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.

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 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.

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 131 (Inclusive Psalms Translation)
Philippians 2:1-11 (New Revised Standard Translation)

Nothing less than the New York Times reported it this way – “The landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh is a diviner of places, a city whisperer. Though he had never set foot in Tulsa, he was coaxed to a flat, ho-hum stretch of land overlooking the Arkansas River by the billionaire philanthropist George B. Kaiser, who was bent on building a park.

Seven years later…a much-anticipated $465 million park…one of the largest and most ambitious public parks ever created with private funds — and the latest example of deep-pocketed citizens rebuilding cities through projects they perceive to be in the public good.

If it succeeds, as its founders and community leaders hope, it can bring families together and help mend a city with a legacy of segregation, where many neighborhoods grapple with poverty, health disparities and the isolating effects of urban renewal. “Tulsa has a long history of social inequality,” Mr. Van Valkenburgh observed. “There’s hardly a better way to bring people together than in a democratic space like a park.”

Now, it’s not a popular position, I know, but I’m not down with the hype – which goes far beyond this article from the New York Times. It looks like a lovely park from all the pictures I’ve seen and I’m aware that seemingly half of Tulsa showed up yesterday to celebrate it’s opening. The praise is that it was a great, multicultural, diverse gathering. So let me be clear – I don’t have anything bad to say about the park itself, or even the generosity of the many philanthropists around town, who also do amazing and crucial work with their wealth aside from parks. What I am critical of is the narrative attached to it. Mending a city? Dealing with a “legacy of segregation?” You might remember that some of the same words were attached to the opening of another park – Reconciliation Park – downtown almost a decade ago.

In the second chapter of this letter from Paul to the Philippians we find the “Philippian Hymn,” what many scholars believe is an ancient piece of liturgy. It starts with verse 6, “…who, though he was in the form of God…”, and goes all the way to the end at verse 11, “and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord…” It is a remarkable hymn, placed right in the center of a letter in which Paul speaks very directly to the Philippians about how they ought to act in the world, what their ethical “norms” ought to be and how the world may tell them one thing, but they ought to work for something else. For Paul it is this thing that he calls the “mind of Christ.” The mind of Christ is imbued with all of the power of the Creator – God in human form – but, as the hymn says, Christ did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited.

Christ, in Paul’s model, is God – literally the image of God on earth — and the implication is that Christ has the same power we ascribe to God. The key is this – how is that power used? With humility or hubris? In a very big picture sense, this might be the critical point for Christianity today – how we will relate to power, how we will view and cooperate with and even acquire it, and what we will do with it when we have it.

After all, what is going on around us today? We have turmoil in the Presidency that is a struggle with power. We have another shooting of an unarmed black man, this time in his own home not running or arguing or combative – shot dead in his own apartment while people burn their Nikes to protest the protest of this power struggle which African-Americans have been engaged with their whole lives – and generations before. We know that as the debate goes on for who gets named to the Supreme Court that we are not just talking about judgment or temperament, we are talking about power, for the failure of the legislature to actually legislate has shifted the balance over to the courts.

In Paul’s world, and certainly the world of the Philippians, the power was the Roman Empire. Paul writes to compel the group of Jesus followers to a higher calling, to an obedience beyond the civil regulations. Their responsibilities derive from the Gospel of God given through Christ Jesus. He calls on them to love and to show compassion and sympathy, to be humble and to set aside ambition. And he tells them directly that the group outside their meeting place where they worship God together will see their actions as destructive to their existence, as damaging to their way of life, as disruptive to the status quo. They will see your behavior as bad but, Paul tells them, this is YOUR salvation.

It’s salvation that requires us to work it out – with fear and trembling – as Paul says – a Hebrew idiom that means, “with serious concern.” In other words, we have to engage with our own rescue, to labor over the conflict between the values we claim in here and the values that are at work out there. We must be willing and able to say to the power brokers in the world that we see power differently, to speak truth to that power, even if it seems well-intentioned, and to confess that our current systems of power are unsustainable if we seek the salvation of liberation for all of God’s people. It cannot be that we simply confess with our tongues that “Jesus Christ is Lord,” we must actually do what Christ does, sacrifice like he sacrificed, and have the mind of Christ, to respond to our own power the way that Christ responded to his.

With this hymn, Paul subverts the paradigm, taking what we anticipate, power in the same old form (only on “our” side now) and turns the whole thing on it’s head. For here is a Christ who will take the power of God and give it away, not in a philanthropic sense, dolling out to causes, but as a reversal of the story of Adam, not seeking to play God, not self-exalting, obedient to God’s will. In a world of self-preservation, self-promotion, and just plain selfishness, we might be perplexed by the words of this hymn. With so many people striving for power they do not deserve, why would Christ surrender this power? It seems not to make sense. I might even say right now that it doesn’t seem Christian.

After all, we bear witness to a church with very different agendas. We see an evangelical tradition line up behind a leader with completely different values than them, simply, it seems, for the power it gets them. We see the church in Rome facing what might be the result of their own power structures, as 5 more cities in the U.S. alone begin investigations into their own state’s dioceses, investigations that seem likely to turn up evidence of the same evil and injustice that we have seen before. We bear witness to a church that on various ways wants to claim it’s embrace of all of God’s people but cannot get humble enough to allow the action of the Spirit that is moving us to new places.

We like our status. And we like our honor. And, perhaps most of all, we like our privilege, whether that comes from us being white in a culture built on white supremacy, or financially stable in a culture that rewards being rewarded, or Christian in a culture that advantages the claim of that title, without, it seems, much need for any proof. That privilege is power, which the “mind of Christ” model tells us not to exploit, but to give away. And despite the higher ideals of a park, this is not what I see happening all around us.

I know that many of my friends gathered on the lawn last night – the sprawling lawn of this new trademark park in Tulsa to listen to the Roots and jam out amongst a diverse crowd. I know that the parade was full of symbolism and what I believe are sincere gestures to a brighter future for our city. I have to hold those ideas alongside my awareness that the very land the park is built on was once parceled to Tuckbache, a Muscogee man who had the land taken from him through guardianship, the process by which much Creek land was removed from its rightful owners and awarded to whites.

I hope that we don’t make the same mistake that was made with Reconciliation Park, which is that we rush to reconciliation without the truth telling that it requires, or that we seek the absolution without the confession. If we don’t make serious efforts to correct systems by which we all live – criminal, social, economic systems – and address the imbalance of power, which really can only come by changing the status quo, by shifting our paradigms, by people who have the power giving it away, many of them, we ought to note, who are professing Christians.

I have heard many say, after a carefully orchestrated day of celebration, that The Gathering Place could allow us to imagine a new Tulsa, one that is younger, more energetic, and far more racially diverse – where historic divisions are tempered as we gather together. I hope that is the case. But that won’t happen at a park. It will happen first in our own hearts, for this is where God is at work in us – working ON us, my friends. Then it must happen in the board rooms, the classrooms, the city council and school board meetings, the police training academies, the county jails, the city halls, in the legislature and in the voting booths. Those are the places where we work out our salvation, friends, with fear and trembling.

May it be so. Amen.

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

1 Kings 8:1-11 (New Revised Standard translation)

Ephesians 6:10-18 (New Revised Standard translation)

When I did my preparation for today, I must admit that I thought about the last few weeks and I wondered how you all might be processing what I am putting out. I’m a little worried about what message you are hearing when we have a set of services in July changing location and style followed by a worship service merging ourselves with two other churches and then you come today to see the front of the bulletin – a picture of a church with a “For Sale” sign in front of it. So, let me set your minds at ease. That picture isn’t ourchurch. And just because we’re thinking about what we do, how we worship and what our sanctuary looks like…just because we reach out to some other congregations of similar peculiarity in these parts, with similar numbers on a Sunday morning, doesn’t mean that I thinkanythingis going to happen to our church. But I do think that something is happening to THE Church, and we’d best pay attention to that.

At the beginning of chapter 6 of 1 Kings, the story of Israel after King David, Solomon tries to move forward by reinvesting in the things of the past. He calls the priests and has them bring forth rivers of oil for anointing, they set out the Ark of the Covenant in full and proud display, on giant poles to elevate it higher than ever, as if it were a military parade down main street, and they sacrifice so many sheep and oxen that they could not be numbered. It’s a double-down approach we are familiar with – create the future by evoking the past…even if the past is not necessarily worthy of evoking.

And yet, what Solomon finds is that when they do all this, the opposite of what they expect happens. They fill the temple with all the accouterments of power and wealth and a cloud fills the place – a symbol of God’s glory – and, the text says, they can’t minister because of it. If the church chases after the same things that the world does, the text seems to tell us, it will miss the glory of God. Could it be that the “good ol’ days” are not the target, but the warning? Maybe what we should be focusing on is whowe are, not howwe are.

Let me suggest to you that in the wake of Christianity being modeled in giant buildings with competitions for the biggest cross on the outside, televangelists stealing money from the sick and the old and the repeated horror of a priesthood preying upon children in demonic fashion that people are tired of the “good ol’ days”, me included. What seems to pass today as a faithful expression of the Way of Jesus is the cruel treatment of people deemed “sinners” by a narrow reading of scripture, parents condemning and denying their own children because they have been taught a conditional love that bears no resemblance to Christ and a mean-spirited, judgmental wrath supposedly representing the one who taught us to look at the plank in our own eye before focusing on the splinter in our neighbor’s. More innocuously, I have seen churches split over the color of the carpet and division occur because we can’t remember that if we don’t like something in worship we ought to treat that with some humility because we’re not the ones being worshipped. I have borne witness to churches that fed the hungry and tended to the sick until they moved into a new building, and then the sermons shifted to the completely cultural philosophy of Jesus helping you be a better spouse, or how the way of Christ helps you to run your 401K.

So, please excuse me if I don’t want to bring back the “good ol’ days” but instead long to reach for something else, to help create the kin-dom which I see glimpses of, but which falls victim to old bigotry, hatred, fear and dogma. Please understand me when I say that given the Christianity I have seen, I’m ready for the post-Christian era. I’m ready to move into the Way of Jesus, not the way of the church under the guise of Jesus.

Of course the trick is that I don’t know how to do this. I’m not yet sure how to separate the Way of Jesus from the way of the church, as I’ve learned to treat them as the same things. I that’s where I think that Paul’s suggestions help me. Paul, using the analogy of war, suggests that it’s not enough to just wish something was different. It’s not even enough to be angry about things – we have to be prepared for the struggle, not a fight against one another, but instead against the spiritual forces that pull us in different directions. As followers of Christ in our context, we must resist the pull of an “American ethos” every bit as much as Paul tried to warn his churches against the “adversary” of his time that tried to pull them away from responding to the world with love, kindness and compassion while seeking justice.

When I think about how much I need to stay focused on truth these days, or how I need to hold onto a sense of morality, what the Bible calls “righteousness,” or the need to walk in peace as if it were the shoes on my feet, then I understand this metaphor of armor, wearing something that is heavy enough for me to know it’s there, reminding me to embody those values, even shielding me from temptation to set them aside for things that seem easier or quicker. The armor, you see, is really meant for us, as defense, not for use against the world, as offense. We are meant to feel it’s weight, to understand that peace is a responsibility, truth and righteousness a discipline, for as soon as we think that we possess them, that we are the proprietors of truth or morality, we are something else indeed.

The armor is meant to keep us shielded from the temptation to think that there is one right way, or, more specifically, to think that God can only do certain things in certain ways and we know exactly how She works. Our shield, in Paul’s analogy, is faith. That ought to tell us something, for faith, the most uncertain and intangible of things on this list, seems an unlikely shield if you are thinking this is conventional armor. Faith – or trust if you’d rather – allows us to move forward, to understand that our sacraments, our traditions, our “good ol’ days” are not where God resides. Rather God lives on the far horizon, in the places we aren’t yet – beckoning us to grow and change and expand our hearts…to feel the weight of this armor giving us confidence to step into whatever fear we might have about what’s ahead. After all, no one puts on armor to watch TV on the couch…we armor ourselves for the challenge, for the bold and brave steps ahead.

It has been a long week and a short one at the same time. Several among us have had to face tough decisions and deal with hard consequences, and our city and nation continue to wrestle with the most basic questions – who are we and what will we become? We gather here, in the wake of newness and of a unity expressed in worshipping together – a new kind of together that we haven’t experienced before. We gather as people who have been here for a long time and people who have just been to a few services at Fellowship. We gather wishing safe travels for those who are not here and with our grief at the loss of one of our own this week. Soon we will sit down over some pizza in our fellowship hall and talk about planning for our death, which seems to make as much sense as talking about wearing armor to wage a war for peace. But it’s the important work of planning and imagining – we need both.

These moments are all pieces, my friends, not items on a carefully engineered set of instructions, but individual pieces of a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle – a Hubble photo of the Milky Way, the most challenging one you can imagine. All we do here is put another piece in place. We might not even be sure it’s in the right spot yet, because we constantly have to see what relationship it has to the other stars on the other pieces, perpetually feeling our way towards a complete picture. That is how we do church. Our puzzle is far from complete We may have a whole corner in place, which can be pretty satisfying, but we have so many more pieces left to place, so much more of the picture to assemble. And if you’ve ever worked a big puzzle you know this feeling – sometimes you have to take a step back and look at things from a different perspective, because you can’t assemble all 10,000 pieces by doing the same thing over and over, just as we can’t reach for a new horizon with the tools of the “good ol’ days.”

The kin-dom awaits. So dress the part and let’s step forward together, setting our sights on whatever God has in store for us beyond what has been called “Christianity” thus far, knowing that the Holy awaits us there, with open arms to be present for that moment that seems so far off now when we snap that last piece into place and the picture is complete.

Amen.

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

Psalm 122 (Inclusive Psalms Translation)

Philippians 1:1-11 (New Revised Standard Translation)

So, for the month of September we’re going to look at some of the whys and the hows of churching, using Paul’s correspondence with the Philippians as a guide for the next 5 Sundays. We begin on the Sunday of Labor Day Weekend, which may turn out to be as much providence as coincidence. Labor Day, after all, began as the promotion of the value of labor. Now it’s more about mattress sales and a day at the lake, or perhaps the end of the cultural summer, even if the weather is not cooperating. But Labor Day began as a protest, not as a party. It began as noncompliance with the systems that were in place, something Paul knows a lot about. It is clear from the letter that the group in Philippi is under threat, and Paul writes to console and support. Why are they under threat? Well, that is more speculative, but many scholars feel that they are threatened because of their non-compliance – with the social system, with the cultural hierarchy, with the way of Empire. Seeking a change of the season, an end to the era of empire, this group under the guidance of Paul, seeking the Way of Jesus, looks for change.

The signs are out there right now, despite the heat and humidity. Have you seen them? The flocks of geese headed south? The sizable acorns on the sidewalk outside? Pumpkin spice everything hitting the shelves? The seasons are changing. And the signs are here for us as church, too. The old theological models are becoming increasingly unappetizing, whether from a eulogy at the Queen of Soul’s funeral or on church signs around town…from assertions made by the dinosaurs of white, patriarchal, homophobic theology that seem less like the voice of power and more like the voice of antiquity or the weight of a Catholic Church’s culpability in it’s own sin, deep and cultural, that seems to fuel this new Reformation towards an even more profound set of changes in how we seek to follow Jesus, how we think what church ought to look like and how we will relate to and use the Bible – the single most influential part of our faith over the last two hundred years. And more signs are out there during an intense political crisis in which our values are being constantly tested, in a small town in Iowa where the horrific murder of a young woman by a person who also happens to be undocumented has placed before people a choice about how they will view the world around them, where the death of a Senator with a mixed record, to be honest, is rightly lifted up as the potential death of a way of being in the political world…his funeral becoming perhaps a moment of resistance in and of itself, a last hurrah for what we worry may be lost.

And yet despite that harsh edge, we still have a dream for the future, don’t we? A dream of peace and justice, of kindness and mercy, of at least cooperation and civility. It’s a dream we call the kin-dom. At times it seems to me a rather meager dream, and at times like the mightiest of wishes set against overwhelming opposition.

For the past year or so, our own Sheri Curry has been getting regular correspondence from an inmate at a Federal Correctional Facility in Kansas. As you might imagine, the letters are full of dreams for things that aren’t yet reality, and, frankly, may never be reality, for as Sheri knows all too well as she reads these letters, the outside world may not be nearly as welcoming as the inmate envisions. The same is true for the communication The New Sanctuary Network has with detainees seeking refuge in this country. Many of them have been lead to this dream of America from the nightmare of their own countries. And while we sometimes want to tell them that this dream of America that they seek is perhaps less real than they hope for, that’s not what dreams do. They don’t label reality. Like the kin-dom that Jesus teaches us about, dreams are both here and not here, real and not real, realized and still yet to come.

The general opinion is that Paul writes this letter to the Philippians from a jail cell, perhaps in Rome, and almost certainly not his first time in prison. He writes it not knowing what his future holds, and knowing that this dream he has dreamed is in jeopardy. Paul’s words to the Philippians are basic, almost rudimentary, and in this section you have heard today – what is a standard intro for a Greek letter, a greeting we might say – Paul lifts up the basics of Christian life…grace, compassion, love…and something that we might not expect – knowledge and insight. For what Paul suggests is that when we actually hold on to our values, when we practice grace, compassion and love, it gives us knowledge and insight, it does something more that just satisfy our emotions or give us a “feel good” moment. It actually shapes our perceptions.

When Paul writes his letter, he’s not certain who will be receiving it. There’s no Facetime, he can’t see the people on the other end and it’s been months since he’s been there. If church then is anything like church now, could be a whole new set of people. He doesn’t know if they are ones that he’d even welcome to the way of Jesus. And he’s not writing based on what he knows. He’s writing based on what he dreams, on a vision for something. It is not certainty that fuels his correspondence, but his celebration of possibility. He’s been in enough churches to know that grace, compassion and love are not the first three things on the list of interactive motivators. But they could be.

Here’s the practical point for this morning. I’m not sure how best to be a welcoming church. I don’t know if it’s name tags or no name tags, if it’s a “passing of the peace” meet-and-greet moment that I’m sure is like nails on a chalkboard to many of the more introverted here. I don’t know if someone remembering your name is as important as someone just saying “hi”, offering a handshake or a hug, letting the point be known that they are glad you’re here and then the recipient making sure to also be a deliverer of the same good news. And I know we want the 10 easy steps to being a welcoming church. They don’t exist. Frankly, in my experience, because when you start focusing on those things you often forget the reason you are doing those things, and the sincerity of the effort is diminished.

So perhaps Paul’s beginning to his letter holds some good advice for us. Our resistance isn’t just resistance for the sake of resistance. It is rooted in something – grounded in a value. Love first, Paul tells the Philippians, love first as Christ loved, and let that love grow your insight, let it shape your perspective. For the Gospel value is this – welcome the stranger first, whether you know their name or not, whether you consider them “worthy” or not, for we all have our prejudices, and let that kindness work on you. For insight is found in the heart, given freely, strength is gained from sharing with another person, impact is felt when we hear of God’s love for every one of us – every single other. That kind of deep welcome, that kind of hope for a place of total peace and compassion, giving us insight and guiding our dreams, it’s not something you might easily find here. Heck, it’s not even the primary thing that you will find here. But it could be.

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

This sermon was presented on Sunday, August 19th at Phillips Theological Seminary’s chapel during a service that joined East Side Christian Church (DOC), College Hill Presbyterian (PCUSA) and Fellowship Congregational (UCC) for worship together.  It was written in two parts and preached “tag-team” style by the pastor of College Hill, The Rev. Todd Freeman, and the pastor at Fellowship UCC, The Rev. Chris Moore.  The sermon text was John 6:48-60.

August 19^thSermon

–REV. MOORE —

This passage is gross. Let’s just say it and get it on the table. It’s gross. We, just like what our translations calls “The Jews”, a term better translated as “The Judeans”, are completely disgusted by the implications of these words. Of all the Sundays to just skip communion, this would be one for sure. But that’s what we are here to do, the good Rev. Freeman and I, to help unpack what is a passage that we’d rather just skip. In fact, lots of John’s gospel has been so hijacked by the fundamentalist interpretive lens that it can be tempting to just cast it out into the outer darkness where there is wailing and the gnashing of teeth – you know, the megachurches.

But I would like us to consider one thing before we do. The Gospel of John was written to a developing community, a community seeking to distance itself from the tradition that seemed increasingly out of touch with the values it claims, a community trying to resist the connection of church and state, a community re-imagining what it means to be faithful, standing as a counter-narrative to the culture in which it existed. So, maybe there’s something for us here after all, we “progressives” in the buckle of the Bible Belt at a time of resistance, witnessing the title “Christian” being claimed by people who seem to display the exact opposite of what we hold as Christian values? But first we’re going to have to deal with the “viewer discretion advised” portion of John.

John’s is a highly symbolic gospel, full of metaphor and poetic imagery that, unfortunately, does not translate well when your lens for interpretation is a literal one. It is poetry and brain science tells us today that the parts of our brain that fire up while reading poetry are the same ones that fire up while listening to music, evoking our centers of memory and self-reflection. Sometimes poetryhas to be shocking to be effective, and nothing is quite as shocking as cannibalism.

It was a charge leveled at Jesus by the Judean authorities, and later at his followers – that this communion meal was cannibalism. But is that what is really going on here? The phrase “flesh and blood” that gets used, in parts and in whole, throughout this passage, is an idiomatic phrase in Hebrew, an expression – like saying “I’m gonna hit the sack” when you’re tired, or you’re “under the weather” when you don’t feel good.

In Hebrew, “flesh and blood” means the whole of a person – their hearts, minds, spirit, feelings, hopes, dreams, fears, concerns, everything.

Throughout John’s gospel we are told who Jesus is and who we arein relationship:

Jesus is the shepherd and we are the sheep; he is the vine and we are the branches; he abides in God and we abide in him. But here we get the most stark and dramatic example of them all – a reminder of the unbreakable union we have in the “Way of Jesus”, a new life, a kind of life symbolized for us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. John asserts (through Jesus) that we must claim this life with our “flesh and blood”, with our whole selves, embracing the way of Jesus so deeply that it becomes our food, clinging to our bones and coursing through our veins, supporting and sustaining us as if it were sinew and plasma.

This is the promise which God makes to us in the Sacraments: to be one with us and for us forever, to stick withus and even inus no matter what. It’s a promise meant to be our food, more than the false identity of status, more than the plastic promise of finances or fame, more than even the inert promise of a salvation only concerned about what happens to us after we die. John’s gospel opens with the Word become flesh, dwelling among us, and continues right through this sixth chapter and beyond, where he feeds 5000 in a miracle of sharing, and announces to the disciples and all who will listen that he is the true bread from heaven, delivering the good news of the centrality of life and God’s life-giving presence announced in him and made real in his actions, not just by belief in him, but by believing intohim.

John makes this point by wrapping it in a basic, foundational item for the people who follow him. After all, Jesus lived in a world where the vast majority lived at subsistence level, and to them bread was life – quite literally. (for us it’s too many carbs) In Arabic, and many other middle eastern languages, the word for “bread” and “life” is the same. Bread was both food and currency, it was culture and identity and politics, the basis for agriculture and community, and control over it was used by “the powers that be” to exert their own power, distributing it by whim and withholding it as a means of control. So when Jesus claims that he is the “bread of life”, it’s no idle phrase. He asks his disciples through this metaphor to consider something more than their bellies, to imagine something beyond this age of oppression and resistance in which they currently reside and to life extends far beyond what we can see and hear and touch. He announces a new kin-dom, one of abundance, not scarcity, bread that is not about death and the means of death, but about life – life for all, life abundantly. And Jesus asks them, at least in the original Greek, not for their belief in this as an intellectual agreement, but rather their belief in this new world as trust…long-term solidarity with Jesus…so close to him that it is as if we have consumed him, nourishing us for the building of this new life.  It’s a lot of work, I know — this a very tough passage.  Man, I’m exhausted!  I wish I could just take a break, you know?  Hey, Todd…wanna you tag in here?

—–REV. FREEMAN —–

I agree with the good Rev. Moore, this passage is gross – and it necessitates a tag-team of preachers to address it.

“Bread of life,” “bread that comes down from heaven,” “living bread,” “eat my flesh and drink my blood,” “eternal life,” “true food and true drink.” No, the scriptures do not simplistically interpret themselves, especially the Gospel of John, like so many folks would have us believe.

Continuing with verse 56, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abidein me, and I in them.” From a spirituality perspective, this is perhaps the key verse in this entire passage. “Abide” is a theological term for the gospel writer, and it carries many connotations, such as to stay or remain with another, to make one’s home with, to dwell with.

In this gospel, however, it goes even deeper than that, it means indwelling, as in Jesus dwells within us, and we within him. Yes, that still sounds pretty weird. So, let me approach it this way. It has to do with the fancy theological word, “incarnation.” John 1:1 famously states, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It continues in verse 14, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”

There’s that word, “flesh”. God’s very Word – God’s Wisdom – was made flesh – incarnated – in the person of Jesus. Jesus, according to the gospel writer, is the physical embodiment of God. This is where God chooses to meet us – in the flesh.Thus, when we look at the ways and teachings of Jesus we see the very nature and character of God, and God’s will for the world.

Let me oversimplify the implications of all this flesh and blood language this way. At one level, the gospel writer is asking the question, “Where Is God?” The Jews basically believed that God’s Presence dwelt not only in heaven but also in the Temple in Jerusalem. Later, Christian thought expanded this to include Jesus as the livingtemple of God, the Word that became flesh. But now, in a major theological shift, for us to eat and drink the flesh and blood of Jesus (to ‘ingest’ and ‘consume’ God’s Word, the living temple of God), symbolizes that the Sacred Presence of God now dwells within each one of us.

Notice the historical progression in the understanding of the Presence of God: Heaven. Temple. Jesus. Us! Biblically, that’s a place ‘outside’ this world, to a place in this world, to a personin this world, to all persons who live their lives according to the ways and teachings of Jesus! We, like Jesus then, become living temples where God dwells; with direct contact with God, running through our veins, nourishing every part of our body, mind, and spirit. This is the true bread and true drink that brings life in the here and now, as well as in the hereafter.

To take all this a step further, we face the challenge of what we will do with this understanding that Christ’s Presence is a part of who we are? Are we called, then, to commit ourselves as totally to others as Jesus does? Can we provide nourishment – food and drink, physically and spiritually – to those around us? Will we allow ourselves to be nourished by others? After all, are we not the Body of Christ, and in this together? If so, then how can we be the incarnation of Christ in and to the world?

This is a call to radical hospitality, inclusion, and diversity. It is the community of a bigger table.

That’s one response. Another, like the disciples in verse 60, is to simply declare, “This teaching is difficult, who can accept it?”  Who CAN accept it?  Feeling rested, Chris?  Back to you!

–REV. MOORE–

Look around this room — it is a beautiful thing that we are all gathered here for this sacred meal, for this time together at a bigger table.  This is why I think that it matters that we are gathered here. This teaching IS difficult!

It is one thing to speak about a bigger table, but if we don’t do the difficult work on ourselves and our churches, opening our own hearts, changing and growing and reminding ourselves that we don’t have the copyright on how to be church, or how to worship God, or how to express Christianity, then we have not ingested the Word, it is not in us like it needs to be.

We live in difficult times, friends, just like the followers of Jesus in the years after his death and resurrection – times full of doubt, uncertainty and turmoil. As we struggle for human rights, we must remember our centers; as we fight for equality and inclusion, we must be fed by living bread; as we make the assertion that there is a right and good way that we must live together as human beings, we must know that this assertion comes from a place bigger than us, a place deeper than even our own hearts. This way, based in humility and kindness, in compassion and hope, in mercy and grace…this way, founded on the power of love rather than the love of power…this way which we call the Way of Jesus, known also in other traditions, must be our food, as surely as the nutrients we need to survive each day. So be fed, good people, by the meal that announces the abundance of God’s love against the fear of scarcity – the meal that helps us trust in God’s grace, given to us each day – the meal which claims youas a child of God…and everyone else, too.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

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

Ephesians 4:1-16 (NRSV)

Paul was a pastor. Now I say that not to insult him or anything, rather to say this – pastors aren’t theologians, they aren’t academics or strategic planners. In fact, if they want to be effective, they have to be much more specific than that because they are not dealing with ideals as much as with people, with the same inconsistencies, complications, and dichotomies that the pastors themselves have. That’swhy I emphasize that Paul was a pastor – in his letters, he addresses specific situations with specific people in specific places. It is we who have turned this all around and taken his letters as if they were written to everyone, in every time and place.

Paul is writing to a particular group of people. A group he knows. So when he leads off with, “I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace…”, you can be sure that the bond of peace and the unity of the Spirit are nowhere to be found in the church at Ephesus.

Maybe it’s because there are legitimate differences of opinion about how to proceed on a major issue…maybe it’s because of general division and strife in society that is leaking into the church life…maybe it’s because they cannot agree on the color of tile to put down in the foyer, but sometimes the reality is that church is church and since churches are made up of people they come with contention and conflict. So when Paul pleads with them in this letter, a letter written to them from his jail cell in Rome by the way, he begs, the text says, for something that does not exist. And I guess I ought to mention something here – while I keep saying “Paul”, this is probably NOT Paul’s letter. It’s likely someone writing in Paul’s name, which was a common thing in the ancient world as a sign of admiration. I think the writer came from the “school of Paul” and must have imagined what Paul felt like, there in a prison cell – AGAIN – facing the most serious charges he had faced and guessing that his time on this earth was not long. And this writer imagines that his call to the church in Ephesus, the church he had spent the most time with, was a call for unity. “There is one body and one Spirit,” the writer states, “…one Lord, one faith, one baptism…” It’s not the case. Not in Ephesus, a culturally and religiously diverse city, teeming with the smells of exotic spices, the sound of foreign tongues and the statues dedicated to god after god after god. There is not one of anything.

But then again, I don’t think this is a directive as much as it is a dream. It’s a dream dreamed forPaul, in the spirit of Paul, oriented towards Paul and what Paul has taught his churches about the Way of Jesus. Paul is used to the language of dreaming, he uses it all the time, asking his churches to imagine a life in Christ and to seek love and compassion and generosity. But Paul’s message is more than just the power of positive thinking. Paul genuinely believes that the world has changed. He more than believesit – he trusts in it, he depends on it. His imagination for this new world is so strong that he makes bold claims about it – in Christ, Paul writes, “…there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female…in Christ, we are all part of the Body, raised with Christ into a new life, given gifts unique to each of us – some teachers, some prophets, some evangelists, some the makers of the coffee and some the singers of the songs.” None of that is, of course, the complete reality of his students or his church members. It’s not completely true for us, either.

We do not live in a world where people love even their neighbors, much less their enemies. We don’t live in a world where we care very well for the sick or the poor. We don’t live where there is comfort for the brokenhearted, nor good news for the imprisoned. And Paul didn’t think that we did. He thought that this is the age, the era, theaeonin which we live, but something else is coming. Perhaps we believe that it’s still coming. This is what I mean when I talk about the kin-dom, something here and not here, something real and not real. It’s something we can point to, like the response we see after any natural disaster, where the bubbles fade and people care for one another, or the compassionate and grassroots reaction to a cruel immigration policies, where strangers are taken into someone’s home, and language barriers struggled with and food shared and love assembled. That occurs right alongside the ugly and hard news of our cruelty to one another, the searing images of torches carried through a town square in Virginia, the number of ways that we cloister ourselves together, loving only those who are just like us and fearing differences. It is always a tension, the kin-dom, a chance to engage and fortify our spiritual imagination, dreaming about what we trust will be someday.

Such work bolsters our soul’s resilience, a word that is in heavy use in our city’s strategic planning right now. Next Sunday we’ll are fortunate to be joined by DeVon Douglass, the Chief Resilience Officer for the City of Tulsa. She will talk to us about how the city imagines it’s future, and how resilience plays a major role, not only in helping us prepare for recovery from a tornado, for instance, but also in how we shape economic, social and environmental policies to help us be more resilient collectively. That starts, of course, with us being more resilient individually. Part of our awareness of what it takes to live well in challenging times like these is that we have to be more resilient, more able to resist the drag of a culture that seeks to alienate and divide.

Paul, and some of his students afterwards, are, I think, up to this kind of work. We wrap it in the language of Christianity, but the essence is the same. Work hard, be nice, develop, maintain and foster Hope in the world. Be careful how you speak to yourself and others. Practice humility and grace and love, gentleness and patience. This is no “pollyanna” wish from this author, full of self-help and feel-good advice, but rather a counter to the clear narrative in which they live. The author we call “Paul” states very clearly that, “We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming” as if this is a widely held experience of the world. And we are to shield ourselves from it by practicing something else.

The dream for the people in Ephesus who will read this letter is to counter the polarizing cultural pull of the Roman Empire with unity in the Body of Christ. But the imagination of unity set forth here is not uniformity. It isn’t “one size fits all.” It is something into which we grow, following the Way of Jesus, seeking truth with love and striving for this kin-dom which we can mostly only imagine right now. Unity must look like something bigger than we can see, understanding that we can work with people from different denominations, different backgrounds, different expressions, different faiths to build a better world. In fact, it’s the only way we’ll get there, by following the same Jesus who reached across the boundaries of his day and age to imagine a new era, as we must do, sometimes like a disciplined mantra, developing our spiritual imagination to see what is not yet visible, to hear what is not being said, to speak the words that are not yet spoken. Against our cultural backdrop of hyper-individualism, surrounded by a shallow ethos of the “self-made man”, waist deep in the assertion that everyone just needs to “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps”, we imagine a different world. A world of unity through the sharing of story and of compassion born from inclusion, seeing this table as one open to all who would come.

This is why two Sundays from now, on the 19^th, we won’t be here in this sanctuary. We’ll join our siblings in Christ, College Hill Presbyterian and East Side Christian, in the chapel at Phillips Theological Seminary to be together as a statement for our spiritual imaginations. We don’t know what the future looks like. All indications seem to point to our denominational identities breaking down in favor of an identity of what it means to walk in the Way of Jesus, beyond our denominational ideas about sacrament or doctrine. Three churches in Tulsa (at least) are making the claim that this means we seek to visit the imprisoned, to care for the hurting, to feed the hungry and shelter the vulnerable and such practices not only come before doctrine, they ARE doctrine. Three churches, using our different gifts the Spirit gives to us, hold the claim that the Church of Jesus Christ must be open & affirming, and that the table at which we share this meal of solidarity, where we commune with God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, must be open to anyone who would partake of this tiny feast for our souls.

Two Sundays – one to imagine resilience, one to imagine unity. By coming together for worship we will expand our hearts and minds, picking up the work of building newness, taking the cornerstone the builders of our era refuse, the cornerstone of inclusion and justice, and using it as the solid rock on which we will stand.

That will be our unity, joined and knit together by the Way of Jesus, practicing his faithful walk, trusting in the God of Hope, in whom he trusted. We will walk together in God’s kind of unity, woven together, our diversity our strength, fed by this tiny meal with huge imagination.

May it be so. 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.

The World I Live In – a poem by Mary Oliver

John 14:1-12a

You might have noticed that the PRIDE doors we’ve had displayed on the front lawn are down. June is long over, and since we painted those little rainbow beauties specifically for PRIDE month, we knew that it was time for them to come down and move on to their next home. We’ll be keeping the purple door and passing on the rest to other open and affirming churches in town. And the good news on that front is that we have to make choices. We have more open and affirming churches than we have doors. It wasn’t always the case.

There’s a reason, you know, that we fly a rainbow flag off our sanctuary, and placed six doors on our front lawn, and carried them on wheels through the PRIDE parade, and marched in the PRIDE parade for the umpteenth year in a row. We are so public about our stance on LGBTQ inclusion because it’s a pretty major issue in the church today and we want to be clear on which side of the debate we fall. We want people to know that this is a safe place to be LGBTQ, or an ally, AND be Christian. More and more people are abandoning the church, or the church is abandoning them, and we want them to know that the answer they’re getting isn’t the only one. AND we want them to know that abandoning one part of a closed system theology, say the orthodox position on gay people, will invariably mean a change in how you relate to God or Jesus, or the Bible. This is what makes our “debate” on LGBTQ inclusion so difficult in our churches – it isn’t just how we interpret a few verses from the Bible, but how we read the Bible itself, and how it has authority for us. Our rainbow flag outside is a symbol of more than just our stance on LGBTQ persons, but also our stance on the rights and dignity of allpersons. It is an indicator that we subscribe to a kind of open source theology which sees God, Jesus, the Bible, sin, salvation, communion, prayer, forgiveness, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera in a very different way than many other churches around us.

“Open and affirming” means, to me, much more than the welcome of LGBTQ persons into our church. It is rooted in an understanding of our faith lives – is this “way of Jesus” and open door or a closed one? What do I mean by an open door or a closed one? Let me explain it to you in this way. In non-relativistic classical mechanics, a closed system is a physical system that doesn’t exchange any matter with its surroundings, and isn’t subject to any net force whose source is external to the system. I’m glad to have cleared that up for you. A little more? Well, how about this – a closed system can exchange heat with another system, but not matter. In other words, nothing of substance. An open system, however, can exchange energy and substance. An open system is one that interacts with other systems, and changes because of it.

In my research, my education and my experience, Christianity is an open system. It thrives on relationship and interaction. When we practice it, we exchange not only energy with our neighbor, but substance as well. This is why Jesus tells us that we should love not only our neighbor, but our enemy as well. What good does it do to love only those who love you, he asks? That’s an exchange of energy only. When you must try to love your enemy, that’s when you learn to give of yourself, something of your substance to the effort of love. When we close the way of Jesus, making of it an exclusive path, open only via a specific set of beliefs, interpretations and dogma, we render it inert. If it is a closed club, welcoming only those who believe the right way first, we are loving only those who are already lovable, closing that system down to a recycling of the same energy. The power of the way of Jesus is not found in right belief, nor even right action, but in right relationship, in wrestling with the big questions of life and existence and seeking meaning in the nooks and crannies all around us. This is why we come back to the Bible, why we continue to wonder about God and God’s role in life, why we come again to the table or say The Lord’s Prayer yet another Sunday, because our interaction with these things, our wrestling with the transcendent, our metaphorical chewing on the bread of life creates meaning, it helps us make choices about who we are going to be in this world.

And ultimately, at least for me, the choice comes down to this, are we going to be open – open to new ideas, new concepts, new identities, the newness of a God who we claim is still speaking – or are we going to be closed – trapped in tradition, closed to innovation, unwilling to grow or change ourselves because we believe that we possess the truth, final and unedited?

When we hear this passage from John, and we hear it a lot, I think, it can sound pretty exclusive. That’s generally the way that I hear it interpreted, from a literal position. But you can’t pluck it from the chapter in which it is held, nor can you use a highly symbolic and metaphorical gospel like John to make wooden and literal points. In Mary Oliver’s beautiful poem, no one thinks that when she speaks of “angels in your head” that she is speaking literally. I doubt anyone would try to make an assertion that one must acquire and maintain “head angels” as the only way to develop a notion of a wide and amazing world based on this language. Rather they understand it as poetic – angels in our heads taking it’s place in our imagination like President Lincoln referring to the “better angels of our natures.” John’s language, too, is poetic, not literal.

The sad thing to me is that I think this passage is meant to be an inclusive one, and we’ve turned it into an exclusive one. John’s Gospel is full of cultural hooks that we don’t get – we’re not first century, Greek-speaking, Jewish-influenced Mediterranean people after all. We hear Jesus saying, “I am the way, the truth and the life and no one comes to the Father but through me”, and think that this, of course, means that Christianity has a firm and total grip on the keys to St. Peter’s gate. Sorry, everyone else. The poetic language, however, builds on a Hebrew concept, present heavily in Proverbs, of wisdom as “the Way” – a wisdom that isn’t intellectual but habitual, found in a well-worn path of behavior that infuses in us an internal disposition, a transformed heart. This, Jesus says, is the way to God. It is found in being like Jesus, we would say as Christians. But believe me when I say that I know so many Muslims and Jews and Hindus and Buddhists and people of no faith tradition at all who act more like Jesus than many of his self-professed followers. Are we really going to place stock in a faith that claims those who have been through a little ritual but remain exploitative, rude and even cruel to the creation around them are in, but those who have not professed Christ and yet live in a Christ-like manner are out?

Peter Rollins, who is a theologically rebellious, beer-drinking Irish philosopher (I love him already) tells a parable about leaving church – an exit parable he calls it – and it goes like this: A man dies and he goes to heaven and arrives at the gates in front of St. Peter, just like we’ve always been told. And Peter opens the gates wide and spreads open his arms and says, “Oh, Dominic, great to see you! Welcome!” And he’s just about to step into heaven and he notices that some of his friends are there – Amal, who is Muslim, Naomi, who is Jewish and Bet, who is a Buddhist. And he says, “Peter – what about them?” And Peter replies, kind of sheepishly, “Oh well, you know the rules…” Dominic stops for a moment. And he thinks about his own life, his own faith, and he remembers the rebel Jesus, the outsider, the one who is always eating with the sinners, sharing what he has with the downtrodden and oppressed, standing alongside the cast-out and he says, “You know what? I think I’ll just stay out here with them.” And a smile slowly breaks out over St. Peter’s face and he says, “At last you understand.”

The reason that we claim this title “open & affirming” began with an invitation to the Gay & Lesbian communities to be a part of our congregation, fully and completely. And then we found out if we’re going to do that effectively, that we had to change. Then the “gay & lesbian” community became the LGBT community, and more expansion of our hearts and minds. Now the LGBTQIA+++ community, which is evolving every day it seems as we expand the idea of human potential and identities. And so, too, our hearts and minds must grow. But it doesn’t stop there, for the arrival at this place of growth, at a desire to expand and welcome, begins with an open system and a deeply formed realization that the image of God is broad and expansive, like the galaxy, not limited to our capacity to see our understand. It means, to me, that the age of monopolies on God are over, and that the sustainable and healthy path forward will necessarily mean that we walk together, acknowledging and even celebrating our difference. That is the kind of trust in God’s creation that Jesus displays, and if we have the same kind of trust it won’t be shown in the number of Bible verses we have memorized or the size of our church buildings. They’ll know we are Christians by our love.

Another famous passage from John says it like this, again through the power of poetry — For God so loved the world that God came to be in it – that God took the form of flesh, like all of us, and lived the fullness of incarnation, embracing those we have called unclean, leaping across the social barriers we have carefully constructed, healing the sick, loving the enemy, tending to the broken, speaking truth to power and telling us again and again that the way to God is love. When we do these things, we experience God. When we live these things, we know Jesus. When we trust in these things, we walk in the Spirit. And that, my friends, is the way, and the truth and the life.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

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

Genesis 4:4-7 & John 9:1-12

The problem is sin. The problem is sin and we agin’ it!! That’s how it starts off, I’m sure some of you are aware, and then the talk about Jesus as the solution, or more specifically the sacrifice of Jesus as the solution to the anger of God produced by our sin. The God of love so angry that only his son’s brutal death will appease him. But don’t worry, it happened and now he loves us again.

So let me confess, probably won’t be a shock to you, that I don’t believe that Jesus died for our sins, at least in what I would call a conventional sense. But, I do believe that sin is a problem. Also not in the way that we’ve been told, at least most of us, all of our lives. We’ve spend the last few Sundays revisiting God, Jesus and the Bible, and now we turn to some very foundational theological concepts for Christians – sin and salvation. And for that I’m going to have us look at a specific and very poignant example.

It’s easy to look at the horrific pictures of small children locked up in pens, to hear the heartbreaking stories of the forced separation from parents, of children not allowed to touch their brothers and sisters, of one year-olds placed in front of immigration judges for a court proceeding with no representation and be outraged. That is easy. And right. And it’s easy to point fingers and assign blame and cast disparagement at people whose policies have caused this immediate crisis. It is easy. And right.

What is less easy is to be aware of how we got to this place. What is less easy is to see how complicated this situation is and how many working parts make up this machine of dehumanization and greed. What is less easy is to make the connection between those heartbreaking images and our $8 t-shirts, or our year-round bananas, our quick roof repairs after a hailstorm or our well-mowed green spaces. What is less easy is to understand that we are part of something larger, part of a combination of individual and corporate sin, and none of us is pure or unstained.

It’s a harsh reality. And it is the only way I ever have any connection to one of the central tenets of fundamentalist Christianity – the so-called “doctrine of original sin.” Because we don’t often, in the so-called “progressive” church, speak about personal sin, typically because the people who sit in our sanctuaries have had sin used as a club, to beat them into submission. This stands in direct contrast to the practice of Jesus, who does talk about sin, but doesn’t wield it against people. As Russell Rathburn says in his commentary on the passage from John, “The Pharisees…see God work as restrictive. Jesus sees God’s work as permissive. They see sin as transgressing the restricted, Jesus sees sin as limiting the continuing of God’s work of creation, that work which is imaged from Genesis forward as bringing light into the darkness.”

How we think about “sin” matters. If it is only a list of prohibited actions, then we’ve missed the point entirely. It is, after all, totally possible for me to follow the rules and act immorally. It was the defense at the Nuremberg trials, “I was only following orders.” The point of the lists in some parts of the Bible is to evoke in the followers a sense of morality that is inherent, not depended on legislation to tell us what to do…or not do. But we have our idea of sin all out of whack. We keep trying to refine the list, acting like we may not know exactly what sin is, but we know it when we see it. But Jesus teaches us this – that which harms is sin. That which does not promote life is sin. He says take the 2×4 out of your own eye before you point fingers at the toothpick in someone else’s eye. In other words, sin never works aimed at someone else. My knowing that there is evil in the world is one thing, my knowing that I can sometimes contribute to that evil is another. Let me be clear, I don’t think that I intent evil, but there is intent and there is impact. Living my life as a straight, white, cis-gendered male in this world means that I will impact others in a negative way despite my intent to not do so. Because I participate in the systems that are evil, without meaning to do so. As we head into the 100th anniversary of one of the worst race massacres in our nation’s history right here in Tulsa, we should be painfully aware of how we have not named the sin of those days, and how that lack of seeing makes our reconciliation so hard, if not impossible.

So, while it seems important to know what constitutes this life-denying, hurtful thing we call sin, it can be difficult to define, because it is so contextual. Here are just a few comments on sin from our tradition through the centuries:

• In Judaism, sin is “missing the mark”; refusing to listen to God; a wrongful path; hardness of heart; stiffness of neck; Rabbi Abraham Joshua Herschel called it; “a refusal of humans to become who we are”
• Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th century Christian mystic, theologian, scientist, and artist says that
  sin is drying up. It is care-less-ness; as in not caring. It is also “uselessness”; lack of passion; sterility. Those who do good are like an orchard full of good fruit. If we do evil, we shall remain sterile in God’s eyes.
• Contemporary Roman Catholic liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez says simply this:
  Sin is denial of love.
• Langdon Gilkey, a 20th century, U.S. Protestant theologian, who was my conversation partner for my final theology paper in seminary says, “Sin may be defined as an ultimate religious devotion to a finite interest.”
• Rosemary Radford Reuther, a contemporary, Roman Catholic, feminist theologian, says:
  “What is appropriately called sin…lies in the distortion of relationship, the absolutizing of the rights of life and power on one side of a relation against the other parts with which it is, in fact, interdependent.”

The distortion of relationship, care-less-ness, an ultimate religious devotion to a finite interest. Boy does that last description hit home? For what do we see around us now but almost fanatical devotions to political or ideological ideas as if they were ultimate truth? It makes me think of the immigration crisis as an example of sin…primarily systemic, but driven by a personal devotion to a finite interest, a twisted narrative that both wants to claim the United States as a immigrant story and deny the reality of colonization, a narrative that wants to reject people from certain countries while ignoring our own role in the histories of those same countries economic and social plight…a distortion of relationship.

Personal transformation is good. Reconciliation from personal “sin” is good, but that does not change the systems in which we are bound — racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, etc. We may rightly admit to our personal racist notions and seek to admonish them in our lives, but that does not end the systemic weight of racism. And that is the double whammy of this thing we call sin. There is a personal component, yes, but our focus on that often pulls us away from the larger and more nefarious side of sin – the systemic sin that we create which alienate and isolate, which break relationship and seek power over justice, choosing not to see, hear or understand certain people in favor of others.

What if we moved beyond the language and liturgy that speaks of sins as only personal and our need for forgiveness? What if we acknowledged sin as a power that seems to hold us in bondage? What if we imagined, as the Psalms do, of sin that rules our lives like an unwanted Pharaoh, or keeps us in exile as if we were trapped in Babylon, or blinds us with self-interest, keeping us attached to distraction and entertainment as a means of anesthetizing the pain that is around us? What if we thought of sin more like idolatry, getting the centers of our lives confused, our identities tied up with the wrong things?

Now I’ve spent all this time on sin and the title of the sermon is sin AND salvation. So, I’d better get moving. Fortunately, the second part is deeply connected to the first. If sins are the things that take life and deny love, then salvation is that which brings life and love. Salvation, like sin, looks different in different places. Sometimes it is liberation from bondage, real or spiritual. Sometimes it is economic or cultural. It may mean finding a place where you are truly accepted for who you are, or finding your meaning in being that place of sanctuary for others. It can be a move from sickness to health, from fear to trust, or something more systemic, like a move from injustice to justice or violence to peace. And, yes, it may even mean a salvation to come. Our opening song, Orphan Girl, by Gillian Welch, tells the story of an orphan with no family who sees no possibility of that relationship in her life so her salvation she envisions coming at her death when she meets her family at God’s table. But I don’t think salvation is primarily talking about our afterlife, rather it is concerned with here and now, with what Marcus Borg calls the “twofold transformation of ourselves and the world.” This may be more radical a shift than we think – but what if we no longer thought of our salvation as primarily about an afterlife? What is the point of Christianity then? What if it isn’t about the prize at the end of the race at all, but the race itself? And what if our salvation is not the forgiveness of sins, but our liberation from sin? What if our stories about Jesus are here to remind us of what Dr. Borg calls the “three tenses” of salvation – what God has done in the past, what can happen in the present and what has not yet happened, what is not completed, neither for us as individuals nor for the world?

We live perhaps more than we’d like to admit in the same sin scenario that Jesus did, where a person’s misfortune is a result of their sin. He refutes that. I hope we heard that clearly this morning in John’s gospel. Jesus calls that bunk. And he uses this encounter with a blind man to make his point to the Pharisees about their own blindness. Perhaps this is the whole work of sin and salvation, helping us to understand the ways in which we are blind – blind to our own transgressions, blind to one another, blind to brokenness which we may not have even created, but in which we participate. And that blindness is precisely what Jesus came to save us from, letting us see in his own life how we might continually work to shift our centers away from the pharaohs and the Babylons of this world, binding and exiling us, and towards the God of liberation, seeking our wholeness, transforming our hearts and minds and souls. Let us not lose sight of how Jesus’ actions change the expected story in John’s Gospel, surprising everyone with God’s love for this so-called sinner…letting the blind man, and maybe others, too, see again, like Amazing Grace…

I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see.