Supporting and nurturing our church community is central to Cleveland Park Congregational United Church of Christ.  We are committed to supporting each other in times of both celebration and challenge.   Our Deacons and Member Care Associates organizes rides, meal deliveries, home and hospital visits, and cards and calls to members and friends of our congregation.  If you are interested in helping with any of these activities, please email Member Care.

Mission and Vision Statement

 

Mission:

To nurture love of God and love of neighbor in the world.

 

Vision:

We see our church as a place of refuge and spiritual nourishment. Through quality worship services, learned preaching, and sacred music, we experience God’s presence and seek the inspiration to carry God’s blessing into the world.

Ours is a reflective congregation that challenges us to discern God’s word for us in the present day. Our theology is liberal and our worship experience is informal and personal, without emphasis on pomp and circumstance.

We participate together, through Christian Education for children and adults, in increasing our knowledge of God and in helping one another in our spiritual growth.

Our small but growing congregation is a church family, and we share God’s love by caring for one another. We offer hospitality and fellowship that is warm, inviting, and welcoming to all. We embrace the children in our congregation and welcome their participation in worship and the life of the congregation.

As a faith community, we believe we are called to serve our neighbors, near and far, in small ways and large; to reach out and share the blessings of our community with others, spiritually or physically.

We value our diversity and we covenant to share God’s love with everyone, across generations, and embracing any race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability or political affiliation. We offer a place for believers and seekers alike to ponder, question, and celebrate our faith. We embrace our UCC affirmation: “No matter who you are, or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.”

Pastor’s Newsletters

September 14, 2011

Greetings,

As I said in my sermon on Sunday, the 9/11 Anniversary had a far greater emotional impact on me than I anticipated.  Several of you shared that this was true for you as well, and I’m grateful that we have such a wonderful community that gathers, with love, in times of both sorrow and joy.  The choir’s offering of “Prayer for the Children,” the beautiful organ music, the return of so many of our children, and the 9/11 Coffee Hour Sharing all made it a very special day.

And, yes, it really was true that the assigned lectionary reading  for Sunday, 9/11,was the famous passage on forgiveness from the Gospel of Matthew (the lectionary is a three year, set cycle of readings in both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament). In Matt. 18:21, Peter asks, Master, how many times do we have to forgive—seven?And Jesus answers, Hardly!Try seventy times seven.  That’s a lot of forgiving, but it’s what we’re called to do by a loving God who forgives us all our trespasses as well!

As we move forward into the fall (I felt a slight crisp to the air as I walked my dog, Zooey, yesterday evening), CPC has a lot of wonderful plans and events in the making.  Many of you received a copy of the fall calendar in your worship bulletin on Sunday, and it’s attached again here.  The calendar includes a number of upcoming mission events, such as the AIDS Walk on October 29^th.  We’ll walk together as a team that day, wearing our new CPC t-shirts.  Please take a look at the attached AIDS Walk form for information about how to register for the event both as an individual walker and as a member of the CPC Team.

Other upcoming events include:

Sunday School Supper &Information Session:  This Saturday, 9/17, from 5-8 pm.

Bible Study:  Reconvenes this Sunday, 9/18, from 9:30 to 10:20 am.

Cabinet Meeting:  This Sunday, 9/18, after worship in the Library.

Diaconate Meeting:  Sunday, 9/25, after worship in the Library.

Interfaith Meditation:  Tuesday, 9/27, from 7:30 to 8:30 pm in the Sanctuary.

In closing, I had a lovely time yesterday morning with the CPC Book Group as we discussed the amazing novel, Cutting for Stone.  If you’ve never met with this passionate and informed group of readers, you’re missing a real treat!  They gather on the second Tuesday of each month from 9:30 am to Noon in the Parlor.

Blessings to you and yours,

Pastor Ellen

 

August 31, 2011

Greetings,

It was a joy to see so many of you this past Sunday, emerging from homes with or without power, sloshing through rain soaked streets, and gathering together in worship to celebrate the call to love and justice exemplified by the life and work of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  As I said in my sermon, many Civil Rights leaders have emphasized that their movement began “at the hour of prayer, on our knees.” And I claimed that it was the spiritual inspiration of both the Exodus Story of liberation and Christ’s call to love our enemies, which motivated those involved to risk their own lives without harming others.  It was an extraordinary movement, and it is not yet finished.  For, just as “the Exodus is a development, not an endpoint, the Civil Rights Movement is a process, not a product.  And Dr. King may have passed on, but his dream has not.  His dream… still lives and there are many voices and lives through which it is going to be realized.”  We at CPC can be a part of this realization in so many ways, through worship, mission, education, outreach and extravagant welcome.  There is hope, and there’s still a great deal work to be done!

~New(s) For Fall~

Mission:  The Mission Committee will be meeting on Tuesday, 9/6, at 6 pm and seeks the support of everyone who’s asked that we do more mission work at CPC.  Please e-mail Jennifer Singleterry at jsingleterry@gmail.com if you’d like to participate in a specific project and/or join us for the meeting.

Sunday School:  Thanks to our wonderful Christian Education Chair and Associate (Serena Wiltshire and Anna Sannes), we have a great year planned for the children.  On Saturday, 9/17, all families and teachers are invited to a Sunday School Supper & Information Session from 5-8 pm.  Activities for the kids will be provided after supper while the parents and teachers gather for information sharing and training.

Worship:

Preaching—Beginning in September, I’ll preach most Sundays, but will open the pulpit to other voices and ideas once a month.  Please let me know if you’d be interested in sharing a biblically and/or experientially based 15-20 minute talk with the congregation, and I’ll schedule your theme for the appropriate Sunday!

Middle School Students—Beginning in October, our 6^th-8^th grade students will join us for worship on the 1^st Sunday of each month.  Since that’s Communion Sunday, I plan (hope!) to offer a homily on those days that is multi-generational in appeal.

As we approach the end of summer, I look forward to seeing many of you who have been away.  I wish you safe travels and a joyous return!

Blessings,

Pastor Ellen

August 11, 2011

Many thanks to Mike Durst and Dit Talley for preaching and leading worship while I was away on vacation this past week.  As Don Marshall emphasized in his recent e-mail, Sabbath and rest are very important parts of our life and work together as a congregation, and it was, indeed, a good thing for me to spend a week out west, on the trail, by the river, and in the mountains.

Of course, I was also visiting family, and, as Dit reminded us in last Sunday’s sermon, all families face their own systemic challenges.  I’m grateful to him for this honesty at a time of year when so many of us are visiting relatives or attending family reunions as part of our summer vacations.  It’s important to be reminded that, just as none of us is perfect as an individual, none of us has a perfect family.  And that’s okay; our loving God embraces us with tenderness and grace regardless (or perhaps even, because of) these challenges.  For this triune God is nothing if not a God of relationship:  Father, Son, Holy Ghost; Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer; Mother, Child, Spirit.  Each of these Trinitarian formulas presents a God-in-relationship.  In fact, the Trinitarian concept of God reminds us that we are connected at the core.  And even if our families, at times, provide us with more concerns than joys, well, we are still connected.  So stay tuned for Part II of the dysfunctional families sermon series:  I’ll be preaching it this Sunday!

Other bits and pieces:

• I spoke with Rev. Dick Dodds, our Minister Emeritus, a few days ago, and he and his wife, Margaret, will be joining us for worship on Sunday, August 28^th.  He also happened to mention how much he loves our Coffee Hour–hint, hint!

 

• A half dozen people responded to my “Pastor vs. Reverend” question.  Matt Henkes wins the prize for best Wiki Research response, which I’m sharing here:  “Reverend and Minister are both titles denoting that you are a clergy person.  Pastor [means] that you are the ordained leader of a particular church.  I like Pastor, because of the leadership position it denotes, and [according to this definition], you are our pastor!”  Margaret Goodman had the funniest response, which was to suggest that I be called “Reverend Mom” (though, as you might guess, my kids had already thought of that!).  So here’s what I suggest: 1) you’re each free to call me what you wish, 2) I’d like the children to call me Pastor Ellen, and 3) I’ll appear as “Reverend Ellen Jennings” on formal and “Pastor Ellen” on informal written communications (with both in the worship bulletin).  Your further input is always welcome!

I look forward to seeing you this Sunday.

Blessings,

Ellen

 

 

July 27, 2011

I want to offer my thanks to the large number of people who attended this past Sunday’s worship service and special thanks to those of you who stayed afterward for our mid-year meeting.  I’m told this may have been record attendance for a July service and congregational gathering!

In many ways, Sunday was the culmination of the first stage of my ministry with you—the “start up” and “getting to know you” stage.  Of course, there are still more people for me to meet and plenty of things about CPC for me to learn, but I have a feeling that the intensity of this initial two month period, in which I threw most of my energy into finding out “who you are,” “what you do,” and “how things work,” will probably not need to be repeated.

I’m grateful for this, because it means that we can now move on to the next stage and begin working on the ideas I shared Sunday, both in my sermon and in my visioning statement (attached to this e-mail).  As I said at the meeting, the vision I’m proposing for the coming year does not preempt any strategic planning that will begin this fall.  In fact, the two are quite compatible.  The vision I shared, which is based on the input I’ve received from you, provides a roadmap for the coming year, while the strategic planning committee will be creating a plan for the next 5-7 years, most likely concluding with our 100^th Anniversary in 2018.

If you weren’t at Sunday’s worship service or meeting, I encourage you to read the attached sermon and statement.  And, of course, I invite your questions, concerns and suggestions.  Because this vision involves us all!

On a few more notes:

* I received a lovely and welcoming card from Rev. Dick Dodds, who hopes to come visit and worship with us one of these days.  If anyone is in need of his addresses (summer in PA and winter in FL), please let me know.

* I’ll be away on vacation from 7/30-8/7, visiting my parents in Montana.  Mike Durst will lead worship and preach on Sunday, 7/31, and Dit Talley will lead worship, preach and serve communion on Sunday, 8/7.  If there’s a pastoral emergency, please call Kimberly Durham Bates at the church office, and she’ll contact me.

* If anyone else has an opinion about the “Pastor vs. Reverend” question, please share it!  I’ll summarize your responses in my next missive.

I wish you a wonderful couple of weeks.

Blessings,

Pastor Ellen

 

July 13, 2011

Hi Everyone,

As you’ve probably figured out by now, Don Marshall, our interim Moderator, and I are taking turns with this weekly missive to the congregation.  This week we’re going out of order, so that Don can write next week’s message leading up to our mid year congregational meeting on Sunday, 7/24.  If you don’t yet have this date on your calendar, please add it now—we’ll meet for an hour immediately after worship, and childcare will be provided.

This week I thought I’d update you on a few groups and committees with whom I’ve been meeting as well as presenting you with a challenging question…Mission—we had a great meeting last week and have come up with a plan for mission work at CPC that we’ll be sharing with the congregation over the next couple of months.  In the meanwhile, committee members will be offering a Moment for Mission at the beginning of worship each Sunday to highlight both specific mission projects and important mission themes.  If you’d like to be part of this dynamic committee, please e-mail John at josborne@g-risk.com

Young Adults—we recently enjoyed both a fun dinner together and an interesting conversation about what appeals to younger adults and what they hope CPC can provide for them.  Interestingly, though they’d like CPC to offer more evening/after work events, they don’t want to create anything that will directly compete or conflict with Sunday morning worship.  They value being part of a multi-generational community!

Children and Youth Programming—we’re planning an excellent year of Sunday School, including a new 6^th/7^th grade class.  We’re also brainstorming ideas for our teens, such as the possibility of a Summer 2012 mission trip to WV.  The Sunday School year will kick off with a Family Supper in September (date TBA), at which we’ll outline the year’s program for parents, provide training and materials for teachers, and offer kids the opportunity to be part of our acolyte and/or new Jr Deacon programs.  If you’re interested in assisting with our Children and Youth, please e-mail Serena at Wiltshire@starpower.net.

Sunday Get Togethers—we’ve already had two good sessions on 7/3 and 7/10, with one more scheduled for 7/17.  About a dozen people participated in each, with an age range of 12 to 80(ish)!  I’m finding out all sorts of interesting things about the history of CPC, as well as people’s hopes and dreams for the future.

In addition, I discovered (see following):Pastor or Reverend?– …some people have mixed feelings about what to call their pastor/minister!  In other words, am I “Reverend” or am I “Pastor?”  Good question!  In my past positions, I’ve always been known as “Rev. Ellen,” but I assumed the tradition at CPC was to use the term “Pastor.”  And, in fact, upon thinking about it, I decided that “Pastor” has a more heart-centered feel to it than “Reverend,” so I was fine with the switch.  But, I’m curious—what do YOU think?  If you have an opinion, feel free to e-mail me at (yes, my e-mail refers to “pastor”) pastor@cpcchurch.org and let me know both your preference and why you prefer it.And, of course, you’re always welcome to call me, “Ellen!”

Blessings,

Rev. Ellen Jennings

 

 

July 7, 2011

Greetings~

I hope everyone enjoyed a festive 4^th of July celebration after our Sunday Service that focused on welcome and refuge.  Both the reading from the Gospel of Matthew, “Come unto me all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest,” and the Emma Lazarus poem, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…,” connect in wonderful ways to our congregation’s welcoming mission statement:  “To nurture love of God and love of neighbor in the world.

As you probably realized from last Sunday’s sermon, I don’t think we can ever overstate the importance of welcome to Jesus’ message, and, hence, to our Christian tradition.   In fact, our denomination, the United Church of Christ, makes this point by referring not just to “welcome,” but to “extravagant welcome.”  And, since the UCC just celebrated its 54^th anniversary (right before our nation celebrated its 235^th), this seems like a wonderful time to highlight and affirm the extravagant welcome that we, as Cleveland Park Congregational United Church of Christ, make great effort to offer one another, our community and the larger world.

As we move toward our mid-year congregational meeting on 7/24, I invite each of you to envision the ways in which YOU see our congregation living out its mission in the world.  New programming will, of course, emerge from this vision, and many of us are excited, if not anxious, to begin creating it!  However, I strongly believe that it’s important for us to agree on our passions and priorities before beginning to organize and establish new initiatives.

As part of this process, I’ve already participated in a great number of meetings and individual conversations at CPC over the past month, and I’ve listened carefully to what you each have to say.  I plan to share the results of this information gathering, along with my own reflections, in a “vision sermon” on 7/24.  Some of the areas on which I’ll focus will include:  Children & Youth Programming, Mission & Outreach, Communications, New Members, and Member Care.  If you have a priority you’d like to add, please let me know.  This is a great church with many wonderful things already happening and many more excellent possibilities in store!

My sermon this Sunday will focus on Body and Spirit, with references to both the challenging passage on that subject in Pauls’ Letter to the Romans and the Genesis story of Jacob and Esau.  We’re both body and spirit; how do we embrace it all?

I hope to see you in church!

Pastor Ellen

 

June 23, 2011

 

 

It was good to see so many of you in church last Sunday for a service focused on New Life and the Spirit, which celebrated Father’s Day, a Baptism, and my first Sunday preaching as your new pastor.  The sermon explored the interrelationship of beginnings and endings and suggested that the success of our new ministry together will depend on listening and communicating—with God, with ourselves, and with one another.  As I said at the end—“it’s time to begin!”

Following Sunday’s service, we had a very well attended Cabinet meeting that included an official acknowledgement of Don Marshall’s role as our interim Moderator while Lori Sonderegger is away caring for her ill mother.  We also agreed on the importance of creating a coordinated plan for all church communications, including: our website, membership and outreach materials, brochures and signs.  Matt Henkes has volunteered to facilitate this task force of four Cabinet members.

I’m glad to report that I’m continuing to meet and communicate with many individuals and committees in my effort to get to know all of you and learn about the different programs and priorities in the life of the church.  This week’s meetings will focus on:  Sunday School and youth programming, new members, member care, and the website.  I’ll also be participating in the Sunday morning Bible Class and will be meeting with the Diaconate after worship.

This Sunday’s service will, as promised, focus on the Pentecost Story of God’s Holy Spirit descending upon the disciples and their followers on Shavuot (the Jewish Festival of Weeks) fifty days after Jesus’ death.   I’ll make a connection with the challenging story of the Sacrifice of Isaac, which is the Hebrew Bible lectionary reading for the day.

Finally, I encourage you to participate in one of the member meetings I’m hosting after church in July (7/3, 7/10 and 7/17).  Sign up sheets are in the parlor.  And I ask that you reserve Sunday, 7/24, for our mid year congregational meeting, which will be held after church on that day.

As always, I welcome your calls, e-mails and input!

Peace Be With You,

Pastor Ellen

pastor@cpcchurch.org

P.S.  Please feel free to stop by the church parlor and take what you’d like from the collection of old books I recently culled from the pastor’s study.

 

 

June 13, 2011

What a joyful Children’s Sunday Service we had yesterday!  The sanctuary was filled with Spirit and New Life, and I think everyone enjoyed the excitement of a truly multi-generational worship experience.  My hope is that we can find more opportunities for children, youth and adults to worship together, regularly celebrating the fact that our congregation includes members and friends of all ages and stages.

Having just completed my first week with CPC, I’m happy to report that this new journey has already had a wonderful beginning.  I’ve enjoyed the first of many meetings with lay leaders, was happy to provide some pastoral care, and even managed to sneak in a quick trip to the UCC Central Atlantic Conference in Newark, DE.  I was truly pleased that Matt Henkes, the elected delegate from CPC, was able to attend this annual meeting with me.

Looking to the week ahead, I’ll be preaching for the first time as your pastor this coming Sunday.  My sermon will continue the focus on Spirit and New Life while also highlighting my developing vision of a ministry with Cleveland Park Church.  I’ll be performing a baptism as well, which seems fabulously fitting.

As for the Pastor’s Page you’re reading, I plan to write one each week until Lori Sonderegger, our Moderator, is able to return to DC from Connecticut where she’s been caring for her very ill mother.  At that point, Lori will resume sending a Moderator’s Memo, and we’ll decide whether I should continue sending my message as well.

In closing, I want to encourage each of you to sign up for one of the meetings I’ll be hosting after church most Sundays in July.  I’m eager to meet as many of you as possible and to hear about your hopes and dreams for this wonderful congregation as we begin planning our future together.  Please e-mail info@cpcchurch.org with your date of choice (7/3, 7/10 or 7/17) or put your name on one of the sign up sheets in the parlor.

May the Holy Spirit fill your being with the peace and love of God this day and always.

Blessings,

Pastor Ellen

pastor@cpcchurch.org

 

 

 1.29.12

 I Know Who You Are

Rev. Ellen Jennings

Today, as I’m sure all of you are aware by now, is our annual meeting.  A time to take stock of who and where we are as a congregation.  A time to look at our budget, our leadership, our bylaws and our vision.  A time to come together as a community and, in accordance with UCC polity, make sure every single one of us gets both a “voice and a vote.”  It’s going to be an important meeting, and I hope every one of you will attend.  Because each one of your voices is important!  As I preached a couple of weeks ago, “We are each here for a purpose, a reason, and every one of us, as an individual, is the only person who can fulfill our particular purpose or reason for being alive in the world.”  So we need your particular purpose or reason for being alive to be present in our midst.  For it is only by coming together as individuals in community that a congregation can determine its corporate call.  It is only by gathering as ekklesia that we can discover our church’s unique purpose or reason for being in this world.

But that’s not what I’m going to preach about today.  I mean, it’s very important, and I do hope I’ve inspired you to attend the annual meeting.  But what I’m actually going to preach about today is why we’re here to begin with.  Why are we gathered here on a Sunday morning in late January?  Why are we sitting in this sanctuary rather than doing something else on such a sunny and almost spring-like winter day?  Why?

Well, Mark knows.  Or, I should say, the Gospel of Mark gives us an answer to this question. So I’m going to reread today’s passage, this time from the contemporary translation found in The Message.

Then they entered Capernaum.  When the Sabbath arrived, Jesus lost no time in getting to the meeting place. He spent the day there teaching.  They were surprised by his teaching—so forthright, so confident—not quibbling and quoting like the religious scholars. 

Suddenly, while still in the meeting place, he was interrupted by a man who was deeply disturbed and yelling out, “What business do you have here with us, Jesus?  Nazarene!  I know who you are!  You’re the Holy One of God, and you’ve come to destroy us!

Jesus shut him up:  “Quiet!  Get out of him!”  The afflicting spirit threw the man into spasms, protesting loudly, and got out.

Everyone there was incredulous, buzzing with curiosity.  “What’s going on here?  A new teaching that does what it says?  He shuts up defiling, demonic spirits and sends them packing!”  News of this traveled fast and was soon all over Galilee.

Mark knows.

We are here this morning because Jesus liberates us.  We are here today because Jesus, who is filled with the spirit of God, offers us liberation from the many other, decidedly un-godly spirits that seek to possess us.  We are here because, as the lyrics to the song, Shackles, played by the Shaw Community Praise Dancers last week, proclaimed:  [You] take the shackles off my feet so I can dance.  You [break] the chains so I can lift my hands.”  We are here, because, in this place, we experience the possibility of liberation.  We come together in this sanctuary, because we suspect there might just be such a thing as freedom.  And we hope and pray that the love of God as manifest by Jesus Christ will fill us up, take us over, and break the shackles of whatever bondage it is that has bound and chained us.

Perhaps this sounds extreme.  But why are you here?  Are you here because your life is perfect?  I doubt it.  Because I don’t know anyone whose life is perfect.  In fact, one of the privileges and challenges of my profession is that ministers have access to the inner truths of a great many lives.  And I can assure you that what often looks smooth and polished on the outside is far from that on the inside.  We’re all human.  Which means we’re wounded.  We’re broken.  We’re in pain.  We’ve been hurt in some way.  We’ve hurt others in some other way.  We aren’t in control.  There are unclean spirits that possess us.  Do I mean demons?  I don’t know!  You tell me.  What is envy?  What is anger?  What is extreme jealousy?  What is consuming fear?  What is anxiety?  What is deep dark sadness?

Or addiction?  How many among us have had no experience with that?  How many among us have never been consumed with the need for something that is not a positive force in our lives?  How many among us have never struggled with how to stop a behavior or a relationship or a way of thinking that, if allowed to continue, could easily take over our lives?

We have all been possessed by unclean spirits.  And this is why Mark puts this particular story at the very beginning of his Gospel, only twenty verses in.  He prioritizes it.   And remember, Mark includes nothing extraneous in his gospel.  Jesus has been baptized, tempted in the wilderness, and proclaimed the good news he has come to preach:  The Kingdom of God is here, now.  Return to God and believe the message I bring you!  And then, in this story, he begins his ministry.  And how does he begin?  With a traditional healing?  A miracle story?  A story about feeding the hungry or caring for the poor?  A parable?  Nope.  Mark has Jesus begin his public ministry with… an exorcism.  Which is a little creepy when you think about it—or at least the way we’ve been taught to think about exorcisms, thanks to the visuals of horror movies and psycho thrillers.

But Mark makes this choice intentionally.  For what is an exorcism anyway?  It’s the expulsion of an evil spirit, an unclean spirit, a defiling spirit.  More specifically, it’s the expulsion of a spirit that leads us away from the life and love of God and traps us in the shackles of our own worst feelings, thoughts and desires.  And isn’t this the opposite of the Good News Mark has Jesus announce mere verses before the exorcism story begins—the good news that proclaims God’s Kingdom is at hand; we need only turn back to God?

Yes.  Because the truth is—turning back to God requires liberation from that which leads us away from God.  We must first be released from our shackles before we can dance back to God.  We must first be freed from our chains before we can lift up our hands to God.  Only then will we be able to say, in the words of both the Shaw Community Dancer’s song and today’s psalm, “Praise you!”  Only then will we be able actually to experience the Good News of God’s Kingdom.

And Mark knows this.  He knows that the most important thing Jesus is here to do is deliver us, free us.  He knows that all the miracles and feeding stories and parables and healings in the world aren’t going to do a darn thing unless we’re free from the negative and soul crushing thoughts, habits, patterns and addictions that so often consume and dominate our lives.  So Jesus, who is filled by the Holy Spirit and beloved of God (as Mark has already made quite clear in the story of his baptism), begins his public ministry with an act of liberation.  An exorcism.  He quiets and gets rid of the defiling spirit that has bound and shackled someone in the synagogue.

And these words are important.  Because again, Mark uses no unnecessary words.  “Someone in the synagogue” means someone who was present in their congregation!  In other words, the person possessed by this unclean spirit, the person bound and shackled by whatever negative and soul crushing thoughts, habits, patterns or addictions are consuming him, is a member of the congregation in which Jesus is preaching and teaching.  He is not some random outsider.  He is not a homeless person.  He is not a prostitute, tax collector or drug addict.  He is one of the regulars.  He is a congregation member.

And I think this reality makes the very first act of Jesus’ public ministry all the more astounding.  Because it normalizes demon possession.  Yes, you heard me.  I said, it normalizes demon possession.  It lets us know that any one of us, any one of us Sunday morning regulars, or even irregulars, is subject to the same sort of experience.  We’re all human.  We’re all wounded.  We’re all broken. We’ve all experienced pain.  We’ve all been hurt in some way.  We’ve all hurt others in some other way.  We aren’t in control.  There are unclean spirits that possess us.

So why are we here?  Well, I already said it, but it bears repeating.  We gather here, because, in this place, we experience the possibility of liberation.  We come together, because we suspect there might just be such a thing as freedom.  And we hope and pray that the love of God as manifest by Jesus Christ will fill us up, take us over, and break the shackles of whatever bondage it is that has bound and chained us.

Because it can.  The truth is that the power of love is stronger than the power of any unclean spirit.  The power of love is stronger than the power of fear, the power of envy, the power of anger, the power of anxiety, even the power of a deep and dark depression.

The power of love is stronger.

Which is why the afflicting spirit recognized it—and spoke truth about it.  “I know who you are,” it said.  “You’re the Holy One of God,” the Beloved of God, the one who carries the Spirit of God.  The un-godly spirit recognized and realized that the Spirit of God was stronger.  Because none of the soul crushing spirits that afflict us can even begin to compete with the Spirit of God!

“I know who you are.”  Spirits know.  And those words don’t just apply to the ungodly spirits who recognize and flee from the power of love, which can always trump them.  Those words also apply to the Holy Spirit, God’s Spirit, who knows us intimately, who be-loves us, who, “knit us together in our mother’s womb.”  And who never flees.  Because God knows who we really are.  God knows our potential.  God knows our call.  God knows exactly what it will look like when we “fulfill our particular purpose or reason for being alive in the world.”

And that’s what God wants.  In fact, it is all God expects.  God doesn’t expect us to be anyone other than the person God created us to be.

Then again, that’s a pretty big expectation!  Because in order to be the person we were created to be, we have to listen for God’s voice, hear and respond to God’s call, and, Oh God, stop listening to all the other un-godly voices in our heads.

And that’s not all.  We have to want to be liberated. Or, to put it in the terms of today’s gospel story, we have to be willing to participate in our own exorcisms.  Wow.  That’s pretty intense.  But which would you prefer?  To stay shackled and bound to all the things that are stopping you from being the person God has called you to be in the world?  Or to claim your power as a beloved child of God, break free of your chains, and rise up to participate in the liberating Good News of Jesus?!

The answer should be easy.  But the truth is, it’s shockingly hard.  It’s hard to claim our own power.  It’s hard to believe that we’re beloved of God.  And it’s amazingly difficult to see that we hold some of the keys to our own liberation.

But we do.  Because we can choose love.  Oh, I know, it’s not easy to choose love.  But we can choose love.  We can decide that the message of God’s transforming love, as proclaimed by the Gospel of Mark, as broadcast throughout the New Testament, is the message to which we’re going to listen.  We can choose to believe.   We have that power.  We’re human beings with great mental faculties, and we have the ability to decide what we’re going to hold as “true,” and how we’re going to live our lives.

Again, I’m not claiming it’s easy, and I’m painfully aware that in a world where science and anti-science are at constant odds, sometimes the word, “belief” gets a bad rap.  Nevertheless, cognitive scientists assure us that we do, indeed, have the power to choose what we believe.  And if you choose to believe that the power of love trumps all, then I can assure you it will change your life.  Because it has changed so many lives.  And always for the better.

If you doubt what I’m saying, think about it.  Have you ever heard of someone whose life was changed for the better by fear?  Or anger?  Or envy?  Or anxiety?  Note:  I’m not saying that we can’t learn from these emotions and experiences.  Nor am I saying they can’t be catalysts for transformation.  But I’m pretty certain we can all agree that, as a way of life, anger, fear, envy and anxiety are not the way to go.

Love is.

So here’s the bottom line.  I know who you are.  And I know who I am too.  Because we’re each human.  And we each struggle with common human weakness.  You can’t shock me.  Because ministers hear just about everything.  And you certainly can’t shock God.  Because God knows absolutely everything.  And loves you anyway.  And just wants you to re-turn and be liberated so that the love of God as manifest by Jesus Christ can fill you up, take you over, and break the shackles of whatever it is that’s kept you bound and chained.

Which is why we’re here this morning.  Oh, I’m sure there are other reasons as well.  But I’m guessing that, for many of us:  We are here this morning, because in this place, we are known.  We are here this morning, because in this place, we hear the good news of God’s liberating love.  We are here this morning, because in this place, we pray for and experience some deliverance from the soul-crushing spirits that, at times, possess both us and those around us.  And we are here this morning, because in this place, we come together as a community who chooses to believe that the power of love trumps all.

May it be so.

Amen.

 

1.15.12

Called In The Night

Rev. Ellen Jennings

I’m going to begin with a story today—not one of this morning’s scripture stories, though I’ll get to those, but an old Chassidic Jewish tale about a Rabbi named Zusya.

Once there was a rabbi named Zusya who loved God with all his heart and soul, and who treated all God’s creatures with respect and kindness. Rabbi Zusya studied Torah, kept Shabbat, visited the sick, and praised God for all the goodness in the world. Though he was not a rich man, Zusya gave generously to those in need. Students came from far and near, hoping to learn from this gentle and wise rabbi. Zusya often told his students, “Listen to the still, small voice inside you. Your neshamah, the spirit of God within you, will tell you how you must live and what you must do.”

Each day Rabbi Zusya”s students came to the House of Study, called the Bet Midrash, eager to learn what they could from him. One day, Zusya did not appear at the usual hour. His students waited all morning and through the afternoon. But Zusya did not come. By evening his students realized that something terrible must have happened. So they all rushed to Zusya’s house. The students knocked on the door. No one answered. They knocked more loudly and peered through the frost-covered windows. Finally, they heard a weak voice say, “Shalom aleichem, peace be with you. Come in.” The students entered Rabbi Zusya’s house. In the far corner of the room they saw the old rabbi lying huddled in bed, too ill to get up and greet them.

“Rabbi Zusya!” his students cried. “What has happened? How can we help you?”

“There is nothing you can do,” answered Zusya.  “I’m dying and I am very frightened.”

“Why are you afraid?” the youngest student asked. “Didn’t you teach us that all living things die?”

“Of course, every living thing must die some day,” said the Rabbi. The young student tried to comfort Rabbi Zusya saying, “Then why are you afraid? You have led such a good life. You have believed in God with a faith as strong as Abraham’s, and you have followed the
commandments as carefully as Moses.”

“Thank you. But this is not why I am afraid,” explained the rabbi. “For if God should ask me why I did not act like Abraham, I can say that I was not Abraham. And if God asks me why I did not act like Rebecca or Moses, I can also say that I was not Moses.” Then the rabbi said, “But if God should ask me to account for the times when I did not act like Zusya, what shall I say then?”

The students were silent, for they understood Zusya’s final lesson. To do your best is to be yourself, to hear and follow the still, small voice of your own neshamah.

The still small voice of our own neshamah—or, the voice of the spirit of God as it is heard by each one of us individually.  And that’s what we’re going to explore today—the concept of call as it relates to the individual.  Of course, institutions, organizations and congregations are called as well.  And, as we move forward into this spring’s strategic planning process at Cleveland Park Church, we’ll be fully exploring that more corporate concept of call.  But before we do, let’s make sure we understand what it means for us each to be called as individuals.  And why it’s so important for us to listen to and follow our own neshamah.

Marjory Zoet Bankson, author of Call to the Soul, describes call as “the inner nudge to wake up and notice our place in the greater scheme of things.”  She sees call as not just a vocational choice but as “a special way of understanding what we are here for, our reason for being.”  And isn’t this exactly the point Rabbi Zusya was trying to make to his students?  We are each here for a purpose, a reason, and every one of us, as an individual, is the only person who can fulfill our particular purpose or reason for being alive in the world.

As today’s psalm so beautifully puts it, we are each “fearfully and wonderfully made” by a God who knows us completely and who knit us together in our mother’s womb.  And that same God, that same Source of Life and Love, calls us to our place in the greater scheme of things, nudges us to wake up and understand why we are here and what we are meant to be doing.

In other words, the point of call is not for each one of us to be a president or a prophet or a priest.  The point of call is for us to be most fully ourselves, for us to hear the voice of our own neshamah and to live out that purpose in the world.

I think this is why there has been so much hoopla around the quotation on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. memorial—to the point where just this past Friday Interior Secretary Ken Salazar ordered that it be corrected.  As the group of us from Cleveland Park Church who participated in the Help for the Homeless Walkathon last November saw when we stopped to inspect the memorial on our way around the tidal basin, the inscription currently reads:  “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.”  And, while many of us certainly see the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in just that way, this was not at all what he himself said, nor was it the point he was trying to make when he spoke those words as part of a much larger message in a sermon entitled, The Drum Major Instinctii, given a mere two months before he died.

The point of this particular sermon, like the point of the Rabbi Zusya story, is that we each have a piece to contribute to this great big puzzle of a universe.  In Dr. King’s words (and who can preach it better than he can?):

If you want to be important, wonderful! If you want to be recognized, wonderful! If you want to be great, wonderful! But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant…by giving that definition of greatness it means that everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve.
You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love. And you can be that servant.

In other words, we are each called to serve in our own way.  And, as followers of Jesus, we have a mandate to serve!  Again, in Dr. King’s words as he presciently spoke of his death:

I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others…that I tried to love somebody… that I tried to be right on the war question…that I tried to feed the hungry…that I did try, in my life, to clothe those who were naked…that I did try…to visit those who were in prison…that I tried to love and serve humanity.

And then these final words of the sermon—and they are why the quotation, as currently paraphrased on the memorial, is so contentious:

… If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice…a drum major for peace…a drum major for righteousness…. I won’t have any money to leave behind. I won’t have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind…. If I can help somebody as I pass along, if I can cheer somebody with a word or song, if I can show somebody he’s traveling wrong, then my living will not be in vain…. I want to be on your (Jesus’) right or best side, not in terms of some political kingdom or ambition, but…so that we can make of this old world a new world.

These are clearly not the words of a man who was definitively claiming to be a “drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.”  This was a man who, as he lived a life that foreshadowed his death, was very much hoping he had done the things he was called to do, greatly desiring to have served in the way that he, as a follower of Jesus, was called to serve, and truly yearning to have contributed that which he was called to contribute.  I think we would all say that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. did that and more.  But he wasn’t claiming greatness.  He was simply asking that we acknowledge he had tried.

So I, for one, am very happy that the Interior Secretary has asked for the memorial to be corrected.

Like Dr. King’s Drum Major sermon, both of today’s scripture readings hinge on the notion that anyone can be called to serve.  In fact, as he said, everybody can serve, no matter who you are.

In the passage from the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, the young boy, Samuel, was, in the terms of his own culture, a nobody.  It was the old man, Eli, whose vision was beginning to dim, and his sons, who held the power.  But the story begins by telling us that:  The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.  Perhaps this is because Eli’s eyes had begun to dim or perhaps they had become dim as a result.  But either way, it’s clear that those in power were no longer seeing or hearing much from God.  However, Samuel, the young servant of Eli, hears God calling three times during the long dark night of the story.  And yet, he doesn’t know that it’s God!  He doesn’t know that it’s his neshamah.  Instead, he thinks that Eli is calling him.  So each time he runs to Eli and asks, “Here I am, for you called me.”

Now this is where the story, for me, becomes really interesting.  For Eli, the somebody, the one who has the power, the one who is important, but also the one who hasn’t heard the voice of God in a long, long time, could have responded to Samuel very differently.  When he realized that God was calling Samuel, he could have chosen to stand in the way.  Out of envy, jealousy, malice or greed Eli could have decided that if he could no longer hear God’s voice, then he was going to make darn sure that no young nobody was going to hear God’s voice either.  Granted, that assumes someone could actually stop the call of God.  But that’s another sermon!

The point is, Eli doesn’t try to prevent Samuel from hearing God’s call.  Instead, and I think this is so very beautiful, Eli instructs Samuel on how to listen:  Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’

And so Samuel does, and the result is not so good for Eli and his sons.  For God says:  On that day I will fulfill against Eli all that I have spoken concerning his house, from beginning to end.  Eli and his sons had stopped listening to their neshamah long ago and, thus, their senses had become dulled.  They could no longer hear God’s voice or picture God’s plan.  So it was not going to go well for them.  It never goes well for us when we stop listening, when we stop visioning, when we stop responding to our neshamah.

But Samuel listened and responded and so:  As he grew up, the Lord was with him and let none of his words fall to the ground.  Which is wonderful and a good example for us all—and yet, again, I’d like to return to Eli.  Because, as I said, not only does he not prevent Samuel from hearing the call of God, he actually helps him to hear it.  And. later, not only is he willing to listen to what God has told Samuel, he actually demands that Samuel tell him.  I don’t know about Eli’s sons, but in this story, Eli exhibits some exemplary spiritual maturity.  He shows us that even though each individual has to listen to his or her own neshamah in order to be the person God is calling him or her to be in the world, that call actually fits into a much larger picture.  In Marjory Bankson’s words, Eli “wakes up and finds his place in the scheme of things.”  By helping Samuel respond to God’s call, Eli actually fulfills his own destiny.  And by so doing, becomes a servant of God himself.

In this morning’s reading from the Gospel of John we get yet another take on the idea that anyone can be called to serve and that, in fact, everyone is called to serve.

As John tells it in the first chapter of his gospel, Jesus goes to Galilee and calls both Philip and Nathanael.  Philip responds to the call immediately, but Nathanael is reticent.  When Philip says to him: We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth, one might think that Nathanael would shout, “Hallelujah!”  But, he doesn’t.  What he actually says is:  Can anything good come out of Nazareth?

Oy.  He may have been missing the point.  But he certainly wasn’t wrong.  As Peter Woods writes in his blog, Are You Listening:

Nazareth wasn’t a good place to put on your Curriculum Vitae as your place of origin. In fact if there was Facebook back then, you wouldn’t acknowledge that you were from there on any social media. Nazareth was a dump. It didn’t feature in any Old Testament prophecies. No great personage had come from there. It wasn’t the seat of any power and no great families hailed from Nazareth. It was a simple backwater town. No great schools, colleges, universities.  There was nothing.  Nazareth was nowhere.  And Jesus was from Nazareth.

So no wonder Nathanael, who hadn’t heard Dr. King preach about real greatness, had trouble believing that Jesus of Nazareth could be somebody.   In this story, Nathanael is the one who, even though it is the middle of the day, can’t see for his own darkness, the one who can’t hear the call even when it comes straight from God.  And Philip, well, he doesn’t criticize Nathanael, or tell him he’s an idiot, or berate him for not being able to recognize the one about whom Moses and the prophets wrote.  He simply says:  Come and see.

Come and see!  See for yourself!  Open yourself to the possibility that God might be present, that God might be speaking, that your own call may be happening.  Come and see.

And this is exactly what I’m asking each one of you to do this morning.  Come and see.  Open up to the possibility of God’s presence in your life.  Look for your place in the scheme of things.  Listen for the voice of your own neshamah.

You might not think you’re good enough for the job.  But remember Dr. King’s words:  You don’t have to have college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.

You might think you’re too good for the job.  And remember his words for this as well:  If you want to be important, wonderful! If you want to be recognized, wonderful! If you want to be great, wonderful! But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant…by giving that definition of greatness it means that everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.

You might not expect the messenger.  But remember the story of Samuel:  Eli’s own place in the scheme of things depends on his recognition that Samuel is being called.  And you might neither recognize nor respect the messenger.  For as Nathanael said of Jesus:  Can anything good come out of Nazareth?  But know that God does not do things according to our expectations or assumptions!  God does not work according to our plans.  So if everything is going as expected, if all things are working as planned, then we should probably be questioning the voice we are hearing.  For if we’re only hearing what we want to hear, it is likely our own ego, not our neshemah, to whom we are listening.  If our assumptions are not being called into question, it is probably our own unenlightened wants and needs that are speaking, not the voice of God.

We are each called.  In the night.  In the light.  When we least expect it.  Whether or not we are ready for it.  We are each called to be the person only we can be.  We are each called to serve somewhere in this great scheme of things.  Come and see.

Amen.

 

1.8.12

Whose Voice?

Rev. Ellen Jennings

I’m going to begin today by reading you a poem prayer written by Teresa of Avila, one of the most influential female saints and mystics in the western world.  Her complete works include seven books, four hundred and fifty letters, and assorted poetry—all this from a woman who lived in 16^th century Spain!

Teresa of Avila was born amidst a world in transition.  The Spain in which she grew up had been greatly influenced by seven hundred years of Muslim culture, followed by  the conquest of the Moors by the Christian Spaniards and the insanity of the Inquisition, which included either the deportation or forced conversion of the nation’s entire Jewish population.

Teresa’s relatives were all conversos, or Jews who had been forced to convert to Catholicism.  Her immediate family was of the merchant class, though due to the rampant inflation caused by the importation of gold and silver from the New World, they’d become bankrupt by the time Teresa’s father died.

Teresa herself was sent to a convent when she was 15, returned home two years later due to ill health, and then went back of her own volition when she was 21.  At that time, many convents were more like hotels for women, allowing them a great deal more independence than they would have had at home.  And this is likely what Teresa, a high-spirited young woman, would have at first been seeking.  However, a couple of years later she had a near death experience that changed her life, and after that she began cultivating a system of meditation with the intent of quieting her mind so that she could hear the voice of God.

Over the next twenty years, Teresa had many mystical experiences, but it was only after the Inquisition forbade women to read, that she had her most profound encounters with God.  At that time she asked the Holy One to teach her soul about divine love, and she began to write about everything that she learned.  The resulting poems/prayers are intimate accounts of her communion with God.

And so I read her words, translated by Daniel Ladinsky:

He desired me so I came close.

No one can near God unless He has prepared a bed for you.

A thousand souls hear His call every second,

but most everyone then looks into their life’s mirror and says

“I am not worthy to leave this sadness.”

When I first heard His courting song,

I too looked at all I had done in my life and said,

“How can I gaze into His omnipresent eyes?”

I spoke those words with all my heart,

but then he sang again, a song even sweeter,

and when I tried to shame myself once more from His presence

God showed me His compassion and spoke a divine truth,

“I made you, dear, and all I make is perfect.

Please come close, for I desire you.”

“I made you, dear, and all I make is perfect.  Please come close, for I desire you.”

Ahhh.  Just take that in for a moment.  Let that message seep into your very bones.  “All I make is perfect.”  “I desire you.”  This is God as the great lover of all.  This is what it means to be beloved of God.

And this is what today’s scripture readings are about as well:  being beloved of God.

But let’s begin with the one we didn’t read.  The Old Testament or Hebrew Bible Reading assigned to this day by the lectionary, or three-year cycle of Christian Bible readings, is actually from the first chapter in Genesis.  And what is the first chapter of Genesis about?  Creation.  But not just creation!  Beloved creation.  For in this creation account God made the earth and all that is in it, including us complicated humans, and “saw that it was good.”  Note that the bible doesn’t say “God saw that it was mediocre” or “God saw that it was okay but needed a lot of improvement.”  No, the Book of Genesis tells us that God created everything and “saw that it was good.”  In the beginning, the word was that we are actually all right!  No.  We’re more than all right.  We’re good.

Are you listening?

And then, in today’s passage from the Gospel of Mark, which is the gospel that will be highlighted throughout this year’s collection of lectionary readings, we hear these words: “You are my son, the Beloved.  With you I am well pleased.”  And there it is that word again.  Beloved.

As Peter Woods writes in his blog, I am listening, “To know that one is deeply loved is one of the greatest of human experiences.”  Sadly, it is one that too many of us have never truly realized.  But the truth is, knowing that we are deeply loved, knowing that we are beloved, is the ultimate form of human liberation.  To really know that we are beloved, to truly understand that the very nature of God is agape, or selfless-love, is to participate in the very life of the divine.  And this powerful experience of God as Love is transformative to the very depths of our being.  As Teresa of Avila discovered when she quieted her mind enough to hear God’s voice, it is what God wants to tell us.

Which brings us back to the Gospel of Mark and the waters of transformation.  And, mind you, Mark is spare, Mark is very, very spare!  By this I mean that the writer of this gospel never provides us with more details than he considers absolutely necessary.  Mark’s gospel is, after all, the only one in which neither a birth narrative nor a resurrection story is included.  For Mark restricts himself to what he considers to be the most important information about the life and teachings of Jesus.  And, thus, he begins his gospel with the baptism of Jesus by John.

John the Baptist, that radical locust-eating and camel skin-wearing wild man was, as best we know, part of a renewal movement within his own Jewish tradition that challenged the authority of the temple priests to mediate between God and humans.  John preached a message of repentance and forgiveness.  And, as I’ve said before, the Hebrew word, teshuvah, most often translated as “repentance,” actually means to re-turn or turn around, to turn back.  So when John called on people to repent, he was calling on them to turn back to God.  And he was letting them know that they had the power—and the responsibility!—to do it themselves.  They didn’t need to go to the temple to get purified.  They didn’t need a priest to mediate between themselves and God.  By wading into the Jordan River and repenting of their sins, they could re-turn to God, begin their lives anew, and get back on the right track.  John was deeply serious about all this, but notice that he doesn’t take himself too seriously.  Instead he tells the people, “one who is more powerful than I is coming after me.”

And then comes Jesus!  Why he suddenly appears, we don’t know.  For Mark simply writes, “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.”  And unlike the other gospel writers, Mark does not have Jesus argue with John about whether or not he should be baptized.  He simply is.  But why?  Why did Jesus want to be baptized by John, when, as Mark has John say earlier, “I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.”  Why?  Because Jesus is part of, not outside of, the long line of prophets and stories found in the Hebrew Scriptures.  Jesus does not just arrive.  John prepares the way for him.  Just as Elijah and all the other prophets prepared the way for John.  Just as we continue to try to follow the way they have prepared for us!  And Mark knows this.  It’s his tradition.  He doesn’t have to expound upon it.

So Jesus comes to the river.  And one might reasonably suppose that he is at a crossroads in his life.  He is in great need of knowing what direction he is meant to go.  He is looking for a sign.  As Nikos Kazantzakis provocatively supposes in The Last Temptation of Christ, Jesus could have made other choices.  He could have turned away from the river on that fateful day.  He could have chosen the easier path.  But he didn’t.  He chose to wade in the water.  He chose to be baptized and, by so doing, he chose to turn toward God.

And what happens?  What happens is very important.  What happens is crucial.  Listen closely.  “…as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.”  This is such an important sentence!  Because, remember, Mark doesn’t use superfluous words.  So let’s take a closer look at it.  First, “as we was coming up out of the water”—Jesus was under the water, a full body immersion beneath the waters of a substantial river!  Second, “he saw the heavens torn apart”—there is only one other place in Mark’s Gospel where he uses the verb which gets translated as “rent” or “torn apart,” and that is when the temple veil rips from top to bottom when Jesus dies on the cross.  So the point is clear— this is a seminal moment, and the heavens did not just part, they were ripped open!  And, third, “the Spirit descended like a dove upon him”—take a moment and rid yourself of any images that have a dove gently flying out of the clouds.  Instead, have you ever had a bird fly right toward you, felt the rush of wings beating the air, feared that it might actually hit you?  Well, that’s what happened to Jesus.  Only it wasn’t an actual dove that came down to him, it was the Spirit descending like a dove.  And this Spirit did not just gently drift, it came swooping down at him out of the heavens that had been torn apart.

This was no gentle baptism.   These are all powerful, almost violent images:  full body immersion in a river, heavens that are torn apart, and a Spirit swooping down from the sky.  How would you feel if all that happened to you?  But then there was the voice:  “You are my son, the Beloved.  With you I am well pleased.”  Which changes things completely!  Suddenly we know that the power and the might of the images are not violent.  That this God might trouble the waters and whip up the winds, but that all of this power and might, all of these overwhelming images and experiences, are simply God’s way of making it very, very clear that what is about to be said is of the utmost importance.  “You are my son, the Beloved.  With you I am well pleased.”

I’m going to say these words one more time, with a slight modification, and this time I want you to listen and take them in as if God were speaking directly to you.  Because God is.  “You are my child, the Beloved.  With you I am well pleased.”  Just sit with that for a moment.  What does it feel like?  How does it feel to be the beloved of God?  Can you accept it?  Can you believe it?  Can you hold the knowledge that a God of Love loves us to the very core of our beings?

It’s hard isn’t it?  Because the voice of God that speaks to Jesus in this passage from Mark’s Gospel is not the voice we most often hear in our heads.  The voice we more often hear is the voice of sadness and shame that Teresa of Avila references in her poem prayer.  We fear that we are “not worthy to leave this sadness,” and we shame ourselves, keeping away from God’s presence.

So whose voice are you going to listen to?  Because our God is still speaking, every day and in multiple ways.  And yet, we so often struggle to hear.  Instead, we’re tempted by other voices, which, as Mark tells us in one brief sentence following today’s scripture passage, is what happened to Jesus when he went into the wilderness immediately after his baptism.  Mark writes, “At once the Spirit sent him out into the wilderness, and he was there for forty days being tempted by Satan.”  And what voices do you think Jesus heard during that tempting?  The same voices we so often hear—voices that have nothing to do with God’s message of love.  Voices of fear, of anxiety, of insecurity, of resentment, of alienation….  Which are not the voices of God.  And Mark tells it like it is.   Because Satan is just another word for that which is not of God.

So whose voice are you going to listen to?

It’s your choice, but I believe that it’s absolutely essential that we listen to the voice of God Who Is Love.  Because being beloved is who we are.  And Love is what God is.  If you have to write it on a post-it note and stick it on your bathroom mirror in order to remind yourself of this reality every single day, then do it.  “I am the beloved child of God, Who is Love.”  Because you are.  And God is.  This is our core identity.  And it’s so important that we understand it!

Baptism in Mark’s Gospel is about two things:  re-turning to God and being reminded that we are God’s beloved.  And God is plenty willing to shout about it—to trouble the waters, rend the heavens, swoop down upon us, and tell us what is really important.  But we have to listen.  We have to be willing to listen.

I’m going to close by re-reading Psalm 29, the psalm we read for this morning’s Call to Worship.  Nan C. Merrill in her book, Psalms for Praying: An Invitation To Wholeness, has written a version that I believe envelopes us—and might even overwhelm us!— with the reality of divine love.  Listen carefully, and see how it feels to you.  My prayer is that, as I read, you will hear the voice of our still-speaking God— the One Who loves you and Who is Love.

Give praise to the Beloved,
O heavenly hosts,
Sing of Love’s glory and strength,
Exalt the glory of Love’s name;
Adore the Beloved in holy splendor.

The voice of the Beloved is upon the waters;
Love’s voice echoes over the oceans and seas.
The voice of Love is powerful,
majestic is the heart of Love.

The voice of the Beloved breaks the bonds of oppression,
shatters the chains of injustice.
 Love invites all to the dance of freedom,
to sing the Beloved’s song of truth.

The voice of Love strikes with fire upon hearts of stone.
The voice of Love uproots the thorns of fear,
Love uproots fear in every open heart.

The voice of Love is heard in every storm,
 and strips the ego bare;
And in their hearts all cry
“Glory!”

The Beloved lives in our hearts;
 Love dwells with us forever
May Love give strength to all people!
May Love bless all nations with peace!

Amen.

 

12.11.11

Unexpected

Rev. Ellen Jennings

Today we lit the rose colored candle on the Advent Wreath.  Which you may or may not have noticed—but if you did, you might have been a bit puzzled by the inclusion of the one rose colored candle amidst all the purple.  I mean, the Advent Season is only four Sundays long as it is, so do we really need to break it up with one Sunday that sticks out from all the rest?

I’ll answer that question, but, first, I suppose we should take a quick look at why the other three candles are purple!  And, for that matter, why the choir and I started wearing purples stoles a few weeks ago, on the first Sunday of Advent.

As I said during my Children’s Talk last Sunday, Advent is actually the beginning or, “New Year,” of the Christian liturgical calendar.  Our New Year is not Christmas, which celebrates the birth of Jesus, nor is it Easter, which celebrates his resurrection.  It’s Advent.  Which I find interesting, since Advent, as you can perhaps tell from the color purple, is actually a season of penitence and preparation.  This means that the Christian New Year begins, not with a wild rumpus but with a quiet and contemplative look within.  Who are we?  How are we?  And, as this liturgical year starts, where are we in our relationship with God?  Are we connected?  Are we separated?  Are we at home?  Are we in exile?  Are we turned toward the Source?  Or have we turned our backs on it?

And, if we are separated or in exile or turned away (as we all are to one degree or another!), then how do we repent?  Again, as I said last week, the Hebrew word for repent is teshuvah, which means to “re-turn.”  So what do we need to do in order to turn back, turn around, “re-turn” to God?

It sounds so challenging.  It sounds like such hard work.  And, mind you, Advent is challenging, Advent is a season that calls us to account, that urges us to take some responsibility for our own situations, that exhorts us to “prepare the way of the Lord!”

But this Sunday we get a little bit of a break.  This Sunday we get reminded of something very important—it’s not ours to do alone.  We are held by both God and neighbor, and so we make our changes, we engage in our return, together.  In the words of today’s Psalm, “God has done great things for us, and we rejoice.”  Which is what this Sunday celebrates.  The third Sunday of Advent is traditionally known as Gaudete or “rejoicing” Sunday, and rose is the color of rejoicing.  In the words of the traditional entrance antiphon for this Sunday’s Catholic Mass, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice!  The Lord is near.”

“The Lord is near.”  And that’s what this third Sunday reminds us:  even amidst the trials and tribulations of a suffering world, our personal pain, and the immense Advent challenge of re-turning to God, “The Lord is near.”  God is at hand.  For Emmanuel, or “God With Us,” is, after all our Advent name for the Divine.

So here we are on this third Sunday, rejoicing!—while simultaneously acknowledging sorrow and the very real need to repent.

And what voices do we hear from Scripture?  Isaiah and Mary.  The Book of Isaiah, which contains not just two, but three separate sections, and Mary, who speaks in only one of the four gospels, Luke.

As a quick review, First Isaiah includes chapters 1-39 of the Book of Isaiah, was written to the people of 8^th century BCE Jerusalem and is filled with dire warnings, threats and predictions of God’s judgment in response to their abysmal behavior.  Second Isaiah (chapters 40-55) was written two hundred years later to a Hebrew people who had already been conquered, had been carried off as captives, and were living as exiles in Babylon.  And Third Isaiah (chapters 56-66; including today’s reading) addresses the situation of the exiles after they’ve returned from Babylon to a devastated Jerusalem.  The people are filled with joy at the prospect of return but are simultaneously overwhelmed by the reality of rebuilding their lives in the wake of such destruction.

And the moral of this Isaiah story of redemption and return?:  be careful what you ask for.  Because the truth is, we rarely get what we expect.  During their fifty year exile and captivity in Babylon, all the Hebrew people wanted was to return to their homeland, to Israel, or Judah to be precise.  But after Babylon was conquered by the Persians and Cyrus the Great allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem, they found things had changed.  Having lived in a foreign land for more than a generation, few had retained an accurate memory of their homeland.  And, since the Babylonian occupiers had destroyed a great deal, including the temple in Jerusalem, the Hebrew people were faced with not only creating new lives in a now unknown land but also repairing the destruction that had been wrought in their absence.  There was another little considered fact as well:  for the truth is that when the Hebrew people were exiled to Babylon, not everyone was exiled!  In fact, it’s very likely that the majority of those exiled were the more powerful, well-to-do and better-educated members of their community.  So not only were they returning to a homeland that had been physically destroyed, they were also returning to a community whose power structure had been deconstructed—and those who were left behind weren’t necessarily thrilled with the idea that those who had been exiled were coming back!

Be careful what you ask for.  You may not get what you expect.

But what about those times when you get something for which you didn’t ask at all?  What happens when God decides to give us something we didn’t ask for and perhaps didn’t want?  What then?

Which brings us to the story of Mary and the Annunciation.  And note, the choice of this particular archaic word is important, because annunciation means “announcement.”  For in this situation, not only did Mary not ask God for that which God gave her, but also God did not ask Mary.  No, God had Gabriel “announce” to Mary that she would bear a son, a child who would be called “Emmanuel.”  In the words of The Message, first the angel “butters her up” by telling her how great she is, and then he simply announces or declares how it’s going to be:

“Good morning!  You’re beautiful with God’s beauty, beautiful inside and out!  God be with you.”  She was thoroughly shaken, wondering what was behind a greeting like that.  But the angel assured her, “Mary, you have nothing to fear.  God has a surprise for you:  You will become pregnant and give birth to a son and call his name Jesus.  He will be great, be called ‘Son of the Highest.’  The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David; He will rule Jacob’s house forever—no end, ever, to his kingdom.”

“God has a surprise for you.”  I’ll say!  “Mary, you have nothing to fear.”  Are you kidding me?

And she is afraid.  Of course, she’s afraid!  Have you ever had an angel visit you?  I ask this in all seriousness, because I know people who are certain this has happened in their lives.  But either way, I’m pretty sure you never had an angel tell you that the Most High God was about to impregnate you with the Son of the Most High.  Because that, I am pretty sure, would freak any one of us out.

And yet, she’s not reported as freaking!  In fact, after the angel explains to her that this will happen through the Holy Spirit, Luke has her reply:

Yes, I see it all now:  I’m the Lord’s maid, ready to serve.  Let it be with me just as you say.

Now that’s a pretty self-possessed teenage girl!  Which leads me to believe that Luke may not have known much about teenage girls.  However, I think the point he’s making is that even when God presents us with the most astonishing, most unexpected, most bizarre, most unbelievable situation, it is possible to say, “Yes.”  It is even possible to repent, to re-turn to God in the process of saying this “yes,” no matter how difficult the announcement or request.  Because that’s what Mary did.  She said, “yes.”  And I have to believe that she could have said, “no.”  I have to believe that, even if she had no choice in whether or not she got pregnant or what role she was going to play in the divine drama, she could have said, No.  Even as God worked through her and in her and with her, she could have said, “no” to God’s plan.  She could have turned away.

Because there’s one thing of which I’m certain when it comes to human cognition and action:  extreme mental illness and disability aside, we always have choice.  Even when everything else has been taken away—our freedom, our family, our physical well-being, our safety, our health—what remains is our ability to choose how we respond to our circumstances.  What remains is our existential control over how we react.  Which is exactly what Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust Survivor and philosopher, wrote in his classic, Man’s Search for Meaning.  After spending years in concentration camps and observing the significant difference between how any two individuals might respond to the same horrific situation, he concluded that, “The last of the human freedoms is to choose ones attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

And this is exactly what I think Mary did.  She wasn’t “choiced” as a good friend of mine likes to say.  No, as Luke presents it (and his is the only gospel that presents it), Mary was told.  She was just told by God what was going to happen.  Gabriel just stopped by one day and announced it.  No preparation.  No expectation.  And certainly no request (this was not something she asked for!).  Just the unexpected.

Just the unexpected.

And she could have argued.  She could even have ranted and raved.  For as a Jew she was absolutely part of a tradition that allows argument with God!  But she didn’t.  And while I can’t know what her personal reasons would have been, I can speculate on the reasons Luke presented her in this way.  And there are two:

One, Mary lived and breathed a Jewish tradition which taught that God would keep the promise, a promise made over and over again in Hebrew Scripture, and that leaps out at us from today’s reading in Third Isaiah.  In the words of The Message:

The Spirit of God, the Master, is on me because God has anointed me.  He sent me to preach good news to the poor, heal the heartbroken, announce freedom to all captives, and pardon all prisoners.  God sent me to announce the year of his grace—a celebration of God’s destruction of our enemies—and to comfort all who mourn, to care for the needs of all those who mourn in Zion, give them bouquets instead of ashes, messages of joy instead of news of doom, a praising heart instead of a languid spirit.

And this is the same sort of message Luke has Mary proclaim in her Magnificat::

God knocked tyrants off their high horses, pulled victims out of the mud.  The starving poor sat down to a banquet; the callous rich were left out in the cold.  He embraced his chosen child Israel; he remembered and piled on the mercies, piled them high.  It’s exactly what he promised, beginning with Abraham and right up to now.

And she sings this song with a praising heart—certainly no languid spirit!

I’m bursting with God-news; she says, I’m dancing the song of my Savior God. 

So while Mary may not have been expecting to bear the Messiah, she lived within a tradition that expected God to fulfill a promise and that believed God would bring about the radical transformation of the world.  Her “yes” emerged from this worldview, and her praise song is much more than a song of submission; it is a song about a God whose promise involves a comprehensive restructuring of the social order based on a re-turn to God.  It is, at heart, a song of transformation and redemption.  So, for Luke, Mary is a Prophet, equal to Isaiah.

The second reason that Luke portrays Mary the way he does is this:  there had to be a Mary for there to be a Jesus!  Sure, God could have done whatever was needed without us.  But if that had happened, it wouldn’t be our God.  Our God, Mary’s God, Isaiah’s God, is a God of Covenant, a God of relationship.  And, as Brian K. Peterson writes, “God intends to draw Mary and all of us into what God is doing, and God apparently is not willing to do this behind our backs or without our participation.”

Of course not!  We’re talking about Emmanuel—God with us!  We’re talking about the God of Incarnation, the God of Creation.  God wants, maybe even needs, humanity to be part of the cosmic story of redemption, even if it makes things more complicated and difficult in the short run.

And, it is in this spirit of connection that Mary goes straight to Elizabeth as soon as the angel departs.  She travels immediately to Elizabeth, because she’s frightened, she’s overwhelmed, she’s excited, and, even in her “yes” to God, she needs to connect with another human being, an older woman who can reassure her and let her know that everything will be all right.  And, of course, Elizabeth, the woman “beyond child-bearing years,” who has recently and miraculously conceived the child who will become John the Baptist, is the only person who could even begin to relate to what Mary is experiencing at this moment.  So Elizabeth affirms Mary’s “yes.”  She embrace’s Mary’s choice.  And the two women live together for three months, giving one another strength and courage for what lies ahead.

And that, my friends, is what we need to do for one another this Advent Season.  Even as we turn individually toward God, waiting for an announcement, listening for a request, expecting the unexpected, we need to affirm each other’s “yes.”  For by so doing, we collectively embrace our choice to re-turn.  And we give one another strength and courage for what lies ahead.

Dianne Bergant writes that:

According to ancient Christian writers, God waits for Mary’s yes; creation waits, Adam and Eve wait, the dead in the underworld wait, the angels wait, and so do we.  With Mary’s yes, hope is enlivened and history is changed. 

Yes.  Such a simple word.  Such a dangerous word.

I challenge you to say it.

Amen.

12.4.11

Comfort, Joy … and Sorrow

Rev. Ellen Jennings

This is a sermon about grief.  Or, sorrow.  It will be about comfort and joy as well.  But prior to that, it’s about grief.

And before I begin, I must offer a disclaimer.  Because I’m about to break one of the cardinal rules of preaching; I’m going to preach about something I’m in the middle of, something I’m just now experiencing.  And I’m experiencing grief.

Why?  Because last Sunday, my beloved dog, Zooey, died.  It was sudden, it was unexpected, and it was an accident, but the details don’t really matter.  Because the fact is, Zooey, whose name meant “life” and who was so very alive, is no longer living.  In one instant, my constant companion, my only girl, and my hiking soul mate, was taken from me forever.  And all the “what if-s,” “why me-s” and heaven-sent wails in the world are not going to bring her back.

Now, some of you may remember that in last week’s sermon, I spoke of life’s grittier moments, and I acknowledged that there are times when life throws things at us that are so truly sad they make us cry.  Or wail.  Or howl from the depths of our being at the moon or at God.   Yes, I did.  And then, three hours after I preached that sermon, life did exactly that.  And I’ve responded in all three of those ways (crying, wailing and howling) throughout the week.

But I did preach that sermon.  And it just so happens that the primary focus of said sermon was on gratitude and the importance thereof.  In fact, my message boiled down to the following—that we are each blessed with an abundance of God-given gifts, that the way we perceive things shapes our experience of them, and that a focus on gratitude can transform our lives.  Because, you see, I really believe those things.  Not just with my head, but with my heart.  I accept them as true.  And I know, because I have experienced it, that a focus on gratitude can bring joy.

And yet, this week I have been overwhelmed by sorrow.  I have experienced considerable pain.  I have even described myself as “bereft,” whose definition I found to be an extremely accurate description of my feelings at certain times on some days:  “Lonely and abandoned, especially through someone’s death or departure.”

Now, before any of you get too worried about me, or, worse, starts wondering what my problem is—“for God’s sake, it was only a dog!”—please allow me to assure you that my logical mind is quite capable of understanding that I am neither lonely nor abandoned.  I have a wonderful family, caring friends (who, in fact, came out in supportive force this entire week), meaningful and fulfilling work, and a fabulous community of faith.  And I can “see” all of these gifts.  I can perceive all of life’s joys.  But that doesn’t get rid of the sorrow.  Oh, it eases it a bit.  But it doesn’t erase it.

So, I wondered—how do grief and gratitude connect?  How can I hold both at the same time?  And I did what I suppose any pastor would do who, in spite of it all, still had a sermon to write for this Sunday.  I turned to the Season of Advent and asked what it could teach me, and I turned to today’s scripture readings and wondered what they had to show me.  And this, of course, is what I read:  “Comfort, O comfort my people,” says your God. 

Comfort.  Well, that caught my attention!  Because why would we need comfort if we weren’t suffering?  Why would we need comfort if we weren’t experiencing pain?  Comfort.  The gift of comfort.  The God-given gift of comfort.

Because God knows we suffer!  God knows we experience pain.  God knows we feel sorrow.  There’s no need to delve into the theodicean reasons for this; the “problem of pain” is something about which theologians will ponder and argue forever.  The fact is, we do suffer.  And while gratitude as a way of life is a genuinely God-centered way to live and one that I actively endorse, encourage and try to emulate, there are going to be times when the suffering is foremost.  And that is what is being addressed by the passage in Second Isaiah.

Why Second Isaiah?  Because the Book of the Isaiah in the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures is thought by most biblical scholars actually to be two books:  First Isaiah (comprised of chapters 1-39) was written to the people of 8^th century BCE Jerusalem and filled with dire warnings, threats and predictions of God’s judgment in response to their abysmal behavior, white Second Isaiah (chapter 40 on) was written two hundred years later to a Hebrew people who have already been conquered, carried off as captives, and are living as exiles in Babylonia.  In the words of the Rev. Kathryn Matthews Huey, “Second Isaiah comes along to cry comfort to the people, release and forgiveness, the promise of restoration and a great homecoming.”

Comfort.  But Second Isaiah doesn’t stop there.  Oh yes, he speaks of God’s comfort, “tenderly” he says—maternal words, the language of mothers—and tells Jerusalem (which is shorthand for the Hebrew People) that she has been forgiven, that she has been punished more than enough and that it is now over and done.  But then he continues.  After comforting, he challenges the people—not with the dire predictions and active threats of First Isaiah, but with a voice of hope and love.  In the translation of The Message, he writes:

Thunder in the desert!  “Prepare for God’s arrival!  Make the road straight and smooth, a highway fit for our God.  Fill in the valleys, level off the hills, smooth out the ruts, clear out the rocks.  Then God’s bright glory will shine and everyone will see it.  Yes.  Just as God has said.”

“Prepare for God’s arrival!”  Who?  God!  No, I mean who is supposed to do the preparing?

We are.

We are supposed to do the preparing.  We are meant to make smooth the road for God’s arrival.  We are asked to clear the path for the Holy One to come.  And this is why Mark refers to Isaiah at the beginning of his gospel in the report about John.  Because this is exactly what John the Baptist was doing!  As soon as Mark finishes quoting Second Isaiah, he immediately introduces John:  John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Which is just what Second Isaiah was asking the people to do!  For preparing for God’s arrival is all about repentance, or the Hebrew word, teshuvah, which means “to turn back or turn around.”  God wants us to turn around, God wants us to turn back from whatever it is that’s preoccupying or distracting or, even, consuming us, and to notice who and what and where we are.  For as Second Isaiah goes on to say, we are grass, we are nothing but grass; we whither and fade, because that is the way of mortal things in this world.  But God is forever, God is always.  And this God of forever, this God of always cares about us, wants to comfort us.  In fact, using the metaphorical language of the Hebrew Bible, this God watches over us like a shepherd watches over his sheep, gathering the lambs in his arms and gently leading their mothers to good pasture.

And that is what I have learned about Advent this week.  I have learned that this God, who has placed both sorrow and joy in our path, has also blessed us with comfort and challenged us to return.

Oh, I could stay angry.  I could continue to howl at the moon.  I could keep bewailing my loss.  I could, very legitimately I might add, question this addition to a string of other such losses in my life.  I could even take refuge in my bereavement, claiming loneliness and abandonment as my lot in the world.  But choosing any or all of these would mean that I’ve chosen to see with eyes that perceive only the pain.  And while the pain is quite real, I choose not to deny the immense gifts I’ve received as well:  the gift of my parents, who got me through that horrible afternoon; the gift of my non dog-loving husband who immediately affirmed the need for a future dog; the gift of my sweet boys, who share my grief; the gift of my dear friends, including some of you, who have acknowledged my sorrow and upheld me throughout the week; and the gift of my beloved Zooey, who loved me without reservation or condition for 5 ½ years…  I am blessed.  And I know it.  And I choose to acknowledge it.

So I return.  Slowly.  Step by step.  With some backsliding, I return.  I never really left.  But I sure did ask God, “WTF?,” or, as I translated for my oldest son, “What the freak?”

And I still wonder why.  And I still wish it hadn’t happened.  But it did.  And when I stopped shaking my fist at the heavens and started practicing some of the gratitude I preached, something shifted.  Something within me released.  Because, the truth is, I’m not in control—and neither are you.  It’s really not about me—nor is it about you.  We are, in the very best sense, like grass.  And the breath of God can wither us at will, but it also gives us life.

I truly believe, all slogans aside, that God is still speaking.  And so, I try to keep the ears of my heart open.  And, this morning, as I was preparing to leave for church, I was listening to Krista Tippet’s show, On Being, and I’m certain that God spoke.  Krista was interviewing a woman about TV and vampire shows—and, honestly, I’m not that interested in either, so I was only half listening to that—when suddenly they mentioned a show I’ve never heard of, Enlightened, and a character on that show who spoke of the Presence of God, a Presence who said, “This is all for you, even the hard stuff.”

And, as I said, I am certain God was speaking—to me, to us:  It’s all for you, for us.  Even the hard stuff.

So I am sad.  I am deeply sad.  But I am not bereft.  I am, in fact, greatly blessed—with both the Presence of God and an abundance of human love.

In Greek, Zoe.  In Hebrew, Chai.  In English, Life.

I thank you, God for all of it.

Amen.

 

11.27.11

Awaiting Abundance

Rev. Ellen Jennings

The Season of Advent begins rather early this year—meaning that, having barely finished our turkey, the First Sunday of Advent is already upon us.  We’ve hardly had a chance to give thanks for our many God-given blessings, and it’s already time to expect more.  Because for many, that’s what Advent is—a time of unfulfilled expectation, a season of waiting, a period of spiritual longing that will only be satisfied by the long awaited coming of the Messiah (ideally, the Second Coming, but if not, then a triumphant Christmas celebration of the First).

And there’s nothing wrong with viewing Advent this way, there’s nothing wrong with yearning to be spiritually fulfilled.  I certainly do!  And, in fact, that’s what today’s readings from the Psalms and Prophets are all about—waiting for God to restore us, that we might be saved, hoping for God to tear open the heavens and come down, thereby to do awesome deeds.

But that’s not what I’m going to focus on this morning.  Because at the moment, I’m a bit desire-fatigued.  Having just celebrated Thanksgiving, and, honestly, having had too little time to give thanks, I’m in need of some focus on gratitude.  And that’s what I’m inspired to preach about today.

This morning’s reading from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians provides me with a good place to start.  In this passage, Paul writes (and I read from the contemporary “Message” translation):

May all the gifts and benefits that come from God our Father, and the Master, Jesus Christ, be yours.  Every time I think of you—and I think of you often!—I thank God for your lives of free and open access to God, given by Jesus.  There’s no end to what has happened in you—it’s beyond speech, beyond knowledge.  The evidence of Christ has been clearly verified in your lives.  Just think—you don’t need a thing, you’ve got it all!  All God’s gifts are right in front of you as you wait expectantly for our Master Jesus to arrive on the scene for the Finale.  And not only that, but God himself is right alongside to keep you steady and on track until things are all wrapped up by Jesus.  God, who got you started on this spiritual adventure, shares with us the life of his Son and our Master Jesus.  He will never give up on you.  Never forget that. 

“You don’t need a thing—you’ve been given it all!”  Wow, what a contrast to the traditional Advent message of unfulfilled expectation.  And, if you’re in need of an even more obvious disconnect—what a radical challenge to the message of Black Friday.  Which is?  I can tell you without having even entered a store or turned on the tv (which is the unvarnished truth, since I hosted thirteen relatives, in addition to my own family, for Thanksgiving!).  All I had to do was look at the inbox of my e-mail and here’s what I received:  “Black Friday Deals!,” “Black Friday Toy Blowout!,” “Bright Savings!,” “Black Friday Starts Now,” and my favorite, “Stuffing.  Sleeping.  Saving.  What a Thanksgiving!”  Indeed.  Oh, and here’s another one— “The turkey won’t be ready for hours.  Shop our specials on line now.”  Oh dear.

Now before I appear too “holier than thou,” allow me to confess that I did actually do some online shopping—on Friday, no less, as I was writing (or shall I say, taking a break, from writing!) this sermon.  Yes, I did.  But since two of the gift recipients are in the congregation as I speak, I’ll refrain from telling you what I purchased.

But my point today is not that we shouldn’t be starting our holiday shopping.  In fact, I actually hope that you have started your holiday shopping.  I’m a big fan of pacing oneself during the holidays.  No, my message is about the emphasis.  Are we focused on acquisition, expectation and unfulfilled desire or are we focused on gratitude, abundance and God’s good gifts?  The details of life remain the same either way.  But the way one perceives them can profoundly affect our experience.

I recently discovered two books that highlight this message in amazing and life-altering ways—so much so, that I’m actually going to pause and give you their titles before I continue with the sermon (and my take on why they’re so important).  The first book is John Kralik’s memoir, “365 Thank Yous:  The Year a Simple Act of Gratitude Changed My Life.”  The second is “One Thousand Gifts:  A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are,” by Ann Voskamp.  Don’t worry about writing them down, my sermon will be posted to the CPC website by Thursday!

The point of both these books, one subtly religious and the other overtly so, is really the same as the emphasis in much of Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians.  Remember, Paul does not stop with the gifts of grace, knowledge and speech that he highlights in today’s reading.  Later in his letter he will tell us that it’s not just those highly coveted gifts that matter but others as well:  wisdom and discernment, faith and healing, miracles and prophecy, and, of course the “still more excellent” gift of love.  And the good news is that these are all gifts from God that we’ve already been given!  We have them.  They’re ours—by virtue of God’s great mercy, goodness and love.  We’re already blessed, already gifted, already provided with an abundance beyond belief.

The problem is that this abundance is, typically, “beyond belief.”  We don’t really believe it.  We don’t actually accept it.  And we certainly don’t live as if it were true.

In the first book, John Kralik, a middle aged lawyer who’s struggling through a painful second divorce, afraid he might lose custody of his young daughter, living in a tiny rented apartment, and using up his savings to keep his small law office going, despairs.  He views his life as being at a terrible, frightening low point, and, in fact, even wonders if it’s worth continuing.  So, on New Year’s Day 2008 he goes on a hike by himself (did I mention that his girlfriend, Grace, just broke up with him?) and gets lost in the woods.  He imagines having to spend a cold dark night in the forest, fantasizes about falling into a ravine and ending it all, and then, suddenly, hears a voice.  In his words,

Then I heard a voice.  “Until you learn to be grateful for the things you have,” it said, “you will not receive the things you want.”  I do not know who spoke to me.  I could not explain this voice, or the words it said, which seemed to have no logical relation to the other thoughts in my head.  I was tired and frustrated.  I sat down for a minute.  The voice was loud.  For me, the voice was loud enough that I thought it might be important, and that it might have an important message.  I should not throw it away.

John goes on to discover that writing thank you notes (almost a quaint, and certainly an outdated, custom for many!) brings about a profound change in his life.  As he expresses his gratitude to everyone from his estranged older son to the guy who knows his name and coffee preference at Starbucks, significant and surprising benefits begin to come his way.  While John writes his notes, expressing thanks for the good things in his life, and spending far less time despairing and complaining about the bad, the economy collapses, the bank across the street from his office fails, and life itself (with all the challenge and the struggle) continues on.  But thank you note by thank you note, John’s whole life begins to turn around.  And again, it’s not that all of his circumstances immediately change for the better.  He’s still in the midst of a second divorce, he still lives in a shoebox apartment that is impossible to cool in the summer, and his law office is still clinging precariously to survival in the midst of a recession.  But John had changed.  The eyes through which he was viewing his world had changed.  And as he changed, as he was able to see the gifts he already had, more were given.

Ann Voskamp provides us with another example of this.  And, warning, while John’s book may make you sigh at the beginning as you read about his personal travails, the first chapter of Ann’s book will make you cry.  Because life does that sometimes.  It throws things at us that are so overwhelming, so truly sad, or even so completely horrific, that they make us cry.  Or wail.  Or howl from the depths of our beings at the moon and at God.

When Ann was a child, her toddler sister was crushed under the wheels of a delivery truck on their farm as she and her mother watched.  Consequently, her mother checked herself into a psychiatric hospital and her father couldn’t find God.  As an adult, Ann stood beside her brother-in-law two different times as he buried infant sons who died from the same genetic disorder.  She’s a wife and mother who has found it difficult to believe that in God is joy and that there are gifts to be found not just in the celebrations of life but in the midst of its grittier moments.

Ann let’s us know that her name means “full of grace,” and then goes on to write:

I haven’t been.  What does it mean to live full of grace?  To live fully alive?  For decades, a life, I continue to flail and strive and come up so seemingly… empty.  I haven’t lived up to my christening.

[But] How do I give up resentment for gratitude, gnawing anger for spilling joy?  Self-focus for God-communion.  To fully live—to live full of grace and joy and all that is beauty eternal.

 Ahh—how to fully live…  Like John, Ann discovers her own way forward.  And, it too, focuses on gratitude for the gifts we’ve already been given. In response to a dare, she begins to create a list, not a bucket list of unfulfilled desires, but a gratitude list of one thousand gifts she’s already received.  It becomes a spiritual discipline for her—chronicling all of the God-given gifts she’s been given—and, in the process, it transforms her life.  The dishes are still there, the laundry keeps piling up, the kids fight, and people die—and Ann denies none of this.  But, like John, she shifts her focus from lack to abundance, from expectation to fulfillment, from desire to gratitude, and from yearning for to experiencing the love of a God whose Mystery is bigger than any of us will ever begin to understand.

This Advent, I plan to embark on my own spiritual discipline of gratitude in the midst of life, in the midst of all life—the chaos and the crowds, the darkness and the despair, the weariness and the waiting, the jollity and the joy.  It’s all there.  There’s no denying it.  But we can choose how to see it.  We can choose, as Jesus so often implored us, to have “eyes that see,” eyes that truly see all the gifts we’ve been given, rather than focusing on those which we have yet to receive.

And I challenge you, or, in Ann Voskamp’s words, I dare you to do the same.  Every day of this Advent Season, I dare you to write down at least one thing for which you are grateful.  And then thank God for it.  And, if there’s another person involved, thank him or her for it.  Make it your very own Advent Calendar of Abundance.  It could transform your life.

Presbyterian minister, Christine Chakoian, recently wrote about Advent in the Christian Century, and I’ll close by paraphrasing her as follows:

There’s nothing wrong with hope in the not yet, but it begins with gratitude for the already.  So this year, instead of trying to compete with the urgency and volume of the commercial Christmas enterprise, I’ll try a quieter alternative, one of intentional thanksgiving for all that I have already been given. 

Bring it on, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and all the holiday sale days to come.  If the gifts God has in store for us bear any resemblance to the gifts we’ve already received, it’s going to be hard to convince me there’s anything I need to buy.

 Amen!

 

 

11.20.11

Good Shepherds

Rev. Ellen Jennings

I can’t quite believe it’s been more than seven months since you voted last April to call me as Pastor—and that it’s been almost six months since I started my work here in June!

But it has, and today, November 20^th, 2011 marks another milestone: my installation as your pastor.  But why did we wait six months to have this installation?  And, what the heck is an installation?

First, the wait.  Since I started in June, the beginning of summer vacation season, it didn’t make sense to schedule my installation until most of the congregation was back in town.  And the reason this is important leads us to what an installation is.  The installation of a pastor in our denomination, the United Church of Christ, celebrates the covenant or sacred agreement between a pastor and a congregation.  As your pastor, I will promise (in the words of the installation ceremony) “to serve this church faithfully, preaching and teaching the word of God, administering the sacraments, and fulfilling the pastoral office, according to the faith and order of the United Church of Christ.”  And you, the congregation, will promise to receive me “as your pastor and teacher, promising to labor with me in the ministry of the gospel and give me due honor and support.”  You’ll also pledge to gather with me and with the United Church of Christ “as a sign of our mutual ministry in Christ’s name.”

So we’ll enter into a covenant with one another, part of it having to do with a promise to fulfill our individual roles and part of it having to do with our commitment to labor together in the ministry of the gospel and to mutually minister in Christ’s name.  And though we do have different roles to play, in our denomination’s polity, or system of governance, we are all a part of the ministry.  In fact, we’re all ministers.  Some of us may be ordained to a ministry of congregational leadership that includes preaching and teaching, administering the sacraments, and fulfilling the pastoral office, while others may be called to serve as lay leaders, Christian Education teachers, Mission workers and many other roles, but in our congregational tradition, every single one of us is a minister.  Because that’s what Christ calls us to do—minister in His Name.

So, assuming this covenant of shared ministry, there are two themes on which I’d like to focus today.  One is what it means to be an ordained minister or pastor and how this fits in with the UCC’s concept of mutual ministry.   And the other is what this mutual ministry is.  Because, interestingly enough, the covenantal language of the installation ceremony says not one word about what it is we’re actually supposed to be doing together in Christ’s name.

I remember when I first read one of the Cleveland Park Church orders of service and realized that you referred to your minister—Doug Clark at the time—as “pastor.”  I was a bit surprised, because in all the other UCC churches I’ve attended and in all the congregations I’ve served, the minister has been known as “Rev. such-and-such”—usually with the first name, but, still, “Reverend”—Rev. Jim, Rev. Pat, Rev. Liz, Rev. Sandy—you get the idea.  And I was, of course, “Rev. Ellen.”  So, I had to make a mental adjustment, but, by the time you voted to call me, I was prepared to become “Pastor Ellen.”  And, when I arrived here on my first day as “pastor” early last June, I assumed that the issue had been resolved.

Au contraire!  Unbeknownst to me, it turns out that, prior to the most recent pastorate, which began in 1994, Cleveland Park Church had always referred to its ministers as “reverend.”  And, in the life of an almost hundred-year-old church, seventeen years is a rather short stint.  So I immediately began hearing from people who really did not like the term pastor and were very much hoping I’d revert to “reverend.”  Oy.

Interestingly enough, I discovered that the reasons the “anti-pastor” folks didn’t like the term had to do with its shepherd/sheep connotations.  “A pastor is like a shepherd, and we aren’t sheep!” one person said (and note, I’m quoting from oral, not written, history, so the wording may not be exact…).  But I think that’s where most of the discomfort with the term, “pastor,” lay—“We’re not sheep!”

No indeed.  And yet, yes indeed!  In the great “Both/And” of life, we are all sheep, and we are all shepherds, which is why so many biblical passages use this imagery.  Let me explain.  As UCC Minister Anthony B. Robinson writes, “Actually, I am sheep-like, or what I imagine sheep to be like, at least some of the time.  I need my human version of green pastures and still waters, some safe passage and sanctuary.  I need a good shepherd to turn to, check in with.  I am dependent, at least every now and then.  I want, some days or hours, to rest on the everlasting arms and be rocked on the bosom of Abraham.”

Can you relate?  I certainly can.  Because we all have some “sheep” in us.  We all “need,” we all require guidance.  None of us is completely self-reliant.  Each of us is vulnerable to the dangers, both spiritual and physical, of life.  We’re all sheep.  I am.  You are.  We are.

But we’re also all shepherds.  Again, in the words of Anthony B. Robinson, “…we’re big on independence, on being in charge and on our own.  Okay.  But really, we are both, both dependent and independent.  We gather to worship as a return to a womb.  We come back to the rock from which we were hewn, to the well from which we were drawn.  There’s a time for that and a place for that.   You’ve been being big and independent all week long.  Now you get to rest, to depend on an Other and turn to a power greater than your own.  But it doesn’t last forever.  The benediction is a blessing but also a charge.  A sweet farewell and a kick in the butt.  Now the pendulum swings in the other direction.  Having drawn near to God in the hour of worship and prayer, we are blessed and sent forth into the world to declare God’s praise and be instruments of God’s grace… That’s the Christian life: gathering and scattering… Dependence and independence.  Not one or the other, but both.  Sometimes sheep, sometimes shepherds.”

I think Anthony has it right—that we’re each “sometimes sheep, sometimes shepherds.”  But what he doesn’t address is the dynamic between the pastor and the congregation.  How does the metaphor work between us?

Well, I’d say that if we’re all both sheep and shepherds, then a pastor is both a shepherd among shepherds and a sheep among sheep.  However, as I noted earlier, we’re each called to different ministries in life, and, the truth is, an ordained minister is called to lead a church.  An ordained minister is called to provide professional guidance to a congregation.  Again, in the words of the installation ceremony, an ordained minister is called to “serve this church faithfully, preaching and teaching the word of God, administering the sacraments, and fulfilling the pastoral office.”  And that’s a tall order.  It’s an order to be taken seriously.

So, while it is true that we’re all equals—I’m no more spiritually or morally or intellectually developed than any of you—it is also true that I’ve been called from among this group of equals to lead this church.  And, given that call, I believe it’s terribly important to understand what it means to be a pastor, how that involves the responsibilities of being a shepherd, and whether it leaves any space for being a sheep.

My fellow pastor, Matt Braddock, recently called as Senior Minister to Christ Congregational in Silver Spring, has helped me think this through.  Unlike me, Matt came to Christ Congregational expecting to be called “pastor,” and unlike the recent history of Cleveland Park, Christ Congregational has always called its ministers “reverend.”  But Matt strongly preferred the term “pastor,” so he wrote an e-letter about it during the first few weeks of his ministry, which I’m going to quote here:

“I prefer the term “pastor” because it highlights certain aspects of my job that have always been important to me:  to shepherd, care, and lead.  Here are a few things I think a pastor does:

Genuinely cares for the welfare of others, not using them as a means to one’s own ends.

1. Works for the wholeness of individuals, families and communities.
2. Actively searches for the spiritually lost, leading them to protection and blessing.
3. Leads with gentleness and patience, by example, not by manipulation or coercion.
4. Unifies the “flock” around a common vision of a meaningful life of service to others under God’s faithfulness and bountiful provision.”

I agree with all of Matt’s points, and would go even further to say that if a pastor is not doing this, then the pastor is not doing his or her job.  The pastor is, in fact, breaking the covenant.  A pastor who puts his or her own needs first, who disregards boundaries, who does not protect the congregation, who uses manipulation or deceit to get his or her own way, or who creates divisiveness within the church community in order to further his or her own ends, has not only broken the covenant with the congregation but has also mangled the meaning of what it means to “pastor,” whose root pascere, means “to feed,” and which I interpret as— meeting the congregation’s most basic needs of nurturance and security.  A “shepherd” who disregards the needs of the flock has twisted the very essence of what it means to shepherd or “to guide and watch over” the “sheep. “

It is a sad truth that leaders can hurt.  In fact, the news has been full of stories about this reality for the past week.  And it is an even sadder truth that there are pastoral leaders whose actions have done great damage to the individuals or collective they have been charged with pastoring.  This is not okay.  It’s not okay in any way, shape or form.  And, sadly, the legacy of pastoral damage can take years to heal.  But healing is possible.  Because God in Jesus is all about healing.  God is all about shepherding.  It’s what our God does.

I say all of this to you, because the covenant between us is so important to me.  I say all of this to you this morning, because this afternoon I will be pledging to honor our covenant.  And, since I won’t have the chance to tell you then how much I really mean it, I want to tell you now.  I will honor our covenant.  I will serve this church faithfully, I will pastor honorably, and, with the help of God, I will not put my needs before those of this congregation.

Now, that being said… I have needs, too!  Which brings us back to the “Both/And” with which I started this section of the sermon.  We are all both sheep and shepherds.  And our ministry is a shared ministry.  And each and every one of us is part of the covenant.  So, my needs are just as important as yours.  They’re just not more important.  We’re equals here, playing different roles, but we share a mutual ministry in Christ’s name.

So what is this ministry?  Jesus states it simply and succinctly in today’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew:  I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me… just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”  So what is our ministry?  It is, in essence, to see the face of Jesus in every single person we meet and to treat that person as if he or she were the Messiah.  This particular gospel reading emphasizes how absolutely essential it is for us to do this for the least of these, and it is!  But our charge is actually broader than that—because the overall message of the gospels emphasizes how important it is that we do it for everyone—including the people sitting right next to us in the pews.

There’s an old story, The Hermit’s Gift, that illustrates this:

Once upon a time, there was a great monastic order that over the years had lost all its branch houses and declined until there were only five elderly monks left in the decaying mother house..

In the deep woods surrounding the monastery there was a hermitage, and as the abbot of the monastery agonized over the imminent death of his order, it occurred to him to visit and ask if by some possible chance the hermit could offer any advice that might save it.

The hermit welcomed the abbot to his hut, but when the abbot explained the purpose of his visit, the hermit could only commiserate with him: “I know how it is,” he exclaimed. “The spirit has gone out of the people. It is the same in all the nearby towns.

When the time came for the abbot to leave, he and the hermit embraced one another. “It has been a wonderful thing that we should meet after all these years,” the abbot said, “but I have failed in my purpose for coming here. Is there nothing you can tell me, no piece of advice you can give me that would help me save my dying order?” “No, I am sorry,” the hermit responded. “I have no advice for you. The only thing I can say is that the Messiah is one of you.”

When the abbot returned to the monastery his fellow monks gathered around him to ask, “Well what did the hermit say?” “He couldn’t help,” the abbot answered. “We just commiserated and read the scriptures together. Well, actually, just as I was leaving, he did say something cryptic and confusing.  He said the Messiah is one of us, but I don’t know what he meant.”

In the days and weeks that followed, each of the old monks pondered these words and wondered what they meant. The Messiah is one of us? Could he possibly have meant one of us monks here at the monastery? If so, which one?

Do you suppose he meant the abbot? He has been our leader for more than a generation.

On the other hand, might he have meant Brother Thomas? Certainly Brother Thomas is a holy man.

Surely he did not mean crotchety Brother Elred! But come to think of it, Elred is virtually always right. So maybe the hermit did mean Brother Elred.

But not Brother Phillip! Phillip is so passive, a real nobody. Then again, he has a gift for somehow always being there when you need him. Maybe Phillip is the Messiah.

Of course the hermit didn’t mean me. He couldn’t possibly have meant me. I’m just an ordinary person. Yet supposing he did? O God, not me. I couldn’t be that much for You, could I?

As they contemplated in this manner, the old monks began to treat each other, and themselves, with extraordinary respect on the off chance that one among them might be the Messiah.

As all of this was taking place, people continued to visit the monastery, because the forest in which it was situated was so beautiful.  As they did, they began to sense the aura of extraordinary respect that now surrounded the five old monks and that seemed to radiate from them and permeate the atmosphere of the place. Hardly knowing why, the people began returning to the monastery more frequently to picnic, to play, to pray. They began to bring their friends to show them this special place. And their friends brought their friends.

Then it happened that some of the younger men who came to visit the monastery started to talk with the old monks. After a while one asked if he could join them. Then another. And another. Within a few years the monastery had once again become a thriving order and, thanks to the hermit’s gift, a vibrant center of light and spirituality in the realm.

Look for the face of Jesus in every single person we meet—neighbor or stranger, friend or foe, business partner or beggar— and treat that person as if he or she were the Messiah.  This is our mutual ministry.  And how perfectly it dovetails with our church’s stated mission:  to nurture love of God and love of neighbor in the world.  Because according to both the Hermit’s Gift and the Gospel of Matthew, there is no difference between loving God and loving neighbor!  We love God by loving our neighbor.  And by loving our neighbor, we are blessed to see the face of Christ, shining out at us from each and every person we meet.

This is a difficult charge—but no one ever suggested that following the Way of Jesus would be easy.  It is, however, what we are called to do.  And, this afternoon, it is what we will covenant to do together.  Sometimes shepherds, sometimes sheep.  Always looking for Christ in the face of every person we meet.

Amen.

 

11.6.11

Sermon Children of God

Rev. Ellen Jennings

When I was a child, growing up in the Episcopal Church, I loved the hymn,  I Sing a Song of the Saints of God.  Some might say that it’s because I had an overly developed desire to be “good,” but I think perhaps it had more to do with the acknowledgment that anyone could be a saint.  “And one was a doctor, and one was a queen, and one was a shepherdess on the green.”  I mean, my dad was a doctor, so I knew that could be a good way to help people, and queen’s have a lot of power, so I figured they certainly had the ability as well.  But a “shepherdess on the green?”  While it had lovely fairy tale overtones, even as a child I knew that someone who herds sheep does not hold a highly respected position in this world.   And though, at the time, I didn’t make the connection with the biblical metaphor of shepherd and sheep, I thought it was pretty great that a sheepherder could be a saint of God just as well as a queen.

But before I delve any deeper into my childhood memories or begin reflecting further on my adult understanding of what it means to be a saint, let me say just a bit about why we’re so focused on saints today.  Because clearly, given the titles of every single sung musical selection today, we are!

As we all know, Halloween was just this past Monday, and I’m guessing that every single child in this church, including most of our Jr Deacons, went out trick-or-treating Halloween night!  Am I right?

But who knows what the word “Halloween” means?  Yes, it’s actually “All Hallows Eve.”  And “hallows” is an ancient word for holy.  So, Halloween is the evening before “All Hallow’s Day” or the day we now call “All Saints Day.”

Many people don’t know that Halloween is actually part of a three-day series of holidays in the Christian (and even pre-Christian) tradition.  Halloween is October 31.  All Saint’s Day is November 1.  And All Soul’s Day is November 2.

Did anyone here celebrate All Saints or All Souls?

No?  Well then, today’s your opportunity!  What are these holidays and how might they have been celebrated— long ago when the day before All Saint’s was still called, “Hallowe’en.”

In the early Christian Church, All Saints Day was actually celebrated in May.  At first it was a day set aside to celebrate only the martyrs of the church (in other words, those who had perished for their faith).  Later on it became a day to celebrate all the Saints of the church.  Historians think that the date was changed from May to November 1 during the Middle Ages, because in the Celtic countries of northern Europe, the New Year was celebrated on that day.  The Celtic New Year was considered to be a time when the veil thinned between the world of the living and the world of the dead, and the spirits of the dead were able to cross over and walk among the living.  Because of this ancient belief, certain traditions began– such as dressing up in scary costumes to keep away evil spirits and leaving food outside of homes so that all spirits would have something to eat.  Does this sound familiar?

In fact, people even did their own form of trick-or-treating at this time—called going “a-souling.”  Poor people would go around to richer people’s homes and beg for food.  They’d receive pastries called soul cakes and in return would promise to pray for the souls of people in that house who had died.  They even had a song to go with it:

Soul, soul, soul cake. 

Please, good mama, a soul cake. 

An apple, a plum, a peach or a cherry. 

Any good thing to make us merry. 

One for Peter, one for Paul,

one for Him that made us all.

But, what exactly do All Saints and All Souls celebrate?  In traditional Catholicism, All Saints celebrates all the Saints in heaven.  Likewise All Souls is a time to pray for those people who have died but are still in purgatory, a sort of preparation ground for all those who have not yet entered heaven.  In the Protestant tradition, since we’re not big on the concept of purgatory, All Souls Day has become a time to remember and honor all those who have gone before us.

 

But we’ve been singing about Saints today!  So what’s the difference between a “saint” and a “soul?”

 

Well, most dictionaries offer several definitions of a saint, including:  “A person officially recognized, especially by canonization, as being entitled to public veneration and capable of interceding for people on earth.”  These are the individuals the Catholic Church celebrates on All Saints Day.  The second definition is simply, “A person who has died and gone to heaven.”  Again, in the traditional Catholic understanding—someone no longer in purgatory.  And finally, there’s a definition of common usage, “an extremely virtuous person.”

None of these definitions completely grabs me.  But I suppose the third one comes closest to what I want to focus on today.  And yet, the adjective “virtuous,” or it’s noun, “virtue,” which means, “to conform to a certain standard of right,” doesn’t really reflect the qualities of “sainthood” that I want to emphasize. Because what I want to highlight today is those qualities that don’t necessarily conform to a certain cultural standard of right.  I want to emphasize those qualities that, in fact, have much more to do with what I will call a spiritual standard of right, the kind of qualities that Jesus called us to have—and the kind of qualities that anyone, whether a doctor, or a queen or a shepherdess on the green, is capable of having.

I’d like to share a small story with you, one recently told by UCC Minister, Rev. John Tamilio.

A single dad, who was new to a particular community, decided to take his seven-year-old son to church one day. It was a church he had never been to before, so his son sat with him in worship.

The minister came to the pulpit and preached a sermon about the saints. He talked about the history of the church, people like Peter, and James, and Mary, and Martha — people who knew Jesus personally.

He talked about the early, fledgling church: people like Tertullian, Irenaus, Augustine and his mother Monica — people who helped clarify the faith amidst confusion and controversy; people who laid the foundation of the church.

He talked about people who lived over a thousand years later — people like Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Saint Teresa of Avila who challenged us to look at the faith differently and find a deeper relationship with God.

He talked about modern day saints, such as Mohandas Gandhi, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King who struggled for the rights of all people.

While all this was going on, the little boy was fascinated by the stained-glass windows that lined the sanctuary. It was a very bright, sunny day, so he was overcome by the colors as the light shined through them. It was as if a rainbow had shattered and covered the congregation with radiant shapes of red, green, gold, blue, and purple.

After the service, when they were driving home, the father asked the son what he thought of the church service.  “I liked it,” he said.

“Were you listening to the minister’s sermon at all?” the father inquired.

“A little,” the boy admitted.

“Do you know what he was talking about?” the father asked. The boy confirmed that the sermon had something to do with people called saints. Testing how awake and attentive his son was, the father then asked, “And who are the saints?”

The boy said, “They are the people who the light shines through.”

In our church we don’t have windows with stained glass pictures of people, but we do have colored glass, and we do have light, and we certainly have many people through whom the light shines!

Because the point is, you don’t have to be a Rosa Parks or a Mohandas Ghandi or a Martin Luther King, Jr or even a Mother Theresa to be a saint.  You just have to have qualities that reflect a spiritual standard of right—the sort of quality that Rosa Parks called on when she was asked to give up her seat after a long and grueling day of work on a public bus in Montgomery, AL, the sort of quality that Mohandas Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr called on when they refused to engage violence with violence while also refusing to submit to oppression, the sort of quality that Mother Theresa called on every time she bathed and comforted an untouchable with a terminal or contagious disease. These people were not conforming to a cultural standard of what is acceptable.  Rosa was arrested!  Mohandas and Martin were shot!  Mother Theresa exposed herself to illness and chose poverty!  No, these people called upon a much deeper, spiritual understanding of what is Right.  They connected to a more Universal Knowing, a Radical Sense of God’s Love – that they then made manifest in this world.  They let the light shine through them.

And the point is, we can all do this.  We can all be Saints of God, who are really just, as both of today’s New Testament readings affirm, Children of God.  As beloved Children of God, we can all live out of this same radical understanding— that if we want change, if we want love, if we want peace, if we want justice, then we have to be it.  As Ghandi said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”  Be change.  Be peace.  Be love.  Be justice.  Don’t just talk about it.  Don’t just read about it.  And, for heaven’s sake, don’t waste your energy just getting angry about.  Be it.  Be whatever it is you wish to see in the world.  Let the light shine through you!

I’d like to ask the choir to join me in singing the last verse of “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God.”  Because, while written for children, it’s message is meant for us all:

They lived not only in ages past; there are hundreds of thousands still.  The world is bright with the joyous saints who love to do Jesus will.  You can meet them in school, on the street, in the store, in church, by the sea, in the house next door; they are saints of God, whether rich or poor, and I mean to be one too.

Saints are the people that “the light shines through.”

Amen.

 

 

10.30.11

Come By Here

Rev. Ellen Jennings

We’ve all heard it—the dismissive, jaded, almost snide reference to a “kumbaya moment.”  Even President Obama, during his 2008 Presidential campaign, was quoted as saying, “The politics of hope is not about holding hands and singing, ‘Kumbaya.’”  And, in fact, many of us have camp memories of just that—sitting around a fire, possibly holding hands, and singing Kum ba Yah.  Which is really quite a nice image.  So why has the song been so “dissed,” and do any of us know what we’re talking about?

The truth is (and, trust me, there are a lot of different versions of the truth floating around), Kum ba Yah is actually an African American Spiritual that originated with the Gullah, a group of people living on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia.  The Gullah were originally from West Africa, brought as slaves to the United States to work in the rice fields of the coastal plantations.  After the Civil War, many of them chose to stay on the land their labor had turned prosperous, and their descendants still live there today.

Interestingly, because the Sea Islands are so isolated, the Gullah community has maintained a distinctive and unique cultural identity over the years, including their language, which is a creole of English and several West African tongues.  In Gullah, Kum ba Yah means “come by here,” and it most certainly didn’t have a saccharine meaning in the cultural context of plantation slavery.  “Come by here, my Lord, come by here!”  “Oh Lord, come by here.”  In other words, “Come to me God!  I am lost and alone and my family has been taken from me and I am tired and weary and ready to give up, and I need you, God.  So, come to me here.

Which means that I respectively disagree with President Obama and suggest that the politics of hope, assuming we have any left, are actually all about “Kum ba yah.”  “Come by here, my Lord.”  Because you, Lord, are our only hope.

But why talk about such things this morning?  Why, on this day of welcome and celebration and exuberant pledge drive kick off, am I moving in such a seemingly sober direction by focusing on slave songs and despair, kum ba yah and the need for hope?

Why?  Because that’s why we’re all here.  That’s why we’ve all come by here.  Because we need hope.  We need each other.  And, Oh Lord, we need God.

Which is what today’s scripture reading from Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonian’s is all about.  But first, a little historical context.  Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians was very likely the first of all Paul’s letters (or those that were preserved, anyway!).  It was probably written around the year 52 CE (common era), and it was the first document of what later became known as the New Testament.  If you’re doing the math in your head, yes, that was almost twenty years after the death of Jesus.

The fledgling Christian Community in Thessalonica, the second largest city in Greece, was comprised mostly of Gentiles, meaning non-Jews, so in his two letters to the Thessalonians Paul was writing in response to their habits and needs rather than to those of his Jewish brethren as he did in some of his other letters.  But in all of his letters, he typically makes the case that he, Paul, came to share the good news of Jesus Christ with a particular community in good faith, that he conducted himself admirably while he was with them, and that he left them in good shape upon departure.  Then, in his letters, Paul usually does one of two things:  either he remonstrates the community for problems that have come to his attention (apparently word was able to get around without the internet in the ancient world!) or he congratulates them on a job well done (or both).

In Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, he congratulates them on a job well done.  And in section of the letter read today the main point is that, in spite of all Paul’s efforts to bring them the Gospel, or Good News, it’s not really about Paul.  The contemporary translation found in The Message puts it like this, “And now we look back on all this and thank God, an artesian well of thanks!  When you got the Message of God we preached, you didn’t pass it off as just one more human opinion, but you took it to heart as God’s true word to you, which it is, [Godself] at work in you believers!”  So, yes, Paul’s work, even, as we learn later, Paul’s blood, sweat and tears—but God’s word.  And Paul repeats this again and again in his letters.  Because, as Rev. Kathryn Matthews Huey writes:

Sometimes we need to be reminded of who we are. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons we belong in community: the reminding of who we are, and of who we are called to be, and of how we are to live. Perhaps that’s the deepest call beneath much of what we “do” in church and as the church: in the teaching of both adults and children, in the preaching of the gospel, in the singing of hymns, in the breaking of bread and the sharing of cup. We need to be reminded that God’s hand has not only shaped us but guides us still and is in fact still at work in the world, through us… And Paul reminds the people of the church in Thessalonica, lovingly [in this passage and others], that just as he has been nurse and father to them, they must in turn see themselves as nurse and father to those who are in their midst. They must care tenderly for one another, share the gospel of God and also their own selves, urge and encourage and plead with one another to “lead a life worthy of God,” a life worthy of their calling. In addition to all this, they too may be called to suffer for the sake of the gospel. This is the call of the church in every generation.

And this is the dynamic tension within any community of faith.  For while it’s true that many of us are here for the camaraderie, fellowship and support we’re so blessed to find within this congregation of fellow seekers and believers, it’s also true that one can find camaraderie and fellowship and support in many secular organizations as well.  So the fact that we’ve chosen a church means it’s probably fair to say that we’re looking for something of a slightly different nature, that we’re searching for something that goes deeper than companionship, as important as that is.  We’re looking for something that is both a part of all our relationships (and that guides and informs our communities), and greater than these relationships and communities.  We’re looking for God.

Which is what Paul seems to be saying in his letter.  “When you got the Message of God we preached, you didn’t pass it off as just one more human opinion, but you took it to heart as God’s true word to you, which it is, [Godself] at work in you believers!”  The fledgling Thessalonian Christian Community was not about itself, it was about doing God’s work in the world.  It was not just about living well with a particular group of people, it was about living out and sharing God’s message of love and justice, as come to life in the person of Jesus, with both one another and with the world at large.  And Paul’s teaching was not about Paul, it was about the One whose message he felt called to share—the Gospel of Jesus, the Christ.  And the message of Jesus was and is:  The Kingdom is here, now.  God’s world is right here, among us.  It is in our love for God, it is in our love of neighbor.  It is in the way we feed the hungry.  It is in the way we welcome the stranger.  It is in the way we stand up for justice.  It is in the way we walk for a cure.  It is in the way we care for the sick and downhearted.  It is in the way we treat the least of these.  It is in the way we challenge the status quo.  And, it is, as today’s Hebrew Scripture story from the Book of Joshua tells us, in the way the leaders of the people stand in the way of the dangerous waters until every man, woman and child has crossed safely to the other side.

 

Can you imagine?  Can you imagine this Kingdom?  Leaders who stand in the way of danger until we are all safe?  People who stand up for justice?  Those who have enough sharing with those who have too little?  Folks who know each other well having room in their hearts to welcome people they are just getting to know?

I can.  Because it can be us.  It can be this church, this congregation, this people, this community of faith.  We are God’s people.  We are here because we care about more than just camaraderie, fellowship and support.  Yes, we care about those things!  But we also care about something deeper, something bigger, something greater than ourselves and our need for companionship—though that “something” is, of course, compassionately aware of our need for companionship!  So we gather as church, we come together as the Body of Christ, and we celebrate God in our midst while trying to follow the Way of Jesus who let us know, in parable after parable, what the Kingdom is “like,” and that this Kingdom, God’s world, is already in our midst, already here.  But we have to choose to live in it.  Because there are plenty of other kingdoms—material, political, ideological, financial— in which we can live, other choices we can make.

Come by here, the song says.  And we have, we have come. We are here.  Singing, praying, crying, we have come.  We gather together, and we hold one another, tenderly, like a mother or father holds a child, and we ask God to join us.  We ask God.  “Oh Lord, Come by here.”  Be with us.  Help us.  Inspire us.  Because we know the Kingdom is in our midst.  And if You, O Lord, are here, then we may have the strength to choose it.

 

Howard Thurman, an African American pastor, theologian and civil rights leader, wrote the following Kum ba Yah call and response for his congregation, and from the words he chose, it’s clear that he did not see it as a saccharine or outdated camp song.  From the words he chose, I can only imagine that he saw Kum ba Yah as the raw and honest Spiritual that it is, openly vulnerable in its simplicity.  Which is, of course, exactly what makes so many of us uncomfortable.

 

Here it is:

O Holy God, open unto me, light for my darkness, courage for my fear, hope for my despair.

Kum ba yah, my Lord, kum ba yah.

O loving God, open unto me wisdom for my confusion, forgiveness for my sins, love for my hate.

Kum ba yah, my Lord, kum ba yah.

O God of peace, open unto me peace for my turmoil, joy for my sorrow, strength for my weakness.

Kum ba yah, my Lord, kum ba yah.

O Generous God, open my heart to receive all your gifts.

O Lord, Kum ba yah

Come by here, O Lord, come by here.  We the people, your people, are here.  We are the church.  You are the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory.  Come by here, O Lord, come by here.

Amen.

 

 

 

October 16, 2011

Pray Without Ceasing

Rev. Ellen Jennings

There’s a story in Sophy Burnham’s book, The Path of Prayer, about a man who refuses to pray.  Apparently, as he was struggling with addiction and watching his life unravel around him, people kept saying to him, “Pray.  Pray!”  But he was prideful, or perhaps afraid, and he would not.  So one day a friend took him aside and said, “Do you know what an ox does when it’s too heavily laden?”  “No,” the man replied.

“It falls on its knees and refuses to move.”

This passage reminds me of the wonderful opening scene in Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, Eat, Pray, Love.   I don’t mean the movie version, for, while that was a good effort, it didn’t begin to replicate the intensity of the writing.  Here’s the scenario in a nutshell:  Elizabeth has reached the end of her marriage, she’s at a crossroads in her career, and she’s personally in despair.  So late one night she finds herself, on her knees on the cold tile of the bathroom floor.  She’s not interested in theology; in fact, she barely believes in God.  But she is interested in saving her life.  So, what she says through her gasping sobs is this:  Hello God, how are you?  I’m Liz.  It’s nice to meet you.  I’m sorry to bother you so late at night, but I’m in serious trouble.  And I’m sorry I haven’t ever spoken to you directly before, but I do hope I’ve always expressed ample gratitude for all the blessings that you’ve given me in life.  I’m not an expert at praying as you know.  But can you please help me?  I’m desperate and in need of help.  I don’t know what to do.  I need an answer.  Please tell me what to do.  Please tell me what to do.  Please tell me what to do…

And that was the start of Elizabeth’s relationship with God.  That was the beginning of her love affair with the Divine.

And this is how I choose to introduce my sermon on prayer.  Why?  Because this one example includes so many of the points I want to make.

First, prayer often begins on our knees—literally or figuratively, it doesn’t matter.  But prayer begins when we realize that we need God, that we need a relationship with something larger than ourselves and something greater than our relationship with other human beings.  Second, more often than not, prayer includes a request.  We’re mortal, we’re limited, we can’t control or even see the big picture, and so we ask for help.  Third, once we’ve acknowledged that it’s not all about us, it usually becomes obvious that we can take very little credit for most of the good things (or the bad!) in our lives.  And gratitude and thanksgiving flow naturally out of that realization.  Elizabeth does all three of these things—acknowledges her need, requests help and gives thanks—on her knees, in the middle of the night, on the cold bathroom floor.

But what her prayer doesn’t include is what follows and grows from this formative moment on her knees.  However,the title of the book gives it away:  Eat.  Pray.  Love.  Out of Liz’s growing relationship with the Divine, a relationship that requires both attention and nurture, comes a joyful adoration of God that goes well beyond all earthly pleasures—even that of eating pasta and gelato in Rome!  And along with this joyful adoration comes a realization that God is the ultimate Beloved, and that union with the Divine is the end goal of all prayer.

Do you pray?  I ask this with no agenda in mind.  But I’d like you to consider the question.  Do you pray?  And note, I’m not asking if you believe in God.  Or what you think about Jesus.  Or whether you read the bible.  Or how you interpret it.  I’m asking whether you pray.  I’m asking whether you’ve initiated the conversation.  I’m asking whether you’ve experienced the limits of your mortality and found it necessary to connect with a power greater than yourself.  I’m asking if you, literally or figuratively, have felt compelled to get down on your knees.

If you have, then you’re going to know what I’m talking about.  And I think most of us have, whether we’ve continued to pursue the relationship or not.  Most of us have been on our knees before God.  Most of us have experienced the limits of our mortality.  But if you haven’t, that’s fine, too.  Hopefully, what I say this morning will inspire you.

In today’s collection of New Testament Scripture readings, the passages in both Matthew and Luke refer to the first inclination of our prayer life:  Asking.  But note, Jesus makes it very clear that God has no problem with this, and neither should we!  Asking is just fine. In fact, Jesus uses the odd little parable of the Widow and the Unjust Judge in the Gospel of Luke to claim that those who “bother” God, who continue to “cry out day and night,” will receive justice, will have their requests met.  And he shares the same message in the Gospel of Matthew:

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

Wow!  That’s quite a promise!  But is it true?  Each one of us can think of a situation in which we asked and it wasn’t given to us, we sought and we didn’t find, we knocked and the door wasn’t opened.  So was Jesus wrong?  Because, clearly we aren’t given everything we ask for, don’t find everything we seek, and don’t always get an open door (or even a window!) when we knock.

But then again, maybe we don’t always have the eyes to see what’s right in front of us.  Maybe we don’t always recognize the answers we’ve been given or the doors that have been opened.

For example, remember the night Elizabeth Gilbert spent on her knees in the bathroom?  And remember her plea—“ Please tell me what to do.  Please tell me what to do.  Please tell me what to do…”?  Well, I’m guessing that, given the scenario—she’d already decided she no longer wanted to be married but was terrified to tell her husband and to unravel their life together—I’m guessing that she was sort of hoping God would say something like, “It’s absolutely the right thing for you to leave your marriage, and you should tell your husband in the morning, and then you should pack your things and move out; oh, and by the way, I’ll be supporting you the entire way, and it won’t hurt a bit.”  Right?  I mean, isn’t that the type of response we secretly want when we petition God with a request?

But you know what God said to her instead?  I’ll let Elizabeth describe it:  Then I heard a voice.  Please don’t be alarmed… this was my voice… but what my voice would sound like if I’d only ever experienced love and certainty in my life.  How can I describe the warmth of affection in that voice as it gave me the answer that would forever seal my faith in the divine?  The voice said:  Go back to bed, Liz.  And it was so immediately clear that this was the only thing to do!  [Because] true wisdom gives the only possible answer at any given moment, and that night, going back to bed was the only possible answer.  Go back to bed, said the voice, because you don’t need to know the final answer right now at 3:00 in the morning on a Thursday in November.  Go back to bed, because I love you.  Go back to bed, because the only thing you need right now is to get some rest and take good care of yourself until you do know the answer.  Go back to bed so that when the tempest comes, you’ll be strong enough to deal with it.

And that’s why Elizabeth describes this dark night of the soul not as a conversion experience but as a conversation starter.  Because it was the beginning of her conversation with God.  And what is prayer if not conversation with God?

So, do you pray?  I’ll bet you do, if only here in this sanctuary on Sunday morning.  We have praise prayer in our Call to Worship, petitionary prayer and thanksgiving in our Unison Prayer, confession in our Silent Reflection, intercessory prayer and thanksgiving in our Joys and Concerns, and praise and thanksgiving again in the Commission.  And, of course, musicis a form of prayer as well.

So we all pray, here together, every Sunday.  But what about the rest of your week?  Do you find yourself asking for help when the going gets tough?  Do you ever say “thanks” when something goes well?  Are there times when you pray for someone else when they seem to be having a hard time?  Are your prayers impromptu?  Are they proscribed?

I’m going to tell you right now that, whatever your answer is, it’s okay.  Like any relationship, our relationship with God is a work in progress.  And no matter where you are on the conversational continuum, the important thing is to keep moving, keep relating, keep conversing with the Divine.

But today’s sermon title suggests that we should “pray without ceasing!”  And doesn’t this mean we’re supposed to pray at all times and in all places?  Well, yes.  But before we get too anxious, let’s be clear that this is the goal, not the starting line.  And let’s also make sure we understand what Paul was trying to express in this passage from his letter to the Thessalonians. Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. You can be sure that he wasn’t suggesting we get down on our knees, in public, and pray out loud at all times and in all places, for this would directly conflict with Jesus’ admonition that we not turn prayer into a public spectacle.  It would also imply that prayer is distinct from all the other activities of daily life, and I believe that’s quite the opposite of what Paul was trying to say.

If we were able, actually, to “pray without ceasing,” it would mean that every thought, word and deed were a prayer.  Not in a public attention-getting sort of way.  Rather, in a “my life is an ongoing conversation with God” sort of way.  We’d be connected, “plugged in” to the Divine at all times, even as we go about our daily tasks.  We’d be fully conscious of the Beloved’s embrace, and we’d live out of that knowing.  Praying without ceasing would feel great!

And Paul knows it.  But I’m guessing that none of us has yet achieved such a ceaseless union with God.  Moments perhaps—I pray that you’ve had moments, perhaps even whole blocks of time.  But you probably don’t yet pray without ceasing.

And, thus, I’m going to focus the rest of my sermon on ways that might help us move a little further along the continuum of our conversation with the Divine.

First, connecting with God takes intention.  So, if you want to engage in conversation, then it’s helpful to choose a regular time and place for prayer—choose it and stick with it.  It’s like date night with a partner or spouse; it doesn’t happen unless you make it happen.  So make the date.

Second, prepare your space, including your body and mind.  Find a place to be alone.  Turn off your cell phone, radio or tv.  Consider putting on soft, wordless music if that helps to calm you.  Sit in a comfortable position, ideally with your back supported and your feet firmly on the ground.  You can get on your knees, but as long as you’re already there in your heart, I’m going to suggest that it might be easier to have a two-way conversation with the Divine if you’re comfortable.  Relax your shoulders.  Breathe deeply.

Then choose your “conversation starter.”  I’m going to suggest a couple, but I recommend choosing and sticking with just one until you’ve experienced its benefits and feel ready to try something new.  Think about who you are and what appeals to you, because I can promise that God doesn’t care much about the vehicle.  God just wants the relationship.

I should clarify that the prayers I’m going to recommend this morning help open us to God, help us listen for God’s voice.  Because, while it’s absolutely true that Jesus invited us to “ask,” I’m pretty sure that, for many of us, “asking” defines whatever prayer life we already have. So I’m going to suggest conversation starters that encourage us to develop an interaction with the Divine—a conversation that goes both ways.

One possibility is to choose a short scripture passage or spiritual quotation.  Some examples are:  the line from today’s psalm, “Be still and know that I am God.”  Or, a quote from St. Julian of Norwich, “All will be well and all will be well and all manner of things will be well.”  Ora verse from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, “I can do all things in Christ, who strengthens me.”  The important thing is that it be short, clear and easy to memorize.  This is a form of Lectio Divina, or divine reading, where you use the words of the passage or quotation to focus your mind.  Thus, when you pray, you repeat your chosen phrase over and over, saying the words more and more slowly if you’d like, and finally just resting in the silence.  If your mind begins to wander in the silence, thengo back to repeating the scripture passage until your mind quiets again.  We make space for God to speak when we are silent.

Another possibility is to focus on your breath.  Our breath is always with us, and the words for breath and spirit are often used interchangeably in Hebrew and Greek.  With this approach, you might begin with a spoken reminder, “Breathing in, I breathe in the love of God.  Breathing out, I breathe out the love of neighbor.”  However, this time it’s not the words that are the focus, it’s the breath.   Focus all of your attention on breathing in and breathing out.  If your mind wanders, just note it, and bring your attention back to your breath.  We make space for God to speak when we are silent.

So let’s take a moment and give it a try.  We’ve chosen our space, there are no electronic gadgets to distract us, and we’re seated, I hope comfortably. Support your back with the pew.  Relax your shoulders.  Plant both feet firmly on the floor, the earth.  Rest your hands in your lap.  And take a deep breath.  And another.  And another.  Together, we’re going to focus on our breath.  So breathing in, we breathe in the love of God.  Breathing out, we breathe out the love of neighbor.  Breathing in, we breathe in the love of God.  Breathing out, we breathe out the love of neighbor.  Breathing in.  Breathing out.  Breathing in.  Breathing out.

[Silence]

How do you feel?  I hope more connected.

I’m going to close by making a few suggestions about ways we can continue this connection, this conversation, as a congregation.  Because prayer is just important to the life of a community as it is to an individual. Thus, the Deacons and I recently had a conversation about prayer and Cleveland Park Church, and I’d like to share some of what we discussed.  As with any conversation, human or divine, it will be ongoing.  But here’s where we are right now:

For starters, we’ve created a new prayer request process.  We invite you to write any prayer requests on the prayer slips at the back of the sanctuary and place them in the prayer box next to them.  I’ll read each one of them, respond to any that desire a response, and pray for every person and situation.  The Deacons will not read them but will hold the contents of the entire box in prayer and pray for specific individuals or situations upon request.  In other words, anyone who puts a prayer slip in the box will be honored with confidentiality, embraced with love, and held in prayer.

We would, of course, like to hear your thoughts about this new prayer process, and we’d also like to get your input on some of the other ideas we’re considering:

• Shall we have a once a month ritual to bless all the prayers in the box?
• Shall we set up a prayer group or prayer chain that meets regularly—either in person or virtually—to hold the congregation and its needs in prayer?
• Shall we place more emphasis on starting each church meeting or event with prayer—remembering that we’ve been called to “ask, seek and knock,” and that asking for guidance indicates both humility and an openness to receive?

We’d like to know what you think!  So please talk with one another, e-mail me or Bruce Grimes, our Head Deacon, and together we’ll decide how Cleveland Park Church is going to continue the conversation.

Let us pray… and may it someday be without ceasing!

Amen.

 

October 9, 2011

Days of Awe II

Rev. Ellen Jennings

You may have noticed this morning that the words of our Call to Worship and Unison Prayer were a little more somber and sin focused than usual! And that was partly coincidence and partly conscious choice.  The psalm on which today’s Call to Worship was based was indeed the psalm included in today’s list of lectionary readings.  So that was coincidence.  But the confession we recited as our Unison Prayer?  That was conscious choice.

And the truth is, today’s sermon is going to focus on sin.  And reparation.  And atonement.  I’m going to continue the Jewish High Holiday theme I began last Sunday with the celebration of  Rosh Hashanah, or the Jewish New Year, and focus this morning on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.  For as I explained in my last sermon, the ten Days of Awe or High Holy Days of the Jewish liturgical year begin with a Rosh Hashanah celebration of God’s great gifts—the creation, the covenants, the commandments—everything with which we are blessed.  And they end with a Yom Kippur focus on what happens when we turn away from those gifts, when we turn away from God, and on what we need to do in order to re-turn, to be redeemed, to come back into right relationship with a Creator who has provided us with everything we need.

So last week my sermon focused on all of God’s blessings, including the commandments, and how they can sustain us in even our darkest hour.  And today, my sermon will focus on what happens when we turn our backs on those blessings, including the commandments, and are lost in our disconnection from God.

I’ll begin by focusing on this morning’s Hebrew Bible scripture reading—because it’s another challenging one.  In this particular passage from Exodus, we get the next installment of the story about the Hebrew people’s escape from Egypt.  They’ve already experienced a miraculous and God-given release from slavery and bondage, they’ve received the blessing of food and drink provided in the desert, and they’ve been promised a new land for themselves and their descendants.  God has provided them with an abundance of gifts!

But instead of celebrating and trusting and giving thanks to the Almighty, who has so blessed them, the people complain, beg, disobey, and ignore their Creator on a regular basis.  Thus, last week’s reading focused on God’s decision to give them a few rules, the Ten Commandments (though I should note that these ten are only a fraction of the commandments or mitz voth actually listed in Exodus).  And they were given the commandments, because we humans clearly need limits!  We require some serious guidance in order to live respectfully in community with one another and to live faithfully in relationship with God.

The problem is, in today’s reading we find out that after Moses shared the Ten Commandments with the people, God asked him to come back up the mountain to receive the rest of the mitz voth.  And though the people had been quite willing to promise obedience to the Divinewhen Moses was around, shortly after he left this second time, they lost it.  I mean, really lost it.  Though they’d just promised to honor only God, the provider of all their blessings, and not to worship material objects and human-created images, as soon as Moses went back up the mountain, they immediately began whining and whining and asking Aaron (who was, if you’ll recall, Moses’ brother) to make some new gods for them.  Literally.  So, Aaron (what was he thinking?), asks them for their gold jewelry and melts it down to make a golden calf, a shiny thing, a piece of bling, for them to worship.  Which they proceed to do, in addition to having a wild party (feel free to use your imagination here).

And this is what happens next.  God completely loses it and threatens to incinerate everyone!  So Moses, the incredibly human and fallible Moses, has to talk God down, to bring the Creator of the Universe back from the brink, and to save the people from being destroyed by the Almighty’s wrath.

Which is why I find this scripture passage challenging.  I mean, do I really think that God, the great and benevolent Mystery, has a temper that can flare into apoplectic rage just because people do stupid things?  Well?  No!  I don’t.  That’s not really how I view God.  That’s not the Source of Light and Love that I worship.  But I do get it.  I get the story.  I understand why the God character in this story loses it.  And I understand why Moses is given the power to intervene.

But before I continue with that thought, it’s important to understand that in the Hebrew Bible stories, God is more often than not presented as a “character.”  God is anthropomorphized and given human thoughts and feelings and actions.  God is made mortal.  Why?  Well, as I shared a moment ago, I don’t think it’s because the Divine is really constrained by human emotions or limited by mortality.  Rather, I think it’s because human emotions are something we humans can understand.  We can understand a God who feels what we feel and responds in ways that we might respond.  And we can relate to a Creator who wants so badly to be in relationship with us, that our rejection of this offer makes Him angry.  Or Her.  Remember, God is being anthropomorphized here.  And the reason we can understand all this is that we want relationship as well.  Human life, at the most fundamental level, depends upon our relationship with others.

Which is a message we find throughout both the Jewish and the Christian Scriptures.  We need relationship—with God, with other humans.  And God wants to be in relationship with us.  It’s all about covenant! We humans are in a covenantal relationship with God, and this relationship involves abundant blessings, solemn promises and specific requests. So throughout Scripture, whenever the covenant is abandoned, whenever the relationship with the Divine is severed, we’re at a loss.  We’re in the wilderness, bereft and alone, because we’ve turned our backs on God.  But what today’s Exodus story wants us to understand is that, when this happens, God is bereft as well.  Bereft and angry, because anger is so often a cover for grief.  The Divine grieves when we step out of the covenantal relationship.  Because God needs to be in relationship with us just as we need to be in relationship with God.  There is a holy symbiosis here that the Exodus stories highlight.  And in today’s reading, Moses steps into the rift and reminds God of this.  And the Almighty listens, and remembers, and decides not to destroy.

So here we are, thousands of years later, still in a covenantal relationship with the Divine and still trying to honor the promises made and the requests given. But it’s hard, and we’re human, and we often miss the mark.  Which is one of the definitions for sin in both Hebrew and Greek: we “miss the mark.”  For just as an archer pulls his or her bow and either hits or misses the target, so does our moral aim either hit or miss its goal.  And, like I said, we often miss.  We do!  Let’s all admit it right now.  We.  Sin.  It’s really an okay word.  Yes, it’s been overused and judgmentally used and hypocritically used.  Nonetheless, it’s an accurate description of what each one of us does every day:  we miss the mark.  Sometimes we try really really hard to aim true, and we still miss.  Other times, honestly, we don’t try very hard at all, and so, we miss.  And other times, well, we don’t even give it a shot.  We just choose to miss.

And that’s what we’re talking about today.  That’s what Yom Kippur is really all about—acknowledging that we missed the mark and determining what to do about it.  Admitting that we have sinned and deciding how to respond. Because sinning does require a response!  At least in a world of relationships it does.  And certainly with a God of covenant it does.  Why?  Because when we miss the mark it never affects only us.  It always affects at least one other person with whom we are in relationship.  And if it doesn’t affect a human relationship?  It still affects our ultimate relationship—the one with God.

Which is why each year, during the Days of Awe, Jews acknowledge their sins, seek to make amends, and ask forgiveness from God.  They spend the entire ten-day period, culminating with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, attempting to right their wrongs and make reparation for their sins.  And having done this to the best of their human ability, they trust God will absolve them.

So this is one way of taking seriously our covenant with the Divine.  In the Jewish tradition, seeking forgiveness is always connected with making amends and working to repair the relationship—whether with another human or with God.  Asking for absolution always involves teshuvah, a turning back from the golden calf and a re-turn to the Divine.

And this may sound familiar.  For many of us have either read about or followed a Twelve-Step Program that includes steps which involve both identifying the wrong we have done and seeking to make reparations to those whom we have harmed.  Step #8 asks us to make a list of all the people we have harmed and to be willing to make amends to each one.  And Step #9 asks that we make direct amends to those people whenever possible except when to do so would injure them or others.  So this is another way of taking covenant seriously, another way of honoring our relationship with other humans and with the Divine.

And what about our Christian tradition?  What do we Christians do when we miss the mark?  For in our tradition, we believe not only that we are already forgiven by a God who loves us unconditionally but also that we don’t have to do anything to earn this forgiveness.  We are already loved, already, accepted, already blessed!

Yes.  We are.  But being already forgiven does not exempt us from making reparations.  Being already forgiven does not absolve us from the need to re-turn to God.  And being already forgiven most certainly does not relieve us of the duty to make amends.

Which brings me to today’s parable from the Gospel of Matthew, a parable about which Mary W. Anderson, a Lutheran pastor, recently wrote in the magazine, Christian Century, “If you wrestle with this Matthean parable through the night, it’ll leave you limping by morning.”  Which is what I did.  I wrestled.  And, though I may not be limping, I was certainly up a lot of the night!  But, suddenly, within the context of my thoughts on Yom Kippur and the Jewish understanding of forgiveness and atonement, this parable made sense to me.  I “got it.” Or, I got something.  And I’d like to share it with you this morning.

Because what I “got,” is actually connected to the Exodus passage we examined earlier.  What I “got” is that it’s all about relationship.  God is indeed in this thing, this covenant, with us.  Our Creator is intimately involved with all that we do and all the choices that we make.

So this wedding parable that on the surface appears to be an allegory about the saved and the damned (which is not a theology I profess), is, from a covenantal perspective, about the relationship between the Great Gift Giver and those of us who accept or reject the gifts.  And it’s also about those who receive the gifts andhow we receive them.  So when the first invited guests don’t show up to the party, they’re clearly rejecting the gift outright.  And their rejection infuriates (or, perhaps, saddens and then infuriates) the Giver. Thus, the Giver offers the gift to another group of people, a “less deserving” groupin the eyes of popular culture. And these people accept the gift, these people come to the party!  Which is great!  And should perhaps be the end of the parable.  In fact, some New Testament scholars think that it actually was the end of the parable as Jesus, the great bringer of God’s message of love and forgiveness, told it.  But in the Matthean version, it’s not. Because one of the people who comes to the party does not honor the Giver.  One of the people just takes the gift for granted and makes no special effort in response.  And that person is thrown out of the party, into the dark, where there is “wailing and gnashing of teeth.”

Which is the point at which many people, including myself, find this parable troubling.  For doesn’t God accept us just as we are?  Aren’t we forgiven, regardless of our sin?  Well, yes.  But.

Yes, love is unconditional.  And, yes, forgiveness is complete.  But the covenant still exists!  We’re still in relationship with God.  And relationship, if you will recall, is a two way street.  Which means that the Giver of the gift, the Host of the party does expect something in return.  What we do with the gift means something.  How we come to the party, matters.

So I ask you—if the gift is forgiveness, if the wedding party is God’s great and total acceptance, then how many of us are putting any special effort into our response?  I ask, because in a covenantal relationship, it matters.

And this is where the Jewish approach to forgiveness can be so instructive.  This is where the Twelve Step emphasis on making amends can teach us so much.  Because both traditions require us to view forgiveness in the context of relationship.  In Judaism, absolution requires reparation.  And in the Twelve Step program, righting the wrongs we have done to others is an essential part of our own recovery, our journey toward spiritual health.

So last week we honored the celebration of Rosh Hashanah and the great gifts we’ve been given by a God whose generosity knows no bounds.  And this week we’re focusing on Yom Kippur and the need to repent of our tragic inability to fully accept these gifts, in fact our inclination to reject them, and our tendency both to miss the mark and to walk down a path that leads us further and further away from our connection, our covenant, with God and other humans—indeed, with all of creation.

So we must acknowledge that we’ve missed the mark.  We must admit that we have sinned.  And we must repent.  We must repair.  We must turn around.  Because when we’re walking down the wrong path, making the wrong choices, doing the wrong things, and, therefore, missing the mark, forgiveness is not the end of the story!  We still have to make amends.  We have to walk back into relationship with God and our fellow human beings, and we have to choose to make things right with them.

God wants to be in relationship with us.  In the words of Torah interpreter, Ava Zarnberg, “God desires us.”  Which is to say, “God loves us.”  We are beloved of God, in a relationship as ancient as Creation, as blessed as covenant, as important as commandment, as loved-filled as gospel, and as new as this morning.

God loves us.  And God forgives us.  We are, in fact, already loved and already forgiven by God.  We know this, because Jesus has told us.  But the God who loves and forgives us also desires a dynamic relationship with us.  The God who offers us these amazing gifts, wants us to accept them, wants us to respond, wants us to love back.  We’re meant to accept the gift, respond to the invitation, and dress up for the party.  But it’s our choice.  We can re-turn.  Or we can turn away.  We can gratefully accept the gifts.  Or we can reject them.  We can assume forgiveness is a right.  Or we can embrace it as a sign of God’s eternal love and respond to it by entering ever more deeply into our covenantal relationship with other humans and the Divine.

And so I ask one more time, because in a covenantal relationship it matters:  if the gift is forgiveness, if the wedding party is God’s great and total acceptance, what sort of effort are we putting into our response?

Amen.

 

October 2, 2011

Days of Awe

Rev. Ellen Jennings

As I said in the Children’s Talk, Thursday was Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the Jewish High Holy Days, and the start of the Jewish liturgical year.  So I say to you now, Shanah Tovah! (which means “a good year”).  These High Holy Days, or Days of Awe, are bookended by two important ritual celebrations: Rosh Hashanahand Yom Kippur.   The first celebrates God’s great gifts—the creation, the covenants, the commandments, everything with which we are blessed, and the second focuses on what happens when we turn away from those gifts, when we turn away from God, and what we need to do in order to return, to be redeemed, to come back into right relationship with the Creator who has provided us with everything we need.

The truth is, it’s impossible to separate Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which is why they’re bound together by the Days of Awe.  For the question of whether we accept or reject Gods’ gifts sets the stage for the great divine and human drama in which we live.  In fact, this question is so important that I’m going to spend two Sundays on it.  Today’s sermon will focus on all of God’s blessings, including the commandments, and how they can sustain us even in our darkest hour.  And next Sunday’s sermon will focus on what happens when we turn our backs on those blessings, including the commandments, and are lost in a wilderness of disconnection from God.

Because Creation was God’s first gift, on Rosh Hashanah the Torah reading often includes a passage from the Creation Story in Genesis.  For at the beginning of time, the Source of Life created the world.  The Eternal One created Eden! And God saw that it was good, and it was good.It was an amazing gift.  But as we all know, humans weren’t and aren’t so great at appreciating this wonderful Eden.  In fact, it’s part of what makes us human—we always seem to want more.  And though sometimes this serves us, often it doesn’t.

So in spite of this first amazing gift, we humans pushed the limits, we ignored the rules, and our actions resulted in our banishment from the garden.  Butthe Creator loved us just the same, and later, in that very same book of Genesis, created a covenant with us, promising to stay in relationship us, and expecting in return that we wouldhonor the limits, follow the rules, and respect our part of the covenantal relationship.But, we’re human!  And we have a hard time honoring limits, following rules and respecting covenants.  In fact, we’re notorious for doing exactly the opposite.Which is what we did.

So the Almighty tried another approach, and chose a great leader, freed us from slavery, and led us on an Exodus into the wilderness, promising us our own land. But even then, even after being freed from bondage, the people complained and wanted more, rejecting their relationship with the Creator, turning their attention toward material substitutes, and failing to trust the promises God had made.

So God decided we needed some clear boundaries—because, obviously, the permissive approach to divine parenting was not working.  These humans needed some tough love.  Thus, in today’s reading from the Book of Exodus, God provides Moses with some limits for the people—some rules to live by, a set of expectations for what it means to live in community with others and to live in relationship with God.

And these are the Ten Commandments, which Penny read to you earlier.  I’m going to repeat them now, because as popularized and politicized and polarized as they’ve become, these words from the Creator, the Source of All, the God of Good Gifts, are actually key to our happiness.  When followed, they keep us from our worst excesses and save us from our more unbearable bouts of selfishness.  They help us to stay focused on what Jesus later summarized in the Two Great Commandments:  Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.

So here they are, in simple, straightforward and contemporary words:

• Love God.
• Don’t serve other gods.
• Don’t worship “things.”
• Be respectful when you say God’s name.
• Rest and appreciate God’s creation one day a week.
• Be respectful and appreciate your parents.
• Don’t kill.
• Respect your marriage vows.
• Don’t steal.
• Don’t lie.
• Don’t desire things that belong to other people.

These are limits, folks.  They are clear boundaries.  They are guidelines from a Loving Source who understands that we need to be reined in sometimes, that we don’t always make respectful and loving choices, and that we often err on the side of selfishness, vanity and greed.  They’re words from a Divine Presence who “gets” that we humans need help if we’re going to take real pleasure in God’s good creation, that we need guidance if we’re going to fully enjoy, and not destroy, the great bounty we’ve been given.

And Rosh Hashanah is about enjoying that great bounty, about appreciating the abundance of God’s good creation, about tasting the sweetness of the apples and honey eaten to symbolize a sweet and wonderful new year.  The sound of the shofar wakes us up both to these gifts and to the blessing of a fresh start.

And all this is good.  The creation is good, our God is good, the commandments are good, new beginnings are good, and these ritual celebrations empower us to embrace the great goodness with which we have been blessed.

And yet.  And yet we know that it is not all good!  We just heard a song Ani Ma-Amin, meaning, ironically, “I believe,” that was sung by concentration camp inmates as they marched to their deaths.  In fact, on Friday I watched a tragically beautiful videoof this song, sung by the Miami Children’s Choir, illustrated by photos and footage from the Nazi death camps.  You’ve all seen them.  Many of you have been to the Holocaust Museum right here in DC.  And it’s terribly disturbing to see what human beings are capable of doing to other human beings, and, hence, to God.

And I’m not going to try to make it better today.  Not even for the middle school students who are sitting here with us.  Because they already know that people are not always kind.  They already know why the Ten Commandments and the Two Great Commandments are so important.  They already know that people need loving moral guidance.

No, I’m not going to deny the horror of what happens when human beings make choices in direct opposition to our God given commandments, when they make a conscious decision to reject the divine covenant to love and be loved.  And, in fact, that’s what I’m going to preach about next week.  But I’m also not going to let the ones who’ve turned their face from both God and neighbor have the final say.  Because there’s another side to this story.  And this is what I want to share withyou today.  This is the Rosh Hashanah tale I want to tell.

Once upon a time there was a young Jewish woman named Etty Hillesum, who was in her late twenties when the Nazis invaded Amsterdam in 1940.  Like Anne Frank, she kept a journal, which was later published under the title, An Interrupted Life, and I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been deeply affected by reading it.  Her words have been a shofar, a wake up call, for many people around the world, including myself, and her story of spiritual growth and transformation as she embraced God’s giftsin the darkest hourhas inspired and catalyzed us to live our own lives in new and different ways.

Etty’s story begins as might the story of any well-educated, cosmopolitan, young European woman of the 20^th century.  She’s very bright, somewhat tormented, a bit driven, and disarmingly insecure.  She lives in a group house in Amsterdam and earns a living teaching and translating Slavic texts, though she has a law degree as well.

Etty receives herwake up call when she begins seeing a famous psychologist, Julius Spier, and forms a relationship that is simultaneously therapeutic, personal and deeply spiritual.  He’s Etty’s shofar and inspires her to initiate a period of intense self examination which leads to a path of daily prayer, scripture reading and reflection—all of which result in a deeper connection with the Divine, a connection that will become more and more powerfuleven as the Nazis invade her city, the Jewish citizens are slowly divested of their property, livelihood and dignity, her friends and neighbors are shipped off to Westerbork (one of the holding camps on the way to Auschwitz), and she, too, is finally sent to the camps.

But what makes Etty’s story different from that of many of her peers is that, rather than being a story of tragedy and defeat, hers is a story of triumph.  Etty’s life, even though it ends at Auschwitz, is a Rosh Hashanah tale of Divine gifts and new beginnings.  Why?  Because rather than being defeated by the overwhelming forces of bigotry, insanity, evil and hate, she is set free by a liberating tide of compassion, a deep deep understanding of the human condition, and by Love—yes, love of God and love of neighbor!

As a member of the Jewish Council in Amsterdam, Etty had the chance to stay out of the camps longer than most, but, instead, she chose to go to Westerborkwith the others, because she understood that there was no difference between herself and every other Jew, Gypsy, Communist, Slav, homosexual or handicapped person who had to go.  Non-Jewish friends in Amsterdam begged her over and over again to allow them to smuggle her out of the city to safety.  But Etty realized that the only true safety is the soul deep knowledge of covenant—the knowledge that we are each so connected to the other that there is, in the end, no space between the place where I end– and you begin.  Loving your neighbor as yourself means exactly that:  loving your neighbor as yourself until there is no distinction left between the two.  And loving God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength means the same thing:  loving God with your whole self to the point where the line between self and God is blurred and we are One.

In the end, Etty was killed as a Jew, but she identified with no particular religion.  She was in love with the Christian gospels, especially Matthew, she was a voracious reader of literature and philosophy, she was a follower of Julius Spier’s Jungian inspired psychology, and she was committed to sharing the life and fate of her peers.  Etty allowed no one to define her, nor did she define herself.  Rather, she lived out of her deep connection to the Divine, writing a year before she died:

I now realize, God, how much You have given me.  So much that was beautiful and so much that was hard to bear.  Yet whenever I showed myself ready to bear it, the hard was directly transformed into the beautiful.  And the beautiful was sometimes much harder to bear, so overpowering did it seem.  To think that one small human heart can experience so much, O God, so much suffering and so much love.  I am grateful to you, O God, for having chosen my heart, in these times, to experience all the things it has experienced.

Such was Etty’s acceptance of God’s gifts!

And so… even though it’s impossible for me to imagine—and I thank God for this blessing!— I think Etty would have understood what was on the hearts and minds of the precious human beings who marched to the gas chambers, singing “I believe.”  I know she understood.

There’s a picture of Etty that I can see in my mind’s eye—though no such photograph really exists.  In fact, the event that inspired this image is not even recorded in her journals, which were left behind with friends in Amsterdam when she went to Westerbork.  But the picture I have in my head is the Etty that got on the cattle car when she was finally being transported to Auschwitz.  And she’s singing.  Yes, Etty is singing.

And how do I know this?  Because she must have written and addressed a postcard when she got on that transport train, and it was later found on the side of the tracks by a Dutch farmer, who sent iton to her non-Jewish friends in Amsterdam (the same friends who had so often begged her to let them smuggle her away).

And the postcard read, “We left the camp singing.”

So as we honor the Jewish celebration of Rosh Hashanah, the first of the Days of Awe, let us really listen to the wake up call of the shofar.  Let us respond to its trumpeting sound that reminds us of the many good gifts, including God’s creation and commandments, with which we are so richly blessed.  And let us move forward, deeply connected to God and one another, into thenew year… singing.

 

Shanah Tovah.

 

September 18, 2011

Manna

So what was all the complaining about?  What was going on when the Israelites complained to Moses and Aaron about being hungry as they entered the wilderness of Sin between Elim and Sinai?  A month and a half into their journey away from Egypt, and, already, freedom wasn’t feeling so sweet!  They were no longer dancing and singing in celebration of their victory over the Egyptians and their elation at escaping the Pharaoh’s cruel reach.

No, reality had set in, and they were hungry.  Hungry, tired, and wondering what the heck they’d gotten themselves into.  “What,” they must have asked themselves, “were we thinking?”  “There we were, back in Egypt, with plenty of bread and even some decent lamb stew.  Okay, so we were enslaved, but at least we had food to eat!”

Ah, such is the short duration of the average spell of gratitude and joy before we find something to worry about, something to fear, something about which to complain before God.  And so the Israelites did.  They complained to Moses and Aaron.  Who complained to God.  And God understood.  Because God gets that we’re human, and we forget, and it’s really difficult for us to trust in abundance, really challenging for us to believe in grace.  So the Holy One, El Shaddai, the Almighty, told Aarron and Moses to let the people know their complaints had been heard—and that they’d be answered.  God, the Great Provider, would send down quails in the evening and bread in the morning.  And the people would eat.  And so it was.  And the people knew what quails were, they’d seen those small birds before, and they were quite comfortable cooking and eating them.  But the “bread,” well, that was something else.  Because it certainly didn’t look like any bread they’d ever seen!  Instead, it was a white flaky substance that covered the ground.  So, they said, “man-hu” (what is it)?  But just because we don’t recognize something, doesn’t mean it’s not what God says it is.  And in fact, this “bread” was no more unearthly than the quails the Israelites recognized.  It was simply the result of a type of plant lice that punctures the fruit of the tamarisk tree and excretes a substance from its juice, a whitish flake or ball.  During the day, it disintegrates, but in the cool of the night, it congeals and can be gathered, compacted and baked into a kind of bread.  So—“man-hu” or manna, like the quails and all creation, provided by God.

And that’s where today’s lectionary reading ends.  But, as usual, that’s not the end of the story.  Rather, Moses then lets the Israelites know that, while God has indeed provided, the provisions come with a few instructions attached.  And the instructions have to do with the amount each person is to gather, about two quarts per every man, woman and child, the amount needed to provide them with adequate nourishment.  Which means that, amidst the abundance—God asksmoderation!  Amidst the abundance, God asks that they gather according to their need.  And that was not all.  Oh no, that was not all.  Because according to Moses, God also instructed that they not save any of what they collect, that they not keep any of it until the next day, that they not hoard the abundance.  In essence, God asked that they trust that more would be provided the next day, that the abundance would continue.  But this proved too much to ask, for the Israelites were fearful, as we are all fearful, that there wouldn’t be enough, that God wouldn’t provide on the morrow.  So, they hoarded.  They didn’t eat all that they were allowed.  They saved some for the next day.

And the result of their hoarding?  The manna rotted and spoiled and had to be thrown away.  Their fear and lack of trust transformed God’s great gift of grace and abundance into something that couldn’t be enjoyed.  Though, even so, God continued to provide.  The bread appeared on the ground to be gathered every morning, and the quails appeared to be caught and eaten every evening.

So why is it that the Israelites (that we) find it so difficult to trust in God’s abundance?  Why is it that we have such a hard time believing God will provide?

And why is it that there seems to be so much proof that God won’t?

Hmmm.  This is the great conundrum Jesus faced as well.  Why, in a world of such awesome abundance, blessed by a Creator who has provided us with all that we need, are we so fearful?  Why do some of us continue to gather way more than we require, hoarding it until it spoils and, thus, abusing the gift of God’s great abundance—while others finding almost nothing to gather, cry out to God, and wonder why they aren’t granted a share?

Good and well meaning people have struggled with this question for a very long time.  And so often, their answer has something to do with “deserving.”  So often, the answer involves “merit.”  Because it is so much easier to believe that the good fortune some of us experience is a result of some good thing we must have done and that the bad fortune experienced by others must be the result of some bad thing they must have done—or some inaccurate thing they must have believed, or even, some past life they must have lived.

But that’s not what Jesus taught.  If you read the Kingdom Parables of Jesus, and today’s story from the Gospel of Matthew is one of them, you find a very different take on this subject.  You may even find an answer to the dilemma of why, in a world of so much abundance, some have so much and some so not enough.

In the Kingdom Parables, Jesus “explains” what the Kingdom of God (not Caesar!  not popular culture!) is like.  And, remember, parables are stories that bring us close to a truth, stories that make us think, stories that, like a Zen koan, bring us near a source of wisdom that is deeper than intellectual knowledge.  They are heart stories, leading us toward life truths.

And here, in the language of the Message translation, is a brief summary:

God’s kingdom is like an estate manager who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard.  They agreed on the wage of a dollar a day and went to work.  The manager returned to the town square at9:00, Noon and 3:00 to hire more workers, each time telling them he would pay a fair wage. At 5:00 he returned one last time and asked those who were there “why are you standing around all day doing nothing?”  They said, “Because no one hired us.”  So he told them to go work in the vineyard.  When the day’s work was over, he called the workers and, starting with the last hired, paid them their wages.  They each received a dollar.  The first workers weren’t too happy about his and groused angrily that it was unfair, because they had worked longer.  But the manager replied that he hadn’t been unfair.  He paid what had been promised.  “Can’t I do what I promised?” he said.  “Are you going to get stingy because I am generous?”

The parable closing with this statement:  Here it is again, the Great Reversal: many of the first ending up last, and the last first.

This is a challenging one.  In fact, of all the parables, I think this may be the one that many people struggle with more than any other.  Why?  Because it’s not fair!  Instinctively, we side with the leader of the laborers who were first hired.  “Hey, we worked really hard!  Why are you being so generous to those guys?  They didn’t work as hard!  They didn’t even work half as hard.”

But, woah, stop.  Let’s think about this a little more carefully, hearts and minds open, trust in God activated.  What is “fair?”  Is “fair” that some people have a job that pays them a living wage while other people can’t find work no matter how hard they try?  Is “fair” that some people grow up in a family where education matters and there’s some money for college while other people grow up in a place where high school drop out and prison incarceration rates are in competition?  Is “fair” that some people drive by and hire, for not much more than a dollar a day, some of the day laborers who line the streets in places such as University Boulevard and New Hampshire Avenue in Silver Spring, while other laborers wait all day and never get “chosen” by the man?

Think about this parable.  Jesus doesn’t say that the estate manager tried to find workers to labor in the vineyard but couldn’t find anyone who wanted to do hard work.  No!  What he says is that the manager went back several times to hire more workers.  We’re not sure why he didn’t hire them all in the morning—maybe he didn’t know how many he’d need!  But each time there were plenty more looking for work.  Even at 5 pm, when the manager asked the last of them why they were standing around doing nothing, they said, because no one hired us.  Not “because we didn’t feel like working.”  Not “because we were home playing video games.”  Not “because we were at the park playing soccer.”  No, because no one hired us.  They had been standing there all day!  They had been waiting for work.  They had been hoping to be hired.  But “no one hired us.”  So the manager hired them at the end of the day, and they labored in the vineyard, and they were paid the same amount as all the other workers who had wanted to have—and had been given—honest work for the day.  They were the last.  The lost.   The forgotten.  And they got paid first.

And this is the Kingdom of God.  A place where those who are last, who are lost, who are forgotten, will be just as important and recognized and rewarded as the rest of us.  Because we are, in so many ways, so very blessed.  We live in a world of such amazing abundance.  And I don’t just mean the world that God, in an unending burst of creative energy, has made for our pleasure.  I also mean the 21^st century world of the United States of America into which most of us here were born.  And I don’t just mean the world of average American abundance.  I mean the world in which many of us, here in this Sanctuary, live.  The world that includes not only plenty of food, and decent clothes, and a warm or cool (depending on the season) shelter, and way better than average education for ourselves and our children, but also interesting hobbies, and cultural events, and travel and vacations and, most importantly, freedom from anxiety about where the money for our next meal or rent check or heating bill or prescription medication is going to come from.  We are so very blessed.

And it’s important that we recognize this.  Not in order to feel guilty!  But in order to feel gratitude—so that we can recognize and laud and praise the Source of All That Is, the Source of all this abundance, the Creator of all good things.  Because unless we can allow ourselves to fully accept the reality of God’s great abundance, unless we can bring ourselves to acknowledge and trust in the manna that, in many of our cases, truly does fall from heaven, unless we can relax into the grace that fills our lives, unless we can let go of our fear that it might all just disappear, then we, like the Israelites before us, are just going to try and hoard whatever we’re given.  We’re not going to trust that God will provide again tomorrow what has been provided today.  And, we’re certainly not going to want to share it.  Because fear of deprivation does not lead to sharing.  And if we believe that God’s blessings are limited, that there is, in fact, no reality to abundance, then we will fear deprivation.  And, no matter how many good gifts we have in our lives, we will act as if we lack even the basic necessities.  And we will not share.  And we will not be of generous heart.  And we will not put the last first.  Because we will, instead, be desperately clinging to our own first place, terrified that we might someday lose it.  And by so doing, spoil all that we have gained.

But what if we have gained at others’ expense?  What if all that we have acquired, all that we have, in fact, hoarded, has not been a celebration of God’s abundance, but has, instead, taken advantage of God’s abundance?  What if we have collected more than our share of the manna?  Does this mean that others are left with less than they need?  And what do we do about the spoilage and rot in the excess?

Friends, this is neither idle biblical exegesis nor random speculation.  As many of you know, the U.S. Census Bureau released a report this week, which said the poverty rate in our country rose for a third consecutive year to hit 15.1 percent in 2010. This means that the number of U.S. citizens living in poverty is now the largest since the government first began publishing estimates in 1959.  And that is not all.  Oh no, that is not all!  According to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has the highest poverty rate amongst all developed countries.  The highest poverty rate!  And do you know what our poverty line is?  $22, 113 for a family of four (which assumes two adults and two children).  $22, 133 for a family of four!  I’m sorry.  Please just think about this for a minute.  I’m not asking you to tell us what your family lives on.  But, please, just for a minute, in the privacy of your own heart, please think about what sort of income is required for each of us to live the lives we choose to live.  Because I’m here to tell you—in the greater Washington, DC area, $22, 133 is impossible for a family of four to live on.  $22, 133 a year means making choices between rent and food.  $22, 133 a year means making choices between prescription medication and heat.  $22, 133 a year means making choices that no family should have to make.  And, in fact, Manna, yes, “manna,” a food bank and hunger organization in Montgomery County, MD, right outside of DC, has estimated that, when taking into consideration the basichuman needs for housing, child care, food, health care, transportation, taxes and miscellaneous expenses such as clothing, a family of four in the DC area needs $70,000 a year in order to be self-sufficient.  In other words, in order to survive without additional public or private assistance, a DC area family of four needs an income of $70,000 a year, which according to my math, is over three times the amount of the U.S. government determined national poverty level.  And, again, according to my math, means that the 45 million people deemed by the latest census report to be living in poverty is actually a gross underestimate of the actual number of impoverished peoplein this country if by “living in poverty,” we mean those people and families who are unable to meet their basic human needs for housing, child care, food, health care, transportation, taxes and miscellaneous expense such as clothing, without additional public or private assistance.

45 million people.  Plus.  In the richest country in the world!  It’s a travesty.  It’s a shame.  It’s inexcusable.  And it’s most certainly not biblical.  How we can continue arguing about whether or not the wealthiest among us, corporate or individual, should contribute what they are able so that the least of us can share in God’s great abundance is well beyond my powers of understanding.  God’s abundance is for ALL, not just for some.  It is for everyone, not just a few.  But God depends on us to share what has been given.  God has actually instructedus not to take more than our share. God has, indeed, commanded us not to hoard the manna.  And God has clearly shown us, in the person, parables and life of Jesus, what the Kingdom looks like.  And it looks like all of us, no matter how late we come or how much or how little we work.  It looks like all of us, getting paid a decent wage, getting valued in the same manner— because we’re human, and because God values us, and because, no matter who we are or who our parents are or what we do or what we’ve done, we matter.

We matter.  We each matter.  And God created this great big beautiful abundant world for all of us.  Not just for some of us.  For all of us.

Man-hu?  “What is it?”  It is bread from heaven.  Manna.  And it is for everyone.  Everyone. 

 Let us share it.

 

Amen.

Rev. Ellen Jennings

 

 

September 11, 2011

 Seventy Times Seven

What are the chances that the gospel reading for today, the 10^th Anniversary of 9.11, would be about forgiveness?  Now don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of sections in the bible that address this important theme, but this particular passage emphasizes it in a very specific, one might even say, “adamant,” manner.  The reading begins with Peter asking Jesus (and I quote from the contemporary “Message” translation), “Master, how many times do I have to forgive a brother or sister who hurts me?  Seven?”  And Jesus replies:  “Seven?  Hardly.  Try seventy times seven.”

Well, whether “seventy times seven” or “seventy seven,” as the translation read earlier suggests, the point is clear:  we’re supposed to forgive as often as necessary.  In other words, we’re supposed to forgive any time someone does something for which forgiveness is required.

Oh.  That’s hard!  Really, really hard.  Because people do stupid things all the time.  People do inconsiderate things all the time.  People do hurtful things all the time.  And, sometimes, too often, people do truly mean things.  They do things that badly hurt others.  Or they do things that end someone’s life.

And we’re still supposed to forgive them.

So perhaps it’s easier to begin by thinking about being forgiven.  Because both the gospel reading and this morning’s psalm include this angle as well.  For the story Jesus tells to illustrate his point about the importance of forgiveness starts with a servant asking for, and receiving, forgiveness.  And the section of the psalm that we read this morning concludes with our being forgiven.  Together, they make two main points about this experience.  One:  if we’re going to receive forgiveness, we’d better plan on giving it.  For if we don’t, we’re going to feel awful, or “tortured” as the scripture puts it.  And, two:  in order to be truly forgiven, we have to accept the forgiveness.  In other words, we have to be willing to humble ourselves enough to acknowledge our need for forgiveness.

So being forgiven is one side of the two way street of forgiveness.  The other side is, of course, forgiving.  And both sides always involve a wrong that has been done.

On the two way street of forgiveness, one, if not both, of the people (or other groups) involved has done something that has harmed another person or people in some way.  From verbal slight to genocide, a sin has been committed.  For it is always sin, or wrong doing, which precedes the need for forgiveness.  And once this has happened, there are several possible ways for traffic on the two-way street to flow.

• Scenario One:  Forgiveness is neither requested nor offered, which results in a soul stifling stalemate that allows neither individual to heal or transform.
• Scenario Two:  Forgiveness is requested, but not granted.  This means that the person who has done wrong has humbled him or herself and admitted culpability.  But, the other person has not been able to let go of his or her anger and hurt enough to forgive.
• Scenario Three:  Forgiveness is offered, but not accepted.  In this scenario, the person who has been wronged chooses the healing path of letting go the anger and hurt, but the wrong doer is locked in a prison either of self-recrimination or denial and defense.
• Scenario Four:  Forgiveness is both requested and granted.  Here, the person who has done wrong, humbles him or herself, admits culpability, and asks to be forgiven by the one who has been wronged.  And the one who has been wronged is willing to let go of his or her anger and hurt and to forgive the wrong doer.  Healing and transformation of both souls is, thus, able to take place.

Now remember, it’s possible that forgiveness needs to be granted to and given by both parties.   But the four scenarios remain the same.  Forgiveness, like any other human interaction, is a relationship.  And, when both parties are willing to engage, it’s almost always successful.

Ah, you say, but what about the rupture with my brother that occurred ten years ago?  I said something stupid, and though I’ve asked and asked, he refuses to forgive, or even speak, to me?  Or, perhaps you’re thinking, what about the horrible fight I had with my mother right before she died?  She said some really awful things to me, and I know she didn’t mean all of them.  But she’s no longer around for me to forgive.

So here’s the fortunate disclaimer.  While it’s true that forgiveness is best accomplished in human relationship, it’s not essential.  If the other person is inaccessible or departed or incommunicado, you can still engage in forgiveness.  Why?  Because God is always a part of the forgiveness scenario.  No matter who’s the forgiver or who’s the forgiven in the two way street scene, it is always in the embrace of God’s great love and mercy that we are each, ultimately forgiven.  As this morning’s reading from Paul’s Letter to the Romans tells us (and, again, I quote from The Message):

“It’s God we are answerable to—all the way from life to death and everything in between—not each other…  So tend to your own knitting.  You’ve got your hands full just taking care of your own life before God.”

In clear and no uncertain terms, Paul makes the same point that Jesus makes over and over again:  we are not to judge.  It’s only God, Source of All, Spirit of Life, and Creator of the World, who has the right to judge.  Because it is only God who loves us extravagantly and wildly and completely enough to dispense a justice that has no hint of vengeance, no modicum of vindication, no remnant of grudge!  Pure love judges with pure love.  And pure love always forgives.

But humans don’t have this ability.  God knows and Jesus knew and Paul repeated that, since loving and forgiving are both still a stretch for us, judging is something we’re asked not to do.

Which is kind of strange.  Because judging comes so very easily to us, and loving and forgiving are so much harder!

But let’s think about the difference in our experiences of them.  Seriously.  When was the last time you judged someone? Perhaps it was this morning when your spouse left the cap off the toothpaste, or perhaps it was later when your kids wouldn’t get in the car on time, or perhaps it was 2 minutes ago, when you disagreed with a point I made in the sermon.  Think about it.  How does it feel when you judge?  For me, even when I’m at my most righteous or “right-ness,”there’s a tight-ness that I feel whenever I judge another.  There’s a tight-ness, a constriction, a narrowing of possibility.  Can you relate?

Now think about the last time you forgave someone.  When was it?  Was it a big thing, like forgiving a parent for physical abuse?  Was it a little thing, like forgiving your spouse for leaving off the toothpaste cap?  Or was it a medium sized thing, like forgiving your boss for embarrassing you in front of your co-workers?  Please try not to get sidetracked by the litany of injustices in your life (because I know we all have them!).  Instead, focus on a specific time when you were able to forgive.  What did it feel like?  Again, if your experience is anything like mine, there was a loosening, a letting go, a releasing of control.  In fact, forgiving feels almost like the opposite of judging—the tightness loosens, the constriction releases, new possibilities open up.  Ahhhh.  One can breathe again.  The Spirit is again able to live and move and have its being!

Which one feels better?

But today is September 11^th.  Today is the anniversary of a day when we were all, in some way, negatively affected, a day on which so many people, or their loved ones, were badly hurt, a day when so many lives were ended.

So shouldn’t we get a “bye” on forgiveness for just this one day, for just this one huge, tragic and “unforgivable” event?  Shouldn’t we just be able to say that it’s too big, too bad, and affected too many people—including us?

Well… no.  Because Jesus has let us know very clearly that it doesn’t work that way.  Forgiveness is expected.  Loving and forgiving our neighbor is what we’ve been asked to do. And we just found out “why” by remembering what it feels like to judge—and what it feels like to forgive.  In forgiveness, we find release, we find redemption, we find love. In judgment, we do not.

So what are we meant to do? How are we supposed to respond to the horror of that day, ten years ago, when the towers came down, the Pentagon was bashed in, and a plane full of every day heroes went down in a Pennsylvania field.  Thousands of people died on September 11^th, 2001.  And some of us knew one or more of them.

This is a day of such sadness, such mourning.  And, I’m afraid, for too many hearts and minds, a day on which forgiveness does get a bye.  Which is understandable!  But not gospel.  And not healing.  And no way to live.

And yet I, who did not lose a loved one and who only tangentially knew some of the victims, have mixed feelings about my right to preach such a message.  So I’m going to allow two other women to preach it by concluding with their story.  They are the two women on the front of your worship bulletin, two women who experienced the worst of tragedies on 9.11, because they each lost a son.

Their names are Phyllis Rodriguez, a Jewish Mom from White Plains, New York, and Aicha al-Wafi, a Moroccan Mom from France.  And their story is a story of deep sadness, because death is always sad, but it is also a story of love.  It is a story of hope.  And, most of all, it is a story of forgiveness.

Phyllis and her husband, Orlando Rodriguez, lost their only son, Greg, when the World Trade Towers collapsed.  As Phyllis tells it:

Returning from an early morning walk along the Bronx River, the porter in my building told me there’d been a fire at the World Trade Center. I hurried upstairs and turned on both the TV and the answering machine.  I was listening to a message from Greg saying there had been a terrible accident at the World Trade Center but that he was all right, when I saw on television the second plane crash into the second tower.  At that point I knew that this was no accident.  But even so I rang family and friends and said, ‘he called, he’s OK’. I assumed he was out of the building.

Later that evening, when there was still no word from him, I suspected the worst – but still I refused to believe it. In fact I didn’t take it in until the following evening when it was officially announced that he had perished along with 3,000 others.

Aicha has a very different story, because her son is Zacarias Moussaoui, an admitted member of al-Qaeda, who was convicted of plotting the World Trade Tower attacks, though according to Phyllis, there’s no evidence that he knew anything about these particular attacks, and who is now serving three consecutive sentences of life imprisonment.

In her words:

On 13th September 2001 my daughter called me to tell me that Zacarias was on television. I couldn’t recognize my son – the picture was horrible. I knelt down in front of the TV and yelled, ‘it’s not true, it’s not my son; it’s not possible!’ They were suggesting he was connected to the terrorist attacks, but he had been in jail in the States since August for visa violation. The media came straight to my house and didn’t leave for a week. I was beside myself. I couldn’t eat or sleep. Friends said I wasn’t to blame, but I said, ‘how can I not feel responsible for something he may have been involved in?’ The hardest thing was not knowing. Then, on 25^thOctober, I received a letter from Zacarias saying, ‘I am an Islamic extremist, but I had nothing to do with the attacks’.

Two families, two mothers.  Two devastating situations.  And the miracle?  They found one another.  They came together.  Again, in Phyllis’s words:

Since 2005, when Zacarias pleaded guilty to the conspiracy charges against him, I knew Aicha would be coming to America. I decided I wanted to give her as much support as I could beforehand. So we started speaking on the phone. I couldn’t speak a word of French at that time but somehow we managed. Later I continued supporting her in her campaign for the rights of her son, in the hope that someday he will be transferred to France to serve out his sentence.

And Aicha:

While I knew my son was not directly responsible for the attacks, extremist thinking like his had created a climate of hate. [I decided that I had to meet some of the American families who had lost loved ones.]  The evening before meeting the families [in New York] I was so nervous I couldn’t sleep, but my French human rights interpreter encouraged me by telling me I was doing the right thing. The next morning we took the subway and my heart was beating double-time as I walked down the hallway. Then I entered the room where all these family members were waiting…[and] everyone introduced themselves; we showed pictures, we talked… Although of course nothing was normal. It was painful and wonderful at the same time.

So much pain!  And yet Aicha, whose son had, at least by association, contributed to the death of so many, and Phyllis, whose son was one of those who had died, broke through their own feelings of anger and grief and despair and reached out to the “other,” reached out to another human being who was experiencing the same human emotions.  It’s not that it was easy.  It wasn’t.  Forgiveness is never easy.  But it was the right thing to do, it was the human thing to do, and it was, in their cases, the Jewish and the Muslim thing to do.

Again, in Phyllis’s words:

A Moroccan Muslim woman living in France and a secular Jewish woman living in the US are no different when it comes to suffering. It was an accident of history that brought us together, and it is an accident of history that means Zacarias is now in prison and my son died in the World Trade Center. It could have been the reverse.

When Greg was killed I thought, I will never forgive the people who murdered my son, but I have come to see forgiveness as more than a word; it’s a context, a process. I don’t forgive the act, but trying to understand why someone has acted in the way they have is part of the process of forgiving. Forgiveness is being able to accept another person for being human and fallible.

What Phyllis means by “trying to understand why someone has acted in the way they have” is that she’s practiced empathy, which is an unbelievably important part of forgiveness.  She means that she has tried to put herself in the shoes of the other, to understand why that person might have made the choices s/he did.  And in fact, Aicha has helped her to do this by sharing some of the facts of Zacaria’s life.  It doesn’t excuse his choices or his actions.  But it does help us to understand how and why he made them.

Although I am not responsible for the choices my son has made as an adult, I still feel guilty because I gave birth to him. I so wish that Zacarias hadn’t got involved with al-Qaida but… In Bin Laden he was looking for a father figure, because his own father was violent with him and then abandoned us. I would have liked him to be loyal to France. I love France because French people welcomed me when I arrived from Morocco at the age of 17, but Zacarias was subject to racist abuse all his life. He was called a ‘dirty Arab’ and made to feel like a stranger in his own country.

What Phyllis and Aicha discovered is that everyone involved in or affected by terrorism is vulnerable to being part of the cycle of violence.  And this cycle of violence cannot and will not end until each one of us who allows vengeance, anger, retribution, recrimination or hatred to rule our actions or our heart has the courage to get off this despicable carousel and begin walking a straight path of love and forgiveness, the path that, in our tradition, was first trod by Jesus and later followed by Paul.

Together, Aicha al-Wafi and Phyllis Rodriguez have created something unique out of the tragedy of their own personal situations.  They have reached out, they have touched (both literally and figuratively) the “other.”  And, in so doing, they have begun to heal.  In Phyllis’s words:

Meeting Aicha gave me strength and took away my anger and bitterness.

In the words of Aicha:

[When] my eyes landed on Phyllis – something like a magnet drew me to her. We fell into each others arms and cried for a long time. I felt her heart beating as fast as mine.

“I felt her heart.”

And those words describe an experience of forgiveness as deep and as wide as seventy times seven, an experience that has helped heal not just two devastated mothers but that, I believe, can help heal the whole world.

May it be so.

In Memory.

Amen.

Rev. Ellen Jennings

 

September 4, 2011

Loving Our Neighbors… And Our Enemies

Passover.  The “Passover of the Lord.”  Sacrifice a lamb, either sheep or goat, and use its blood to mark the doorposts and lintel of your home.  If you do, the angel of death will pass over, sparing both your own firstborn and the firstborn of your animals.  The God of Life will let your children live.  But the children of the “other” will die.

As a parent, it’s difficult for me to read this passage with anything close to a celebratory attitude.  And, yet, I’ve participated in over a dozen Passover Seders and know that the main point of Pesach, or Passover, which usually takes place around the time of Easter, is to celebrate the Exodus, the freeing of the Hebrew people, from their bondage to Egypt.  It’s a classic story of a people moving from slavery to freedom, and it has been used by oppressed communities all around the world as a symbol of hope and possibility.

Exodus.   Passover.  Two such important words in the Jewish and Christian traditions.  And yet, so complicated and confusing in their mixed messages.

So let’s start with celebration.  Because that is a very important part of the story.  As you may recall from last week’s Hebrew Bible reading, Moses was asked by God to lead the Hebrew people out of Egypt.  In the words of today’s song, “Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt land.  Tell old Pharaoh, let my people go.”  And, ultimately, that’s what happened.  Which is why we celebrate—we celebrate the redemption of a people, their transformation from slaves to free men and women.  We celebrate the Exodus of the Israelites, and we know that this is only the beginning of their story, which will take them on a long journey through the wilderness, to the Promised Land.  And even then they won’t be finished.  We know that, because we’re not finished.  But without the Exodus, they never would have gotten started.   Without the Exodus, there can be no Promised Land.

So we celebrate.  The Exodus and the Passover.  Because without the Passover, without God’s sparing the lives of the Hebrew’s firstborn, there would have been no Exodus.  Without this holy act of mercy and favor, the Hebrew people would have been too overcome with grief and despair even to care about escaping the bonds of slavery.  So we celebrate, we celebrate the mercy and freedom granted the People of Israel, who have become both a beacon of hope for all people seeking mercy and freedom, and an inspiration to all who would assist those who are yearning to breathe free.

But.  But there’s another side to this story.  And it begins when God hardens Pharaoh’s heart.  Because that’s what happened.  When Moses asked Pharaoh to let the Hebrew people go—guess what?  He didn’t!  So God, through Moses, let the Pharaoh know that if he didn’t set the Hebrew slaves free then some pretty bad things were going to start happening in Egypt; plagues, to be precise.  But God hardened Pharaoh’s heart.  So Pharaoh refused, and the plagues were sent.  And this is what they were, as listed in the Haggadah or “telling” of the Passover Story that’s read at the Seder Dinner.

1. Water, which turned to blood and killed all fish and other aquatic life.
2. Frogs
3. Lice
4. Flies or wild animals
5. Disease on livestock
6. Unhealable boils
7. Hail and thunder
8. Locusts
9. Darkness throughout the land

10. Death of the first-born of all humans and animals who did not have marked doorposts.

Now one might have thought the Pharaoh would have relented after the first plague, when water was turned into blood, but, no, his heart was “hardened,” and he refused to listen to God’s command.  Which leads naturally to the question of how and why is heart was hardened.  Because the story seems to suggest that God hardened is heart, which, to me, makes it more disturbing.

Of course, I don’t know exactly what the biblical writers or storytellers had in mind when they decided on this version of the Exodus tale, but I’m guessing it had something to do with celebrating not only the freeing of the Hebrew people but also the naming of the People of Israel as God’s chosen and the glorifying of the Hebrew God as the most powerful (in other words, better than all those old gods of Egypt).  So there were, perhaps, multiple messages for the listeners of the ancient world:  God frees, Israel is chosen, and their God is the real God.  And I think we’d all have to admit—the story gets all three of those points across, no problem.

The problem is—we’re left with an image of God that is not only freeing but also violent, petty, vindictive and chauvinistic.  God hardens Pharaoh’s heart, so that God can show God’s strength.  God spares the Hebrew firstborn but slaughters the children of the Egyptians.  Where is the love?

So you see, I’ve struggled.  And in so doing, I returned to the Haggadah, the version of the Exodus Story that’s told at the Passover Seder.  And I remembered something very, very important.  I remembered that, as the ten plagues are recited and remembered during the Seder, each participant dips his or her finger into their glass of wine and releases one drop onto their plate for each plague.  Ten plagues.  Ten drops.  And the reason for this?  Because the suffering of any being lessens our joy, and the ten drops of wine, or blood, remind us of the suffering of the Egyptians during the ten plagues.  This is what later rabbinical commentary added to the Exodus Story—compassion for the Egyptians.

Because the Jewish tradition, for all its personal suffering, has retained a radical empathy for the enemy, even in the midst of jubilant celebration, and, therefore, created this tradition to distinguish between justice and revenge.  Justice is appropriate and necessary in any civilized society, but vengeance just keeps the fire of hate burning and sets the stage for a continuing cycle of mutual violence.

The truth is, when any of us is treated badly, there’s an instinctive part of us that yearns for revenge.  We want the Pharaoh to be punished, severely, and we may even hope that he doesn’t repent too quickly, so that the harsh punishments can continue until he’s really hurt.  And we want to know that our cause or “side” is right, that our God is the best God, and that this can be proven by a great show of power and might.

Those feelings are there.  But, friends, they’re toddler feelings, feelings located in the amygdala or animal brain, within a much larger and more mature brain that has evolved to choose our responses, to be released from the shackles of our more primitive angers and fears.

Revenge serves no one.  And, in fact, the Babylonian Talmud, rabbinical commentary on the Hebrew Scriptures from the time of the Babylonian Exilesix centuries before the birth of Jesus, releases us from the more primitive picture of a punishing and vindictive God by adding the following to the Exodus Story.  From Sanhedrin 39b:  “In that hour the ministering angels wished to utter the song before God, but God rebuked them, saying: My handiwork is drowning in the sea; would you utter song before me!”  Because, of course, after the Hebrew people fled Egypt, the Pharaoh’s heart was hardened one more time, and he sent his soldiers after them, where they were drowned in the Red Sea.  And the later rabbis realized that, while a just God may sometimes allow the oppressor to be punished, even unto death, our God is not a God of vengeance or vindication, and so would never celebrate the pain and suffering of any human or other creature.

Perhaps one thinks of Osama bin Laden here.  And, in fact, there was great discussion amongst both Jewish and Christian leaders following his death at the hands of the US Navy SEALs.  Though there was some disagreement, the majority opinion was one that I hold.  The death of any human being is not something to celebrate even when justice and the greater good of humanity require it.  Bin Laden was responsible for the destruction of a terrible number of human lives, and his death was a just outcome of his actions.  But he was also the Creator’s handiwork, and God does not celebrate the demise of any human life.

So if the image of God as portrayed by the Passover Story is not one we want to fully embrace, is there another image we can glean from today’s readings in Paul’s Letter to the Romans or the Gospel of Matthew?

I think so.  And this is not to say that the Hebrew Bible doesn’t have its share of more loving and compassionate images as well.  Certainly, the rabbinical commentaries, both Talmud and Midrash, contain stories of a God who is both extravagantly loving and freely forgiving.

And, in fact, Jesus was fully steeped in both the Jewish Scriptures and accompanying rabbinical commentary.  And it is the extravagantly loving and freely forgiving image of God that he both preaches and teaches.  Jesus challenged certain factions of his own tradition—and challenges us to do the same!—by offering us an understanding of God that is both undeniably radical and overwhelmingly compelling in the degree and intensity of its loving and welcoming embrace.  In Jesus’ view, the entire compendium of commandments in the Hebrew Bible (and there are 632 of them!) can be boiled down to the phrase Paul quotes in his Letter to the Romans:  “Love your neighbor as yourself.” And, as Paul goes on to say, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”

Which is really hard!  I mean, who among us has not had trouble loving their neighbor?  Who among us has not, at times, had a difficult time liking the person next to them in the pew?  Who among us has not had the experience of distrusting or disliking or disrespecting the people with whom we share our lives?

But, realize.  Jesus does not stop at “our neighbor.”  Jesus, who knows the Exodus Story, who has celebrated the Passover, whose last supper was most likely a Passover Seder, tells us to love our enemies.  Love our enemies!  As if.  As if they were God’s handiwork.  As if God’s heart would be broken if they were lost or destroyed.  As if they were all the more precious for having been lost.

For you know, the passage that precedes today’s reading in the Gospel of Matthew, is all about the lost and the found.  So in the context of this gospel, we read first that the lost are inordinately precious and must be found and then that when two or three are gathered in God’s name, God is with them, that where two agree on what to ask, it will be given to them.  Which is a great relief, really.  Because it means that God exists in relationship, in community.  God is with us and among us.  Because we do not exist apart from others.  And we mourn when we lose those with whom we feel connected.  We mourn when we lose those whom we love.

And God loves us all.  God feels the connection to everyone and everything.  And so, for God, when one is lost, the whole has been rent asunder.  When one is lost, it is worth turning heaven and earth on its head in order to find him or her.  And when one is found, that is when the celebration begins.  That is when the joyous feast takes place.  Not because one has survived at the expense of another.  Not because one has triumphed and another has been vanquished.  But because the lost has been found and can now become part of God’s beloved community.  The sheep has been brought back into the fold, and the shepherd can give thanks and praise for its safe return.

So the focus changes from the Passover Story to the Passover Seder to the Welcoming Table.   From the God who spares one people at the expense of another, to the God who mourns if any of her handiwork is destroyed, to the God who invites the outcast and the stranger to his table and will go to any length to find the lost and welcome them home.

“Let my people go,” said Moses.  “Love your neighbor… and your enemy,” says Jesus.  We are blessed with a God who challenges us with both freedom and love.

 

Amen.

Rev. Ellen Jennings

 

 

What If There’s Hope

August 28. 2011

It’s been a strange week.  An earthquake on Tuesday, a hurricane (or should we say, “tropical storm”) on Saturday.  A major memorial celebration, anticipating 250,000 people, canceled for the weekend.  And yet, here we are this morning, together, maybe not as many of us as might otherwise have been, but we are here.  Hineni, as Moses said in this morning’s Hebrew Bible reading, “I am here.”  And we are ready.

Are we?  Are we ready?  What does that mean?   And for what?  That’s what we’re going to explore this morning.

Today’s verses from Exodus jump ahead in the Moses story, so allow me, as usual, to provide a brief recap of the events leading up to today’s chapter so that we better understand the context of what’s going on.  As you may recall, Moses was born in Egypt, sometime after the era of Joseph, during a time when the Pharaoh had grown anxious and decided that, given their numbers, the Children of Israel were a threat to his Kingdom.  He thus ordered all Hebrews to be enslaved, forcing them into hard labor.  But the Hebrew people continued to grow in numbers, so the Pharaoh became even more alarmed and ordered all Hebrew male children to be drowned at birth.  This introduction lets us know that Egypt was not just a horribly repressive and unjust place for the Hebrew people to live, but that the Pharaoh’s oppression was “over the top,” making it a completely unacceptable situation in which to remain.

The only good news in this despicable scenario is that one Hebrew baby, through the desperate efforts and faith of his mother and sister, was saved from this awful fate.  They placed him in a woven basket and floated him amongst the reeds where Pharaoh’s daughter most often went to bathe and then waited to see if he would be rescued.  What an agonizing wait that must have been!  But in fact, when Pharaohs daughter found the baby, her heart went out to him (though she knew he was a Hebrew), and when Miriam, Moses’ sister, saw this, she crept out of her hiding place and asked if Pharaoh’s daughter would like her to find a nursemaid for the baby.  Thus was Moses nursed by his own mother, adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter, and raised in the palace of the Pharaoh.

When Moses grew up, knowing he was a Hebrew (I’ve always wondered how he knew—perhaps because he was circumcised?), it made him furious to see how the Hebrew slaves were mistreated by their Egyptian masters.  One day he became so angry that he killed an Egyptian foreman who had hit a slave.  At that point, he realized he had overstayed his welcome in the palace of the Pharaoh and better move on—so he fled to the land of the Midianites, his distant relatives, and settled down with them for many years, marrying Zipporah, and having a son, Gershom.

And thus we come to today’s section of the story.  But before we explore this well-known segment, I want to reiterate where Moses was in his life at that time.  Yes, he’d had a very exciting beginning, yes, he grew up in the palace of one of the most powerful rulers of his era, yes, he was wanted for murder by this same ruler, and yes, he was on the lam for murdering an Egyptian overlord.  But, really, right before his experience at the burning bush, he was living a pretty tame life.  He was married, he had a kid, and he was working in the family business, shepherding, for his father-in-law.  And seems to have been doing just fine.  He wasn’t conflicted about his life.  He wasn’t really looking for adventure, he wasn’t even seeking a new call.  And he certainly wasn’t dreaming about a return to Egypt!  Nope, he was just minding his own business, tending the sheep, maybe thinking about what he was going to have for lunch.  And then, whoosh!  A burning bush.

Okay, I don’t know about you.  But if I suddenly saw a bush burning on my lunch hour, I’d be a little freaked out.  And Moses was pretty astonished himself.  But then it got even freakier.  Because GOD called from the bush.  “Moses,” God says.  And Moses replies, Hineni, which is Hebrew for “here I am.”  And God says, “Don’t come any closer, and take off your shoes.  You’re on holy ground!”

And then God makes “the ask.”  “Moses,” God says, “I’ve heard the cries of the Hebrew people, who continue to be horribly mistreated and abused by the Egyptians, and I’ve decided that it’s time for you to go back.  Because you’re the guy who’s going to bring them out of Egypt.”  And Moses says, “Me?  Why?”  And note that God doesn’t really answer his question.  Instead, God says, essentially, “Don’t worry about it.  I’ll be with you.”  And Moses, who isn’t too thrilled with the lack of information, asks, “What if the Hebrew people don’t believe me.  What if they want to know who this God is who sent me?”  And God says, Ehyeh asher ehyeh, which is Hebrew for “I am that I am,” or “I shall be that I shall be.”  Which again, isn’t really the definitive and informative answer that Moses was hoping for.  And that’s where today’s reading ends.

But in the verses following today’s reading, God provides a bit more certainty by revealing that the Egyptians will, indeed, be vanquished and that Moses will be given three signs to prove his spiritual status to the Hebrew people.  Even then Moses is hesitant.  Because, guess what, it turns out he has a stutter, and the truth is, he’s afraid to speak before the Hebrew people, afraid to reveal his disability, afraid they won’t listen to him because of it.  So God says, “who do you think made your mouth?  Who makes some mute, some deaf, some sighted, some blind?  So get going.  I’ll be right there with you and your mouth!  I’ll be right there to teach you what to say.”  But Moses still resists.  And, finally, God relents.  “Okay, listen.  Your brother Aaron can do the talking.  You’ll tell him what to say.  But get going!  Now.”

And so Moses was “called.”  And so he went to lead the Hebrew people to freedom.  And so the Exodus began.

But that isn’t what usually happens, is it?  Most of us don’t get to see a burning bush or it’s equivalent— though I know some do, because they’ve told me about it.  But for many of us, if we experience a burning bush at all, it’s in the most figurative, most easily dismissed or explained away sense.  God doesn’t appear visually and dramatically, nor does God tell us specifically and certainly what it is we’re meant to do with our lives.

Unless we’re listening.

Unless we’re paying attention.

Unless we’re, as Karl Barth famously said, “holding the bible in one hand and the New York Times in the other,” meaning that we’re both reading the stories of the bible and interpreting their meaning in the context of what’s going on in our own lives, in our own culture, in this 21^st century world.

Because Egypt is always in power.  And the enslaved Hebrews are always among us.  And leaders are needed every single day to help bring them out of bondage and into freedom.  And that’s exactly what today, August 28^th, memorializes, whether or not there’s a big celebration on the National Mall.  Today we celebrate the life of a modern day Moses, a man who never planned to lead a movement, a man who would probably have been very happy to live his life as a preacher and a husband and a father, but who was called to do otherwise.  And who heard and responded to that call.

So what was the “call” of Martin Luther King Jr?  Did he experience his own “burning bush?”  I’m fascinated by this question, because I’ve often wondered if all great leaders have their own version of the burning bush or the Road to Damascus.  And some of them do.  But, you know, I’ve looked pretty hard to see if MLK had one particular turning point in his life, and I have to tell you that I’m hard pressed to find only one.  I really can’t find one “burning bush” moment.  Like most of the rest of us, he seems to have had many—a series of formative and transformative experiences that ultimately resulted in his accepting the role of Leader of the Civil Rights Movement.  In fact, in her book, Heeding the Call, Diana Childress describes many of these experiences.

Was it the time when, as a six-year-old he learned about racial discrimination when two sons of a white shopkeeper stopped playing with him and his mother explained segregation but told him to remember, “You are as good as anyone”?  Or was it the time his father told a salesman that he and his son would walk out of the shoe store before sitting in the colored section?  Or was it when, during high school, he won first prize in a speech contest, traveled to a statewide competition where he eloquently voiced the need to translate the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th amendments from “writing on the printed page to actuality,” and then had to stand for 90 minutes on the bus home when the bus driver ordered him and his teacher to give up their seats to white passengers?  “It was a night I’ll never forget,” King said later.  “I don’t think I have ever been so deeply angry.”  Or was it when he went to seminary and stayed up all night reading about Walter Rauschenbusch’s vision of social justice, Mohandas Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence, or Reinhold Niebuhr’s argument that political power is necessary to defeat social evil?  Or was it later, when he and Coretta Scott had married and decided it was their moral obligation to return to the south, and MLK chose to accept the pastorate at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.  As Diana Childress writes, “It was a fateful choice. The following year, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus, the African American community, ready to take action against segregation, asked the scholarly, soft-spoken preacher to lead their protest.”

But was any one of these events Dr. King’s own particular burning bush?  Were any of them his Road to Damascus?  I don’t think so.  Instead, I contend that they all were.  And that, for him, as an African American Christian, steeped in the biblical tradition, each one was informed by his knowledge of the Moses Story, of the burning bush, of his understanding that God does call.

And King answered.  He answered the call.  He could have said, “no.”  He could have said, “I have a wife and kids and a job, and that’s really more than enough.”  But he didn’t.  In fact, he resisted his call quite a bit less than Moses did—Moses, with his questions and excuses and objections.

And perhaps that’s because Martin Luther King Jr already knew who God was.  Unlike Moses, he didn’t have to ask.  Because while the burning bush may have been the first (though not the last) conversation Moses had with God, King had been involved in such holy conversation for years before he was asked to lead.  These conversations may not have been as dramatic or over the top as the one Moses had, but they were a part of him, they guided him.

Many of those who were involved have said that the Civil Rights movement started at the hour of prayer, “on our knees.”  And I think that’s key to understanding this movement as a development of, rather than a repetition of, the Exodus Story.  Because while today’s reading didn’t bring us to the more violent part of the Exodus Story, I think it’s fair to say, and that everyone would agree, that this is not a non-violent story.  The Exodus was not a non-violent movement.  And yet, the Civil Rights movement was.

Somehow, the Civil Rights movement, even in the midst of a world gone mad with war—the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War—somehow the Civil Rights movement was able to remain non-violent.  Somehow, those who were involved were able to do what Paul wrote in today’s passage from his Letter to the Romans:  “Love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor… Bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse them… Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves…”  Or, as the New Living Translation words the first phrase, “Don’t’ just pretend that you love others.  Really love them.”

Really love them.  That’s hard!  It is unbelievably hard to love your enemies.  And it’s desperately difficult not to fight back when fire hoses are being aimed at you and your loved ones, dogs are being set loose on your friends, crosses are being burned on your lawns, and innocent neighbors are being lynched in front of cheering crowds.  And all this while you can’t even use the same toilet as the family for whom you work, can’t handle a book touched by a person whose color happens to be white, and can’t protest the fact that you make less than the nation’s minimum wage unless you want to get fired.

It’s desperately hard not to fight back.  But they didn’t.  And it’s even harder to love your enemies.  But they did.  Starting at the hour of prayer, on their knees, and led by a man who knew that hopes and dreams can be made true by a God who is not just an “I Am” God, not just a “this is the way it is” God, but is an “I Shall Be” God, a “this is the way it can be” God, the participants in the Civil Rights Movement knew that change was possible.  They knew that “hope is” and that “dreams can be.”  And they discovered, in the words of singer, Nicole Nordeman, that in fact “there’s hope you never dreamed of hoping for.”

And there still is.  Because our God is an “I shall be” God.  Our God is a still speaking God.  And the Exodus is a development, not an endpoint, the Civil Rights Movement a process, not a product.  And Dr. Martin Luther King Jr may have passed on, but his dream has not.  His dream lives on.  And I’d like to conclude with a story that celebrates that fact.

As many of you know, my oldest son has autism, and several weeks ago he participated in a wonderful camp hosted by the Smithsonian for high school students with cognitive disabilities.  On the last day, the camp held an “opening” at which each of the students shared a short film he or she had made about one of the many Smithsonian Museum exhibits.  As you might imagine, there were quite a number of films about dinosaurs and other large creatures from the Museum of Natural History and several about the First Lady dresses at the American History Museum.  But of the twenty teens, two of them had chosen the Civil Rights Movement as their topic, and I was quite taken by this.

One young man in particular captivated me with his passion, personality and prose.  Now remember, this is a young man with more than one challenge:  not only does he have cognitive disabilities but also he’s a person of color in a culture that has not yet overcome its racism.  But Dale is not limited by these constraints.  Because he believes in Dr. King’s dream.  And, in fact, the majority of his short film consisted of a clip from King’s famous speech, given 48 years ago today.  I don’t know if I’ve ever viewed the entire speech, though I’ve certainly read it, and I was moved to tears by watching it and thinking about the young man who had made it.  Because it made me think that God really is keeping that promise made so long ago to Moses and is right there with Dale (and Dr. King!), teaching them how to speak, reaching the rest of us through their words.  When it was over, I sat, weeping and thinking how glad I was that I’d been given the opportunity to see this footage, when Dale shared his own opinion from the microphone onstage, “I think we should listen to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech more often, don’t you?”

Yes, Dale, I do.  And, yes Dale, the dream still lives.  The dream still lives and there are many voices and lives through which it’s going to be realized. Moses and Dr. King are just a part of “what shall be.”

There is hope.

Amen.

Rev. Ellen Jennings

 

Who(se) Are You?

August 21, 2011

 

Whenever I ponder who we are, whose we are, and what we’re meant to do, my mind turns to Frederick Buechner, the American writer, theologian and Presbyterian minister, whose work has been praised for “having the unique ability to inspire readers to see the grace in their daily lives.”  That’s a great tribute to any person, and it aptly describes the affect this wonderful human has had on me.

Rev. Buechner wrote the following paragraph about vocation in his book, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC, and the last line has become a guiding light for many who are trying to figure out who they are and what they’re meant to be doing in the world:

“[Vocation] comes from the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a [person] is called to by God.There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Superego, or Self-Interest. By and large a good rule for finding out is this. The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work: (a) that you need most to do, and

(b) that the world most needs to have done.If you really get a kick out of your work, you’ve presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you’ve missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you’re bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a), but [you] probably aren’t helping your patients much either.  Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.  And this is what today’s scripture readings are about.  The lesson from Matthew focuses on the question, “who are you?”  And the lesson from Romans focuses on the question, “whose are you?”  And finding ones vocation is about locating the place where those two questions conjoin.  For each of us must first decide whose we are (to whom do we belong?) before we can determine who we are and how best we can serve the master to whom we’ve committed our lives.  And we do each serve a master!   Whether it’s God, or mainstream culture, or our own egos, or a specific addiction (to work, alcohol, shopping or any other substance or activity that rules our lives), we serve a master.  So it makes sense that we should at least be conscious of whom or what we’re serving!

When Paul asks the “whose are you” question, he is, as usual, both directive and blunt in his approach.  In today’s passage from his Letter to the Romans he asks that we present our bodies, by which he means, “ourselves,” as a living sacrifice, by which he means something made sacred by our offering of it.  And he urges us not to be conformed to this world but to discern what is the will of God, since our gifts have come from God.  In other words, Paul’s answer to the “whose are we?” question is that we belong to God and are called to offer our God-given gifts back to God.  That’s pretty clear, but I’d like to share it with you again in a different version, found in The Message, a contemporary translation of the Bible by Eugene Peterson, another Presbyterian minister and a Professor of Spiritual Theology.  His translation of this passage is quite a bit longer than the version you just heard Penny read, but I think you’ll find it worth listening to:

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you:  Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering.  Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for [God].  Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking.  Instead, fix your attention on God.  You’ll be changed from the inside out.  Readily recognize what [God] wants from you, and quickly respond to it.  Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. 

I’m speaking to you out of deep gratitude for all that God has given me, and especially as I have responsibilities in relation to you.  Living then, as every one of you does, in pure grace, it’s important that you not misinterpret yourselves as people who are bringing this goodness to God.  No.  God brings it all to you.  The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and by what [God] does for us, not by what we are and what we do for [God].

In this way we are like the various parts of the human body.  Each part gets its meaning from the body as a whole, not the other way around.  The body we’re talking about is Christ’s body… Each of us finds our meaning and function as a part of his body.  But as a chopped-off finger or cut-off toe we wouldn’t amount to much, would we?  So since we find ourselves fashioned into all these excellently formed and marvelously functioning parts in Christ’s body, let’s just go ahead and be what we were made to be, without enviously or pridefully comparing ourselves with each other, trying to be something we aren’t. 

If you preach, just preach God’s Message, nothing else; if you help, just help, don’t take over; if you teach, stick to your teaching; if you give encouraging guidance, be careful that you don’t get bossy; if you’re put in charge, don’t manipulate; if you’re called to give aid to people in distress, keep your eyes open and be quick to respond; if you work with the disadvantaged, don’t let yourself get irritated with them or depressed by them.  Keep a smile on your face.

Wow.  Place your life before God as an offering and embrace what God, not your culture, does for you!  Fix your attention on God, and you’ll be changed from the inside out!  That’s Paul’s answer to the “whose are you” question, which of course also begins to address the “who are you” question.  Because for Paul, we are who God wants us to be.  If we belong to God, then we are meant to do and be what and who God calls us to do and be.  We each receive God-given gifts, and Paul instructs us to “Go ahead and be what we were made to be, without enviously or pridefully comparing ourselves with each other, trying to be something we’re not.”  He then goes on to suggest that whatever we do, we should embrace it completely and do it well and cheerfully.  Because that is the offering we were born to make.  That is the gift we were created to give.

Which brings us back to Frederick Buechner and the question of vocation.  For if, like Paul, we answer the “whose are you” question by agreeing that we belong to God, then vocare, or “call,” becomes a question of discerning what it is God’s calling us to do.  Meaning that we have to listen for God’s still speaking voice and, as Buechner writes,discern the difference between the voice of God and the voice of Society, Super-Ego or Self-Interest.  Which is not an easy task!  So Rev. Buechner gives us a tool or, as he says, a “rule” for finding out which is the voice of God.  And he puts it this way:  The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work:  (a) that you need most to do, and (b) that the world most needs to have done.And he then goes on to provide us with some examples:  First, someone who loves to write deodorant commercials (thus fulfilling (a) but not (b)) and, second, someone who works to heal lepers but hates what she or he is doing (thus fulfilling (b) but not (a)).  “Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do,” he says.  “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

So between Paul and Rev. Buechner, we have a pretty straightforward formula!  Whose are we?  We are God’s.  Who are we?  We’re the ones who’ve been asked to offer ourselves as a living sacrifice, meaning that we’ve been asked to share our gifts with a world in need of being made sacred by our offerings.  And what gifts are we meant to offer?  Those things which we love to do, and the world is in need of receiving.

So, think about this for a minute.  Think about it and consider the kind of listening required if we are to hear God’s Still Speaking Voice and distinguish it from the voices of Society, Super-Ego and Self-Interest.  Imagine the sort of attention that must be paid in order to recognize the beauty of the gifts each one of us is meant to share with the world.   Imagine the sort of listening one must do in order to hear God’s call to that place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.  Imagine, and then focus on these words by the poet Mary Oliver, who along with Paul, and Frederich Buechner, and Eugene Peterson, implores us to take seriously the question of purpose for each of our own precious lives.  In her poem, The Summer Day, she, too, addresses the questions “Who are we?,” “Whose are we?,” and “What are we meant to do?”

The Summer Day

Who made the world?


Who made the swan, and the black bear?


Who made the grasshopper?


This grasshopper, I mean-


the one who has flung herself out of the grass,


the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,


who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.


Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.


Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.


I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.


I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down


into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,


how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,


which is what I have been doing all day.


Tell me, what else should I have done?


Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?


Tell me, what is it you plan to do


with your one wild and precious life?

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”  In that phrase, Mary Oliver sums up what is at stake in our search for the right vocation just as Frederick Buechner provides us with the definition of what that vocation, at its best, can be.  For Oliver answers the “who are you” question with the heart felt and poignant words, “wild” and “precious.”  And she ups the ante with the word, “one.”  Not only is our life “wild” and “precious”—and it is!  But we have only one.  We have only this one wild and precious life.  And Mary Oliver asks what we plan to do with it in such a way that we have to acknowledge our answer matters greatly. We have to admit that we matter greatly.

So knowing who and whose you are and having been given the tools to figure out what you’re meant to do, it’s now time to listen for God’s Still Speaking Voice.  It’s now time to discern.  And the good news is, we don’t have to do it alone!  As I wrote in my ministerial profile for the search committee last fall, “I believe that … the role of the parish minister is to help a congregation discover its own powerful call… The task of every church and, indeed, of every church member, is to find a place to serve that brings together their great joy with the world’s great need.  [And] my job as minister is to assist the congregation in identifying those places, beginning that service, and becoming the people God has called each one of us to be.”

So, as you’re minister, your pastor, and as a person who can gratefully claim that I am indeed blessed to be serving in a role where my deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet, I want to hear from you.   I invite you to share your own stories of call with me—and with one another.  And, if you haven’t yet found that place where “a” meets, “b,” then let’s talk about it.  Let’s pray about it.  Let’s pay attention.

Because one thing I know for sure is:  the world needs you.  This beautiful struggling world needs each one of us to be doing what we were born to do, giving what we were created to give.

So I ask you, and please tell me, because I would love to hear:  What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Amen.

Rev. Ellen Jennings

 

Hine Ma Tov

August 14, 2011

The great Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy, begins his brilliant novel, Anna Karenina, with the words, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”  I love the way this famous sentence sounds, but I must confess to disagreeing with it. Because, while happy families do tend to have certain things in common, unhappy families do, too!  And the truth is, most families are a combination.

Last week, Dit Talley preached a sermon on dysfunctional families, and I, having had a similar idea when I saw that the first two lectionary readings in August covered the Joseph story, asked him how he’d feel about my preaching a follow up sermon on the same topic.  He readily agreed that there’s more than enough material for two sermons on family dysfunction, so here I am today with Part Two…

Last week’s Hebrew Bible reading clearly focused on an unhappy family situation. As Dit aptly said about the beginning of this story (when Joseph’s jealous brothers plot first to kill and then to sell him as a slave), “I’m not sure what your definition of a dysfunctional family is, but I have to believe that whatever your definition is, this family qualifies.”  Too true!  Dit then went on to explain some of the common features of dysfunctional (or as Tolstoy might say, “unhappy”) families:  denial of abusive or enabling behavior; inadequate, missing or disrespected boundaries; conflict avoidance; high levels of jealousy or other controlling behaviors; fear of sharing outside the home what is happening within; extreme conflict (verbal or physical); and unfair or unequal treatment of different family members.

One could argue that all of the above are present in the Joseph story, and I’m sure that many of us recognize these behaviors, to one degree or another, in our own family narratives as well.  It’s not a pretty plot line!  But, as Dit testified last week, there is the possibility of redemption.  I agree, and keeping that in mind, today I’m going to delve deeper into the Joseph story, highlighting both the behaviors and perspectives that drive us toward dysfunction and unhappiness and those that encourage us toward happiness and health.

Of course, we only heard two small parts of the Joseph story in last week’s and this week’s readings.  So before we go any further, I’d like to fill in a few of the missing pieces.

Joseph was, indeed, sold by his brothers to the Ishmaelites, who brought him to Egypt as a slave.  But once there, he lucked out (or, as one translation of this Bible passage reads, “God was with Joseph and things went very well with him”), and he became the personal aide of one of Pharaoh’s managers.  Unfortunately, Joseph was also very attractive, and the manager’s wife was extremely unhappy when he spurned her advances, so he ended up doing time in jail.  But thanks to his ability to interpret dreams, Joseph was released so that he could listen to Pharaoh’s dreams.  And, after he’d interpreted them to mean there would be seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine, Pharaoh made Joseph second in command, “in charge of the entire country of Egypt.”

During the seven years of plenty, Joseph helped Egypt to stockpile great mountains of food.  Then the seven years of famine began, and it’s at this point that Joseph’s brothers reenter the story.  Because when Jacob, their father, finds out that Egypt has food, he sends his sons there (from Canaan) to buy some.  And whom do they meet when they arrive?  Joseph!

But Joseph doesn’t actually tell his brothers who he is this first time around.  Power play?  Insecurity?  Anger?  Fear? We don’t know.  But he accuses them of being spies, takes Simeon (one of the brothers) as a prisoner, gives them food to bring back to Canaan (interestingly, without charge), and tells them that they must return with their youngest brother, Benjamin, in order to prove that they aren’t spies and to gain the release of Simeon.  So the brothers return to their father, Jacob, and explain the situation to him.  Needless to say, he’s not pleased and says something along the lines of, “You idiots—why the heck did you tell him you had another brother?  This is going to kill me!  If I lose Benjamin as well as Joseph, I’ll die!”  But Judah convinces Jacob to let Benjamin go, saying that he’ll take the blame if anything bad were to happen.

So the brothers all return to Egypt and when Joseph sees them again, he welcomes them back, especially Benjamin.  And yet, he still doesn’t tell them who he is!  In fact, he goes so far as to leave the room to have a good cry in private in order not to reveal his true identity.

So they feast, and Joseph gives them more food to take back home, and, bizarrely, hides a silver chalice inside Benjamin’s donkey pack, so that it will look as if it’s been stolen.  Of course, when it’s discovered, Joseph demands that Benjamin stay in Egypt with him as his slave, but Judah begs him to reconsider, letting Joseph know that their father, Jacob, would be devastated if Benjamin were not to return, since he’d already lost one son from his wife, Rachel, and losing the second would surely kill him.

It’s at this point (perhaps because Judah lets Joseph know that he’s been deeply mourned by his father?) that Joseph finally capitulates and, in a fit of violent sobbing, reveals himself to his brothers.  And this is where today’s scripture reading begins.

I’m guessing that if you heard this reading out of context, you might think Joseph is one amazingly forgiving guy.  I mean, this one section makes it sound like his brothers showed up years after throwing him in the pit and selling him as a slave, and Joseph immediately welcomed them with open arms and a forgiving smile. But no… When read as part of the entire narrative, it’s very clear that forgiveness comes slowly to Joseph, and that his initial reaction was to be angry, suspicious, fearful and eager for some revenge.

So let’s take a closer look at some of these emotional and behavioral patterns and see what we can learn.

But first, I’d like to acknowledge something.  This is a story, and as such, it’s meant to teach us a lesson or enlighten us to some truth, which is what scripture stories in general are meant to do.  However, I want to make it very clear that if you or anyone you know is suffering from actual physical, emotional or verbal abuse from a family member or anyone else, it is NOT OKAY.  It needs to stop.  Staying in such a situation so that you can grow spiritually or learn from the experience is not something that God or any of us wants you to do.  So please let me or a trusted doctor, social worker or counselor know if you need help.

The story of Joseph, with its extremes of abuse and dysfunction, can teach us many things about our own lives and how we respond to difficult family situations.  So let’s return to the narrative:

When his brothers first show up in Egypt, Joseph is stunned.  He’s stunned and most likely angry.  And for good reason!  These brothers abused him, betrayed him and did so with seeming impunity (certainly, they never made any attempt to right the wrong they committed by selling him into slavery).  So he’s angry, and he’s suspicious.  And most likely, he’s fearful.  Because in spite of his powerful role in Egypt (or in spite of whatever role each of us plays in our adult lives), there’s nothing like family to make us forget who we are now and take us right back to who we were “then”—in Joseph’s case, the annoying and resented younger brother, who was too weak to resist the awful plans and reprehensible actions of his stronger older siblings.  Can any of us relate?

But now the tables are turned!  Joseph has the power!  So, not surprisingly, because he’s human after all, Joseph doesn’t immediately forgive his brothers.  Instead, he toys with them, calling them spies (when he knows they’re not), taking Simeon prisoner, and demanding that the brothers go get Benjamin and bring him back for Joseph to see (remember that Benjamin, the youngest brother, not only hadn’t been involved in the original crime but also hadn’t accompanied his older brothers to Egypt—because his father couldn’t bear to let him go).

Then when the brothers return with Benjamin (after a serious argument with their father), Joseph welcomes them with a feast, but he’s still unable to be honest with them.  He’s holding on to his hurt, his fear, his anger and his need for revenge.  But he’s also so close to tears that this time he has to excuse himself to another room in order not to give his identity away.

Has this ever happened to you?  Have you ever held on that tightly to bitterness and resentment, your body wanting to let go and give way to grief, but your mind hanging on for dear life to all the “reasons” it makes sense to stay angry?

Anger so often seems like the primary emotion.  But the truth is that grief almost always underlies it, and unless we can get in touch with that core emotion of loss, our anger will continue to both produce and drive any number of other dysfunctional emotions and behaviors.  Underneath it all, Joseph is so very sad that his brothers rejected him.  He’s experienced so much loss.  So much sorrow.  So many wasted years.  Such a broken heart. Yes, Joseph is heartbroken.  How could his brothers have treated him the way that they did?  What did he do to deserve it (ah yes, we always ask ourselves that question)?  And why don’t they recognize him now that he’s standing right there before them?  Did he mean so little to them, that even now they don’t notice who he is?

So Joseph cries.  In a room by himself. But he still can’t forgive.  And he still can’t be honest.  Because anger and bitterness and resentment easily deceive us into believing that they’ll make us safe, easily convince us that if we give them up we’ll be in danger.

Joseph holds onto his power and defenses and even wields them abusively (you may recall from Dit’s mention of The Great Santini that abused persons frequently become abusers).  He “sets up” Benjamin by hiding the silver chalice in his donkey pack, so that when it’s discovered he can force Benjamin to stay as his slave.

But why is he forcing Benjamin to stay?  Is it because he misses his younger brother?  Is it because he can now wield his own power, and, just as his older brothers made him a slave, he can make Benjamin a slave?  Or is it an attempt to hurt his father, who we might just as well point out—didn’t rescue him from his brothers!?  Or, is it a cry of anger and grief at losing his mother, who died giving birth to his younger brother?  Such pain.  Joseph is in such pain, as everyone who is human experiences pain.  We can’t avoid getting hurt, but are we condemned to perpetuate it?

No.  No, we’re not.  Because we have the capacity to transform.  We have the ability to heal.  And we have the grace of God to help us do both.

And this is what happens for Joseph.  In spite of all his painful experiences—the early death of his mother, the betrayal by his brothers, the loss and fear and grief and anger at not being rescued and having to live his life in exile (even if God did grant him favor)—in spite of all this, Joseph transforms.  He’s able to let go.  Once he hears that his father has truly missed him, that his father has been heartbroken at his loss, Joseph’s own heart melts.  In fact, it seems that his entire being melts as he allows himself to feel loved, grieve his losses, and begin to forgive those who’ve done him such wrong.  And, in that moment, he tells his brothers who he is and begins to sob uncontrollably.

So Joseph forgives his brothers, letting go of his anger and bitterness, which in turn allows him to see clearly that his amazing life in Egypt and his ability to help his family during the time of famine were only possible because of that one truly awful decision made by his brothers so many years before.

Can you relate?  Have you ever had something truly bad happen—a death, a divorce, an accident, a job loss—and only much later gained an understanding of its place in the grand scheme of your life?  Now please don’t misunderstand me; I’m not being Pollyannaish here, I’m just positing that oftentimes truly difficult experiences do lead to transformation and growth.  When we let them.

So what do unhappy families have in common as portrayed by Jacob and his progeny? Well, I’d say:  jealousy (that wonderful coat!), secrecy and deceit (the brothers lied to their father about Joseph’s disappearance), guilt and shame (how must the brothers have felt all those years?), ongoing conflict (I’m just guessing their arguments didn’t cease with Joseph’s sale), lack of good boundaries (I didn’t even mention the parts of the story having to do with the inappropriate sexual antics of certain brothers), an inability to be “real” with one another (it took Joseph two different visits for him to tell his brothers who he was!), and a strong harboring of anger and resentment concerning past wrongs (I’m sure that Joseph, like all of us, thought he was well justified, but most of Joseph’s actions were driven by his bitterness and rage until he was finally able to let go and grieve and then, ultimately, forgive).

And happy families?  What do they look like?  Well, I think they look like healing and growth. They look like healthy responses to both the good and bad things of life, because all families, happy and unhappy alike, have both good and bad things happen to them.  Individuals in happy, which is just another word for healthy, families are honest with one another—even when it’s hard and when it hurts.  Healthy families admit their faults.  Happy families respect each person’s boundaries and don’t expect each other to make up for any perceived lack.  Healthy families neither avoid conflict nor indulge in it.  Happy families do not become petri dishes for guilt and shame, because conflicts are resolved openly and no individual family member is turned into “the problem.”  Happy families let go of perceived wrongs after talking openly about them and forgiving one another for them.  Thus, there’s no need to harbor the anger and resentment that can slowly but surely kill any relationship.

These are the characteristics of a happy family, and I’m guessing that most of us could still use a good deal of practice in this arena.  And that’s okay, because transformation doesn’t happen overnight, and God has all the time in the world.  So I’m going to encourage each of us to do just one thing (well, okay, it may technically be two things) this week.  And that’s to identify an area of anger in any family relationship (and by the way, it doesn’t matter whether the person is living or dead or whether s/he lives nearby or across the country)—identify an area of anger and ask for God’s love to rain blessings upon it.  I’m not asking you to get rid of the anger or make an effort to transform it or think hard about why you feel it.  I’m only suggesting that you identify it and ask God’s love to bless it.  And then see what happens!  I surely can’t promise a specific outcome.  But I can assure you that something will shift, something will change.  And, if Joseph is any indicator, it could very well have to do with letting go, experiencing grief, seeing things from a new perspective, and having the courage to forgive and the humility to be forgiven.  But who knows!  Because I’m only asking you to do one, I mean two, things: identify your anger and ask God to bless it.

Hinei mah tov umah na’im shevet achim gam yachad.

How good and pleasant it is when brothers and sisters dwell together as one!

Amen.

Rev. Ellen Jennings

 

 

Listening for the Kingdom

July 24, 2011

Six weeks ago, I stood before you and delivered my first sermon as your pastor.  I spoke about New Life and the Spirit, beginnings and endings, and I acknowledged that there was a great deal of spirit infusing this new beginning and that everyone with whom I’d met was tremendously excited to get started.  But I also asked some practical questions— how are we going to direct this excitement and inspiration?  How are we going to decide what matters most?  How are we going to determine what it is we’re really meant to do?

And I told you that I’d already received an answer, that in fact, one of you had, without knowing, supplied it.  And the answer was “listen.”  Listen to the Spirit as it leads us toward New Life.  Listen to ourselves.  Listen to one another.  Listen.  And I said, “this is how we’re going to find our direction.  This is how we’re going to know the next steps we’re meant to take.  We’re going to listen– to ourselves, to God, and to one another.  It’s all going to depend on listening.”

And then I asked you to do something for me.  I asked that you practice listening.  I requested that you stop and ask God who and what and how God wants this congregation to be.  And I urged you to listen for an answer.  And then write it down.  Write it down and bring it back to share with the rest of us.  Because in addition to listening, I said, we’re going to need to communicate—with ourselves, with God, and with one another.  We’ll need to listen.  And we’ll need to communicate.  And then we’ll need to listen again.

“And this is how we’ll do it,” I said.  “This is how we’ll discover who we’re meant to be, what we’re meant to do, and how we’re meant to do it.  Because God is still speaking!  And the Spirit is still inspiring.  And Jesus is still teaching.  And New Life awaits us wherever they lead.“

So here we are.  Six weeks later.  And I ask—have you listened?  Have you stopped and asked God who and what and how God wants this congregation to be?  Have you written it down?  And have you shared it with others?

Of course, I can’t answer that question for you.  And, in fact, some of you are here today who weren’t here on that Sunday six weeks ago.  So you’re hearing my request for the first time.

But I’m going to tell you that I’ve observed a lot of listening.  And communicating.  I’ve met with you, and conversed with you, and watched as you heard each other speak and as you listened to what each other had to say.

During the three “getting to know you” sessions I hosted this month, the thirty people who participated shared their memories, their hopes, their ideas and their dreams.  And as each person spoke, everyone else listened.  During the Cabinet and Deacons and Mission and Music and Sunday School and Young Adults and Finance and New Member and Member Care and Bible Class meetings and groups I’ve attended, the dozens more people who participated shared their plans, their questions, their suggestions and their inspirations.  And as each person spoke, everyone else listened.

And during yesterday’s staff retreat in which I and four other staff members participated, we shared our backgrounds and our job descriptions and our work styles and our visions.  And as each person spoke, everyone else listened.

So we’ve listened to one another.  And it is my prayer that we’ve also listened to God.  That we’ve spent some time in silence with the Spirit and listened for God’s answer to who and what and how we’re meant to be.  Knowing, of course, that God speaks in many different ways—not only in the silence of reflection and contemplation but also through the voices of those with whom we share our meeting spaces and agendas.

We have listened.

And I have listened.  I’ve not only met with all the aforementioned groups, but I’ve also met with at least a dozen of you individually.  And I’ve asked many of you the same questions:

 

• What do you want me to know about Cleveland Park Church?
• What are your hopes and dreams for this congregation?
• What are your expectations of our shared ministry?
• What are its sacred cows?

And I’ve listened to your answers.  Listened and reflected and prayed and synthesized.  And as a result, I’ve created and am proposing a vision for the coming year, which I’ll present at today’s mid-year meeting.  It’s a fairly typical visioning document with an overview and a goal and five key areas and five other important highlighted areas—and I think it will act as a good starting point for both discussion and action.  But before we get there, I want to emphasize a few of the themes and ideas underlying this proposal.  Which leads me back to the questions I’ve asked, and the answers you’ve given, and the listening we’ve all done.

So, I’ll start with the last of the questions I just shared:  what are your sacred cows?  Meaning, what are the things you tend to resist changing?  And you do have a few, mostly concerning worship, but not that many!  In fact, Cleveland Park Church seems to be an amazingly flexible congregation.  For all your love of nostalgia, you deal with change quite well, even seeking it as a means of transformation and growth.  The case in point being that even as people told me about the various sacred cows, most of them added, “but we could probably be convinced to do it differently!”

Which brings me back to my first couple of questions:  What do you want me to know about Cleveland Park Church?  And, what are your hopes and dreams?  What I heard in response is that you have a surprisingly consistent understanding of your history and identity as well as a gratifyingly coherent vision of your hopes and dreams for the future.  By this I mean, that when I ask five different people to tell me about something in the life of the church, I of course get five different versions, but the versions are compatible.  They all reinforce one another.  There don’t seem to be any wildly divergent versions of reality floating about.  Rather, you seem to have a healthy (meaning you’re both positive and realistic) view of the ups and downs in your history, the strengths and weaknesses of your identity, and the various possibilities for your future.

Which makes my job unbelievably easier and bodes very well for our shared ministry.  For, as today’s reading from 1^st Kings (about the coronation of the young Solomon, David’s son) lets us know—an important part of leadership, and in our denomination, we are all leaders, is the ability to discern what is right, the wisdom to know what is true.  So the fact that this congregation as a body has chosen to tell both an honest and optimistic story about its history and identity is a truly excellent sign.  There don’t seem to be any skeletons still lurking in the closet or unidentified goblins remaining under the rug.  The skeletons or goblins that do exist (and, trust me, they exist in all congregations) have been discussed, dealt with, and consigned to their rightful positions in the past.  This is a congregation that’s interested in its future!

What else have I heard as I listened over the past couple of months?  One of the things I’ve been told over and over again is how welcoming this congregation is.  Some of you have described this church as a sanctuary, others as their “place of comfort,” others as a place where “I go and people ask me how I am, not what do I do.” This sense of welcome and inclusion and caring and warmth is a strong and wonderful aspect of this church’s identity.  It’s what draws people in, and it’s often what compels them to stay.  It is, in fact, what attracted me.

But there’s a flip side to this comfort, and I’ve heard many of the same people who express a deep and grateful love for the blessed sanctuary of this church also claim that it can get too comfortable.  That, in fact, it can be so comfy inside these four walls that folks can forget to look beyond them.  Which is to say that we do a wonderful job of comforting the afflicted—which all of us are!  But we may need to work a little harder to afflict the comfortable—and, of course, we all fall into that category as well!

So I’m hearing that we could push ourselves, challenge ourselves a bit more to look outside the warm and welcoming nest that we’ve created for all who enter here and find ways to reach out and share the good news of our welcome with more of those who might need to know about it.  And this includes not just those seekers who might find a home as a member of our congregation.  But also those who may never find a home here, but who need some of the warmth and welcome we have to share, who need some of what we have to give.  I’m talking about mission.

And from everything I’ve heard, you agree with me!  Almost every individual and group with whom I’ve met has emphasized the importance of mission and outreach in one way or another—whether as a way to give back a measure of the blessings so many of us have received, as a way to build relationships between our congregation and those who live in the surrounding community, as a way to strengthen the bonds between individual congregation members, or as a way to show our children and youth what faith in action really looks like and to help them develop a lifelong habit of loving their neighbors as themselves.  You have many different and excellent reasons for wanting more of a focus on mission.

So as I’ve listened, two themes have stood out:  your deep gratitude for the comfort and welcome you experience as members of this congregation and your strong desire to reach out and share this blessing with others.  And, this dual emphasis on welcome (or comfort) and mission (or outreach) is what you all so wisely summarized in the mission statement you created over a year ago.  The mission of Cleveland Park Congregational Church—printed on the back of each worship bulletin—is “to nurture love of God and love of neighbor in the world.”

I love this mission statement!  In that one phrase you’ve included both the two great commandments of Jesus in which he summed up all the law and the prophets—“to love the lord your God with all our heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and to love your neighbor as yourself,” and fulfilled the great commission of Jesus, when he directed his followers to go out and make disciples of all nations—“teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you.”  And you have done so using the word, “nurture,” which so succinctly expresses this congregation’s beautiful culture of welcome, comfort, and caring.

So we nurture (which is the great commission) love of God and love of neighbor (which are the great commandments).  And we do this in the world, thus creating God’s kingdom here on earth.  Not Caesar’s kingdom, not the emperor’s kingdom, not the czars kingdom, not the president’s kingdom—but God’s kingdom, God’s realm—which is created by nurturing love of God and love of neighbor in the world.

And this is what today’s Gospel parables are about—creating, or to put it more accurately, recognizing God’s kingdom.  For Jesus tells us that the kingdom is right here. It’s not in some far off heaven or some enchanted land.  It’s right here. We just don’t tend to recognize it, because we have neither eyes to see nor ears to hear.  We aren’t looking.  And we aren’t listening. How can we recognize something if we’re wearing blinders and earplugs?  Blinders and earplugs comprised of our cultural assumptions, our societal expectations, and our race, class and sex “isms”—all of which keep us from seeing or hearing things for what they really are, from seeing or hearing people for who they really are.

Take the parable of the leaven or the parable of the mustard seed.  We tend to hear these parables as tidy little maxims of growth—grab a little yeast, mix it with flour, and voila, the kingdom of God!  Or, take a tiny seed, water it, care for it, and poof, the kingdom of God!  And, of course, parables being parables, these would not be incorrect interpretations, for parables have multiple angles from which they can be seen and multiple levels at which they can be understood.  However, they would definitely be limited ones.

For, in first century Palestine, every Jewish peasant would have known that leaven is unclean and that mustard is a weed. And not only is leaven unclean, but the person who is using the leaven to make the bread is a woman. And women?  Unclean.  So is Jesus saying that the kingdom of God is like a culturally unacceptable concept being spread around by a culturally irrelevant (or worse) person?!  Hmmm.  As for plants and the kingdom, the Jewish ears listening to Jesus’ story about the mustard seed would have been accustomed to the scriptural references that compared God’s kingdom or temple to the towering and majestic Cedars of Lebanon!  But Jesus doesn’t use this obvious, respectful and expected metaphor.  No, he chooses a weed—a useful weed, of course, because one does like a bit of mustard powder in ones food now and again—but a weed nonetheless.  And not a weed that one would ever choose to plant in ones garden, because mustard is a voracious plant that tends to take over all other vegetation around it.  Just like yeast.  A voracious little animal, that when fed properly, tends to grow and grow and grow, making everything around it grow as well.  Which is why dough rises.  And perhaps why the kingdom of God is just a little bit “like”—remember, Jesus is the master of simile—just a little bit “like” a mustard seed or yeast.  The kingdom of God is not what one would expect.  It is not that for which we thought we were looking or listening.  And it grows and grows and grows, in plain view, even as its value is hidden to all those whose cultural blinders and earplugs prevent them from acknowledging the possibility of a different sort of world, a different sort of reality, a different sort of kingdom.  God’s kingdom.

So are we ready to keep listening?  Because God is still speaking!  And it seems that God has provided us with a more difficult task than the one I requested of you six weeks ago. Meaning that, yes, we need to listen—to ourselves, to one another, and to God.  But we need not only listen, we must also have eyes that see and ears that hear.  We must dare to remove the cultural and societal blinders and earplugs that impede our vision and muffle the sound of God’s voice and look and listen for the kingdom. We must have the courage to live out our excellent mission statement that is such a wonderful combination of both the great commandments and the great commission.  And to do so, we must be willing to risk going beyond our comfort zones and venturing outside the sanctuary created by these four walls even as we carry their comfort with us.

I’m ready!  Are you?

Amen.

Rev. Ellen Jennings