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

Mark 13:1-8

“Nosotros trabajamos por ustedes”

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

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

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

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

We are working for you.

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

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

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

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

Nosotros trabajamos por ustedes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

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

Diamonds and Rust

Selections from Ruth, chapters 3 & 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The election is over. The struggle continues.

May we have strength and courage for the journey.

Amen.

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

Ruth 1:1-18 & Mark 12:28-34

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Acts 8:26-40 & Mark 10:46-52

Bartimaeus has a problem. Yeah, in part it’s the blindness that keeps him from being able to function well in a society created for seeing people. That’s why he’s a beggar, that’s the only path left for people who are lame, or sick, or wounded or broken or leprous or otherwise untouchable and cast aside in Jesus’ world. But it’s not just the blindness. He’s lonely, he’s scared, he’s tired. He’s anxious about his future, and he is marginalized, with no place to really fit in. Have you ever felt left out? Have you ever felt like no one is listening to you? Have you ever been the only person with whatever label you most identify in a room full of people not like you and felt really alone?
That’s every day for Bartimaeus.

So when Jesus comes around the corner, this man who he’s heard so much about, he is reaching out for more than just being able to see again. Maybe that’s the cornerstone of his desire for healing because if he could see, perhaps all the other stuff would fade away. Or, more likely, he’d still be set aside because once you are out, it’s hard to get in. Once you are marginalized, the majority seems to always find new ways to keep you on the edge…if not you, then someone else. Because the system seems to be – from 1st century Roman empire to 21st century American empire – founded on hierarchies, those who have and those who don’t, those who are in and those who are out. And Bartimaeus is tired of being left out, tired of being marginalized…he’s tired of being tired, to partially quote Ms. Fanny Lou Hamer.

But when he speaks up, when he gathers enough courage to say something to this itinerant healer who he’s never even met, he is immediately shouted down. Quiet, the crowd says! Hush, those gathered around him cry! Shut up, the authorities demand!
He is crying out for acceptance, like the voice of a transgendered person; begging for something as basic as recognition; like the cry of a refugee on a 2,000 mile trek to possible freedom, hoping for healing; like the person with chronic illness relegated to the emergency room; longing for justice; like the man who kneels at the national anthem to draw attention to a very real threat on his existence only to be told to shut up and play ball.

How often are we asked to keep our own voices down, to keep some offense from being uttered? Something that would cause a disruption in the very controlled status quo? How often do we silence cries for mercy, as if only some cries are worthy of God’s attention? The God-response in this little morality play from scripture this morning comes from Jesus, who shushes the shushers to hear the cry of this blind man and to tell him the thing we all want – and don’t want – to hear…your faith has made you well. Sometimes I think that’s the real kicker line that we skip right over in these Jesus healing stories. It’s not my power has made you well, it’s not you had enough faith to make you well, it’s the faith you already have – that in which you have trusted…the reason you have raised your voice in the first place – that has made you well.

I don’t know if the healing that occurs in this story is medical or metaphorical. Can Bartimaeus see – like I can see – or does he see like I often don’t see, his trust in a world that doesn’t exist giving him hope for a world that could exist. After this last week, healing would be nice, but I don’t really hold much stock in that happening. Every time I feel like we have reached the rock bottom, we seem to go lower. And given the way that we talk to one another, the almost always detrimental impact of social media and our propensity towards dehumanization, I can’t see how we climb up at this point. I can’t see it. I am blind to a hopeful future.
So maybe this is the time that I cry out to Jesus – have mercy! For, like Bartimaeus, I’m not sure what else to do. Relying on my strength alone hasn’t done it. My outrage, much to my chagrin, hasn’t changed the world. My attendance at every protest, vigil, rally and meeting that occurs hasn’t brought about the kin-dom. In fact, right now it feels like things are headed the opposite direction.

The title of the sermon is “no more silence,” and it was originally going to be about raising our own voices and making sure that we are heard. But I really don’t think that’s a problem for this congregation. You have all dedicated major parts of your life, lots of energy, towards raising your voice or raising the voices of others. And you might be feeling, I suspect, a little like me right now. Here, tired, heartsick, in need of healing, and hope, and communion. And it makes me wonder if it’s not just raising our voices that needs to happen, not only a dedication to “no more silence,” but actually what we’re raising our voices about. For we cannot claim our identity in our outrage, which is easy to do. There’s certainly enough of it to fuel all kinds of things and while I’m not suggesting that you somehow “turn it off,” as if that were possible, I do believe that, like Bartimaeus, we might recognize the ways that it blinds us and seek something bigger than our outrage, something that might actually be able to bring healing.

Now, in this time of social turmoil and backlash, a time in which battles we thought we had fought are being waged again, ground we had gained being threatened once more, it is so very important that we understand why it is that we make the claims we make. We don’t say that we welcome LGBTQ+ persons into full participation in the church because we are reactionary, or because we’re a bunch of liberals. We don’t seek to do the hard work of racial reconciliation or press on in the struggle for gender, immigration or environmental justice because we’re bleeding-hearts, or even because we are “social justice warriors.” We do so as a matter of faith. We do so because we trust in the Way of Jesus, that teaches us to listen to others, to be merciful and compassionate, to welcome all of God’s creation as if it were all created by God, and to love not only our neighbors, but our enemies, too – thereby announcing an entirely different system of relating and being in the world than the one that so often gets set before us – even more so during an election season which often reduces things to a zero-sum game full of winners and losers. He calls us, as a matter of faith, to not trust in the hierarchies, not to believe in power, at least in the way that we usually construct it, not to take stock in rage or resentment, but instead to trust in God’s incredible love for all people, without exception, and then try as best we can, where we are, with what we have, to live that love in the world, letting it open our eyes to the people and places which we have been unable to see.

Every time that we see Jesus encountering the religious authorities of his time, he stands before them and reminds them that the difference between their religion and his faith is that they use scripture to determine what love means and he uses love to determine what scripture means. Then he reaches out to the downtrodden, he accepts the rejected, he embraces the untouchable as a sign of God’s love amidst a religious practice that divides, distinguishes and seeks to make God a keeper of rules rather than a giver of grace. Paul, decades later, says it this way – if you obey all the rules and have all the talents and possess faith that can move mountains but don’t have love, you are nothing. And the Book of Acts says it this way, even a few more years later. If the eunuch, the first century equivalent of the gender non-conforming, the Jesus-era symbol of the queer person, sees and feels God the way that we do – and they do – then what is to stop them from participation in the same way we participate? And the answer, from our Bible, is nothing. That’s the faith we are called to…that’s what I want to trust in as I call out for mercy.

Today marks the 501st anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, begun as a set of criticisms against the church, it became a church, and carried a virulent strand of anti-semitism and misogyny with it. What started out as change soon became the very thing it sought to change and it is so important that we understand that we must not become what we abhor as we resist what we abhor.

This morning I am here deeply disturbed, very tired and wanting for some hope and light, some vision, some ability to see. And I, like Bartimaeus, find myself crying out, but not in anger – though I have it – not in outrage – though it consumes me – but rather crying out to Christ…have mercy! For the only thing that I can see, the only light that maintains a sliver in my mind’s eye is the hope that there is something beyond me – something bigger than just my methods, my narrow vision of what things “ought to be”…something that will really heal and make whole. That’s why I need the meal this morning…the meal of communion which ushers in the mystery of that which we call God…adrift in the universe and unfolding all things still, even in my despair. I need to trust that there is some Spirit still spiraling around us, present in this strange, small meal that I cannot rationalize nor understand, which is not part of my own strategy, but something to which I surrender, something which comes to me – comes to all of us – feeding our faith. For that faith, I am assured, will make us well.

God, I hope that is so. Let us hope together at the table.

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

Isaiah 52:7-10 (The Inclusive Bible Translation)

In our scriptures the prophets often use Zion is a central image – that or Jerusalem – the nation-city rebuilt, back to original luster, shining like a city on a hill. It’s not an image that I can wrap my head around. We are a young nation, and think it remarkable to preserve a house built in the 18th century while our cousins in Europe routinely walk around in 800 year old castles. In Jerusalem you can still walk through the Church of the Nativity, built almost 2000 years ago. It boggles the mind to consider how something built so long ago can still be standing, let alone in use. The closest I can get my mind to absorb is an old house. This I can appreciate, and do, particularly when a perfect moment comes along. It doesn’t happen too often, which is probably what makes it perfect. It’s a cold day outside, I have on a nice sweater, maybe a fire in the fireplace, a cup of coffee, and I sit in my favorite chair, flip on the TV only to find that “This Old House” is on. That’s a perfect moment. I can sit in my comfort as floors get torn out, walls get demolished and replaced, wiring redone, tile laid and grouted, rafters, framing, ceilings repainted and I don’t have to do a thing. I just drink my coffee, sit back and feel like I’ve renovated an old house back to it’s original shine because I have an imagination that allows me to take psychic credit for things I have absolutely nothing to do with.

Would that all things in life were that easy. On Tuesday night, I was struck by one of the quirks of community organizing at the ACTION accountability session for the DA race. There were close to 200 people there, all seeking to educate themselves a bit on the race but something else happened, I think…at least for some. There was a connection between individual races, for particular political positions, and the system – how a DA, for instance, can influence the over all justice system, with all it’s broken parts. The discussions I have had immediately after, during a long bike ride with a friend and in subsequent conversations have all centered on how we can create change, whether that is all at once, in great revolutionary style, or in increments, often seemingly innocuous and definitely not glamorous. It’s the same way we might think about that is how we transform things – our own hearts, our families, our cities, or our world? How do we bring about the kin-dom of God, which Jesus said was all around us – in giant, violent upheaval, or in small, dedicated, even tedious moments – like pulling tile off a wall?

Isaiah didn’t have KIN-dom language, like we do. He didn’t even have KING-dom language, like Jesus used. He spoke instead of Zion, of Israel, of Jerusalem – kingdom, nation, nation-city – all metaphors for what God was up to in the world. Isaiah speaks these words, as he does many others, at a time of turmoil and anxiety about the future, with corrupt rulers at the helm and the constant assertion from the prophet that the moral level of the nation is, shall we say, lacking? Isaiah is a carrot-and-stick guy, and this passage is of the carrot variety, speaking words of promise and comfort to a people likely weary and troubled by the future. Isaiah tells his people to wake up, to dress themselves with strength, and shake off the dust! He calls on them to untie the ropes from around their necks – God is coming to ransom them, to free them from oppression. It sounds huge, but it’s really a practical, mundane hope that Isaiah evokes – big things with small foundations.

I am struck each time that I watch This Old House how they sort of time warp you through what I know is much more work than we’re seeing on the screen. You don’t add an 800 square foot room and completely renovate a bathroom and kitchen in a 120 year-old house without a lot of effort. And just because it’s effort we don’t see doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. You miss out on the team that levels the foundation, or the pair of expert carpenters that seamlessly remove a weight-bearing wall, replacing it with a joist hidden in the ceiling. That work comes while you just see the problems with the house, while the repair work looms overhead like a dark cloud. Isaiah’s promise is the same way, for it comes in the middle of a situation, that is nothing like the promise of God.

Lots of people say that this is why we have church. We come here once a week (maybe less) with a dark cloud hanging over our own vision of the world, to get recharged, or inspired, or simply to be amongst like-minded people. But that alone doesn’t change the world. Might change us, but the dream, the kin-dom, the beloved community, it has to exist beyond these walls to be any good to anyone. So maybe we come here to realize, in part, that we don’t change the world…or at least we don’t change it alone. What we can do is to meet the world’s weakness with our own weakness, our power being found in weakness, which is the most peculiar of Christian assertions. And yet the more I give it some credence, the more I see how counter-intuitively real it is.

Isaiah’s lamentations and accusations are leveled at and for Zion/Israel/Jerusalem. He feels pain for them as he feels frustration at them. It is the task of prophets and messengers to live with the dichotomy of helping people who also bear some responsibility for their own predicaments. And, truth be told, this is the task of all of us who seek to follow the Way of Jesus, a spiritual path founded on Grace, and the idea that we do not earn transformation, we don’t manufacture wholeness, we don’t self-create redemption, but instead choose to participate with God, which sometimes means surrendering to God’s plan instead of trumpeting my own. And it means, of course, wrestling with a lot of discernment and making a lot of room for complexity, which sounds like the perfect description of ministry.

Ministry is often defined as the work of a religious practice, done by the authorized people, wearing the right clothing and typically “looking the part,” which often means only looking like me – white, male, straight, with a beautiful wife and 2.5 children. That .5 is the dog, for those of you keeping score. But the etymology of the term “ministry,” how we get from ancient languages that our faith ancestors spoke to our modern English, begins with the Greek word diakoneo, meaning “to serve” or douleuo, meaning “to serve as a slave.” It’s where we get the term “deacon,” which was one of the earliest terms for people who were in leadership in the Way of Jesus. Ministry, from it’s very beginnings, is supposed to be about service, even sacrificial service. And that extends FAR beyond the pulpit, far outside the scope of “ordained ministry”, past even the reach of the seminary, the congregation, the conference. Ministry goes on all the time, all around us.

So, lest you think that I’m the only minister around here, please know that this is a sanctuary FULL of them right now…those who have served and are now happily retired, those who serve, just not in a church, even those who don’t seek that title at all, and those who think they don’t “know enough” to minister end up doing it, each in their own ways. So, effectively, ALL of us. It takes all of us doing the small things to create the big things. We can’t get repair Zion/Israel/Jerusalem, we can’t bring about the kin-dom, or raise up the beloved community…heck, we can’t even have a good city-wide community without realizing the balance between our effort and our weakness. We need to be involved and to participate, and we need to know that we cannot fix the world by ourselves. We need the best of what humankind can bring to the table AND we need something more than what we are, something Holy and Divine, the something that we call God, which loves what we cannot love, hopes what we cannot hope and completes what we cannot complete.

I get the privilege of bearing witness to the ways that you do this, my good church people, on a daily basis. I have stood with you in the jail, at the clinic, serving a meal, holding a hand, carrying documentation papers, loading up clothing, singing carols in the halls of an apartment complex, marching in the PRIDE parade, our church banner held proudly, bearing witness at the city council meeting, holding signs of welcome at the mosque, the synagogue, the church full of immigrants, and so many other places where your ministry carries the Gospel into the world. It is one of the most wonderful things about being a pastor, you get to see the small, foundational things being done everyday, the work that doesn’t get shown on the big screen. These are the tile laying things, the remodeling work, the cutting in on the corners of the walls with a small paintbrush, the sometimes tedious and ordinary and basic work of remodeling the world into the kin-dom.

Ministry, the sacrificial and dedicated work in the direction of God’s love, hope and realization, takes all of us. Yes, I do this “professionally,” but you do this every time you reach out to someone who feels on the edges, every time you care for the wounded, tend to a sick person, share some food on a cold day, give a smile in the pouring rain, or speak out for the one who cannot use their own voice. When we do the things that Jesus did, we are exactly what the earliest followers tried to be – little Jesuses, little “Christs,” Christians – trying to live just a little differently in the world, sharing the load, translating language, making connections, building bridges, seeking justice and longing for the same world that Jesus longed for…what we call the kin-dom. Here and now.

So thank you, Fellowship, for being the church…where you are, with what you have. For you are all ministers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I see 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.

You Lack One Thing

Mark 10:17-22

We start off with a young man well versed in the rituals of his time, greeting Jesus with the appropriate respect and formality only to have Jesus deliver news so unwelcome that probably wonders why he was so cordial in the first place. What must I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus tells him, after giving him the opportunity to affirm the ten commandments like it was his list of credentials, that he needs to get one more thing…

or, in this case, he needs to get rid of one more thing. It’s not welcome news to him any more than it is to any of us when the often annoying voice of the Holy Spirit tells us something in prayer or in study or in conversation that we know we need to hear but really don’t want to hear. Have you heard this voice before? Hey, friend – you lack one thing if you’re on going to stay on this holy road. You’re almost there. One more hurdle to cross. Just give a little more, love a little more, trust a little more. Keep your lamps trimmed and burning! What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer! Keep pressing on the upward way. Move on up a little higher! All inspirational, powerful lessons that we sometimes don’t want to hear.

We just want our question answered, Jesus. You are as elusive as the best politician, answering something totally different than what I asked! I didn’t ask you for difficult truth, I just want the easy, two-step formula for eternal life, the magic key that unlocks the gate. What must I do, we all wonder? What must I do to gain heaven, to acquire salvation, to get liberation, freedom, compassion, belonging, relief? C’mon Jesus, it’s a simple question.

This man’s question seems simple, too – what must I do to inherit eternal life? Not what must I do to earn it. Not what must I do to see it or make it or find it.What must I do to inherit it? Chances are very high that inheritance is precisely what the rich man has “done” to become a rich man. He got born to the right people. That’s a really good first step…I advise that everyone choose their parents carefully. Also helpful if you choose the right gender, race and orientation, too. Born into his privilege, the man hopes out loud that he can be “born again” to the right people and gain another inheritance. It’s his model, his framework for seeing the world, his paradigm that Jesus lifts up for him to see. He begins with what I think is a setup – have you done all the right things? Have you followed the rules, have you graduated from the right schools, do you belong to the right fraternity, do you wear the right suits and present the way you are supposed to present? Yes, yes and yes – Jesus. I look the part. I’m entitled to this eternal life – so what other hurdles do I need to jump?

He goes away, the text tells us, stugnasas, a Greek word which often gets translated as “sad” or “grieving”, but also means shocked, or appalled. When told that he’s actually not entitled to this, he is appalled. Maybe even angry. When told that just checking off the boxes is not what God is looking for, that God’s plumb line is actually a little higher than memorizing scripture verses, saying the right things and not murdering people or stealing from them, he is shocked. And when Jesus confronts him with the unwelcome idea that he lacks one more thing, that repentance means actually doing things differently, that having “treasure in heaven” will cost you something here, he is ticked off about it.

Now as tempting as it is, we ought to be very careful about painting this passage as a treatise against rich people – no, no, my friends, the Gospel won’t let us off the hook so easily. Throughout chapter 10, Mark’s Jesus is trying to get us to look at the things in which we place our faith…and – spoiler alert – there’s something for all of us. There is legalism, social position, status, authority, wealth, a false sense of superiority, an attitude, as they say, it is power, or our privilege, which I must remind us all, comes in many forms. Jesus lays down that directive to sell all his possessions and give that money away not because it is a universal directive for all people in all places for all time, but because, for this man, the possessions are where he lodges his faith. It is the thing that has kept all of his other piety, his devotion and observance of the instructions of faith from actually making him faithful. His possessions have driven a wedge between him and the world around him, keeping him from what faithful living ought to do, which is grow our hearts and expand our compassion. And Jesus’ solution is direct – let’s take all your money and give it away…let’s divest you of this thing that has distorted your vision, this thing that stands between you and all else in God’s creation, so that you can live by trusting in God’s way – by being in solidarity with your neighbor, which is like having, in Jesus’ kin-dom vision, treasure in heaven.

What Jesus wants to know from this man is this – where is your line? Where do you think that God doesn’tgo? Where are you unwilling to cross though Jesus himself stands on the other side and calls out to you – come on over! What do you cling to as God asks you to let go? From Genesis to the prophets to Jonah to the Gospels to the book of Acts the the letters of Paul, the Bible is full of stories about the lines in the sand that God beckons us to cross. As soon as we claim to know God, our own scripture and traditions tell us, God is more than we imagined. As soon as we are sure that we have the rules down well enough to start using them against other people, God moves the goalposts. As soon as we are sure that we hate the the right people – you know, the ones that God hates also – word comes to us that God is standing on the other side of the lines we have drawn, begging us to love more…to let that love overshadow our hate, our control, our power, for we…only…lack…one…thing.

The man goes away grieving. He can’t “get there” with Jesus. It’s a hurdle he can’t jump. And Jesus is good at this – constantly setting up for us the idea that the kin-dom of God doesn’t happen with us gaining something, but with us giving something up. Some people need to give up thinking that the point of God is following the rules, or that some people matter more than others. Others need to divest themselves of the idea that God is predictable and logical, or that faith is something you can verify and lock down. And some of us need to get rid of the feeling that God can’t possibly love us…maybe everyone else, but not us. Or, maybe it’s something even bigger, like the kin-dom of God will not come without you giving up the assertion that some people get to define, codify and enforce “normal,” forever enshrining the example with a certain gender, skin tone, accent, orientation, worship-style, interpretive answer, etc, etc, etc. The kin-dom only comes with change. I’ll say that again – the kin-dom only comes with change.

This is ultimately what the rich man’s grief is about, isn’t it? He’s going to have to change – I mean fundamentally change– in order to gain the very thing he says that he’s been seeking all this time. But he won’t, and contained in that refusal is the realization that perhaps he hasn’t actually been seeking the thing he says he’s been seeking this whole time. He has a lot to grieve, my friends, as he walks away, resisting the words of Jesus still echoing in his ears.

He grieves because “how do I inherit eternal life” isn’t really a question about heaven. Oh, we think it is, shaped by generations of theological manipulation that create a door to heaven and conveniently give the church the only key. It’s a good way to keep the membership roles filled, but I don’t think that’s what Jesus means when he talks about eternal life. In Greek the man asks something more like what he must do to be enjoying his allotment of life beyond this era. “This era” in the Jesus movement language from Peter to Paul, is an era of selfishness, greed and oppression. So when the man asks how he can assure his ticket to the next chapter while also insuring that his riches come with him, how he might have a world of inclusion and justice, let’s say, but maintain the order and structure of the previous world of exclusion and injustice, Jesus reminds him that you can’t get there from here. What you value will have to change for the world to change. What you treasure here must be different for any “treasure in heaven” to come.

If our salvation is about more than what happens to us after we die, and I believe that it is, then here, at this particular moment in history, we must divest ourselves of our borders, we must dare to risk more than the rich man was willing to risk, to closely examine that thing we lack and choose to reshape our values, seeking to hear perspectives from outside our bubbles, and understanding that the Gospel truth always lies just beyond the place where we have drawn a line. We – and by “we” I especially mean people who look like me – have to be willing to give up the idea that being “right” is the same thing as being “holy,” that winning is the same thing as following Jesus, or that being comfortable is the same thing as being blessed.

This isn’t a judgment story from Mark, it’s a healing story. The story of seeking a just world, of working to create equity and inclusion, compassion and mercy isn’t a story of judgment, it’s a story of healing, what our Jewish siblings call tikkun olam the great healing of the world. Itis the story of how we can participate in our own and other people’s healing by meeting their weakness with our own weakness, trusting in the way of Jesus and knowing that while for us it may be impossible, with God all things are possible. As much as I want some of God’s judgment to come down right now…and fall precisely on the people who I want it to…it is not judgment that is God’s goal. Love is God’s goal. It must be ours, too, for no healing comes without love. Wasteful, sacrificial, angry, dedicated, pliable, hurting, merciful, truth-telling love, redistributing our carefully arranged hierarchies, resisting our own resistance, written on our hearts like a revolution, and constantly reviving us, leaving our ears echoing with the call –

(pastor starts the singing) I have decided to follow Jesus (x3) no turning back, no turning back.

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.

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost & Mark 10:2-12

October 7^th, 2018 – World Communion Sunday

Today is World Communion Sunday. Started in Presbyterian circles in the 1930s and then being officially adopted by the National Council of Churches in 1940, this Sunday is supposed to mark a time of unity amongst Christian denominations, to see in this common ritual a connection between all followers of Jesus. It is a lovely sentiment, akin to the foundation of the United Church of Christ, which came together under the banner of a snippet from John’s gospel – that they may all be one. This is the call for unity, and it’s a lovely image, the whole world learning to sing together in a circle, in perfect harmony, drinking a Coke. But unity, I’m afraid, is not what the Gospel calls us to…at least not unity the way we often think about it. Troops marching in lockstep down a main street is unity. An all-white jury unanimously deciding the fate of a young black man is unity. You can see unity in political battles on both sides where people clearly choose party over country and politics over truth. You can see it in the sometimes inexplicable actions of fraternities, civic groups and unions that back their members even when great injustices have occurred. It is unity that allows for the cruelty of mocking laughter against people deemed inferior for any number of reasons – people who aren’t part of that thing being called unity.

I have a problem with calls for unity, you see, because they are more often calls for mere conformity, not the relational, sacrificial effort that Jesus often portrays. The calls for unity are often set against people seeking recognition, asking for them to just get with the program and recognize the power. But Jesus’ power is power given away, our scripture stories tell us, authority through compassion and healing rather than dominance and control. An appeal for unity shouldn’t ask someone to give up their identity to join. That’s not unity. It’s conformity. I know that World Communion Sunday is supposed to draw us together as the Church, but how can we stand together in unity when some parts of the church claim to follow Jesus but show none of his compassion, his hope, his love?

I want to be clear. My pushback against “unity” is something far beyond whether or not I disagree with someone. I can disagree and still be in fellowship. I can take issue with someone’s opinion and stay in covenant. What I can’t do is to side with people who claim to value one thing, but stop valuing it as soon as it gets a little inconvenient, or as soon as holding that value threatens their power. A quote often attributed to James Baldwin, but actually written much more recently by a man named Robert Jones Jr, who goes by the Twitter handle SonofBaldwin, goes like this: “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.” In other words, if you say let’s get together because you value women but insist, in a variety of ways, that they “stay in their place,” then that’s not a unity I seek. If you seek a “colorblindness” that asks people of color to whitewash or ignore their own lived histories, then you aren’t seeking unity, you’re just asking people to stop fighting your power.

When the Pharisees come to confront Jesus, they set up a test. Jesus has just come from a series of events where he spreads God’s grace and mercy to places and onto people that are unclean, cut-off, definitely out of any unifying effort. It is a direct challenge to the status quo, and I imagine the Pharisees confronting him with angry voices, faces clenched against this person who is daring to question their authority, the right that they have to be in charge, the LAW that is God-given, for which they have set themselves up as the keepers. I imagine it started as a calmer voice, urging Jesus to just “go along.” “C’mon, Jesus – this is the way the world works. Heck, God set it up this way, quit trying to mess it up with all this talk of justice.” But that didn’t work, so their voices got louder, their faces angrier. They try to set a trap asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” Now, we may see this as a kind of innocuous question, but we need to understand something. In the ancient Mediterranean world, adultery means to dishonor a male by having sexual relations with his wife, but not the other way around, nor does sex with some other female means dishonor. The teaching at the time varied, but a woman could be dismissed from her marriage for displeasing her husband. Some required marital infidelity. But whatever the case, a woman was completely powerless in the situation. A woman had no right to seek a divorce, they were always the victims of divorce. It is an intrinsically inequitable system and it has nothing to do with love. The law, designed to bring some equitability into the realm of marriage, Jesus reminds them, has been warped into a system that places all power and authority in the hands of men who aren’t interested in morality as much as power.

Jesus turns the question from them on it’s head, shifting the tone from legal to relational, thereby paying attention to the vulnerability of the women in this patriarchal system. Jesus wants these men to know that marriage is something more than just a legal contract, just as a woman is not a possession. The ethic behind Jesus’ response isn’t that divorce is wrong, though that has been the most common interpretation. His prophetic word to the Pharisees, and anyone listening, is that treating women as unequal to men, treating them as possessions, is blasphemous – bothwere made in the image of God.

America, as if you needed a reminder after the last couple of weeks, is still a land of patriarchy. Maybe some progress has been made, but the reality is that it is more difficult to be a woman than it is to be a man in this country in almost every way. From wages to rights to access to the media, women are still not seen as created in the image of God, too – at least not in the sane way that men are. We still live with a so-called justice that let’s the “she saids” stack up, one atop the other, on one side of the scales, only to be outweighed by a single “he said.”

To our shame, it is stillthe wife who is typically affected disproportionately by divorce, particularly when children are involved. The husband becomes a single man. The wife becomes a single mom. Women are still subject to the same sexual catch-22, be chaste and pure and a sex object all at the same time. The attitudes we see in a nomination fight for the Supreme Court or in countless stories from the #metoo movement aren’t new attitudes – they are biblical in nature and while it may seem like they’re getting worse, I think that they are more likely getting revealed. They have lived in the shadows for sexism and misogyny, like racism, have deep roots and just when we think they are gone, they sprout up again.

And I can almost hear the call now – pretty sure we’ll hear it out loud in the next few days. OK, let’s move on. You could hear it in some Senator’s voices – yes, she was credible, yes, I believe her, I just don’t care. I don’t have to. I can parse out the legalities and sharpen the legal pen and make sure that policies and procedures are setup precisely in a way that allows me to not have to actually expose my ideas to the disinfectant that is sunlight. This way I can continue to say that I support women, without having to ever actuallysupport women. We can hire them, but make sure they don’t advance too far. We can praise them in public while we continue to control their choices and minimize their voices. We can continue to let what is really in our hearts be known with our Freudian slips and our overhead whispers when we didn’t realize the mic was still on, but believe it, when we’re caught, we’ll have a quick retort about how you misunderstood. It is the way the world is, after all. Just go along with it – for the sake of unity.

What fills my head and heart this morning are not those voices, which I really do think are putting up such a strong fight because of how impending their end is, but rather the voices of the marginalized – bold and courageous. It’s the face of a professor, hand in the air for an oath, letting her voice be heard like Jesus let his be heard in his “trial,” where the ending was already determined. It’s the continued call of this table, ringing through the ages, the road less taken, welcoming a new way of being in the world, the ushering in of the kin-dom. Here we will welcome everyone to the table – gay and straight, brown, black, white, across class and genders – we share the meal not from a place of uniformity, but out of a sense of sharing, a deep awareness that we need one another – every single other.

A Facebook “friend” wrote this week – you know, one of those “friends” you’ve never actually met – she wrote about the prophetic voice, crying for truth and justice in times of injustice. “I know,” she writes, “lots of us are exhausted from crying out. Children still separated from their parents. Environmental regulations weakened or disbanded. LGBTQIA+ folk put at risk. Health care taken from vulnerable people. Mockery of sexual assault victims by our President.

Please hear me: it is worthy to cry out, to speak deep truth, even if it isn’t heard by the powerful. It is good to speak up, to speak out, to stand firm, even if you lose. Justice is worth fighting for, even if the fight lasts longer than our own lives.

Maybe the powerful won’t listen to us. But when we shout, the powerless hear too. And when they hear you, they realize they aren’t alone. Solidarity with one another is the only way we’re going to make it.”

We are a covenant people, my friends, joined together in the grace of Christ Jesus. And this is a covenant of relationship, not a contract but a chosen solidarity. And this World Communion Sunday, I don’t know if I’m down with the whole church. I don’t really want anything like unity right now, at least the kind of unity that asks me to go along to get along. After all, I’m painfully aware that many churches have blessed this current wave of injustices in our nation, saying they’re “OK” with separating children from their families and placing them in internment camps, giving a “thumbs up” to misogynistic comments and actions from the most powerful leader in the world, crying “Yes” to complicity with blatant white supremacists marching in the streets. That church is fine with all of that blasphemy in a quest for power. And I am surethat I know how Jesus feels about that.

So, this morning, we will have our communion meal by ourselves, just our church, nursing some wounds and catching our breath, hoping all the while that we aren’t the only church full of disparaging people. We’ll expect that we aren’t the only house of worship that trusts in a God of justice to bring that reign on the earth – and to bring it soon. We’ll assure ourselves that we aren’t the only place where people are gathering, considering more than just a sip of wine about now and trying to chase away our apathetic tendencies to retreat to a couch and binge-watch through the next two years away with the visions of possibility and the sometimes absurd hope for change. There is still a world that longs to be born, a kin-dom of equity and justice, of compassion and kindness that is all around us. May we have the eyes to see it. Right now, O God. Right now, please.

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.

Lead, a poem by Mary Oliver
Philippians 4:1-9 (Common English Bible Translation)
September 30th, 2018

“Dear Henry,” the open letter from Lisa See to her grandson begins, “I don’t ever want you to feel hopeless or powerless. Now, of course, you have the usual ways that little boys can feel hopeless and powerless – bedtime, for example – but I’m talking about bigger things. You paid surprising attention to the election. How could you not, when your parents, your uncle, Grandpa, and I were talking about it all the time? When we were out to breakfast, the conversation might be about the rise of neo-Nazism, the possible defunding of Planned Parenthood, women’s rights in general, the dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, our criminal justice system, and targeting people because of the color of their skin, their religion, where they came from, or how they got here. You’ve also heard us talk about how none of these things will matter if we end up having a nuclear war or go off the deep end when it comes to climate change. Immediately after the election, you heard us sound hopeless, frightened or angry. Yep, you saw us freaking out, and I’m sorry about that. You’re only four and a half. We should have been more careful.

But here’s the thing I want you to know: We aren’t helpless, and things aren’t hopeless. We may not work in the Senate or Congress or the White House, but we aren’t powerless either. We are strong as a family, and we’re strong as individuals. Don’t ever think, I can’t fight back, because you can. Whenever you think, Oh, this is too hard or too dangerous, or Whatever I could do would be too small to make a difference, I want you to remember the people in your own family who faced variations of what the president-elect and his cronies are threatening.”

See goes on to write about history, and how her grandson, who is of Chinese descent like she is, is part of a bigger story. She writes to him of a time during the election of 1876, when “swing votes were tied to the issue of Chinese immigration in the same way that immigration was a hot topic during this election cycle. Rutherford Hayes endorsed Chinese exclusion and won the election. In the following election, James Garfield also carried the torch of anti-Chinese immigration into office. (From those days to now, every presidential election has fanned the flames of anti-immigration…hate and fear are reliable, predictable, and effective political tools.) All this led eventually to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred the entry of all Chinese immigrants to the United States…It also declared all Chinese totally ineligible for naturalized citizenship. This clause alone (she writes), allowed the United States to join Nazi Germany and South Africa as the only nations ever to withhold naturalization purely on racial grounds.”

She goes on to tell of the many laws and policies that were put in place making life difficult for the Chinese who were already here, even if they were born here and already citizens. Anti-marriage laws, housing discrimination, property ownership limits, and no wall, but instead Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay, an immigration station whose only purpose was to keep the Chinese out. How, she asks her grandson, are we here?

Her answer to him is what Paul’s answer is to the Philippians, struggling with internal strife and external oppression, with Paul himself writing from a prison cell, likely to be executed. In that atmosphere, surrounded by oppression and filled with much of what we feel today – anger, frustration, rage, pain – from that place he writes – be joyful! This is not Paul’s glib sermon on the “power of positive thinking” or a suggestion that all you need to do is put a smile on your face during your suffering. It is an awareness born of a long history with pain, a deep relationship with the millimeter progress scale that is justice, a long, long, long moral arc.

Throughout the letter, Paul encourages this Jesus-group in Philippi to persevere, to keep up the practices of that group, to develop a resiliency, a pliability in the face of stress. He encourages them to not only show the values of this little “family of Christ” to the world outside, but first and foremost to one another. It’s what one commentary on this passage called, “holy friendships.” These are special kinds of friendships, not run-of-the-mill folks who you are friendly with, or even frequent dinner guests. These are the people you call in a crisis, the ones who have your back (and whose back you have), the friends who are there when the chips are down and you have nothing to offer them but your struggle and pain. You might be related to them by blood, maybe by choice. What valuable resources friends like that are! I hope you have some. Actually, I know that you ARE some for each other, and that says who we are as a church more than anything.

What Lisa See writes to her grandson in a collection called, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times, is that his own family is this kind of holy friendship, as well as the diverse collection of people to whom they have attached themselves, driven by the empathy for others so often created by our own hardships. She tells him that they really aren’t (stereotypically) powerful people but, “as the Chinese say, The collapse of a dam begins with an ant hole. She tells him the story of his ancestors, not all light and love, but with an orientation towards freedom, justice and hope. She tells him of an accusation of spying against great-grandparents by the FBI that becomes a funny family tale to be told over and over at celebrations. She tells him of the joy, not always happiness, but the joy, the resilient, pliable joy of that holy friendship-family. And she concludes with this – “In honor of my great-grandfather and grandparents, who fought against discrimination and hate in their own lives…we have a responsibility to do our part by being vigilant and helping to defend and protect…Oh, Henry, we’re going to have a lot of fun being mischievous, using our best tricks, and marching along together as two ants. Do you want to know who else will be with us? Mommy, Daddy, Grandpa, Uncle Chris, and so many more. There’s hope and power in that.”

Paul packs a lot into nine verses of his letter, right at the end. Here, according to Paul, is what you ought to do, holy friendship-family:

1. Affirm and love one another, standing united in Christ – so that’s not just loving one another, but affirming each other. Listening to one another’s stories, being the place where you will be heard – which we know is a rare location – and looking for the goodness in one another.
2. Help your friends through conflict with one another – please notice it’s not just help your friends through conflict, but through conflict with one another. Yikes. I think we all just got a little uncomfortable right then. Which brings us to this strange word…
3. Practice gentleness and forbearance with one another. OK, gentleness is not the strange word, but forbearance sure is. What the heck is that? No one uses that word anymore, but it has a depth of meaning. Forbearance is comprised of patience, offering the benefit of the doubt and maybe even some mercy. More than this forbearance is that deep friendship, which is not froufrou, happy, lovey-dovey all the time. It is the willingness to be vulnerable and to bear another person’s vulnerability, the suppleness of soul that allows us to struggle and stick, to wrestle and remain, to tear and also to trust. This we are to practice, to trust in, and, at times, to depend on.
4. Meditate on things that are true, honorable and worthy of praise. Here’s the only real nod to the “power of positive thinking.” I don’t advise anyone to smile through their pain, nor do I think that denial is a healthy approach – AND – I also know that we, in part, create what we see…and when we work together to deconstruct the negative realities in front of us, only then can we reconstitute new identities, new understandings of ourselves, and the world, and the divine. When we look for hope, when we expect and seek it, when we keep knocking, the door will be answered. There’s no need for “pollyanna” sugar-coating, but there is a need for hope. There’s always a place for hope.
5. Share the peace of Christ with each other – I know that we do this ritually every Sunday morning, though we as often say “Hi” as to offer the words of peace from our tradition. That’s not what is meant here. This is the reminder that we give to one another as we are surrounded by the wind and storm of the moment, that there is a rainbow to come. It is the gift of the peace that really does pass our understanding that allows us to say – it gets better. I don’t know how or when,
but it does. So we also…
6. Rejoice in God, and take our prayers to God. It is a blessing to know that there is a place you can go, a place within us and beyond us, where we can find respite and a reserve. If you don’t think that sending requests to an invisible entity in space makes much sense, good. Go with that. It’s not sense that you’re trying to make with prayer, it’s work on the heart and soul – which are rarely rational. There is a deep truth in creating a prayer life. It can help us to lament what is not yet present, and to imagine and seek it, too. You can start with what Anne Lamott calls the three basic prayers – “Help me, thank you and wow.” My guess is that if you start with those three, it’s probably where you’ll end, too.

The Quaker writer and teacher, Parker Palmer says that, “Heartbreak is an inevitable and painful part of life. But there are at least two ways for the heart to break: it can break open into new life, or break apart into shards of sharper and more widespread pain.
A brittle heart will explode into a thousand pieces, and sometimes get thrown like a fragment grenade at the perceived source of its pain — there’s a lot of that going around these days. But a supple heart will break open into a greater capacity to hold life’s suffering and its joy — in a way that allows us to say, “The pain stops here.”

The joy that Paul calls his people to is not a joy born of total satisfaction, nor a joy that arises from tranquility or something as elusive as happiness. The joy he calls them to is a broken-hearted joy, born not in spite of their pain but because of it. He calls them to complicated healing, to work out their own salvation, as we have said during this series, with fear and trembling. He calls them to accountability – not only with one another, but accountability with themselves and with God, perhaps to see if some of them are taking any of this seriously. For why we may be able to layer all kinds of subterfuge and absorb any amount of denial, God knows our hearts. And I would assume that the impending approach of justice would be terrifying to some who have hidden for a long time – almost as terrifying as a forced silence, the fear of the trial, which typically comes long before any courtroom, and the heartbreak of feeling alone with the trauma.
As we face the wounds of our own world, some inflicted on us personally, others we live as vicarious trauma, it is incumbent upon us as followers of Jesus to bear witness to his model, stepping into the fray, speaking out for the vulnerable, holding onto our righteous anger as a healthy and divine response to injustice, and raising our voices. It is equally important that we seek the shelter of the garden, the mountaintop, the lake when we need to, bringing our grief, our trepidation, our hopes to God in prayer and taking our steps in the kind of love that God gives to us – grace-filled, willing to bear suffering, and hopeful in the face of hopelessness.

Let that be our orientation – trusting in God, reaching for wholeness, our sights set on a world that we believe, sometimes despite the evidence, is about to turn.

May God’s loving arms surround victims of abuse and violence, and may God’s justice break our hearts – breaking them open so they may never close to the world again.

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 1:1-3 (Inclusive Psalms Translation)
Philippians 3:17 – 4:1 (New Revised Standard Translation)

It’s one of the worst realizations as a parent, a guardian, grandparent, teacher – anyone who is around young kids – they will pay attention to what you do much more than what you say. It has generated a now venerable saying inherited by parents everywhere – “Don’t do as I do, do as I say,” which, of course, makes no sense to the person on the other end. The truth is that for all of us, no matter our age, well done is better than well said. When we speak of the integrity of a person, it isn’t measured in how well they speak, but how their words and their actions match up. When someone says one thing but does another, trust what they do.

For Paul, what followers of Christ DO is really important. Paul encourages the church at Philippi, and all the communities he engages for that matter, to a very high ideal, nothing less than what he calls the cross of Christ. And here’s where we need some unpacking, because when we hear “cross of Christ,” most of us think the most common theological stance, sacrificial atonement – Jesus dies on the cross for our sins, appeasing God’s wrath and our sinfulness, thereby gaining us eternal salvation. It’s not how I view the cross, nor many others, and I guess it could be the view Paul holds, but I don’t think so. For Paul, the cross is a symbol – a symbol that refutes an entire way of thinking, the rejection of a paradigm that saturates the atmosphere in which he lives with some very certain ideas about how life works. Life is organized by a very strict and divinely ordained hierarchy which states firmly that some people count more than others and God is fine with this – some people are in and some are out. The implications are all around them, Paul says – a reckless and out-of-balance economic system, an almost perpetual state of war as rulers seek power from one another, a entire class of people in slavery and a system of justice that goes as far as to exploit some to maintain the status quo. The cross, you see, is Jesus working against that system with such commitment that he is willing to die for it. The cross is a focus, a model, a perspective. The cross, or rather the resurrection after the cross, is a sign for Paul of God’s great “Yes” to the Jesus plan, God’s approval of Jesus’ version of the way we should live – loving our neighbor, loving even our enemies, trusting God and using our power to help those who have less.

Paul sets two examples in front of his students – the way of Rome and the way of Christ, illustrated with his imagery of being “in this world but not of it,” and his metaphor that living to Christ is dying to the world. That’s how starkly he feels the example needs to be made, like a 12-step, line-in-the-sand, cold-turkey withdrawal from the ideology of the empire. And, like any addict will tell you, that’s easier said than done. But Paul says that a good part of this faithful withdrawal is our perspective, shaped, in part, by having better examples to follow. It’s one of the strengths of group recovery work – you get to see other people who have changed their perspectives. So, Paul says to the Philippians we must become examples – our word “example” translates the Greek word typos, which refers to a blow that leaves an imprint, like what is left by a stamp or a seal, or a slap across the face. And let us note something — Paul presents not only the life of Jesus as the typos that has left a mark, but his life as well. I think of the scene in the movie Airplane, where the people are lining up to smack the lady who’s being hysterical, or Moonstruck, when Cher smacks Nicholas Cage after his profession of love and says, “Snap out of it!!” Maybe we don’t need the physical violence, but a jolt is sometimes needed to wake us up – our example becomes a shock to the system.

It came this week to me in the form of an editorial, her first at the New York Times, from Michelle Alexander, the civil rights attorney and author of The New Jim Crow. In this op-ed she writes – “Resistance is a reactive state of mind. While it can be necessary for survival and to prevent catastrophic harm, it can also tempt us to set our sights too low and to restrict our field of vision to the next election cycle, leading us to forget our ultimate purpose and place in history. The disorienting nature of Trump’s presidency has already managed to obscure what should be an obvious fact: Viewed from the broad sweep of history, Donald Trump is the resistance. We are not.”

So, I’ll let the echo of that slap reverberate for a second. She continues, “A new nation is struggling to be born, a multiracial, multiethnic, multifaith, egalitarian democracy in which every life and every voice truly matters. In recent years, we’ve seen glimpses of this new nation at Standing Rock, in the streets of Ferguson, in the eyes of the Dreamers, in the voices of teenagers from Parkland and Chicago, as well as at L.G.B.T. pride celebrations, the Women’s March and the camps of Occupy Wall Street. Confederate statues are coming down as new memorials and statutes are going up in Montgomery, Ala., and beyond, honoring victims of lynching as well as the courageous souls who fought for the abolition of slavery and the end of Jim Crow….Every leap forward for American democracy — from slavery’s abolition to women’s suffrage to minimum-wage laws to the Civil Rights Acts to gay marriage — has been traceable to the revolutionary river, not the resistance. In fact, the whole of American history can be described as a struggle between those who truly embraced the revolutionary idea of freedom, equality and justice for all and those who resisted. One might wonder whether it matters, in the end, whether we consider ourselves members of the resistance or part of the revolutionary river. Can’t we be both?”

So I wonder, friends, what our faith might be – or need to be – if we didn’t hang everything on Jesus, pun intended, but took up the mantle of being examples ourselves? If we were both part of this larger story of the kin-dom coming into form all around us and the ones who bring it into view, both the ones in need of a savior and the ones who must work out their own salvation with fear and trembling?

Greater things than these you will do when you believe, Jesus tells his disciples in John’s version of the Good News, an adage that Paul definitely pushes as well as he takes the image of the cross and asks his students to seize upon that as a metaphor for their own lives. How do we take this metaphor of citizenship in heaven and claim it for us today, not only resisting the empire, but part of it? Surely it’s not in a “in case of rapture this car will be unmanned” bumper-sticker kind of theology. Perhaps it is a shift in perspective – working for justice and peace WHILE seeing to it that we aren’t just setting our sights on our own goals, that we aren’t just seeking our own desires, that our god isn’t our belly, too, as high-minded and sincere as that well-intentioned belly might be, but clinging instead onto the perspective that we are part of an effort, flowing with our faithful siblings in a river full of life – life giving and dangerous, full of the snow and ice of a thousand winters and the blood of those who have come before us. A river that IS going somewhere, in whose flow we are being pulled towards the heavenly vision of a beloved community that the forces around us resist – forces that don’t want heaven, but their safe and known and powerful hell.

On Thursday I helped give a presentation on the New Sanctuary Network at the unveiling of the city’s New Tulsans Initiative, a strategy designed to help immigrants into our city feel welcomed and valued. It’s a effort with a lot of things working against it, and for it to be really successful I believe it will require a different perspective. Too often our discussion of inclusion, particularly around immigration, is couched in the language of fear or trepidation, which keeps us from seeing that different perspective. The example I used Thursday was the pictures of the earth from space. Within our lifetimes – many of us – those pictures were first seen and they had a profound cultural effect. From space there are no borders, no lines of demarcation separating country from country, race from race – just one big, green globe holding all of us as we hurtle through space together. That realization takes us, even if only for a moment, away from the smaller, pettier things by which we divide ourselves from one another and sets our sights on a higher plain, to a bigger picture, a broader perspective. Maybe that’s what Paul means when he says that we ought to be citizens of heaven, or in this world but not of it.

That takes some faithful practice, friends, some faithful, intentional, even counter-cultural practice. And we, just as the Philippians did, need some examples to emulate for I don’t think we can get past our pretty “unheavenly” mindset without working at it. So I give us the example of Jesus, of course, and perhaps even Paul, or at least the Paul of some of the letters. And then I also lift up Gandhi, or Dr. King, or Sojourner Truth, Mandela or Mankiller or Angelou. And I’ll set before us others this morning. Shall we consider the family of Botham Jean, the young man murdered in his own home by a Dallas police officer, whose family has offered what I’m sure is a costly forgiveness for them even as they seek justice and an end to the smear campaign against their son, a family who has approached this awfulness with a faithful perspective, when I would have been screaming into any available microphone. Or shall we consider Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who knows that her truth telling will result in her being chastised for not “saying something sooner”, disparaged like so many who have come before her, and humiliated (again) and yet has the courage to speak out against patriarchy and privilege though it will cost her?

You’ve probably heard the saying attributed to someone – they’re so heavenly minded that they’re of no earthly good. It fits for people who wear that theology of afterlife concern, that the point of this life is the next one. But that is not our version of a heavenly mindset – no, ours is a mindset of liberation, the idea of heaven come to earth, the coming of the kin-dom, where God’s will for the inclusion of all of God’s creation is made real. We can hear what the Lord’s Prayer asks for – that things be on earth as they are in heaven – as the call to be heavenly minded – not speaking for social justice because of a party affiliation, or a political ideology, but as an act of faith, attached to tradition, community and a much bigger perspective! We do so as a revival of moral thinking, a shift beyond the inherited language or partisanship and competition that Rev. Dr. William Barber says is, “…too puny for the moral demands of our time.” We do so because of the witness of Jesus Christ, and the cross, God’s “yes” to the Jesus plan.

If our minds are set on heavenly ways, if our hearts are revived by a moral clarity, if our actions are examples of a new kind of citizenship, then we might see the spectre of supremacy, bigotry, hatred and violence replaced, conformed, transformed into a spirit of glory, hope, inclusion and love. We may have tears for those who live as enemies to the cross, holding it before them as they continue the very attitudes and actions that nailed Jesus to it in the first place, but we cannot acquiesce to attempts to make us fear one another, or to divide-and-conquer. Our vision is a heavenly one – like looking at earth from space – where the borders vanish and we can hold up what is common to all of us. It’s a perspective with examples for us to see – people and movements which no longer find it acceptable to speak of women’s rights apart from LGBTQ+ rights, separate from civil rights, from immigrant’s rights, from human rights. For this is a movement of theological and moral perspective – human rights are for everyone. Every single other. Because either all of us count or none of us do.

May it be so.

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Psalm 19:8-15 (Inclusive Psalms Translation)
Philippians 2:12-18 (New Revised Standard Translation)

In her book, Bossypants, comedy legend Tina Fey (BIG fan) gives the “rules of improvisation.” I am reminded by my children that she did not write these rules, they are just “THE rules,” widely in use in theatre circles. Here’s what she writes: The first rule of improvisation is AGREE. Always agree and SAY YES. When you’re improvising, this means you are required to agree with whatever your partner has created. So if we’re improvising and I say, “Freeze, I have a gun,” and you say, “That’s not a gun. It’s your finger. You’re pointing your finger at me,” our improvised scene has ground to a halt. But if I say, “Freeze, I have a gun!” and you say, “The gun I gave you for Christmas! You jerk!” then we have started a scene because we have AGREED that my finger is in fact a Christmas gun.

Now, obviously in real life you’re not always going to agree with everything everyone says. But the Rule of Agreement, she writes, reminds you to “respect what your partner has created” and to at least start from an open-minded place. Start with a YES and see where that takes you.

The second rule of improvisation is not only to say yes, but YES, AND. You are supposed to agree and then add something of your own. If I start a scene with “I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,” and you just say, “Yeah…” we’re kind of at a standstill. But if I say, “I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,” and you say, “Yes, this can’t be good for the wax figures.” Or if I say, “I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,” and you say, “I told you we shouldn’t have crawled into this dog’s mouth,” now we’re getting somewhere. To me YES, AND means don’t be afraid to contribute. It’s your responsibility to contribute. Always make sure you’re adding something to the discussion. Your initiations are worthwhile.

The next rule is MAKE STATEMENTS. This is a positive way of saying “Don’t ask questions all the time.” If we’re in a scene and I say, “Who are you? Where are we? What are we doing here? What’s in that box?” I’m putting pressure on you to come up with all the answers. In other words: Whatever the problem, be part of the solution. Don’t just sit around raising questions and pointing out obstacles….Speak in statements instead of apologetic questions. No one wants to go to a doctor who says, “I’m going to be your surgeon? I’m here to talk to you about your procedure? Make statements, with your actions and your voice. Instead of saying “Where are we?” make a statement like “Here we are in Spain, Dracula.” Okay, “Here we are in Spain, Dracula” may seem like a terrible start to a scene, but this leads us to the best rule:

THERE ARE NO MISTAKES, only opportunities. If I start a scene as what I think is very clearly a cop riding a bicycle, but you think I am a hamster in a hamster wheel, guess what? Now I’m a hamster in a hamster wheel. I’m not going to stop everything to explain that it was really supposed to be a bike. Who knows? Maybe I’ll end up being a police hamster who’s been put on “hamster wheel” duty because I’m “too much of a loose cannon” in the field. In improv there are no mistakes, only beautiful happy accidents. And many of the world’s greatest discoveries, she finishes, have been by accident. I mean, look at the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, or Botox.

Now what, you may be asking yourself, does this have to do with a letter that a first century Jew wrote to a group of people in Philippi? Or, for that matter, the writings of some person we loosely call the “psalmist” from an even earlier time talking about the precepts of God? Good questions. We begin in Paul’s letter where we left off last week, with this powerful instruction to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” a phrase that has held a lot of weight in Christian theological circles, and not only because it suggests a salvation that isn’t entirely wrapped up like a Christmas package. Despite Martin Luther’s call for salvation by grace alone that has so dominated our protestant world since the Reformation, the thought of our participation in God’s work, our involvement in the task of liberation that lies all about us today – both literally and figuratively – that thought may be making a comeback, and for good reasons. It’s clear that the world needs our participation. It’s no longer, if it was ever, OK to just say “Yes” to your faith. The world needs your “Yes, AND” as we seek to work salvation out, which is not a clear path. We have to wrestle with it, to discern it, to improvise our way into a world of justice and peace that none of us knows how to get to or to make happen.

Paul is saying the same thing to the Philippians, worried about how they relate to the Holy and, by extension, each other. He says it this way – “Do all things without murmuring and arguing,” a word in Greek that means something more like “talking something to death.” Paul then encourages the Philippians to a very high ideal – to be Children of God, “without blemish” in a twisted world. He doesn’t mean perfect, though the English translation might leave us thinking so. That word in Greek really implies harm. He’s asking them to be harmless, to be helpful, to say “Yes, AND,” participating in the act of improvisation that God is up to in the world.

Paul suggests to the Philippians that they make statements about who they are. To bring it back home to us, it would mean that we don’t say, “I am Christian?”, but rather assert our faith, claiming it boldly when we serve at meal at the Day Center, or sign a petition asking for criminal justice reform or when we hang a rainbow flag on our sanctuary.
As we face new challenges in our lives, at work, in our relationships, with our responsibilities, we might think of it as an exercise in improvisation, where God is trying to help the scene move and grow and it is our responsibility to say “Yes,” and the “Yes, AND,” as we respond to the energy that may surely be taking us to a place we feel unprepared to go – like a hamster cop, or Dracula in Spain. Our answers, our responses, may not always be the best – anyone who has watched improv has watched a scene go horribly south in a hurry – but the point is to participate, for nothing is created if we don’t. In church language, we call this the Holy Spirit. As we study the Book of Acts on Sunday mornings, we’ll get a glimpse of what happens when church is dynamic, more of a movement than an institution, listening for and guided by the Spirit which takes the early followers of Jesus FAR outside their comfort zones.

Perhaps not only as individuals but as a church we have some space to grow. How often do we “process” our future plans, or take surveys seeking the “will of the majority” in our decision-making but make no space to seek the call of the Spirit, no place to pray for guidance or discern where the Spirit is directing us, seeking to create a beautiful, improvised scene if we will only take the prompts?

Learning to trust in the guidance of the Spirit means we must also learn that we don’t have to have all of the scenarios worked out, all our “t’s” crossed and our “i’s” dotted. In the words of Dr. King, we don’t have to be able to see every step on the dark staircase in order to take the first one, this is the basis of faith. When we learn to listen to the Spirit, to trust the improvisation, participating in the dance, seeking something beyond our own comfort all the time, that is when we are capable of working out our salvation with a big capital “S.” That salvation is much bigger than what happens to us after we die, it’s bigger than even us and it does not lie in the safe and neutral places, but waits for us on that next step of the staircase, in the beautiful, happy accidents that help us to understand that there is no old man with a beard above us pulling the strings, but rather a God who walks beside us, weaving in and out of our own actions, giving us cues, sending us the Spirit to offer possibilities, to push our own borders, transforming our mistakes into beautiful accidents and waiting for our “No” to turn to “Yes,” and then to “Yes, AND” as we respond to God’s creative power, shining like stars in the world.