Here is your word of the day: Quanked.

For our youth and young adults, expanding your vocabulary is a lifelong skill. For those of you who think I’ve gone “batty,” This is a real word – not just one I made up because I’m from Lancaster County – and I learned it this week. Its definition is: “to be utterly overwhelmed by fatigue, exhausted, or drained of all energy”

If you are like me, this describes me more recently than in a very long time, and I’m unwilling to say it is just “age-related”. This is why this season, we are inviting you to “press pause & listen.” There is currently an attempt to overwhelm us with chaos so that we will either opt to check out of the news completely or reduce our consumption to that with which we agree, that which makes us feel safe and comfortable.

I am saying something different. I want you to look at how you are consuming news and choose a less reactive mode – a different station, listening rather than viewing, reading rather than listening or viewing, and spending less time with it. And with the time you aren’t watching news or the chaos of the moment, sit in silence – pray – talk or connect with those that matter most to you. Practice being the love you want to see in the world!

Based on today’s scripture, John 3:1-17, I’m not sure I can argue that Nicodemus is quanked.

But he’s upset enough to risk going to meet Jesus, even if it is in the dark, where he’s less apt to be seen. Nicodemus is trying to understand who Jesus is and what to believe, as he is not like any other teacher Nicodemus has ever met. The conversation with Jesus raises even more questions.

Nicodemus was a Pharisee, well-versed in the law, such that he even held a place on the Sanhedrin, which was the Jewish legislative and judicial body that ruled over the people. They will be the group later who tries Jesus before sending him to Pilate.

But for now, Nicodemus wants more information, and in this scripture, we have the very famous verse John 3:16. But with all the talk lately about the power & might of Jesus, and depictions of him coming with the “armor of God” to avenge those perceived as God’s enemies, I think we often forget verse 17

“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

This month is Women’s History month and we are lifting up some women and their work within our congregation.

Today, I want to lift the Rev. Jacquie Church-Young. Pastor Jacquie was the Youth & Family Ministries pastor in the early 2000’s, and based on my conversations with those who were youth at the time, she was very beloved. One of the reasons she was beloved was that she appreciated the act of questioning, understanding that it led to growth.

During Pastor Jacquie’s work with you, I was leading the youth at Salem UCC, and we both took our youth to a retreat at Hartman Center, where I observed her, and unfortunately, my first impression was not as positive. Then when I became a Member in Discernment of the Lancaster Association, they assigned Pastor Jacquie to be my mentor for the process. To be clear in our descriptions, she was just out of seminary and starting a family, and I was the mother of three teenagers. This is where I was reminded that God has a great sense of humor and works out situations for us to grow.

To start the relationship off well, Pastor Jacquie invited me to lunch, and at that lunch, I had to be honest with her. During the course of that conversation, I learned about the challenges she had been facing, of which I was unaware during our first encounter at the retreat. She talked about the internal turmoil within the church at that time and the shenanigans the youth were doing at the retreat. This is when we both learned lessons.

When I messaged her about including her in today’s sermon, I named that by her telling her story, I was able to have compassion for her. She named that I helped change her for the better, not just as a pastor, but truly – as a person.

All of that learning and growth came from an honest, heartfelt conversation. Which is what I think happened for Nicodemus in his conversation with Jesus.

So, where does all of this leave us?

I think it highlights the value of conversation and its ability to help lessen our feeling of being quanked and increases our ability to be compassionate.

Within the scripture, I have two takeaways for today:
~ God is always wrapped in mystery
~ The Divine always give second chances

Which leads us perfectly to Holy Communion. Which I think is also wrapped in mystery & about endless chances. We are not bound by past mistakes, missteps, or failures. Every time the feast is served, we are welcomed. May we come to the table seeking the mystery and find another chance to live and love better!

May it be so. Amen.

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 We are well into the season of Epiphany, and the season of Epiphany is about revealing who Jesus is.

Since his conception, we’ve been getting signals. This is Matthew’s year, so the angel came, and we heard the story of the angel coming to Joseph and telling Joseph that this baby would be Emmanuel, God with us. Then at his birth, the angels declared, this is our savior, the Messiah, the Lord, and then the magi showed up. They came bearing gifts for this newborn king, this new ruler, this person who would become a shepherd of his people. At his baptism the Holy Spirit came down and declared, this is my beloved, my son.

Since then, we heard John declare who he was and point to him. “He is the one who comes after me, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.” – John 1:27. Then we saw how he chose the people to follow him. All he said was, follow me.

Now, we come to the Beatitudes, and I think that we like to approach these as what they tell us about who we are to be, because we have an insatiable desire to be self-absorbed. We love ourselves, so it has to be about us, right? But what does it tell us about who Jesus was? And this may be a different road to get to the same place. But that’s the road I wanna take you on today. Because it’s supposed to reveal something about Jesus.

So who is Jesus? What does this tell us about Jesus?

Well, if we look really carefully. I tried to do a deep dive. I’ve had five weeks to prepare this sermon, not one, five. I don’t usually have that much time, but I did, so I did a deep dive on this, and this sermon contains all of these words that do not appear anywhere else. The words that are translated meek, hungering, merciful, pure peacemakers, having been persecuted, they shall be insulted. Those words aren’t anywhere else. It’s the only time they show up. Well, a couple of them show up in Luke’s Beatitudes, too. Other than that, they’re not in the Bible. So what does that say?

What that says to me is that these words and Jesus are unique, and it means that those first people, remember I told you that you are like those first people hearing it. Those people, I can imagine, said, What did he just say? Did he say what I think he just said? Because these weren’t words that were used all the time. They would have been shocked to hear these words because other people who stood up and professed to know things wanted to talk about power and control. That’s the empire, they’re about telling you what you can do, what you can’t do, and how you’re gonna do it. But that’s not what this says.

The second thing I noticed was this offered hope, both in the short term and the long term. Our scripture says “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.“– Matthew 5:5, and they shall inherit the earth today and in the future. It’s both.

If we had read the verses right before this, they talk about how all the people were bringing their sick and infirm friends and relatives and themselves to Jesus because he was healing them. He was providing hope in the moment. Life was changing with him, and he was giving them this. Here’s your big word for the day: eschatological future hope that in the end they will be with God. They’ll be the ones in the kingdom of heaven.

The third thing it tells us is who Jesus cared about. He didn’t talk about the empire. That was the big thing about Jesus. That’s why Judas is scared. I’m frustrated with him when we get to Holy Week because he didn’t challenge Rome the way they wanted him to. Instead, he came to the people. He was there for the people who needed the help and the healing. This tells us that it wasn’t about the influencers of his time, but those who had been forgotten, ignored, and left behind. That’s who Jesus cared about. So, like I said, maybe a different road to the same destination.

That’s who we are to care about. Not necessarily who we are to be, but it’s who we are to care about. Who are the people in our community who are struggling right now, who are afraid? Terrified, even? He cared about those who wanted a different life, even if they didn’t know how to get there. There was hope in what he said, that this life that they had wasn’t the life that God had intended for them. That was good news. That is the good news, my friends, that this life that we live is not the way God intended for us to live. Even today, 2000 years later, we haven’t gotten it right yet. We still have much to learn.

This month is also the month that the inclusive church team wants us to focus on black history. So, I’m gonna try to do that.

Today, I wanna talk to you about someone who I think lived the way Jesus wants us to live, and who cared about others, who cared about her people as a black American. Who cared about the suffering of others. Fannie Lou Hamer was a sharecropper in the early sixties, and she decided that she had every right to vote as everybody else, and so she went to register. She was beaten and imprisoned in terrificly horrible ways. She paid with her body for that. She was not killed, but she paid with her body

Then she continued the struggle. She co-founded in 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and she went to the Democratic National Convention in 1964. I don’t know how many of you remember that. I was too young to remember that, but I read all about it. I’m gonna read more of this because I wanna make sure I get my facts straight.

She went there demanding integrated nominating committees and delegate committees. Her plea was so compelling, and frightened President Lyndon Johnson so much that he did a press conference. So that she wasn’t on the live tv, but her speech for those who heard it could not be quenched, and it was televised later. In 1968, her vision of racial equality in the delegation became real. Took some time, but became real. She also created the Freedom Farm Cooperative that helped other black farmers have a piece of property. As part of the cooperative, they got a piece of property, and they got a place to live. They got pigs to learn how to breed, raise, butcher, and sell, and become independent.

She was a force to be reckoned with, and you know what she’s most known for? She’s most known for her quote, I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired. That’s how we remember her. I’m glad to learn the rest. I’m glad I went looking for the rest of her story.

I put the picture of communion there because I knew it was communion Sunday. For me, it was the idea of the breaking of the bread, and the cup poured out for us that this is where we get to live our lives to do the hard work, because hard work is here. It’s not coming, it’s here.

We admit that we are all marred, scarred, and imperfect because we’re human. I’m sorry. I was wrong. I don’t know. I need help. Those are four statements that we need to use and own because we are living in a time when we cannot be silent, while those who are poor in spirit, mourning, and meek or those who are hungering and thirsting for justice, the merciful, the pure in heart and the peacemakers are becoming victims of hatred and violence, and we can’t just go along anymore.

So I also created cards for you that are on the high top with each of our congressmen’s names and telephone numbers. They need to hear from you. You need to tell them what you’re thinking and what you’re feeling about what you see in this country.

We need to figure out as a collective what we have to offer. One of the lessons that we got from the clergy in Minnesota was that we need to prepare before they arrive. We need to talk about what assets we have. What assets can our congregation give?

Is it that we can hold a large gathering and bring a lot of people together? We have space for a lot of people to gather. That may be our piece. There’s a prayer vigil that’s gonna start at Lancaster Friends, and maybe we wanna host one of those. Maybe we wanna send additional funds to the churches downtown. I’m thinking about St. John’s Episcopal because I know they do so much with the immigrant community in Lancaster. What is our peace to do? That’s something for us to, to really sit with and discern, but this is a time when we cannot be silent anymore. The white church cannot be silent now.

Next week I have invited Reverend Edward Bailey, who is retired, and he’s coming to have a conversation with us next week, because we’re gonna talk about. What do white people need to know about the black community in Lancaster? Because we don’t have the answers. We need to be listening, but this table makes all the difference. When we receive the bread and the cup, it gives us the strength, the comfort, the determination, the chutzpah, even to do what we didn’t think we could do.

We know that we couldn’t hang on that cross. We couldn’t pour out our blood, and we probably have a hard time or should drink the cup of forgiveness because we have not forgiven ourselves, let alone anyone else, but that is our challenge.

We come here and we gather because we need Jesus Christ. We need each other. And right now we need to be the beloved community.

May it be so. Amen.

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Sermon by Rev. Tracey Marx

 Our winter theme is “Look for the Light.”

We’ve been thinking about how we can see light in the darkness, how we can look for light in the darkness, even when it’s difficult. How can we not be overwhelmed by the darkness that sometimes can feel very overwhelming?

Our gospel reading for today is an unusual one, John 1:29-39. We don’t often turn to this passage because it’s only found in the gospel of John. In the other gospels, we read of Jesus being baptized by John in the Jordan River. But in this gospel, we don’t get that particular story. We only get this one, which is John the Baptist’s witness to the baptism, his witness to who Jesus is.

Well, the main purpose of this passage is pretty clear. It’s repeated several times, and it is this, John is pointing to Jesus. He’s pointing attention toward Jesus. He’s pointing away from himself and to Jesus, saying, He’s the one. I’m not the one. This is a story that takes place over three days. On day one, just the day prior, just a few verses before our passage, the religious leaders had been asking John, who are you? Are you the Messiah? Are you Elijah? Are you Moses? There was yearning expectation for one of these figures to return, and they wanted to know, are you the one? Are you the one we’ve been waiting for? Are you the one we’ve been hoping for? And John says no to each of these questions, and then, quoting the prophet, Isaiah says, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,'” -John 1:23.

On day two in our passage, John again is definitively clarifying that he is not the one. He literally points to Jesus, who’s walking by, and John says, he’s the one. He’s the one I’ve been telling you about. He’s the one I’ve been preparing you for and telling you to prepare yourselves for.

Then, on day three, John again points to Jesus, who is again walking by. This time, two of John’s disciples change allegiance right then and there. They stop following John, and they start to follow Jesus. John the Baptist did have followers, disciples, quite a few of them. He was the leader of a movement. He had his own ministry. He preached repentance and the ritual cleansing in water for one’s sins. When John explains the relationship between Jesus and Himself, he says, I myself didn’t know him, which might be hard to understand because according to Luke, they were distant cousins, but the word know can be translated as recognize him. John says, I didn’t recognize who he was until the day of the baptism. And then he has this complicated statement, which is almost like a prepositional riddle, where he says, “After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.” – John 1:30.

At John the Baptist’s invitation and prompting, two of his disciples changed allegiance to follow Jesus. We’re told later in the passage that one of those disciples was Andrew, the fisherman, the brother of Simon Peter, and the other disciple is not named. And it’s the question that Jesus asks Andrew and the unnamed disciple that I’d like us to focus on today.

In John 1:38, we read, “When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, “What are you looking for?”

In the original Greek, the verb look is ζητέω (zeteo), which is translated to seek. He is asking them, what are you seeking? In the NIV, the translation is, what do you want? It’s a good question, isn’t it?

Because this question that Jesus asks his brand new followers gets to the very heart of our faith journey, the very heart of what it is that God might be calling us to or away from. What God might be wanting us to hear or to pay attention to.

Let me ask you this question this morning, and I’d like to ask it in three slightly different ways. The first is simply, what do you want? It’s still January. It’s still the beginning of a new year. It’s still a good time for looking deeply into our hearts and minds and answering the question. Not to create a resolution that might be hard to stick to, but to consider our identity. Now, when we ask this question, we might have to be careful because sometimes the first thing that comes to mind, what we really want is for someone else to change, someone else to be different, or we want circumstances to change, or we want outcomes to be exactly the way that we want them to be when we don’t have that kind of control.

So, asking this question as a spiritual question really focuses our attention on what we want within ourselves. Maybe when we first consider this question, we might answer on a more surface level. Maybe we wanna go on a trip, learn a new skill, explore a new hobby, fix something in our home, declutter our living space, spend more time with family, rekindle a friendship, or eat in a healthier way/be active. But when we dig deeper, there might be an unmet need that we are trying to address by those wants.

The second way of asking this question is simply to add the word really. What do you really want underneath what you might say at first? Maybe your answer might change and deepen. Maybe we want to belong. Maybe we want connection & a community. Maybe we want reassurance that we’re doing okay. Maybe we want to make a difference. Maybe we want to know that our lives matter. I think it can be really helpful to qualify the question one further time by remembering who is asking it. Because we’re not just asking ourselves the question. We remember that it is God who is asking the question of us.

Then the question changes slightly, and this is the third way of asking it. What do we really need from God? Then our answers change again. They distill down into what’s most important in the very core of us, where it’s just us and God. I need to feel God’s love. I need a sense that He is right here with me and with those I love. Bringing light into the darkness, bringing enough light so that it can shine deeply into what’s difficult and what needs to be addressed, and allow us to look straight at it and not be afraid. Or, I need God’s reassurance. I need His encouragement, or I need to find rest. I need to find rest in God. I need peace.

Sometimes, our answers can be further distilled down to something very simple and very central. When God asks, what do you really need? We might just answer. I need you.

John the Baptist is well known to most of us.

We might remember that in the gospel of Luke, we’re told that as a baby, he leaped in his mother Elizabeth’s womb. When her cousin Mary, who was newly with child, came to stay for an extended time, we might remember that his father Zechariah was silenced by the angel Gabriel for his disbelief that he and his wife, in their older ages, would bear a child.

We might remember that Elizabeth and Zechariah were told that their child was special and that his lips should never touch alcohol because he would be filled with the Holy Spirit. We likely remember that as an adult, he ate locusts and honey and lived in the wilderness. He wore camel hair and a leather belt. He was an aesthetic, turning away from the comforts of the world in order to be closer to God. Some scholars think that John was part of the Essene community at Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, the oldest known manuscripts of the Hebrew scriptures. In fact, there was a tradition of ritual washing for spiritual cleansing that existed at Qumran, a practice which might have been the forerunner of baptism.

We might remember that John the Baptist came to a very tragic end as he spoke out against the immoral behavior of Herod the Tetrarch, and that his death is actually one of the more disturbing scenes in the gospels. Anyone who has seen the musical Godspell knows that John the Baptist belts out the very first song, Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord.

What’s less well known to us is that John the Baptist is the only one in the Bible who refers to Jesus as the Lamb of God. The phrase Lamb of God is very liturgical in Latin. It’s Agnes Day. Agnes, meaning lamb, and day, meaning of God. We use it in our communion, liturgy, Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. Lamb of God, have mercy on us and grant us your peace. So in the Bible, you might be surprised to find that this phrase only appears twice, and both of those times are right here in this morning’s gospel reading. Jesus is referred to as a lamb in other places. But the specific phrase, lamb of God is only found here, and it’s found in the context of John the Baptist pointing away from himself and to Jesus.

He’s saying it’s Jesus. Here is the lamb of God. There are so many other phrases that John could have used. Here is a charismatic speaker who’s drawing crowds that are eager to hear what he has to say. Here’s a man who tells thought-provoking stories that help us to think about who God really is. Here’s a healer who allows the power of God to work within him so that he can do miraculous things, but he uses this phrase, lamb of God. There’s very likely an intention to call to mind the sacrifice of Jesus. With this phrase, lamb of God, we are reminded that Jesus gave his life for our forgiveness.

It’s a foreshadowing the end of the gospel story right here in the beginning, right here in Chapter one. We are invited and encouraged by the author of this gospel, whose name is also called John, to read the entire story. Through the lens of its conclusion, here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Here he is just beginning his ministry. Here, he is just beginning to have others choose to follow him. Here he is just beginning to gently invite those followers to look inward and to ask themselves this question, a question of discipleship, a question that gets to the very heart of our faith. If you follow me, as you follow me, as you continually redefine your life to follow me, what are you looking for?

After Jesus asks these new followers the question, what are you looking for? They don’t answer him exactly, but in a way, they do. They say, rabbi, where are you staying? They call him Rabbi (teacher), which in itself is a statement of allegiance, letting him know that he will be their teacher and they will be his followers, and then they ask this very practical question, where are you staying? They want to know, and it’s understandable where they’ll be staying. Maybe, if there’s gonna be something to eat, who else might be there? They wanna know what it’s all gonna look like. Jesus, in typical Jesus fashion, doesn’t tell them what it’s going to look like. Instead, he invites them to come and find out for themselves by saying, come and see.

This quintessential invitation reminds us that discipleship involves a lifetime of following, of paying attention, of being open to what happens next.

I’d like to invite us to consider this question today, right now, but also maybe later today or this week, maybe as you journal or just have some quiet time. Maybe as you have a conversation with a trusted friend. Maybe when you’re by yourself, and it’s just you and God. What are you looking for? What is it that you need from God? What is a need that you have that only God can fill?

As the French philosopher Pascal said in the 17th century, so poetically, “there is a God-shaped emptiness in the heart of every person that only God can fill”.

Maybe the phrase, lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world can help us to further and even more deeply answer this question with honesty and vulnerability. What is it that we need from God? Maybe it’s a reminder of God’s grace & of God’s mercy. Maybe it’s a reassurance that no matter what happened in the past, no matter what, you are forgiven and you get that chance to start again. You get that chance to be seen as a person who’s not defined by their past or by their past mistakes, but by their relationship to the one who continually invites us to follow and to be faithful.

Maybe it’s a prompt to forgive someone else, to reconcile, or to stretch out your circle of inclusion. What is it that we really need from God as a church, as a community here in Lancaster, as a nation, as human beings, and worldwide? What do we really need from God? I invite us to open ourselves to those questions. To live with those questions, and as you do, may you look for the light this day, this winter, this new year, and always the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Have mercy on us and grant us your peace.

May it be so. Amen.

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Sermon by Rev. Dr. Dennis Lippart

My wife and I have six sons between us, and when our sons began getting married, we discovered that when holidays come, you don’t see your sons because daughters go home to their mothers for holidays.

Rather than fight that fight, we decided to create our own holiday. About the end of October, we picked a date that nobody had picked for anything, and we decided everybody would come to our house for turkey, stuffing, and sweet potato pie, and all the trimmings. We have done that every year for over 10 years. We call it hollowgiving.

Most holidays are arbitrary anyway. We can make one up on Christmas Eve. I’ve always wanted to come to the blue Christmas that Kathryn was doing here for years, but Christmas Eve was always when we see the grandchildren in New Jersey. On Christmas Eve my wife and I usually exchange presents because Christmas Day is filled with grandkids and all that kind of stuff.

It occurred to me that maybe we need another time when we can exchange our presents with each other. I called it Donkey Day, the day Joseph loaded up the donkey to go wherever he was gonna go. It happened before everything else happened. There was Donkey Day, and we’ve been practicing Donkey Day, except when I reread the Christmas stories recently. There’s no donkey in the Christmas stories.

We tell ourselves there has to be a donkey, but there’s no donkey in the Christmas story. If there’s no donkey in the store, I really can’t call it donkey day. As far as we know, Joseph and Mary simply walked to wherever they had to go. Having a donkey was probably a very middle-class thing to own livestock, and there’s no indication that they were anything other than wandering migrants, so they didn’t have a donkey.

But Matthew tells us another story about Christmas. He tells us a story about astrologers.

How many people here have checked their horoscopes recently? Some people we were with recently were checking their Chinese Zodiac to see what year they were. 2026 is the year of the horse, and they were going on about things.

Did you ever ask yourself why Herod had no astrologers in his court? We talk about the stars as if everybody saw them. I’ve seen articles that it had to be a comet. There’s no indication in the story that anybody other than these guys from the foreign country actually saw this star, which meant they were professional stargazers or astrologers. Herod did not have any astrologers in his court. They didn’t see the star. You know why? It was forbidden knowledge.

That’s why the story goes back to the first Samuel. One of my favorite stories in the Old Testament was about King Saul going to consult the last witch available in Israel because he’d killed all the witches and he’d chased all the witches, astrologers, tarot readers, necromancers out, and all those who foretold the future and read palms out. He got rid of them all because it was all forbidden knowledge. That’s why, when it comes back to the Christmas story, there are no astrologers in the royal court because it’s forbidden knowledge.

But yet we all know about the stars. We all know about the Zodiac signs. My wife’s gotten to be an excellent stargazer at 1:30 in the morning. She’s got pictures to prove it. She was out looking for the Pleiades the other day, but it was too overcast to see them.

We haven’t let go of forbidden knowledge, and sometimes it takes people with different languages and different perspectives, who have knowledge that’s supposed to be forbidden to us, to tell us things that are true about our own stories.

Matthew tells his story in the gospel, which is addressed to the churches. They are modeled after the synagogue, so bear with me on this. The only religion that I know of, which was devoted to telling the sacred stories, or telling the stories about what God has done for the people, happened in the synagogues. The other religion celebrated rituals, events, and current things that were going on. But only in the synagogues do you get together to hear the old stories because people didn’t have Bibles. You didn’t have scrolls, you didn’t have a big book at home. You couldn’t go read the stories for yourself. The only place to be in touch with the history of the old stories was to get together and listen to the rabbi read from scrolls. The Rabbis knew the old stories and the scholars knew the old stories. We got together back in the day, once a week on Saturday, to listen to the old stories because the old stories were important.

Matthew tells an old story. The story he tells about the birth of Jesus and the visitors from the East who see the stars in the sky is the same story that some of the old documents that did not get into the Bible tell about Abraham and Abraham’s birth. Abraham’s birth is foretold by a star in the sky. Abraham’s birth was accompanied by the slaughter of innocence. Matthew tells a story that is not even original. The scholars would’ve known the references to Abraham. So Matthew’s trying to make Jesus into the new Abraham, the new father of a nation, a new people. He’s telling the old story that’s been told about Abraham over again in the context of Jesus.

Some of you may be aware of the crusades. Did you know there was a children’s crusade? The children all ended up being sold into slavery.

It seems historically, over and over again, powerful people, to maintain political and economic control, do it at the expense of the most vulnerable and the most innocent. It’s happened before. All I’m gonna say about it happening now is I’ve heard that 20,000 children have died in Gaza. I’ve read that it’s estimated that 20,000 children have disappeared from Ukraine. I’ve heard it said that this year, mostly in Africa, 600,000 people have died from lack of medicine and lack of food, and 400,000 of those have been children. So we ask ourselves, what are we to do?

Well, we have a story. Maybe, from that story, we could create a holiday? The 12 days of Christmas didn’t really work. The Russians celebrate gift-giving on Epiphany. Today is the day of Epiphany, by the way, when the wise, the magi, the astrologers, the foreigners, brought their gifts to Mary. We could make it a holiday where we all give gifts to our mothers, but we don’t. We could make it a day when we celebrate making places safe for people who wander, are homeless, or people who feel threatened, but we don’t. So we ask ourselves, what are we to do?

I think I have a clue, with all that’s going on in the world, that maybe we’re simply asked to be witnesses to the light to say. This is light, and that is darkness. If we say it loudly and often enough to remind each other of what’s light and what’s darkness. Maybe just maybe we’ll find that the darkness is not overcome, and the light shines in the dark, and we have to confess sometimes that we are not the light, but we can bear witness to the light, we can testify to the light, we can point to the light. We can even sometimes light a light. One of the earliest songs I remember singing is “This Little Light of Mine.” We’ll let it shine.

We are called like John, not to necessarily be the light if we find it beyond our capacity, but for none of us is it beyond our capacity to bear witness to, testify, point to, and sometimes to hold the light.

May it be so. Amen.

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 I want to us to start by thinking about who has blessed us in our lives.

If you haven’t read the November Crown yet, I’m going to give you a heads up that Allison Carr wrote a great article for the board this month about what a blessing is and how if we claim that we are blessed when we have good health, our possessions, and everything that we need. That sends a message, intentionally or not, to those who are struggling that, for some reason, they are not blessed. That’s not the message that we wanna send.

I’m turning it to say that the blessings we receive are the encouragement of others. The encouragement and the affirmations to continue the journey. We’ve all had people in our lives who helped us. It might have been a parent, a friend, or an acquaintance. Someone who helped you to know that it was worth it to continue the journey.

This picture is of my grandmother with my oldest daughter. She’s not in the room today. She would’ve gotten a surprise, but I would’ve had to tell her, just like I told Allison, it’s the people who helped us know who we are and believe in ourselves. Those are the people who blessed us, and that is who we are to be with others. So who are these people in your life?

Today is All Saints Day, November 2nd, or in Mexico, it’s Dia de los Muertos. It’s the remembering of those who have gone before us, and they may even still be alive. Those who have encouraged us or those who helped you to affirm who you are.

I called Milt Gockley this week and asked if he had some wisdom from someone who encouraged him, and he shared with me that his grandmother had told him that time gets shorter, the years go faster as you get older. And he thought, well, that’s silly because there’s always gonna be 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year. Now he knows the wisdom of his grandmother.

But, this is one of those days when we stop and we will remember those who passed in the past year. But it’s that time when we think about who else was important in our lives.

In our scripture today, 1 Peter 3:8-12, it talks about being a blessing. You are blessed to be a blessing. That is who we are to be.

The first letter to Peter was written at a time when there were a lot of Gentiles converting to Christianity, and there was this sense within the Roman culture that there was fear about this foreign religion that we know as Christianity. They were afraid that Christianity was going to challenge their patriarchy and make their women misbehave. It was said that Christianity would bring immorality, insubordination within the household, and sedition against the state. Now, I want you to sit with that a minute. And I want you to think about that.

This letter to Peter was written to help quell the fears of those who were looking at this religion and wondering; it was to remind the new Christians and those who had been converted for a while, that they were to be compassionate. We are to imitate Christ. “Be agreeable, be sympathetic, be loving, be compassionate, be humble.”

But what was Christ really like? When I look at the scriptures, I see someone who was not about picking up the norms of the society and continuing them, but someone who was looking for those who were struggling, who were hurting, and it was to those people that Jesus went, and he offered healing and he offered them community. He helped them to come back to stop being pushed out and ostracized as they had been.

I paired this scripture, 1 Peter, with the first chapter from John’s Gospel, John 1:10-18. I read this scripture twice a year. You may not have picked up on that. I read it on Christmas Eve and I read it on Good Friday because I think we need to remember the circle and it’s John’s creation account that Jesus was with God from the very beginning and came, we call it the incarnation, became one of us so that we could know more about God and helped us to be called children of God and to know that we are blessed.

Just because we are loved by God, it doesn’t give us any other guarantees. Just that you are loved as you are, for who you are, and we are to share that Jesus was trying to have us come alongside him so that we would do the same. God is the word that they use, which means Jesus is the unique Son of God, and through Jesus Christ, we are children of God.

The beauty of that is that as children of God, God helps us in our journeys because life isn’t easy. We don’t need to sugarcoat this. We all have struggles, and they’re different struggles, but we all have struggles, and Jesus wants us to know that first of all, he’s with us to the ends of the earth. We’re never alone. We don’t need to be afraid, and he invites us to create a beloved community so that we have others to help us understand. Sometimes those thoughts are in our heads, and we don’t know if that’s God or us. Community can help affirm the thoughts that are God’s. Because we just naturally wanna take care of ourselves, we wanna protect ourselves and get the most for us because we’re afraid that we won’t have enough.

As we affirm others and encourage others as we bring them into the beloved community, we also have to name when we see things that aren’t. Last week, I shared a quote by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

We are living in times when there are some who believe they know the will of God. In fact, they’re so sure of it that they are trying to take over all hearts of our society, and they are going to. It can be inviting because they can talk about bringing us back to God and bringing prayer back into school. All of this can sound very romantic until you realize that they have a very definite definition of what this will look like, and it really is about power and control. They’re going to set up the laws so that we have to function in the way they want us to function.

This isn’t about encouraging others or affirming who people are. This is about saying, you have to do it my way. That’s not who I saw Jesus as. Jesus didn’t challenge the Roman Empire. That was Judas’ problem. Jesus didn’t go far enough. Judas wanted Jesus to challenge the empire, and he didn’t. Instead, he continued to help those that hardly anyone knew, to just quietly go about blessing people.

We are in a place where there is a real crisis. Some people rely heavily on their SNAP benefits, who are about to find out that those cards are empty, and they don’t know how they’re gonna feed their families. We have people who haven’t been paid for the past month in their jobs. We have to say this is not it. This is not how we are as people of God. This is not how you bless people by making them struggle harder, and we have to act.

Here are your senators and your representatives’ telephone numbers. Take them down, call them, tell them it’s time to act. People need food, people need funds.

The group that wants to control things is in town. They are the ones behind the national prayer breakfast this week. POWER Interfaith is having a prayer vigil at St. John’s Episcopal in town on Friday. In addition to doing a prayer vigil, we’re doing a 12-hour vigil asking for donations of food for their food pantry because they feed a lot of people.

The other thing that we’re doing, as Church of the Apostles, is that we are giving $5,000 to the FoodHub this week. We’ve had money in the market basket conduit because of the grocery cards that you buy. We have this money, we’re gonna send it to the food hub. That’s what it’s meant for. It’s meant for times like this. We are gonna make a difference.

As always, we are also collecting for the Hempfield Food Pantry. All food pantries need more resources, so we’re gonna try and spread things around. It’s not right what’s happening.

We are a community, and we can make a difference. That is what we are called to do. We are called to bless others, and we are about that work.

May it be so. Amen.

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Sermon by Seminary Intern, Deklan Lewis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seriously, love, real love can be super painful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May it be so. Amen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May it be so. Amen.

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Sermon By Rev. Dennis Lippart

Old preachers are like old baseball players and old gamblers.

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

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

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

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

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

“Twinkle, twinkle little star…

“Up above the world so high,”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May it be so. Amen.

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 As we look at these scriptures, Luke 7:11-18 & John 11:17-27, I’m focusing on those whom Jesus helped and the situations because I believe that we have an epidemic of brokenness.

We are doing our very best to ignore it, and I don’t mean we as in just the people gathered in this room. I mean a big we. In fact, it may be the whole world.

But I want to specifically talk today about the young men and boys in our culture who are feeling lost, confused, and are facing social isolation, economic anxiety, and societal expectations. Research shows that young men spend more time alone. They are isolating, and that is linked to depression and anxiety. Right now, the suicide rate for men is higher than women, and the economic change over the last couple of decades has not helped. Companies have defunded benefits and reduced workforces for a better profit on their stock, which has left the traditional idea of the company man to no longer exist.

You don’t go and work for a company and expect to retire from them. That doesn’t happen because the allegiance to the workforce isn’t there. The allegiance to the company isn’t there either. That’s leaving them feeling very unsure of who they are to be. We have also done a good job of lifting our girls and young women, which needed to be done, but we can’t do that at the expense of our boys and young men. We need to empower every person.

We’ve talked a lot in the last years about toxic masculinity, but I don’t think that we have defined what healthy masculinity looks like. And we need to. I think that’s where our scriptures help us.

That is where I’m heading and what can be gleaned out of these scriptures, because we need to help our young men and boys find their purpose, because the internet and social media are not anybody’s friend.

Their exposure to negativity, violence, and unrealistic masculine expectations is setting the stage for the violence we’ve been experiencing. I think we’re headed for, if we’re honest, a culture where brokenness is a sign of weakness, even being overwhelmed is a sign of weakness. We try to hide it or we try to fix it with a quick fix. But there are no quick fixes, because we don’t want to feel vulnerable. We don’t like that. That’s uncomfortable. I’m uncomfortable with my vulnerability, too, and there has to be some place where we can show it.

I think this is what the church can be. It can be a place where we’re honest about our brokenness, about being overwhelmed by the world and what’s going on in it. But, too often, the church has been the least safe space because we are so good at judging each other. So good at pointing to another person’s faults so we don’t have to look at our own, but that’s something that we can change.

We say God’s vision for us, God’s mission for us, is to create a safe space, and we can do that. In the scripture today, both times Jesus goes and meets a grieving female.

In Lazarus’s story, I only talked about Martha, but Mary’s there too. We’ve got Jesus going and meeting three females, and I want to lift up how Jesus models for us this healthy masculinity.

He does tell the widow of Nain not to cry. I wish he wouldn’t have. I’d like to say, Luke put that in. I don’t know if Jesus said that or not, because in the story of Lazarus, if you keep reading, Jesus cries. Crying is not the end of the world, and we all need to get better at that.

But what Jesus shows us is that Jesus was not afraid of their pain or their anguish. Jesus walked toward it, not away from it. He walked toward them with empathy and compassion to meet them.

In Luke, he touched that coffin. He all but touched the dead body, which you may or may not think anything of, but back then, that was a big no-no. You didn’t wanna touch a dead body that made you unclean. He was going to have to go through ritual purification. Again, that was women’s work because we went through that every month anyway.

But Jesus wasn’t afraid of it. He was willing to allow himself to be vulnerable with the widow. The griever’s there with Martha. He takes Martha’s harsh criticism. I think Martha wanted to tell him off.

That also tells us something about what God can handle from us, that we can say our harsh words to God, and God can handle them. God wants the relationship. God’s not gonna get mad at us because we said something that could offend God, at least the God that I know. Because the God that I know, which I think is the one and only God, loves us and walks with us, comes to us in our brokenness to bring us healing if we allow ourselves to be open to it.

If we shut down and don’t allow God in, that’s on us. That’s the choice that God still lets us make, God won’t force God’s self on us, but God will come to us in our darkest nights, maybe not in ways that we expect. But, God will be there.

Jesus wasn’t afraid of death, not even of his own, but this is also not the “Jesus wasn’t afraid of death, so we don’t have to be either” sermon.

I’ve heard those sermons. Jesus knows that we’re human and that we do break. These women, if you put them in their culture, you need to know that they were about to be destitute. They could not inherit any of the wealth or property of the son or the brother. They were going to be homeless and on the streets begging. Jesus understands that, too, and does what he can to change that.

The ones who are without resources, the ones living on the streets, the ones who are lonely and broken, those are the ones we are to care about too.

So, what is our role based on this? Well, we’re not going to produce miracles. We’re not gonna raise anybody from the dead, but we can walk with those who are struggling. We can comfort and listen.

That is why we have a Compassion Team. Our Compassion Team will listen to us, and they will hold your confidences. You could be that person among us who just needs somebody to care about their pain, confusion, or anger.

If we look at our collective lives. We have learned a lot. For those who’ve been with this congregation for a long time. We know how to survive conflict. It is our humanity that unites us. According to the research, our DNA is 99.9% identical. It’s only that 0.1% that makes each one of us unique. That is not a big difference. Even though it’s a difference we tend to focus on.

We can choose differently.

We can choose to walk with each other, to comfort one another, to come and be reminded that our God is here for us. Life is hard, and we are all going to suffer in some way. That is a reality.

Sorry if this is a downer, but I hope that you also hear that we are surrounded by the love and grace of God. That is beyond our imagination, and I hope that you feel that today.

If you need that in a physical way, reach out to the Compassion Team, and let one of them walk with you.

May it be so. Amen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will you let the Spirit move in You?”

May it be so. Amen.

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