Category: Sermon

This sermon was preached on the weekend of October 21, 2018. The Scripture texts are Psalm 98 and Ephesians 5:15-21

Anyone ever get anxiety dreams?

The most famous one is, of course, going to school or work with no clothes on.  We will not be talking about that one in church.

Thankfully, I never had that one. When I was in school, I had used to have one about forgetting about never attending a class and there being a test the next day. Today, mine are over mundane things, and usually involve this stupid microphone in one way or another. 

Public speaking isn’t a fear of mine, all things considered. Nor is it, is and this has happened to other pastors for real, going to the bathroom with the mic still on and broadcasting. And yes, it is apparently as mortifying for all parties involved as you might thing.

No, one of the things I am most frightened of actually is forgetting to mute the mic when we sing our hymns together. It’s completely and utterly irrational, as many anxieties are.

Especially because I love loud singing. I love to do it.

Especially in my car: I have a thirty-minute drive to church from home in Wallingford, so if I’m not listening to an audiobook, I’ll rock out to some soul classics- some Marvin Gaye or Prince, or some Rock and Roll or Outlaw Country.

No, my fear about having the mic on is that I’ll be too loud, and make some people think that its not worth the trouble to sing.

That frightens me.

For singing in church is one of the gifts of God.  Singing in church reminds us of the primal freedom that we have in and through Jesus Christ, and lets us become more open to the power of the Holy Spirit which binds us together.

Our scriptures both describe this gift in different ways. In our psalm, Psalm 98, God is to be glorified for the work of salvation, the vindication of his love and power to and through the ends of the earth.

This salvific work is powerful enough and good enough that it should spontaneously cause us to shout and sing for joy. In Psalm 98, the community that praises God is not only the human family over the whole earth, who the Lord reigns over, but also the earth itself. 

When the seas roar, they do so in praise of God.  When the forests and hills sing for joy with birdsong and the wind whistles through the trees, it is in praise of God. If some of the imagery and in the psalm seems familiar, they should.

Does anyone know the popular hymn that is based on psalm 98? No lifesaver today if you do, but that’s ok. Let’s take a listen for a second, and I think you’ll get it.

It’s the basis for the hymn “Joy to the world”!

Let’s listen for the second verse and its direct connection to the psalm: Hear that second verse- Joy to the earth, the Savior reigns! Let men their songs employ, while fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains, repeat the sounding joy, repeat the sounding joy, repeat, repeat the sounding joy.

All of creation is resounding for joy for the presence of God on earth, and the work of salvation. And if you were wondering how Joy to the World ties into our musical heritage, this song is our musical heritage. Isaac Watts, who wrote Joy to the World, was a Congregationalist in England.  He knew of the power of song, and wanted to make sure his people knew it too.

He knew that singing brings communities together, and gets us in tune with our creator and the rest of creation.  That legacy has come down to us through our traditions of choir, of solo singing, and especially, in congregational singing.

It is a tradition that has been passed down to us through vastly different musical eras and technologies, from the psalmist who urges the people to sing alongside lyre and cymbals, to the organ and piano on we play at our Sunday services, to the guitar and drums as heard through a Samsung tablet at our Saturday afternoon services.

The psalm reminds us that we sing for the Glory of God because there is something primal, free, and untamable in singing.  Before humanity invented even the most rudimentary of instruments, we had our voices.

We can imagine our ancestors singing in the dark around a fire, much as we still do when we’re out camping, or when our children and youth are at Silver Lake Conference Center, keeping warm and chasing away the darkness.

And for those who through the terrible accident of birth, war or conquest, were enslaved, who were stripped of as much freedom and human dignity as was possible, song was one of the things that could not be taken away.

Miriam, Moses’ sister, sings a song of freedom and thanksgiving after the Pharoah’s army is drowned after they escape across the Red Sea from the Land of Egypt.

For African slaves in the Americas, as much as the Israelites, treatment was even more brutal, as slave owners, and the wider white community, especially in the south, sought to dehumanize African Americans to a degree never attempted before. However much they tried, however, they could never take away the power of song that slaves possessed. 

We know that many of the old Black Spirituals sung by slaves were coded messages about liberation and freedom, sometimes metaphorically as messages of hope, but also sometimes functioning as actual codes during escapes.

Harriet Tubman would sing use different songs as codes, which would tell folks if they were supposed to stay, go, cross a river, find shelter immediately, or run.How more poignant or direct example of the liberating value of song than its use in bringing people to freedom! Literally.

What of our Ephesians reading then?

It is also about the power of the Gospel, but not through the primal forces of the earth, or the individual and collective liberation from bondage into freedom promised to those who believe, but about the power of the gathered community, and the transforming power of the Holy Spirit in that community.

It’s a call for the people of God to not just be the people of God, but to do the hard work of being the people of God.  

It calls us through four sets of contrasting pairs, three of which are conventional: Be careful in your living- live as wise people do, not as the unwise do.  Be careful of your time, for the times we live in are evil. Do not be foolish, but try to understand the will of God. 

These are pretty common exhortations in the Bible, which we can finds roots of in Proverbs, in the Gospel stories.

It’s the fourth pair, though, that I find most interesting: Do not get so drunk you lose yourself, but instead fill yourself with the Holy Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts.

I find it interesting because I believe it says something very interesting about the power of community and the universal power of music, and the Gospel.

Here’s another question, and I promise it won’t end with Christmas music: Does anyone remember a New Testament story that involves a joke about wine and the Holy Spirit?

Here’s a hint, it’s not in one of the four Gospels, but it probably gets read every year, usually sometime in June. It’s the story of Pentecost, featuring one of my favorite jokes in the Bible.

Pentecost is the story of the birth of the church, which takes place in Acts chapter 2. 

Peter is preaching to a mixed nationality and multi-lingual crowd, and through the power of the Holy Spirit, every person is able to understand him in their own language.

And there’s a great line from Peter who says, “those of you who thought we were drunk this morning, why would we be drunk, it’s only 9 AM out here!”

Apparently Mimosa and Bloody Mary drinking technology had not advanced to the point we’re at today. In all seriousness though, this contrast (or maybe comparison) between drunkenness and the Holy Spirit happens in the context of the universality of the Gospel message, and its ability to cut across cultural barriers.

As a brief aside, wine, for its part, was the civilizing drink in the Greek and Roman world, able to unite people of different cultures into a same shared space, which is part of why it is mentioned here.

I believe that that music has the same Pentecost power.

Music is one of the channels that the Holy Spirit works through, binding us together, and turning our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh, which help us to grow and learn as Christians.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, singing together has been scientifically proven to help bring people together into community.

But perhaps more importantly, music softens our hearts, preparing them to respond to the word of God, not only in our bible readings, and hopefully, in the sermon, but also in the prayers of the people around us, and the faces of every child and adult in this community.

It helps us to notice Jesus more clearly in our midst, to know and remember that we, along with the whole of creation that sings out to God, will eventually return to his embrace.

And I don’t know about all y’all, but I could use that reminder pretty often these days.

Amen.

Scripture: Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32 ; Luke 24:13-27

Preached on October 14, 2018 at Wolcott Congregational Church.  Sorry for the poor audio quality!

One day in middle school, someone asked the math teacher if she did math problems for fun. As a child, it was one of those, “well, what did she say” moments, that I’ve found more and more humorous as I’ve gotten older.

Her answer, by the way, was No.

As a pastor, sometimes people assume the same sort of things about me, that I spend my non-work time reading theology or praying, and while I do try to a little of both, I do have a social life that extends beyond those activities.

I tell you this to also let you know that many of my non-pastor friends are not even Christian. In Boston, where many of my friends still are, being Christian is actually pretty weird. 

Other than my Christian friends, I have friends who are Jewish, Muslim, Pagan, or Unitarian Universalist, but most of them aren’t anything in particular.

This is the case for my people in my generation, and even more so in the generation younger than mine, who are either in middle or high school now. A couple of days ago, I did an informal survey of my facebook friends about what first came to mind when they thought of Christianity. 

These folks were under forty.  Most between twenty and thirty, and what they had to say should trouble us. The shortest answer was “step 1: vote for Donald Trump.”

Another said, “I always associated Christianity with threats about the afterlife shrouded in a facade of caring, followed by feeling like I was being judged as lost or misguided.”

The most heartbreaking was the story of a close friend who is LGBTQ, who grew up bullied and harassed for it, said “I was harassed most by people who were out Christians.”

If this is how people interact with Christians on a daily basis, well, it won’t matter how good our worship is, how fancy our churches are, how compelling our bible studies are.

If these are the fruits of Christianity that are being shown today, what are we doing?

And I’m not saying that they are the only fruits, but it is the only side of us that some folks, maybe even many folks, see.

It’s as though we’ve gotten so used to being on top of the world, that we don’t remember what its like to be different, to be scared to be who you are, that we have a right to bully and judge others for being who they are.

We’ve forgotten what its like to not have the law on our side, to not have leaders who believe the same thing as us. We’ve forgotten what its like to not be the only game in town.

Now, luckily, the Bible does have some good insight for us for times such as these.

Paul’s letter to the Romans is such a book.  It’s incredibly rewarding, to read, although it is quite complicated.

Part of this is because the letter to the Romans is Paul’s theological masterpiece, where he writes extensively about the nature of grace and faith in relationship to the Jewish law (The Torah).

It’s a relationship that’s more complicated that sometimes we give credit to on a surface read, and sometimes the church hasn’t followed it very well.

Unfortunately, Romans has been used as part of anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish talk in the Christian church, which I think Paul would have found abhorrent.

But there is another reason that the letter is so complex, and that’s because Rome was the most diverse and complex city in Europe at the time, maybe even the world.

Christianity and Judaism haven’t split at this point, although tensions were quickly rising. Folks who were ethnically and religiously Jewish worshipped alongside Jewish followers of Jesus, (many of whom still followed Judaic law, Gentile followers of Jesus, and folks who are not ethnically Jewish, but followed Judaic law.

What our passage today says, and it’s a good reminder for us, is that even though they aren’t following Jesus, they are still a part of God’s plan for the salvation of the world.

Paul says there unequivocally that even though some Jewish folks were enemies in their eyes, those people were still beloved by God.

When Jesus talks about loving your enemies in the abstract, it becomes easy to say, but we don’t really have many examples of what that looks like for the rest of us. This is what it looks like on the ground.  And it’s hard.

I know that when I’m deep in fighting on a political post on facebook, even with people who make me really angry, who I think are wrong about everything, even people who might bully or harass me, there are few things harder than understanding that they are still beloved children of God.

This doesn’t mean their actions are acceptable, or that we should allow abuse, harassment, intimidation or exploitation to occur in any form, but it does force me to accept their full god given humanity, and that is hard.

I do this somewhat reluctantly, and usually not for any selfless reason, but because the moment I begin to strip the dignity of God-Given humanity away from someone else, the possibility opens up that I might be able to strip that humanity from myself.

That is really terrifying.

So then, with that in mind, I ask us, what would a letter of Paul to the People of New York City, or Boston, or Wolcott, Connecticut look like?

What would Paul tell us of in our time, a time of rising anxiety and tension between Christians and non-Christians, and all those folks who live in a hazy in between place.

Because for many people, Christian is just one of many identities that we can make meaning and organize our identities around, seen as equally valid as being a Parrothead (a Jimmy Buffet fan), part of the Beyhive- fans of Beyonce, Red Sox Fans, a gamer, or on a more serious note, a Democrat, a Republican, or being Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender or Queer.

This is not to say anything bad around those identities, but rather that Christianity, and religion as a whole in the United States, is increasingly becoming another consumer choice.

If Paul reminds us that Jewish folks- non Christians are a part of God’s plan for the world, how then are we called to interact with non-Christians while being faithful to what we know to be true about the Gospel?

I think the Road to Emmaus story has a lot of good practical and some metaphorical suggestions in it for us.

The first is to note that the disciples were walking along that road with no intention to evangelize to the stranger. 

Travel in ancient times was a dirty and dangerous business.  Bandits and thieves were common, and people were absurdly vulnerable when they were on the road. There were no police patrols, and for Jewish folks, a roman soldier was as likely to rob you or force you to work for him as he was to stop the bandits himself.

The disciples were simply glad for the company.

Shouldn’t we also be glad for the company on our roads of life? I don’t know about you, but for me, life is too hard, too dangerous, and too short to not accept good company when we can find it.

Secondly, the disciples were vulnerable and authentic with the stranger.  They told him that the life of faith was difficult, that it wasn’t all hashtag blessings, and that they struggled. The disciples acknowledged that things were not going as they expected, that they had some doubt and some courage and faithfulness, and that it was hard.

Moving away from a manufactured and Instagram worthy life of faith lets us connect with others who are struggling.  It moves our faith from this thing only for the unworthy to something that’s for really for all of us, which Jesus wanted.

Thirdly, and this might be the most important, the disciples listened. They listened to this man who told them things they weren’t expecting to hear.  He told them things that went against their traditional religious understandings, and they didn’t dismiss out of hand, didn’t reject, them, but were amazed by them.

Now of course, this stranger was Jesus Christ, and he told them about how they could interpret the Hebrew Bible to find him in there, but I think the lessons remain.

What if we showed up and journeyed with people, no matter who they were?

What if we were then vulnerable and authentic with them?

And what if we listened to them?

None of these things require that you abandon your faith, or what you believe.  I think doing them might help your faith out a bit.  It’s strengthened my faith.

And I know this sounds hard, and it is. It’s a task we can’t do alone, nor are we expected to.  But to give you a little bit of hope, I’ll finish out the quotes of what two of those folks from my facebook wall had to say about Christianity.  I do this not to inflate my own ego, but because of the power and difference that one person can make:

From the person who called Christians out as having a façade of caring, “I hadn’t been able to think of Christians as good people until I met you (and it’s not for lack of encounters).”

And from the person who was bullied most by people who were Christians? They finished the sentence, with, “so nothing good, until I met you.”

And I am but one kind of socially awkward, weird guy who’s a decent listener.  What could you do when you meet a traveler on the road?

Amen.

This sermon was preached on September 30, 2018, at the Wolcott Congregational Church. The Scriptures were Ecclessiastes 3: 1-9, Mark 2: 1-12

Say you’re in a nice roman city with a nice roman house with a nice Jewish Roman family. You hear stories about the nice rabbi who’s been going around, and invite him in to do some talks. 

He’s popular around town, so hosting him will make you look good, and you invite the local scribes, clergy and other intellectuals to meet with him.  It’ll be an easy day, just sitting down, drinking some wine and talking philosophy and Torah.  So you think. Of course, what ends up happening is that by the end of the day, you end up with crowds so thick you can’t move about in your own house and a giant hole in the roof.

As much as I would like to say this is out of character for Jesus, it’s not. It’s quite in line with who Jesus is throughout the Gospels. He’s constantly disrupting the lines separating the conventional and the unconventional.  Jesus is clearly a learned man, who knows his Torah and is able to debate with the wisest rabbis of his time.  But he’s also a man who gives no regard for social conventions, especially when they restrict who can claim him, and who he can claim as his own.

Our Gospel story today is emblematic of that. I will say that there’s certainly something cinematic about the imagery of the scene.  Picture it: a large house, beyond standing room full.  People from all walks of life are present, from peasants, and hardscrabble workers, to scribes, respected teachers and religious lawyers. In the center is Jesus, holding court.  Perhaps he is teaching about forgiveness.  Perhaps he is teaching about the transformative work of God’s love, or our love for our friends?

Four men, perhaps friends, perhaps folks who didn’t know each other at all, heard about the healing power in this Rabbi Jesus, and decide to go and see if this man can heal a man they knew, who had been paralyzed. Maybe this paralyzed man was a war veteran, maybe he got sick, or maybe he was born paralyzed. Either way, as they approach the building, they see that the crowd around the house is beyond crowded.  The house is so thickly crowded that maybe they begin to despair.  They try yelling, cajoling and pushing their way through, but to no avail.

One of them has an ingenious idea: if we can’t get in through the conventional way, why not go in through an unconventional way? So they literally begin to “unroof” the house.  Yes, the word in the Greek that we translate as to dig through the roof of the house literally means, “unroof.” We can imagine these four men digging with pickaxes, shovels, or maybe even their bare hands, trying to get at Jesus.  They know that they very well might get in trouble for this from the civil authorities, but it does not matter to them.  That this man, maybe their friend, maybe someone they met that very day, is in need of their love is what matters.

And eventually they do get to encounter Jesus.  They lower him through the hole they made in the roof, delivering him into the arms of the healer.

After this, a discourse on forgiveness follows, but that’s not what we’re going to focus on today.  Today, we’re going to focus on the unconventional and difficult work of faith and love that we see in this story.

The paralyzed man and those the four who lowered down their fellow into the house with Jesus are an example of faith manifesting itself as love.  They were willing to risk physical and financial harm, or even imprisonment, because they knew of the healing power of God. They knew that it would be hard work, but that it would be worth it. They trusted that the abundant love of God would dissolve the boundaries of what conventional and what was unconventional, and heal the paralyzed man.  

It’s an error of our modern world that when we think of love, we think of an easy sort of emotional affection, something that we never have to work on, or work for.  We are in love with narratives of “love at first sight,” or that love in a family is easy. I think Jesus would disagree with that characterization of love. 

This is not to say that people didn’t feel genuine romantic affection for one another.  The presence of the Song of Songs/Song of Solomon, a book of romantic poetry in the Bible signifies that.

But when Jesus was talking about love, love of God, love of neighbor, Jesus was not speaking just about an emotional response toward someone that you feel an intense affection toward, but hard work.  Jesus talks about love mostly not as a noun, but as a verb. The work of love for Jesus is to see your neighbors, your friends, and most difficult of all, your enemies, as children of God, full of dignity and humanity, and to be able to place their needs and desires as equal to your own.

This means that love is really hard work. Anyone who has tried to be concerned for or care for someone who really irritates them knows this.  It’s hard when we have the best of intentions, and it’s harder when life complicates things. Sometimes we only see as through a mirror darkly.  We grow and we change, seeing things differently than we did when we were younger. Ultimately, I’m thankful that the balance sheet of my works is not what will guarantee my eventual communion with God, but trusting in the rather the overwhelming power and sometimes strange and abundant love of Jesus Christ.  When that trust is absolute, we can’t help but manifest that as love for our neighbors.

That’s true at least in theory. As much as we like to think that our love is an ever upward trajectory, the work of love is not guaranteed. The history of the church is full of stories of failure, death, and sometimes resurrection. After all, right before the crucifixion, Peter, the chief disciple denied Christ three times. Three days later, when the women of the church proclaimed the resurrection of Jesus to the men of the church, the men believed it was idle chatter.

Yet the church did sometimes grow in love, in fits and starts. Peter would go on to proclaim the Gospel in the far away city of Rome, with a church of mixed ethnic origins, something scandalous in the ancient world. 

We also know that even though women were not believed after the resurrection, women played a key role in the early church; the letters of Paul mention several women working as apostles, something unconventional and scandalous for the time. In ancient Greek culture, women were not just thought not to be inferior to men, but perhaps a whole different category of less than human.

On a related note, especially given the testimony of Dr. Ford and Judge Kavanaugh in the Senate that captured the nation’s attention on Thursday, and the hurt and pain I saw that it caused in many women, especially those who had been sexually assaulted and harassed, I promise that as your pastor, as a Christian, as a fellow human being, if you disclose to me your experiences with sexual assault, sexual harassment, or abuse, I will believe you.

I believe that we have a special calling in the church as Christians to believe women, as the disciples should have believed Mary Magdalene in the Gospel of John.

Unfortunately, the unconventional promise of a leading role for women in the earliest church soon lost out to a conventional sort of misogyny.

After a ban in the second century, women were not allowed to be priests, deacons, or clergy for more than 1700 years. And although women make up a majority of Christians in the United States, most Christians in the United States have never, and might never have, a female pastor or priest.  Thanks be to God for our Congregationalist forebears for ordaining the first woman in a mainstream denomination in 1852. Despite that long history, this year is the first time that women are the majority of ordained clergy in the United Church of Christ.

I will leave us with one final note. When I’m reading the Bible for myself, one of the things I like to do is try to identify, or imagine myself as one of the characters in a particular story. Who and why I identify with someone changes over time, depending on where I am. For example, in the story of Mary Magdalene and the women telling about Jesus’s resurrection to the male disciples, has my own testimony been dismissed for one reason or another? Have I been a man who has dismissed what women have had to say? 

I find that strategy to be particularly meaningful in our story of the paralytic man.  Am I a member of the crowd, unwilling to give up a conventional and privileged place near Jesus in order that someone who needs to be near him right now can approach? Am I one of those folks, coming up with an ingenious way to help someone I love encounter the living God that I know can help heal them? Or am I the man so wracked with ailments, paralysis in the Biblical story, or in my case, loneliness, depression, or anxiety, that I am unable to come to Jesus without a little unconventional love from those around me?

So let us thank God for God’s grace, healing and love when it finds us in a conventional way or especially, in an unconventional way. Let us give thanks to a God who loves us so much, that he is always pushing us to love more and more.  Let us sing and shout for joy for a God who loves us so much that we can’t help but try to love our neighbors.  And let us be especially grateful that when we screw up our, we can do better.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

“A Time to Seek”

Preached at Wolcott Congregational Church on September 23, 2018, by Rev. Shane Montoya. Note that this is the third in a four part sermon series on “Transitions.”  Previous entries are available here and here.

Scripture: Ecclesiastes 3:1-7; Exodus 32: 1-14

Is God a Cow?

That might seems like a funny question to ask, but there we have it in our second Bible reading, in the book of Exodus. God has helped Moses, Aaron, and the Israelite people escape the cruelty of Pharaoh.  The plagues have been unleashed upon the Egyptian people, Charlton Heston has lifted his staff and God parted the waters of the Red sea for the people. They have seen the Glory of the Lord but now they wait and they wander.

To give you all a little refresher about the primary characters in our story, Moses and Aaron are brothers, and the two main leaders of the Israelites. Moses is the moral force and primary organizer. Although he has a stutter and doesn’t talk so good, he was the one who spoke to God in the burning bush, and who organized the people as they resisted the pharaoh.  His older brother is Aaron, who is the charismatic religious leader.  He leads worship, dispenses justice, and is the ancestor of the Levite priesthood that would dominate religious life in Israel for centuries.

This particular story happens pretty early in the grand scheme of the exodus, occurring about four to five months after the escape from Egypt.  The people are camped out around Mt. Sinai.  47 days earlier, the combined leadership of the Israelites, including Moses, Miriam, Aaron, and the heads of the other tribes go up to Mount Sinai, and have dinner in the direct presence of God. After dinner, The Lord calls Moses up to the top of the mountain.  Smoke and fire surround the mountaintop, and to the people of Israel, Moses seems to vanish.

He’s up at Mount Sinai for so long that, in the quippy language of UCC pastor and author Frederick Buechner, “some thought he’d settled down and gone into real estate.”

So Aaron does what any good Congregationalist minister would, and listens to the people. “Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him,” they say to him. Make Gods for us, they tell their priest, their religious leader, their pastor.

Let’s stop there for a minute before we go any further.

The theological arrogance is almost breathtaking. It upends the order of creation: God creates us in his image, we should not create God in our own image. Aaron, who dined in the presence of God just weeks before, knew better than to go along, but for whatever reason, he did.

Maybe he tried to dissuade the people from it: Give me your Gold, in your jewelry and trinkets, he tells them, so we can make it into a calf.

In my experience, asking people for money can put a big damper on devotion, so maybe that’s what Aaron was hoping to do.

But give they did.

And so Aaron assists them in dutifully casting their gold into the shape of a calf.

The calf isn’t a terrible sort of thing to worship if you’re an agricultural people, which everyone was at the time.  Cows are signs of wealth, prosperity and fertility. They, almost magically, turn grass into milk and meat. To this day, there are places where the number of cattle someone owns is their primary signifier of social and economic status.

When the new statue of the calf is done, the people like their new God.  This God isn’t hidden at the mountaintop behind clouds, who has taken away their leader for the past month and a half. This God can be touched, and seen.

This God represents the prosperity of their community, and their hopes for the future. “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt,” the people dance and shout for joy.

In response, Aaron, tries to salvage the situation as best as he can, making an altar to God before the calf and declaring the next day a feast day.

But the damage has been done.

For when the people of Israel, as anxious as they are, declare that the calf that they made is the God who brought them out of Egypt, they attempted to domesticate God, and God can never be domesticated.

This domesticated God, who is not merely represented by something, but is defined and limited by the image, is what I call an idol.

Idols are contained by their very existence, beholden to the forms and limitations of their makers.  For the Israelites, the calf represents prosperity and fertility. Logically, it follows that if we worship the calf, we will have lots of cows and lots of children. What else could anyone need in an agricultural society?

But what relationship is there to form with a God who is little more than a (quite literally) glorified vending machine?

Is a business relationship with God, one that has debt that could be settled and abandoned at any time, really a relationship with God that we want?  One where God could cast us off, as soon as a better, more devout, or wealthier people came along?  Would we want to be a people who would break our covenant with God as soon as a better, more practical God came along? Do we really want to worship a God who provides services in exchange for adoration?

Honestly, it is tempting.  It’s tempting to have a God who provides only Good things to Good people. People, which, by the way, look like me, believe the same things as me, heck, who even cheer for the same sports team as me (Go RedSox).

But that’s not who God is.

God sees what is happening with the calf, and God gets angry.  God gets angry because the Israelites would forsake the covenants and promises of their ancestors, for a God that they could control and domesticate.

God gets angry because however much the people believe they are worshipping God in the form of the idol of the calf, the values that the calf represents are not the values of God.

The calf does not represent righteousness, justice, and fair and equal treatment of poor.  It does not represent a God whose greatest commandment is that people should forgive their debtors and love their neighbors. It does not represent the Living God our Creator and Father, God made flesh in Jesus Christ, or the Holy Spirit who challenges, provokes, and inspires us.

The calf is not God.  God is God.

Further proof of this is in the very next scene, where Moses argues with God.  God is set on fully alighting his anger on the Israelites, but Moses *argues* with him.  This is a God who listens to us, who wants nothing more for us to be in conversation and dialogue with him.

Our God is not the shopkeeper who provides us with services in exchange for money, and more like a family member who loves us and sometimes infuriates us, especially if either of us is doing something dumb.

God doesn’t want us to be standoffish, to be meekly submissive in a way that ultimately discourages engagement, but to be intense and fully authentic.  God wants us to follow in the example of Jacob and wrestle with him.  Yes, we do want to follow God’s will, but Moses shows us that we have can have say in what God’s will is.  This is particularly true if we’re praying not for ourselves, but for those that we love.

In this argument on the mountaintop, God offers Moses a place of high honor, the sole parentage of a new nation, something quite like Jesus’s temptation the desert, yet Moses does not accept it. Instead, Moses argues, hopes, and prays for his people, against his own self-interest, even though they infuriate him at times.

That’s not something we would do with God who we created. The Golden Calf could never challenge us, never call us to be our best selves, never makes us argue against your own self-interest in compassion for others.

But our God does.  Our God “pushes and pulls” us into a relationship of transformation. It’s not an easy transformation, nor is it a quick one. Indeed, for my part, I only ever see the changes in my life when I stop and take a look at the difference between where I was and where I am. I suspect many of us are like that. After all, if we aren’t ready to be changed by God, by the Good News of Jesus Christ, I’m not sure what we’re doing here at church.

Looking back in hindsight, it’s easy to see the Israelites as villains in this particular story, prone to wander and leave their God, who had done so much for them so recently.

Yet how different are we, really?

For as much as we’ve been changed by God, we still live in a culture of the quick fix, where we are given incentive to worship the new, the innovative, and the tangible.  We’re a people who like to get results, and get results now.

Business is driven not by the needs of communities, workers, and customers, but by the quarterly profit report.

All of this has provided us a large degree of material wealth and prosperity, but it does make us a bit more anxious than we perhaps ought to be.

This is especially the case during leadership shifts and changes, or when leaders either are absent, or even just feel absent.

I understand that it was about three months in between when Rev. Sue left and when I started, and I’ve heard that people were starting to get a little bit antsy, especially as there was a feeling that there wasn’t as much communication about the search process as some folks would have liked.

Now luckily, nobody decided to take everybody’s jewelry and make a cow statue of it, but I get it.

Some of that is simply because there’s a level of confidentiality that happens with the search process. Some of that is because communication can be difficult.  The Deacons and church council have noted that we could have done a better job with communication, and during the upcoming search process, are committed to being as clear and transparent as possible while also honoring the process.

And if you start to feel sad or antsy because things seem to be taking too long, that’s ok.  Others are too. I’m here to help you work through that.

But God is here too.  That is because even as great or as weak as our faith in God is, God is ever more faithful and steadfast to us. Even when it seems like God is doing some work behind the smoke at the top of the mountain, God is here for you too.  Here for you to confess your doubts to, to listen to your anger, your pride, your joys, and your laughter.

God delights in your shower songs and wants you to argue with him about the big questions and the small ones.

So no, God is not a cow. But neither is God a vending machine, A Republican, a Democrat, or even a Red Sox fan.  God is God.

And that’s enough.

“A Time to Mourn”

Preached at Wolcott Congregational Church on 9/16/2018

Note: This is the second in a four part series about transition.  The first part is available here.

Scripture: Ecclesiastes 3:1-5, John 11:32-45

Today, we’re going to talk about death.  And I have no funny story to ease the tension, no way to sugar coat it, or to ease the pain around it.

Normally in Sunday morning worship, we talk about death one or  two times a year; once on All Saints Day during the first week of November, and once on Good Friday. But we would be remiss in a sermon series about transition if we didn’t talk about the greatest transition that we all will have to face, death.

But today, we won’t talk about happens when we die. Our eventual communion with the living God and the final resurrection will be the topic for another day. No, today we will speak not about those who die, but those who survive. We’ll be exploring the complexity of sadness and anger in grief, and how as Christians, our hope of resurrection lives side by side with that complexity.

To get it out of the way, grief stinks. It cuts into the soul, destroys the heart again and again. It leaves scars that never go away entirely, but fade, and sometimes only barely.

In the beatitudes, part of Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount Jesus says to us, “Blessed are those who weep, for they will laugh”, and although that promise will come true eventually, in the depths of grief, that promise rings hollow. And sometimes, just when we think the worst of it is over, it strikes again, set off by something others don’t understand.

One example: Christmas. For most of us, Christmas is a time of joy and laughter, but for people who’ve recently, or even not so recently, lost a loved one, Christmas can bring up painful memories, reminders of a loss thought healed. It’s why many churches, including this one, do a “Longest Night” or “Blue Christmas” service near Christmas Eve to recognize those difficulties.

So then, how are we to understand this encounter between Jesus, Mary and Martha, and Lazarus? At first glance, it’s an easy enough story.  Jesus and the apostles get a request to come to heal a disciple of Jesus’ named Lazarus, and thus stride into the town of Bethany- no, not the one near Naugatuck, this is the one in Judea, where Mary and Martha are from, and when they get there, Lazarus has passed.  Jesus then sees the that the people, especially Mary and Martha are sad. Jesus gets sad too, Jesus cries, then goes to the tomb, raises Lazarus from the dead, and ta-da, everyone is happy. Wrap it up with a bow, story is done.

But as is often the case with the Bible, things that seem clear at first glance are often anything *but* clear.

The first major piece of this story that is well, odd, is Jesus’s attitude toward death.  Jesus at first seems well, nonchalant about death.  While this does foreshadow the resurrection as a victory over death, its odd within the rest of the emotional context of the story.

When the request for Jesus to go to Bethany arrives, Jesus delays going there on purpose. He does so, because “this illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s Glory.”

That’s hard for me.  It’s hard because even though yes, Lazarus got better and God was glorified, there was still mourning and grief and despair, and that’s tough.

One of my favorite songs goes into what I mean a little bit. “Casimir Pulaski Day”, by Sufjan Stevens, is from the point of view of a teenager whose girlfriend is slowly dying of cancer in front of him. There’s a lot in the song that echo what must have been going on for Mary and Martha as they watched their brother die. Stevens sings, “We lift our hands and pray over her body, but nothing ever happens.” We can imagine Mary and Martha doing the same over Lazarus as he passes, sure that the God who heals would come through for them.  But even more striking is one of the closing lines of the song, “All the Glory that the Lord has made, and the complications we can do without.”

And in the raising of Lazarus in Bethany, the effects of Lazarus’ death are a complication.  The Gospel of John makes it abundantly clear that the point of this whole encounter at Bethany is to foreshadow Jesus’s own death, resurrection, and victory over death.

If there are complications, well, that’s life. If that sounds crass, it is, but it is also true. Most of our lives happen in the complications. Life happens when we screw up, when life screws us up, when we’re sad and angry and frustrated.

Life happens when things fall apart, when we’re just trying to get by and something pushes us down.

But I think it’s important to note that even though the goal of this story is the further glory of God and the resurrection, Jesus is not a robot. Jesus is in constant communion with God the Father, and is God, Jesus is fully human too.  When Jesus sees the tableau of the weeping Mary and Martha, Jesus loses his composure.

Jesus Christ, Lord of Creation, who calmed the seas and cast out demons, becomes unsettled. It is the power of death to hurt those who he loves that unsettles Jesus.  And this unsettling, yes, means sadness, but the word that the Gospel uses to describe Jesus’ emotion isn’t just sad or even devastated, but “disturbed.”

This disturbance in the original Greek implies anger and frustration, and I love that the text mentions that Jesus is this sort of upset. I love this because on a psycho-spiritual level, grief and mourning is not just pure sadness and regret but also anger and frustration. It’s a human element in a story that otherwise might strip Jesus of his humanity.

But I think there’s another aspect to this anger too. After all, John is quick to remind us that if whole event is about the resurrection and the glory of God. There’s a cosmic flavor to everything that happens.  Jesus is not only angry on a personal level, but on a cosmic level. For Jesus is disturbed not only at Lazarus’s death, but at death itself.

If the Last Supper and the resurrection echo through time and space it, surely too do Jesus’s pain, grief, sadness and anger at Bethany. For we know just as Jesus loved Lazarus, and loved Mary and Martha who mourned over him, Jesus loves each and every one of us. Because of that, God is with all those who face that final transition, and the Holy Spirit mourns alongside us just as we mourn.

Yet Lazarus’ death still happens. It happens because for the Glory of God to be shone in resurrection, death must happen first. There is no resurrection without death. After all, there is no Easter Sunday without Good Friday first.

I think it’s really telling that in the bible, God almost never promises us that we won’t feel sad or angry. Many of the psalms, are songs of mourning, of lamentation, of feeling like we are beset on all sides by enemies. They acknowledge those feelings that happen, even to the faithful and devout. Christianity is not a religion that promises freedom from loss.

What the gospel does promise is that even the darkness of death, hope persists. For right next to those psalms of grief are psalms of comfort, of celebration, of outright joy.

Indeed, the authors of the Bible knew that pain and loss are an inevitable aspect of love. If we are to live fully, to drink from the well of living water that is God’s love as known through Jesus Christ, it means we are to love deeply, and to love deeply is to inevitably feel loss.

For it is in the course of that living and loving, that we must mourn. For we mourn who and what we love. And as our love can be complicated, so too is our grief. Grief becomes even more complicated because we don’t only love people, but also places, groups, and ideas.

When things just ain’t what they used to be, when hopes are deferred or an institution declines or changes form so deeply that it becomes unrecognizable, we feel real grief.

Grief will happen in this church as we come to terms with the changing of generations, the passing of torches, and making sense of the impact and legacy of not only Rev. Sue, but Rev. Haggard too.

And it will hurt. It will hurt when we need to make changes to keep this church as healthy and vital as we need it to be. I see so much life and vitality here and it is good, but over the next year or two, some things will change and that will be sad and scary and may make you angry. And you are entitled to those feelings. They are real.

But just as real as that anger is the God who is Love who will never let you go. As real as the pain is a God who promises that beyond death is the hope of resurrection.

God only once promises that there will be a time of no more tears and no more grief, and that’s at the end of time, in the fullness of history and the resurrection. It’s on the next to last page in most bibles, and on the back side of my new business cards. Revelation 21: 3-4 “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”

In the meantime, I can promise you two things: we will face the pain and the grief together, and two, in the midst of all of the pain and struggle, the Good News of Jesus Christ is that God is with you always.

Always.

Amen.

“A Time to Heal”

Preached at Wolcott Congregational Church on 9/9/18.

Note, this sermon is the first of a four-part series about “Transitions”

Scripture: Ecclesiastes 3:1-3, Luke 8:43-48

Church, I have a confession to make.  I am a nerd. But not just any type of nerd: I am a word nerd.

When I was a kid, being sent to my room as a punishment was no good- I could just read and be in my happy place. One time, my sister and brother in law that I grew up with had to actually take the lamps out of my room and make me sit there in the dark. After that, they thought better of that strategy, and began to use other forms of discipline on me.

To this day, I probably listen to and read something like 75 books a year; many of them fiction, especially science fiction and fantasy, but a fair number of weighty history and theology books as well.

Part of why I love reading so much is the chance to hear voices, words, and stories that are not my own.  Ones that call out to me through differences and the vastness of time and the boundaries of reality and fiction.

All of that is to say that there is a reason I chose the story of the bleeding woman as my first sermon here; to reinforce across the importance and power not only of our voices, but also our words, and our stories.

Our voices matter:

This story is one of my favorite healing stories in the Gospels; it’s one of the few stories that gives us a deep insight not just into the nature and personality of Jesus Christ and God, but also to the struggles and faith of a regular person and how they encountered Jesus Christ during his ministry.

This story gives voice to a person more like you or me than someone like one of the superstar disciples like Peter or John, who seems almost mythically faithful.  I also love that this story puts into the center not just any person, but a woman cast out by polite society, possibly homeless, made poor through a medical debt, and because she was considered religiously unclean by the same people who should have helped to take care of her, mostly abandoned.

The bleeding woman had been suffering for 12 years from what we today call a chronic illness. A chronic illness is not something like a cold, which affects us acutely, makes us feel bad for a while, and goes away, but a longer-term health problem.  These are diseases like Lupus, like HIV, like addiction, that people deal with for long bouts, sometimes even the rest of their lives. One of the most insidious parts about chronic illnesses is that they attack our souls as much as our bodies.

So imagine the courage, the leap of faith it must have taken, for this woman who had no money to spend, no place to go, to rush forward touch the hem of Christ’s garment.

Jesus, for his part, was walking along a busy street with his followers and friends, alongside the leader of the local synagogue, Jairus, a man of power and influence in the town, to help Jairus’ sick daughter. Jesus could have ignored her rushing to his next appointment, or had her punished, but does neither.  He stops and acts puzzled, but was the son of God truly puzzled? I don’t think so.

Here’s something that’ll put it in perspective.

Who here has a dog at home?

And who has ever come home to see trash on the floor, and has asked, “Who got into the trash?” When you darn well know who got into the garbage can.

But unlike us dog owner, Jesus is not trying to shame or guilt this woman.

No, Jesus is drawing her story of faith out, getting her to proclaim with her words, the truth that God knows and she needs to learn, that she is a person with a voice who has the same right as the leader of the synagogue to proclaim her faith. Jesus wants her to know that her words mattered.

Our words matter.

They matter for our children, and they matter as we age; for small children, having the right words means the difference between being able to tell your parents you want a toy and a temper tantrum. As we age and get more words, having words is often the difference between doing well in school or not, between finding meaningful relationships, or not, and between being able to make sense of the world around us, or not.

And Jesus knows this.  There’s a reason that the Gospel of John begins with calling Jesus the Word of God. Because words are important, because God did not think the world into being, God spoke the world into being with God’s words. The act of speech made it real. For this same reason, Jesus Christ wants us not to believe solely in our private hearts and thoughts, but to proclaim the gospel publicly with our words and speech.

But it was not only her words and speech that Christ desired her to proclaim. When Jesus Christ asked for the woman to come forward, she came forth while trembling, and declared her faith not through a formula of words or a right intellectual conception of God, but through her story.

Our stories matter.

She proclaimed to the crowd and to Jesus Christ the story of her struggle and desperation and fear, and yes, faith. She told her testimony, and that was enough.  And you know what Jesus did?  He didn’t interrupt her, he didn’t ignore her, he didn’t correct her.  No, Jesus listened to it fully her story without judgement, or commentary and accepted it.

His response to her was simple and short, but in doing so, he does something remarkable; he doesn’t try to overshadow her or make the encounter about the mighty power of Jesus, but instead integrates her story into his story. In saying “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.” Jesus makes her a symbolic member of his family, a radical move which confers a powerful social benefit to someone who was so recently considered ritually unclean.

But even more powerful than that is his farewell to her.  Although his blessing for her, to “Go in Peace”, was something of a set phrase, it also, taken literally, applies just as much.  The Greek word that is translated as Peace- eiréné (Iraynay), does not mean that she will be without conflict, rather that she will continue the process of being made whole. Just as touching the hem of his garment made her whole in body, so did the telling and listening of her story, make her soul whole. In addition, with the public social rehabilitation of this women that Jesus started, now could her relationships with her community be made right, moving away from pity, disdain, or apathy to empathy, reconciliation, and wholeness.

So yes, our voices matter, and our words matter, but most of all, our stories matter:

As your interim pastor for the next year to two, one of the things I will be doing is drawing out and listening to the stories of the church.  In listening to these stories, and helping you to put voice and words to them, together, we are going to learn about who the church is, who our neighbors are, and most importantly, who God is calling us to be in the future.

These stories, your stories, will help us to evaluate where we are and where we want to go, and what changes we need to make to have that happen.  These stories will be the foundation for the church profile that your committee writes which will help to match this church with the pastor who is called to lead it for a longer term.

These stories will be the way we begin to tenderly approach old wounds and begin to reconcile.  They will be the healing balm on broken relationships that we might have not have realized had even been broken.  These stories will guide us closer to Jesus Christ in not just as individuals, but as a church.

So over the next weeks and months especially, remember that your story matters.  Your story matters to me as your interim minister, because it will help us tell the story of this church.  Your story matters to me as your pastor, because you are a beloved child of God who I am called to serve, guide, and sometimes lead.  But most of all, your story matters to God, who is just waiting to draw you in, call you his child, and make your story his own.

Amen.

“They Danced With All Their Might”

Preached at Newtown Congregational Church, in Newtown, Connecticut on July 15, 2018, on the occasion of the Baptism of Chloe James Buckley

I am not a dancer. I can, if pressured, not embarrass myself for short periods of time on the dance floor. This usually happens at weddings, and after a drink or two, or sometimes three. I did make it through the dancing at my own wedding last year, somehow.

So, it’s kind of surprising that one of my favorite songs, especially from a theological point of view, is an older song, that some of you might know, by a soul singer named Sam Cooke.  The song is called “Twistin’ the Night Away.” For those of you who don’t know it, it was the Uptown Funk, or Get Lucky of its day.

I believe it’s one of the most pure expressions of togetherness and joy across differences of race and age and social class ever put to music. I think it might even be a vision of heaven, as it describes a diverse group of people, crossing barriers to celebrate with one another.

So when I came across this reading from Second  Samuel, that’s where my mind turned.  An image of dancing in pure celebration of joy.  The Israelites , led by King David, had just defeated the evil Philistines- yes, the same David and Philistines of David and Goliath fame, and just recovered the Ark of the Covenant.

Yes, the same Ark of the Covenant from Indiana Jones, which hosted the presence of God on earth.  It journeyed along with the Israelites during the Exodus, dwelling in a tent, but having been recovered, it was going to go to a new, more permanent home.

So David, this mighty warrior king, gathers the “chosen host” of his people- 30 thousand people.  During this time period, a group of 30,000 people would have been together only in the biggest cities in the world, or for an army. But this is no army.  This is a procession to celebrate God.

In leading this procession, David’s royal dignity is not to be silent, one of the frozen chosen. David is not like a British Monarch greeting the crowd with a dignified wave.  No, David begins to dance. Not just to wiggle, to cabbage patch, to whip and nae nae, but to dance with all of his might.  This is the sort of dancing that most of us only do when no one is watching, if ever. And David does it in front of all of his people.

This celebration helps to deliver God, into a (somewhat permanent) home on earth.

But Shane, we might ask ourselves at this point, what could the Ark of the Covenant have to do with the baptism we just witnessed? Well, I’m glad you asked!

Just as the Ark of the Covenant was a visible sign of God’s love for the chosen people of Israel, so too is baptism a visible and physical sign and seal of God’s love and grace for the chosen of God today.

Let me start with a very brief history of baptism. Baptism is a descendant of Jewish water cleansing rituals. Ancient Judaism had a strong sense of what was clean and what was unclean.  We find this in the first five books of the Old Testament, which Jews today call the Torah. Some of these things make sense to our modern ears and sensibilities: blood, especially animal blood, was considered ritually unclean, for example.

Unfortunately, other things were also included under the category of unclean that aren’t so friendly to modern sensibilities.  For included in the category of unclean was not only animal blood, but also the blood of women who were menstruating.  Women during menstruation would be forced to sleep separately during their periods, and then be reintegrated back into the life of the community after a ritual cleansing.

That’s a key point- that these cleansings served as physical signs of reconciliation whether rightly or wrongly separated between the unclean and the community. These rituals became more spiritualized as time went on, with less physical cleaning and more spiritual cleansing happening, culminating in John the Baptist, who, as his name suggests, baptized people.

John’s own work proceeded and presaged Jesus’ ministry- in the words of the prophet Isaiah, “ he made straight the path for it.” His most famous baptism, was of course, of Jesus Christ, who when baptized, a booming voice from the heavens said, “This is my son, with who I am well pleased.”

In the book of Acts and in Paul’s letters, our guide to the history of the early church, baptism is noted as an important rite of initiation, a key part in God’s plan of salvation.  It appears that baptisms were probably mainly of adults, but probably included children as well- The book of Acts refers to entire households being baptized.

Fast forward to today, and Baptism, particularly of smaller children, doesn’t appear to make much sense anymore, especially to liberally minded individualist American Culture.

“Shouldn’t children get to pick their own religion?”

“What about the agency of the child?”

These concerns might bear real fruit, if we believe that the primary actor in the sacrament of baptism was Chloe, Kayla or even me.

After all, I firmly believe that as they age, children, should have increasing privilege and rights in forming their own identities, including religious ones. And yes, it was Chloe’s mom and her godparents who got her up and fed and looking strong and happy this morning.  Nor do I want to underplay the role of the gathered church in public baptism, performed in the company and witness of a community of believers.

But I believe these criticisms fundamentally misunderstand the nature of that plan of salvation, the heart of Christianity as it is practiced in our protestant and reformed traditions.  The plan of salvation is not ultimately about individual choices made, about sexual morality or who donates the most money or is the most progressive or the most faithful.  The plan of salvation, as our reading from Ephesians outlines it is “a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”

Salvation is not about us moving ourselves closer to God, but allowing God to draw us in ever closer.  To put it another way, the primary actor in our relationships with God is not us, but God.  Thus, baptism is not about our rational choice of God, but about God’s infinitely merciful and grace-filled choice of us.

Yes, Baptism is about God choosing us. Let me say that again.  Baptism is about God choosing us. Today, the primary act that we witnessed was God placing a sign and seal upon Chloe James Buckley’s heart, a public notice that she is adopted into the family of God.

I will say that being baptized into the family of God’s chosen people will not make her better than anyone else, will not make her smarter, more loving, or more likely to go to church when she’s older. Nor was she chosen because she is better, smarter, stronger, more faithful or more beautiful than anyone else.

Indeed, her being chosen by God tells us very little about her, just as our being chosen by God actually says very little about who we are. To find out why she was chosen by God, we must not look not to the how wonderful she, her parents are, or how great this church is, but over there, to the cross.

For it is through the painful work of reconciliation Jesus performed on the cross, bridging once and for all the gap between humanity and divinity, defeating death and ensuring eternal life through reconciling creation unto creator, that tells us why God chose Chloe today. Jesus’s birth, life, ministry, death, and resurrection, and especially the work of the cross, let us know with Blessed Assurance that not only is Jesus ours, but most of all, that we are Jesus’s.

It tells us about a God who in the specific person of Jesus Christ, and more generally in the world, is present both in things spiritual and things physical.  The work of the cross, the actual suffering of Jesus upon the Cross, reminds us that God uses physical objects and real experiences to signify and declare spiritual truths.

It reminds us that our God is present in tablets made of stone and dry bones, in the bread and the cup of communion, and in the Ark of the Covenant that David and the people of Israel danced before, as a physical sign and seal of God’s promises and faithfulness made physical and real and manifest.

It tells us that our God is not just a transcendent God existing outside of space and time, an absent watchmaker who set the universe but then retreated, but a God whose true delight is to dwell with us, his most beautiful creation.

The work of the cross tells us about a God who dwells in the human heart in our pain, comforts us in our sorrows, and dances with us in our delight and joy. This is a God who in the sacrament of baptism, uses our human hands and water, to bless Chloe and to signify the presence of God that already exists within Chloe’s heart.  It is God who has chosen Chloe, working through the Holy Spirit and our friend, savior, and Lord Jesus Christ, who has placed a seal upon Chloe’s heart.

And that, I believe, is worth dancing for.

Amen.

 

“Imitators of God”

Scripture: 1 Kings 19:4-8, Ephesians 4:25-5:2

Preached on July 1, 2018, at Edwards Church, Framingham.

Ever get that dark irritable mood where nothing seems to go right? One of those moods where every, single small thing just gets on your nerves, when you yell without warning, and folks around you can’t even eat crackers in peace without facing your wrath? And then realize that you haven’t eaten in 12 hours?

If so, then you might have been “hangry”

Hangry is a combination of the words hungry, and angry, and, you might have guessed, attempts to describe that state of anger, irritation, of unsettledness that comes from being hungry. Many folks know about this concept, this word, from a recent series of Snickers advertisements; some of them are quite funny.

But, it’s good to know for us that being hangry is not something that was made up by a modern junk food corporation, but does have biblical precedent.  Our first Bible reading is a testament to that.

In that reading, the evil Jezebel has promised to kill the prophet Elijah, who has just fled from the court in Jerusalem.  After fleeing the city on foot, Elijah is out in the desert under a broom tree and is settling down to sleep.

A broom tree, by the way, is a hardy desert plant, it looks more like a bush than a tree- not a majestic oak. It’s kind of low to the ground and brambly, and if there’s just one, you know that the land is pretty sparse, but it is more than capable of providing shelter and water.

Elijah is feeling crestfallen, sad, angry, disappointed, and perhaps a bit melodramatic. “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.”

Hearing this, God follows in the footsteps of the best of Grandmothers, and makes him some food and tells him to eat up. Elijah does so and falls asleep again, and once again, like the best of grandmothers, God tells Elijah to have seconds and to stay hydrated, for otherwise, “the journey will be too much for you.”

An exhortation to remember to eat might feel odd to hear in church in this particular moment in our nation, a moment that has many of our LGBT, immigrant, and non-white members, friends and family feeling vulnerable.  And if you don’t know anyone who is feeling vulnerable, I assure you that they are.

But this story reminds us that Elijah was feeling pretty vulnerable politically too. Queen Jezebel, who had threatened Elijah, was a follower of Ba’al, an ancient Mesopotamian Storm God, who was followed by surrounding nations which had been traditionally hostile. Religions were (and in many cases still are), intensely political, tied up in notions of who is in power and allowed to hold political power. So this was as much a political takeover as much as a religious one.

I think it’s a pretty extraordinary thing that the message God gives to Elijah at this critical juncture is not some grandiose pronouncement, even something such as “Do not be afraid”, but rather, “eat some food.” Take care of yourself, don’t be hangry, for the road is long, and the journey can be treacherous. Your people need you, God says to Elijah, they need you alive and healthy to lead them and journey with them. And to do that, God says, first you need to eat, to drink, to tend to your physical needs, because we need you to be here and at your best.

The world does not need any more Hangry leaders.

For us as Christians, this command to eat bread given from God takes on a new meaning through our communion table, opening up a spiritual dimension to this physical and practical command from God. To be able to endure the journey ahead we must take care of ourselves and each other not only physically, but spiritually as well, feasting on the love of God made flesh in Jesus Christ.

And although we do this most viscerally in our partaking of communion together, we also do this in our prayers, our bible studies, our creating and listening to music together. I know that sometimes I get spiritually “hangry”, which manifests itself in a dark cynicism.  Just as a physical hunger pain reminds me it is time to eat, my spiritual hunger reminds me to feed myself spiritually.

I’ve talked before about some of the ways I do that; Marvin Gaye’s album What’s Going On (in my opinion the best album ever made), coming to worship or, my newest addition, a daily prayer app on my phone that gives me a small ready-made worship service. This soothes my hangry soul just as a home cooked meal soothes my hangry body.

But being hangry is only one small branch of the family tree of emotions and behavior that make up anger.  Anger as an end unto itself, serving its own needs, sowing violence and terror is something else entirely.  Often born out of frustration, and targeted toward the vulnerable, it is a great evil that stalks this land.

That sort of anger, which we might call wrath, is something that the bible condemns justly. But there is one sort of anger that the bible does not condemn.  It is one born out of the deep deep biblical imperative to love our neighbors as ourselves, and which moves us to right wrongs and heal the world.  It is born out of that innate sense of equity and justice that we all have as children, a god-given gift to imagine the world as it ought to be, not as it is. This sort of Anger, a righteous anger, the bible tells us, can be a good thing, if properly channeled.

God, the Bible repeatedly tells us, is slow to anger and quick to return to mercy, but God does get angry sometimes over the course of the Bible. The prophet Amos evokes the image of God’s Anger made manifest against Israel’s enemies for what we would today call war crimes, and against the kingdoms of Israel and Judah for their treatment of poor and moral disorder in society.

Unfortunately, some of this Biblical imagery has been conflated with wrath, that terror, to frighten people, especially those with little power. Because of this, there has been, in progressive Christian circles, a hesitancy to talk about God’s anger. I understand that this has provided healing and comfort to those traumatized by these images as children by hateful voices in our current religious landscape.

But if, as Paul tells us in our second reading, in the letter to the Ephesians, that we are to be imitators of God, if God should not get angry, then neither should we. Therefore, in limiting and eliminating God’s anger as a valid emotional response, we have also frustrated our own ability to feel that righteous anger.

And honestly, there’s a lot of stuff that we should be mad as hell about.

Our second scripture passage from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians does remind us that we shouldn’t discharge anger entirely from our emotional lives. Rather, Paul reminds us that anger should not cause us to sin, that is, to separate us from God’s love.  As long as our anger is born out of empathy, that sense of seeing others as fully human and worthy of our and God’s love as we are, it does not separate us from God’s love.

For when anger comes from a suspicion that something is not right with the world, when it is properly channeled and backed up by a deep and abiding sense of love, anger can be a force for equality and justice.  This anger arises from a deep swell of God’s love, which envisions the world as it should be, rather than accepting the injustice of what is, has been at the core of the Abolitionist movement, the Civil Rights Movements, and all the other movements for equality, which demanded from society the full recognition of their God given humanity.

This is the anger that has erupted in recent weeks about the treatment of children at the border. That we can still feel anger when children are torn from their families, or when whole families are being detained indefinitely for the legal act of seeking asylum, is a good thing.

When there is something that is deeply wrong, when our most vulnerable friends and neighbors live in fear, that we feel anger is a good thing. Feeling that anger means that we still have empathy, that ability to love our neighbor as ourselves.  That empathy that is a core of what it means to be a Christian. My wife, Shannon, summed up this distinction well, in saying “It is the difference between Anger as an end, and Anger as a means to an end.”

If we are to be imitators of God as Paul suggests, then anger must be a part of our emotional vocabulary.  It should be a deliberate anger, slow to start, quick to end, and tempered elsewhere in our lives in relationships built on mercy, kindness, honesty, and in the steadfast love of God.

Building a life built on those principles is hard today. The forces of greed, corruption, of inhumanity are vast and organized.  Systemic evil seeks to set us apart from one another, to keep us docile and helpless, tries to teach us that the only way forward is to purchase, buy, and consume. I believe that It is only, only, in reaching out to one another, and to another source of power, of a reservoir of love vast, and unable to be bought, sold, or controlled, that we can make it through.

This sermon marks my final teaching with this church as a gathered body; I leave you with a deep and abiding gratitude for my time here, and this is my final lesson: Embrace your full selves; bring your whole physical, emotional, and spiritual lives to the messy confines of the church.  Love and care for one another, joining together in your grief, your righteous anger, and your joy.  Know that all that you are is pleasing to God, and nothing, no nothing, here on heaven and earth can separate you from the love of Christ Jesus.

Amen.

Listen along as you read!

 

Wounded and Risen

Preached by Rev. Shane Montoya on April 8, 2018 at Edwards Church Framingham, in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s Assassination

Scripture: Psalm 133, John 20: 19-31

I saw a comic recently on Facebook that featured three men in ancient clothing talking to one another. One of them says to the other two, “All I’m saying is we don’t refer to Peter as “Denying Peter”, or Mark as “Ran away Naked Mark”. Why should I get stuck with this title?”

To which one of the other men in the cartoon responds, “I see your point, Thomas, but really, it’s time to move on.”

This is true church: it’s time to move on from Doubting Thomas.

This is partly because of the simple fact, The word “Doubt” doesn’t actually appear in the original Greek text of our Gospel reading.

This is especially pertinent to us, because when we modern folks think of doubt, we think of intellectual arguments, of skepticism and testing done by scientists in labs.

This is not what this passage is about.

Thomas wasn’t having a theological debate about the nature of the trinity or the ontological implications of the physical resurrection. We know this because the word that we translate as believe or faith in the New Testament, “pistis”, is not about intellectual agreement, but about trust and faithfulness.

It’s the trust that children have for their parents, an utter dependence on God’s grace and mercy. So Thomas was doubting doctrine. No, Thomas was full of despair. Despair that his friend and teacher had abandoned him and only him, that he would not share in the bounty of grace which God had promised him and his community.

Thomas, though, Thomas didn’t abandon his fellow disciples in his hour of despair, nor did they abandon him. Instead, even though he was in the midnight of his soul, he still gathered with his people. I think that’s quite notable.

And if there is one thing we do know about our God, it is that God keeps promises. Jesus, seeing Thomas’s despair, does the work he said he would do as the Good Shepherd, following after the one who was alone and in pain even when the 99 had been seen to.

Thus, Jesus makes a special visit, just for old Thomas, who is the depths of his despair. Thomas sees Christ, and, after feelings with his hands Christ’s wounds, proclaims “My Lord and My God!” He is not suddenly convinced of the Nicene Creed through an academic paper. No, what happened to Thomas was that he encountered his Lord and his God both wounded and risen, fully human and fully divine. In doing so, his despair is turned into trust and faithfulness. His love and trust in and for Jesus Christ is restored.

This isn’t in the bible, but history tells us that Thomas would go on to start the Christian church in India, a community of millions that has survived persecution, from local rulers and from Europeans, and isolation.

So I don’t try to use Thomas as a foil so much anymore. Sometimes, I wish that I could be as faithful as Thomas, making the leap of faith to preach the gospel in a distant land. Me, I just made the arduous journey from Natick to Framingham.

Indeed, in considering Thomas’s behavior, throughout this whole episode, I find him to be something of a hero.

Sometimes I wish that we would “doubt” as well as Thomas did. For, if in seeing with our own eyes the wounded and risen Christ, in his full humanity and full divinity, that we would be faithful and trusting as Thomas was, I would consider that a faith well lived.

But for me at least, this begs the question:

What if we “doubted” our neighbors, our fellow humans the same way?

50 Years ago this past Wednesday, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.

It shocked and horrified our nation; some of us in this room remember that day. The country convulsed with what some historians have called the deepest civil unrest in this country since the Civil War.

It was the tragic end of a life that was dedicated to the liberation of his people from the bondage of Jim Crow, a vision of equality that many, did not want to hear.

He did it by making racism a moral crisis in this country.

He knew that White Folks in this country, even, and especially well meaning and good hearted folks in the Northeast and West, were not truly aware of the full scope or implications of the murderous regime of terror that African Americans lived under in the Jim Crow South.

There were stories, and news reports, sure. There were the horrific scenes of violence over the integration of the school systems in Little Rock, Arkansas and other towns and cities in the South.

And, of course, MLK also knew that White Americans were a people who were very good at turning away from what was going on “over there.” After all, if it was so bad, why didn’t they just leave? I’m sure it wasn’t really that bad, they said. “If they followed the law, this wouldn’t happen.” “The truth must be somewhere in the middle.”

So MLK decided to force the issue, setting out to destroy even the perception or possibility of moral ambiguity about conditions in the South.

He felt, no, he knew that if the wider public knew the full extent of the brutality of life in the Jim Crow South, even under “moderate” leaders, then folks would become so shocked and horrified that they would demand change.

Dr. King believed that when White America saw the wounded, and especially the risen nature of African Americans, in the American South, enduring with solidarity, and dignity, that Whites would finally see them as fully human.

And for a historical moment, an all too brief historical moment, the strategy worked. Americans were awaken from a moral slumber during the freedom summer, and watched with shock and horror as black and white protestors were savagely beaten by racial segregationist city and state governments.

For a moment, White Americans looked at wounded and risen African Americans and believed them.  Collectively, we said, “My God, what has happened here?”

This sparked the passing of the Voting Rights Acts and Civil Rights Act of 1964, which were truly massive accomplishments, but did not eliminate the many differences and disparities, especially economic, that African Americans lived with.

Indeed, in the years after these bills were passed, public sentiment started to turn against MLK and the cause of Black freedom within the United States. This was partly because of deliberate efforts of the United States government to stir dissension; this is not a conspiracy theory- it’s well documented that the FBI wanted to discredit MLK and other African American Civil Rights leaders. The FBI even sent an anonymous letter to MLK, encouraging him to commit suicide.

Part of it was also because of his early campaigning against the war in Vietnam, which was still popular at the time. Images of burned out villages were just starting to appear on American televisions, but the widespread opposition to the war that would galvanize the country in the late 1960s had not yet appeared. In1966, MLK had a disapproval rating of almost 63%.

By the time he was killed in Memphis 50 years ago, White politicians as prominent as Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, would say on the day of MLK’s funeral, “that his death was ‘a great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order and people started choosing which laws they’d break.’”

This, in effect, blamed MLK for his own assassination, equating murder with civil disobedience.

It would be nice if I could say that after MLK’s death, things got better for African Americans, but in many cases, they did not. Trends in the United States, including the closure of factories, stagnation of wages, the HIV epidemic, and the rise of prisons as places for private profit impacted African Americans disproportionately.

No longer were we saying, “My God, what has happened here?”, and worked to better the lives of African Americans and others who were suffering.  Instead, we began to say, “I don’t believe you.”

If only we had trusted, and believed.

If only now we would trust, and believe.

If only like Thomas the truster, Thomas who did not abandon his community, even in the midst of his despair, we would believe.

We would believe the poets and artists and activists who are opening their wounds to us, to see and touch their wounded ness and their risen ness, and to proclaim, “My God, what has happened here?”

We would believe and surround with the strength and hope of community those who were struggling with depression and anxiety and other mental illnesses, not trying to fix them but simply being present with them.

We would believe that new life is possible and sometimes probable for those whom society has written off.

We would believe that our God is not just a transcendent God worthy of our praise and majesty from a distance, but one who would appear to someone he called friend not in the form of an majestic angel,  but as his friend whose wounds were still visible and who would invite him to touch them.

And if that is our God, what does that say about who we should be in the course of our love? Our God who is glorious and vulnerable, fleshy and fantastic? Is that not what love is?, to be vulnerable to one another and then to believe each other’s pain?

Believe the Good News, Friends, believe that Christ is risen and wounded, and that we can be too.

Amen.