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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By loving your neighbor, you are loving God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May it be so. Amen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May it be so. Amen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what are we gonna be about?

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

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

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

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

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

May it be so. Amen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May it be so. Amen.

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