Sermon by Seminary Intern, Deklan Lewis

 I had to fight the temptation to write an entire sermon out of song lyrics.

There’s no shortage of songs written about love. “I Will Always Love You” by Dolly Parton, “Love Will Keep Us Alive” by Eagles, “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” by Queen, “How Deep Is Your Love?” by Bee-Gees, and “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” by The Shirelles. The list goes on and on and on. But, I think that we can agree that one song that seems most relevant right now is “What The World Needs Now Is Love” by Jackie DeShannon.

“What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
No, not just for some but for everyone“

I have a question for you, though: “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” (Tina Turner). That’s the end of the song lyrics, I promise.

In our gospel reading this morning, John 15:9-17, the word love was repeated nine times.

When I shared on Facebook that I was gonna be preaching today, a lot of people reacted with the heart emoji, which means that they loved that I was gonna be preaching this morning. By the estimation of some people, the concept of love, the word loved or loving, shows up in the New Testament 316 times. Do you think that number’s a coincidence?

Especially since the Bible verse that most everyone has memorized and quotes like the ABCs is John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

In this week’s scripture, we also find some other pretty heavily quoted verses, one of them being John 15:13. “No greater love than this that, than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”, in particular stood out to me as I heard it quoted in a very unlikely place several years ago toward the end of the old animated Disney Jungle book. Baloo dies after defending Mowgli against a vicious tiger, Shere Khan. As Bagheera, the panther, is comforting Mowgli, he quotes this famous scripture. It’s crazy how a Disney movie can still make me choke up.

Love hurts, love scars
Love wounds and marks any heart
“Love Hurts” (Nazareth).

Seriously, love, real love can be super painful.

There’s this 19-year-old kid who lives on campus at the seminary. They are a student at Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, and they share some of our housing.

They’ve adopted me this semester as their college dad, which is a huge honor. The other day, we were talking about all this craziness in the world that we find ourselves in, and they looked at me with a super serious face and said, “Life is not for the faint of heart.”

As painful as it is to hear a 19-year-old who has up to this point lived a semi-charmed life. It also shows me their heart. They aren’t afraid to look at the world without their rose colored glasses. They aren’t afraid to love and care for others, knowing the pain that that may carry. Maybe I should rephrase that. They might be afraid, but they do it anyway.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt said that “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear“. That’s the kind of love Jesus demonstrated through his life on Earth. Love that he called his disciples to in these verses, and it is this very kind of courageous, self-sacrificing love to which we should all aspire.

In Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi, he presents this challenge, “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself.” – Philippians 2:5-11. Some translations say exploited, but he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness, and being found in the appearance of a human. He humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. ,If Jesus who was and is God, can love this way, can we as well? His divinity didn’t make him special. In regard to his human relationships, interactions, emotions, or the expression of his emotions through actions, it says that he was sent as a model. I don’t think a loving God would send someone to model our lives after whose example was impossible to follow.

It doesn’t take superhuman abilities to love as we have been loved by God. There’s no Marvel superhero called Love Man or Compassion Girl. But maybe there should be, maybe love like God’s is a superpower, but I don’t think that makes it unattainable. Maybe it just takes the God in all of us to love as only God can.

Jesus was rejected in his own town, argued with, by not only those who were skeptical of him, but also those closest to him. If he could heal the child of a man who represented the very government oppressing Jesus, people dying, sinners, tax collectors, and self-righteous religious people, and then after all that be betrayed by one in his inner circle. But still call them friends worthy of life and death. Maybe we can love a little better too.

We all bear God’s image, and the spirit of the divine lives within all of us, so maybe we aren’t so different from Jesus as we think we are.

Yesterday, millions of Americans turned out to protest around the country.

Sadly, I had to sit this one out because. I’m a retail employee in my other life, and Saturdays are retail days. I was scrolling through social media on Friday, and I saw this post preparing people for the protests. It’s really hard to read them up there. These were just like a bunch of things to think about as you were heading to protests.

One of them was to be mindful of words and tone. Speak with kindness even when disagreeing, avoid insults, screaming, or comments that demean others. Another was to carry joy beyond the rally. Take this feeling of camaraderie with you as you go and remember that we’re all in this together. These are standard operating procedures that have been used by nonviolent movements for decades.

For one of my classes, students have been encouraged to choose a spiritual practice for theological reflection. Initially, I was a little put off by this as my undergraduate studies were done in a rather conservative, legalistic institution, and every semester we had to choose a spiritual discipline from a pre-approved list. This was a graded assignment. We had accountability partners. It was not fun, and about the only thing it formed in me was resentment. This assignment, though, much to my surprise and gratitude, is much more flexible. Our professor encouraged us to find something that really works for us, and to make it personal.

I’m an artist a,nd artistic creation is one of the ways that I feel connected with God. So I chose to engage daily in creating. In addition, I chose to listen to audiobooks or podcasts by and about people whose spirituality and activism I admire and aspire to.

The first book that I began listening to is a collection of writings by Bayard Rustin, while I’m working on a portrait of him. He was a civil rights activist and a friend of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In fact, it was Rustin’s own spirituality, formed by his Quaker upbringing, that was influential in King’s adoption of a nonviolent approach to protest.

Sadly, most of us have never heard of Rustin because he was largely left out of the history books until very recently, because he was gay. His involvement was scaled back and pushed into the background because of bigotry and fear. Fear that bad press about his personal life would negatively impact the movement. I can relate to that feeling of being a liability. I’ve wondered whether I’ve been left out of things or not invited to the table because of who I am.

It hurts and if I’m honest, it makes me angry. I’m sure that Bayard Rustin was hurt and felt a range of emotions that goes with being betrayed, but he continued. It was Rustin who was largely responsible for organizing the buses from around the country that carried more than a million people to Washington, DC. To me, Bayard Rustin was like, Jesus. Jesus wept over the loss of a friend. He was scared to finish the job his father sent him to do. He got angry about injustice, and was misunderstood by everyone. Yet he chose to live and love anyway.

I’m not saying that we need to ignore the pain or pretend that things aren’t scary or walk around with our hearts on our sleeves for anybody to take it.

I’m not presenting the forgiveness narrative that so many of us have been harmed by, which says, if Jesus forgave Judas, we must forgive our abuser or betrayer, and that if we forgive, we must forget and act as though nothing ever happened. That’s not what this is, and I don’t believe that’s what Jesus did or said when he walked this earth.

What I’m saying is that life is not for the faint of heart. Neither is love. It’s messy, and we get hurt. And when we are hurt, we are scared we will get hurt again. So we build up walls and we put on our armor. We write people off before we even know them, and we try to run as far as we can from the pain.

But I would say to you that a broken heart is better than one that doesn’t feel. That courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something is more important than fear. May we learn to love with broken hearts, with courage and willingness to lay down our lives for others.

Would you pray with me? Creator and Sustainer, Love in its purest and truest form, only you can teach us to love. Thank you for the gift of Jesus and his life of love. Help us to open our hearts and minds so that we may receive your love and allow it to transform us into people who love, of love, who bring your love to the world around us. Spirit moving us as only you can.

May it be so. Amen.

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Yesterday morning, our Compassion Team met so that we could talk about how we could be more helpful to you as a congregation.

We realize that one of the hurdles for you is in trusting us with your stories. Confidentiality is something that this group takes seriously. You may look at these people and think, ‘these people talk to people.” Yes, we do talk to people, but we do not share your story with people. Your story is only for you to share. And yes, I’m saying that, but I know that that’s how the group feels also, and we do have some other ideas that we are praying about that may be helpful to you.

I think that another piece of this is that we as people do not like to allow our needs to be known. We have prided ourselves on being self-dependent, self-reliant, and figuring out things for ourselves. I don’t need any help, but the reality of life is that it is too hard. Things happen that make us realize that we need one another to comfort each other and to hold us accountable to being the people that God has created us to be. That’s the beauty of the community.

That’s where the Compassion team can be a help to you. To both comfort and to hold you accountable. If that’s what you need and if that’s what you want, because we are to forgive.

We talk about forgiveness a lot. That was in today’s scripture, Colossians 3:12-17, but we are not so good at it.

Even though we talk about it, we talk a good game, but we’ve got a lot to practice. As a survivor of abuse, forgiving is not about removing any type of accountability. That is not what forgiving is. Forgiving is letting go of the anger and the hurt, which, as long as we hold that, that person continues to control us. But when we can let go of that, then we are truly free. That’s where we find peace.

That scripture lesson from Paul today reminds us of the important things in life: compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. It almost reads like the spiritual gifts that align with Galatians. These are the traits of a Christian. This is who we are to be.

And that phrase “bear with one another” – Colossians 3:13, that means when we don’t agree, we don’t attack each other. We continue to stay in the conversation. We bear with one another, and if one has a complaint against another. We forgive. This is what it means to choose life rather than death.

In our other scripture today, Luke 17:11-19, we read of the 10 lepers.

I know I have heard many sermons on and I have preached many sermons on this, and this time I was surprised. I love it when I get surprised in reading a scripture because I had missed something that I saw this time, and that is that the one who came back.

The first side of this piece of art is them calling to Jesus. The second side is after he has sent them to the priest. You see, most of them are walking away, but one comes back and is on the ground kneeling in front of Jesus, and above it it says Samaritan. And I’ve overlooked that detail in the past.

We’ve always praised the one who came back because he was grateful. But there’s more to it than that. There’s more to that story. Because he was a Samaritan. Jesus told them to go to the priests and, that would be the end; they would be announced as clean so that they could rejoin the community.

He couldn’t go to the priests because he wasn’t welcomed by the priests in the temple. They don’t consider him Jewish, even though by ancestry he was, you see, the Samaritans were in the northern Kingdom of Israel. And when the Babylonians came in, and probably when the Assyrians came in too, when they took away the leaders from Jerusalem, they didn’t take them. They left them and they mixed with the invaders. So they weren’t considered Jewish anymore. They didn’t worship in Jerusalem. They worshiped at Mount Hob, and so they were considered less than. Maybe a contemporary context for our political situation is almost like being an undocumented immigrant in the US right now. Or a Palestinian in Israel. They were not welcome. They were considered other. They were considered an enemy.

So as long as he had his skin disease, which separated him from his people. He had to leave Samaria, and he found this group of other people with the same disease, and so he found community, but when he was healed, he lost his community.

So, where’s the priest that he went to? Show that he was healed. Jesus was the priest who could show himself and be proclaimed clean because Jesus welcomed him. Jesus received him not as a foreigner, not as an outcast, not as an enemy, but as one to welcome. To bring into the kingdom of God. That is not to minimize his gratitude; that is to put context around his gratitude.

But I know that I never looked at it that way. I never saw him as truly a Samaritan with few options looking for community, and we don’t know what happened after this. He may have stayed with Jesus and the disciples from then on out. We don’t know. More people traveled with Jesus than just the disciples.

We are reminded that Jesus wants us to be his hands and feet in this world, and to be the ones who welcome and accept people as they are, and help them have a relationship with Jesus. That’s who we’re called to be.

So today we have communion, and when we come to this table, we come because we’re hoping to meet Christ here. After all, I encounter Christ in the sacrament, in the ritual, in the bread, and in the cup. I hope that you find Christ who is the host of this table, in the bread, placed in your hand, in the cup offered to you, in the eyes of our servers, in the music that will be played, and in the faces of each other. Christ is here. May we see it and be healed?

This week, I was reminded that this year is the 40th anniversary of the We Are the World Campaign. At a time when it feels like we are isolating ourselves from the rest of the world. I’m struck by the way we came together, led by 40 incredible musicians with 40 incredible egos that probably would not have even fit in this room, but they managed to be in a small recording studio from midnight till 7 AM. To do their part, to raise money for starving people in Africa.

And these are the words, “We are the world. We are the children. We are the ones who make a brighter day. So let’s start giving. There’s a choice we are making. We are saving our own lives. It’s true. We’ll make a better day. Just you and me” – We Are the World by U.S.A for Africa (1985).

It wasn’t about saving them. It’s the same concept that I said last week. What hurts you, hurts me. And what blesses me, blesses you. Let us learn to be in the world with compassion and to be in the world with forgiveness.

May it be so. Amen.

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 As I sat with this scripture, 1 Timothy 6:6-12, I thought about the question, what is enough? How do you know when you have enough?

Then on Friday, I was on Route 30. I was coming back from York, and I was doing 75 in a 55 mph zone in the left lane. Don’t ever do that. I got past the on-ramp from Centerville Road and got over, and realized that I had a line behind me, and they went past me, going at least 85-90 and revving the engines. I thought I was already going over what is enough, what’s fast enough, what’s big enough, what’s shiny enough?

It seems that humanity was created with this longing, this hunger within us. But I think God gave us this hungering, hoping that we would hunger for God. I think that’s what that hunger was meant to be about. But God didn’t force us. But we are easily distracted, and we’ve been looking from the very beginning for something else that will fill that hunger. Something shiny or exciting or stimulating, like money, looks, the right body, the right clothes, the right car, or the right house. Do you get the point? We’re very good at trying to fill that hunger with other things. Besides a relationship with God.

So I leave you with the question today. At what point are you content? What does contentment look like for you?

Actually, the book of Genesis, where Genesis 11:1-9 came from, is a collection of origin stories. It’s trying to explain how things became as they are, how we got to where we are, and from the very beginning, we were discontent.

That’s the story of the Garden of Eden. They couldn’t be satisfied until they took from the tree of knowledge, the one that was off limits. The knowledge was too great a temptation.

And then we have Cain and Abel, the two brothers. And Cain couldn’t stand that Abel was favored by God because being favored was too great a temptation not to take.

In our scripture for today, although it seems to be about languages, it’s really about the fact that they weren’t satisfied. They were discontent. When they could make bricks and mortar, then they thought they could be gods, and they built a tower to the heavens. They weren’t looking for a relationship or to get closer to God. They just wanted to be gods to look down on all the other people. That was the problem. That was too tempting.

Yearning, which God placed within humanity, hoping that they would choose a relationship with God, instead became a yearning for power. The yearning for power is too great a temptation. We were created to be content. God wants us to be content with all God’s gifts. With that yearning, being satisfied in our relationship with God, then we can be at peace and it didn’t work.

God came to us in Jesus to show us what this looked like in a human being. And Jesus didn’t chase after money, shiny things, or anything at all. Jesus wanted to make relationships with people and help introduce them to God. Even when he sent out the 72, he said, Take nothing with you. Rely on the hospitality of strangers and as followers of Jesus, that is who we are to be those who extend hospitality to strangers. For we never know when we’re entertaining angels. We can be generous with what we have.

In our scriptures today, the writer said, “Be faithful, loving, dependable, and gentle” – Timothy 6:11.

This was the message that he wanted to get through to the church because obviously they were hung up on money. So he got a little bit more specific. The love of money causes all types of trouble.

Then we have this other sentence, which I think is so good to know, because there are all kinds of sayings that people attribute to the Bible that are not in the Bible. Like God helps those who help themselves. Not in the Bible. It’s Benjamin Franklin.

The other one is God won’t give you more than you can handle. Not in the Bible. It is not biblical. Actually, God shows you that God will be with you through all that life gives you. It does say “We didn’t bring anything into this world, and we won’t take anything with us when we leave” – Timothy 6:7. That is in the Bible, which I hear as a call to a simpler life. Our Amish brothers and sisters practice this. They also stay much more closely tied to the land. That’s a piece that I think we’re forgetting. We’ve got to get closer to the land right now.

We are living in incredible times, scary and yet filled with potential.

The breakage of our systems means we have an opportunity to create more just and caring systems than what we have now. Last Saturday, I caught a few parts of the FarmAid concert, and one of the pieces that I saw was an interview with Dave Matthews that I thought was profound. He essentially said life in this country won’t get better until we value people over profit. We need to see each person as our neighbor. Be willing to help and care for them.

We remember that Jesus gave us two commands. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your strength. That’s who we have to be. We haven’t done it well yet. We need to get better. That’s our challenge. But to do so, first we need to figure out, as a congregation, what is most important to us.

So, I have a challenge for you this week. I want you to think. About the world that you wish existed. What do you want to see in this world? I keep saying we are creating because it’s real. We are creating the world for these babies that we baptized today, and for all the little ones. We are creating the world that they’re gonna live in. What do we want that to look like?

Write it down because we need to start really getting clear on what we want, because if we’re clear on what we want, then we can come together and build it. We can organize and build those systems that we need.

If you tend to be nostalgic, to put on those rose colored glasses and say, “Well, if it just was the way it was when I grew up”, I have a caution for you. It wasn’t good for everyone then. It was good for some, but not for all. And I think our call is, it has to be good for all or it’s not good for any of us. Because what hurts you hurts me. And what hurts me hurts you. Whether you realize it or not.

We are a country with great diversity already. Maybe the best place to start is to write down your favorite Bible verses. What are the verses that that lead your life? What are your guiding verses?

One of mine is “And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” – Micah 6:8.

May it be so. Amen.

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 Last Sunday, Nathan Moore preached as part of our youth Sunday service.

If you were not here and you haven’t either watched it on YouTube or listened to the podcast, I’m gonna encourage you to do so because he did an excellent job. It’s very much worth listening to.

But one of the issues that he brought up was the issue of Satan and demons, and he said that we don’t talk about Satan and demons much. That’s true. He actually told me later that one of his friends had told him that at his church, if that word is in the text, they just skip that word, which I find interesting. I don’t try to skip it. I don’t go into it; I believe in evil. I think we are the ones who want to personify evil and make evil more of a being that we can challenge, or more to the point, someone who we can blame.

I think that is the bigger issue when we start talking about Satan and demons, it’s because we want to take the responsibility of our inappropriate and cruel actions away from ourselves and say that someone else, something else, Satan, demons are to blame. They’re the reason that this happened, not me. Looking around, several of you are as old as I am and may remember. I still have a very vivid memory of Flip Wilson with an angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other, you know, and he had this expression, the devil made me do it. That’s all about not taking responsibility for our own actions, all of it.

Just this week in a family text thread, an unimportant topic came up, but I chose to respond to it with a GIF of Ursula laughing. And I thought if there’s an evil side to me, I believe it might be Ursula, and I apologize to all of you who don’t know who Ursula is. She’s a Disney villain from The Little Mermaid.

Evil is in the world, and there are temptations. Think about the story of Jesus and the temptation of Christ, right? There are temptations around power, greed, and wanting to control others. I think that’s very real right now. I feel like I’m seeing that right now, but we have to accept the responsibility and own the fact that I can be as kind and compassionate as I can be, and I can be Ursula and laugh and do evil, cruel, and hateful things. In every minute of every day, we choose who we’re going to be and we need to think about that.

Who does God want us to be? God wants us to be the kind, compassionate ones. Jesus came so that we would learn and see what that looks like. Jesus said to us, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” – Matthew 16:24. That is a call to risk our lives to risk everything.

Evil wants to say, “Take care of yourself. Be safe. Put up the walls to protect yourself. Build the walls, accumulate your money. Build a bigger barn.” That’s not what Jesus says. Jesus said to the rich man, get rid of it all, and pick up your cross. Be vulnerable. Take risks and follow me. Because Jesus didn’t protect himself. He showed that with his life. He knew what Judas was gonna do, but he didn’t stop Judas. He said, do what you need to do.

That was one lesson. It ties into the rest of it, but now I want to go into this parable of the dishonest manager.

As we get into this, let’s first remind ourselves what a parable is. So first of all, it’s a story. It’s not a true account. This didn’t really happen. Jesus knew that we learned better and we remembered better through stories. So he told stories to teach us things, to teach us about what the kingdom of God would be like.

This scripture I have wrestled with for a lot of my life because it just didn’t make sense. Why is the dishonest manager being praised? Why is he being praised for cheating the employer? I’ve been an employer. I didn’t like it when I got cheated, but that was the first lesson I learned. And this is the beauty of parables.

The first lesson I learned about this parable was, God doesn’t think like me. Imagine that God has bigger thoughts and more compassion and grace than I do. Praise be to God.

Then today I looked at this scripture, and I said, what else happens in this scripture? Let’s go deeper. Well, what the dishonest manager does is he builds community. That’s what Jesus wants us to do. Jesus wants us to build community. I would say he did the right thing for the wrong reason. He built a community to save himself so that when he didn’t have a job, he at least had friends.

Jesus wants us to have friends. Jesus knows that we can’t survive this life without community. But this time I found something else. I realized what the dishonest manager did. He helped those who were struggling. He went to them and reduced their debt for the people at the bottom who were indebted to his employer. He went to these people who owed his employer money and said, “Take half off your bill. We’re just gonna cut your bill in half.” And that’s what never made sense to me. The employer thanked him and praised him for cutting these people’s bills in half, because I was missing the fact that he was helping those who needed it the most.

Again, he did the right thing for the wrong reason, but he still did the right thing because Jesus wants us to go out and help the least of these. To the thirsty one, you gave a cup of water, and to the hungry one you gave food.

It’s about recognizing that there are those who have less than we do, who are in need and helping them in that need.

I was talking about Jesus calling us into risk. There was a risk for the manager in the scripture.

Paul and Barnabas took a big risk. They were in trouble with the Council of Jerusalem because they weren’t following the tradition. After all, the council believed at that time that you had to be fully Jewish to follow Jesus. There are people now who are shocked that Jesus was Jewish, or they don’t know it at all. It’s true. And what Paul and Barnabas went to Jerusalem to say, but the Holy Spirit is working with them, whether they’re circumcised or not.

They went and pleaded their case, and interestingly, Peter sided with them. Now, if you haven’t read the book of Acts, you need to, because in the Book of Acts, it talks about Peter’s ministry. Peter was the rock upon which I will build my church. And then you have Paul, who had this experience on the road to Damascus, and they had different ideas of what Christians were. Although they didn’t call themselves Christians at the time, they were people of the way. How do people of the way live this out? They were actually often in opposition to each other. They essentially decided to go their separate ways, which is why Paul went off into what is now Turkey with Ephesus. And, you know, he planted all these churches in Philippi and Ephesus and Galatia, and he did all of that.

But in here, Peter stands up for Paul and he says he’s right, because Peter had this dream, several chapters before this, where God said to Peter. Do not call anything unclean that I have made. If I have made it, it is clean. It had to do with eating and what they could eat and how they ate it and all that stuff. But it opened Peter’s mind to realize that there were people who were not keeping kosher, and yet they were being welcomed by the spirit to become part of the way.

If God is bringing someone and working with someone to bring them into a closer relationship, it is not our place to deny them or to put a stumbling block in front of them.

We are at that point where we need to decide if we are going to live or die, and that is our choice. We can just drift off into oblivion, and when there aren’t enough people here, sell the assets and close the doors, and go about our business. Or we can decide that there’s something here that is important enough to us that we need to save it.

That’s the wrong word, because we are not saving it; God is. We invite God to do the work. We get out of the way of the spirit and let the spirit bring whomever is coming, and we welcome them. We give them safe refuge here. And we don’t talk about them behind their back, and we don’t snear at them, and we don’t make comments because they don’t dress like us, talk like us, look like us, or act like us. We just accept them for who they are because they want a relationship with Christ. Thanks be to God.

We have to decide, are we all in on this? It’s not about forcing others to do something. It’s not. It’s about owning our responsibility to live with our fears and build a community by being an active part of it.

The United Church of Christ has a motto, and it goes like this, “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, diversity; in all things, charity” And that charity is the Caritas, the agape love the care for others in all things, be compassionate in all things, care for the other, and we have to decide what are the essentials in which we have unity. I think it has to do with the table that we believe this is Christ’s table and you built the sanctuary so that it is accessible to all.

So let us invite all to this table to experience God’s love & God’s grace.

May it be so. Amen.

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 I want you to take a look at this picture and think about what you see. How do you interpret this picture?

What you see and what you feel when you look at this picture is based on your perspective. When you look at these children, do you think that they need anything? Do these children have what they need? Do we need to do anything for these children? Think about what perceptions you have just based on that picture.

You might see children who don’t have a lot and who live in a house that hasn’t been painted lately. We don’t know how well fed they are. They’re all huddled up, so you can’t tell, but they look like they’re thin. They don’t look like they’re overeating.

But if you look carefully at their faces, which are harder to see, they’re actually all smiling, and the dogs look very relaxed beside them. I would actually say that these kids don’t need anything. They’ve got what they need. They have each other, and they have comfort.

I saw another picture this week that I won’t show you, but it was of a person on the street holding a sign. A person on the street with a sign, and this is what the sign said, “Homeless but Hopeful. Broke, not Broken. Everything helps.” That picture was in an email from Cameron Trimble, who’s another UCC pastor that I appreciate and follow. She added these two questions, which are the ones we need to focus on because they are profound for this moment in time in which we’re living. Can we meet this moment with kindness, creativity, and fierce love without pretending that we’re above all the mess of it? Can we stay grounded in the humility that we are not saviors, even as we long to heal what’s breaking?

That’s big. We see things breaking. Things are being broken, and that can be a good thing because if something’s broken, then we have to fix it, and we can do so in a better way. In a more loving way, in a more just way, and in a way that brings more peace in the world. That might be hard to hear, but just sit with it.

The scripture today is Deuteronomy 35:15-20, and it’s Moses talking to the people.

This is a scripture that I love, but this scripture is also problematic. So, let’s take it apart. I don’t want anybody to leave this sanctuary without knowing. Moses did not write this. There’s a stream of thought out there that says Moses wrote it, but Moses did not write it. It includes his death and burial. He couldn’t have written it. Nobody has written about their own funeral yet. Not from an after perspective. We haven’t figured that one out yet.

This scripture is the basis for the prosperity gospel. The idea that if you love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, you follow all the laws, you do everything right in your life, then your life will be good. You will have good health and riches, and all the possessions you desire; you’ll have it all.

But if anything in your life goes wrong, that’s because you are not living right. I was raised on that kind of theology, and I will even tell you, I’ve looked at my own life and said, “I wasn’t living right. I needed to get back on track.” There’s some internal stuff with that, but it’s not a God thing.

You know why? Because there’s truth to the statement. Bad things happen to good people. And when that happens, we don’t know what to do. If you are of the Prosperity Gospel, you don’t know what to do with that. What we’ve done, churches, clergy, and congregations have looked at people who are broken or have terrible health issues, and they’ve told them it’s their fault. That’s where we’ve been wrong so many times. Life happens. Accidents happen. Disease happens. It’s not because you’re not following God, nor is it because you’re not faithful enough. We need to feel that in our bodies. We need to know the truth of that.

Now, here’s the good part of this scripture, because I really do love this scripture. This reminds us that God is a covenant maker and a covenant keeper. God made covenants from the very beginning with Abram and God kept those covenants. That did not mean that anybody had an easy life, but it did mean that God was there with them through it. That’s the difference. That’s where the good news is. God, through Moses, lays this out.

What is your choice? Curses and death or blessings in life. The choice is yours. It’s called free will from the beginning because some things are our choice.

What came back to me in my head was a car accident I had years ago, and you know what? It was my fault. I forgot. I was so focused on the traffic coming one way. I forgot to look the other way, and I was close to a light, and I pulled out right into somebody. That was something I could have avoided. That was on me. That’s not on God. That was on me, but God was with me in that moment.

I felt alone. I thought I could have crawled into a hole and covered myself, but God was with me then, just as God was with the people in the car that I hit. We choose blessing or curse.

I’m using this book as the basis for this series, and it’s called Leading Causes of Life. A long, long time ago, I did a series on this, probably longer than you remember, and I knew that I had the book. I don’t know what I said the first time around. This time around, they challenge us. Saying for every issue, there’s a way to look at it as a curse, and there’s a way to look at it as a blessing, and part of what God wants us to do is look more at our blessings than our curses.

So the first issue I put up there is aging. So what are the curses of aging? Yes. I only had room for one, or you wouldn’t have been able to read them. So I put dependency because that’s what I hear. People don’t want to lose their independence. That feels like the curse of aging. But there’s a blessing of aging, and I feel like I’m old enough that I can start claiming some of it. I’m not the same person. I will never pull out without looking the other way again.

I think Crime keeps coming up a lot in the news cycle. The curse of hearing about all the crime in our country is that we wanna isolate, we wanna pull back, when actually the answer to crime is developing community. The places that have lower crime rates have a good sense of community. They have police presence where people know the police, they trust the police, and they know each other.

I remember the day I got a call from my neighbor who said, I just watched a pair of legs go into your house. And I freaked, but my neighbor called me and went and knocked on the door, which made those legs go back out, and I called the police. I wasn’t home, but they saw an opportunity and they took it. They came in through the window. I’ll never open that window again. We learn.

How do we look at money? Do we look at money and say, “We don’t have enough, we’re broke.” Or do we say, “I don’t have a lot, but what I have I can share because it builds community.”

Then I left the last one for you to sit with. If we look at the church from the perspective of death, from all the wrong things, I’m thinking you have a list, but what are the things that are right? What are the blessings the church has, and I’m gonna let you sit with that one. I’m not answering that one. You need to figure that one out.

The other scripture for today was John 6:35-40, where Jesus tells us that he is the bread of life. He is where life comes from.

I’ve been challenging us to think about the world that we are creating because we are creating the world now that our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren are going to live in.

So, what do we want that world to be about? What do we want this country to be in the future? This is the time to figure that out because through the choices we make, the energy that we put out into this world, and the environments that we create, affect what this world will become. And I believe that in our country, no one should go hungry, no one should be uneducated, no one should be afraid to be in their own house, which means they have a place to live, and no one should be without access to quality medical care.

How will we move forward in this time? Well, to help us, we have the wisdom, the comfort, and the strength of Jesus, who taught us how to care for other people. This table is Jesus’s table. It’s not my table. It’s not the Church of the Apostles table. This is Jesus’s table, and for Jesus’s table, everyone is welcome. In fact, he reminded the rich that they needed to wait until the people who were struggling, who were at work, who were trying to pay the bills, got to eat first. Because the rich people had plenty of food at their house. They didn’t need to come in and eat all the food at Jesus table, there are no limitations or restrictions on God’s love and mercy.

A broken heart, which is what I believe Jesus’ was, is also open to more possibilities. It can hold more. When our hearts are broken, we can open to love more. We are invited here to meet our savior, the only savior to know that we are still within the covenant, and we have covenanted together to be Christ’s body in this world.

God is here. All we have to do is have the love that I talked about last week, the agape love, the love that has concern for all. No exceptions. That’s who we’re called to be.

May it be so. Amen.

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 It is my intent every Sunday morning to give you the best information I have. And last Sunday morning, I talked about the historical markers, and today I have more information.

Or we’ll say better information. I found out that the Stephen Smith marker is that it was erected as part of the Civil War Trails, where markers were installed specifically for the150th anniversary of the Civil War. That’s when the Stephen Smith marker was put on the building beside Mount Zion, since then, that marker had been vandalized and was worn. What I learned from one of our members who contacted the Pennsylvania Historical Marker Program, is that they are in the process of refurbishing markers for our 250th anniversary of the country. They have also taken some down that have to do with race and black history because there was some racist language on some of them. So, some of the language needed to be updated, and they are working on all of that.

It is not my intent to create any ill will with the Pennsylvania Historical Marker program, and I wanna make sure that you have accurate information. So I wanted to start with that.

But in preparing this sermon, I ran across that phrase with malice towards none, and learned that that was the beginning of Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, which I wanna read to you.

He wrote this in March of 1865, and the Battle of Appomattox was in April of 1865. So, this was written before that battle and before Lee surrendered. He wrote “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the rights, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.”

Just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. That sounds profound right now. So at a time when the battle was still raging, when the war was still raging. Lincoln asked specifically the people of the North who were listening to him to have charity, and that charity is based on the Latin form of the verb, which is caritas, which is a concern for others.

Not charity as in just give them something. It’s not about a handout. It is about having love for neighbor. It is caring about the other. That’s what Lincoln was calling us to be about, and I think it’s who we need to call ourselves to be. It’s not easy right now.

Our scripture today is Matthew’s Gospel, and it was written to a Jewish audience.

As far as chronological order in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus has come into Jerusalem for his final stand. He knows that he has come to Jerusalem and he will not leave alive, and he’s running into the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Herodians. Because they’re all looking for something they can use as a reason to arrest him.

The lawyer says to him, what is the greatest commandment? It’s a trap. Jesus knows it’s a trap. It sets up the same piece that, in Luke’s gospel, leads us into the Parable of the Good Samaritan. But this is Matthew’s piece, and if you read the next chapter, you’ll find out that Jesus is not in a particularly charitable mood with the Pharisees and Sadducees. He’s about to put them in their place.

But for this moment in time, Jesus gives them the right answer. It’s simple, “Love God with all of your being and love your neighbor as yourself” – Mark 12:30-31.

I think we tend to think about the Pharisees and assume they’re always saying inappropriate things and are always challenging Jesus. We never would’ve done that, but I really wonder if we aren’t closer to the Pharisees than we realize. Because if Jesus were here, we might also say, “But Jesus, what is the one thing that I need to do? What’s the one thing that I need to do to be faithful? What’s the one thing that I need to do to secure eternal life?”

And Jesus’s answer is simple: love God and love your neighbor. If you can’t love God with all of your being, then love your neighbor.

The Pharisee was probably saying the same thing because Pharisees are Jewish. It was like, what is the one thing that I need to do to be a good Jew? How can I be a good Jew? Love God. If you can’t do that, then love your neighbor because in Matthew 25, we’re gonna get the parable of the sheep and the goats.

That one always takes us because we so wanna be sheep. If everybody’s gonna get divided into sheep and goats, we wanna be sheep, because it doesn’t go well for the goats, and we don’t wanna be on that side. So what do we have to do to be sheep? In that parable, the king says, “When you do it to the least of these, you have done it to me” -Matthew 25:40.

By loving your neighbor, you are loving God.

It’s that simple, and it’s that hard because we don’t always love our neighbor. We don’t know how to love God. With all of our being, we struggle. We can’t love God with all our being, and God knows that. We can’t love our neighbor as ourselves, because God’s watched us do that. I don’t think we trust in God’s mercy.

I think that’s a problem. If we can’t make all of our lives about loving God, then God wants us to try and love our neighbor, and if we still fail at that, then the Apostle Paul reminds us that Christ said, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” – 2 Corinthians 12:9. We have a hard time with that power being perfect in weakness. That is not the way our society is set up. That is not what we’ve been taught. That’s not how we function. That turns us around

Power in weakness. How much do we trust God to be God?

I said this was a hard week, and I’ve been talking about the fact that I’ve been asking what the world is that we are trying to create.

It matters; our energy that we put out into the world makes a difference. I believe that. I think that’s part of prayer. I was really struck by two people. I don’t know what all you heard around the shooting, but I heard the mayor say, I don’t want your thoughts and prayers. I want something to change. Then, I heard Fletcher’s father. If you didn’t hear his piece, that will take you down. It took me down because he said, I don’t want you to remember my son as a victim of a mass shooting. I want you to remember him for who he was.

What kind of world do we want? What kind of country do we want to raise our children in? Because we have a chance to make a difference. Right now we are living in a time where everything, all the systems are being broken, and we have a chance to build it better. We have a chance to make it just, where every kid has the right and the ability to achieve and become who God created them to be.

I also wrote down in my notes, Jeremiah 31:15, maybe this is a good time, while I might not make it to the end of this sermon. The prophet Jeremiah reminded the people in exile, “This is what the Lord says: A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more” – Jeremiah 31:15.

As of Friday, it was day 241 in 2025. There had been 286 mass shootings, 1,180 injured.

“How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? How many times must the cannonballs fly before they’re forever banned? They’re allowed to be free. Yes. And how many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see? Yes. And how many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry? How many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died?” – Blowin’ in the Wind, Bob Dylan.

That song is one year younger than me, written in 1963, and the sentiment hasn’t changed. How Long, oh Lord, How Long?

May it be so. Amen.

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Last week, I said that we were in a moral moment, and I’m going further with that because I think that we are living in a time when people are looking to see how far they can go until we raise a fuss.

I just need to remind you that the crisis in Palestine needs to be on our minds. That’s one of those places where there is a moral issue. But I’m gonna talk about the injustice in our country.

There is a detention center on an unused airstrip in Florida. It is made of tents. I lived for four years in South Carolina. I’m gonna tell you that the alligators are the least of their problems. Because when you put a tent on asphalt in Florida with no air conditioning and no running water, that is called an oven, and no one, regardless of what they did or did not do, belongs there.

This is a picture from NPR of Washington. It triggers me because I remember when I went to Lebanon, and the road in and out of the Beirut airport had manned machine guns on it. As we walked around Beirut, soldiers were walking around with a K-47’s and when you pulled into a parking lot, your vehicle was scanned for bombs. I thought to myself, I never want to live like this.

I heard yesterday that the National Guard has now been given permission to carry weapons too. The other problem is that, in DC, they’re not in the areas where the crime is. They’re in the areas where the white people are, and the black and brown people are the ones being arrested. In Texas this week, they changed the districts, and by doing that, the districts with a higher number of people of color were reduced from 13 to 8.

We are creating the world that our grandchildren are going to occupy. My grandson’s in the room, and that’s not the world I want for him. That’s not where I want him to grow up.

I also look at that picture and think, do we not know? Remember Kent State? Bad things happen when somebody gets anxious. If there’s any people in the room who are young enough not to know what Kent State is, please Google it. You need to know.

Paul, in the scripture today, was talking to the church in Corinth, and the church in Corinth was a mess.

Paul uses both of his letters to try and help. But what always shocks me is that so many weddings want 1 Corinthians 13 read, and they don’t realize that it was written for a bunch of people who couldn’t get along. It is a beautiful passage about what love is, but in context.

What he’s trying to do in that very long diatribe is my issue with Paul. For those of you who’ve been here long enough, you know that I hate it when Paul goes on and on and on trying to prove his point. But they had forgotten that they were called by God to come together and be one body. They were called to come together and work together for the common good. And the common good has to mean that it’s good for everyone, and that’s part of the problem.

One of the issues, if you read Corinthians, is that the wealthier people decided that they should have more rights. One of the big things was the table. They would come early when communion was being offered because they had all the time, they weren’t working. They didn’t need to be anywhere. They had all day. They could sit and feast at the Lord’s table. The poor people, the people who were working hard, didn’t get in until much later. There’s a whole section where Paul says, You all rich people, you’re just going to have to wait. You don’t get to come in and eat up all the food so that the poor people don’t have anything.

We’re all created equal. We are all created good, and then we make choices, and choices are made for us. That’s another sermon we’ll not go into today, or we’ll be here all day. We make choices and our country makes choices together. We make choices about who has rights and who doesn’t, and we need to pay attention, because stuff’s happening. We are called to respect each other. And I’ve been sitting with that, and I want you to sit with this.

I want you to think about how Jesus calls us to love our neighbor as ourselves.

What part of that love has to do with respect, because where I’m landing is that I have a really hard time loving someone whom I do not respect. That’s hard for me. I can try and love them as a child of God.

There’s a line out of my favorite movie, which is the American President, where Michael Douglas says, “Democracy is about me protecting the rights of the person who says something that makes my blood boil.” But, in a democracy, he has the right to say it; that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. We live in that tension between what is right, the right thing to do, and what our rights allow us to do.

The thought that just came to my head is that thing you say to kids, “just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” Maybe we need to remember that. I looked up respect, and this was the definition that I liked. It is due regard for the feelings, wishes, rights, or traditions of others.

The Stephen Smith Community Development Program Project is coming to Columbia, and I’m gonna tell you more about it.

But when I got this information, I thought, there’s a backstory to this. I wanna know the backstory, who was Steven Smith? And so I asked my friend who sent me the information. I think this is worth you hearing.

Reverend Steven Smith came to Columbia at five years of age. She didn’t tell me what year it was. I’m guessing it was in the 1700’s, but I could be wrong. He was brought to Columbia as a 5-year-old enslaved child. He was the first pastor of Mount Zion in Columbia. When he grew up, he started a lumber business, which was extremely successful, and he became the wealthiest African American in Columbia. He owned the most stock in the bank in Columbia, but he was not allowed to be president because he was black. And so, in his wrath, he built the Wrightsville Bridge. I didn’t know that he paid to have the Wrightsville Bridge built, which was part of the Underground Railroad eventually. But, when the riots broke out in Columbia, his office was destroyed and he was run out of town.

There was a marker at the Mount Zion Church. The Pennsylvania Historical Society had put markers around the state to designate African American history. And it has recently disappeared. The church asked the Columbia Historical Society what happened, and they didn’t know. So, they went to the Pennsylvania Historical Society, and what they learned was that all the historical markers in Pennsylvania regarding African American history and the contributions of African Americans have been removed in our state. I haven’t seen that in the news; it wasn’t reported on, but it’s happened.

Mount Zion Church is taking a building that they had and converting it into the Stephen Smith community development project. It is named that to honor Steven Smith, who was a prominent African American in Columbia. Their purpose is, or what they believe is, that youth thrive when their basic needs are met and educational resources are provided. The programs that they offer will be tailored to their individual needs. The programs will be specifically designed to help empower and equip them. We believe as they are prepared educationally and fundamentally, the result will be productive citizenship. The center is long overdue as a safe space for academic support, STEM projects, peer interaction, as well as the reinforcement of core values.

They are dedicated to empowering youth in Columbia and surrounding areas, providing a safe and inclusive space for them and their families through education, support, and connection. Their goal is to rebuild, restore, and inspire a stronger, brighter future for our youth. If you would like to donate to that project, visit https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/donation-form/the-stephen-smith-community-development-project

We need to decide where we’re at and how we’re gonna speak and live in this moment.

We do live in tension, but we have to decide what world we want our children and our grandchildren, and our great-grandchildren to grow up in.

May it be so. Amen.

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 I want to begin today by thanking you, because I’m going to be starting a class in September through June in Gestalt Pastoral Care.

I’m thanking you because the Rader-Schellenberger Endowment for Theological Education is paying for it. I believe you will find that it will be mixed into my sermons as well as the pastoral care that I give to all of you and to anyone who comes to the door.

Gestalt Pastoral Care, what does that mean? Well, the Gestalt model is a holistic model. Gestalt Pastoral Care is about realizing that our emotions, our spirit, our mind, and our body are all connected. We can’t just talk about what’s going on in our minds. We have to look at our bodies, our souls, and our emotions. We have to look at all of that.

What I love about this approach to pastoral care is that it does not seek to prescribe anything. It’s not about giving advice or setting goals for anyone. It is merely about asking questions, listening, and helping the person find their truth because we believe God is already at work in all of us. It is learning to listen to God and learning to listen to the Holy Spirit, to recognize how the Holy Spirit is working in each of us, continually stretching us towards healing and wholeness.

I’ve been looking at it for about a year, and I’ve gone to a couple of workshops on it, and I have seen amazing things happen with it. So, I’m starting this course and I want you to know about it. In this coming year, I’m gonna be focusing more on pastoral care. We’ve been in this shift of job descriptions and figuring out what’s Melissa’s and what’s mine, and how do we work together? Now I’m at a point where I feel like I have more time and energy to put into the care of our members and to those outside.

I will also note that there’s just an interesting thing that’s going on, and that is that I’m getting emails from people outside of the church who wanna be baptized or who want their children baptized. I don’t know what’s happening, but I’ve got two Preschool families that I’m talking to. Then we have our babies who are gonna get baptized. Breanne and Carlos’ baby, Bella, and Adam and Sarah’s baby, Lucy, are both going to be baptized at the end of September. The spirit’s moving and I don’t know what that’s all about yet, but we’ll see.

We have this scripture today, Ephesians 4:1-6. This makes my top 10 of scriptures.

We have our favorite scriptures, and this is definitely in mine, particularly the fourth chapter of the book of Ephesians. We’re not sure if Paul wrote it or not, but that doesn’t matter. There is a lot of truth in it and there’s a lot of wisdom in it that we can still take.

It’s not really clear what the issue was. You know, usually there’s a specific issue that a letter is written for. It’s not clear what it is in this book, but there is, especially in this chapter, and in the first three chapters, this sense that the writer wants this church to come together. That they were separated between Jews and Greeks, and they wanted them to come together and recognize that they were better together. In the course of this book, it does say about them being tossed and blown about with every wind of doctrine.

There’s some other information that is coming to this congregation, and whoever wrote the book didn’t like what was coming. There are several references to the devil. There’s a reference to cosmic principalities and powers, and there’s a reference to deceitful teachers. I’m not sure what they were saying, but this author was trying to bring them back to the wisdom of Paul because Paul started the church. He founded the church in Ephesus, and this is still the church in Ephesus.

What is clear is that it’s saying that we need to come together with our differences because we are one humanity. Then this part is near the end of what I was reading, and it’s interesting, the author lists seven things that are one, one body, one spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God. Now that’s important because the number seven is the number of completion in the Bible.

That’s just like one of those things you need to learn about the Bible that scholars have figured out over the years. There’s nowhere in the Bible that says if it’s seven things, that is complete, but that’s wholeness. So the world is complete and all is well and perfect when seven things happen. This is the wish of the seven things, or the author is trying to convince the church in Ephesus that these seven things are present, that even though they might have disagreements in the church, that’s okay.

In fact, I was listening to a podcast this week where they talked about the need for antagonism. We need to have some tension between us. We need to have differences of opinion so that we wrestle with where, we should be. What’s the best answer in this?

This is where it gets interesting because I want to say that I think we are in a moral moment.

Because there are a lot of truths being said right now, or claiming to be truths, and we are at a time when we need to determine whether we opt out or whether we opt to participate. What happens in the future, what the future’s gonna look like for our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren.

We can be about faith, hope, love, and peace, and the ways of Jesus. That’s who we say we follow, or we can be a different thing. I hear Christians, they call themselves Christians, they say they follow Jesus, but they follow someone who is all about power over others and being militant. They say, “We don’t agree with you, so you are the enemy”, and they’ll squash us, arrest us, detain us, and do all kinds of things.

There’s a lot of dehumanizing language in our society right now, and we need to hear that. If we’re able, we need to say, “That’s not what I want us to be.” That’s not who I think we are, and I don’t think that’s who we want to be in the future, because Jesus was not about that. Jesus never belittled somebody else. Jesus was never demeaning to people. Maybe to the Pharisees a little bit, he tried to teach them about humility, but he never put himself above everybody else. He had power with people, not power over.

There are tensions between our liberties and everybody getting to do what they want. But that’s when our liberties step on someone else’s rights. We have to figure out where the right point is between those. You don’t get to just take away someone else’s rights because you don’t like it. How do we figure this out? I don’t think we have that. We’re at a really important moment in time, and I think that there’s wisdom that we can rely on.

So what are we gonna be about?

I don’t know how many of you know who Archbishop Oscar Romero was, but he was an archbishop in El Salvador. He spoke against the militarization and authoritarian regime that was there, and this is one of his quotes. “When the church hears the cry of the oppressed, it cannot but denounce the social structures that give rise to and perpetuate the misery from which the cry arises.”

He took a strong stand at his time, and he was gunned down in the middle of a mass by a member of the military who didn’t appreciate what he had to say, but he stood for what he believed in. I think that’s part of this moral moment. We need to figure out who we are and what we stand for, and we need to stand for it. Because, by being silent, we allow the other.

Now that I’ve taken you to a dark place. Let me give you some light, because remember, Christ is the light that comes into the world. Well, I also found some light in a quote from a bluegrass band called The Jet Rows. I’ve never heard of them, but I found their quote.

“When people in power try to remove our humanity and our dignity. Art and music provide a reason for being. The simple act of making music in difficult times becomes an act of defiance and self-determination. Creation of art and music is cathartic and reinvigorating. It can inspire action, collaboration, and resistance. Music eases our minds during difficult times in our lives. It reminds us that we are a community. We are all in this mess together. Music reminds us that even when life is difficult or when the odds are stacked against us. Life itself is beautiful and worth celebrating.”

We are not called to be perfect, but God does call us to be our best selves. So let’s do that by listening more and speaking less, but speaking when we need to. Let’s listen to the pain of others, because I think that’s where a lot of this is coming from. It’s coming from a place of pain.

May it be so. Amen.

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I want to begin by thanking you for the time last month when I got new eyes.

Now, that was not a miracle. That is called perspective. My first eye after surgery compared to my eye, pre-surgery was fuzzy, but compared to the second eye after surgery. Wow, what a difference. It’s all perspective. What the piece about perspective is that there’s a bit of choice in that. I mean, not with how my eyes see, but boy, did I find color. Maybe I shouldn’t have chosen the colors to have my kitchen painted last year. Maybe I should have waited till I had my eyes done and taken off those, it was like I was wearing yellow glasses. My kitchen’s bright. I still like it, but it’s bright.

But that perspective piece is where we have agency and choice, and we can choose how we view others. That’s gonna be my point.

I said to somebody this week that our sermon is about loving your enemies. And somebody said, “Well, I don’t have any enemies.” Good for you. I wouldn’t say that I have enemies, but I have a shorter list. But it’s a choice for me to change that. I can choose differently. I can choose how I perceive that person.

When we see a person standing on the corner of Prince and King St asking for money. We can immediately think, “Oh, they’re lazy.” Or we could choose to think, “I wonder what’s going on in their life that has taken them to this point.” That’s a choice. That’s a perspective choice and I’m going to try and make that a theme in this sermon.

So, this scripture, Luke 6:27-36, has two big verses, love your enemies and do to others as you would have them do to you.

These scriptures are a part of Luke’s Sermon on the Plain, which is very similar to Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. And in both of those, they’re not identical; there are differences. Luke’s is called the Sermon on the Plain because he was among the people, whereas the Sermon on the Mount talks about him and the disciples going up to the mount and him talking to the multitudes.

But both of these verses are in both gospels, and they’re hard, especially that first one. The beauty of them being in those sermons is that they were not directed to one person or an individual; they were directed to the corporate body, to the community, because loving your enemies, that is just too hard by ourselves. We need each other to say, “Hey, you can do it. You can find that compassion, you can find that empathy within you. I know you’ve got that in you.” We need that.

The golden rule, and you might be thinking, “That’s not that hard. We teach that to our children because that’s a good thing.” Right, but do you follow it? If somebody cuts you off in traffic, are you following it? If somebody charges you more than you expected, how loving are you in that moment? How loving are you when the person you’re talking to is espousing a position and arguing for a position that makes your blood boil? That’s hard. That’s hard work.

This is an expectation. It’s God’s expectation about what the beloved community should be like. And that’s why we come together and have community, so we can do it together. Because you know what? We’re all gonna mess it up. We are all gonna fail these, maybe even every day. But we come together and we remind each other that God is still with us, that God’s love and God’s grace covers a multitude of sins, thank goodness.

So, in spite of all of our failure to meet the expectation, we are still loved and we are not alone.

We are kin. We are meant to be family. We are meant to see the Christ in each other. This always brings to my mind the concept of Ubuntu, which I learned from a book by Bishop Desmond Tutu. I am Ubuntu, says I am because you are. The divine in me is connected to the divine in you. The love in you is the same as the love that is in me. We are interconnected, and we need to remember that.

That’s where we start putting people as enemies or on our “less-liked” list. But I have to remember that it doesn’t matter; the reality is, we are 99% the same, every single person on this earth. It’s not just the people in this room. It’s not just people with white skin. It’s not just people of European ancestry, Western European ancestry. It is everybody, all of humanity. We are kin.

We are all children of God, and we are called to remember that first. We have to put that in our mind and let that be the lens.

Today, we’re talking about having kindness be the lens through which we look at the world. As I was going through this, I thought about Joanna Macy.

She passed away in July. I don’t know if you know who Joanna is or not, but she did a lot of teaching, and one of her pieces that she often shared was called the Shambhala Warrior Prophecy. I want to share that with you.

She says it says in a future time of great danger, when the earth will be ravaged and all humanity hangs by a thread, a new kind of warrior would emerge, not with weapons of destruction, but with tools of healing.

This is not a fantasy or a metaphor, but a call. Shambhala warriors will not destroy, but will dismantle poisoned systems with compassion and insight. They will be led by compassion. So that the suffering of the world breaks their hearts even when the world is unraveling or without shutting down or turning away, and the insight to see clearly the interconnectedness of life, even when, or especially when the world is unraveling.

The Warriors are not limited by race, gender, or belief, not chosen or ordained by institutions. They will be ordinary people, teachers, gardeners, artists, organizers, students, and elders trained in being present. Refusing to be numbed or distracted, willing to stand in love when fear would be easier.

This is who we are called to be. This is us. The question is, how will we train for them? How will we become these people? Because we don’t need any more heroes. We need people who can hold fire without burning others. Hear that again.

People who can hold fire without burning others doesn’t mean that we don’t get burnt.

People who have faced grief and choose to sing. The most radical thing any of us can do at this time is to be fully engaged and present in what is happening in the world. The choice is ours.

May it be so. Amen.

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Sermon By Rev. Dennis Lippart

Old preachers are like old baseball players and old gamblers.

They want to make one more bet or be in one more game. Old horse racers want to race one more time. We want to do one more sermon.

So, we agonize over what it is that we want to say to folks. Do we find the sermon that they need to hear and preach that sermon? Or do we find the sermon we’ve always wanted to preach and preach that sermon, or do we preach the one about the house of religions?

Like golf, you play it with other people, who keep their own score and nobody knows if you cheat or not, except you and God.

Then it occurred to me that I needed to take a chapter from my own book.

We are now all in English 101 at Mon University, and I had a group of students, not unlike all of you, that I started one of my classes by telling them that they were all poets. They’re all thinking, no, we’re not poets. We don’t like poetry. We don’t do poetry. And I said, yes, you are poets, and I can prove that you are all poets because I’m going to give you a poem and you’re gonna respond with the next line.

“Twinkle, twinkle little star…

“Up above the world so high,”

We are hardwired to see the world in patterns. Poetry is a pattern. You are all hardwired to be poets. Now, people have told you that you can’t do poetry. People have told you poems have to be a certain way. People have bored you to death with poetry. Teachers have made you memorize poems that you didn’t like. You’ve come to believe that you’re not poets, but you are.

There’s a huge amount of poetry in the Bible that we ignore because we’re not poets, so we don’t read the Psalms very often. We stay away from the books of wisdom. We don’t like to be inspired that way because it’s not who we are, but that is who we are. We are all hardwired as poets. Some people see their poetry in rhythm and sound, but we are all poets.

I am going to give you another line to complete, ready for it? “For God so loved the world…That he gave his only Son”

You are hardwired to love. You are hardwired to be the lovers of the world.

It goes back to Genesis when God creates men and women in his image. We have creation stories in the book of Proverbs, we have all kinds of language in the Bible about how God calls us to something. Jesus himself said, “Truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” (John 14:12)

Most of the people that Jesus talked to towards the end of his ministry, when he talked about whether there’s going to be a judgment or not, were people who didn’t even know they were doing it.

You are hardwired to be the lovers of the world, and people have told you your entire life that you can’t do that. You’re not young enough, you’re not wealthy enough, you’re not strong enough, you’re not intelligent enough, you’re not old enough. Sometimes you’re too young. People have given us reasons why we are not to consider ourselves to be created to be the lovers of the world.

I’m here to tell you that all of that’s untrue. Just like you are all poets and don’t know it. You are all lovers, and you haven’t found your way to love the world yet, but that’s what you’re made for. That’s what God has asked you to do.

One of the problems that preachers have is how deeply we wanna become scholars.

There was once upon a time when the only scholars in the community were preachers. Harvard University was founded because preachers were the most learned people in the community, and they wanted to get smarter.

I’ll tell you a conversation I had with one of the little old ladies in the church that I was telling them about something I’d found in the library, in the Pastor’s study. She said “Our pastors don’t read books.” And I thought, “I’m not gonna tell her that I write books.” If you don’t like pastors who read books, you’re certainly not gonna like pastors who write books.

There was something about being a scholar that became bad news at some point. We have to walk a fine line between how deeply we dive into the text. Because people don’t want to hear from scholars that they don’t know what’s going on in the Bible. Most people understand the Bible because they’ve been told their whole lives what it means. So they don’t pay any attention to what it says, which is the best reason for reading it as to find out what it actually says to us.

God created you to be lovers in the world. He did not create us to be in torment.

Sometimes the biggest tormentors in the world are simply other folks. Other folks who can’t be accepting, other folks who don’t understand, other folks who refuse to be loved or to love the world the way it’s supposed to be loved. God did not create us to be tormentors, and he did not create us to be in torment.

One of the gifts of the self-help programs is that in the first step of the program, you must come to believe that a power greater than yourself could restore you.

In our text today, we have a man who is insane. People don’t like others being insane, so he’s living out in the cemetery somewhere and a power greater than himself restored him to sanity. We don’t like to think that we’re insane, but the program makes us have two confessions. One is that there is a power greater than ourselves, and second, that we are not sane in the moment. We are not the lovers we are intended to be. We are not the people we are created to be. We’re not as whole as we want to be, and we need to be restored to who we are meant to be. But first we have to admit that we are broken, we are not whole, and we’re flawed. Once we make that admission, then healing is possible.

I wanted to point out that when I saw the title for today, and I never title anything, by the way. My editor titled all my books for me. When I saw the title for the sermon, I thought I could have written that book, but I didn’t. It’s not my title, it’s Rev. Kathryn’s title, but it speaks to the fact that we live in a world where we have somehow accepted being tormented as a normal state of affairs. And it’s not normal to be tormented or to be the tormentors.

One of the ways that we can be lovers in the world is to speak out when we see torment happening, either the people who are doing the tormenting or the people who are being tormented, and simply say, it’s not the way it’s meant to be. It’s not right. It’s not the blessed community. It’s not who we are as a people, because we are the people that God created us to be. And God so loved the world that He gave it you. There are days I like to think it’s working, and days I believe it’s not.

But God gave us each other. He gave us a blessed community where we could be more together than we are by ourselves.

May it be so. Amen.

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