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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As I was considering our theme of “Cultivating a Life of Delight”, I was curious about the difference between delight and joy.

I Googled it and AI says that delight is a more intense, often short-lived, feeling of pleasure. Where joy is a deeper, more intent, sustained state of happiness or contentment. Joy is knowing this is as good as it gets.

That’s a picture of both of my dogs. Tina made an appearance during COVID and I did a sermon with Tina. Tina stayed home today. Tina is not all about love. Tina has different ideas, but Molly is.

I was wondering when have you experienced delight? If you think about your life when did you last experience delight?

Was it seeing fireworks? Or maybe just sunrise or sunset, something very simple. Or the geese that have been moving through in the past month?

I know I get a sense of delight when either Carl runs up to me and gives me a hug, or Frankie, who’s our granddaughter, who somehow is 10 months old already. I can hardly believe that, but when I walk into the room, she gets so excited because I need to take her. She needs me to hold her. That gives me delight. Molly gives me delight because Molly wakes me up every morning. When she is ready to go for a walk, when she thinks it’s light enough for us to get up, she puts her paws on the bed. There are friends out there waiting for us. We need to go see friends.

I toyed with the idea of bringing Molly today, and then I was listening to one of the podcasts I listen to called “The One You Feed”. They had a guest by the name of Mark Rolands who wrote a book called The Word of Dog: What Our Canine Companions Can Teach Us about Living a Good Life. His theory is that dogs do not reflect on their lives. Molly had a stick this morning, so he argues that Molly didn’t pick up that stick and think “yesterday’s stick was better than this one. I’ll put this down and go look for another one.” Molly instead would think, “I got a stick!” She was loving it and she was in her glory. Then she found a friend, and she just had a walk which is why she’s calm now. I made sure we went to the field and saw as many friends as we could find this morning.

Then, she got to run and chase the ball with her friends, so she could come and be mellow now because she got all that energy out of her system. Now she’s ready for her morning nap. But what is it about a dog? I mean, I’ve had cats too. I was told that my cat acted like a dog, so maybe I’m not a good cat owner, because she came when I called. But with Molly, it doesn’t matter if I go away for seven hours or 15 minutes. When I walk in the house, I get the same greeting and it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to her for that moment.

She lives in the moment, so I kind of want to push back on his idea that they don’t reflect. No, I don’t think that they reflect, but even more. I don’t think that they judge. Like when I’m gone seven hours and I open the door, she doesn’t think, “Do you see what time it is? Where have you been?” She’s just excited that I am home. She doesn’t judge me or anyone else. I’ve never even heard her growl. She just doesn’t have it in her. Even when her friends are chewing on her, she just lays down. That’s not her nature, but I think she has a lot to teach us about how to live in the moment and just be so happy for what is.

I think that is the point of the Lord’s Prayer. ’cause this does all tie together. In case you thought I was like way down that rabbit hole.

I think that the point of the Lord’s Prayer is to remind us about how simple life can be. You know this scripture started with, don’t be like those people that have these long run on prayers that fill them with words. The point is just to say what you need to say, because God knows what you need to say anyway.

I think it’s also important or worth mentioning that the fact that Jesus said, this is how you pray in Matthew. Jesus says this is how I want you to pray in Luke because this also appears in Luke. The disciples ask Jesus, how are we to pray? And he gives them this. I think that’s a little different. That’s worth thinking about.

Did we need the prayer because we felt like we didn’t know how to pray, or did Jesus think that we needed the prayer because we weren’t doing it right? There are all these people, and Jesus wants to make it very simple and there’s more than three lines, but it comes down to three things.

The first part, our Father in Heaven is the contemporary English version because I wanted you to hear it a little differently. Help us honor your name. So it’s about acknowledging that God is God and we are not. We need to acknowledge where we are in this relationship. We are in a relationship with God, but we are not God. God can do things and will give us things that we may not have the ability to give each other. Let’s lift up God first. Personally, I always try to start every prayer with a thank you. Thank you God. Remembering that God is God and I am not.

Then “thy come and set up your kingdom. So that everyone on earth will obey you as you are obeyed in heaven.” That would be the perfect world. If everyone was able to operate as God operates, we would be in utopia. We would be giving each other good gifts. We would be caring for each other. There would be justice for the poor and the oppressed. The prisoner would be released and this blind would see. It would be all for everyone. I’m going to remind you that I don’t like the kingdom language because it’s being used for a different purpose now that has nothing to do with justice and peace. I’m instead trying to use the language of God’s beloved community. So we pray that God set up God’s beloved community. That’s also who we are trying to be together as a congregation, we are trying to be God’s beloved community with each other and with the greater community. Loving each other is challenging because we have a lot of fundamental differences, but trying to bridge that with love.

Lastly, we’re able to ask for what we need. “Give us our food for today”, we’re used to saying, give us our daily bread. Give us our food for today. Do you notice that? That doesn’t say, give us a fridge full. Make sure my pantry’s full. It gives us what we need to eat today. My guess is most of us don’t live that way. I know I don’t live that way. I’ve got enough food in my house for more than today, but I think this is reminding us that all we need is food for today because we are to trust God will also give us food tomorrow. Tomorrow we will ask for food for that day and God will make sure that we have the food that we need. So it’s a reliance on God. I think it also reminds us of the Israelites in the wilderness who were given Naan every day to sustain them. But if they collected more than they needed for one day. Do you remember what happened? It spoiled. God had a plan because he wanted to make sure that they were relying on God. So there’s something to that, we live our lives relying on God’s gifts.

The English contemporary version says, “Forgive us for doing wrong as we forgive others.” Before Covid, we had a conversation where we looked at this and we said debt means financial. Trespasses are something when somebody walks on my property. We don’t use those ancient understandings of those words. We took both of those out and we simplified the version it to “forgive us as we forgive others.” It doesn’t matter what the issue was. It doesn’t matter what the hurt or the pain was. We know that we have hurt someone else and we have been hurt. We need forgiveness for the pain and the hurt that we have caused. We are willing to extend forgiveness to those who hurt us, and that’s not easy. It is our challenge.

Then “to keep us from being tempted and protect us from evil”, it used to say, “lead us not into temptation.” We changed it to be,” Let us not fall into temptation again, looking for God’s protection.” Which I think is closer to this version than the older version.

Our Lord’s Prayer lacks the ending and the blessing, the glory, and the power. It’s not there because it wasn’t there initially. That was the early church that added it. It should be a mirror for me. I like circular things, so for me it takes me back around to the beginning. “Blessing and honor, glory and power be unto you, oh God, like holy is your name, you are God and I am not.” It’s just that reminder.

But in the scripture that I read today, after this, Jesus uses two more verses to make sure that we understand that the forgiveness verse is really important. That’s where he says if you don’t forgive others, you will not be forgiven.

That’s hard. Some people are hard to forgive depending on how badly they’ve hurt us. That’s the challenge of being a Christian, is to forgive.

So where does this leave us? Well, I think this leaves us in a place that reminds us that we need to pray. We need to pray and we need to pray every day. Jesus expects that we pray every day,

I’m going to give you the challenge to pray the Lord’s prayer, every time, whether you use the version that you’ve always known. Or whether you go to the Matthew Scripture and look it up, or you look up other versions. Try out some different ones. See how it changes it for you. Pray it for the rest of Lent and see what happens. See how your life changes.

What does it do by saying that every day that you pray, you’re praying for the world. For justice to prevail in the world, for you to have enough food for the day and that you will be forgiven as you are willing to forgive. It puts God in charge, not us. It reminds us. To look for the gifts of God.

Now, I said that I was going to end every sermon this season with these words that remind us that it matters how we are living right now because the children are watching.

We can experience delight every day if we are looking to be delighted by God, if we are looking for the spirit to show up, we will see it. But if you’re not looking for it. You’re gonna pass it by and miss it.

So each day I hope that you ask, how may I delight in you? Oh, God. We can add that to the prayer. How may I delight in you?

Now the words from Steven Sondheim’s Into the Woods. “Careful the things you say, children will listen. Careful the things you do, children will see and learn. Children may not obey, but children will listen. Children will look to you for which way to turn, to learn. Be careful before you say, listen to me, children will listen.”

May it be so. Amen.

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Our theme today is “Cultivating a Life of Curiosity.“

As much as I thought about that, I could not get myself past the show, Ted Lasso on Apple TV. I will play a clip so you have a better idea of what I’m talking about. To set up the clip, Ted was a soccer coach in America who was hired to coach an English football team. In this scene there are two of the main characters, Rupert, who used to own the team, and his ex-wife. Rupert has just acquired significant ownership of the team and he has just announced that his new wife will be joining him and his ex-wife in the owner’s box every game. He bought enough stock in the team that he could set the line up if he wanted to, because he doesn’t like the way Ted’s coaching the team. They ended up making this wager that if Rupert wins, he gets to set the lineup for the rest of the season. But if Ted wins, Rupert doesn’t go near the owner’s box and he lets his ex-wife alone.

Are we curious? Do we ask the questions?

The point that Ted was making is that too quickly we become judgmental just as Rupert was, but unless we ask the questions, we will never truly understand one another. It is far easier to judge, to make snide remarks, and to write people off than it is to get to know them and try to understand them,

That’s not how Jesus lived. Jesus went to people and he asked questions. He asks Zacchaeus, why are you in the tree? He asked the Samaritan woman at the well, why are you at the well at this time of the day? He asked the questions of people because he wanted to get to know those people. He wanted to hear their story because when we hear each other’s stories we understand each other so much more and can have more grace for one another. That’s where our empathy comes from, our compassion.

We have these Proverbs, these wisdom teachings of Jesus in Matthew 7:7-14. Remember I said context matters. This is what Jesus was saying to those who believed in him, who followed him, and for them this was his expectation. They were to do unto others as they would want to be treated. We have to remember that.

Jesus is Jewish, he’s talking to a Jewish audience, and it’s about how they are different from the rest of the community. That’s a huge part of Judaism. What makes them distinct? That may be harder for us to know in this context. If you don’t know a lot of people who are Jewish, we might be able to answer the question of how Amish people make themselves different in our community. That might be an easier question for us to answer because they do the same thing. They have ways about them that make them distinct.

Christ was calling us to be distinct. In our world, we should live differently. We shouldn’t blend with society. Here are some things that we are to do.

Ask, Seek, and Knock. We have to be looking for God, asking for God’s help. But this scripture gets taken advantage of. I think it’s because of the descriptions that he gave because it sounds like we should just ask for material things. I don’t believe that God is some type of ultimate Santa Claus. That if we ask for a beautiful house, somebody’s just gonna call us up and give us a beautiful house. I don’t think it works that way.

This is where people sometimes lose their faith when there’s a diagnosis and they ask for healing, but they don’t get a cure. I wanna say that we don’t know what healing looks like and sometimes maybe being whole is joining eternity. That’s a hard one and I know that.

But I do think if we ask for the gifts of God, think back to our last season with “The Economy of Jesus.” The gifts of God, are love, grace, compassion, empathy, self-control, and patience. Those gifts, if we ask for them, God will help us find them. If we look for a way forward, if we ask God, to help us to figure out where we are to go or what we are to do, the path will become clear to us. It may not be where we wanna go or it may not be what we wanna do because God doesn’t work like that.

I think that leads us down to the narrow gate. So the easy road is the wide gate. Do you remember where it said? it leads to destruction. It’s the narrow gate and the hard road that leads to life. That’s not what we wanna hear. We wanna hear that we can just ask God for a nice, easy life and it will all be roses and sunshine, and everything’s going to work the way we want it to. We’re always gonna be happy and we’re never gonna experience sorrow or pain, but that isn’t it. That’s not the story of Jesus. Jesus was the one who was willing to die on the cross for us because of his love. That is not an easy road.

But in order to do all of this, I think that there is a level of humility that Jesus is also calling us to.

It didn’t say that in the scriptures. It did not say, you must be humble. But, I think that there’s a humility and a vulnerability that is also needed. We don’t like either of those words. Our society says when people are vulnerable, then they’re weak, or they’re losers.

I disagree and I think that Jesus modeled for us letting go, and being vulnerable to meet people where they are. I think that we are called to meet each other, to get to know each other, and to ask questions.

We have to be willing to acknowledge that we don’t know everything. We don’t know everything that we think we know. We have to own that. We don’t know everything and we don’t have everything that we need. Not really. You may have the physical comforts that you need, but if you look within yourself, do you have all of the love, grace, compassion, patience, and peace that you need? My guess is if we’re honest, none of us do.

That’s where we can be more curious. We can be curious within ourselves, what is that within me that drives me to act like that? What is it within me that makes me think that I’m not loved? Maybe that’s an old story you need to reexamine.

Meister Eckhart’s quote invites us to approach life as a child because they haven’t lost their curiosity yet, and we can work on building our curiosity muscle. We can work on being more curious and asking more questions.

That’s actually how we’re going to bring ourselves together because none of us holds the real truth. But the truth is in the midst of our stories. With humility and a sense of curiosity, we can seek to understand and have more empathy.

This past week on Thursday night, we had the Clatterbucks here for Mocktails & Meaning.

The Clatterbucks lost their transgender son to suicide almost a year ago. They named the pain and sorrow that they still carry around. He was surrounded by people who loved and affirmed him for being who he was. But the rhetoric in our county, state, and country was so hard. It told him that he was not welcome. It wanted to erase him, and so he did.

How we treat others matters.

What we are called to do is to love. What are the two commandments? Love God with all of our being and love our neighbor as ourselves. There’s a third because that means you have to love yourself.

The next thing to do in every moment is the most loving. What is the most loving thing I can do in this moment? That’s what God wants us to do. And I told you I was going to end every sermon with these words because I think we need to be thinking about this right now. We need to be thinking about what we are telling the children by our actions and our words. What are we teaching them that they are learning for when they are adults? The wisdom of Stephen Sondheim.

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

May it be so. Amen.

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 As we start to talk about meaning, meaning answers the why.

As I was thinking about this and the fact that it’s Lent, I’m wondering if any of you gave something up for Lent. You don’t have to raise your hands, this can be internal. I’m not going to put anybody on the spot, but if you did, my question is why? Why did you choose to give something up for Lent? Because I think the why is important.

Is the why, because it’s something that you always do? Does it give you something to talk about with friends? Do you wanna prove to yourself that you have some self-control so that when it comes to Easter you can pat yourself on the back? Why? Or is it because that’s what the church used to tell you to do? I remember those days.

As I told the children, we assign meaning to things, to people, and even to experiences. If I asked what was your first car, you probably remember it, because that was a significant point in your life. I know some of you are just getting there. You’ll remember it.

Our parents are important in our lives and their words and how we experience them affect us deeply. Because they’re an important person to us.

Seeing a spectacular sight. That’s what’s different for each of us.

The Northern Lights is on my bucket list. I went to Maryland for a trip and Pennsylvania saw the Northern Lights. I have lived in this county all my life and I go to Maryland once and you all see the Northern Lights. That’s an experience that once you’ve done it, you remember that.

It might be a smile or a hug from a child that we deem priceless.

Now, I’m wondering how many of you looked at the picture to the left and what meaning you assigned to that picture. That is the oldest slave shack to still exist in the United States. It is in the Virginia Chipokes Plantation State Park. Now that you know that, that might change what you were thinking about that picture.

As we begin to get into these parables today, there’s a few things that I want to name before we go there.

The first thing that we need to remember with all scripture is, that it doesn’t matter what scripture you open to and read, all scripture was written for a specific time and a specific audience. In fact, the reality is those writers had no idea we would still be reading their works 2,500 years later. If you think about the Hebrew Bible, and placing so much value on everything they said. They didn’t know at the time that they would become part of the number one bestseller of all time. That’s good to remember that it wasn’t written specifically with us in mind.

It’s also good to remember that, for that time, they understood what a kingdom was. There are all of these parables that refer to the kingdom of heaven. They were reminded of their history when the kingdom of God was under King David, and that was a wonderful time for the Jewish people. That was a time under David and Solomon. Life was good. But they also know that there are bad kingdoms, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and now the Romans.

The Romans, we call it an empire, but it’s the same idea. That there is one leader and he’s deciding exactly how life is going to be. The good, bad, and the indifferent. Being part of God’s kingdom or the kingdom of heaven was a good thing. Good things came out of that because God’s not the same as the kings or the emperors. God is a different kind of king. But, that kingdom language today is associated in our country with Christian nationalism, which has a very definite political position that I do not support.

So, I’m not going to use the language of the kingdom of heaven when I talk about the scripture. I’m just naming that for you the meaning behind that.

It’s also good to know that the Greek word that is used for the kingdom is Basilea. Basilea means the spiritual reign. The future physical manifestation of God’s rule, and it encompasses the authority, sovereignty, and royal power of God, as well as the community of believers who acknowledge his lordship. I’m going to refer to it as the beloved community. I’m just explaining my language and why I’m doing it that way.

I know this is a lot of unpacking before we get there, but I’m going to leave a lot of unpacking of the parables to you. The other part is we have to remember that in a parable, there is always a surprise factor. Parables were their stories meant to tell the truth about God and about the way God would want life to be oriented. But they’re also meant to shock us and make us go, well, that’s ridiculous.

Last week I had said to you that it’s good to ask questions of the scripture.

If there’s a scripture that doesn’t sound right, sit with it and pray about it. Look it up, look at other places, look for other words. You can do a Google search on a particular word and it’ll tell you other passages that that word is used in and you can go a little deeper because it’s in the questions that we get to the meaning. After all, this is about meaning today.

What we want to know is what truth does this name about the beloved community of God? The actual scripture says the kingdom of heaven. So it begins with the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed. So what is this trying to tell us? Or we could say, what is the surprise that something that small can have a huge impact? We know that seeds are small, and some seeds will grow into a tree eventually such as an acorn will grow an oak tree. But the tiniest of seeds don’t usually grow us the largest of plants, shrubs, or trees. But it does remind us of the potential.

The potential for every small thing. Whether it’s a small thing you do. Whether you feel like you are a small person, what can you do in this situation? You might be able to do quite a lot just by doing small things that can have a larger impact. The yeast. I considered bringing in my sourdough starter and sitting here working with bread in front of you today. But, you know, what’s the point of the yeast? Why would you hide, and we always hide, yeast in the flour? Because it helps it to rise. It helps it to become more than just flour. Put too much yeast in it and I’ve blown the top off my sourdough starter. That’s a thing, a little bit can transform it.

The hidden treasure. This is a great one. Do you remember what I said about that? That’s where the man goes and he finds a treasure. Then he re-buries it, sells everything he has, and buys the plot. Buys that that piece of land. Do you have any questions about that? Don’t you wonder why he reburied it? If you found it, why would you put it back in the ground? Why not keep it? Go sell it. Display it. Do something with it. Give it to somebody. But he didn’t. He put it back in the ground. Why did he buy the rest of the land? My thinking is he thought that there was more. What does it teach us?

There is this sense that once you find a little bit, you want more of it and you’ll do whatever you can to get more of the beloved community.

How about the merchant who finds the pearl and sells everything he has for one pearl? Does that bother you? Would you do that? Would you sell everything that you have? Maybe not for a pearl, but what would you do to know that you are part of the beloved community of God? Because that’s what the pearl is. That’s what the pearl represents. What would you do for that assurance that you are part of the kingdom?

Then we have the net that they cast and a fish of every kind is brought in. The beloved community of God is inclusive. Later, we’ll figure out who’s the righteous and who’s the evil. But first, God wants everyone to be invited. Everyone comes into the beloved community of God and we’ll figure it out later.

Then, there’s the scribe that says that there is old wisdom and that there is new wisdom.

I look at that and hear there’s the law and the prophets and there is Jesus. Jesus says, I did not come to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfill it. There’s the old wisdom and the new wisdom and they exist together. There is the way we’ve always done it and the new things that we can do. They can exist together and we can determine what is the best wisdom for this time.

It is with Jesus. So the law still stands, but Jesus brought in all these Gentiles with the Jewish community, those who the Jewish community had thought were outcasts. Jesus says, no, they’re not, they’re part of the community. Everybody, it’s that inclusive net. Everybody’s coming in.

Because at the end of the day, love wins.

I think that’s the biggest piece that I want you to focus on. The parables can be confusing, but no matter what happens, our focus needs to be on doing the most loving thing. I do believe that love wins. By doing what we can, we make meaning of it. Meaning is not something you can buy at the store. It’s what you do. It’s how it affects you.

The other thing this tells us is that we’re not responsible for the outcomes. God takes care of that. God takes care of it and God will judge.

So at this moment, what are we learning? What are we learning right now in our lives? I’m not going to answer that question. That’s a question for us to sit with. What are we learning? What is the meaning that we want to make of this time in our lives? This time we are living through together. What do we want this to be? What meaning do we want to give to this?

I know there’s a lot of people that are scared. There’s a lot of chaos, and it can feel like every day is a new day in many ways depending on what else is going on in our lives. We are called to let love win, we need to be reminded that we are resurrection people and that before you get to rise, there has to be a death. We’re anxious as we see systems breaking. But a just system, which we don’t have, we don’t have just systems. A just system cannot come in until the systems that are in place are broken. I know that’s not good news. But remember, we go through the pain.

We go through the dark night, and in the end, love wins. There is resurrection, there is new life, there is justice, love, hope, and peace. We don’t know when that’s going to happen, or how it’s going to happen. But I’m going to read this to you every week. Because everything is meaningful. This time that we’re living through, not only do we need to think about what it is for us, but we need to be thinking about what we are telling and teaching our children in this moment.

Because they’ll need to remember this. So this is, these are the first couple of verses to the finale of Steven Sondheim’s musical, “Into the Woods”. “Careful the things you say, children will listen. Careful the things you do, children will see and learn. 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”, children will listen.“

May it be so. Amen.

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