I was going to talk about the spirit and how the spirit is experienced differently in today’s scriptures, Acts 2:1-6 & John 14:8-17 and 25-27. But something wasn’t sitting with me.

I’m going to call that the spirit wasn’t sitting with me. I even woke up this morning and said, “This isn’t the sermon I want to do.” Which is kind of scary on the day that you’re gonna do it. But it opened me to read my email, and in my email, I found a very heartfelt, but serious email from Rabbi Jack Paskoff letting me know just how afraid the Jewish population is right now. After this, we just had the attack in Washington not too long ago, and then there was the attack in Colorado, and I knew that the attack in Colorado left me almost numb with grief.

I’m sharing this because as Christians. We have had a habit of saying that our beliefs trump theirs. That’s where we started, but now we know better. It sets up this hierarchy. Like they’re not as evolved, they just haven’t come to the belief or faith that we have. That is the understanding within Christianity that fuels antisemitism. And right now in our country, there are so many people hurting, and there is this permission to be cruel and hateful that the church cannot abide with.

That is not who we’re called to be on any level. We need to remember that as we talk about our faith, as we talk about Christ, as we talk about Pentecost.

They read the Book of Ruth. Now, two things about that to make note of. Shavuot is 50 days after the second night of Passover. But by celebrating Ruth, she became one of the ancestors of King David. They get King David because of Ruth.

But Ruth was not born of Jewish heritage. You can convert to Judaism, and it means that it’s more inclusive. Judaism itself is more inclusive then we give it credit for.

Then we use this term Pentecost, Penta meaning five. Pentecost is supposed to be 50 days after Easter, and you’re going, “wait a minute, it’s been eight weeks. That’s not 50 days.” But we don’t count the Sundays because we need to make it complicated. Pentecost is supposed to be the gift of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit’s been with us since the beginning.

We talk about that in Genesis 1. The word for the pronouns we use for God are all plural. I hope you’ve noticed that. If not, go back and read Genesis one again, and you’ll be surprised. We talk about those plural pronouns, saying that it is because God is plural. We have a plural understanding of God in that we have God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, or the Creator, Redeemer Sustainer. That’s one of the reasons we are sometimes accused by other religions of not being monotheistic. That’s the whole Trinity piece. That’s next Sunday, come back and we’ll try to try to unpack how we have one God that we know in three different ways.

In Proverbs 8, the spirit is described as wisdom. Wisdom was there from the beginning. a All of this is trying to come together. Maybe not very clearly, but in a way that is part of it because the spirit is mystery.

I was going to start this sermon by saying, “How do you experience the spirit of God or the Holy Spirit?”

In our scripture, Acts 2:1-8, it comes as this rushing wind and fire. There are flames, tongues of flame up above everybody’s head. Suddenly this group of people, who would’ve been gathered in Jerusalem because of their festival. According to Luke’s version, it’s this large group of people who suddenly, because of the Holy Spirit, can understand one another in languages they didn’t know. It’s this inclusive nature of Christianity.

The point is that everybody there was able to communicate and be together. Then, they decided this was so good that they needed to live together, and they chose to call themselves followers of the way. The name ‘Christians’ came much later. They were followers of the way, and they chose to live together to share their things and to create a whole different way of being. That attracted people. People wanted to have what they had. To know that spirit that calls them to be loving, compassionate, and caring. That’s the same spirit that in John 14:8-17 and 25-27 was being promised.

But, in John 20, according to John’s gospel, it happens in the upper room when Jesus breathes on the disciples. It’s a breath.

So, whether the spirit comes to you as the breath of God that enlivens you and brings humanity to life. From the very beginning, we are breathed on again to put more and new energy into us, and all of this breathing, all of this inclusion. It’s all about relationships. It’s all because from the very beginning, God has been trying to be in a relationship with humanity. And humanity has constantly done otherwise.

But God continued to speak and God spoke through the priests, God spoke through the prophets, and we continued to say that when things were going wrong, we needed God on our side. But, when the storms cleared, everything’s great now, we got this. Our story is that God finally decided to come and be one of us, that we just weren’t getting it. And so God came and took on this body because then God was relatable. God was one of us, and yet still wasn’t enough for us. We rejected that God, crucified that God, and God still came back and said, “I’m going to make sure that my spirit is in all of you, so that everyone has the opportunity to follow God.”

The question is whether we choose to or not? Do we choose to listen to that still, small, forever speaking voice?

Maybe it’s this energy in us that’s telling us something’s wrong? Something’s not right here. The way I’m supposed to live, I need to do something. If you have that kind of energy within you, I call it a nudging, but sometimes it’s a bit stronger than a nudge. God’s given me a head slap once or twice. Because I, too, can get caught up in what I want and what I think is important, but it’s not about me, and it’s unfortunately, not about you. It’s about our relationship with God.

I do mean OUR relationship, because we have our relationships, but we need the body. We need the group because it’s within the group that we keep ourselves on track. It’s within the group that when one of us is falling apart, the group can come together and be the hands and feet of Christ. That’s why we come together. We gather each week because life is hard.

I get frustrated and depressed watching the news, and I need to come together with the rest of you so that I remember who I am, that I remember who God is, and our reform traditions. We believe God’s got this. We just keep going because God loves us and cares about us, and we, too, love and care about others. So when we see someone who’s being picked on, we reach out to them.

God calls us to be those people, and God calls us to have a little bit of fun. So we’re we’re going to close this sermon with having some fun.

I know that some of you are now panicking, asking, “what is she going to have us do?” You are going to be the spirit. Because today for Pentecost, the spirit came as a rush of a mighty wind. I’m gonna have you breathe and ask, “Who?”

Every time I say the word spirit, that’s what we’re gonna do. “On that day, the Spirit broke through every barrier, language, culture, fear, and doubt. That day, the Spirit turned hiding into preaching, confusion into clarity, and death into life. That was just the beginning because the Spirit kept moving through baptisms, through brave words, through acts of love and justice. The Spirit did not stay in the upper room or the temple. The Spirit moved into hearts and homes and every corner of the world. Today, the Spirit is still moving, still breaking barriers, still breathing hope, still calling you, calling each of us. So if you wonder, am I ready? Am I good enough? Am I brave enough? Remember Pentecost, and remember this: you don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be open because the Spirit is already moving.

Will you let the Spirit move in You?”

May it be so. Amen.

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 This week I had a call from someone who’s not part of the church, but has a lot of questions about the church, about what we believe, and about how we have faith.

He had a lot of questions about what faith is, and I gave him my definition of faith, which to me is believing in something that you cannot prove. Hebrews 11:1 has this as the definition of faith, “Now faith is the assurance of things, hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

With those definitions, I want you to think about what it is that you have faith in? Where does your faith lie? I think an equally important question is why. What is your why? What is the why that helps you have that faith in this conversation with this person asking questions? He was asking, but how do you know that they’re telling you the truth?

So, what is your why? Why do you believe what you believe? I think it is so easy for humans. There’s a part of humanity where our default is to have more faith in ourselves than in anybody else. If we think about that, I think that’s because we think that we can control ourselves. We can have faith in that which we can control, but that is not faith.

And that believing in ourselves more than God is what broke the relationship with God. From the very beginning, God gave us everything, and we thought we knew better. Isn’t that still true? Aren’t there times when we think we know better? We’re so good at making up stories in our heads and reinforcing those stories. We see examples that reinforce the stories that we want, but all of that is following our agenda rather than God’s agenda.

One of our challenges in life, which doesn’t stop, is to learn to open ourselves to God’s leading, to open ourselves to God’s agenda, which is about love and forgiveness. Are we able to let go of that?

When I think about how we try to trust in ourselves because we think we can control ourselves, I also think about how we can control ourselves until we have a diagnosis that we can’t control, or we’re faced with the realities of aging and bodies. They don’t work the way we want them to, and we can’t do anything about it.

Having faith is challenging and that’s why I think we get this beautiful letter to the Ephesians.

Whether Paul wrote it or whether someone else wrote it later, we don’t really know. But it begins by praising the Ephesians for their faith, but then it goes on to pray that they would have wisdom and that the eyes of their hearts would be enlightened.

If we ask this question of why it was written this way? I think we realize that it sounds like they were having a hard time. They had faith, but they weren’t as good at getting along with each other. Especially if you’ve read the whole book. There’s a lot about how they’re to be the body of Christ and what that looks like. But this is all the writer is asking, that they may have this wisdom and revelation, that they can have a stronger ‘why’ for their faith.

When everything’s falling apart and we pray to God and it doesn’t feel like God’s listening sometimes, but is that because God’s not listening or is it because God’s not doing what we want God to do, and don’t we have to wrestle with that? That maybe what we want isn’t the most loving and forgiving thing. Maybe it has more of our agendas tied up in our fears.

The author of Luke wrote both the Gospel and the Book of Acts and our scripture today, Luke 24:36-53, is the Ascension story or scripture in the Gospel of Luke.

There’s a slightly different account in the Book of Acts and one might ask, why did he write two different. accounts? Well, they have different purposes. This one is still trying to help the disciples to understand that their work was to continue the work of Christ.

This scripture puts us back in Easter, which seems like a long time ago, seven weeks. This puts us back on Easter Day, and the disciples are confused and scared. They’re scared because they watched the one that they were following, the one that they loved, cherished, and believed had the answers. They watched him be killed. They didn’t do anything about that, and they were afraid that they were next.

Then they heard about this empty tomb, and they really didn’t know what to do about that because they didn’t have his body. So, where was his body? Luke 24:36-53 comes right after.

The story about the road to Emmaus, if you remember that story where two other disciples were walking and they met someone and they invited him back for dinner, and during the breaking of the bread at dinner, all of a sudden they realized he was Jesus, and he disappeared. Now they’ve shown up with their story. They’re confused and they’re scared. In the middle of that, Jesus just shows up and says, “Peace be with you.” Every time he shows up in a resurrection moment, he says, “Peace be with you.”

The word that he uses is (i-ray’-nay) means peace of wholeness. It’s a wish of health and welfare for them to be whole. In other words, don’t be afraid, scared, or self-limiting. He’s inviting them. He’s trying to give them this freedom to open themselves to the rest of the world. To open themselves and do the work that he was doing, meeting people who were struggling and offering them love and forgiveness.

I often say it’s about doing the next most loving thing. Anytime we have a challenge and we don’t know which way to go, what is the most loving thing to do, or what is the most forgiving thing to do? That’s what God is doing with us. That’s how God’s trying to guide us in loving and forgiving ways. That’s what God’s looking for us to do.

God was looking for the disciples to let themselves out of the locker room. Don’t be closed down, but be open. Be open and go out. Go out into the world. Make a difference in the world.

All of creation was meant to be in harmony. From the very beginning, we pushed back on that. We thought that we knew better, or we wanted to do it our way.

The reason Jesus came, the whole incarnation, is all about Jesus, God coming after trying in so many different ways through prophets, priests, and through the writings of the Psalms. God needed another way to get our attention.

He came in the body of Jesus. In Jesus, He showed us how to live, but the disciples wanted that to continue. They said, ‘Don’t go away. Stay with us because life is better when you are here.’ We’d probably say that too. We’ve got a mess here. Come on back and straighten this out.

But that’s not the point. Jesus is probably saying, ‘You didn’t listen to me the first time.’ That’s why Jesus gave us the Spirit, and the Spirit encourages us to go out in love and forgiveness. It’s about repentance and transformation. We live transformed lives so that others realize the joy that we have and ask themselves, “Why are they so happy? Why can they look at this mess and be okay?” It’s because we have hope in something bigger than all of this as reformed people.

I was just reminded yesterday at the Interfaith Coalition, Lee Barrett was there talking about the reformed tradition and saying how, because we believe that God is sovereign and that in the end all will be well, God will win. That was last week’s scripture in Revelation. That, in the end, it will be the garden again, and all will be well.

We are called to live through this time to look for and stand for justice and to make sure that everyone is treated equally and with equity. Make sure that we are living in ways that are loving of our brothers and sisters.

As I was sitting with all of this, I was still struggling and wasn’t clear that the why was so much a part of the questions that I was asking. I ended up finding myself at Rader Park, sitting on the steps at Brubaker Run, watching the water. That’s a place that is comforting and calming for me.

As I sat there and thought about the river, I thought we were meant to be like the water, trusting that God would guide the way. There will be bends that will have to be gone around. There will be falls that we experience. We’ll have to go around the rocks, the impediments, but we will also help to purify with that love and that forgiveness. We’ll wash away the impurities, and we’ll promote and bring life-giving properties to all that we meet.

Knowing that the way leads us towards God. So we follow the way. But, I encourage you this week to think about why you follow the way and where you draw your reasoning from. What is your big why? For why you believe and have faith that you do.

In these trying times, we need to hang on to our why. That is why our hope is our resilience in these trying times.

May it be so. Amen.

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This past week I was introduced to a book called My Grandmother’s Hands, which talks about the trauma that we hold in our bodies.

Not necessarily talking just of the trauma that we have experienced in our lifetimes, but that our ancestral lineage has experienced. Talking specifically about the trauma in African American bodies, but also the trauma in white American bodies. The traumas that we’ve experienced throughout history and how our bodies seem to hold that in a certain way, and it affects us unconsciously.

The author makes this statement, which is a pretty bold statement, that if we are to survive as a country, it is inside our bodies where this conflict will need to be resolved. I don’t completely agree with that, but I think it’s a place that we haven’t looked before. We tend to look at all the external places and we forget that we have to be right within ourselves before we can be right with others. That’s what it reminds me of.

Rev. Adrian Thorn gave a lecture this week on embodied worship and preaching.

She was saying that to get more out of worship, we need to embody it. We need to feel it. We need to move. Thus, your hand gestures for “Shine, Jesus, Shine.” During this sermon, I’m going to ask you twice to place your hand on your heart and feel what’s going on in your body.

This may feel very uncomfortable to some of you because you are used to sermons being up in our heads. We’re very good at that. That’s our tradition. We appreciate educated clergy and we appreciate learning something in a sermon, but I also want you to feel it in your body.

With that in mind, let’s go to the Revelation scripture.

There’s a lot that could be said about the Book of Revelation, and I don’t wanna try unpacking that. That’s a whole series, and you can’t do that justice in one day. But I want to say that this is the last chapter of the Bible, and here we get the good news.

In the end, whenever the end comes, like Julian of Norwich used to say, “All will be well, and all matters of things will be well.” We will come back. It invites us back and almost describes the garden again. We started in the garden where everything was right, and then we broke that relationship with God. In the end, we’ll be reconciled with God, and the beloved community of Christ will be one again. It’s this beautiful reminder that in the end, all will work out.

With that in mind, I want you to put your hands on your heart, and I’m going to read you some other verses from the 21st chapter.

“and God himself will be with them and be their God; God will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” – Revelations 21:3-4

Notice how that feels. Take in the healing knowing that you are loved, forgiven, and free. There’s not a lot of places in our world that tell you that anymore, and I think that’s part of why we are here together. That’s part of why we come back to remember the stories, but we also come back to experience the healing.

Our second scripture is with the man at the gate.

There’s a bit of a problematic piece to this in that a lot of us approach the scripture, and we hear that Jesus is going to heal you. I’m gonna pray for you, and Jesus is going to heal you. You’re not going to need that wheelchair anymore, or you’re gonna be able to see again.

I think we set up God in a way that if that doesn’t happen, which it can, prayer is an amazing thing, but it may not happen in that moment. Healing may not come like that, then it looks like God’s not there or God’s not listening.

Maybe the problem is that we are not seeing the person as a whole, as they are. I read a story about a man in a wheelchair who someone came up to him and said, “I’m gonna pray for you so that you can walk again.” And he said, “I don’t need your prayer, for I am whole.”

Maybe it’s our perceptions that need to change, where we think that it’s only the very able-bodied person who is whole. Whereas, as the commercials tell us, disability is not a bad word. Many of us live with disabilities. It’s just some of us can hide ours better than others.

The whole story is that Jesus healed on the Sabbath, and then we have this whole issue with the Pharisees because he healed on the Sabbath, and is that allowed or not? Then, we can ignore the healing issue and just argue about whether or not he was right to do it on the Sabbath. But I don’t wanna talk about Sabbath.

I want to keep us in this healing space because I think that we have the power, the ability, to do some internal or spiritual healing that we don’t pay enough attention to. I’m specifically focused on that piece because I want us to hear that incredibly powerful question of Jesus, “Do you want to be made well?” – John 5:6

That’s the question I want us to sit with. It’s the question I’m challenging myself with. Do I want to be made well? Do I want to be whole? What do I need? What do we need to feel whole?

The man does wanna be healed. He wants to be healed, and he reaches out and says, “Yes, I want healing.” He’s following the rules. He’s been told that the healing only happens when the pool is stirred. Think of God’s gonna trouble the waters and you have to be the first person in the pool.

Only the first person in the pool gets healed, and somebody always steps in front of him. He’s following all the rules, and yet it doesn’t feel like he’s getting anywhere, and he’s stuck. Until Jesus says, you don’t have to worry about those rules. It’s not about getting in the pool. Do you wanna be made? Well pick up your mat and go home.

We can change our perspective, and it may open us to healing. Maybe even healing we didn’t even know we needed.

So what does he do? I stopped reading the scripture where he walks away. But what he does is he walks away, and he starts telling people he didn’t even know who Jesus was. He told people that he met a man and he told me to walk and I can. Then finally he meets Jesus and he knows that it was Jesus who healed him, and he tells everybody that he meets that Jesus healed him.

How often do we do that? How often do we tell everybody that we meet the healing that we found? Through our faith, through what Jesus has done in our lives.

You may not have a specific event like this man did that was so transformative. I think the transformative ones are the easiest ones to talk about. If you’ve ever seen someone who wasn’t raised in church suddenly encounter Christ. They wanna tell everybody about it.

What’s coming to mind is Tom Rex’s story, for those of you who’ve been here a long time, Christ encountered him on his deathbed and gave him new life, and he wanted to tell everybody about that new life.

In my own life, I don’t think that I’ve had that kind of a healing moment, but when I look at the trajectory of my life, I can see where God intervened. Maybe God turned me around because I was wandering off, and God said, “Let’s go this way instead. Have you tried this yet?” And He put people in my life who asked me questions.

I didn’t want to go to seminary. I had the person who was in charge of admissions at the time come up to me, and instead of asking me about when I wanted to come, she said, “You have a date with the admissions department on this day and time. Please show up.” I guess God’s got a plan that I don’t have.

There are those moments in our lives. Christ is here and Christ is offering you the healing that you need, whether you know that you need it or not. That might be something that you need to search for within yourself, but Christ is here. And will you accept that?

I’m going to ask you to put your hand on your heart again, and here you are, loved, you are forgiven, and you are free. All will be well and all manner of things will be well, and may you rest.

When we look at a scripture, I try to think about where we are in the scripture, and today I’m placing us in the position of the man at the pool, the one who wanted healing.

Maybe you walked in here thinking you didn’t need healing. But think about it. Seriously, spiritual healing within yourself. Placing you at that pool and allowing yourself to have the transformation.

I think we are also the ones called to go out and tell people, tell people we encounter about Christ. Not, asking, do you know Christ? But saying, I found this great peace within me, through my relationship with Christ. You have to find that within yourself first, and then tell other people about it.

I think that we are wounded healers. But the wounded healer is a very powerful person because we know how bad it hurts in the wounding, but we know that you can survive. Someone said to me, I have survived 100% of the hard things that I have had to do in my life, and so have you.

You have survived 100% of the hard things you’ve had to do in life.

I would say that was because of Christ. God is within you, giving you that strength, helping you to move on.

I invite you to look for that strength within yourself and to share the love, the faith, and the healing that you have found with at least one other person. Just one.

Or pray about who it’s to be. Maybe all your friends go to church, but it doesn’t mean that they have found that healing. Pray about who that should be and watch who God puts in your life. There are a lot of people in our world who are hurting, and they don’t know what to do with their hurt.

We can remind them that the answer to their hurt is in Christ.

May it be so. Amen.

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Sermon Given by UCC Conference Minister, Rev. William P. Worley

Brothers and sisters in Christ from the 150 congregations that make up the Pennsylvania Southeast Conference of the United Church of Christ, where I have been the conference minister for the last 10 years.

What I have learned in the anniversary Sundays and sermons I have preached around those 150 congregations is that nobody really knows what a conference minister is or does. The easiest way I have found to describe that is to say that a conference minister is like the superintendent of a school district that has 150 schools filled with students who have one very simple lesson.

That lesson is how to follow Jesus Christ. I am joined this morning by my conference minister colleague, the Rev. Dr. Carrie Call, who’s not only a conference minister for the Pennsylvania Southeast Conference, but one of the finest conference ministers in the United Church of Christ. That, of course, is my objective opinion. Carrie and I are working with other colleagues in ministry, David Ackerman, who is in Penn West and Bonnie Bates in Penn Northeast to bring together the four Pennsylvania conferences to make one large keystone conference of 530 congregations in the state of Pennsylvania, from which we will take over the entire United Church of Christ.

If you quote me as having said that, I will call you a boldfaced liar. Even though it is now apparently recorded for posterity.

I grew up here. It’s hard to stand in this spot and not hear the whispers of saints in my ear.

Including Rev. Nevin Shellenberger, who bent over this pulpit many times with a bony finger pointed in what I thought was my direction, because clearly I was asleep. Saying something that I didn’t always quite understand, but I knew that Nevin believed it. And because he did, I could.

I think about that baptism window where I have a picture of my now 32-year-old son being held a loft on the day he was baptized. Who is at this moment with his wife, I believe, having some early contractions before giving birth to what is going to be our second grandchild. So, if you see his mother jump up in sudden anxiety, heading for the door. It is to go get our two and a half year old granddaughter.

There are other whispers from the past, but there’s a message from God for the future and we need to get to that. So I invite you to join me in a spirit of prayer.

Holy God. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable unto you, oh Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

Well, friends, 50 years, that’s half a century of hymns sung, casseroles served, council and board meetings, budgets, quandaries, coffee hours, fellowship meals, and moments that could only be called holy.

You don’t last 50 years in church without getting some bumps and some blisters, and you don’t last 50 years in church without having some love that gets you past the bumps and the blisters. Love for this place. Love for the people in these pews. Hopefully, love for their church.

People are notorious for being challenged to like each other, let alone love each other, and love for God. What God has done through Jesus Christ and what Jesus Christ is doing through you. Because that’s what today’s about. Not just the memory of what was, but the love that is and the love that will create a future for this place and all people who call on the name of Jesus, the one who gives us a commandment.

Commandments don’t sit well in the church. That is sometimes referred to as the church of you can’t tell me what to do.

Some hear the word commandment and old echoes of obligation, duty, and guilt arise, and it feels heavy, like something I should be doing. But when Jesus speaks this commandment, it doesn’t sound like a threat. It sounds like a gift, maybe even a map. Maybe a GPS that gives you good directions to get where you’re going. He gives this commandment when one of the 12 disciples is about to get very lost. Judas has just stepped out of the room. The bread that Jesus offered, the bread that Judas took to identify himself as the betrayer, has barely passed his lips, and he has gone out into the night to forge the legacy that will linger. And everyone left at the table is looking at the door and wondering. Did that just happen?

This is when Jesus starts talking about glory, not on the man of transfiguration, not walking across water, not changing water into wine. Not only Easter Sunday, but also in a moment of betrayal, when it looks like things are falling apart. Jesus looks at the people who haven’t walked out the door with Judas and says to them, Now, the son of man has been glorified.

Judas, our treasurer, just walked off with all of our money, and now the son of man is gonna be glorified. Imagine your treasurer walked off with all the funds of this church. Would you believe that God was gonna be glorified in this place? Probably not.

$30 billion are embezzled from churches in the United States every year. It doesn’t feel to those congregations like God is gonna be glorified, and yet this is when Jesus says, I give you a new commandment to love each other. Not just love when it’s easy, not just love the people who agree with you. Not even love the world though. That’s coming too. No, he says, as I have loved you, so you should love each other.

And just so there’s no doubt about what he means by loving each other, he has just shown them. It looks like washing feet that have trudged through dirt and manure. It looks like feeding someone who will sell you out. It looks like kneeling low when you could have just as easily run towards safety.

In other words, love isn’t about feelings. This love that Jesus is speaking of is about freedom. Freedom to love, even when you don’t want to. Freedom to love when it’s risky. Freedom to love when it’s gonna cost you everything.

Church anniversaries are not just memories and celebrations. They are a celebration of what people have done with their freedom.

This place was built on how people used the freedom of their time, their treasure, and their talent to build something magnificent. One of my very first experiences of freedom was in this room. Some of you remember that when this sanctuary was in construction, the congregation was worshiping down the hall in Fellowship Hall.

Just before the carpet was laid over the concrete floor that holds this space up, someone, I don’t remember who it was, invited the children to pick up chalk and draw on the floor. Now for an 11-year-old who had been told time and time again, do not write on the walls of the house, especially someone else’s house, and do not write on the floor unless you are outside on the driveway or the sidewalk.

To be invited into this empty space and told, Go for it, was huge. You all are sitting on a whole bunch of young doodles, blessings, and words of hope. They’re still here.

There were other freedoms. Lou, last night, mentioned liturgical dancers, which I had forgotten. I don’t know why I did. My mother was a liturgical dancer in this space at that time. That was a little risque in a church where people get excited when they do this.

I saw some of your heads bobbing this morning to the music. Some of the people in the congregation at that time didn’t like that freedom. That freedom looked uncontrollable, unrestrained, dare I even say, in those outfits, sexy, holy cow.

And yet in that movement, there was inspiration. There was freedom. There was permission to worship in ways that neither St. Paul’s or St. John’s did. There was freedom in that.

There was freedom for Nora Smith to become a woman in ministry in the United Church of Christ in the day when women were not ordained to minister.

That was a huge freedom. The freedom to practice ministry in this place created opportunities for all of the women that followed. I don’t know if you noticed, but I am the only male clergy person up here this morning, which is in keeping with the fact that there are now more women in ordained ministry in the United Church of Christ than men. That freedom. Began in part here in this space.

Then there was the freedom to make mistakes. I was the treasurer for the youth group when someone came to me with bank statements that showed that the youth checking account was overdrawn. She was a little panicked and came to me to ask what was going on. We figured out that I didn’t know the difference between a checking deposit slip and a savings deposit slip, and that you had to put money into the checking account to write checks. Who knew?

She didn’t freak out. We figured it out. I wasn’t fired, though I could have been. What she gave me is what I believe many of our churches don’t have, and that’s the freedom to fail.

Underneath it all is the stubborn belief that something sacred happens when people get together in the bumbling, stumbling ways that humans do. Something miraculous happens when you set people free to love, free from shame, from fear, from walls that keep people out, free to say, come in, there’s room for you.

Freedom to say you are loved no matter what. The kind of love and freedom that doesn’t always look impressive.

It looks like a casserole in choir practice, it looks like protest signs, and prayer cards. It looks like showing up when the world is burning down to sing the doxology.

Jesus knew that when he was commanding the disciples to love, the cross was not that far off. Betrayal was already in motion, and still he gave this commandment, not a creed, not an obligation, not a duty, not a pledge card. He gave them this commandment to love each other. It’s that simple. And it’s that hard.

So Church of the Apostles, what do we celebrate? 50 years of a not a flawless history. Say amen if you know the place that is, the Church of the Apostles is not flawless. Amen.

God’s got nothing to do here if you all were perfect. We celebrate freedom, the kind that Jesus gave his disciples that night at the table, and the kind that lets you build something beautiful together.

Church was never meant to be a museum. Someone once said, it’s a garden, a workshop, a kitchen table, a harbor. I love that. So here’s your word, church of 50 years for your golden anniversary. Don’t stop loving. Don’t stop breaking bread. Don’t stop showing up at hospital beds. Don’t stop praying for each other.

Spontaneously grabbing someone’s hand when they have just told you that they’ve been diagnosed with cancer and saying with them a very simple prayer that Jesus Christ, the lamb of God, come with your healing spirit and help this friend of mine. It’s that simple. Say it. Don’t be afraid of it.

Don’t stop telling stories, the story of God who loved the world into being and this place into existence. In the end, maybe the greatest glory is not in the miracles that we are going to expect, but the love that we are gonna be able to share with each other.

Because everyone who walks in the door of this place for the very first time has gotten over their fear about what might be inside. Maybe just maybe, the people in there have a place for me.

Love that does the dishes, and I hate doing dishes. Love that forgives. I’ve got a long list of people I’m still working on, and I know that I’m on the list of others. Love makes room and stays at the table even when there’s somebody at the table who’s ready to take your life.

50 years of that kind of love, that’s a miracle and that’s where celebrating. May you keep loving.

May it be so. Amen.

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 Today is Mother’s Day, and as I have talked to many people over the years, that can bring a wealth of emotion.

I want to name that upfront because there are people who specifically stay away from church on Mother’s Day. After all, it’s not easy. Some people have complicated relationships. But today I wanna celebrate with you. All of the people in your life who have nurtured you, who have encouraged you, who have been there and loved you, all of those people who have helped you to have second chances.

I’m going to lean on this idea of second chances because I think that’s what it means to rise again. That’s the theme of today. Let’s celebrate all of those people who’ve helped us over the years, whether they are biological or chosen family. Let’s acknowledge that everyone needs someone who believes in them, who reminds them that they are loved. And someone who encourages them to be all that they were created to be.

This week, the theme is rising again. To do that, though, before you can rise again, you have to admit that you’re not up at the moment.

Life isn’t the way you want it to be. We all experience loss. I think right now we are going through what could be called life-draining times. There seems to be a lot that people are carrying, and I want to read this piece by Cameron Trimble this week that I thought touched on some of the pieces of loss that we may not be thinking about.

“Modernity told us that if we played by the rules, contributed productively, and kept our side of the social contract, then the ledger would stay balanced, that we’d be safe, respected, and protected. But the ledger is burning.” – Cameron Trimble

What’s being revealed is that the system of modernity has never worked for all of us. It was never built to hold everyone equally. This is not just about a collapse. It is about a revelation. It reveals the systems that were never just, never sustainable, and never sacred. Even if we thought that they were. Saying that might sound like I went to a really dark place. But the good news is that it provides us an opportunity to change and to create new systems to work on being different people.

To rise again and create a world where everyone is seen as a child of God, where everyone is encouraged to fully be who they are, and to live into their potential. That is what we have the ability to do. This time, it is an opportunity to look at the potential rather than just wallowing in the sorrow.

That’s where this scripture, Acts 9:36-43, hits us because we meet this group in Joppa that was grieving.

The whole town was grieving the death of this woman because it tells us she was very active in the community. She did a lot of good work for the community and was very charitable. She was generous with her time and her money. She was an important person to the town and they were devastated that she had died.

They heard that Peter was nearby. Now, remember Peter is our one who during the gospels could never get it right, but now that the resurrections happened, he seems to have been able to put it all together. Peter had just been in Lida and had gone to a man who had never walked and commanded him to walk, and he did. Now that’s not about Peter, it’s about Christ working through Peter. But Peter being open to that and being able to have that work through him.

They called for Peter and told him to come to Joppa. What isn’t said is what they think Peter would do? We don’t know that. Did they know that Peter was going to bring her back to life? They might have wished it, knowing that he had just done a miracle in the town over. They may have hoped for a miracle. In this moment, in this story, they receive that miracle.

He goes in and he commands her to rise, and she wakes up and walks out with him like Lazarus coming out of the tomb. Jesus says, get up and she gets up and comes out. The whole town believed because they saw something that is beyond our understanding and imagination. I don’t wanna get caught up in that.

But what I want to focus on is the fact that Tabitha was given a second chance. The whole community was given a second chance to be maybe even more like Tabitha.

Maybe they need more people in the community who operate like Tabitha, people who care about another person and live that out. I think that’s who Christ wants us to be. I think that’s what Christ was trying to teach us in the way he lived. That was part of the whole message, he wanted us to love each other.

One of the ways that we do that is by being there and supporting one another. The smiles that we give to each other. You’re supposed to tell the person who is down that everything’s gonna be all right. That’s not what I think you should say. I think you should say, we’re gonna get through this together. Because we don’t know what the future brings, but we can choose to do it together, to support one another, and to be that positive influence that reminds. Sometimes we need a reminder that there are second chances.

It may be raining today, but the sun will come out tomorrow. We won’t stay in this place. There will be another tomorrow. However you’re feeling right now, know that it won’t last forever. There are always resurrections.

Resurrections are about reawakening to life, to God’s presence, to the life source that is within creation that can energize us as much as it energizes the rest of the world.

The indigenous people call that the grandmother spirit, and I wanna tell you a little bit about the grandmother’s spirit. It is more than a person. It is a presence. It is the wise one who lives within the trees, the ocean, and the moon. It is the ancestral hum that echoes through generations. It is the womb of the earth, the fire of the hearth, and the medicine in our bones. The grandmother’s spirit lives in all who choose to love with depth, nurture with grace, and hold others in sacred remembrance.

To me, that is no different than the Holy Spirit, the Christ spirit that is within each of us. Where each of us can love with depth, nurture with grace, and hold others in sacred remembrance.

Now your challenge, there is someone in this world who needs you to be that person. They need you to believe in them, to love them, to nurture them, to embrace them, and to encourage them with grace and patience.

Because there are a lot of hurting people right now. People who are scared and who need to know that they are valued, that their lives count, that they are seen, heard, and loved as they are for who they are.

So let us go out into the world and make that difference. Help those people to have a second chance.

May it be so. Amen.

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 This Easter, we are talking about freedom, which is a very important value to us as Christians and as Americans.

The First Amendment of our Constitution protects free speech, including freedom of expression. It includes freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, peaceful protest, and freedom of the press. There have been actions this year that have challenged those freedoms. This picture is from the Mayday protest this past week downtown, which was Mayday as in urgent help needed, that was supporting immigrant workers who appear to be under attack.

There is also a desire among an influential group to make our nation a white patriarchal Christian nation, and that is not what the Constitution says. Our faith also has freedom. The Roman gods became very jealous and required their subjects to give to them and to listen to them. Our God has never required that. Our God has always invited it. Now, there are consequences when you choose not to, and those consequences still exist.

But in our scriptures for today, we hear two very clear examples of people who were going in a way that was against God. Yet they are invited back to come and be God’s people once again.

There is a Saul in the Hebrew Testament who becomes king. That is not this Saul. In the scripture, Acts 9:1-6, this Saul is a Pharisee who has gone after people within the Jewish community, who are following Jesus, who believe that Jesus was the one who is more than a prophet, but the Son of God.

Saul’s story starts actually in Chapter Seven, where he is present at the stoning of Stephen. So he endorsed that, even encouraged it. And in Chapter Eight of Acts, we hear this about Saul. He was ravaging the church by entering house after house, dragging off both men and women, and committing them to prison. That’s what Saul was doing to the people who followed Jesus. Saul saw his work as eliminating those who followed Jesus, and he did so with violence and cruelty. It seems that he felt entitled to continue this violence until he had this moment, which I call his come-to-Jesus moment, where Jesus shows up and says, why are you persecuting me?

I think this scripture is meant to send us back to Matthew 25, where Jesus says, “When you do it to the least of these, you do it to me.” So Saul went after the followers of Jesus. Jesus felt that he was being persecuted. When we go after the people who are the poor, the orphan, the widow, those are the ones that we are supposed to care for, and yet those are the ones that Saul was attacking.

While we’re on Matthew 25 and we’re remembering that story, I think we need to be reminded that at the end of that, it tells us that at the end of time or in our death, we get to stand for how we lived our lives. The sheep and the goats are separated. Have we used our lives to make a difference in this world? Have we used our lives to care for others or not? There are consequences for our behavior, even though I still believe in forgiveness and grace.

Our gospel reading is another come-to-Jesus moment for Peter, and I really do mean another one for Peter.

I think throughout the gospels, Peter has had more than one. If you think about all the times Peter gets called out by Jesus, Jesus kept trying to turn him around. I often say that Peter is our best reason for why you can believe because Peter appeared to have done everything wrong, including denying Jesus in his hour of need, and yet we bring them back.

When I think about this moment, this is a piece by Raphael. A little bit more traditional than some of the ones I show, but in this moment, Jesus is calling Peter to say, What are you gonna be about in your life? And if you love me, then you’re going to feed my lambs and tend my sheep and feed my sheep?

Because the Easter story is that love transforms. It forgives and it sets us up and sends us out to serve others. That is who we are to be. What does that entail? Well, I think it’s about loving our neighbor. It’s about recognizing the stranger in our midst and offering hospitality. That’s how Christians were known in the beginning.

They were known because they welcomed people. They invited people in. As Pope Francis reminded us in his living, it’s not our place to judge. We want to judge. The church has been doing that for a long time, and it worked for quite a while, so we tried to make people feel guilty and come to church because they feel guilty.

That’s not working anymore. I don’t think it was ever a good strategy. I think this strategy is to remind people of the love, the grace, the forgiveness, and the accountability that we have to face, that we are called to be our best selves, and how are we living into that?

So where does that leave us?

Well, today is May the 4th Be With You. The empire uses fear to control. The resistance acts freely to protect and defend all beings. Our God is not one of vengeance and fear, but a God of love and forgiveness and justice for all.

So on this May the fourth, I wanna leave you with the wisdom of Yoda. “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering.”

It almost sounds like it should have been written in the Bible, but what was written in the Bible in the first letter of John is that there is no fear in love. Perfect love casts out all fear, so the darkness is all around us, but the force of light is also present. We also have that piece that I read from the beginning of John’s gospel, that the light was in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. The choice is yours.

May it be so. Amen.

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Since we are talking about the Freedom to Sing, I had heard some of Dot Lippart’s story, and she is here to today to share a little bit about a story from her life.

Pastor Kathryn had asked me to share a bit about my story, these memories came back to me as I was attending a Flute Day at Millersville University with 70 other flute players. One young man, who graduated from there, was working on a piece called Poem by Griffey’s. That brought back memories of my 9-year-old self.

My mother, who was an amazing musician, was always been my main mentor in my life. She was a church organist and a marvelous pianist, and I heard music all the time. I started taking piano lessons when I was probably seven, and I always enjoyed hearing music.

But when I was 9, she took me to a concert. It was a community concert on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, and this man played the flute. He stood up, and I had no idea who he was, and he said he had one of three platinum flutes in the world. He said he was going to play Poem by Griffey’s, and he started playing that piece. Then, my 9-year-old self said, “That’s what I want to do. I want to play the flute.” I knew that from that moment. It was a spark that this gentleman had no idea that he had set off.

Here I am, many years later, still playing the flute. I’ve taught music and shared music. I’ve moved a lot in my life, but everywhere I have gone, I have made friends in the musical world. Music has been a joy in my life. Sometimes it takes work and is difficult, but I have always loved playing the flute.

 When I heard that story, I thought that moment, that concert, gave Dot the Freedom to Sing.

She happens to sing for a flute. But we all have that within us. We all have different ways in which God has gifted us, and maybe it is the challenge of our lives to figure out how we are to sing in this life.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in the choir, but we can sing in so many different ways within our lives. So, I want you to think about how do you bring more beauty and love into this world?

Playing the Flute is how Dot does it. That is how she is more herself, the one God intended her to be through her music, through her flute.

Our tradition is to always read the gospel last, but today I think I should have flipped them because they’re out of chronological order.

The gospel story, John 20:19-31, would’ve taken place first, and then the story from Acts 5:27-32.

After the crucifixion and death, the disciples are scared, right? They don’t know what to do. This story begins on that first Easter day. It is now evening, and the disciples are locked in a room, and they are afraid of the authorities, and Jesus comes to them. But, he doesn’t come to shame them because they deserted him. He comes and offers them peace. He says, peace be with you. And he breathes on them. That is meant to remind us of the Genesis story where God breathed life into humanity. Jesus breathed on the disciples to bring them back to life. To say, don’t keep yourselves locked up in this room, afraid. You are here to live, to enjoy this life, to love, and to share that with everyone. That is such a gift. He was inviting them back into life.

I don’t usually read the part about Thomas, but I read it today because I think that the church has done Thomas a disservice. It says Thomas is also known as the twin. We don’t remember that. He was the twin. We remember that he is doubting Thomas. That’s what we’ve named him. We have renamed him, Doubting Thomas. And don’t be a doubting Thomas. We weaponized it and, we put shame if you doubt. But the reality is that doubt is part of faith. If it were complete certainty, it wouldn’t be faith, it would be what we know.

One of the most freeing sermons I ever heard was that faith is 51% certainty and 49% doubt. You’ve just tipped it towards, I’m more certain today, and that needle moves depending on the day and depending on the moment, right? Depending on what’s going on in life, whether we think God’s listening to us or we feel like our prayers fall on deaf ears, that needle moves, and we can just be honest about that.

But God wants us, and Jesus wants us to build this beloved community that he started to build.

But the writer of this gospel, whether it was John or someone else, put in this verse, too. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet come to believe” – John 20:29, and I think that verse was there because John’s gospel was written so much later than everything else. He was already writing for people who had not seen Jesus, they could only believe through the stories of others.

It was meant to be an encouragement, but the church has weaponized that, too. If you don’t believe, then obviously we are going to shame you. That’s not the idea. That doesn’t help anyone live more fully into their faith and who God intends for them to be.

I know guilt is powerful, but we need to teach people to love and to be joyful, compassionate, and empathetic. Because the more I question and the more of my doubts there are, the more it helps me and leads me to more belief.

So we went to Acts 5:27-32. This is a story from the very beginning.

I thought I’d lay out Acts for us so we understand where we are. We had the sightings of the resurrected Jesus in Chapter One. The Book of Acts is meant to be a continuation of Luke’s gospel. It was written by the same person, and so it begins with the ascension of Jesus. They watch Jesus Ascend.

Chapter Two is Pentecost. That’s coming up on June 8th. We’ll celebrate Pentecost and the gift of the Holy Spirit. By Chapter Three, Peter starts his ministry in the community, and he begins by healing. That’s what’s getting people’s attention because he can bring healing to people, and by Chapter Four, the religious authorities are onto them again, and they arrest Peter and John. They question them, but they release them. They don’t have anything that they can charge them with.

Chapter Five begins with a story of Ananias and Sapphira, where they try to withhold some things. The community’s been kept holding everything in common living communally, and Ananias and Sapphira decide not to, and it doesn’t work out well for them. Then the apostles start healing again. So the religious leaders get jealous again, and they jail Peter and John a second time. This time, while they’re in jail, an angel comes and releases them.

That’s when Peter had this scripture that we read today. It’s their testament to the other people. When I look at this and I think about what the disciples and those now called apostles. What the apostles lived through, how they continued, they had reasons to be afraid, but they were so strong in their belief that they continued to preach Christ.

They continued to learn and trust in God. And now God empowered them with gifts that no one else had, especially this ability to heal people. They healed a crippled man, and that was one of the things that got Peter and John in trouble at first. But even in this text, Peter answers, we must obey God rather than any human authority.

I lift that because I’m concerned about that verse right now. I’m concerned because there are people who are saying that we need to just follow God’s authority.

It seems like something that we would say absolutely, God is the ultimate authority, except that they want to go back to following all the Levitical laws. Except I don’t think they really mean all Levitical laws. They want to choose which laws we follow.

They wanna say these are important and these are not, because the laws about whether you mix cotton and synthetic. Well, does anybody care if you wear a cotton top in synthetic pants? Or whether you have macaroni and cheese with meat? You can’t put milk and meat together. Those are not the laws they wanted, and they don’t want to lift the laws about leaving the edge of your field unharvested, so those who are poor and the stranger or the alien among you can eat and survive. Those aren’t the verses they wanna lift up.

They have a very definite agenda that I think we need to be paying attention to right now, but later after Acts 5:27-32, there are two more verses that I think are critical. They’re verses 38 and 39. It says “A Pharisee in the council named Galil said to the other leaders, ‘so in the present case, I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone. Because if this plan or this undertaking is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them – in that case you may even be found fighting against God.” – Acts 5:38-39.

That’s what we need to be watching. We need to pay attention. What is God behind, and which of the different voices is God really behind?

The Easter season is about freedom. On Easter, we celebrate that Jesus was free of the tomb, and that we are free from the shame of our faults and our failings.

We are forgiven, loved, and free. Jesus wants us to feel loved and forgiven in our deepest being. That is where our strength will come from. And because hurt people, hurt others. Jesus doesn’t want us to be the hurt people. He wants us to be the loving, empathetic people who look out for the wellbeing of others.

And when we see the well-being of others being hurt, ignored, or blatantly dismissed, then we use our voices. We lift our voices in protest.

Last Saturday, the day before Easter, LIFT UCC and First Reformed UCC downtown held this pop-up choir in Bins Park to sing for justice and declared that immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community are welcome in our midst. I took this picture as I parked at the parking garage.

At that event, there was a Middle Eastern woman who was standing beside me and the whole time we were there, she had tears streaming down her face. They frequently told us to look, turn to your neighbor, and say, “You are loved and you belong here.” We even did a whole chant with “You are fearfully and wonderfully made.”

That’s the message that we are to share. This is Jesus’ love in action during these challenging times.

May it be so. Amen.

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This morning, we are starting a new series called The Cup of Freedom for the Easter season as we look at the freedom that we receive from God.

That is what Easter is about: the open tomb, the empty cross. We are freed to live. Our sins are forgiven. All that we have done, all the regrets that we have, we can release them because in God’s eyes we are whole and loved.

But to really feel that ourselves, we have to get honest about who we really are. We have to admit the times that we do hurt each other, the times that we have hurt each other, that we hurt those we love, the times that we have hurt others, and the times that we have been hurt.

This is a picture from an Easter Sunrise service a couple of years ago. We didn’t see the sun this morning, but it’s good to remember that it’s out there. A lot of us don’t like Holy Week, and we don’t come to those services because we don’t like to be reminded that we are just like those first disciples and we will betray, deny, and desert God, Jesus’ beliefs.

We will go the other way on a lot of things, maybe because of the crowd. A lot of people don’t like Good Friday because they don’t want to believe that they would be one of the ones who would say, crucify him. But, if we’re being honest. Could that be us? I think it could. I think it could be any of us, because we’re not as perfect as we want to believe that we are. We all have the potential.

You may be thinking we came to hear good news. Well, I think Easter sermons are hard because the story’s the same. We have a general sense of what’s going to happen, right? And although they change a little bit from gospel to gospel, there’s a running storyline that we have that the women will go to the tomb, and it will be empty. They’ll tell the disciples, these disciples won’t believe them. Peter will go and check himself, and then everything’s wonderful.

But what I noticed about Luke’s version, Luke 24:5b-12, is that only Luke says this, “but these words seemed to them an idle tale” – Luke 24:11. Idle tale in Greek is the word lēros, which means nonsensical, lacking credibility or seriousness. In other words, they didn’t believe them. In the version I read at the early service, it translated as that they were lying.

I wonder how often we hear the story of another person and we question it.

We question the validity of someone’s story because it wasn’t our experience. That happens to people of color, to immigrants, to LGBTQ+ people, and members of the queer community. I know that because I hear their stories, and we are called to hear their stories and to believe them, just as we want to be believed.

In this story, I think this tension happens when the women aren’t believed. Shocking, especially in the first century, because women were property, they had no voice and no claim on anything.

How would life be if we actually believed one another?

If we actually took seriously what one another says, then maybe we too would experience new life. Maybe we would experience the freedom that God has for us.

God wants us to enjoy this life, to be let free, to forgive ourselves for the things that we wish we hadn’t done. We all have those moments where we wish we could take that back, that we hadn’t said that, or that we wish we hadn’t done that to that person. We can forgive ourselves, and we can forgive those who have hurt us, and in that, we can find new life.

The beauty of today is that we get to celebrate that in communion. To me, communion is at the heart of what we do because communion reminds me that I am loved and forgiven. I don’t believe that it actually becomes the body and blood of Christ. That sounds gross to me, but I do believe that in partaking of communion, I am drawn closer to God. I am drawn closer to you because we are going to eat it together. We’re going to eat one loaf, and we become the body of Christ, the Hands, and the feet of Christ, who are called to share this freedom that we have with every person we meet.

A good way to do that is by listening to their story and believing them, even if it’s not our story.

I think that we are living through a time that will be written about in the history books, and only they get to judge us, but we get to do our best at being loving and compassionate. People who act out of our empathy, who are willing to listen and to do the next most loving thing in every moment, and I decided that we needed to say the words that we’ve been using through Lent, we needed to do it one more time.

“Careful the things you say. Children will listen. Careful the things you do. Children will see. Children may not obey, but children will listen. Children will look to you for which way to turn, to learn, what to be. Careful before you say, listen to me.”

May it be so. Amen.

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As I was thinking about our theme for today, which is, cultivating a life of self-giving, I was reminded of a film I saw in seminary called Bette’s Feast.

This comes from the eighties. It is a French film about a village in Denmark, a small village that was started by a pastor. He was very much about a life of piety and he taught them to live with the most modest means.

This is the village people that are left at this point in the story. They always dress in black. There is no color in the village. They have gruel, or oatmeal would be a nicer way to put it, for most meals and maybe a piece of bread. They’re very careful about living a life of poverty. They do not allow themselves any luxuries. At this point in time, the pastor has died. His two daughters, who are sitting at the far end by the windows, have continued on his legacy.

They get together and sing for their worship, but there is quite a bit of disagreement within the village. They’re just getting to be grumpy old people. They don’t have anything that brings them joy or happiness.

And a stranger comes a stranger named Bette Babe. This is set in the 18th century. Bette is a refugee coming from Paris, fleeing the war. She’s sent to the sisters by someone who had been courting one of the sisters years back, and she’s there to be their housekeeper. They say, well, we can’t pay you, but we can offer you room and board. What she does in her time with them, she slowly starts cooking for them and adding spice to their food.

As the story goes, she also has a lottery ticket from Paris and at this point she wins 10,000 francs in the Paris Lottery. With her winnings, she decides to throw them a French banquet. She spends all of her money on one dinner to celebrate the pastor’s 100th birthday. There’s quite a difference from this scene with their very modest bowls and their simple tablecloth to the beautiful China and they have a glass for each different kind of wine. All of the candelabras and dishes, it’s quite a change.

What happens after they have this meal, it was like the joy within them started to awaken and they remembered the pleasures of life. Not that they would be that way always, or have those things always. But that life that God gives is a good life. That all came about because of Bette’s willingness to give of herself, to give of everything that she had, knowing that it was okay. She was okay giving a meal, just one meal with everything that she had.

We are at the this point in the Holy Week story where Jesus is also about to give all that he has.

Jesus is coming into Jerusalem. Jesus is on the donkey and his followers are putting cloaks down, and palm branches are coming in on one side of Jerusalem. On the other side of Jerusalem is Pilate and the military.

What we have is like a poor people’s protest and a military parade. The question is, which parade will you attend? Where will you go? Jesus said “No one has greater love than this to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” – John 15:13. But when people are willing to serve our country’s military, we celebrate them because they are willing to give their life to defend our freedom. We are grateful because not all of us can do that. But how willing are we really to lay down our life for a friend?

I know of parents who will lay down their life for their children. Partners who will lay down their life for a spouse. Those will give up everything to see that one survive and thrive. But a friend, would you do it for a friend? Would you do it for someone you don’t even know? That’s what this week is about.

There’s this scripture when Jesus got to Jerusalem, he wept and said, “If you, yes you, had only known on this day the things that would bring peace to you“- Luke 19:42.

What are those things that make for peace? Well, I think one of those things is gratitude, recognizing that who we are and what we have is not because of our efforts. We are who we are today and have what we have today because of who our families were, who our friends are, the teachers that we’ve had, our life struggles, and the gifts that God has blessed us with.

Because we have all that we need to be the people God intended us to be. The question is, do we live it? Is that who we are in life? Do we recognize all of that and do we use our gifts that we have for the benefit of others?

I think the other part of it is that we have to recognize that the needs of others may be more important than our needs. We have to put the needs of the many over the needs of the one, and that’s a hard thing. Our self-interest, our egos, everything in us wants to preserve us, and we have to fight against that to say, no, the whole is more important than me.

That’s what Jesus does. That’s who Martin Luther King was. That’s who Bonhoeffer was. That’s who Oscar Romero was. They said that their lives were not as important as the rest of us.

Let me go to a lighter place. I watched Moana 2 yesterday.

Her story is that she’s willing to go where no one else has gone and risk herself for her community. That’s the storyline. I’m not giving anything away. It’s worth watching.

I want you to pray for Jonathan Paredes this week. Jonathan, Lucy and the boys, because Jonathan got a call to go back to El Salvador. He has been going back every holy week for quite a few years to a camp where he has helped to run. He told them last year that that was his last year because he’s in his first pastorate and holy week is kind of a big week to not be there. But, he got the church’s permission to go. They called him and they usually have like three or four thousand kids at this camp that he goes to, and this year they have 10,000 kids going to this camp. They asked him, can you please come back? The whole family’s getting on a plane this afternoon to go to El Salvador.

That is not the problem. The problem is will he get back? He has a passport. They all have passports, but will he get back? That remains to be seen. He’s coming back on Easter, so we’re going to pray that everything works. But I’m nervous and I’ll name that he’s nervous too, but he’s going because it’s the right thing to do.

I think life can be frightening and overwhelming. Right now, we don’t have all the same resources, we don’t have all the same gifts, but we come to this table and to this space with the gifts that we have. By sharing our gifts, everybody has what they need. That’s the beloved community of Christ.

So the question is, can you give yourself away in this moment? Do you have compassion, the gift of being present? The gift of your attention, your empathy, that you can share with someone who’s struggling right now, and are you seeing them? Do you see them in our community, at the grocery store you shop at, or the places that you travel to?

Who needs someone that’s near you that you can just give them a bit of your time? Because it matters what we do right now.

I’ve been ending every sermon in Lent with this. It matters what we do because we are teaching our children how to survive in these difficult times. I’ve been reading this piece by Steven Sondheim.

“Careful the things you say. Children will listen. Careful the things you do. Children will see. Children may not obey, but children will listen. Children will look to you for which way to turn, to learn, what to be. Careful before you say, listen to me.”

May it be so. Amen.

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 Connection is what we have been doing today.

That moment of coming together and welcoming our new members, baptizing, and naming that we are the body of Christ in this building. That’s what connection is about. That is the collective piece that we do individually.

It’s about showing up, being present, and wrapped in empathy.

It’s about coming as our true selves to let our vulnerability show and enabling the power of connection and healing that is fueled by kindness. That’s how we build community and connection. In this world, we need that now more than ever.

In this scripture, Luke mentions that the Pharisees are watching Jesus.

So, Luke turns it on them by watching them and commenting on how they’re acting and what he sees in them. The Jewish culture was a culture of honor and shame, and with this verse, he is telling them that they actually could be shamed for the way they act.

“For all who exalt themselves will be humbled and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” – Luke 14:11. This reminds us that we are to take a posture of hospitality, but also of humility.

Then he challenges Roman imperialism. The Jewish culture has that idea of reciprocity. If we are gonna have a dinner, well, let’s invite those who we love the most. Invite those who we’re gonna have the most fun with, our closest friends, our family, or maybe those people that we’d like to have an invitation to their house so we’ll invite them to ours. But Jesus says that’s not what it’s about. It’s not about scoring points here in this world.

It is about reaching out to those that society is ignoring, that no one else is caring for the poor, the crippled, the blind, the lame. Those are the people we’re supposed to invite for dinner. Those are the people we are supposed to care for because God cares for them. The people that the rest of society is saying no to and pushing out. Those are the people that we as disciples are called to say “Come in. You are welcome. You are invited to our tables and especially to the table of Jesus Christ.”

That’s who we are meant to be. That is our challenge. We come together because it’s hard.

Life is hard right now and we forget. So, we have to come together to be reminded of who we are, of who God is, that we are loved as we are, and that we are to love our neighbor, the stranger, the one who is different from us, as well as our family and friends, and those who do not share our political views. We’re to love them all. And that’s hard right now. That is very hard.

But we come together because, together we remind each other of our purpose and we give permission, encouragement, guidance, and an opportunity to live better. That’s who we are together. The beauty of our connections is this holy moment. There’s this holy moment when each of our souls grieves meets another’s.

Together we are stronger and we support one another.

One of our members reminded me that even though right now I’m doing hard things in my life, I have a 100% success rate of surviving hard things in my life, and so do you. I needed to hear that. I needed to be reminded of that.

Each of our solo voices, when we come together, and this is the secret, we make beautiful harmony. The secret is that not one of our solo voices is gonna save the world, but together we are powerful. We can make a difference and we want to make a difference in this world.

So every Sunday I’ve been doing, I’ve been ending with the words to Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics from Into the Woods, “Children Will Listen”. I know that some of you haven’t been here every Sunday in Lent. Those of you who have been here, I’m hoping that you’re learning this because I want you to hear this in your mind.

“Careful the things you say. Children will listen. Careful the things you do. Children will see. Children may not obey, but children will listen. Children will look to you for which way to turn, to learn, what to be. Careful before you say, listen to me.”

May it be so. Amen.

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