so difficult to hear because of how close to home they hit. Make no mistake, this is a turning point in history, and if we allow ourselves to get caught up in short term, reactionary stuff – as good as some of it may feel to us viscerally – we will lose the long game that God calls us to see…God, whose vision we must now lean upon and have faith in so fully that we will choose to take steps onto the unlit staircase, trusting that we can climb up, one step at a time.

May God be with us on the journey, as God surely is…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.

Jeremiah 8:18 – 19a and 8:20 – 9:1

“Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” has been sung by the likes of Louis Armstrong, Sam Cooke, Marian Anderson, even Bing Crosby, for crying out loud. It was likely a slave song, born from the experience of pain and suffering that is the original sin our our nation, a story so deeply ingrained with what it means to be the United States that we must tell it alongside Paul Revere, Washington crossing the Delaware and the battle of Gettysburg. The original lyrics tell of the promise of an afterlife without all of the trials of this life, the perfect encapsulation of what we now call “slave master” Christianity, a numbing theology that tried to remove the mark of the whips and the trauma of slavery with a flowery promise of some future reward. There’s lots of evidence, however, to suggest that when such songs were sung in the fields, with lyrics that appeased the eavesdropping overseers, it was actually code for a night-time meeting in which the real religious imaginations were spoken out loud, imaginations that thought of freedom in the here and now, that spoke of endurance for a literal tomorrow, of change before death came. It was the beginning of the blues.

Jeremiah, in the midst of singing the blues to Israel, lodges his complaint to the heavens – is there no balm in Gilead? There’s evidence that Jeremiah is referencing an ancient colloquial phrase here. And, if not, it certainly is one now, thanks, in no small part, to King James English and gospel spirituals. A balsam tree was something real, though, an ancient medicinal plant, most likely the sap, and it gets mentioned a few times in the Bible as something of great value. Then the King James version of the Bible that translates this Hebrew phrase into “a balm in Gilead,” which sticks like sap, slowly becoming the equivalent of a “cure all” solution in our vernacular.

But whatever it is…Jeremiah is sure there ain’t none. In announcing this, Jeremiah takes on the role of poet, he sings the truth at us “on it’s side”, like he’s singing the blues, and I say that intentionally. The blues, after all, is more than a musical style, more just three chords and a pentatonic scale. Civil rights activist and blues singer Barbara Dane once said that the blues, “…speak from heart to heart.” The blues, as an American musical style, were born out of the worst conditions one people can force upon another, out of slavery and exploitation and were given to the world in the spirit of turning madness into sanity, pain into joy, bondage into freedom, and enmity into unity. This is music for survivors.

Jeremiah speaks to the same heartache that we find in the blues, but any musician will tell you that the blues isn’t meant to make you sad, as odd as that may sound. It is the voicing of sadness, the expression of grief, or pain, even guilt, but evoking it to get it out. It’s more about making you ache…about developing a longing in us for something other than what we are singing about, something that may feel soul-crushing, but which always sings it’s way into a joyfulness that can only be found in our struggle. “Nobody Knows” is a perfect example of this, a song of lament and promise, of hopelessness and hope, of struggle, yes, but also the endurance to support that struggle.

Psychologists who study the blues, and yes there are such things, tell us that blues songs teach us three things:
1. They remind you that you’re not the first to struggle with problems.
2. They give you perspective, they connect you to a larger story.
3. They enable you to find humor in your situation, and humor is a crucial tool in our stability.

All of this language is strategic language, not the rhetoric of a balm to heal our wounds. It is language that reminds us that we actually depend on our wounds, for our wounds are what can produce wisdom. It’s when we seek to cure them that things can go awry, as we become convinced of the illusion that there’s some perfect place we need to get to to be loved, or cared for, or accepted by God. It seems to me that this is exactly what Jeremiah laments – there really is no “cure” to be had, no God as deus ex machina who will fly in to save the day. The “balm in Gilead” isn’t even needed. What is needed is much more of a radical transformation. A balm is just a band-aid anyway, a way to mend an arm or stop a bleed so we can get back to what we were doing before. And that is precisely what Jeremiah is warning against, and what he laments. His people are searching for a quick and painless to return to business as usual, when what they need is to engage with the struggle, the ache, and the longing to transform them to a new way of living.

The quick fix is oh, so tempting, but it does not do what we hope it will do, whether that’s in our personal lives, or in the systems we build together, our collective lives. Jeremiah teaches us with harsh lessons that sometimes you have to tear things down to build things up. Sometimes walls and barriers, systems and policies need to be plucked up and pulled down, to use Jeremiah’s language, chains broken, so that we can plant freer and more just trees in the soil around us. That doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t happen with some magic tonic, some perfect salve to heal all the wounds, it comes from something more transformative, it comes from seeking a new trajectory, a new way to walk through life, not looking for some path of absolute feel-good happiness that doesn’t exist, but accepting the certainty of struggle and pain, the inevitability of the blues. Jeremiah knows that you sing the blues to find the joy.

Later on, in chapter 31, Jeremiah will hope (with the same intensity that he laments) for the humanity around him to have a new heart, one made of flesh and not of stone. God’s word, the text famously says, will be written on this new heart and placed within the body so that we will all be God’s people again. Surely such a heart transplant is a painful process filled with blood, sweat and tears. We have a lot of hurt in the world and currently several flavors of impending doom. This is our lament, these are our blues – quite different than Jeremiah’s, and yet not so different after all. And this isn’t Holy Week. It’s not Ash Wednesday or All Souls Day, or Lent or even a Blue Christmas service. This is called “Ordinary Time” in the church calendar. Ordinary time. That is the lament itself, I think. For this is not ordinary. Our relationship to the planet, our relationship to each other, our relationship to power and money – none of it is ordinary. We just think it is. Our default settings, Jeremiah has been screaming at us, are all off-kilter. We were not created for this, yet we seem unable, or unwilling, to change.

Now if it seems like I’m preparing us for something, I am. I believe that we have very challenging days ahead of us. Like the large crowds of mostly young people who gathered on Friday at Guthrie Green and in parks and public places all over the world, I believe that the impending climate change will have incredible impact on our social systems, the fabric of our societies and the awareness (or lack of awareness) of our interconnectedness. It’s like the anxiety around the impending invasion of a conquering army. Its a clarifying crisis that makes us remember that we are not the first to deal with problems, we are connected to a larger story of resistance and change and we need some good humor and light hearts to endure such trauma.

The truth is that we still need one of those heart transplants that Jeremiah sought. And there is a movement at work for just such change. Our children, if you haven’t noticed, are rising up now, lifting their voices on a multitude of issues. They are asking for us not to listen to them, but to the overwhelming science that climate change is real, it is here, and we are causing it. They call on us to transform not only our carbon footprint, but our social footprint, pleading for us to stop this mad dash towards a “freedom” found only in more consumption, more guns and more walls. They ask us to consider the world we will leave them – will it still be imprisoned by racism and sexism, captive to fear and animosity, confined by a greed that we’ve been told is good, but actually constrains us all?  Will we be able to light any candles for our future, or will we simply curse the darkness loudly at one another, over and over?

Jeremiah, friends, pleads for repentance, a fancy Bible word for changing course. He seeks the same words that we bandy about all the time now – resistance, transformation, revolution – even salvation. Here’s where I part ways with Jeremiah, though. He seems to try and guilt-shame people into this revolution, to humiliate them to change. In fact, this is an oft-used technique of organized religion, browbeat people into submission. But I think that’s another band-aid. It doesn’t really work, not long-term. It just makes people miserable, and miserable people don’t transform anything. And, truth be told, miserable people don’t sing the blues. They don’t sing at all. They despair.

So, here’s another approach for the very poignant and necessary message of repentance from Jeremiah’s time to ours, a message we can hear and then tailor a bit for our purposes. I mean, if our salvation, not just the salvation in some life to come, mind you, but OUR salvation – ALL of our salvation – is supposed to come only from suffering and struggle and sorrow, then I have little hope for that salvation to succeed. Jesus tells his disciples, take up my yoke, take up this discipline, but his yoke, he tells them in a gentle voice, is easy…his burden is light. For his yoke is joyful, it is the full-throated blues sung in full awareness of the misery of the world, and in full acceptance of a God who seeks to transform and to heal. It is the yoke of joy and we should pave the road to transformation with such joy, we must gear our revolution with life-giving things, for if the resistance is only struggle and heartache, who’s going to sign up for that? If the revolution is awful and brutal and full of only suffering and torment, bitterness and beatdown, how many will we really expect to sign up for that rally? And why would they?

Joy, my friends, is not happiness. It isn’t giddiness or elation. This is not a “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” plea, nor do I want some pollyanna hope that is built on rainbows and puppy dogs and fairy tales. That’s a band-aid approach as well, an numbing approach to the struggle that we need to build new things. I am calling us to joy, a joy that stands next to our pain, alongside our struggle, recognizing that we need our scars to show us healing, we need our broken places to teach us about wholeness. Mark Twain, never really known for being an optimist, once wrote that, “the healthiest response to life is joy.” Not happiness or despair, not resignation or acceptance…joy. Joy is not optimistic, but hopeful; not content, but hungry; not at peace, but peaceful. One of the most popular voices on this life balance is Brene Brown, the “vulnerability researcher” as she calls herself. Dr. Brown says that joy comes only from the darkness, only from the Blues. She writes, “Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”

May God be with us all on the journey, with us in our joy. 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.

Jeremiah 4:11-12 & 22-28

Andy and Red are in the prison yard. They are leaning up against the gray wall in gray clothing, with the gray-ness of the everything all around them. “Do you think you’ll ever get out of here?”, Andy asks Red. “Maybe when I’m too old for it to matter,” he answers. Andy reaches for a handful of the soft clay on the ground, sighs deeply, and tells him that when hegets out, he’s going to Zihuatanejo…this fantasy dream place in his mind where all is right with the world. He says that he’ll go there because it’s warm and the Pacific Ocean has no memory. He invites Red into this dream, but Red won’t have it. The Pacific Ocean, something that big? Likely to scare me to death. I’m institutionalized, he says. I can’t make it out there. And then he breaks – he remembers the gray all around him and chastises Andy. I don’t think you should be doing this to yourself. Mexico’s all the way down there and you’re in here and that’s the way it is. “Yeah, you’re right,” Andy says through clenched teeth, throwing that clay back down to the ground. “I guess it comes down to a simple choice – get busy living or get busy dying.” He stands and leaves, Red wondering what he means by those words that fall harsh on his ears.

Jeremiah’swords this morning may once again fall on our ears harshly, words of lament and anguish that sound both familiar and foreign at the same time. These words might feel like clay in our hands that we want to shape in one direction, but which will not go that way. We may want to hear about salvation, but these words are not those kind. We may want to hear peace, but it’s not readily available here. Jeremiah is telling his people that the southern kingdom of Judah will face the same fate as the northern kingdom of Israel, falling to the might of the Babylonian armies, unless they repent, unless they turn around, and demonstrate their faithfulness.

And – spoiler alert – Jeremiah already thinks it’s too late. As he preaches this repentance to them he laments not only the fact that he thinks they won’t turn around from their “evil ways,” but that they don’t even know how. That’s why the tears and the anguish is so heavy in these words he supposedly speaks on behalf of YHWH, words that seem to make absolutely certain the impending collapse, and yet also include this important line – “The whole land shall be a desolation; yet I will not make a full end” – the smashing down of the clay of creation back into it’s original form, to be shaped again into something new. It’s the method of the prophetic genre, a style which has, for us anyway, been twisted by a fundamentalist interpretive agenda, turning what is really just a literary genre into what we think is historical forecast. Prophetic literature doesn’t predict the future, nor does it announce hopeless destruction, it is about disclosure of the present, an examination of what is happening right then, speaking as if God were speaking, announcing judgment or favor from God as a way of making public commentary on the political realities of the day.

These days we have things like 1984,The Handmaid’s Tale, and countless movies and shows that depict dystopian futures where the decisions humanity has made, or been unable to make, change life forever for those who survive whatever disaster is delivered – nuclear, economic, social or environmental. They foretell an extreme version of events as if they were happeningas a way of commenting on what ishappening, a way to shock us into realization and maybe, in the best scenario, action. Jeremiah’s words carry the same sentiment to a people hiding from the reality around them, living in denial as the forces of Babylon gather around them. Because Jeremiah the book, at least as we know it, was not gathered together until a long time after the historical events it depicts. In writing backwards, as it were, it becomes a commentary basedin history, but really talking about the future. Jeremiah warns Israel, stating her sins directly and demanding repentance, telling Israel that it can happen here. And even as he does so, he knows that there will be no turning around and the impending doom will soon arrive.

In a brilliant piece from a recent edition of The New Yorker, novelist Jonathan Franzen writes about climate change by evoking a Franz Kafka quote – “There is infinite hope, only not for us.” It is a bleak start to what is, ultimately, an essay of hope on the often hopeless feeling subject of climate change. Franzen suggests that we are facing what is now an inevitable meltdown of the planetary climate as we know it. He states boldly and harshly that if you are under 60, you have a good chance of seeing “radical destabilization of life on earth,” and if you’re under thirty, you are virtually guaranteed of it. It is the impending doom that Jeremiah evokes in his judgment on Israel, and there might be more than one parallel, for we have played the biggest part in the disaster to come.

The science, Franzen writes, “verges on irrefutable.” Just a few days ago a study was released that says parts of the globe have alreadypassed the two-degree mark, the number that scientists and policymakers have identified as a red line if the planet is to avoid catastrophic and irreversible consequences. It’s hard to see because the world is still basically normal – we just had another big televised debate, the football season is in full swing, still plenty of food at the supermarket and a new set of Netflix shows start really soon. But this crisis can’t be placed on the calendar. It won’t be a single, cataclysmic event, like an invasion of a foreign army or the impact of a meteor. No, climate change will wreak it’s fury as a series of increasingly compounding crises, another wave of storms, the shortage of food, the impact felt – as it almost always is – by the poorest among us first. It will come on slowly at first, easy for some of us to ignore, until the systems we have built thus far begin to fray, challenging our way of life. That will be the biggest impact. It’s the changepart of climate change that will be the most disruptive.

Franzen suggests in his essay that we are already headed towards such chaos. The two-degree rise in temperature is not only already happening, it may indeed be inevitable now without changes so drastic that they seem impossible to achieve without tyranny and force. So, his suggestion is – keep going. If you plant a garden, keep it up. If you ride your bike to work, don’t stop. If you cut down on meat or have gone vegetarian, if you drive a hybrid or seek to curtail your air travel, you must continue even if it won’t curtail the impending approach of severe climate change. Why? Because a garden means you will need to share your tomatoes with someone, and a bike ride means you see more of the neighborhood than you would in a car, and curtailing your air travel means your going to start thinking more locally, and all of those things build community, they strengthen the social fabric that we will need to survive the coming changes. It is very much like the commandments of Torah that Jeremiah reiterates, calling on his fellow Hebrews to listen to the wisdom and the justice and the mercy found in the ancient instructions, which are meant to help mold us, to shape us, to fashion us into community.

Franzen suggests, “in times of increasing chaos…any movement toward a more just and civil society can now be considered a meaningful climate action,” because it can shield us from the impact of reactionary fear or the tyranny of tribalism, which we already see at work. The hope found in Jeremiah may be hard to see, it says, turn around and you mightsurvive, repent of the ways that make for chaos and seek the ways that make for peace, make a different decision and get a different result. It’s an implied hope at best, found only alongside the calls of imminent doom. Franzen echoes this sentiment, imagining what might happen if we don’t think of the coming crisis as the final word. What if we think of securing fair elections, instituting humane immigration policies or combatting extreme wealth disparity as climate action, for they help us to develop and maintain the networks that we will need to face the changes that are inevitably coming. We will discover in the crisis to come that we not only need each other in theory but will need each other in very tangible ways, and whatever we can do to build our interconnectedness and strengthen our social fabric will soon become absolutely critical.

In his introduction, Franzen reverses the rather cynical Kafka quote. Instead of saying, “There is infinite hope, only not for us.”, he writes, “There is no hope,except for us.” That might seem like a “get busy living or get busy dying” kind of choice, a “this or that” duality that gives us few options and feels limiting. But maybe, like Jeremiah’s announced “judgment”, it’s the exclamation of the failed bowl that will be pounded back into a blob of clay, only to be reshaped again. And maybe it is the exact kind of hope we need now, a durable, pliable, malleable hope that speaks to possibility even in catastrophe. A hope that is found in a slight variation of Franzen’s variation – there is no hope, except for the “us” we can make, as full as we can make, as wide as we can make. Perhaps we cannot avert cataclysmic change at this point. It might indeed, as Jeremiah says to Israel again and again, be inevitable now. And, then again, maybe Jeremiah is trying to tell us something in the only way that we can hear it…giving us no other option that to turn to God, and God’s ways of justice and mercy, for our hope lies onlyin such practice. Our hope lies in the reshaping of our souls and our lives, the “potter” God ever at work on creation. Our hope lies in our own choice, setting aside our busy-ness with things that make for death and getting busy with the things that make for life.

May God bless our days with peace, and enough struggle to make us wise.

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.

Jeremiah 18:1-11

Sometimes, when the chaos of the world is too much, I mow the yard. It’s rhythmic, takes place in a confined period of time and obeys certain rules, handed down to me by my father. And it’s a definable, simple task – there’s a start time and a finish time and you can see your progress as you go along. There is something fulfilling in that. It stands in stark contrast to the world I regularly walk in, full of complexity and innuendo, the need to discern rather than decide, and tasks that are never, ever really completed.

Mowing acts as a physical metaphor for me, helping me open up a different approach, settling my anxious heart with the repetition of rows. Now, don’t tell my kids I said this, ’cause I still want them to mow the yard. I can just hear it now, “But, Dad, we’d hate to take away your metaphor.”

Metaphors help us shape reality, they help us grab hold of things that are ethereal and slippery. They are a way to talk about things you can’t talk about or describe things you can’t really see. The great poet Robert Frost once said, “Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.” Nowhere is this more true than in the Bible, or in the world of theology, the realm of “God-talk,” for what is more elusive, more indescribable, more ethereal than God?

The prophet Jeremiah’s name means, “the LORD exalts,” or “the LORD hurls,” depending on how you translate an ancient Hebrew that is as pliable as the clay from Jeremiah’s metaphor. This “exalted hurler” Jeremiah comes in the midst of a rough time for Israel, and he comes to speak the word to a people worn out by the anxiety and stress of the days in which they live. Jeremiah is born at the tail end of the rule of Manasseh, who reigned for 55 long, brutal, corrupt years. Manasseh was a liar and a cheat, he completely trashed whatever moral authority the office of the king had, he made shady business deals that benefitted him over the nation, his appetite for the sordid and profane knew no bounds, and he filled the temple of Solomon, the literal “house of God” to the Jewish people, with magicians, prostitutes and idols. Manasseh did not worship YHWH, he worshipped lust and greed.

It was a hard time to grow up for Jeremiah and his family, for our scriptures tell us that they were part of a remnant of faithful people who resided in an almost exile in their own country. Eventually, though, Manasseh died. His son, Amon succeeded him, though, and little changed. In fact, it got worse. Amon was eventually murdered leaving Manasseh’s grandson, Josiah, the throne. And that’s when something surprising happened.

You know how despite the gallons of grass killer or the layers of fabric you put in places where you don’t want things to grow…things grow anyway? Little shoots begin to break through the rocks we’ve laid down or the concrete we’ve poured over, grass dots the edges of the places we want our way, life happens, even in the unlikeliest of places. Josiah, with no model to inherit, no family bloodline to emulate, changes course, bringing life and morality back to the temple, sending green shoots through the decades of selfishness and greed, seeking the will of YHWH, rather than the multitude of self-serving gods his father and grandfather sought.

Of course, he didn’t do this alone. And he did have a model, it just wasn’t from his own family. It was Jeremiah. We have records of Jeremiah’s sermons, the ways that he called out Israel, his words aimed clearly at the king. While he often spoke with a sarcastic, acerbic tone, Jeremiah always ended with hope – “Go stand at the crossroads and look around,” he wrote, “Ask for directions to the old road, the tried-and-true road. Then take it. Discover the right route for your souls.”

In our passage today, Jeremiah uses the metaphor of the potter, claiming that we are clay in the hands of a God who can (and will) recast us in proper shape, even if that is not what we’re asking God to do. It is a theology that raises God to a level of activity among us that we, here in this church, might be unwilling to ascribe to the God we imagine. After all, it is hard for us to recognize the voice of a God who says things like, “I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you.” The Hebrew, by the way, says something closer to I’m shaping doom against you, rather than evil, but that might seem only marginally better, right? This is not the God we lift up, it just ain’t our theology.

Yet theology, like sculpting clay, in malleable and changing. Unlike a finished piece of pottery, it often does not hold it’s shape. I know, for instance, that I do not believe in a so-called “providential” God who pulls the strings from on high in heaven, controlling our lives like a cosmic puppet-master. Then again, there are things that occur in my own life that I have a hard time reconciling as coincidence. I have experiences that I think of as “bad” until years later when something happens to me that the “bad” event prepared me for perfectly and then I reconsider – hey, maybe that was actually a “good” thing. And then I wonder at the way that seemed orchestrated by a providential God I don’t believe in.

It’s why we speak of God largely in metaphors, for metaphor helps us to understand aspects of what we do not understand fully. While I believe wholeheartedly in a God of Love and Compassion, I also must admit that there are times I want God’s judgment to come raining down on people I think deserve it completely. (It’s never me, of course, always other people) And we all bear witness to everything from broken relationships to fractured social situations to monster hurricanes that make us all realize that actions have consequences. As a parent, I can tell you that’s one of the most difficult things to do – let your children have the direct results of their own actions. It’s hard to think of that as love. But isn’t it? The phrase “tough love” seems a little worn out, and there is something to realizing that part of loving someone includes a little judgment, right? I mean judgment not about someone’s self-worth or value, but judgment about what they are doing – particularly if they are doing something incredibly damaging.

We are, Jeremiah imagines in his metaphor, clay on the potter’s wheel. And when we are not shaping up, when it’s clear that what is being formed is another poorly shaped ashtray, not the fine piece of pottery God intends, then it’s back to the lump of clay with us. It’s an image of destruction in one way of looking at it, an image of creation in another way of looking at it. An endless supply of second chances, from a God who reforms rather than rejects, who breaks down, but only to remake.

There is a reason, I think, that Jeremiah uses the potter’s wheel as a metaphor. Think about it for a second. Though pottery is to us now a nice form of art, something we are bound to see at a fair-trade store or at Mayfest, in Jeremiah’s time it was a foundational part of life. As Eugene Peterson writes in his book on Jeremiah, Run With the Horses, “The invention of pottery set off a revolution. Before pottery there were only wandering tribes, following herds of animals, going from one food supply to another, forced here by drought, there by famine. There was no time to develop anything, no leisure to reflect on anything. It was hand-to-mouth existence, day-to-day survival. But the invention of pottery made it possible to store and carry. Then it was possible to stay in a place for a while because grain could be stored for next winter’s meal and water carried. Then cooking could be done and merchandise transported. The invention of pottery signaled a revolution and the revolution was what we call civilization—the Neolithic Age.”

Potters were everywhere in Jeremiah’s time. There were artisan families that passed the skill down, generation to generation, and their shops were like QT, on every street corner. By using a metaphor of something so commonplace, and something that made it possible for life as they knew it to exist, Jeremiah brings the importance of what he is asserting about God and the path of God right into the core of his listener’s understanding of life itself. Pottery wasn’t something to set on the mantle and look at, it was the way you transported the food and water you needed to survive, the way that you brought your surplus to the extended family to help them survive, or the way you received that lifeline of water in the desert.

Jeremiah’s metaphor imagines God at work like those potters Jeremiah saw every day, sculpting the very survival of humanity, God making away of life for God’s people, each human being with a useful with a part to play in what God is doing. God pushes and pulls, kneads and presses, never throwing anything away, but seeking reconciliation and connection…and when the reality of our alienation from God is realized, an alienation found in not only our own personal connection to the Holy, but the unholiness in our politics, our systems and our cultures, then we find that God is plotting disaster like a potter who sees that the bowl is not shaping up as expected, it is hopeless — and God decides to recast it.

If we look at this from one angle, it is a message of destruction and doom revealing a God who we could easily cast aside as an angry God…we’ve all been taught about that one. But is that what is happening here? Is that what the metaphor is all about? Or is the metaphor reaching for something with more complexity, a way to understand a predisposition in us that alienates us from God, pulling us away from the very things that lead to life and wholeness? Can we see this as the action of a God who loves us enough to correct us, calling out our self-deception, calling faithful people to turn away from resignation to an unjust world, demanding that we root ourselves in something life-giving rather than in fatalistic sentiment. We are persuaded by Jeremiah’s metaphor to visit the potter’s house, listening for a God who is reshaping our lives and our world into something more beautiful, something more useful and just and merciful.

May God we with us in the hearing of the word…and the living of the Word. 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.

Jeremiah 2:4-13

Jeremiah is confusing. The whole book, which we will get only glimpses of during our 6 weeks of study, is full of different metaphors, poetry, song, prose, allegory, all kinds of literary genres thrown together with theologies and cultural pulls we don’t accept or recognize. It might be enough to make one wonder why their pastor is preaching on it. I’ll tell you, when it has come up in the lectionary before I have skipped past it, because of all the aforementioned reasons, and yet, just because something is difficult to hear does not mean it doesn’t have something important for us to hear.

Jeremiah had something for hisaudience to hear, his audience being the people of Israel during an invasion. It was a time a great stress and trauma, as is any time in which a homeland is invaded, loyalties are divided, leaders are dispersed and neighbor is pitted against neighbor – ask Ireland, Rwanda or Bosnia. Those crises, like Jeremiah’s, often ask the same question – Why is God, if God is worth anything, not protecting us from evil and suffering?

Maybe this is a familiar question to you, too. Maybe you’ve asked it yourself, because it doesn’t take a crisis to wonder what control you have over your own life or to consider just what exactly this God you keep hearing so much about is actually doing. Trauma, any kind of trauma, makes us consider such existential things, and we all deal with trauma of some sort. One of the measuring methodologies for this is called an ACE score – adverse childhood experiences. It measures the long-term impact of things like physical, verbal, or sexual abuse, neglect, abandonment, the imprisonment of a close family member, or violence visited upon the family. Such scores impact a person’s risk factors for chronic disease, mental health issues, and general well-being. It’s helpful to know, when reading Jeremiah, that the people to whom he is speaking the harsh voice of God are people who likely have high ACE scores.

Most scholars think that Jeremiah is written down after the facts, as in after the Babylonian armies have conquered Israel, destroying the temple and hauling off the leadership to exile in Babylon. This means that Jeremiah is written down for people already traumatized, not people anticipating trauma.

Such trauma informs us, it changes the way that we think, feel and act. And, perhaps most importantly for our discussion today, it changes theology. There are many of us here who have heard the adage, “God never gives you more than you can handle,” right? Not only is that not in the Bible anywhere, anyone who has had more than they can handle on their plate will reject that idea wholeheartedly. Ask Job, or the people of Israel at the time of Jeremiah, it seems like God is giving them WAY more than they can handle and, they’re beginning to imagine, God may be doing that on purpose. The God of Jeremiah has a very specific message, after all – what’s up with all y’all? Why have you rejected me? It was you all who went after things that do not profit, you all that worshipped other “gods,” you all that defiled the land and made heritage an abomination. In other words, God “says” through Jeremiah’s words, I didn’t givey’all anything – that was all you.

Does Jeremiah’s God blame the victim? Does Jeremiah’s God insist that the traumatized community be traumatized again by a God without much mercy at all? Or is this something else entirely? We should be clear that while blaming the victim is not a very good therapeutic model, prophetic language is not therapeutic language. The purpose of the prophetic voice is not to comfort, but to awaken, not to appeal to the mind, but to jolt the heart, evoking shame and desire at the same time. A scholar on shame, Helen Merrell Lund, suggests that the kind of shaming that Jeremiah heaps upon Israel can point to a wrongness in the self or a wrongness in the world in which a person (or a nation in this case) is judged. And maybe this is a cooperative effort on the part of the people and God, exposing an inherent wrongness in the world itself, a sentiment that feels very familiar.

What, after all, are the things we do that lead to life? This is the shaming component of Jeremiah’s words, asking the people to consider what they have created before laying all the world’s evil at God’s feet. In Jeremiah’s time, the main function of God is to support armies. In a multiply-divine universe, the way that you know your God is best is that your army is victorious. That’s an imperial way of thinking about Divine action.

Jeremiah uses this metaphor of cisterns and water, a familiar image to his listeners of something that is life giving in the desert. Water is scarce, you must be able to store it effectively to survive. YHWH, in Jeremiah’s metaphor, is living water and we the cisterns that cannot hold it if we have cracks in our foundations. If we do not do the things that make for peace, we will not have peace. If we do not do the things that make for community, we will not have community. If we do not do the things that connect us to God, we will not be connected to God. That’s not judgment in Jeremiah’s eyes, that’s just the deal. As Walter Bruggemann says in his work on this text, “Israel need not generate it’s own water or conjure it’s own life. It is freely given by this gracious partner of a God who is (in another metaphor that is problematic today) owner and husband. But Israel has rejected such a free gift that embodies it’s very life, and wants to be it’s ownsource of life – which of course leads only to death.” The “wrongness” that the people, and certainly Jeremiah, might see can be alleviated, God says through the prophet, by beingdifferently in the world.

That changes how God works, though. God is no longer about protection, but rather about direction. God offer us a way to be, a path, a set of rules if you want to be dogmatic about it, or a set of directions, an orientation that does not include arming yourself more heavily or hoarding more money, but rather asks us to seek our “protection” by investing in each other and reaching for compassion.

Jeremiah uses a metaphor of family to talk about this direction, and it isn’t his metaphor. He borrows from an earlier prophet, Hosea, who used the family household as a metaphor to speak about the nation’s previous collapse. We must acknowledge that it is full of patriarchal and misogynistic language and imagery, and it doesn’t sit well on our own sensibilities as we hear the words of the prophet echo across the centuries. But this story wasn’t written for us, this story and metaphor would have been familiar to Jeremiah’s audience and can be critical for people struggling in crisis to use as they search for a lost identity. Jeremiah roots his prophetic language in the old traditions to remind his people of their identity and to push them to solidify themselves with dedication to their tradition. It’s Fiddler on the Roof, only set in the ancient near east.

In Fiddler, Tevye wrestles with his own family, trying to preserve tradition in a changing world. The crisis looms, the soldiers close in and this man argues with God throughout the musical, and then argues and shames and guilts his family into trying to stay the course before slowly realizing that they are staying the course, but the road is different for them. They must seal up the cracks they have in their own ways.

The trauma-informed people of Israel, and the people of the village of Anatola in Fiddler, have a good deal in common with we trauma-informed people today, who know something of disaster and turmoil, of mass causalities and war, of the long-term impact of greed and inequality, though we also praise these things, truth be told. We also have cracks in our cisterns that cannot effectively hold the water of life, of compassion, of love or trust in an authority, a power greater than that which we can produce or quantify or know.

There is room for some corporate guilt to be laid down. When we continue to think that we can win enough wars to create peace, we can create enough wealth at the top that it will “trickle down” to those on the bottom, when we think that we can build high enough walls to keep “them” out, whoever “them” is at any given time, we are wrong.

The people of Israel in Jeremiah’s time are seeking something from God – namely protection. They want God to protect them from Babylon because they assume that this is how God works. You just go about your merry way, doing whatever you’d like and then, when you get in a jam, along comes God to rescue you. It was the part of the plot of all Superman cartoons that I never liked – Hey, Jimmy Olson and Lois Lane! Quit making poor decisions and Superman won’t need to rescue you from the collapsing tunnel or stop the runaway train!

What God offers us instead is direction. God offers us choices about what is life-giving, and, yes, we find them in scripture, but mostly we find them in the voice of experience, our collective experience, listening to and with one another, as the Spirit guides us along the way. For the life-giving things are based in trust and faith, which do not offer us security or certainty, save the security and certainty of God’s presence and our capacity. I say these words as we all know that west Texas was visited again by gun violence yesterday, another mass shooting in our midst. We do, I hope, lift up prayers and lament to God for such trauma as we also collectively lament that we’re not sure what to do about this and wish God would just protect us all. So I hope that the prophetic voice can be heard as loudly, reminding us that there is something not right with the world, and it is notjust upon God to remedy it, or to save us from ourselves. Wemust also take steps, make choices, stop reaching for the wind and remember who we are, and whose we are.

May this meal, this morsel and sip made feast, be our starting point once again, for a reminder that we cannot hoard the bread or drink all of the wine and expect this meal to give us Jesus. We have to respondto God’s call, we have to do our part.

May God bless us in the effort. 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.

Jeremiah 1:4-10

Over the next few weeks we’ll be spending some time with the prophet Jeremiah. We will see him in full prophetic voice as he chastises Israel for its systemic evils, as he confronts another prophet’s vision of the future and we will watch him weep over the very people he chastises, helping us to understand the complexities and dichotomies found in being a prophetic voice.

A little background first – what we would call Israel today was, in the time of Jeremiah, split into two kingdoms – Israel to the north and Judah to the south. Jeremiah, we are told in the verses just before what you heard read, received this “call” from God in the thirteenth year of the reign of king Josiah who ruled over Judah from 640-609 B.C.E., about 700 years before Jesus. It is a time of great turmoil for Israel and Judah, if you can imagine a map in your head and understand where Israel is located, then you will note that all around that nation is desert to one side and the Mediterranean Sea to the other. Israel lies between the major powers of the time, Egypt to the south and the Babylonian empire to the north – a tiny sliver of fertile land perfect for a trade route in between the empires. And, as we can see in our news headlines today, controlling the trade is a critical function of empire.

This nation was under the constant threat of invasion, and they saw their ability to avoid such conquering as a mark of God’s protection, God’s favor, so when invasion was imminent, it was a theological as well as a political crisis. And the role of the prophet – Jeremiah in particular – is to point out that God seeks covenant, meaning that God’s “favor” comes with strings attached. God expects righteousness from us, the Biblical code word for doing the right thing, and when we systematize injustice and oppression, when we build social structures that protect and nurture greed and inequality, we are not producing righteousness…at least that’s what the prophets say, and what Jeremiah says to Israel.

Jeremiah was a PK, a preacher’s kid, raised in the central highlands in the territory of the tribe of Benjamin, the “priestly class” of the 12 tribes of Israel. In the conflict of leadership that occurs right after King David’s time on the throne, a subsection of this priestly class is banished for their dissent of the “David program,” a sort of “Make Israel Great Again” merger of military, patriotism and religious authority. Jeremiah is raised in a family that has long been opposed to this trajectory of economic-military autonomy which David started and Solomon continued, he comes by his “propheting” naturally.

The purpose of the prophet in the biblical world is to deliver the “word of God.” So we need to unpack that because we think that the “word of God” is the Bible, but before there was a Bible, before people even wrote things down, there was revelation, prophecy, the speaking of God’s will from people who were seen as conduits for divine proclamation. But here’s the thing with such proclamation, conduits are contextual. A prophet might be recognized by some people, and flatly rejected by others. How do you know a prophet really is delivering the “word of God?” And how do we hold up the “word of God” as a possibility, even in our days where the words are written out on a page and we yet we still translate and interpret them differently based, largely, on context?

I’m sure that we could talk a lot about what makes for a prophet, and probably have very different lists. Instead, let’s talk about prophetic action – what prophets do. They proclaim, they examine, they look at the world around them and ask why it is not better. And, in the Bible, they do this in very specific ways. They always speak of justice, of mercy and the ways that we, as human beings, seek God’s grace for ourselves, but fail to deliver that same grace to our fellow human beings. Prophets DO things that call this habit out. Acting as the voice of God, they announce God’s judgment. We tend to hear judgment as individual, God’s wrath called down upon me for something I’ve done, a byproduct of a culture that sees lots of things – if not everything – through the lens of self. Not so for the ancient Hebrews whose prophets speak of judgment on Israel itself, on the systems and the cooperate structure.

I think that we also hear judgment as a negative thing, by and large, and often attach it to images of a punitive, angry God that we were raised with, but that’s not what is at work in the ancient Hebrew model of God. There we find judgment as a natural and cyclical consequence of the breaking of the covenant, or people not being righteous. Think of it as Judeo-Christian “karma,” you get what’s coming to you. If you act unjustly, justice comes knocking. If you treat people unfairly, God rights the scales. Now, we may be able to give a lot of examples of where this seems NOT to be the case, but the Biblical prophetic witness claims that God’s justice comes – so if it ain’t here yet, just wait. It’s on it’s way.

In our context, if this prophetic genre is going to still have impact on us, and I think we need it to, we will need some redefinition of things like judgment and righteousness. We have been taught by the biggest chunk of Christian expression in the 20th century that righteousness is found in identity – it is what group you belong to, what church you are a member of, what profession you make, what baptism you have. Righteousness is often presented as if it is contained in a carefully selected list of “do’s and don’t’s” that you need to at least appear like you are following, almost as if it’s more important to look righteous than it is to actually be righteous. It’s how you can have a leader slapped with the label “righteous,” who has affairs and questionable business practices, who uses the most unjust and brutal tactics against those deemed “the other,” and who lies and manipulates to get what he wants. I am, of course, talking about King David. Who did you think I was talking about?

In some ways, the prophetic voice reaches across the ages because it calls out something that seems to be part of the human condition. Every age has it’s tyrants, every time sees it’s own evil and injustice, yet these conditions stay with us throughout the generations, as if the human struggle to reach the Holy, to stay in covenant with God, is an eternal struggle. Jeremiah calls out injustice and meets it with the intervention of a God who balances the scales…maybe because it often seems only God who can do such work. We always miss the mark.

There is an opportunity for we so-called “progressive” Christians to hear the call of the prophets anew. While we may hear the criticism and the cry for justice with clarity, we miss the process that the prophets set before us. While we try to positively spread the message of a loving God, we don’t have very much room for that love to contend with the very real evil and injustice in the world. Jeremiah will preach destruction coming from the hands of Babylon, destruction and exile. But that formula doesn’t stop there, it’s always destruction in order to rebuild, an ending so that a new beginning can happen. In psychological terms, and in academic terms, we often talk about deconstruction and reconstruction, a process that disassembles one way of thinking or one set of assumptions so that there is room for something else.

Like clay made into beautiful pottery, only when we’re willing to be shaped and re-shaped can God mold us into something beyond what we already are. Love, we should note as we preach a loving God, is not without pain, or even suffering. Destruction has such a negative connotation, but in order to hear the prophets effectively, we will have to work through that connotation, allowing that all change – even positive change – comes with destruction. A butterfly springs forth from the death of the caterpillar, a beautiful flower springs forth from a broken seed, our whole lives rotate around the cycle of life though we rarely see it – life comes from death. And, for our more hopeless times, we say in our Christian ethos – life, death and resurrection.

When faced with this formula, with this plan of life from death as the “word of God,” Jeremiah does exactly what I think we’d all do, he says, “Pass.” He pulls the Moses trick with God, “O, mighty and sovereign Creator, I am but a lowly worm, incapable of speech worthy of your glory.” To which God replies, “Pffffttttt – you’ll be fine. I am with you. Get moving.” How would you feel if you were, “appoint[ed]…over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant?” Would that fill you full of confidence, or leave you feeling supremely unqualified…in over your head? And this, friends, is a primary “call” story in the Bible. It’s preached on at people’s ordination! Not mine, thank God, but this is the weight that can be handed to us – and not just ministers – for we are ALL called, the Bible teaches us. God’s promise is to send us forth with this message and a trust that God will be with us, giving us words when we need them.

All os this is set before us at a time when, like Jeremiah, we may feel overwhelmed by the call, insufficient to the task set before us, we might even feel like we’re working on it, but it’s like screaming at a wall. And yet we probably all also feel like the screaming has to go on, even when it feels ineffective, for there are a few things that need to be plucked up, and a few things that we need to plant. There are even some things that we will likely have to destroy because, like a crepe myrtle or some kudzu, they are too deeply rooted to simply pluck up…there are some things that we will have to overthrow because they are such an ingrained part of what we have considered “normal” that they won’t step down, we’ll have to tip those thrones over. And there is plenty of room to build new structures, new systems that recognize we actually need one another, that our differences sharpen us, they don’t weaken us. There’s plenty of good soil in which to plant the seeds of hope – and then wait for that hope to sprout, for we may labor for things that we ourselves will never see bloom, but our labor is not in vain.

Do not be afraid, God says, for I am with you…to deliver you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AND at the same time…

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

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

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

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

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

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

May God give us strength for the journey. Amen.

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

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

Luke 12:13-21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God, I hope so.

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

Psalm 85 & Luke 11:1-10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May God’s Grace be with us all. Amen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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