During the Bosnian War back in the late 90s, the Serbs had completely surrounded Sarajevo and shells and bombs were being dropped. It was dangerous to go out into the street and yet in the middle of that violence, the symphony players, the orchestra players came out to the middle of the square and started playing music.

They started playing because they needed to give the people hope. Hope that violence didn’t have the last say. Hope that there is another day to come.

I didn’t find any pictures of that, but I found this picture from 2015, where the Baltimore Symphony came out during riots in the city. Again, they tried to bring the people hope. That we can live a different way, we can make different choices, and goodness and love can win.

That’s our story. That’s the Christian story. That goodness and love will win the day, rather than violence.

In the midst of everything that’s going on, we can be overcome by our fears. But we have to remember that we worship a God that is bigger than us, that is bigger than our fear, that is bigger than our issues, and who is calling us to be part of the solution rather than the problem.

We are called to see how our brothers and sisters, our siblings, are struggling. Those who are being discriminated against because of the color of their skin, or their language, or their sexual orientation, or their disability. We need to see how they are being hurt. And we need to be part of the solution to making this a better world for everyone.

The story that I shared about Isaiah (Isaiah 6:1-8) is his call story. Isaiah had a vision. This wasn’t something that physically happened. He said it was like a dream, but he wasn’t sleeping. So, we don’t think that an actual hot coal touched his lips or burned his lips. But, in it God qualified him to be a prophet.

There was nothing about Isaiah that made him special in, that’s why I shared that reading of it because I loved the way it brought in so much more of the story, including how unprepared Isaiah felt because God qualifies. the called. He doesn’t call the qualified. Hear that again.

God qualifies the called. He doesn’t call the qualified.

So all of the things that we are called to do, we may not feel prepared to do. We may not feel like we’re ready to do it or qualified, or worthy, but God calls us anyway.

God will give us what we need to do the task we’re called to do. God will qualify us. So, when our fears, like Isaiah’s fears, of not being ready. Because I think that’s probably closer to the story. I don’t think anybody, when God calls, says “Yes! I was waiting for this! I’m perfect! You knew it!” Because that person’s not ready.

But that God comes to us and the only thing that fights our fear, is perfect love. That’s what God brings. Perfect love. Perfect love casts out all fear. That’s what we say. So, we allow that love. We have to accept that love. Because we have a choice there. That’s what makes it faith. We have a choice. We’re not forced to say yes to God. But God calls to us and looks for our yes, looks for us to turn to God and say, “help me, help me in this. I’m not ready to do this. I’m not prepared. Help me do this.” Then we will find the strength, the comfort, the courage to do things that we never thought we could do, to go to uncomfortable places.

I talked again about the Trinity, and how you understand the Trinity.

I did have a nice Catholic diagram that was trying to say, God is this and is not this, and I read a piece by a colleague that said, in seminary he tried to define the Trinity and his professor said, “In 2,000 years no one’s defined the Trinity, so how do you think you’re going to do it in a paper?”

I thought, how do I think I’m going to do it in a sermon? But God can be experienced in so many ways. Some people experience the Creator God.

This is the Milky Way over Colorado. I got permission from God. That picture showed up on my Google Chromecast and I was like, “I love that picture.” That is a picture I can connect to. And he gave me permission to use it in worship.

You hear some people say this, that they connect to God when they’re in nature, when they’re out in the woods, at the beach. With their hands in the dirt, seeing the sights, being part of creation. Some of us really connect to God through the stories of Jesus. Through those stories that help us to know how to live.

Because that God with skin on did a lot of the same things we do. There were lots of issues with other people that he walked into and helped. We can walk into those issues too and help others. Then others prefer the Spirit, divine, holy one, higher power. The words you use are not as important as your ability to connect with God in some way, in whatever way works best for you.

That’s how we know this. The idea of the Trinity didn’t come out of the Bible. The closest we have is, is Matthew 28:19, where Jesus says in the Great Commission, “Go out and baptize in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” We call that a Trinity.

What I want you to do this week is listen deeply within yourself to what is God saying to you?

What are you hearing in your innermost self? What’s truest in your heart? I use the words of the still small voice inside. If that doesn’t relate to you, then listen to the people around you. Where do you hear God? Listen there, in whatever way works for you, to what is God asking you to be about. Because every one of us has a purpose. We are still called to love.

If nothing else, we’re called to let go of those boxes that we try to put people in. Because if we’re honest, none of us fits in a box. There is no one that a box fits perfectly. We’re complex creatures and we have to learn to love one another and we have to learn to love others.

So I’m wondering, what is God calling you to do today? What is God calling you to be about? There’s good work to be done in the world.

I’ve been promoting the education piece, Pennsylvania is at an intense unique point in time where we are going to change the way we fund Pennsylvania public education. We have to. The way we’ve been doing it has been declared unconstitutional. They have to do something different. How they do it differently remains to be seen. But there’s some of us that are doing a 40 day flood to our legislators, saying “You’ve got to fix this. You can’t let this go on. The children in poorer school districts need a good education. They deserve it just as much as everyone else. So let’s fix the system.”

We also have a group that’s getting together that’s worried about homelessness or affordable housing and especially in Lancaster. I mean, we heard that’s a state issue. Affordable housing is an issue across the state. There’s all kinds of bills in Harrisburg right now to try to address it. But if affordable housing is the thing that keeps you up at night, then talk to me about that. Because I can help you get connected so your voice can make a difference.

Whatever it is. Everyone can do something because it can be as simple as a smile. It can be as simple as allowing someone else to be heard. So much of life is about recognizing and acknowledging one another.

Let us be about this very important work that God has put before us.

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If you have been in the church for a while, then you recognize that today is Pentecost Sunday.

Pentecost is the 50th day following Easter. The normal Pentecost reading is one where we have all those names that nobody wants to get stuck with. All those names that nobody can pronounce and be ashamed of fumbling through them.

Then we have this experience of tongues of fire and wind. But, my sense is that most of us probably have not experienced tongues of fire and wind that way. That’s not how we’ve experienced the Holy Spirit. In talking with the Worship Commission in preparation for this Sunday, what they said to me was, “you know, it seems like the Holy Spirit is really hard to understand. We’re really not sure that we know that much about it.”

So I put this graphic here because the Holy Spirit is confusing. Just in Scripture alone, all of those things represent the Holy Spirit. It is represented in wind and in fire, but it’s also represented by the hand of Jesus, by a dove that descends, by anointing oil. Sometimes it’s a cloud, sometimes it’s a seal, sometimes it’s in water at baptism. There’s so many different images for the spirit, that the spirit is confusing.

I thought rather than sit with the Pentecost and what happened, where we give credit for the church being created, I thought it might be worthwhile to just try to unpack a little bit about the Spirit.

In these readings that we had today, John 15:26-27 & 16:4b-15, we heard some things about the Spirit. The Greek word is paraclete, which in the NRSV gets translated as advocate. But the word comforter is a lot closer to what it really means. It’s not just one who goes before you, although the Spirit does help us intercede in our prayers with God. But it also said that the Spirit comes to us in our weakness, The Spirit pleads our case, like the advocate, but the Spirit also convinces the world of its sin. And it explains or brings the availability of God’s goodness. It brings deliverance from judgment. It guides us into all truth, and it tells us about the future. The Spirit praises Christ.

All of those things are just in the scriptures that we read this morning about the Spirit. The Spirit really is like a first responder that’s coming to us, that is with us whenever we need it.

All we need to do is ask for the Spirit’s guidance, for the Spirit’s comfort and help in whatever situation we’re in.

Then, it’s up to us to listen. That’s where I think, probably more than anything, we miss out. Because, I think, the Spirit even comes to us in ways that we didn’t ask, in ways that we miss, because we’re so focused on our own agendas and what we’ve got to do. It comes in gentle ways.

So, there’s a lot of ways to experience the Spirit. But the Spirit is there to help guide us to remember that Jesus is our helper. That Jesus is there for us to help us with our sin. In fact, sin here, in this scripture that I read, means not abiding in Jesus. It’s a theological understanding of sin rather than a moral one, right?

Sin can also be the injustices that we allow within our communities, within the bigger county, state and world. When we allow people to be hurt, that is not of God. Actually, that’s the challenge with listening to the spirit is that we have to determine what is spirit and what is ego.

For me one of the big ways in which I tell the difference is that spirit will always lead us towards life, towards wholeness and peace, love and joy.

It is an expansive peace. It is not about retracting. It’s not about dividing us. The Spirit doesn’t want us, like the disciples, to be hold up in a room, shuttered from the world.

That’s why the Spirit breaks in that way comes to them and says, “it’s okay.” In that Pentecost story from Acts 2 that we didn’t read, the Spirit comes to all of these people. People that would have been from Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, and Jordan, and says, “you need to work together. Stop dividing. Come together.” They were able o come together and agree. That’s the beauty of the Spirit.

But when we hear things within us that encourage us towards mean spiritedness or violence, that is not of God. That is of our egos. So telling the difference is something that’s the most important thing. Because the Spirit does come in different ways. We might be like Samuel, who actually hears the voice calling him. Or it might be like Elijah, where the Spirit is not in the wind or the fire, or the Earthquake. But the, Spirit is in that still small voice within.

That’s the one that I particularly relate to because I find that the spirit more like nudges me. I’ll be walking along and all of a sudden somebody’s name will come into my mind. Like, “Yep, you haven’t talked to that person in a while.” So often when I do that and I’m thinking, I’m late, I should have called them last week. I should have gone yesterday. But, I get there and they look at me and they say, this is the perfect time for you to be here because we put all that other stuff on ourselves.

But the spirit is there, if we’re just paying attention to those little nudgings.

If you feel called to call somebody, if they’re coming to your mind, do it. Pick up the phone. Give them a call. They may need to hear from you right now. There may be something going on that you don’t know. Or maybe, you may be like Mary and actually see a vision of an angel.

There’s so many ways to experience the spirit. I heard a colleague speak this week and was talking about the spirit in a very prescribed way. I think the church has tried to control the spirit. The church has tried, just like we’ve tried to control God. Instead of thinking and remembering that we are made in the likeness of God, we try to make God in the likeness of us. We try to control what the Spirit does and we say, “this is Spirit, but this isn’t.” Maybe I’m doing that too with this mean spiritedness versus wholeness and love, but I think there are so many times we want to put a frame around what the Spirit is, who God is or who Christ is, and the answer is actually yes and much more.

Our versions of God and the Spirit and Christ are too small. We can’t comprehend all of God. We can’t comprehend all of the Spirit or even all of Christ. Jesus was our best way to know God and it gave us an understanding of who God was as one of us. But that was just a piece and there is so much more.

So I hope that you think about the Spirit and I put this picture because it’s a transformation. It’s striking because usually a caterpillar will go into a cocoon or a chrysalis in order to transform and it appears to be doing that without it. It’s going right from caterpillar to finding wings.

How might we transform if we listen to the spirit? What is the spirit calling you to be about today? If it’s calling you towards love, peace and joy, then it is the Spirit. And it is not just of you. And I hope you choose to follow. May it be so.

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Testimony is a word that we don’t use a lot.

Testimony is what the evangelicals do. Those people that we don’t want to be. That’s what the white protestant churches said. We don’t want to be like those people. They force people to have conversion moments. That’s not who we want to be. I want to say today that I think we have done ourselves a disfavor in this because testimony can be as simple as sharing our story.

Just as Emmanuel did last week, for those of you who heard or were here last week. Testimony is just about sharing a piece of our story. That is how we encourage one another in faith. It hurts us that we don’t do that more often.

I will admit that those testimonies, the way some churches have put them out or created them, it’s almost like there’s just this formula. As long as you say that you’ve received Jesus into your heart, then you’re good. That’s all that needed to be done. We know that there’s a lot more to it.

When I think of my story, it’s not a once and done thing. I’ve had many moments and my faith has grown through the moments. I think that’s part of what’s supposed to happen. The heartaches that we all carry, the pain that we have gone through, the struggles. When we admit that, we can see the places where our stories may connect or they may touch. They’re not the same. It’s not the same pain. It’s not the same struggles, but there is something about going through the pain and the grief that helps us grow, in our stories and in our faith.

I want to start today with the scripture that was read for us, 1 John 5:9-13.

Let me begin by saying that I should never assume what you know or do not know. This scripture that was read comes out of the first letter of John. That is not the same thing as the gospel of John. It is a letter further to the back of the Bible when you’re looking for it. It is meant as a type of testimony. It is meant to encourage the faith of the believers of the faithful. The scripture that we read was all about testimony. For as much as I’m not really a fan of the word testimony, it appears God’s going to make sure we talk about it today.

God says, it begins with saying if you believe human testimony, if you believe the story of another. If you believed Emmanuel’s story last week, if you believe the story of anyone else you’ve talked to, any of your friends or family, then you should believe God’s story even more. Some people set it up like that, it means that God’s story is the only testimony that humans aren’t. It’s not meant to do that. It’s meant to just say, Our stories are true and God’s story can be trusted even more because our stories do change over the years when we get some distance away from the event where our perceptions change about it, but God’s story doesn’t change and it comes down to the simple verse.

It was verse 11, 1 John 5:11. “The testimony is this. God gave eternal life to us and this life is in His Son.” It’s meant to jar our memories or to be a parallel, almost a paraphrase of John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only son. That whosoever believes in him may not perish, but have eternal life.” It’s meant to help us connect the dots and say, “Oh, I’ve heard that before.” That’s a good thing to remember. It’s naming that God stands opposed to the world because the world is the way in which our capacity to hurt one another. We have a tremendous capacity to create pain and conflict with each other, and God’s love is in opposition to that.

Then the scripture that I read from John’s gospel, John 17:6-19, I heard that as well, it’s unique.

Let’s start there. It’s unique in that it’s the first time we get to hear Jesus pray about the disciples specifically. Usually when Jesus prays, he goes off by himself. It says Jesus went off into the mountain and prayed. We don’t hear much about it. We hear it in the Garden of Gethsemane. There we get to hear some words of Jesus. But this time, Jesus is praying to God about the disciples right in front of the disciples. So they’re hearing it. It’s meant to be a blessing. Jesus wants the disciples to understand that they are blessed.

Now I want to say, I want you to understand that you too are blessed.

You’re not just blessed so that you can pat yourself on the back and feel good about yourself, but that you are blessed to be a blessing. You have a story so that you can share it. and encourage others.

Jesus knows that the disciples are about to face one of their hardest times. When Jesus is arrested and taken away and crucified, they are going to feel like their world has fallen apart. He wants them to know that he has asked God to be with them, to protect them. It says it a couple of times, protect them. He wants them to know God is with them even when they don’t feel like it.

This is where this touches my story.

Some of you know, some of you are aware of parts of my story, but one of the parts of my story is that my father died when I was two years old. My father was a UCC minister. But I have absolutely no memory of him. So, through my life, I have tried to figure out who he is. Just because I thought it would be appropriate, I put a picture of him here for you to see.

This past week, I went to clergy convocation. Clergy convocation is when all four conferences in Pennsylvania, so all the clergy of Pennsylvania in the United Church of Christ, were invited to gather and it’s a time of learning, but our focus was on healing. Healing me. Healing you. Healing us.

At that convocation, A gentleman came up to me and said, I was a friend of your father’s. They went to F&M together. They went to the seminary together. He said, I need to talk to you. I was both excited and scared at the same time. Anxious in all those ways. I thought, “oh, there’s so many questions I have for you.” Because I really wanted to know who my dad was as a pastor. What was his thing? What was his specialty? Where were his passions?

But when we gathered, I decided that I needed to listen. I didn’t end up asking any questions. I just received his story. What he wanted to tell me was the last conversation he had where my dad told him that he was okay dying at 26. That was okay. That all he wanted was to spend as much time as he could with my mother and I. What that told me, which I think was underneath all of my questions, was that my dad loved me. That’s what I really needed to hear. More than anything else. The rest is frivolous in comparison. It wasn’t what I thought I wanted. But it was what I needed. His testimony affirmed me.

We can do that for one another. That’s who we are called to be. We’re called to be people who are willing to open up our lives and share the hard stuff.

Because everybody’s got that safe superficial stuff. But we’re supposed to look at the hard stuff. Because that’s who we are. When we can see each other’s stories, that’s when we break open our hearts, we learn to have more compassion for others. Then we can walk with another. Not because we’re better or because we have any special gift, except that we’ve gone through the grief. We know what that’s like.

We can encourage one another.

I will encourage you because I can tell you, God can handle all of your words. Because I spent years railing at God for the situation of my life.

I just had the opportunity the other night to listen to another person’s story who told me about how they were physically and emotionally abused as a child by a stepfather. I said, me too. Me too. I know what that’s like. They didn’t know that about me. It’s amazing the places where our lives connect.

But we are blessed to be a blessing to others. That’s who we are.

But when we keep our stories to ourselves, then we’re denying that. We’re holding back that encouragement that is meant for someone else. Because we are not alone. We have one another and the Spirit is here encouraging us to be here for each other. To be a shoulder to cry on, to be one who laughs with us, who celebrates with us, and will walk with us, even through the valley of the shadow of death. That’s who we are.

In John 17:13, it said “And now I am coming to you. I have told them many things while I was with them So that they would be filled with my joy.”

Have you looked for the joy in your life? What does that look like to you? Where do you see the joy of Christ?

Because let’s celebrate that. Our white Protestant pietism gets in our way and we can be the chosen instead of acting like we’re here for a celebration.

Let’s celebrate that love and grace. Let’s have a good time because that’s part of who we are. and who Christ calls us to be. Thanks be to God.

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I want to go back to that first scripture (1 John 4:7-13) about love because a lot of times when we talk about love, I think we’re a little confused about what kind of love are we talking about?

It’s not just the feeling that we have. It’s not a romantic type of love. It is a caring type of love. But more importantly, it’s a verb. It’s an action. It’s love. Love is put into action. Loving someone else means you do something about it. Which is why I talked about the caring cart and what we have done in collecting these personal care items. You love somebody by doing something.

I think it is just that easy and that difficult because we don’t always know what loving someone looks like. What action is a loving action? But I’ve said in the past, and I’m going to repeat that. I want us to hold this question.

What is the most loving thing I can do?

If that is the question that we hold in our being every day. Then when we run into a situation or we encounter someone, we can bring that question to mind. What is the most loving thing I can do right now? We will get an answer. We will know what to do. If we listen to our hearts, God will tell us what the most loving thing to do is.

On Thursday, April 18th, the most loving thing I could do was go to this rally called Justice for Education at J. P. McCaskey.

Because the point of the rally was to help show our legislators that we care about this issue. Now I’m going to give you a little bit more information about the issue if you haven’t been following it in the news.

Our system for funding education in Pennsylvania has us ranked 45th out of 50. Even more importantly, last spring a commonwealth court ruled that it is unconstitutional according to the Pennsylvania Constitution. We have to change the way we fund education in Pennsylvania because not every child in Pennsylvania receives the education that they need. That’s has been proven.

So, now it is dependent on our legislators on how to change that. Last summer, there was a Basic Education Funding Commission that had a series of meetings across the state to understand ideas. It was half Republican, half Democrat. This is bipartisan. They went back to Pennsylvania and they have come out with a new plan.

What we are saying is you need to vote for this plan. The plan is in the 2024-25 budget and you need to vote for it. You need to codify it. You need to make it law so they don’t just do it this year, but they continue to do it because it’s a seven year plan. So doing the first year of a seven year plan and not doing any more isn’t really going to get us far. We got to keep doing the plan until we get to where we should be with that. That’s the education justice issue.

Now you might be thinking, social justice. Do you know what my schedule looks like?

I’ve got enough going on in my life right now. I want to affirm that we do have enough going on in our lives right now. I know that. I know that a lot of us are overwhelmed. That we are filled, we feel like we’re pulled in so many different directions by so many different priorities and we don’t know what to do with that.

In the midst of all of that, I want to say, it’s also matters that we pay attention to what’s happening in our world, to how other people are being treated. We need to do whatever we can. Maybe you can’t go to a rally, but you can be kind to the next person you meet, or act in a loving way.

I also want to name that we talked about the fact that social justice and compassionate justice is part of who God is calling us to be.

When we talk about “what does home look like?”, Home is a place that accepts you, that recognizes you and affirms your humanity. Because at the end of the day, that’s what it’s about.

It’s about looking at another person, regardless if they are like you or not. Regardless if they have the same political position as you or not. That’s really big right now. Recognize their humanity. We all still want to be respected. We all still want to belong and feel that we matter. We all want that.

So here comes our story today from Acts. Philip and the eunuch.

This is a social justice story. Did you know that? It’s a huge social justice story. Philip and the eunuch are both in places they don’t belong. Philip and the disciples have been chased out of Jerusalem because the Pharisees are out for them. They want to squash this Christian thing that’s going on and the Romans want to squash it because they thought if they killed the leader the movement would die and it didn’t. So now they got to go after the next level.

The Apostles have left Jerusalem and Philip is going around all different kinds of places. The spirit, which is what happened at the end of this story, the spirit just picks him up and puts him somewhere else. But for this story, he’s on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza.

Now I want everybody to just take a deep breath, because we know something about the road from Jerusalem to Gaza right now, do we not? I hope you do. I hope you’re paying enough attention to know what’s going on in Gaza and Israel. That’s the road they’re on.

Philip hears this eunuch reading. That means he is emasculated. The question can be asked, “Why is that the feature that is brought out in this scripture?” He’s an Ethiopian. It also tells us that he’s the treasurer. He mines the treasury of the queen. He’s in a chariot. That’s why I chose this picture, this image of it, because he’s in a different class than some others. He has privilege. He has a driver because he is in a chariot, and he may even have a bodyguard. Because he’s that important.

The part that they tell us in this story is that he’s a eunuch. He’s been emasculated. To the Hebrews, that means he is not a man. Because he cannot procreate, because his body has been altered, he is not welcome in the temple. So even though he’s been to Jerusalem, he would not have been welcome. He needed to stay out with all the other people, with their leprosy, their bleeding, and the other things that made them unworthy of walking in.

But he wants to learn. The piece that we need to pay attention to is what Philip does. Philip doesn’t care. Philip doesn’t ask about any of that. He doesn’t talk about the fact that he’s a eunuch. He doesn’t say, “Hey, since you couldn’t get into the temple, I’ll help you out.” He just says, Do you know what you’re reading? The guy says, Essentially, no, I need help, and invites him into the carriage, and Philip goes.

Then they find water, and even more than teaching him, oh my gosh, he baptized him. That means he is part of the body of Christ. He is welcome. Room has been made for him. Even though the religious authorities would have shun him, even though he was everything that they said no to, he was welcomed and baptized into the family and God blessed it.

It’s very interesting. Something else I learned when I was doing my research is there is a verse in Matthew 19:12. You want to read it because it never comes in the lectionary. We never read that verse. We read the verses before it and after it, but we never read that verse, and it’s all about eunuchs. Eunuchs that are born as eunuchs. Eunuchs that are emasculated by someone else’s choice and eunuchs who allow it so that they can be part of the kingdom. You need to think about that in all of our things that we do.

Because we are called, as a congregation, to make sure that everyone feels welcome. That’s what we say. Inclusive refuge, Anyone who is powerless or afraid, Anyone who needs refuge is welcome here.

This isn’t easy. We’re going to make mistakes. I picked this picture on purpose because you see what’s going on in this picture? All the white people are making a demand of the black woman and we’re very good at that. We’re very good at expecting them to fill our expectations without finding out what they need or who they are.

But we are called to compassionate justice. So, what I want to suggest is that I think right now with our congregation, we are at a point where it’s time to set up a justice team. This is what I would like the team to do. I would like the team to interview the congregation. Because I want to know. I want us to know. What keeps you up at night? What wakes you up at three o’clock in the morning? Which issue? Because there are a lot of social justice issues on the table right now. The education justice is just one issue, but there are so many. So I want to find out what is the number one issue in our congregation?

Then we’ll decide how best to work in that area. What difference can we make in our Lancaster community? Because I think we can make a difference in our Lancaster community. But we need to do our research first. I’ve learned from the organizers that you start with research meetings. So we need to do an internal research meeting first and find out what our priorities are. Then I have resources that I can connect us to in the community so that we can work. We’re going to work with people who are already doing the work. So that we can make an impact in this community. Because we want to. This is not just about coming in here to serve us. We want to make a difference with people. I heard that during our discernment process for the vision and mission. It matters why we’re here.

Reverend Roland Forbes, some of you may know Rev. Forbes from Ebenezer Baptist, he always says, “What would happen if your church disappeared? If your church disappeared, would the community notice?” And we want the community to say, don’t disappear. We need you. You are vital in this community. That’s our call to action. So, if you are interested in being on a social justice team, then come talk to me and we’ll put that team together because we make the way by walking.

We’ll make mistakes. We’ll fumble, we’ll stumble, but we can make a better community and we can share love with others.

The story of Philip and the eunuch, in several ways, an outsider, expresses the inclusive love of God for all. All are invited to come home to God because love is simply part of our nature. Love is from God. The invitation is as simple as it is every time we make it. When you endeavor to love your neighbor and live in peace with each other, there’s always room for you, no matter who you are or how you think you don’t fit in.

No matter whether you’ve been coming to church a long time or not a long time. Welcome home.

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This image of Jesus as the good Shepherd is one that I think we really love.

I think it’s one of those beloved things. So I did choose a shepherd image that is not maybe as comforting as some. I know in the church up the road at Salem, UCC of Roherstown, they have a Good Shepherd window that is the normal Good Shepherd image with Christ carrying a lamb across his shoulders. My grandparents always sat so that it was directly in front of them. So, that’s where I sat too. That image is comforting to me because we always think that we’re the one sheep that Jesus would leave the 99 to rescue. But maybe that’s not really who we are. Maybe we’re one of the 99 that get left out.

I think there’s a lot that comes into this idea of Jesus as shepherd.

If Jesus is our shepherd, then Jesus is the one who is to be guiding our lives. The one that we look to for answers. The one we listen to, more than our own desires.

That’s where the rub is, isn’t it? Because we want to be independent people. We want to do life our way. That’s the American way, but that’s not the Christian way. The Christian way says we follow Jesus. He’s our guide, He’s our model, and He’s the one directing where we go and what we do.

There’s a couple other points that he makes in this passage and I think we have a tendency to get caught in sort of this nostalgic feel good “We’re special because Jesus would do anything including lay down his life for us.” That’s true and it’s also true that we probably are more in the 99 and we need to think about that one that Jesus will go off to rescue.

Because that one is going to be one of the vulnerable in our society. One of the ones who is shunned or pushed to the edges, marginalized is a word we use a lot today. One who doesn’t have a voice in the public square. One who is discriminated against. So I just want you to stop and think. This is a question for you to contemplate.

Who is that today? Who, who are the vulnerable in our society today? Who are the ones without voice?

Because that’s who Jesus wants to take care of. That’s who Jesus wants us to take care of.

Then we have this other piece, John 10:16 says, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice.” There will be one flock, one shepherd. What I hear in that is this idea that they’re all welcome to the table. In fact, if there’s not room at the table, then we need to make the table bigger.

But we’ve spent millennia, Big Church has spent millennia deciding who’s really worthy and who’s not. Who’s welcome and who’s not. But that’s not what this says. This is Jesus inviting everybody, looking at us to say, how are you living that out?

I hear that in our Inclusive Refuge and in our Compassionate Justice. But it matters how we’re living. That’s something for us to think about.

Then we have Psalm 23. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake. Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.”

I don’t know about you, but this was the first piece of scripture that I memorized. I had the whole thing memorized because when I was a young teenager my mother taught me to be afraid of strangers, particularly the people in our town. Our town wasn’t a safe place to be. It wasn’t a big town. She had me walk to piano lessons for a mile and a half every week by myself. It was a different world. People don’t have kids walk a mile and a half by themselves anymore. Maybe in the city to get to school. But at that time she set up that situation so I would repeat the 23rd Psalm all the way to piano lessons and back because I felt like that kept me safe. It worked for me. Nobody bothered me. They might have thought I was crazy, “Hey, there’s that kid again mumbling to herself.” But they left me alone.

That scripture evokes a sense of comfort within us. But if you read it seriously, there’s hard stuff in that scripture. We love that we’re invited to lay down in green pastures and walk beside still waters. We love that. We love that our cups will runneth over.

But there’s also that whole piece about walking through the valley of the shadow of death and making a place for me at the table of my enemies.

I saw a post this week by our associate conference minister who suggested that this is a psalm that you could take and meditate on every day because every day there’s a piece of it that would work for you. And I would encourage you to do that.

It is about comfort. It is about reminding us that God is with us through everything, through the highs and the lows. Through the good and the bad, the gratitude and the fear.

But then I wonder, do we think about God being with us all the time? Do we think about that? Do we think about God seeing the choices that we make? Monday through Saturday? Or just when we walk in the Sanctuary?

Would you make different choices if you thought about the fact that God was watching you all the time?

I think God is watching us all the time and nudging us, like the shepherd, prodding us in the right direction. Sometimes we go, and sometimes we say, “Nah, not today. I don’t feel like it today. I’d rather binge watch Netflix today. Because that’s all I can manage.” That’s not the end of the world. We’re still forgiven. But it’s not all easy. Right?

A Place at the Table

That’s the theme for today. With this picture, I think any of us would take a place at that table. That looks like they’ve got a wonderful assortment of food. There’s plenty of food, plenty of good fellowship.

But what if it is a table with people that you would consider enemies? This isn’t about us just sitting down with our families on Thanksgiving. This is about us, the Catholics, and the Protestants of Ireland sitting down at a table together back in the 90s. This is about Israelis and Palestinians sitting down at a table now and not talking about all the pain, but just talking more deeply so that they hear the hurt in each other. Because everyone’s hurting.

We have to remember the humanity. That’s the beauty of the table, I think. Is that when we sit down at a meal together, then we start talking about more than the weather and the social pleasantries, and we can really hear what’s on one’s heart. If one feels safe enough to share.

We recognize that we all have essentially the same goals. We all want to be loved and we all want to feel like we belong. We all want to feel like we matter in this world. That it matters that we got up today. That we’re above ground, as I’ve heard people say. We all want that.

The Africans have a word called “Ubuntu”. Which means, “I am because you are.” and “You are because I am.” We are interconnected. And we forget that. We forget that we’re interconnected. We forget that we need one another.

So we need to make a bigger table if there’s not enough room. Because everyone deserves a place at the table with everything that they bring to that.

That can be a challenge because there’s some people I would not want to sit down at a table with. And I bet you have a list too. There’s definitely some people I would be like, “Really? Not that one. Anybody but that person, please.” But sometimes God calls us to those places where we have to sit down with that one.

Our United Church of Christ has called in this season for prayers of peace. There’s actually a place on the website where you can submit your own prayer of peace. I’m going to be sharing one written by the Reverend Dr. Nora Faust this week with the conference. She is our associate conference minister about being a peacemaker.

But there is so much war in our world right now. So much conflict. I feel like our country is headed to the brink of that ourselves. In the way we are divided so deeply. We need to find ways to talk to one another. To see one another and to figure out how we move forward together.

There was a news piece this week about speaker Johnson and the commentators thought it was terrible that as a Republican speaker, he was going to have to rely on Democrats to get a bill through. And I thought, Hallelujah! We have to recognize that it can’t be all just my people. Well, all my people are going to vote for it and we’re going to make you do it. Regardless of what you think. We have to come together and find how to compromise. It’s the only way we go forward. We’ve got to get rid of the sharp lines we have. In our country, in our community, they’re here too.

So, I encourage you, if you’re inclined to write, I encourage you to write. If you’re able to get on the internet, put your prayer in there. There’s not a lot of prayers yet, but it’ll get published. It’ll end up on the UCC website. You can tell us about it. We’ll all go on it and see it and celebrate with you. Doesn’t have to be your best work ever, but it matters that we be involved in bringing about peace. I think that’s who Jesus calls us to be. May it be so.

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What does it mean that we call ourselves family in the church?

I’m wondering what ideas you had. The children said they’re people that you love and care for, and who love and care for you. They’re people that you are related to, and we are related through this common story of the Bible. Family is love.

This ability to be together and to support one another. Because the reality is life is hard. We all have really hard moments, and the way that we get through that, the way we can get through our guilt and our grief is by caring for one another. By talking together and reminding each other of this love that we have.

The presence of Christ, which sometimes we feel it and sometimes not as much. We can feel sometimes like God’s not listening. So we need to remind each other that God is listening, even if our prayers don’t get answered the way we wanted them to be answered, or in the time frame we wanted, right?

The other reality about family is sometimes there’s members that you just want to say, “don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” It’s really good when we don’t all think the same, because that’s how we grow in faith. If we all think exactly the same thing, that’s a boring life. We won’t get anywhere. We won’t deepen our faith. We won’t trust more. We need people that challenge our thinking. So it’s good, it’s really good that we don’t all think the same.

But one of the challenges right now of the church is, we have to decide how much of our faith, of the church that we have been, do we want to continue? And how much do we need to break open to be something new?

That’s part of the thing that I think is happening the entire way through the Bible, is that God is inviting us not to have a more closed mind. But to break our hearts open so that we have the ability to love more fully, to love more people, more diverse people, more people that we wouldn’t always love. That’s part of the story.

I do think that, in our culture now, we use that language of “family of origin” and “family of choice.” Because some of us, unfortunately, our families of origin have not always been healthy places. Many of us it was a very healthy place and praise God, but some of us not. So, we can also choose family.

That is what we think we’re doing when we come to the church. Is that this is a family of choice. I want to push us just a little bit to say, “Hey, I wonder how much God influences that choice?” How much are we here because God has called us to be here in this group with these people at this time? We may think that we did wake up and decide to come to church on our own. But I think God is also in there nudging us towards being part of a community of Christ.

These scriptures, when you put John 3:11-19 and Acts 3:1-7 together, it’s a real dichotomy.

Because John’s scripture, the letter of John, is encouraging and it’s about love and light and community. Then you get to hear Peter’s words and Peter feels like he’s shaming us and he wants us to have that guilt.

I want to say, this is Peter. Peter often got it wrong when Jesus was alive. Not to say that this is right or wrong. It’s in the scriptures. It’s there. But I don’t think it’s meant to just guilt us. I think that Peter, at this point in the right, has actually had a come to Jesus moment. He’s had a real one. So in those days leading up to Jesus death, he was the denier. He was the one that said, not me, I don’t know that guy, I’m out. That’s the same guy that we hear today saying, “…but you didn’t stand up for him.” You’re in this too, Peter.

I was frustrated by this text because Peter doesn’t own his own part in it. We all know he had a part. But Peter has also been forgiven. After Jesus’s resurrection, Peter has a meeting with Jesus. Where he has to admit, “Yes, Jesus, I did deny you just like you said I was going to. That was me. And I’m really sorry.” Jesus forgave. Jesus offers all of us forgiveness. That’s why I can say we are all loved and worthy.

This is the picture of the gospel reading today, which is the two men on the road to Emmaus who encounter this stranger and what they do is they bring him home to have dinner with them and in the breaking of the bread they realize that it’s Jesus.

There is something about the breaking that we all need to experience that opens us up to a better encounter of God. To a better understanding of who Jesus really is and who we are called to be. We need to have our hearts broken. That’s a hard message because none of us like pain. Nobody wants to go through the heartbreak.

And yet, it is through the heartbreak that we find life and joy and love and the abundant life that we didn’t know before.

I want to share a clip with you of the miracle club. It is a movie that’s right now, streaming on Netflix for free. It’s a movie about three women who go looking for a miracle at Lourdes. If you don’t know what Lourdes is, Lourdes is a cathedral in France where the Virgin Mary had made an appearance. At Lourdes there are baths that you can go into and people have had miracles. It’s a good family movie. British humor, but a good family movie.

So that is the challenge are we going to get a miracle?

I don’t know, but we can heal together and we are better together than we are apart. So, I encourage you to think about how we are family. To think about what that means to you. And to really make a commitment to that. To make a commitment with your time, your talents, and your gifts.

Because we say that we offer Inclusive Refuge, that everyone is welcome. Especially if you are afraid or powerless. People are walking in our door and we want to show them the love of Christ that we have received.

May it be so. Amen.

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