10/21/2018 - Christ is Our Peace - Acts 15:1-9; Ephesians 2:11-17

Christ is Our Peace

Acts 15:1-9

Ephesians 2:11-17

October 21, 2018

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Kathy Donley

Some rescue crews discovered a castaway on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean. She had been there for five years before they found her, and when they found her they discovered that she had seen fit to construct for herself three buildings, using only sticks and vines. They asked her about them.

“Well, that one is my home,” she said, beaming with pride. “And that one,” pointing to the structure directly next to her home, she said, “is my church.”

“Well then, what’s that third one?” one of the rescuers asked.

“Oh, that’s the church I used to go to.”

It seems likely that wherever there is a church, there will be church fights.   Evidence of that comes from the New Testament where many of the letters were written to address conflicts in particular churches. 

In Acts 15, we heard one version of a church fight that seems to repeat itself in multiple locations in the first century.  If you were listening to the two readings, you probably noticed that the word “circumcision” was repeated a lot.  That was the buzzword of the day.  At other times in church history, there were other buzzwords like papal infallibility or the inerrancy of the Bible or abolitionism or women’s ordination or many others.  We might not attach theological significance to the word “circumcision,” but that’s just because it’s not our current buzzword.

The fight in Acts 15 happens because the church is expanding rapidly.  It started as a movement within Judaism, but there are Jewish people spread out all over the Roman empire.  As the Jesus story spreads to Jewish people living beyond Israel, it is also received by Gentiles.  And that’s when fighting really starts.

At this time in history, one scholar says, “To the Jew, the Roman or Greek was an idolater; to the Roman, the Jew was an atheist who refused to acknowledge the gods or the divine authority of Caesar.”[1] The hostility was thick.  Add to that the Jewish rebellion of 66 and you get a bloody, horrific war.  That was probably the context when the letter to the Ephesians was written.

The fight about circumcision, like so many other church fights, is really about identity.  Who is on our team?  Who is against us?  And how do we know?  Some Judean Christians think they know all about the Gentiles and their idolatrous ways, so they are sure they have to set down firm rules at the start.  They are trying to hold onto a strong identity in the midst of the hostile culture surrounding them. 

The culture around them said that Jews and Gentiles were too different to get along.  As the Rev. Shannon Kershner, pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago says, “They could not pray in the same worship space, sit at the same lunch counter or around the same table, live in the same neighborhoods, go to the same schools, be church together, because they were too different. Jews and Gentiles were different. They had different stories, different rituals, different histories, different diets. How could they be one? How could they live out any kind of unity? No, culture said. No, no, no. You cannot. You stick with your own kind. You watch only the news that will support what you already think. You read only the scriptures that are your favorite ones because they buttress your theology. You eat meals only with the people who either won’t talk about hard things or who agree with you as to what to do about hard things. You don’t invest energy in nurturing friendships with people who might wear you out with difference. The proposition of Jews and Gentiles together, the culture claimed, is not only ridiculous but dangerous.”[2]

Some of the Judean Christians absorbed that cultural message and thought that the only way to resolve the issue of differences was to eliminate them.  Instead of recognizing that God was doing a new thing, they maintained that in order to follow Jesus, a person had to follow Moses first.   Before we judge them too harshly, we might remember that Protestant denominations made similar assertions, to follow Jesus best you had to follow Luther or Calvin or Wesley or Roger Williams. 

Acts 15:5 identifies the people  arguing for required circumcision as Pharisees.  This is so interesting.  When we read about Pharisees elsewhere in the New Testament, it is almost always a negative, combative encounter with Jesus.  But these are Pharisees within the Jerusalem church.  Somehow instead of opposing his teachings, they have joined his followers.  They have already accommodated a lot of changes in their thinking.  It may be that giving up this central piece of identity is just more than they can imagine.  There is a paradigm shift taking place among the people of God, but some folks just can’t get on board. 

That paradigm shift is still happening. It is the shift that moves us out of a mindset of fear and scarcity to one of abundance and trust. 

The first time I ever preached here was on the Sunday I candidated 8 years ago. (It’s OK if you don’t remember it.)    On that day, I talked about walls. I mentioned the photos I saw in a college journalism class.  They were photos of people who escaped from East Berlin by digging a tunnel under the Berlin Wall for weeks, and then crawling through it as it filled up with ground water.  I also told you about the seminary class in 1989 when my professor, Glenn Stassen, returned from Germany and passed around a chunk of that wall.  He had been there as it came down. 

Last month, I stood on the ugly, rusty side of the  U.S. border fence with two 22-year-old women. I told them that when I was their age, there was a wall in Germany that I expected to be there always.  Then I told them that it was destroyed before they were born. They seemed to be listening earnestly, so I put my hand on the border fence and in my best wise-old-woman-who-knows-the-future voice, I solemnly said, “This wall will not be here forever.”    I fervently hope that is true. 

I have seen the border wall in San Diego and the so-called peaceline in Belfast. I have seen pictures of the wall in Israel-Palestine and the wall that no longer divides Germany.  I am aware of other invisible, but equally potent walls, like the wall of apartheid in South Africa and the Mason-Dixon line in the United States. 

I am convinced that walls like these are built and maintained by fear, fear of the other, fear of differences, the fear that without boundaries, I will lose my identity, the fear of scarcity and the belief that walling off resources from them is the only way to make sure we have enough.  Walls are built and maintained by fear.  When those on one side try to get through or under or around or over the wall, it just increases the fear.  The Berlin Wall was rebuilt three times, each time bigger, stronger and more repressive.  The Peaceline Fences in Belfast have been increased in height three times. 

The first fence along the border near San Diego was installed during the Clinton administration, the second fence running parallel to it was done after 9-11.  They are currently replacing the Clinton-era fence with materials approved during the Obama administration, while Trump requests proto-types to make it higher, stronger, longer yet again.  Building bigger and better walls seems to result in more deaths as people go to the desert to get around them and it creates more of a market for the coyotes who smuggle people across the border. Surely, we need a paradigm shift.   

In Acts, the paradigm shift is explained as God making no distinction between Jews and Gentiles, giving the Holy Spirit to both.  In Ephesians, the shift is Jesus, who has broken down the dividing wall, the hostility between us. 

Not everyone can handle this paradigm shift. I see a parallel in the movements for religious freedom that happened in other times.  We often hear that the first Europeans to come here were seeking religious freedom. That is somewhat true, but more specifically, they came for their own freedom.  Once they got here, they did what had been done to them.  Eight of the thirteen British colonies established official churches.  Practicing a different version of Christianity or a non-Christian faith, was illegal and often met with violence. Baptists and Quakers were two notable exceptions.   It took a long time for the idea of providing religious liberty for everyone, not just for ourselves, to become the law of the land.

People often do what has been done to them.  When we are shut out or excluded, we often we exclude others.  Sometimes, when we are welcomed we learn to welcome others and then sometimes, when we welcome others, they welcome even more people.   We can choose to be part of the God’s paradigm shift, moving from fear to trust, from scarcity to abundance.  We can be generous with our hospitality, caring for the stranger, offering a roomy theology that welcomes peaceable differences. 

The most effective expression of that welcome is often in sharing our finances and physical resources.  The gospel spread in the first century because people invested their money and time and even their lives to make it happen.  Christ is our peace.  Christ has broken down the walls.   That work is done for us, but being part of God’s paradigm shift requires our own generosity, our own willingness to move out of scarcity into abundance.  

Maybe it would be best to try to show what I’m talking about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQVC_m4GtDs&t=1s One of the things I love about this is that one person’s generosity inspires others which inspires others so that even those who received the original gift are giving back.

Let me close with some hopeful, inspiring words I read in a commentary late this week.  Two Presbyterians, Allen Verhey and Joseph  Harvard wrote this: 

 “The church is a demonstration plot for the new humanity brought about by God’s reconciling work in Jesus Christ.  To be the church is to be a people who respond to God’s work with joy and praise, who display something of what God intends for all humanity in their common life. The church is called to provide an alternative to the culture of enmity at work in the world. It is to be a community that resists efforts to build up again those walls of division and enmity that Christ has broken down.  It is to be a place of hospitality to the stranger, a place of peaceable difference.”[3]

“The church is called to provide an alternative to the culture of enmity at work in the world.”  Sisters and brothers, what a high calling this is.   What task could be more important in the world just now?  May God grant us the wisdom and the courage for the living of these days.

[1] Allen Verhey and Joseph S. Harvard, Belief:  A Theological Commentary on the Bible – Ephesians, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2011), p. 29.

[2] Rev. Shannon J. Kershner, in her sermon “A Place for Me?” July 19, 2015, http://www.fourthchurch.org/sermons/2015/071915.html?print=true

[3] Allen Verhey and Joseph S. Harvard, Belief:  A Theological Commentary on the Bible – Ephesians, p. 106.

10/14/2018 - More Than I Needed - Genesis 11:1-9

More Than I Needed

Genesis 11:1-9

October 14, 2018

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Kathy Donley

The image on the bulletin cover is of a windigo. This one is an abstract sculpture at the Albany Institute.  Judy told me about its existence.  I’m grateful because all the images of windigo that I found on the internet are way too gruesome to put on a worship bulletin cover.

In Algonquian folklore, the windigo is a mythical monster native to the northern forests of the Great Lakes region and the Atlantic coast of the United States and Canada.  It may appear as a monster with some characteristics of a human or as a spirit who has possessed a human being and made them monstrous. I have only been introduced to this concept recently, but from what I understand, it is probable that the idea of windigo began when people were hungry, in the winter when food was in short supply. The monster windigo became a way to tell the story of the power of hunger, but also a cultural warning about sharing resources and not being selfish.

Basil Johnston was a Canadian Ojibwa scholar.  In one of his eleven books on First Nations mythology, he devoted an entire chapter to windigos. He says that almost all windigos are self-created.  A windigo is a human whose selfishness has overpowered their self-control to the point that satisfaction is no longer possible. That is why windigos are always hungry no matter how much they eat.[1]  They are pictured as simultaneously gluttonous and emaciated from starvation because they can never get enough.

In her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes: “Windigo is the name for that within us which cares more for its own survival than for anything else…. The very word…can be derived from roots meaning…’thinking only of oneself.’”[2]  Dr. Kimmerer is Professor of Environmental and Forest Biology at SUNY-ESF and an enrolled member of the Potawatomi Nation and, by the way, a personal and professional friend of Kathy and Judy.

You might be wondering why I’m talking about Native American concept so much, why it is on the cover of our bulletin.  I have two reasons.  First, the windigo fits the image of a monster, a scary thing suited both to Halloween and to the idea of scarcity.  It is an image for our spiritual journey this season, a journey away from a mindset of scarcity and selfishness.  Second, there are often some similarities in old stories from different cultures, not perhaps in the stories themselves, but in the warnings they contain.  Having the windigo in our minds may help us understand the story from Genesis 11 in new ways.

The story seems simple enough.  Way back near the beginning, when everyone spoke the same language, the people of earth learned how to make bricks.  Doing what people always do with the technology at hand, they used it to its fullest. They determined to build a city and a skyscraper with the bricks.  Somehow, they thought that in building this tower they would make a name for themselves and they could stay together in that one place forever.  For reasons that aren’t spelled out within the story, God is not happy with this plan, so God makes it impossible for them to work together by disrupting their language.  They can no longer understand each other and, as a result, they are scattered across the earth, which is what they had been afraid of in the first place.

Without context, it seems like the humans are finally getting along and working together, which we might think God would be happy about, but instead it seems like God throws a temper tantrum and messes everything up.  That doesn’t really sound like a story that would have been saved and preserved in the Bible, so how else might we understand it?

If we read Genesis from the beginning to this point, we might see this story in a different light.   In Genesis chapter 1, just after humans were created, it says, “God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.’  And then came the rebellion of Adam and Eve and Cain murdering his brother Abel and a level of evil among humans that resulted in a world-wide flood.  After the flood, God determined never again to destroy the world.  It was a huge do-over for God and for the creation.  In Genesis chapter 9, God says to Noah and his family the same words God had said to the first human beings “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.”

Then in Genesis 11 the people said “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” (11:4) The reason given for building this city and tower is fear, the fear of being scattered. So, they are united, but their unity is around resisting God’s intentions and their motivation for that is fear. 

One scholar says, “The setting for this passage is the ripple effect of sin in the world. It is far more about human beings and their capacity for sin and disobedience. The very real concern here is about the tremendous capacity of human beings to bring disruption into the world, the incredible and sometimes horrifying ability of human beings to perpetrate the most unspeakable actions against each other.”[3]

God is not throwing a hissy fit, but rather God has a justified concern about the nature of human beings to do evil, and the propensity of humans with power and united by fear to commit atrocities and cause suffering and even to put the creation itself at risk. 

The tower-builders are like the windigos, they care more for their own survival than for anything else.  Walter Brueggemann suggests they have a “fortress mentality that seeks to survive by its own resources. . . it is a unity grounded in fear and characterized by coercion.  A human unity without the vision of God’s will is likely to be ordered in oppressive conformity.”[4] “A human unity without the vision of God’s will is likely to mean oppressive conformity – we have seen that to be true, haven’t we?

The tower-builders were afraid of the unknown, afraid of living in another place where they did not have a reputation, afraid of taking up their God-given task of filling the earth. In strong contrast, the very next chapter begins to tell the story of Abraham whom God tells to leave home and set out for a land that God would show him. For generations, that action has been cited as evidence of Abraham’s faithfulness. 

Fear of the unknown, fear of hunger, the concern for self-preservation – all of these have been part of what it means to be human for a very long time. 

The litany of confession we heard a few minutes ago, emphasized “more time, more power, more work, more money.”  I suspect that most of us here are not really driven by a desire for more, more, more.  We are not greedy or selfish, but we may feel that we have to work harder to maintain what we already have.  It may seem that there is not enough time to do what we need to do or want to do, not enough money to provide a secure retirement or a better future for the next generation. 

Somehow, living in this country with so much wealth and so many resources, we have been made to feel that there is not enough.  We are constantly warned of imminent danger and potential loss by loud voices all around us that want us to be afraid, very afraid.  Those are the voices of windigos. 

But I think of Abraham, who refused to be controlled by his fear of the unknown, but set out to find what God would show him. I think of the faith of the disciples commanded by Jesus to scatter to the ends of the earth.  I wonder how to move from the mindset of scarcity and fear that entraps so many of us to one of confident living within God’s abundance. 

And then I remember a woman named Comfort.  She is from Ghana, but I met her in Tijuana.  She was one of thousands of people who went to Brazil before the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016.  Those were years when jobs in construction and hospitality industries were plentiful.  When those jobs dried up, the migrants moved again. Comfort walked for months, from Brazil to Columbia to Panama to Costa Rica to Honduras to Guatemala to Mexico, a journey of 6,000 miles.    When I asked how she had made such a journey, she said “God provided for me, more than I needed.”  She emphasized more than I needed.  That was all she said at first.  But later, I asked her to tell me more. 

She said that her daily prayer was that God would provide helpers for her. She set out from Brazil, walking with a few others.  I think they had made it as far as Panama when her companions suddenly abandoned her. She found herself completely alone in the jungle. At first, she tried to continue on her own, but she stepped into a fast-moving river to cross it and became convinced that she would drown.  So, she stopped walking.  She sat down in the jungle, by herself, and she prayed.  She told God that she needed one of those helpers to come to her now.  And she stayed in place and prayed and sang hymns like It is Well with My Soul and Great is Thy Faithfulness. 

She stayed in place like that for four days and nights.  Alone, in the jungle, trusting that God would provide. On the fourth day, some Chinese people wandered by.  They asked what she was doing there and she explained.  One asked if she had any water left, and when she said no, he pulled out his canteen and gave it to her.  Another pulled food out of a backpack for her. They helped her make it to a refugee camp in Costa Rica.  By the time they got there, she could no longer walk.  She spent 8 days in the hospital recovering from a lung infection and other illnesses from her time in the jungle. Eventually she continued her journey north to Mexico with the ultimate goal of being united with a cousin in Arizona.

Comfort said that every time she felt like giving up, God stepped in and delivered her.  She said she heard God’s voice again and again in many ways, telling her that God was with her.  She still feels that way, stuck on the other side of the last border, just 300 miles from her cousin in Phoenix.

I am amazed at her faith, amazed that she could stay in one place, alone, in the jungle and trust that God would deliver her.  And I then I remember what she said at first about this experience – that God provided more than she needed.  Now friends, that is not how I would tell the story if it happened to me.  I might say that I almost died, that I was grateful to be alive, but I’m pretty sure I would not say that God provided more than I needed. 

I wonder if that is an important clue to moving away from a scarcity mindset.  What if I imitated the faith of Abraham, moving into an unknown future?  What if I adopted the confidence of Comfort, trusting that God will provide help when I need it?  What if I intentionally saw the creation through the lens of abundance, of God’s good gifts shared with me and with many, provided for the well-being of all creation? What if, on a daily basis, I sang Great is thy Faithfulness and It is Well with my Soul and gave thanks for the living of that day.  Maybe then I would come to say “God has provided more than I needed.”    

[1] Basil Johnston, The Manitous: The Spiritual World of the Ojibway (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2001), p. 222

[2] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass:  Indigenous Wisdom:  Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis:  Milkweed Editions, 2013) p. 306.

[3] Dennis Bratcher, http://www.crivoice.org/lectionary/YearC/Cpentecostot.html

[4] Walter Brueggemann, Genesis: Interpretation A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, (Atlanta:  John Knox Press, 1982), p. 100.

10/7/2018 - The Migration Parable - Luke 10:25-37

The Migration Parable

Luke 10:25-37

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Kathy Donley

October 7, 2018

This parable is usually called the parable of the good neighbor or the good Samaritan.  I have just recently come to understand it also as a parable that says something about human migration.  Let me supply just a little bit of background before we get to the parable itself.

Going way back to ancient Israel, at one time there were 12 tribes united in one kingdom.  Saul was their first king and then David and then Solomon.  When Solomon died, not everyone was willing to recognize his son as the next king.  So, the kingdom of Israel split, with ten of the tribes coalescing around Israel in the north and two tribes forming Judah in the south. 

In 721 BCE, Assyria invaded Israel.  Assyria deported 27,000 of Israel’s citizens and imported other conquered peoples to repopulate it. Generations later, some of those deportees’ descendants returned to Israel.  Those left in the country and those who were deported intermarried with people of other cultures.  Because of this, the people in Judah saw them as impure and unfaithful to the covenant.  Their capital was in Samaria; thus, they became known as Samaritans. 

Later, a similar thing happened to Judah.  In 587 BCE, Babylon captured Judah and deported many of its citizens to Babylon.  A couple of generations later, the deportees were allowed to return to Judah.  Some did that, bringing their Babylonian wives home with them.  So, the Samaritans, now at home in the land for a hundred years, considered the Judeans to be impure and unfaithful to the covenant.

There were multiple waves of deportations and emigrations associated with both countries. People were moving in and out, sometimes by choice, sometimes by government force.  There are other disagreements, theological and historical, between the Judeans and Samaritans, but today what I find significant is their parallel histories and the way their forced migration patterns led to enmity between them.

This ancient story is particularly relevant on this 2018 World Communion Sunday, as an unprecedented 68.5 million people around the world have been forced from home. Among them are nearly 25.4 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18.[1]  The United States admitted only 22,491 refugees last year and just set a limit of 30,000 for next year.  For comparison, we resettled almost 85,000 refugees in 2016.[2]

Against that backdrop, let us recall this parable of Jesus.  Travelling down to Jericho, a man was mugged, beaten and left half-dead on the road. Sometime later, a Jewish priest also travelled that road.  He saw the man, and he walked on by.  A bit later, another religious man, from the tribe of Levi walked by.  The Levites were assigned to assist the priests, like today’s deacons or church moderators.  The Levite did not stop either.  Now, we might think that the priest and Levite are the bad guys, the villains, but maybe we should not be too hard on them.  They are only doing what is legal. They were not allowed to touch a dead body.  Making contact with the dead required a lengthy purification process.  Until they were purified, they could not do their jobs as religious leaders and that is not something to be taken lightly.  The rule in the Torah was that they could not have contact with a dead body, with some specific exceptions.  They could defile themselves only for their parents, a son or daughter, a brother or an unmarried sister.  The man on the Jericho road did not fall into any of those categories.

Then, Jesus says, a Samaritan man came down the road.  This is a surprise.  By this time in history, Samaritans and Judeans did not have anything to do with one another.  They went miles out of their way to avoid each other.  This Samaritan is on a Jewish road, known for its bandits.  You might think that a Samaritan, a despised foreigner, would feel particularly vulnerable and have even more reason to keep moving.  But he draws near, and explodes with compassion and risks himself to help the stranger. 

Remember that the Jews and Samaritans have an ancient shared history, even though they might not remember it.  By this time, they have excommunicated each other, and they worship in different places and they don’t even agree on all the books that count as Holy Scripture.  But they both accept the Torah, the books of the Law, which means that the Samaritan also knows the rules about contact with the dead, and the exceptions to those rules, how contact with a dead body was permitted if it was the body of your parents, a son or daughter, brother or sister.    And so, it seems, the Samaritan believes that the wounded man fits the category.  It was this Samaritan, the one whom no one else would possibly see as a brother, who saw his blood relative in the face of the stranger.[3]

Many of our leaders are threatened by the presence of so many different people on the move in the world.  They are busy labelling the threats, stirring up fear, criminalizing foreignness, militarizing our borders.  What if, in spite of all that, in resistance to that, in the name of Jesus, we commit to seeing every person for who they really are – our sisters and brothers, our blood?

Perhaps that is a hard request to hear today.  Maybe on this particular day, after the events of this particular week,  many of us are feeling like the we are the ones half-dead on the side of the road, the ones who need a neighbor ourselves to restore our hope. 

In that case, let me offer a different story.  This is not my story.  It is a story Ray Schellinger told during our Immigration Immersion experience.  If you ever go to Mexico with him, and I really hope you do, then let him tell you this story.  Don’t tell him you already know it.

He said it was the worst day of his life, about 6 years ago. They were on the verge of opening the second story at Deborah’s House, a domestic violence shelter, most of which he had built or had supervised Baptist church groups in building.  He hadn’t slept in two nights because he was trying to finish things up as new families were moving into that space.  He had a particularly threatening encounter with the husband of one abused woman.  He was keenly aware that these women and children were traumatized by the violence in which they had lived, and he wondered if he was making any difference at all. He was so discouraged that he called his wife, who was in the USA at that time, and wondered if he should quit.  She suggested that he get some sleep and pray before making a decision. 

So, he went to bed, and with his head on the pillow, he prayed, “God please let me know if I am where you want me to be.” 

He was asleep for perhaps 30 minutes when he was woken by the director of the shelter.  She wanted him to go pick 3 new residents.  He asked why him and she said there was no one else available.  So, feeling very groggy from his too short nap and still overwhelmed by everything, he drove across Tijuana to get them.

One of them was a European woman I’ll call Elena.  She had lived in California some years earlier on a student visa.  During that time, she had become a Christian.  When she returned to her home country her family had disowned her because of her faith.  Things had never worked out for her there, and in fact, her life was threatened, so she sought a way to return to the USA. She contacted a man in California whom she knew from her time there.  He offered to marry her, as a way of getting her into the country.  She didn’t like that idea, but he assured her that it was just a matter of paperwork, not because he expected an actual marriage.  Once she was safely here, they could divorce.  Finally, she agreed.

They met in Tijuana.  They had a couple of fun days together and got married. Then he imprisoned her in a motel room and daily attempted to break her will so that he could traffic her.  One day, he was distracted and left the door unlocked.  Elena grabbed her papers and ran past him.  He chased her.  She ran to a police officer, at which point, he quit chasing her and disappeared.  When she said that the man was her husband, the officer said he could not help her. 

She was in a foreign country, having been disowned by her family, with no way to get where she wanted to go. Wanting to at least see the United States, she made her way to Friendship Park.  Elena was so close and yet so far from her dream there in Friendship Park.  In despair, she determined to simply walk into the ocean and end it all.   She was following the border fence down to the water, when she noticed the graffiti painted on the fence and started reading it.  What she read reminded her that people – many people, people who did not even know her – cared.  She began to believe that maybe there was hope.  In what she called a moment of transformation, she decided to look for help.  So, she had made her way to people who referred her to Deborah’s House.

She poured out this story to Ray as he drove her and the other women to the shelter.  Later, when she was settling in, Ray asked her, “What did you read on the fence that spoke to you?”  She said “I read, ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me’.  And I read “No wall can contain my heart.”  Those words in particular spoke to her and gave her hope.

And then Ray told her that a week earlier, a team of Baptists had gone with him to the fence to paint messages there.  LeDayne Polaski, the Executive Director of Baptists for Peace, had written “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”  And Ray, whose wife is Mexican, and whose daughters consider themselves both Mexican and American, had written, “No wall can contain my heart.” 

He told her that.

Elena said, “No way.” 

Ray said, “Way.”
“No way.”  “Yes, way.”

So, she said, “Now I know that I am in the place God wants me to be.”

And then Ray realized that in her words, he had received the answer to the question he had asked God just a few hours earlier.  Elena herself offered Ray a transformation—a reminder that even when we are discouraged and feeling useless God is using us, even us.  

Sisters and brother, the good news, the great good news, is that God often shows up where we least expect God to be. Because perhaps the only way we can see ourselves as the Samaritan – the one called to act like a neighbor– is first to recognize how often we have been the traveler left for dead.  Friends, do not lose hope. Even now, God will show up where we least expect God to be.  Amen.

[1] http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html

[2] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/10/the-trump-administration-set-a-record-low-limit-for-refugee-admissions-it-let-in-half-that-number/

[3] Ray Schellinger, “Who is My Neighbor?” in Pastoral, Practical, Prophetic and Personal:  A Resource on Immigration produced by the Immigration Task Force of the American Baptist Churches/USA, April 2015   http://www.abc-usa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Pastoral-Prophetic-Practical-and-Personal-FINAL.pdf

9/30/2018 - Who is My Neighbor, Again? - Galatians 5:13-23

Galatians 5:13-23

Who is My Neighbor, Again?

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Kathy Donley

September 30, 2018

Go back with me to November 9, 2016, the day after the presidential election.  On that day, a pastor in Louisville, Kentucky received three desperate contacts from beyond his immediate congregation.  The Rev. Derek Penwell, is the pastor of Douglas Boulevard Christian Church.  He also serves as adjunct faculty at the University of Louisville.  The first call that day was from a lesbian atheist he had met when they were both graduate students.  She and her partner had planned a destination wedding to Hawaii in 2017, but now they felt that they had to get married before January 20th.  So they called to ask him to perform the ceremony. 

Next he heard from a Syrian man.  This man was the father of a family of refugees that Derek’s church had welcomed and helped to start a new life in America just four months earlier.  The man was worried that his family might be sent back or sent off somewhere else and they were just beginning to settle in.  

The last call was from his doctor, who happens to be Muslim.  The doctor called from work to report his distress that people were high-fiving each other in celebration.  He said that these people know him, they know his children and they did not attempt to hide their glee at electing a president who was clearly anti-Muslim.   

Derek said that he learned something very important that day. He learned that even people with no personal commitment to Jesus have expectations of Jesus’ followers.  They expect Jesus’ followers to protect them from the suffering and injustice and terrorism.[1] 

Imagine the people of God at our best. Imagine that we are protectors, that we advocate for justice and compassion  and mercy. Imagine that our reputation as Jesus’ followers is such that adherents of other faiths and of no faith call on us to practice our faith in these radical ways.  Imagine.

Our reading from Galatians offers two keys to being the people of God.  1)  God’s will is summed up “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  And 2) you know the people of God by the fruits they bear – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness and self-control.

I don’t have to work hard to imagine the people of God, because I know you and that’s who you are. But in the last eight days, I saw the people of God more vividly and I learned some things with my head, but more importantly with my heart.  So I invite you to come along with me as a sojourner in faith. Bring along a sense of expectancy, a glimpse of future possibility, a working imagination. For God’s creation is not done.

Early last week, we met Yolanda.  She lived in the USA for 18 years.  When her son became a U.S. citizen, she thought there was a path to citizen for her through him. So she applied for citizenship from within the USA. Not only was her request for citizenship denied, she was deported for life.  She lives Tijuana to be near her son who lives in San Diego.  It has been 8 years since she has seen her daughter, who is afraid of deportation herself.  Yolanda says “I will never be the woman I was before.  My motherhood has been truncated, severed.” 

Three years ago she started Dreamers Moms, to support women in similar situations.   They offer counseling, and immigration legal services and a help for immediate needs like food and housing.  She said she discovered more suffering, more injustice that she anticipated.  At first the participants were from Central America and then from Mexico and also Europe, which she says indicates that this is a world-wide problem. 

We met Patricia, who was taken by ICE from her workplace and simply did not ever come home to her children, the youngest who was then a 9-year-old boy.  She was detained for 18 months and then because she did not understand her rights and did not pay a $100 fee for an appeal, she was deported.   Now there are two grandchildren she has never met.  One is 5 years old; the other is 3 months.   She said “Everything gets broken.” 

Monserrat moved to North Carolina with her husband when she was just 17.  He was abusive to her for 12 years.  Domestic violence is a theme that echoes in the lives of most of the women we met.  Her husband told her he would kill her if she did leave.  She believed him and she went back to Mexico.  Later when she attempted to come across the border, she was jailed and then deported.   Some time after that, he was deported, leaving their U.S. citizen daughters in the care of his second wife.  Her daughters, now teenagers, found her through Instagram.  But their relationship is difficult because they believe their father who told them she had willingly abandoned them.  Monserrat suffers from ongoing depression and physical illnesses which she says are a result of the forced separation.  She says that what keeps her going is the struggle to be reunited with them, so that they will know she did not abandon them. 

Ray Schellinger, who was a missionary in Tijuana for 15 years was our guide on this trip. He is now the Global Consultant for Immigrants and Refugees.  Ray has the most compassionate, most broke-open heart I have ever seen.  Many years ago, the Dreamers Moms asked him to be their pastor. So before we left, Ray prayed for them.  It was a long prayer, in Spanish, and I didn’t understand many words, but halfway through,  I was aware that people were weeping.  I sensed that there was profound comfort in this prayer.  So later I asked about the prayer and was told that Ray had quoted the Bible, specifically the prophet Isaiah where there is promise of restoration and hope.  Ray was pleading with God to rain down love and joy and peace and reunification of families, imagining the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven. 

Friends,  God’s people are suffering.  It is deep and real and goes on and on.   It’s not religious persecution.  It’s racist persecution  They are not suffering because they are God’s people, but because they are God’s people they suffer together. 

Yolanda has been deported for life.  There is no way to appeal that injustice.    But there are possibilities for other deported Moms and she works with them and encourages them and cheers them on.  At the end of her speaking time, she looked around at the other women and she called them warriors, women with internal strength and capacity for hope unknown even to themselves until they had to draw upon it.  She said unequivocally that their lives and the lives of their children matter. She was loving herself and loving her neighbor in the same way and it was a powerful Spirit-filled moment. 

To  those of us from the USA, she said “you who are sensitive and have compassion for others, we ask your help.  Respect the migrants who are in your midst.  You have the power to elect leaders who will create a better system.  Maybe in the next election you can elect someone who is compassionate.”

Imagine the people of God at our best. Imagine that we are protectors, that we advocate for justice and compassion  and mercy. Imagine that our reputation as Jesus’ followers is such that adherents of other faiths and of no faith and our sisters in Christ call on us to practice our faith in these radical ways.  Imagine.

On our last day, we were told we were going to a working class neighborhood. As I got off the bus, I immediately took in the stench of rotting garbage strewn along the road and the buzzing flies and I quickly sidestepped a pile of nastiness directly in front of the bus door.  Then I saw a line, like a fence, of assorted pieces of cast-off lumber, intermittently secured with padlocks.  Slowly, I realized that these were the homes in this neighborhood. I was seeing the front doors or the front gates, locked because everyone was at work.

This neighborhood is home to people who work in maquiladoras, foreign factories in Tijuana, Mexico.  They might make $8 per day for a 12-hour shift on an assembly line where they have to ask permission to use the bathroom. In this neighborhood, as in another one-third of Tijuana, there is no water or sewer system.  It costs $10 per week to have water delivered via truck.  In more wealthy Tijuana neighborhoods, it costs $10 per month. The poor pay four times as much for the same product.  This particular neighborhood runs alongside the freeway which means car exhaust and traffic noise, but also easier access to transportation.  Workers who live in other areas may face a 2-hour daily commute plus more hours spent waiting for the bus. It costs time and money to be poor.

I heard a dog barking and noticed a small sign on this door. I stepped closer to read the sign, expecting it to say “No trespassing” or “Beware of dog.”  Instead, to my surprise,  it read “Paz de Cristo”  The Peace of Christ

We walked to the end of the neighborhood and turned around.  Coming back, I noticed more personal touches, including this beautified entrance. There was a hard-to-read, hand-lettered sign in Spanish. 

My companion at that moment was Nasteho, a 22-year-old, Somali-American Muslim woman who happens to also know Spanish.  I asked her what the sign said.  On her first attempt, she translated the sign as “I am always here, at the end of the world.”  My heavy heart sank further in recognition of the despair that might lead someone to post such a message on their door.  Nasteho found this Spanish different from Spanish she had encountered elsewhere.  Unsure that her translation was accurate, she consulted a third member of group, Luz a Columbian theologian whose first language is Spanish.  Nasteho came back to me with Luz’s translation, “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”

Then I recognized the words of Jesus, the One who moved into the human neighborhood, the One whose words have been passed from generation to generation, in hundreds of languages, to provide comfort and hope.  In this Tijuana neighborhood, they were passed from a Mexican factory worker to a Somali-American Muslim, to a South American professor, back to the Somali-American, and then to me, a white American Christian who has never endured poverty and is illiterate in Spanish.  They brought tears to my eyes and a lift to my heart.  And I realized again, what I knew, but kept forgetting.  God’s people were already in this place.  God’s people in Mexico do not need me to bring God to them.  God is there.  God’s people do not need me to rescue them.  They simply need me to love them as I love myself, even unto the end of the world. 

Remember Monserrat?  She was the Dreamer’s Mom we met at the beginning.  At the end of our time together, she said to us, “Now you know the truth and it remains with you.   You are responsible for many things. You can’t remain silent.” 

That was a strong statement.  It set up echoes in my head of Jesus’ words “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” 

That, in turn, resonates with today’s text.  Galatians 5:1 which we did not read says, “For freedom Christ has set us free.”  And then verse 13 says, “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love serve one another. 

You know the truth and it remains with you.  You can’t be silent.  The truth shall set you free, but don’t squander it, instead through love serve one another. 

Imagine the people of God at our best. Imagine that we are protectors, that we advocate for justice and compassion  and mercy. Imagine that our reputation as Jesus’ followers is such that adherents of other faiths and of no faith and our own brothers and sisters in Christ call on us to practice our faith in these radical ways.  Imagine.

[1] This experience was shared in a presentation by Rev. Penwell at the Wild Goose Festival 2018.

9/23/2018 - Renewing Your Mind - Romans 12:1-3

Renewing Your Mind 

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Heather Kirk-Davidoff

Romans 12:1-3                                   

September 23, 2018                                                                                   

During my junior year in college, I spent a semester studying at the University of London.  I had never been abroad before and I felt like I spent my entire semester with my eyes wide open, exclaiming, “This isn’t what it’s like at home!”  When my term was over, I spent three weeks in Zurich, Switzerland where Dan had a job.  On the weekends, we had some amazing hiking expeditions in the Alps.  I flew home at the end of June and my parents picked me up at the airport in Minneapolis, loaded my enormous suitcase into the trunk of the car, and drove me home.  As soon as we started driving, I noticed something.  Minnesota looked flat.  As funny as it sounds to say, I had never noticed that before.  But after six months in deep green rolling hills of England and three weeks in the great peaks of Switzerland, I suddenly saw what I hadn’t seen the whole time I was growing up in Minnesota.  The state is basically flat.

That’s a kind of silly story, but it is for me a strong memory of seeing something in a completely new way because I had an experience that changed my perspective.  Have you ever had an experience like that?  Do you know what I mean?

I’m thinking of my friend Bev who spent a couple of weeks working at an orphanage in a village in Haiti.  She told me that when she came back home and went to the grocery story, ready to get back into the swing of her normal life.  But when she walked into the produce section, she was completely overwhelmed and burst into tears.  “There was just so much,” she told me later.  “It was all so fresh and clean and perfect—I couldn’t bear it.”  Two weeks in Haiti had changed the way she saw food.

My friend Mary Jane told me a similar story about having her first child, a sweetheart of a kid named Andrew.  She had been an elementary school teacher for almost seven years before she went out on maternity leave.  She had perfected her techniques of classroom management, had all her routines down, but when she came back to the classroom, she found she had to re-think everything.  “I looked at each of those kids,” she explained, “and I realized that each one of them was somebody’s baby Andrew.”  Three months on maternity leave had changed the way she saw children.

Have you ever had an experience like that?  Has something happened to you that made it impossible for you to see the world in the same way again?  Think of those experiences, for a moment, and then let me ask you:  What if faith was like that?  What if your faith affected your life like traveling to Switzerland, working in Haiti, or having a baby?  What if your faith made you see everything differently?

Faith, as we usually talk about it, is focused on belief.  Do you believe that Jesus Christ is your Lord and Savior?  If you can say “yes” in response to that question, then you are by definition part of the Christian faith, right?  And when people say that their faith is shaken, or when they say that they’ve lost their faith, that usually means that they are started to doubt the things that other people in their church say they believe.  Faith, as we usually use the term, is something that happens up in your brain.   

In today’s reading from Romans, Paul seems to agree with this description.  “Be not conformed to the world,” Paul writes.  Don’t just mimic the behavior and attitudes of the people around you.  Don’t just live on automatic pilot.  Instead, “be transformed by the renewing of your minds.”  In other words, get your thinking straight and then the world will change.  Many Christians have taken this advice to heart.  Instead of focusing on our actions, instead of teaching the practices of faith, we focus on teaching people what to believe and helping them chase away all of their doubts.

Does anyone have a problem with that?  I sure do.  For one thing, having hung around churches all my life, I’ve known quite a few people whose beliefs are perfectly orthodox and they still act like a jerk.  Clearly, all sorts of things can happen in your mind that have absolutely no affect on your behavior. 

And for another thing, I have argued with all sorts of people during my life about their beliefs and as far as I can tell, none of these arguments have ever transformed anything.  I’ve argued with people about the meaning of Jesus’ death on the cross, the meaning of passages in the Bible pertaining to homosexuality and womens’ role in the church.  For that matter, I’ve argued about climate change and nuclear disarmament and gun control and vegetarianism and as far as I can tell, no one’s life was different as a result of any of these arguments. 

So I have now come to the conclusion that belief is highly over-rated, most especially by Christians.  We can’t just think different—we have to BE different. 

Is that even possible?  Paul, writing to people who lived right in the midst of the most entrenched system of power and control in the world at the time, was convinced that it was possible.  And if we step back and put Paul’s words in today’s reading a bit more into context, we can see that Paul is talking about more than having the right beliefs.  Our reading for the morning began with the exhortation to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice…to God”.  Paul’s not talking about nodding and smiling and singing along with a few hymns.  He’s telling people to go ALL IN, to hand their whole lives over to God made known in Jesus Christ and not to hold anything back.  To be as immersed in the Good News as someone is immersed in a service trip to Haiti, or immersed in parenthood.  To allow every aspect of your life to be shaped by the promises of God, as lived by the people of God.  Do you think that is possible?  Can we as the church, the People of God, promote something more than belief, something that really can transform the world?

I’m not asking this as a rhetorical question, one that we all should obviously be able to answer affirmatively.  This is the question that is quite literally keeping me awake at night right now.  The public conversation that has happened over the past week in response to the accusation that Professor Christine Blasey Ford made against Judge Brent Kavanaugh has illustrated over and over that there is something in our culture that is in desperate need of transformation.  All week, women (and a few brave men) have publically shared stories of being sexually molested as adolescents.  All week, men in power have suggested that the women who tell these stories are mistaken or lying.  And as the mother of a 19-year-old daughter and two 22-year-old sons, as a Chaplain on a college campus, I am sickened at the thought that young men have and will continue to receive that message that there is something understandable, even excusable, about treating women as objects of conquest and not as human beings worthy of care and respect.

What do we as a church have to offer to that conversation?  Some shaming and blaming language about the dangers of drinking and premarital sex?  Some high and mighty exhortations about doing unto others as you would have them do unto you?  That can’t be all we have to offer because no one is going to be transformed by thinking alone.  We need to show the world what it looks like to hand everything over to God’s love and God’s law—mind, body, spirit, everything.

This is not just a pipe dream.  I’ve had enough glimpses of this kind of community to keep me from utter despair.  Here’s just one story: 

The congregation I used to serve in Columbia, Maryland was, like EBC, very involved with programs that addressed the needs of people living on the economic margins.  As one part of this work, the church hosted the community’s Cold Weather Shelter for a week each year.  During that week, 24 men, women and children struggling with homelessness lived in our church building.  The members of the church were there with them much of the time as we helped staff the shelter and provided three meals a day, activities for kids and conversation for the adults.  One year, the shelter was in our church the week before the Sunday in January when we read the story about the baptism of Jesus when a voice came down from the heavens declaring, “This is my Beloved Son with whom I am well pleased!”  Our church planned worship in teams (as EBC is starting to do) and so a group of us spent the week discussing this scripture and crafting a worship service around that powerful declaration.

And then, on the Monday following that week, I saw one of the people who had slept in our church the week before sitting in the food court at the mall.  He had a bunch of plastic bags with him and he was kind of muttering to himself.  Other people were keeping clear of him and I would have reflexively followed suit.  But then the words popped into my head, “This is my beloved son with whom I am well-pleased!”  Beloved, I thought.  Well-pleased, I repeated to myself.

You see, those were no longer just words to me.  That was a shorthand description of the world I had lived in for the past week.  That was the language we had spoken together.  That was the law we had lived by.  And it was transforming me from someone who did nice things for homeless people to a person who saw a homeless person as beloved.

That’s what faith can do—faith that reaches way beyond belief and becomes the language and the law of the People of God.  With faith like that, transformation is not just possible, but certain.  May it be true for us, and may we offer that promise to this whole, hurting world.

9/16/2018 - Letting Go of Privilege - Philippians 2:1-10

Philippians 2:1-10

Letting Go of Privilege

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Kathy Donley

September 16, 2018

Paul was connected to a number of congregations as the good news of Jesus spread throughout the Roman Empire in the first century.  He was connected to many, but based on the letters which survive, I suspect he was particularly close to the church in Philippi. It was to this church that he wrote, “I thank God every time I remember you”  and “I long for all of you.”  It is only this church that he calls “my joy and my crown.”  Good pastors should probably never admit to having a favorite church, but I think Philippi was Paul’s favorite.  

In chapter one, the focus is mostly on the struggle between Christians and external enemies, but by chapter two, Paul is concerned with  possible divisions inside the community.  I called this a congregation, but of course, we know that there was not a Methodist church and a Baptist Church and a Catholic church in Philippi. There was just one group of Christians, who were probably a small minority of the 15,000 people who lived in Philippi, and Paul was writing to all of them.  Some form of the Greek word for “all” occurs 6 times in the first 9 verses. 

Paul frequently addresses his letters to “holy ones” or “saints.”  So this letter is “to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi”.  He does not call them saints to put them on a spiritual or moral pedestal.  He calls them that in reference to their commitment to Jesus, to remind them of their calling as the people of God, all of them, together.

If this is Paul’s favorite church, I suspect that it is because they live out his best sense of what it means to be the people of God.  They come the closest to getting it right and that is a source of great joy for him.  But even as wonderful as they seem to be, they have issues.  And one of the issues seems to be internal conflict.  If we read through to chapter four, we would see that Paul is concerned about two women in leadership.  Euodia and Syntyche disagree about something.  Paul doesn’t say what their argument is about, but it must be serious if word has reached him from a distance. 

These women are the real deal, from all we can tell.  Paul says “they have struggled beside me in the work of the gospel.”   The word translated struggling can refer to the battlefield or the athletic arena.  They have worked hard.

They are not false teachers trying to lead people astray.  They are committed to Jesus, but  now they are in a fight with each other.

The idea that Christians could disagree, even angrily, does not come as a surprise to us, does it?   From our place two thousand years after Paul, we know that Christians disagreed enough to form factions and the factions solidified into tribes called Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant.

But let’s back up just a minute and ask ourselves why.  If our goal is to follow Jesus, and Jesus said that the most important thing is to love God with all your being and the next most important thing is to love your neighbor as yourself, then why are there fights among the people of God? 

I guess the most obvious reason is that we don’t follow Jesus perfectly.  Despite our best intentions, we are still sinful, broken human beings and sometimes we fall short of our goals. 

Another way to analyze this might be to return to that idea of external and internal pressures.  I said that in the first part of this letter, Paul is concerned with external enemies of the faith.  Roman culture was highly stratified.  There was a pecking order and you climbed the social status ladder by making sure you paid all due respect to those above you.  Philippi was a developing Roman city and those who lived there would have felt strongly compelled to proclaim the honors they had received and their social location.  Christians would have felt that same pressure.[1] 

Paul appeals to them, to imagine themselves as the people of God, to adopt not the mindset of the culture around them, but to adopt the mind of Christ.  The people of God are to be counter-cultural. Our goal is not achieving social status; our goal is serving each other in love.  When we lose sight of that, we become prone to the internal fights that can ultimately destroy a community.

Privilege is kind of a buzz word in many circles right now.  There are conversations about white privilege and male privilege and the privilege of education and health care. 

Equality with God was Jesus’ privilege.  If you are equal with God, you’re pretty high up on the ladder, but Jesus let go of that privilege.  He came down the ladder as a demonstration of love and it is Jesus’ attitude and action which Paul is holding up as a model for us.

Philippians 2:5-11 contains one of the most succinct and important descriptions of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.  We think this is an early hymn:  Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

These are very important words.  Like all significant theology, they have also been subject to abuse and misuse.  Sometimes they have been used to hold up Jesus’ suffering as something to be imitated by those who are currently suffering.  They were used to keep slaves under the thumb of their masters, to tell abused spouses to submit to their abusers, to maintain the status quo of injustice.  What we need to notice is that this hymn does not start with the suffering Jesus.  It starts with the Christ who is equal to God.  The poor who are told to suffer like Christ rather than to struggle for freedom are not in the position to copy the Christ of this hymn.  The challenge of this hymn is addressed to those who have privilege, who have some status or power, just as Christ had the status of God.[2]

Maybe, just now, we relaxed a little bit and thought, “O good, I’m off the hook.  I don’t have status or power.   This is not talking to me.” 

That’s the tricky thing, isn’t it?  It is very hard for us to recognize our own privilege.  The Rev. Peter Storey was a Methodist pastor and bishop in South Africa for many years.  He was one of the white church leaders who fought vigorously against apartheid and rejoiced when it was finally dismantled. One time he was invited to the United States with a group of church leaders.  Arriving at the airport, they were surprised to learn that they were booked in business class. He had never travelled business class before.  In fact, the thought of a Christian minister travelling any way other than economy went against his principles, but their American hosts had booked the tickets and who were they to argue?  Travelling to Amsterdam in business class, he discovered that the seats were wide and could be leaned back and the cabin crew kept bringing all sorts of nice things.  He found it very pleasant and by the time they arrived in the Netherlands, he was getting used to being pampered. 

Before they boarded their plane to New York, an airline staff member pulled them aside to say that the original aircraft had engine trouble.  The replacement plane had a smaller business class section and so these four ministers were being moved back to economy. The airline apologized and gave each of them two seats in economy to make up for it.  Reflecting on that experience, Rev. Storey said “I should have been grateful to revert to my more appropriate and humble image, but I wasn’t.  Truth be told, I was fed up!  I found myself wondering why I had to be one of the unfortunate four.  Didn’t I look like business class material?  And what was so special about the others who hadn’t been bumped down to economy?  Ten hours of business class travel had weaned me quite effectively from my humility.” [3]

The effects of privilege are subtle.  We feel entitled -- to the rightness of our opinions, to the appropriateness of our needs,  to support for our decisions.  We can assert this privilege without having much awareness that we’re doing so.  If we are not careful, we may deceive others into believing we don’t have power or privilege when we do.

Of course, there is also danger in the opposite direction.   We could ignore the idea that we bear the image of God and act as though our opinions and needs don’t matter because we are worthless.  Then we need to remember that Jesus came to our level.  He came to our level to elevate us, not to push us down further.  We do not need to view ourselves as lower than Jesus views us. 

This is how the people of God are to relate to each other.  We recognize that we are the beloved children of God, that we have worth because Jesus says we do, and at the same time, we honor the worth of all the other children of God around us.  

The people of God trust that we are God’s beloved.  We abide together as partners in that love, not competing for it, not earning it, not setting up winners and losers, but reveling in it, growing in it, expanding with it, together.

In 1974, Adrienne Rich received the National Book Award in poetry.  Other poets in contention for the award were Audre Lord and Alice Walker.  As Rich accepted the prize she said, “We, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Alice Walker, together accept this award in the name of all the women whose voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world. . .”[4]  The three women had written that statement together in advance and no matter who officially won the prize, this would have been their statement.  They said that  they believed that by supporting and giving to each other, they could accomplish more than by  competing against each other.

What a demonstration of cooperation instead of competition, a way of asserting one’s own worth while looking toward the interests of others.

I appreciate how Walter Brueggemann describes this.  He says, “The world in which we live, . . . is premised on a rat-race of competition, on the turmoil of ruthless individualism, and the collection of commodities, of rude social interaction and crude survival shows and toxic public life.  And Paul says to the church do not be so mindless.  Do not be like sheep that imitate the world. Do not act like fearful citizens of the Roman empire or of the American empire.  Paul does not do that so that the church can be the snug, comfortable, happy place in town.  Rather Paul intends that the church should be an exhibit to the world how our common life can be ordered differently. . . . The community gathered around Jesus is called to be as odd in the world as he himself was such an odd Messiah.”[5]

Paul writes his most joyful letter to this church and he says, “Make my joy complete.  Have the same mind, the same love, found in Jesus.”

Sisters and brothers may we imagine ourselves as the people of God, letting go of our privilege, not even grasping our status as God’s beloved, but imitating Jesus our Lord.  Amen. 

[1] Todd D. Still, Smyth and Helwys Bible Commentary: Philippians and Philemon, (Macon, GA:  Smyth and Helwys Publishing, 2011) p. 45

[2] Pheme Perkins, from “Philippians” in Women’s Bible Commentary, ed. Carol Newsome and Sharon H. Ringer (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 1998), pp. 434-35.

[3] Peter Storey With God in the Crucible:  Preaching Costly Discipleship (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 2002), pp 161-162.

[4]  http://www.nationalbook.org/nbaacceptspeech_arich_74.html#.W5wgS6ZKiUk

[5] Walter Brueggemann, “On Changing Our Minds” in The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann, Vol 2 (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox, 2015), pp. 103-104.

9/9/2018 - Wild Wonder Fueled By Love - Ephesians 3:14-21

Wild Wonder Fueled By Love

Ephesians 3:14-21

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Kathy Donley

September 9, 2018

Kaitlin Curtice is a citizen of the Potawatomi Citizen Band Nation. The Potawatomi people originally lived in the Great Lakes region, until they were forcibly removed to what is now eastern Kansas.  Kaitlin is  Native American and Christian, and she often has to defend that dual identity.  To some white Christians, she is too Native.  Some Native people question how she can embrace the religion of the colonizers, the oppressors.  She certainly recognizes that the Bible was used to control and manipulate, to support the goals of greed and Christian empire which led to great suffering and trauma for her people.  But she also says that the true way of Jesus, the way of prayer and nonviolence, is a path that indigenous people have been following for a long time.  I heard Kaitlin speak this summer.  One thing she said that stuck with me was this “Christianity was meant to be a display of wild wonder fueled by love.” 

She imagines the people of God, living our day-to-day lives, finding glory in the ordinary, drawing on the power of the deep, deep love of Jesus.  She says that history often repeats itself, but it doesn’t have to.  We can imagine a better path.  And if we can imagine it, then we can start to live it.

This idea comes out in a slightly different way in the letter to the Ephesians.  We do not know much about the original recipients of this letter, but it seems that they include a number of Gentiles who have recently been welcomed into  the Christian faith.  (Ephesians 2:11-13)  We could say that this letter is an attempt to help them understand how to live into that role, how to imagine themselves as God’s own people.  

In the verses that we read, two in particular stand out for me. 

Verses 18-19 say,   “I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

Bible scholar Pheme Perkins says “Ephesians is not concerned with knowledge in terms of human minds stretched to their limits in apprehending the creator or with cosmological speculation but with the experience of the love of Christ …” [1]

Her idea then, is that we cannot comprehend the dimensions of this love apart from experience.  We don’t know this love intellectually.  We know it experientially.  We begin to comprehend this love when we receive it or when we share it or when we allow it to be the fuel that sustains our lives. 

I suspect we can also experience it vicariously, that is through the stories of other people.  So let me invite you to open your imagination as wide as you can and enter into some of the height and length and depth and breadth of this love.

Imagine this love as the power that deliberately nurtures children as individuals and cares for the elderly with dignity and respect.  It strives for  healthy relationships with people of all ages. It is the compassion of a friend keeping vigil at a hospital or hospice bed so that a loved one will not die alone. This love tutors other people’s children and makes sure the food pantry is stocked for hungry strangers and visits those in prison.  It is the daily fidelity to marriage vows and other significant commitments which turn out to be both more difficult and more joyful than anticipated.  It is also the passion of an activist with a protest sign or in handcuffs who refuses to let injustice and suffering become normal.  It is found in the bonds between the most unlikely people, and between humans and animals, and, I believe, in the bonds between some animals as well.  This love is the boldness that welcomes the stranger, champions the underdog, embraces the refugee, and summons the courage to change minds, hearts and behaviors. 

Do you remember Yusra Mardini?  She was a swimmer from Syria on the Refugee Team at the Olympics in 2016.  Until the war in Syria, she swam in her hometown of Damascus with the support of the Syrian Olympic Committee. When the war came, she kept training, even when bombs destroyed the roofs over her swimming pools.  Finally, at 18 years old, she fled with her sister Sarah, travelling through Lebanon and Turkey before trying for Greece. 

They set off in a boat meant for 6 people, but carrying 20.  Thirty minutes out on the Aegean Sea, the motor began to fail. Yusra, her sister Sarah, and two others jumped into the sea and swam, pulling the boat in open water, eventually reaching Greece.  They were the only ones on board who knew how to swim.  The other two swimmers eventually gave up, exhausted.  Yusra said,  “I had one hand with the rope attached to the boat as I moved my two legs and one arm. It was three and half hours in cold water. Your body is almost like … done. I don’t know if I can describe that.”[2]

Can we try to imagine what Yusra and Sarah did?  We might call it strength, grit, determination, endurance, stubbornness.  Or we might call it love  -- love of self, love of neighbor, love of life in all its fullness.  A power that tapped reserves of strength Yusra and Sarah did not even know they possessed.  Imagine with me the incomprehensible love of Christ which is like that.

Remember earlier this summer when a soccer team and their coach were trapped in a cave in Thailand?  I told you then that I could not watch that story because of my claustrophobia.  But now that they are safely out, I went  back to learn more.

Nine days after being trapped, the boys were located by a British diving team.  Only one boy spoke English, limiting their communication.  The next day, seven Thai Navy Seals, including a doctor, made the 6 hour journey to the boys, bringing supplies.  Four of them, including the doctor, stayed with them underground for the rest of their time in the cave.  They were the very last to exit.

The international rescue effort involved more than 10,000 people, including over 100 divers, representatives from about 100 governmental agencies, 900 police officers and 2,000 soldiers, and required ten police helicopters, seven police ambulances, more than 700 diving cylinders, and the pumping of more than a billion liters of water out of the caves.[3]

The soccer team was trapped about 2 ½ miles from the entrance, at the end of what one diver called an underground obstacle course of rocky chambers, half-flooded canals and fully submerged sections.  One of those fully submerged sections was 350 meters, which is longer than a football field, and the water was so muddy, he said it was like “swimming in coffee.”[4]   There were extremely narrow passages; the smallest was 15” x 28”. 

On the way out of the cave they spent at least 3 hours submerged in water, with one rescue diver accompanying each boy, but that was not the entire journey.  For the last part, hundreds of volunteers stood along the treacherous path.  Each boy was sedated in a stretcher, so these volunteers slid and/or carried him, passing him from one volunteer to the next, until they reached the entrance which was about an hour away.

The dimensions of Christ’s love are beyond my comprehension.  So is the scope of the international cooperation that saved the lives of 13 people, and received the sacrifice of one diver who died early on.  If we had the right instruments, the height, width, breadth and depth of Christ’s love might somehow be measured in the persistence of the original searchers and the skill of divers and the narrowness of passages and the courage of the soccer team and the frustration of language barriers and the thickness of the muddy water and the weeks spent underground and the dedication of those who pumped out water and attempted to drill through the mountain and the fervor of so many all over the world who were praying for them. 

The professional divers advised the Thai governor on rescue options.  He asked about the likelihood that this plan would succeed. One American military diver said that he expected that they would save 60-70 percent of the boys.  In other words, he predicted that 3 or 4 or 5 boys might die.[5]  What a terrible responsibility to make this decision.  And yet, this love was not paralyzed by fear.  This love took deliberate, coordinated, strategic action.

And great was the joy when the team and their coach and all their rescuers made it out alive.  Some might have called it “a wild wonder fueled by love.”

It is hard to measure this immeasurable love of Christ for lots of reasons, one of which is of course that it is invisible.  We cannot see the internal process behind the love.  We only believe that it is there because of the caring, sharing, and trusting, that we witness.  And so I’d like to imagine one more dimension of this love, which is maybe closer to that internal process. 

I’m thinking of a man named Desmond Doss.  He was a Seventh Day Adventist Christian from Virginia.  He took the commandment “thou shalt not kill” very seriously, believing that even in combat, killing was against the will of God.  World War II was happening and Doss wanted to serve his country, so he enlisted in the Army Medical Corps as a noncombatant.  Because of his conscientious objector status boot camp was difficult.   He was threatened and harassed. Many of the other recruits threw shoes at him while he prayed, and they tried to have him transferred out of their unit.  His commanding officers also thought he was a liability.  They tried unsuccessfully to have him court-martialed. 

He was assigned to an infantry rifle company.  They marched into machine gun fire in Guam and the Philippines and Okinawa, and he never carried a weapon.  In late April 1945, 26-year-old Doss and his battalion were repeatedly trying to capture an escarpment, which they called Hacksaw Ridge.  They had secured the top of the cliff, when suddenly enemy forces rushed them.  Officers ordered an immediate retreat.  Soldiers rushed to climb back down the steep cliff.  Less than one-third of them made it.  The rest lay wounded, scattered across enemy soil, abandoned or left for dead.  Doss disobeyed orders and charged back to rescue as many as he could.  Over the span of several hours, Doss treated the injured and, one by one, dragged them to the edge of the cliff and lowered them to safety in a rope sling.  After each successful delivery, he reportedly prayed, “Dear God, let me get just one more man.”  By nightfall, he had rescued 75 soldiers, including many of those who had labelled him a coward.  When the war was over, the captain who had wanted Doss out of his unit said, "He was one of the bravest persons alive, and then to have him end up saving my life was the irony of the whole thing,"  Doss was awarded the Purple Heart, a Bronze Star and the Medal of Honor, all without ever harming another human being.[6]

This section of Ephesians begins with a prayer that God will grant “strength in your inner being with power through the Spirit.”  Private Doss had that kind of inner strength which enabled him to live out his convictions with honor and courage and integrity.  He could imagine a way of life in which Christians did not kill.  And what he imagined, he lived out.

Our worship theme for the month invites us to “Imagine the People of God”.  It shouldn’t require much effort to believe that we are those people.  We know that is our calling; that’s why we’re here.  It is beyond our comprehension to grasp the full depth and weight and power of Christ’s love, but let’s imagine any way.  Imagine what would happen if we spent our lifetimes in the awareness of the extravagance of Christ’s love.  What if we entered every situation, grounded in that love, confident in our inner beings of the presence of God’s Spirit, filled with the fullness of God?   I think, if we tried to do that, we might come to know a wild wonder fueled by love.  Thanks be to God.

[1] Pheme Perkins, New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume XI, (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 2000), p. 415-416.

[2] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/yusra-mardini-rio-2016-olympics-womens-swimming-the-syrian-refugee-competing-in-the-olympics-who-a7173546.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tham_Luang_cave_rescue

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3NB9-x8itY

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3NB9-x8itY

[6] https://www.army.mil/article/183328/pfc_desmond_doss_the_unlikely_hero_behind_hacksaw_ridge

8/26/2019 - My Rock and My Redeemer - Psalm 19

My Rock and My Redeemer

Psalm 19    

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Kathy Donley

August 26, 2018

The Bible is old, very old.  Sometimes I am more aware of that.  The family dramas in Genesis remind me.  Psalm 19 reminds me.  It is ancient poetry which classical musicians like Bach, Beethoven, Handel and Haydn set to music.  C.S. Lewis said “I take this to be the greatest poem in the Psalter and one of the greatest lyrics in the world.”[1]

The first six verses are older than the rest.  They are a song of praise to God the Creator.  This section only uses the word “El” to refer to God.  El is a more generic name for God.  It can be used in reference to the God of Israel, but also more generally about any god.  This hymn, like many of the psalms, praises the God who creates and sustains creation.  This God is known, perhaps obliquely, in the beauty and order and rhythm of the cosmos.

Some of us resonate with that way of knowing God.  We might identify with the Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor.  After she left parish ministry, she and her husband found a place in country with oak trees and trillium and elderberry, persimmon and blackberry and milkweed and water.  She said, “ I found my place on earth.”  And she said, “I know plenty of people who find God most reliably in books, in buildings, and even in other people. I have found God in all of these places too, but the most reliable meeting place for me has always been the creation. I have always known where to go when my own flame was guttering. To lie with my back flat on the fragrant ground is to receive a transfusion of that same power that makes the green blade rise. To remember that I am dirt and to dirt I shall return is to be given my life back again. Where other people see acreage, timber and soil, and river frontage, I see God’s body. . . . The Creator does not live apart from creation . . . When I take a breath, God’s Holy Spirit enters me.” [2]

Some of us feel that way, but not all of us do.  Some of us would say that the creation only reveals a Creator to those who already believe or that seeing God’s glory in the on-going pattern of nature is an interpretation one chooses to make.

With that in mind, we might turn to the next section of the psalm, verses 7-11 which praises the Torah, God’s law.  Living by Torah is living life as God intended it.  Six times, this section uses the personal name for God, the name which was revealed to Moses just before the giving of the law.  What makes life possible is relatedness to God and that personal relationship is mediated by God’s instruction. 

Scholars believe that these two sections were each once independent units, a hymn to creation and a hymn to Torah, but someone put them together on purpose to make a statement.  In its current combined form, this psalm is not concerned merely with the Creator God; rather it expresses the conviction that God has broken through the silences of nature, disclosing God’s own name and speaking and acting in the historical experiences of the people of Israel.[3]  We might also add that God has come even closer in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, but of course the psalm was written long before his time. 

And then there are the last few verses where the psalmist is concerned that he or she might unknowingly go against God’s instructions and asks for forgiveness.  The focus draws even closer, down to an individual life.    May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable.  The first section of the psalm speaks to me of wonder, and the second speaks of knowledge.  This last part seems to be about an interplay between the two, about the insights gained from observation and experience, about knowing my dependence on God, my ability to ignore or be unaware of my own faults, and my need for forgiveness. 

 “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.”  What a great one-sentence prayer.   Some translations say “be pleasing in your sight.”  How would we evaluate what is acceptable or pleasing to God?  The psalmist would point to the 10 commandments, which remain a strong guide for healthy living.  We might think of the words of the prophet Micah, “God has shown you  O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”  Or the words of Jesus, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and love your neighbor as yourself.” 

“My the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing.”  In so many ways, this psalm speaks to me of balance.  There is the balance between wondering and knowing, between the times when God seems utterly silent and the times when guidance is clear, the balance between what I say out loud and what I think internally, the balance of life which might be found in a purity of heart centered on one overriding purpose.  

E.B. White, the author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little said, “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world.  This makes it hard to plan the day.” [4]  Yes. We live in God’s good world.   We also live in God’s world which is wounded and broken and desperately in need of healing.   There is a balance in how we live our days. 

Thinking of rocks and balance reminded me of the amazing people who spend time actually balancing rocks.  Apparently for some, it is a kind of spiritual practice.   So I invite you to watch this video which showcases the work of Michael Grab.  Enjoy it, wonder at it, and as you watch, allow part of your brain to begin to think about the balance or lack of balance in your own life.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vswc7xB0V6c&t=288s

There is a balance within our days and across our days.  There is a balance in the change of rhythm with the seasons.  This is our last time of worship together this summer.  I know that fall won’t officially begin for a few more weeks, but we live by a different schedule.  On our calendar, September 9 marks the beginning of the church program year.  September through December are always busy months in the life of this congregation and in many of your personal lives.  My normal rhythm, in any season, is to move from Sunday to Sunday. I’m usually planning more than one sermon, more than one worship service at a time.   On Sunday morning I live in this moment, but by Sunday evening, I’m already thinking about what comes next.  Except that today, I want to pause.  I invite you to pause with me.    Instead of looking ahead, I want to take a moment to notice what is behind us. 

I wonder what has happened in your life this summer.  Maybe you took a trip, to see family or a new landscape.  Maybe you read a great book or found a favorite new song or gathered up the courage for a hard conversation. Maybe you were energetic or ill or weary.  Within this faith community and beyond it, there have been funerals and weddings, births and deaths, with all the accompanying loss and gratitude and contentment and joy of those occasions. 

What has happened in your life this summer?  I would note two things relevant to our common life.  After five years of sharing space with the Karen congregation, they moved to their own building.  That move will make a big change in their lives and in ours and I wonder what or who God might send our way next.  I also note that this is the end of my eighth year as your pastor. I am grateful for so much and as I pause to wonder how those years passed so quickly,  I say thank you.

Today is not a momentous day, but it is the end of a season.  It is the end of a worship series built around the Psalms.  One of my favorite psalm verses says,  “Teach us to number our days that we may gain a wise heart.”  And so we pause together to notice the passing of time, to take stock, to remember.  For the second half of the summer, we have reflected on God who is like a rock, providing a foundation for life,  and God who is like the rock that beckons us onward through the deepest, hardest, truest things.  We have sought shelter in God through worship and through the companionship of each other.  Throughout this time, we have used the refrain of the psalms “God is a my rock”.

And so, today I invite you to pause with me, to take time to remember whatever it is that you need to remember.  Perhaps it is something about the psalms – their confidence in God, their expression of the range of human life.  Perhaps it is something about your own life, a celebration, a need for forgiveness, an insight to carry with you. Maybe it is no more than the fact that God is present in all of this.   Sometimes it is good to pause and make a memory.  So, as we sing our final hymn, I invite you to take choose a rock to take home with you. There are rocks scattered around the sanctuary.  If you prefer to stay in your seat, I’ll pass a basket of rocks around.   Find a rock that speaks to you, that will remind you of what you want to remember.  Take it home, put it by your backdoor or on a shelf or in your special drawer, so that when you see it, it will remind you of God’s abiding love and powerful presence always.

[1] C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1986), 63.

[2] Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church:  A Memoir of Faith, (New York:  HarperOne, 2012), pp. 79-80

[3] Bernhard W. Anderson, Out of the Depths:  The Psalms Speak for Us Today (Philadlphia:  Westminster Press, 1983), p. 147

[4] Quoted in profile by Israel Shenker, "E. B. White: Notes and Comment by Author", The New York Times (11 July 1969)

8/19/2018 - Shelter of the Rock - Psalm 27:1-9

Shelter of the Rock

Psalm 27:1-9       

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Kathy Donley

August 19, 2018

The foundation of Wartburg Castle was laid in 1067.  It is still structurally intact and explored by numerous tourists today, living up to its name as a fortress.  In 1521, the reformer Martin Luther went into hiding at Wartburg, after he was excommunicated by Pope Leo X.  The castle provided a safe haven where he lived while he translated the New Testament into German.  But even in this fortress, he did not feel completely protected. According to legend, he continued to feel attacks by spiritual forces; one time so acutely that he hurled an inkpot at the devil to drive it away.

That story about Luther is one of safety and security on one side countered by feelings of danger and vulnerability on the other.  It seems to captures some of the range of faith that is expressed within Psalm 27.

Psalm 27 begins with a bold declaration “The Lord is my light and my salvation; The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” Then in verses 5-6, it speaks of being in hiding, of seeking shelter from God.  At verse 9, the tone changes again, and sounds a bit anxious with “Do not hide your face from me.  Do not forsake me.”  And finally, it returns to strong affirmation in the last two verses, “I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!”

We have discussed many times the interplay of fear and courage as aspects of faith.  This is yet one more time that the Bible says “do not be afraid”.   But here, the image is not an angel,; there is not a focus on a message about a surprise or a mission to be undertaken.  Here, in the middle of the psalm is the image of finding refuge, finding safety, finding shelter in God.  It is that image I would like to explore this morning.

Shelter is a basic human need.  Shelter, in a building or a tent or a cave, offers protection from sun or cold, rain or snow and predators.   Most of us find shelter most often in the place we call home, which ideally is also a place where we feel emotionally safe and loved and cared for.  We need shelter every day.  We need shelter to return to when we have gone out to do something difficult or brave or important or ordinary.  We need shelter most especially when we are ill or afraid or grieving or worried or lonely.

In Psalm 61, which we read last Sunday, the psalmist  asks God “let me find refuge under the shelter of your wings.”  And in Psalm 27, we hear, “For God will hide me in God’s shelter in the day of trouble;”  There are some among us who find shelter directly in God.  Well, I mean, they get as close to God as anyone can. 

We remember that Moses did so. After he had followed God’s directions for quite some time, after he had talked to Pharoah on God’s behalf and led the people out of bondage in Egypt and saw them fed in the wilderness, after he had become so very angry at them for giving into  their fears and building a golden calf to worship, after that when God had forgiven them and told him to lead them away from the place of their idolatry and on to the promised land, after all that, Moses had just one request.  He wanted to see God’s face.  And God reminded him that no human can look on God’s face and live.  But even then, God sheltered Moses, placing him in  a protected space in the rocks where God’s hand could cover him and keep him from seeing God’s face.  Whatever the ancient Hebrews might have understood about seeing God’s face as a possible cause of death, we can resonate with the truth that humans cannot know God directly.

There are some who do get close though.  Sometimes people experience God’s presence as overwhelming joy or a pervasive peace, a sense of being held or knowing that we are deeply loved. 

Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician and physicist who lived in the 1600’s.  He was also a devout Catholic.  When he died, a servant found a piece of paper sewn into the lining of his coat. On it, he had written these words, “In the year of grace, 1654, Monday 23 November—from about half-past ten in the evening till about half an hour after midnight: FIRE God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the learned . . . Certitude, certitude; feeling, joy, peace.  . . .God—let me not be separated from thee forever.”[1]

John Wesley, the founder of what become the Methodist movement had a well-known moment which is often referred to his “Aldersgate experience.”  His journal entry from May 24, 1738 reads:

“In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where someone was reading [Martin] Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”[2]

I am amused that Wesley admits he did not want to go to that church meeting where he had such a profound encounter.    Sometimes we have to talk ourselves into going to church.  And sometimes, there is no place we would rather be.

You might remember the images from Syria on Christmas Eve 2016.[3]  There was a cease fire which allowed these Christians to celebrate Christmas together for the first time in five years.  They gathered in a ruined cathedral, with the roof gone from bombings and open to the sky and the snow.   They could have stayed at home or gotten together with friends someplace warm and dry.   Instead, in the place that could no longer provide physical shelter, they sought spiritual refuge in the place where generations have known the presence of God.

Many people since Wesley have used his language about his heart being strangely warmed to describe their own encounters with the Divine.  However, not all of us experience God in those mystical moments. 

Some of us take shelter in the wisdom of those who practice the presence of God and share those experiences with us.  The Apostle’s Creed speaks of the communion of saints.  We share fellowship with other Christians across time and space by their writings.  And so we learn from Pascal and Wesley, but also from Juliana of Norwich and Francis of Assisi, and Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen and Joan Chittister and a host of others.

We find spiritual refuge in mystical experience, prayer, music and worship and indirectly, through the spiritual experiences of others.  God shelters us through other people.  As the Irish proverb says, “It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.”

Psalm 27 also speaks about physical shelter.  The writer wants to live within the temple for the protection it offers.  I wonder how we might understand that?  Some of us come to this building every week in order to receive the love and support of friends, as we share news of our lives, especially during the prayer time but also more generally.  This is one kind of shelter a church offers.

But going back to the psalmist’s idea of dwelling in the temple – did you know that 44 people are living in 38 churches across the United States right now?  They are at risk for deportation and so they live within the protection of the church walls, being supported and provided for by church members. Those 44 represent those who have made their sanctuary public.  The authorities know where they are and could come for them at any time.  There are an unknown number of  people in secret sanctuary.

In the Central Africa Republic, a Catholic church is sheltering about 2,000 Muslim people.   A 5-year-old conflict there has led to a Christian militia seeking vengeance on Muslim people.  Armed men wait for people to leave the grounds of St. Peter Claver Cathedral and they incite others to violence.  Church leaders accused of sheltering Muslim families are also being threatened, but the cathedral is committed to protecting the vulnerable.[4]

There are many other stories of sanctuary and radical hospitality offered in the name of Jesus that we might tell if time allowed.  We also know too many stories where those in need of shelter have been turned away or taken advantage of or abused.  We need to attend to those stories, but I chose not to tell them today.

Instead I’m remembering that back when Moses wanted to be closer to God, he said, “Let me see your glory.”  In response, God said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, ‘The Lord’; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.”  God’s answer is probably a clue about the nature of glory, that it resides with grace and mercy.  And so I wonder if these stories of shelter and refuge are, in fact, some of the best ways we can see God’s glory.  Maybe the signs of God’s presence are all around us, if we remember to look.

“The great lesson from the true mystics is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends and family, in one’s back yard.”  God’s glory passes before us every day.”[5] 

Maybe that is the source of the psalmist’s confidence, when he says “I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”  That is his declaration of faith, in spite of the lies, in spite of the violence surrounding him.  And friends, we can also make that same affirmation  -- we shall see the goodness of the Lord.  Be strong and let your heart take courage.  Amen.

[1] Marcus Borg, The God We Never Knew:  Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Contemporary Authentic Faith, (New York:  HarperOne, 2006), p.46

[2] http://www.umc.org/what-we-believe/holy-spirit-moments-learning-from-wesley-at-aldersgate

[3] http://www.naharnet.com/stories/en/222629

[4] https://religionnews.com/2018/08/14/in-central-africa-a-cathedral-shelters-muslims-amid-sectarian-violence/

[5] These words are attributed to Abraham Maslow.  I have not found where and when he said them.

8/12/2018 - Lead Me to the Rock - Psalm 61:1-4

Lead Me to the Rock

Rev. Kathy Donley

8/12/2018

Scripture Lesson:  Psalm 61:1-4

Two Sundays ago, I suggested the discipline of reading five psalms per day for the month of August.  If you have been doing that, you might have discovered that the psalmist seems to cycle through anger, despair, praise, joy, contentment, wonder, trust  – up and down, back and forth, sometimes fast enough to make your head spin.  If we think of the psalms as poetry or song lyrics, we realize that poetry that lasts tends to reflect what is universal in human experience. 

And so, as I sat with Psalm 61 this week, I wondered about the person who might say these words “from the end of the earth I call to You, O God, when my heart is faint, lead me to the rock that is higher than I.”

Who is speaking?  Is it someone in particular crisis or is this a normal prayer in a normal week?  What clues might help us answer that?

From the end of the earth I call –suggests that the person feels far from God, perhaps isolated.

When my heart is faint – some translations say when my heart is overwhelmed.  It sounds like the speaker is in distress, that something has upset their equilibrium.  This is not a routine prayer, not a grace offered before meals or a bedtime prayer.  This is a prayer for serious help.

The plea is somewhat simple:  "Lead me to the rock that is higher than I."  The first two words could be a mantra offered to God in a lot of situations.  "Lead me."  "When I have to make a hard decision, lead me, God."  "When my loved ones are depending on me, lead me."  "When I am overwhelmed by my circumstances and don't know what to do next, lead me."

“Lead me”  is a basic request, but it is also specific. It implies that I cannot do this alone.  “Lead me” is different from “carry me”.  Different from “fix this problem”  or “change this situation.”  This request suggests that if God will lead, the speaker will follow.  “Lead me” is a personal request.  If this is my prayer, then I am part of the equation.  If it is your prayer, then you are part of it.   We ask for guidance, but it is still our responsibility to move ourselves along, to follow, even perhaps to climb. This psalm seems to be speaking of a journey, a process, a development of faith, which might be something like spiritual rock climbing.

This film clip, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjAUiUyLfrk&t=42s tells us part of the story of a person climbing up a rock at Joshua Tree National Park.  It’s only part of the story because what we cannot see are the people on the ground below.  One person below is keeping tension on the belaying rope so that if the climber slips, he will be caught.  At some angles, the rope connected to him is not visible, but it is there.  And I wonder if God is like an invisible belayer?  I actually tend to think not.  I think that God does not suspend the laws of gravity or physics or biology, but I could be wrong.  The kind of knowledge, that depth of understanding might just be part of the rock that is higher than I which I have not yet attained.

Also in this film, out of our sight, is a rock climbing guide.  What we cannot hear are his instructions to the climber.  He offers suggestions for how to place his feet and distribute his weight.  When the climber is successful, the guide cheers him on.  At one point, the climber says, “I’m just going to take a rest here” to which the guide responds, “That’s a very good idea.”  It is in the this role, the role of the guide, that I understand God, especially in this psalm.

God is that unseen one who might stand below and call up encouragement and suggestions as we climb, or God might lead the way ahead of us and be there to receive us when we finally reach the top.   

But what is it with needing to be higher?  Why can’t we stay on level ground?  What is the psalmist saying?

One idea that occurs to me is that when you get up high, you see the big picture.  You take the long view.  You see things from an different perspective.  Perhaps the psalmist recognizes that being led to a higher place will create a new vantage point.  And the resulting new perspective will lead to a clearer head, a better sense of what really matters, and what to do next.  Sometimes we seek that higher place when we have an important choice to make.  Sometimes we seek it because disorder or chaos or crisis has erupted and we realize that without knowing it, we have become complacent, accepting things that we should not have.  And then, shaken from our passivity, we call on God from the end of the earth to lead us to new understanding and transformation. 

Sometimes we step out of our normal routine and go looking for the new vantage point.  Sometimes it comes to us as a moment of surprise.

One day a church staff person involved with people experiencing homelessness was sitting in the congregation at a service in a downtown church.  As he sat listening to the Scripture reading, a homeless man came and sat beside him.  He knew what would happen next – the man, finding a captive audience, would ask for money. He waited, expecting the whispered request to come soon.

Sure enough, after a few minutes, the  man leaned across,  “Here” he said, “I can’t stay.  Will you put this in the offering plate for me?”  They often give me sandwiches at this church and I just want to say thank you”  He pressed two dollars into the church worker’s hand and slipped away.

Sometimes in a moment when the tables turn, when our expectations are upended and we realize it, transformation becomes possible. 

We have had several funerals recently.  On those occasions, we often tell stories and share memories of a loved one’s life, and in that telling, it becomes apparent what was most important to them.  From the vantage point of examining many years of living, we can see the wisdom that comes with experience. 

Transformation might occur when we step out of the routine and intentionally seek guidance.  It might come as a surprise in the midst of daily life.  It comes to most of us, suddenly and gradually, across months and years of life and change and growth, like taking a long path up the mountain.

But sometimes, transformation comes as a steep, fast climb, when we are in crisis, in the midst of loss or anticipated loss.

That is the experience of Kate Bowler.  Kate is a professor at Duke Divinity School.  When she was 35, she was married to the man she had loved since she was 15 and after not being able to have a baby for many years, they had a son named Zach.  And she had landed a tenure-track position at Duke, one of her alma maters.  She was set to take the long gradual way up the mountain.  Until she was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer.  I am reading her book Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved.  It is a very honest and brave and sometimes funny account of the her life with cancer for the last few years. 

Early in the book she identifies three questions which she says are both too shallow and too deep.  The questions are:

Why?

God, are you here?

What does this suffering mean? 

Some of you recommended this book to me.  I have not finished it yet, but I would recommend it to you.   It is impossible to do justice to it in the time we have, but let me offer a few of her observations.

One year before she got sick, she was at home in Canada for Christmas and she greeted an old friend, remembering at the last second that this friend had recently been diagnosed with cancer.  The friend said “I have known Christ in so many good times and now I will know him better in his sufferings.”[1]

When she was asked about that later, Kate said, “I didn't write the book because I thought, I have a lot of really important things to share with other people. I initially wrote it because I was trying to get down to the deepest, hardest, truest things that I believed - like, get down to those lies that I had perpetuated all along, that I needed to be shiny to be worthy of God's love and the attention of others and that I needed to achieve and be master and commander of my, you know, everything.”

She wrote because she was trying to get down to the deepest, hardest, truest things, which is its own kind of higher place, isn’t it?  I read her book in the hopes of discerning those deepest, hardest, truest things myself, without having to make her hard steep climb.

Someone asked if her prayer life has changed.  She said, “I think maybe it has because I think I don't have the luxury of being too sophisticated anymore. I mean, you just get infected with this urgency that comes with facing your death. And so I pray for very basic things.”[2]

One time she prayed, “God, I don’t want to just know you better.  I want to save my family.  God, let me stay the mom of a boy who loves tractors.”

After major surgery in which the tumor was removed from her colon, she felt God’s presence in a new way.  She writes, “In those first few days after my diagnosis, when I was in the hospital, I couldn’t see my son, I couldn’t get out of bed, and I couldn’t say for certain that I would survive the year.  But I felt as though I’d uncovered something like a secret about faith.  Even in lucid moments, I found my feelings so difficult to explain.  I kept saying the same thing:  “I don’t want to go back.  I don’t want go back.”

“At a time when I should have felt abandoned by God, I was not reduced to ashes.  I felt like I was floating, floating on the love and prayers of all those who hummed around me like worker bees, brining notes and flowers and warm socks and quilts embroidered with words of encouragement.  They came in like priests and mirrored back to me the face of Jesus. When they sat beside me, my hand in their hands, my own suffering began to feel like it had revealed to me the suffering of others, a world of those who, like me, are stumbling in the debris of dreams they thought they were entitled to and plans they didn’t realize they had made.”

She said, “Maybe I was just a narcissist before. But like all of a sudden, I realized how incredibly fragile life is for almost everyone. And then I noticed things like . . . It's like you notice the tired mom in the grocery store who's just  struggling to get the thing off the top shelf while her kid screams, and you notice how very tired that person looks at the bus stop. And then, of course, all the people in the cancer clinic around me. That felt like I was cracked open, and I could see everything really clearly for the first time. And the other bit was not feeling nearly as angry as I thought I would. And, I mean, granted - like I have been pretty angry at times. But it was mostly that I felt God's presence. And it was less like, here are some important spiritual truths I know intellectually about God. . . .  It was instead more like the way you'd feel a friend or like someone holding you. I just didn't feel quite as scared. I just felt loved.”[3]

Sisters and brothers, I hope that our transformation may be full, that we may come to know what really matters -- the deepest, hardest truest things.  Would you join me in reading these verses together?

Hear my cry, O God; listen to my prayer.

From the end of the earth I call to you,

when my heart is faint.

Lead me to the rock that is higher than I; 

Amen.

---

[1] Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason and Others Lies I’ve Loved, (New York, Random House, 2018), p. 95

[2] https://www.npr.org/2018/02/12/585066841/a-stage-4-cancer-patient-shares-the-pain-and-clarity-of-living-scan-to-scan

[3] Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason, p. 121

7/29/2018 - Solid Rock - Psalm 62:5-8

Solid Rock

Rev. Kathy Donley

7/29/18

Scripture Lesson:  Psalm 62:5-8

I have been a lot of beautiful places in the last few months.  In May, we spent just a few days, not long enough, at the Grand Canyon.  I learned that my body no longer copes well with being at elevation. No matter how much water I drank, my head hurt pretty much the entire time and yet, I did not want to leave.  Many of you have been there before and you know that words and even pictures are inadequate to convey the magnitude of its beauty and grandeur. 

The people who live and work in the area are eager to share all they can about the Canyon.  One afternoon, as we rode the shuttle, our helpful bus driver told us that at the next stop, the Colorado River would be one mile below us. He told us where to stand to glimpse it and he said that if we were lucky, we might even hear it.  We might hear the sound of the water.  Wow.  We unloaded from the bus and wandered towards the rim, looking for the particular place he had suggested.  Standing there, we could just make out the path of river far below.  We waited for the shuttle to re-load its passengers and for the sound of its motor to die and then, in the silence we strained to hear the river.  . . . Only as we stood there, another tourist came along. He was carrying a device that played music.  No joke.  He might have been using earbuds.  I can’t remember, but the volume was such that we could hear nothing else.  So Erin and I began a LOUD conversation about how this was the place to hear the river, and I asked her if she could hear it and she said no, could I?  And in that passive-aggressive way, we outlasted the man with the music who took himself and his noise somewhere else . . . and then in the blessed quiet, when we listened carefully, we could indeed hear the river churning its way to the sea, more than a mile below us.

“For God alone my soul waits in silence,” says the psalmist.  Ours is a noisy culture.  Silence is hard to find. And sometimes, when it does get quiet, our own thoughts seem so loud that we might as well turn up the radio. 

I like silence, but you might not know that, because I also like words.  It can take a long time for my words to run out, for me to turn off the flow of sound and sentences and just be quiet.  Except that lately, I am finding words, my own and other people’s more excellent words, to be inadequate.  All the eloquent language, all the compelling arguments, all the chants and slogans and speeches, they just don’t seem to be enough.  I find myself falling silent because I have said all I know to say.  I have used up my own resources.   Perhaps I am learning what the psalmist means, “For God alone, my soul waits in silence.” 

There is a small Hebrew word which is repeated several times in this short psalm.  The word is  ’ak.  It occurs 24 times in the entire book of psalms, but 6 times in this one psalm.   This word can mean two things.  It means only or alone.  It also means truly or indeed. 

It occurs in these verses (1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 9)  and the New Revised Standard Version always translates it with the first meaning of alone or only.  We could translate it with the second meaning, “For God truly, my soul waits.”  The beauty in the Hebrew is that the term most likely has a double-entendre.  It carries both meanings simultaneously.  To wait for God alone means to wait on God indeed.  To truly hope in God means that we hope only in God.[1]

“God alone is my rock.  God is truly my rock.”   This psalm picks up that image of God as a rock which is repeated in several other psalms.  This is an image that I plan to explore with you across the next month.  It is an image of security, of strength.  Rocks stay in place.  They remain part of the fixed landscape.  The opposite image might be of the sea. 

For ancient Hebrew people, the sea was a symbol of chaos and fear.  The sea was constantly moving.  It was the place of monsters and storms and roiling waters.  The sea was death and insecurity and danger. They did not know that atoms were moving all the time in rocks and so when they said, “God is my rock” it mean that God was faithful and solid and steadfast.  You could depend on God like you could depend on nothing else.   

Scholars have different schemes for categorizing psalms.  None of the systems capture all the psalms, but Walter Brueggemann’s categories are very helpful to me.  Brueggemann is one of the leading contemporary Old Testament scholars. He says that some psalms are written for good times, when everything seems normal and right with the world.  These are the psalms of gratitude for God’s ordering of life.  They reflect life as God intends it.  In these psalms, God is praised and the creation is celebrated.  Brueggemann calls them psalms of orientation. 

But life is not always like that, and so there are songs, poetry, and psalms written for the times when things seem to fall apart, when things look bleak and life is inexplicably difficult, times of radical change when old certainties no longer hold.  Some psalms reflect faithful people’s response to God during those broken times.  Brueggemann calls them  psalms of disorientation. 

His third category are psalms of new orientation, which are deeper versions of the orientation psalms.  Having lived through the times of crisis, people come out on the other side with a deeper, stronger faith and their praise takes on a new dimension.[2]

Many of us feel we are living through disorientation.  Things about our communal and civic life which we have assumed were established and solid are being called into question.  From the ways in which government works to the rules of polite conversation to some of the inalienable rights our ancestors claimed were self-evident, everything we thought was nailed down is coming loose. 

In times like these, the psalms remind us, “God alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be shaken.”

Jesus told a parable about a wise person who built a house on a rock and a foolish one who built on sand.  These images of rocks and sand, of wisdom and foolishness – they just lead me to more questions.  In what do we trust?  In our own resources, the strength of our logical arguments, our votes, our buying power?  What would it mean if  God alone, God indeed was our rock, our unshakeable fortress? 

Another way to ask this question might be to ask about authority.  What has authority in our lives?  Roger Shinn was a Christian ethicist and theologian who taught at Union Seminary in New York for many years.  He describes three basic kinds of authority.  The first kind is external, based on power.  This is the authority of the state, the police, a parent.  When a child asks, “Why do I have to brush my teeth and pick up my toys?”  and their parent says, “Because I said so,” that is external authority.

The opposite of external authority is internal.  This is when a person says, “I’m in charge of my own life and I’ll do what I want.  I’ll do what I determine to be right.”  Some of us here might remember Frank Sinatra’s song “My Way” which encapsulates this concept.  A more contemporary expression “You’re not the boss of me” also sums up internal authority.

Sometimes we think that those are the only two choices.  Either we submit to someone else’s authority and we take charge of our lives and come up with our own answers.  But Roger Shinn taught about a third authority.  He said that this the authority of truth.  Truth exists outside of us and within us.  Looking for truth as the authority, the guiding principle requires reason and logic and intellectual struggle.  It requires us to examine what we are hearing and seeing, not to accept things at face value but to go deeper.   It happens in study and in conversation with people who have different life experiences and in examining our own life experiences.  It happens when our own resources fail and we are reduced to silence.  Shinn says that this authority becomes transformative when we recognize that God calls us to be true to ourselves as created by God, and not to be a twisted self, torn by conflicting loyalties and warped understanding.[3]

Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life.”  He also said, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”  God is my rock.  God is my truth.  In silence, I wait for God alone.

I invite you  to nurture truth and silence in your own life.  Here’s one suggestion – use the psalms as a tool for spiritual discipline.  You probably know that there are 150 psalms.  If you read 5 psalms a day, you could read the whole psalter every month.  That works pretty well until you to Psalm 119 which has 176 verses.  But you can work around that.  Try starting with psalm 119 today or tomorrow.  And then on Wednesday, which is the first day of August, read the first five psalms and on Thursday, read the next five and so on.  Or sit down with the Bible, but don’t read it. Instead quiet yourself and just be silent.  Try doing that every day for a month and see what happens.

Let me close by reading from Psalm 62 again.  This translation was done by my professor, Marvin Tate.  Dr. Tate taught a class on psalms which I took in seminary.  We also build on truth under the encouragement of beloved teachers.  Here is my teacher’s translation:

Vs 1:  Yes, my soul waits calmly for God, from him is my salvation.

Then picking up verses 5-9:

Yes, calmly wait for God, O my soul,

for my hope is from him. 

Yes, he is my rock where I am secure,

my stronghold where I am unshaken.

My welfare and my power depend on God;

I am rock-strong and secure in God.

 Trust in him at all times, O people,

pour out your hearts before him. 

God is our refuge!  Selah. [4]

[1] Rolf Jacobsen at http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1215

[2] Walter Brueggemann, Praying the Psalms:  Engaging Scripture and the Life of the Spirit, (Eugene, Oregon:  Cascade Books, 2007).

[3] http://media.sabda.org/alkitab-2/Religion-Online.org%20Books/Shinn%2C%20Roger%20-%20The%20Sermon%20on%20the%20Mount.pdf

[4] Marvin Tate, Word Biblical Commentary, Volume 20:  Psalms 51-100, (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1990), p. 117.