don't eat alone

It’s getting down to crunch time in the baseball season, which means it doesn’t take much for my sermon to intersect with the Red Sox. Here’s what I said on Sunday.

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In the fall of 2004, I was the Associate Pastor of the First Congregational Church of Hanover, Massachusetts, which is about halfway between Boston and Cape Cod. We had two morning services, at 8:30 and 10, and there was a group of five or six women who got there early on Sunday morning to put on the coffee as they prepared for the coffee hour between the services. They were all in the seventies and they were all serious Red Sox fans, which meant they talked baseball while they got things ready. I quickly developed the habit of getting to church early on Sunday morning so I could be a part of the discussion.

The summer of 2004 had been hopeful, if you were a Red Sox fan, but so had several other summers between that one and 1918, the last time the Sox had won the World Series. No one in the church kitchen had been alive when our home team had brought home a championship. We stood in the lineage of the broken-hearted faithful who trusted that if we just kept playing things would be different one day.

Every time the passage we read this morning comes up in the lectionary, I think of my early morning coffee and conversations with those wonderful women: “Not one of these people, even though their lives of faith were exemplary, got their hands on what was promised. God had a better plan for us: that their faith and our faith would come together to make one completed whole, their lives of faith not complete apart from ours.”

We are all a part of the lineage of the faithful.

If there was ever a week when it was evident that our scripture passage started in the middle of a larger story, this is the week. Look again at the first two sentences you have printed in front of you:

I could go on and on, but I’ve run out of time. There are so many more—Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jepthah, David, Samuel, and the prophets.

Hebrews 11 is sometimes called the Hall of Fame of the Faithful because the writer goes down a list of people from Hebrew history whose relationship with God had a profound effect on those who followed: Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Joseph, Moses, Rahab. Some of the names are immediately recognizable and some, perhaps, are not. All of them are a part of the story of God’s relationship with humanity, but the list is far from exhaustive, even within scripture. And most all of them were flawed in some way and fell short of what God called them to do. Still, the writer of Hebrews notes, they endured many things to live out their trust in God, sometimes painful and difficult things.

The writer of the letter to the Hebrews didn’t know anything about baseball, so he turned to another sports metaphor, running. He likened our trust in God to an endurance race, exhorting us to run and not quit, to keep our eyes on Jesus who ran the race before us, to remember those who ran before us.

The problem with sports metaphors is that they make us think in terms of winning and losing. When we hear life or faith compared with running a race, we think we somehow have to win, which runs counter to the reality of life or faith in a way. The Greek word used for race can also mean a heat, as in a qualifying race or one that is not the winner-take-all. There are more races still to come. Everything is not riding on us. We are running our segment of the relay, doing what we can do in our race. It’s not as much about winning as it is about completing our segment, doing what we can, and remembering we aren’t the final runners.

I keep coming back to this verse: “Not one of these people, even though their lives of faith were exemplary, got their hands on what was promised.”

That is a shocking statement that is a bit unnerving. Not one of those people—not Abraham or Moses or Sarah or David or whoever else we want to list—received on what God had promised. They only got part of it. The writer of Hebrews goes on to make it sound as though his readers were the completing piece of the puzzle, the anchor of the relay:

God had a better plan for us: that their faith and our faith would come together to make one completed whole, their lives of faith not complete apart from ours.

And yet here we sit over two thousand years later and the race is still on. If I can return to my Red Sox metaphor, we haven’t broken the Curse. The same exhortation the writer of Hebrews gave those he wrote still applies to us: keep looking at the way Jesus ran the race. He never lost trust in God and the love he had come to share, no matter what it cost, even his death.

I was watching the Red Sox play one night this week, which has been a week when they have struggled a bit, and the commentators were talking about one of the young, promising players who was also struggling. Kevin Millar, who played on the Red Sox team that broke the Curse in 2004, said something that caught my attention. He said, “The guy has good fundamentals and he is going to be great. But baseball is a game built around failure, so he’s going to have to learn how to fail.”

I should probably let him know he helped with my sermon. Theologian Frederick Buechner wrote a book on the Crucifixion entitled The Magnificent Defeat that looked at Jesus’ life and death as failures, in a way that allowed his trust that God’s love was stronger than all of it to bring him back to life and offer us hope and comfort in knowing the point is, as the prophet Isaiah said, “we will mount up with wings like eagles; we will run and not be weary; we will walk and not faint.

Sunday morning, October 31, 2004 had a different feeling when I got to church early to meet the coffee ladies because earlier that week the Sox had won the World Series for the first time in eighty-six years. The cemetery adjacent to the church was filled with Red Sox banners and hats and signs, where people had festooned the tombstones of those who had died before we finally broke the Curse. I was grateful my coffee buddies were alive to share the moment. I was glad to be there, too, since it was a new feeling for me as well.

But even with the championship came the reality of next year. There was another season, another team to field, another game to play, another failure to learn, and another Sunday to gather for coffee and talk and hope. When the Sox won a second championship in 2007, I was speaking to a guy at a different coffee hour in a different church. He had a five-year old son who was dressed in a Sox shirt.

“Look at him,” his father said, “he seven and the Sox have won twice. He has no idea how to be a true Red Sox fan. He thinks we always win.”

Considering that kid is now almost twenty and the Sox have not won every year, I will assume he has a better idea now about both life and the Red Sox.

We are all a part of the lineage of the faithful and the legacy they have handed down is not one of victory, but of perseverance and trust, whether we are talking about the biblical characters named in our passage or those we could name from the history of Mount Carmel Congregational Church. There are very few mornings that we wake up to news that offers hope that love is stronger than greed or power, yet that is what we are called to trust. That is the race we are called to run. That is the failure we are called to learn how to live through. That is the race Christ ran before us. Come, let us run together for as long as it takes. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

Last week’s lectionary passage is one of my favorites. Here’s what I had to say on Sunday.

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Right after Ginger and I got back from our trip to Durham last month, we noticed a plant that had sprung up along our back fence line. It was not there because we planted it, but since it had taken the energy to grow and it wasn’t hurting anything, we left it alone, allowing it to grow along with the volunteer cherry tomatoes along the barn wall and the squash vine that is growing in one of our flower beds.

We are quite good at growing things we didn’t plant it seems.

We’re not good at identifying plants, as a rule. When we got back from the Cape earlier this week, we were delighted to find that the giant mystery plant was a sunflower, now in full bloom. When I realized that, I was really glad we had let it grow. As I sat down to write this sermon, I couldn’t help to paraphrase our passage:

Consider the sunflowers and how beautifully they grow. They don’t exhaust themselves with work or wear themselves out spinning thread. But I tell you not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed as well as one of these flowers.

Right before Jesus talked about the flowers and the birds and what they understood about the generous economy of God that is often lost on us humans, he had replied rather sternly to a man who asked Jesus to tell his brother to share their inheritance. He first said that he had no intention of playing referee between the two siblings and then he told a parable about a rich man who brought in such a big harvest that he couldn’t store it all. Instead of sharing it, he tore down his barns and built bigger ones so he could hoard his wealth and make sure he would be rich for years to come. In the parable, God came to the man and said, “You’re going to die tonight. Now what happens to all that you have hoarded?”

Then Jesus turned to his followers and said, “Therefore, don’t worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will have to wear. Life is more than food and your body is more than clothing. Pay attention to the birds, consider the sunflowers . . .”

Jesus knew he wasn’t talking to rich people. He knew they worked for a daily or weekly wage—fishers, farm hands, manual laborers. None of them would have had the chance to think about building bigger barns so they could hoard their wealth. How did he expect to be taken seriously when he said, be more like the flowers and birds and don’t be afraid?

The answer is in the way he described the economy of God.

Over the past months, I have used that translation—economy—of what is most often rendered as the kingdom of God. I have done so for a couple of reasons, the main one being that kingdom is an outdated metaphor that is difficult to make come to life. The other is that an economy is a system of relationships. The oldest root of the word means “household management,” so we might say an economy is system of taking care of each other, at least from a theological sense. Over centuries of empire, the word has come to mean an exchange of goods and has gone from being relational to transactional.

With that in mind, let’s go back to the garden. We are learning more and more about the interrelatedness of plants and animals, whether we are talking about the mycorrhizal networks of fungi in the soil that transport nutrients between plants even across great distances, or the ways bees and birds foster plant growth. The reason that sunflower is growing on our fence line is probably because a bird fed on one of last summer’s flowers and then dropped the seed in our yard. That is the heart of the economy of God: everything lives together, works together, thrives together.

Jesus’ point wasn’t just for us to learn from the birds and flowers, but to realize we are a part of them. Humans are not managers or owners of other created beings, even though that’s the system we have set up, we are on the same level as the crows and lilies, squash vines, and sunflowers. We are built to share and support whatever life is around us, not hoarding for later but making sure everyone has what they need now because all of us, from plants to people, are only here for a short time. In the parable, God told the rich man he was going to die that night, then Jesus talked about the lily and said, “This is God’s greenery that is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire.

So when Jesus gets to the part where he said, “Don’t be afraid,” he is not rattling off some greeting card platitude, but he is saying in the face of all that is beautiful and temporary (including us), choose trust instead of fear. Look around at the creation you are a part of and be overcome by the generosity of God rather than be worn down by the human economy of perceived scarcity.

Everyone he was talking to had bills to pay and mouths to feed. Jesus wasn’t telling them to pretend that wasn’t true. He was telling them—and us—to be aware of what matters most because, he said, where our treasure is our heart will be as well. Another way to say that is Jesus said that the treasures closest to our hearts are those we can actually clarify in a way that another person gets what we mean and can sense that it matters a great deal. If we want to know what matters most to us, look and what (and who) we hang on to.

I had coffee Friday morning with a friend in Guilford who works for Connecticut Food Share. Her entire job is to make connections between Dollar General Stores and food banks or pantries so that Dollar General can donate the food they can’t use instead of throwing it in the dumpster. There is enough food involved that it is worth Connecticut Food Share to support a full-time job. And it’s kind of a human version of a sunflower on the fence line. Someone had the generosity of imagination to make the necessary connections for fewer people to go hungry.

We are like the lilies and the crows and the sunflowers. We are all part of the integrated, connected web, not just of humanity, but of all creation. That is the world God delights in giving us. That is the treasure that should capture our hearts. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

I think this is the first time that thinking about prayer took me to both Robert Frost and ice hockey. Here’s my sermon for this week.

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My twelfth grade English teacher Ms. Morse is responsible, in part, for my love of poetry—particularly the poems of Robert Frost. When Ginger and I lived in Boston, we loved driving up to Frost’s farm in southern New Hampshire, which is a national park. They had a self-guided walking tour that came with a pamphlet of poems to read at certain places along the trail that matched the words. We would walk, I would read the poems out loud, and Ginger would lovingly mock me.

In English class, Ms. Morse led us to “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” as well as some of his more familiar poems. Then we came to one called “The Death of the Hired Man” that was not like the others. It was long. It told a story. And it didn’t rhyme.

The poem starts with Mary sitting at the kitchen table waiting for her husband Warren to come home. When he does, she gives him the news that Silas, a man who had worked for them off and on over the years—and who had left on less than good terms—had returned. He is a sad and broken man on his return and seemed to have nowhere else to go. Mary has some compassion; Warren wants nothing to do with him because of some old hurt that we don’t know much about. Finally, Mary pleads for Warren’s kindness, saying Silas has just come home to die, and that causes Warren to question what home really is. What he said has stayed with me ever since:

‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.’

I moved around so much growing up that I have had a hard time figuring out where home is, and I also know not everyone feels like their families of origin are where they most belong. However, most of us have a place where they know that when they go there they have to be taken in.

I thought about Warren and Mary and Silas when I read Jesus’ story about the person who wakes their friend at midnight, imposing on their relationship, because another friend had imposed on them showing up in the middle of the night and asking for a place to stay and they were trying to be hospitable. The man did what friends do: they asked for help, even though it was inconvenient for the one they asked.

Jesus said, “I assure you, even if he wouldn’t get up and help because of his friendship, he will get up and give his friend whatever he needs because of his friend’s sheer shamelessness.” That’s what it means to be a friend—and sometimes that is a costly choice.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to let you in.
That’s what home is. That’s what true friendship is. Maybe that’s what prayer is as well—that place where, when you go there, God lets us in.

As you heard in our passage, the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray the way John the Baptist had taught his students. Jesus responded with a short prayer that makes it sound like Luke couldn’t remember the words to the Lord’s Prayer, since it doesn’t match what we pray every Sunday. Still, it boils it down to the basics: feed us, forgive us, protect us.

Then Jesus told the story about the persistent friend who shows up at midnight asking for help, which is what friends do. We wouldn’t call a stranger in the middle of the night and ask for help, but we would call a friend because I know they love us. That’s what friends are for, as we said. They get up and do what is bothersome or inconvenient because we were audacious enough to ask and because from time to time we get a bill for what our friendships cost us, if you will, and if we are friends, we pay it.

Another way to look at it is to say that the requests we make of one another—even the impositions—happen in the context of relationships. The little things we do with and for one another are deposits in a Trust Bank, if you will, so that when the time comes to make a midnight withdrawal, the inconvenience is not the headline to the story, but a chance instead to make a memory together.

“Remember that time I called you in the middle of the night . . .”

The small story is a contagion of trust and need. The friend who showed up in the middle of the night needed a place to stay. The one answering with a room needed food for their unexpected guest. Our need for help and our ability to offer it are the things that weave our lives together. Their calls for help also remind us that we often impose on those we know will answer. We ask for help where we know—or at least we hope—we can get it.

After telling the story, Jesus said, “Ask and you will receive. Search and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you. Everyone, in fact, who asks gets, and whoever searches finds, and the door will be opened to whoever is knocking.”

Then he switched to family examples to illustrate what he was saying. When a child asks for a fish, a parent wouldn’t give them a snake, or if the kid wanted an egg, the parent wouldn’t hand them a scorpion. When we love someone, we listen to them. We respond to their requests. Can’t we trust God the same way?

I would like to point out here that all of these words come on the heels of Martha asking Jesus to tell Mary to get up and help in the kitchen and Jesus responding by saying, “No.” Jesus wasn’t saying God is a vending machine where we punch our selection and out comes the item. He was saying that God is even more trustworthy than those we trust most to get up in the middle of the night when we call, if we are willing to trust. God is an open-all-night kind of God.

And that leads us to one of the things we can infer from Jesus’ words, which is when we pray, we articulate our theology: we say out loud who we think God is and what we think God is like.

Do we trust God is merciful or compassionate? Do we think God is too busy? Do we think God looks at the world the way we do? Do we think God will alter the universe to make us happy? Do we trust God will be with us no matter what happens? Do we think God will get up in the middle of the night and help?

Here’s one more: Could God be the one knocking on the door in the middle of the night asking for our help in taking care of others?

The theology Jesus articulated in the prayer he offered his followers and the stories that surrounded it is a picture of a God who calls us into relationship, who expects us to trust, to ask, to listen, and to act. If we don’t ask—if we don’t risk—we don’t give God the chance to respond nor do we give God the chance to call us deeper into relationship.

Which brings me to ice hockey; specifically, a quote from Wayne Gretzky, whom hockey fans know as “The Great One” because of his goal scoring ability. He said quite famously, “You miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.”

When I searched for the origins of his quote, I found that there was more too it. The full version is, “You will never get what you don’t ask for. You can’t find what you aren’t looking for. You miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.”

It sounds like a paraphrase of our passage: seek and you will find, ask and you will receive, shoot and you will give yourself a chance to score.” I found an interview with a movie producer named James III who said he thought what needed to be added to Gretzky’s words was “the more shots you take, the better at shooting you’ll be.”

I like that addition because it calls us to practice, in the spiritual sense of that word, repeating the words and actions to deepen our connection to God. When we pray shamelessly like the friend, in a way that leans into our relationship God, a way that makes a withdrawal from the trust bank, we deepen that relationship and open our hearts to be changed.

Remember, when we pray, we articulate our theology: we say out loud who we think God is and what we think God is like. And also remember that our theologies can grow and change. Our image of who God is and what we think God is like can grow and change.

Jesus didn’t answer Martha shameless request to make her sister come and cook by telling Mary to go into the kitchen. He answered by offering Martha a larger view of God and her sister and of the moment they were all sharing together that included her hospitality but challenged her view that Jesus would agree with her even as he it clear that both sisters belonged, which wasn’t the answer Martha was hoping for, but it gave her a new way of looking at both Jesus and her sister.

Prayer is that place where, when you go there, God lets you in. Because that’s what love does. And God is love. So, pray because we don’t get an answer to one hundred percent of the prayers we don’t pray. If we don’t ask, nothing will happen. If we don’t seek, we will never find. If we don’t knock, no one will answer.

Prayer is also the place where, when we go there, we let God in. If we don’t answer the door in the middle of the night, we will miss the chance to help and grow. To pray is to open our hearts to God. When we do that, who knows what can happen. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

Mary and Martha have been compared for years. Maybe there’s a different way to look at it.

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I find it interesting that Luke tells the story of Jesus’ visit to Mary and Martha’s house right after the parable of the Samaritan that we read last week. We don’t have any real indication that one happened right after the other, as if Jesus finished the parable and then said, “Go and do likewise, but I have to head to Bethany for dinner with friends.”

Luke isn’t offering that kind of account of Jesus’ life. He, like the other gospel writers, decided what stories to tell and in what order to tell them as well. A timeline of how all four fit together is not easy to figure out, which gives us reason to think about why the story is laid out the way we have it.

Luke 10 starts with Jesus sending out “seventy others,” which seems to imply that the twelve we know were not the only ones significantly connected to what Jesus was doing. He sent them in pairs to go into the towns and villages and say, “God is here. God is near.” If they were welcomed, they were to stay and partake of the hospitality that was offered. No need to rush off. Enjoy the gift. If they were not welcomed, he told them to “shake the dust off of their feet” and leave with the reminder that God was still there.

They returned and then came the encounter with the man that led to Jesus telling the parable of the Samaritan, which we talked about last week. What we didn’t talk about very much were the two who walked by the man in the ditch rather than help him. They were both clergy. We aren’t given any reason why they crossed the road and kept going, only that they did. Jesus gave no details, but used them as the backdrop for the Samaritan who stopped and stayed and helped.

Where the seventy were told to remind people God was there whether the people welcomed them or not, the parable said the man who needed help was in the ditch whether anyone stopped to notice or not. Remember, Jesus told the story to illustrate who are neighbors are. Whether we walk by or stop, whether we take notice or take leave, our neighbor is the one in the ditch, the one in need.

The scene moves quickly to the home of two sisters, Mary and Martha, whom Jesus knew and visited more than once. They also had a brother named Lazarus who doesn’t show up in the story this time. As you can see from the length of our reading this morning, Luke doesn’t give us a lot of layers to work with. We have to use our sacred imaginations and give ourselves room to see the words between the words, if you will.

Having people in the house meant being an exceptional host to Martha, it seems. Luke said she “welcomed him as a guest.” For her, that meant a lot of good food and drink. Jesus sat down to eat, just as he had told the seventy to do when he sent them out. Mary, her sister, appears to have welcomed Jesus more as a teacher or a mentor. She sat down to listen to Jesus, which is a different kind of hospitality.

This is a good example of what I mean by unspoken layers. The two sisters looked at and responded to the world differently. In fact, it was—at least in part—because they were sisters that they did things differently. It sounds like Martha had the catering part of hospitality locked down. If you were Mary, wouldn’t you look for a different way to participate?

Though doing the work of preparing all the food was Martha’s love language, she was also a little miffed that her sweet sister wasn’t speaking the love language of what-can-I-do-to-help, and she said so. One translator pointed out that Martha’s words show they, as a family, were not wealthy enough to have servants. Martha really was doing it all on her own and that would have been onerous work. In her frustration, she walked into the middle of the conversation and said quite bluntly, “Tell her to help me.”

Jesus said, “Martha, you are overtaken by the details of your hospitality. Mary chose what matters most to her. I’m not going to take that away from her.”

And that is where the story ends, though we can infer that a lot more happened, which brings us back to looking at how these stories fit together. Many times all three of these scenes—the sending of the seventy-two, the parable of the Samaritan, and the dinner with the sisters—take on an air of comparison, as though someone in each of the stories is the one to emulate. The parable is perhaps the easiest one to read that way, since the Samaritan does so much, but comparing everyone to decide who did it best doesn’t feel like it offers much more than the ranking.

Luke didn’t tell us about Mary and Martha so that we would know who was better, or who acted better. Jesus wasn’t asking them to compete against each other, nor was he offering a comparison between them, which is hard for us to hear because we live in a world that is inundated with comparison and competition, a world which doesn’t trust that we are all wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved, whether we are sweating in the kitchen or soaking up the conversation in the living room.

Even the word comparison makes the point.

The original meaning of the word, going back about six centuries, was “regard or treat as equal,” since the roots break into two Latin words: com, which means with or together, and par, which means equal: “together equal.” To compare was to represent as similar, to look for likeness. It took a couple of hundred years to look at dissimilarities as well, which has created issues ever since, leading up to Teddy Roosevelt’s often quoted words, “Comparison is the thief of joy.”

Perhaps not, if we see each other as together equal.

Our three stories offer an arc of hospitality and belonging, we might say. Jesus sent people out saying, “Knock on doors and stay where you are welcome and leave when you are not.” Then he told the parable about a man who was a country where he was not welcome and yet stayed to take care of the person who had been left for dead. Then he went to the house of his friends and accepted all of the hospitality that was offered him.

Another way we could talk about the stories is to say they are about asking for help. The people went out with nothing and asked for a place to stay. The man in the ditch couldn’t ask, so the Samaritan asked for him. Martha didn’t really ask—she kind of demanded—and Jesus offered her a way to move beyond her indignation and share in the moment.

As we sit in this very room, we are not being sent out empty-handed to ask strangers to take us in like the seventy, nor are we trying to navigate a place where we are not welcome and help where we can like the Samaritan. But we are in this room to encounter Christ, to see Jesus, if you will. And after we finish here, we will go across to Fellowship Hall where we will have another chance to encounter Christ in our conversations. Whether we move beyond our indignation, or our woundedness, or whatever it is that stands in the way of allowing the Spirit of God to help us be together equal is up to us and our willingness to open our hearts. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

The parable of the Samaritan who stopped is well-worn and often told, thanks to the Revised Common Lectionary. This year, I found him in the supermarket parking lot, straightening the carts. Thanks for reading.

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We reveal a lot about ourselves in a supermarket parking lot.

Specifically, we reveal a lot by what we do with our empty cart once we have put our groceries in the car. Do we leave it kind of tucked in between cars? Do we push it up on the grass rather than walking it to the cart corrals that sit in most lots? Do we take time to slide it into place with the other carts so things will be easier on the poor kid who has to come retrieve them and take them back to the front door of the market?

As you can tell by my detail, I can get kind of judgy in the parking lot when people leave their carts so that others have to clean up. My indignation rivals how I feel when someone leans all the way back in the coach section of an airplane. Both situations fly all over me because I infer that the perpetrators have no regard for other people–my judgment, mind you, not necessarily their actual perspective or situation. I don’t know those people; I just judge them.

If I were to update our parable, I might just tell it in a supermarket parking lot because there are lots of chances to get judgy as we read the story. Is the lawyer asking Jesus a straight up question, or is he trying to trap Jesus? Shouldn’t the priest and the Levite (both Hebrew clergy) have stopped? How dare they walk by? And what was the Samaritan man doing wandering in a region where he did not belong?

You get my drift.

Let’s start with the lawyer and his questions. A lot of commentators assume he was trying to trap Jesus, as we might infer from our translation this morning, but we can also read it as though he was sounding Jesus out, trying to get clarification. So, in a non-parking lot spirit, let’s assume he really wanted to know how to live a life in God.

Let’s also assume Jesus was giving him a direct answer when he answered the question with a question and then the lawyer quoted the Shema: Love God with all you are and love your neighbor as yourself.

A big part of the reason I think the lawyer was asking honestly is his second question: Who is my neighbor? It’s a great question because it requires specificity. Luke says the lawyer asked it in order to “justify himself”—to show he was in the right.

Commentator David Lose writes, “Jesus chose a Samaritan, to remind this self-justifying lawyer that there is no self-justification possible, because the moment we can justify ourselves we no longer need care about those around us. The consequence of justifying ourselves, it turns out, is to struggle to recognize the presence of God in our neighbors and, even harder, in our enemies.”

Theologian Karoline Lewis carries his thought a bit further: “I am convinced, more than ever, that the question of the lawyer is the question of faith today. We need to ask it over and over again, and especially when we don’t want to. I never want to—but I have to. And I will because this story reminds me to trust in Jesus’ answer. An answer that forces me to answer for myself. And, in the end, that is what faith is supposed to be.”

Jesus’ answer is the parable we call the story of The Good Samaritan, though Jesus never called him good and the story is about way more than just him, though who he was in relation to everyone else is at the core of what the parable has to say to us. Theologian Debie Thomas writes,

“The enmity between the Jews and the Samaritans in Jesus’ day was not theoretical; it was embodied and real. The differences between them were not easily negotiated; each was fully convinced that the other was wrong. So what Jesus did when he deemed the Samaritan “good” was radical and risky; it stunned his Jewish listeners. . . . He was inviting them to consider the possibility that a person might add up to more than the sum of their political, racial, cultural, and economic identities. He was calling them to put aside the history they knew, and the prejudices they nursed. He was asking them to leave room for divine and world-altering surprises.

If we were putting it in a modern context, we could say An Israeli person is robbed, and a Palestinian saves their life. A liberal Democrat is robbed, and a conservative Republican saves their life. A white supremacist is robbed, and a black teenager saves their life. A fundamentalist preacher is robbed, and a trans person saves their life. Or if we want to really get down to it, a Red Sox player is robbed, and a Yankee fan saves their life.

Jesus was asking them to leave room for divine and world-altering surprises.

Whether we are talking first century Palestine or twenty-first century America, how we love one another is a live question, and that question keeps bumping up against the reality that we show our love by what we do for those who need us, and not just by seeing people in need and thinking about how much we love them. As most all of us can attest, thoughts and prayers, while essential, only go so far if they are not accompanied by something more tangible. We really begin to love each other when we act like it—when we do something.

Commentator Kristin Berkley-Abbott says,

“This training of love for the world can start small. We might not start out by stopping for every stranger in need that we see or giving away all of our money and possessions or moving to the streets in solidarity with the homeless. We can start where we are. We can help out even when we don’t have to. We can stop keeping track of who has done what to wrong us or who is taking advantage of the system. Instead of keeping track of our losses, we can keep track of gratitude. We can share with people who haven’t had the lucky breaks that we have had. . . . It’s not enough, however, to love the people who are easy to love. It’s much harder to love those who have behaved in horrible ways. But we must love them too. In fact, it might be the more important task.”

Which takes me back to the parking lot. The main reason it has even become a thing for me, other than being frustrated when someone leaves cart blocking a parking spot, is that Big Y in Guilford hires a lot of special needs folks and they end up being the ones who have to retrieve the carts. I have watched them wrestle with the tangled mess left for them. One of the ways I deal with my indignation is to straighten out the carts in the corral when I can. A couple of weeks ago, I was doing that when a woman came up with her cart and I commented about my frustration, which led her to cut lose on a short swearing rant about the character of the other shoppers. Though I understood her anger, I didn’t share her rage.

I also didn’t know anything about her story or why the carts made her so angry. I have seen Ginger struggle with her anger when able-bodied people park in designated handicap spots. Not everyone knows her passion is so intense because her dear friend was paralyzed from the neck down after a car accident.

Rage doesn’t offer much possibility for redemption. The same can be said of fear. Compassion lies beyond our fear when we do the work to humanize one another.

Jesus didn’t tell the parable to embarrass the lawyer or incite enmity towards the two members of the clergy. He was telling those who were listening what it took to be a neighbor. One way to hear the story is that the place we best learn that is when we feel like we are the ones in the ditch because when we are wounded and hurting, what matters is not whose help we’d prefer, or whose way of practicing Christianity we like best, or whose politics we agree with. What matters is whether or not anyone will stop to offer kindness.

From there we can see that every wounded person—which means everyone—is our neighbor and is deserving of our compassion and kindness, if we are willing to notice them. Even those who don’t put their carts up. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

I am playing catch up after forgetting to post my sermons from the last couple of weeks. The title of this sermon came from the first words of The Message version of Galatians 6:1-10: “Live creatively, friends.” Thanks for reading.

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I love the way our passage for today begins: “Live creatively, friends.”

These words come on the heels of what we read last week about the Fruit of the Spirit–what I also called the Fruit of Breathing–because they are what it takes to help each other stay alive, As Paul moves to the last part of his letter to the Galatian congregation, which was not without its own challenges, he talks about what it looks like to live in creative relationship with one another: what it looks like when we are committed to bringing out the best in ourselves as we navigate life together, and he says that to live in mutual and meaningful community is a creative act.

When we hear the word creative, we usually think of something artistic, as if I am going to announce art and poetry classes in the parish house, but the oldest meaning of the word create is to make grow–to help things flourish and develop.

Live creatively, friends. Live in a way that lets everyone flourish and thrive.

Often, the popular perception of artists is that they are somehow different than other people, that their brains work differently. We tend to think of creativity as if it were a gift. Though it is true that we all see the world a bit differently from each other, a lot of what it takes to be creative comes with practice. Artists have all kinds of rituals and practices to help them hone their craft, to help them be more creative. To be able to improvise with an instrument, for example, you first have to play the scales.

I have a friend who was a studio musician and was hired to play for the jazz guitarist, Pat Metheney. My friend said he never saw the man without his guitar. When he was sitting down to eat or to relax, his fingers were running scales, doing the work to foster his creativity.

How then do we practice creative living? What are the scales we need to run, the relational skills we need to hone?

Paul gives a couple of specific examples that paint a pretty good picture of how we can practice living creatively.

If someone messes up, forgive them and keep your criticism to yourself (then he adds that we might need to be one the receiving end of that forgiveness sooner than we think).

Help people who are oppressed and in need. When we share each other’s burdens–each other’s grief and heartache–we complete what Christ came to do (then he adds none of us should think we are above that kind of compassion).

Figure out what you have to offer the world and then do it with all of your heart. I don’t think he is talking about careers here, nor do I think this is a one-time conversation that we have with ourselves. This ought to be an ongoing internal conversation at different stages of our lives. (Then he adds, don’t compare yourself with others; be responsible for who you are.)

Then he changes gears and says to remember that no one makes a fool of God. The fruit of our lives will depend on the seeds we have planted. If we plant seeds of bitterness, we will have a bitter harvest. If we plant the seeds of the Spirit, we will harvest the fruit of the Spirit. How we chose to engage the world is, most likely, the way the world will respond in return.

So, he says, “Let’s not allow ourselves to grow fatigued doing good. At the right time we will harvest a good crop if we don’t give up or quit. Right now, therefore, every time we get the chance, let us work for the benefit of all, starting with the people closest to us in our community of faith.”

As I said last week, Paul was writing to a congregation trying to find its way in the middle of great political and societal upheaval. The Roman government gave little indication that it cared about anyone or anything other than amassing more power and wealth. Fear was their primary tactic to keep people off balance. They wanted people to be afraid of the government and of each other because that made it easier to keep everyone in line.

For Paul, who had spent a good part of his life being a fear mongerer, the best way to respond to that kind of toxic leadership was by living creatively and practicing loving one another–living out the daily scales of forgiveness, compassion, integrity, kindness, and hope so that all of us can flourish and thrive. As he wrote to the congregation in Rome,

Love is patient, love is kind, it isn’t jealous, it doesn’t brag, it isn’t arrogant, it isn’t rude, it doesn’t seek its own advantage, it isn’t irritable, it doesn’t keep a record of complaints, it isn’t happy with injustice, but it is happy with the truth. Love puts up with all things, trusts in all things, hopes for all things, endures all things. Love never fails.

When Jesus talked about love, he said we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, which means some of the scales we need to practice have to do with getting better at loving ourselves. Before we can truly forgive others, we have to forgive ourselves. Before we can truly help others, we have to practice being vulnerable and learn how to ask for the help we need. In order to be responsible for who we are, we have to know who we are. To offer a place of belonging to others, we have to be at home with ourselves.

We said last week that Paul though community was life, and the failure of community was death. Paul wrote because he wanted people to breathe and to live. This metaphor underlines that same idea. If we practice the scales of bitterness then our community will die in bitterness. When we run the scales of the Spirit; we foster healing and reconciliation; when we do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly; we grow in thriving relationships with God, ourselves, and others.

We choose how we want to live and how we see this broken and beautiful world. We can choose, with God’s help, to live creatively, my friends. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

For the past four summers, as most of you know, I have spent time in the north of Ireland as a part of peace retreats intending to learn about and from the centuries of division in that land that culminated in violence the refer to as The Troubles and then in the Good Friday Agreement, which was signed in 1998, that sought to bring an end to the violence and pave a way for peace. It took almost a decade after it was signed before the Agreement was fully implemented, and it did bring an end to the most ruthless of the violence intended to inflict damage and incite terror. People don’t have to check under their cars for bombs anymore, yet the divisions are far from erased.

Two of the people who have spent their lives working for peace are Rev. Dr. Leslie Carroll, a Presbyterian minister and activist, which means she has been connected to the Unionist (or the Protestant) side of the divide, and Tom Hartley, an Irish Republican (or Catholic) politician and historian, who was a member of Sinn Fein and had been Lord Mayor of Belfast. Though they grew up on either side of the conflict, they knew each other well because they were a part of secret meetings that took place for years between Catholics and Protestants that paved the way for the Good Friday talks.

At one point in the conversation, Tom said, “Making peace is harder than making war because your enemy doesn’t think like you do. You have to learn a new language.” As an example, he said Catholics grew up with a Pope, an authority that spoke for all, so when Gerry Adams spoke for Sinn Fein, they were already accustomed to having one leader speak for them. The Presbyterians, on the other hand, grew out of a Calvinist tradition that valued individual experience. Words mattered to them in a way they did not to those who grew up Catholic. In order to understand each other, they had to learn how to listen and understand a way of looking at life that was not what they were accustomed to.

“Conflict sustains itself by dehumanizing the enemy,” he said. “Negotiation means creating something new.”

Hartley’s words may seem a long way from our scripture passage, but Galatia is not as far from Belfast as you might think–or from Hamden, for that matter.

As we contemplate these verses, we remember that the congregations of believers that sprang up outside of Palestine did so in an environment that was opposed and even threatening to their faith. Both Greek and Roman culture put little value on the kind of love-centered community the young churches were trying to grow. The hallmarks of Roman culture were power and acquisition, whether you were talking about things or people. The way Paul contrasted the dos and don’ts of life, if you will, was to underline the basic idea that we are either pulling together or we are pulling each other apart. It’s in the words he chose.

Translator Sarah Ruden says, “Paul connects the peace of the community with the metaphysical Spirit in a way that the English does now show. Pneuma (from which we have “pneumatic”) means both Spirit and physical breath. What is most essential for life is most free, most natural, and most shared. In the Hebrew Bible, the Spirit (ruach) of God comes to the entire nation, bringing God’s kingdom.”

On the other hand, the word we translate as flesh, sarx–from which we get our word sarcophagus–is an animal life driven by desires that have no qualms in tearing another limb from limb to satisfy an appetite. Hear Sarah Ruden again:

“Paul’s point is not that the body or nature is bad and the mind or spirit is good. It is about two ways of using the body, the one for a life that is worth living forever, the other for a life that is as good as death in the short time before it vanishes. . . . Community is life. The failure of community is death.”

Paul laid out the keys to life together in what we have come to call the Fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, which is not simply a list of virtues to be admired but relational resources to tighten the bonds between us, and that sends me back to Tom Hartley’s words about learning new languages because I think the challenges of learning how to listen to each other and learning how to speak to each other begin long before we become enemies.

We don’t always speak the same language, so we have to be intentional about asking questions rather than passing judgments, listening in love rather than moving too quickly to tell someone else they shouldn’t say what they said.

Listen again to the fruit of the Spirit, this time from The Message translation from which Eric read:

“But what happens when we live God’s way? God brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely.”

That list is a little harder to quote, perhaps, but I like the way it begins to unpack what it takes to build a life together, whether we are talking about as a family, as a congregation, as a nation, or as a world. We need to remember that fruit actually aren’t things we can pick up in plastic packages at the supermarket any time. They take time and skill to cultivate and harvest. Sometimes it takes yeas from the time a tree is planted until it bears fruit. Some fruit, like strawberries, grow on vines that have to be tended and trimmed because the berries only grow on new shoots. A number of you know way more about growing things, so I’m sure we could we wear out this metaphor, but what I want to go back to is that we are talking about the fruit of the Spirt of God–the pneuma, the ruach–the breath of God; the essential thing we need to live.

As I was reviewing my sermon this morning, that another way we might name this list would be to call it the Fruit of Breathing. What I mean by that is these are the things that we have to foster to live a healthy life together–to breathe. When we breathe, we are alive; when we don’t, we die. And here are our breathing exercises: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Let’s take a moment and focus on our breathing. Get comfortable. Open your palms and relax. Take a deep breath in. Now take a deep breath out. Breathe in the breath of God; breathe out the love of God. Continue to focus on your breathing as I read an adaptation of our scripture:

The breath of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, competing against one another, envying one another.

Now rest for a moment and feel the breath of God in your lungs, in our life together. Hear Sarah Ruden once more:

For the apostle Paul, crucifixion was both a reality and a metaphor, which he used to say Christ stopped at nothing in showing his love for humankind. On his example, people must stop at nothing in showing love for one another. We must foster each other’s breathing. And we must learn to breathe together.

One of the reasons the Good Friday Agreement was able to be signed was that people like Leslie and Tom risked giving each other room to breathe. They came together in days when people in their positions had grown accustomed to looking under their cars for bombs and listened to one another, talked with one another, humanized one another, thus giving breath and birth to the peace process.

When I first interviewed with the search committee, one of the things that was said—and I have heard repeated consistently since—is that you didn’t want to hear politics from the pulpit. I understand the sentiment and I have no need to use this pulpit as a partisan soapbox, and it saddens me that I cannot be fully myself in this place, as I think is true for most all of us. We hold our breath for any number of reasons. But when we do that we do not strengthen our sense of community, we weaken it. If we don’t breathe, we die.

If Leslie and Tom could learn how to listen and share with one another, I think we can as well. Our country is as deeply divided as Northern Ireland. Leslie spoke about the US and said, “You are in the early days of something that is going to be very, very difficult.” I think she’s right, which leaves me feeling anxious and angry and hopeful and concerned all at the same time. I am pretty sure all of us have feelings about what is going on around us, whether we are talking about international events or local life. We need a space here where we can breathe freely together, where each of us feel listened to and cared for.

That is not a pipe dream. We are capable of living that way. I know your hearts. I trust you. Christ stopped at nothing to show his love for humankind, loving us with his last breath. We must stop at nothing in showing our love for one another, our neighbors, our world as long as we are breathing. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

The first Sunday of the month is Communion Sunday in our tradition, so my sermon ends at the Table, wandering first through the legacy of love that lets us all belong there.

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One of the scenes that replays often around our house around mealtime, is Rachel my mother-in-law telling Ginger how good a cook I am and how much she enjoys the food. But she says it as though I’m not in the room. She’ll say, “Milton makes such good meals. Do you think he’ll make this again soon?” and I smile and say, “I’m sitting right here.”

My friend Kenny, whom I mentioned last week, is good at praying. I know that he prays for me and many others regularly. From time to time, when he knows I am facing something significant, he will call and say, “I want to pray for you,” and then, while we are still on the phone he will do just that. He talks to God about me, and I listen. It is deeply meaningful and a little awkward. Part of me wants to say what I say to Rachel: “I’m sitting right here.”

I don’t say anything because I can sense that I am in a sacred moment, even if it feels awkward. Beyond what feels uncomfortable is an encounter with the surprising Spirit of God. When he has finished praying, I settle myself, receive the grace, attention, and gift and say, “Thank you.”

The Gospel of John has twenty-one chapters. Four of those chapters are taken up with the events that occurred and the things that were said on the night before Jesus was executed. Jesus gathered his followers together in the Upper Room, John said, and washed their feet–an act of practical compassion in a land of dust and sandals. Then he spoke to them, doing what he could to give them metaphors and images for the days to come. He told them he was the vine and they were the branches. He said he was going to prepare a place for them. He told them to love one another, whatever happened. And then he prayed for them while they were sitting there listening as he talked out loud about them to God.

I wonder how that felt, and if they wanted to say, “We’re sitting right here,” if it felt awkward, or intimidating, or comforting—or all those things.

Jesus’ prayer was more than a blessing or a benediction. He wasn’t praying as a disguise for something he really wanted to say, as happens sometimes when preachers use a children’s sermon to talk to the adults in the room. Jesus had said what he needed to say and done what he needed to do. I think John spent so much time telling us what happened that night to make that clear. By the time Jesus had washed their feet and given them several new metaphors and a new over-arching commandment to love one another, he didn’t need to try and sneak in anything else.

Our reading this morning picked up in the middle of the prayer–actually about two-thirds of the way through–after Jesus had told God he knew things were drawing to a close and he knew he had done what he was supposed to do and how he was ready to pass the torch to those who would stay after he was gone. In the verses immediately preceding the ones we read, Jesus said,

I’m not asking that you take them out of the world
But that you guard them from the Evil One.
They are no more defined by the world
Than I am defined by the world.
Make them holy—consecrated—with the truth;
Your word is consecrating truth.
In the same way that you gave me a mission in the world,
I give them a mission in the world.
I’m consecrating myself for their sakes
So they’ll be truth-consecrated in their mission.

And then he went on to pray that they would share the same kind of kinship he felt with God, the deep trust and connectedness that enabled him to trust that love was stronger than death, even on the night before he was to be executed.

It is important to remind ourselves that the disciples were listening to Jesus say all of these things before the crucifixion, and before they found the empty tomb. This is the last Sunday of Eastertide, but we have jumped back in the timeline. They were listening to Jesus pray and didn’t know how to make much sense of any of it because they didn’t know what was coming. They didn’t know how to imagine the promise of resurrection because they didn’t know how to comprehend the inevitability of Jesus’ death. After all his exhorting and instructing, after all his preaching and parables, Jesus couldn’t make things clearer; what he could do was pray.

So that’s what he did.

He felt the disciples’ anxiety, confusion, and fear. He knew they had no idea what was about to happen. He had a pretty good idea that the Romans were going to kill him. And so he prayed, and what he prayed was that they would know that they were not alone, and that they were valued and loved and called to value and love one another. To be one, united, together, with God and with each other. Jesus wasn’t praying simply that they would feel connected as a group, but that they would somehow grasp and trust that they were connected to the cosmos, that they were shot through with the presence of God because they had pledged their lives to Christ.

He knew they were standing right there. He wanted them to hear every word.

But there’s another layer to all of it because this is where we make a cameo appearance in John’s gospel. It’s in verse 20. Jesus said, “I don’t ask on their behalf alone, but also on behalf of those who will trust in me through what they say, so they can all be one, Abba, just as you are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world will believe that you sent me.”

“Also on behalf of those who will trust in me through what they say . . .”–that’s us, or should i say, we are a part of that group, the legacy of the story as it has been passed from person to person, from generation to generation. Jesus prayed not only for the ones in the room, but for anyone willing to trust that they are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God–and that’s us!

Though we have always lived on this side of the resurrection, it is an act of faith to trust that death is not the last word, whether we are talking about our physical deaths or all the ways in which we see the power of death manifest itself in the world. Jesus’ prayer for all of us was that we would be defined by our love for God and one another rather than being defined by the violence and power of the world around us.

To be defined by love means to look at a world that seems overcome by death and talk about life. To be defined by love means to live as though love is the most powerful force in the cosmos. The only way love wins is if those of us who stand in the lineage of God’s love continue to embody God’s promise of unity in a world of broken promises and broken hearts.

After Jesus finished praying, they went out to the Mount of Olives where he was arrested. By the next afternoon, he was dead. We are about to gather at the Communion Table to share the same meal he served his followers that very night, and when we are finished we will go out into a country that is filled with news of the damage done by those who choose power over people. I suppose that has been true most any time Communion has been shared, regardless of where or when.

Like those who have gone before us, those Jesus prayed for on the night he was betrayed, what we are called to trust in the face of everything is that the love of God offers belonging to everyone. What makes us able to trust it are those on either side of us who served us the meal and whom we served. Trust, like love, is passed person to person.

Come. All is now ready. We’re sitting right here.

Peace,
Milton

I have always been drawn to the story of Jesus’ encounter with a man who had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years and I got to talk about it in my sermon this week.

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Our passage this morning tells an odd story.

It’s odd because of where it takes place. In Jerusalem there was a human-constructed pool called Bethsaida. Both the Romans and the Greeks built baths: pools for relaxation and medicinal purposes. We might think of them as the precursors to day spas, or perhaps a hot spring. The one in our story has been located by archaeologists near the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

For reasons we don’t know, the pool in our story had taken on a legend that it had particular healing powers. That story was being told long before Jesus got there. Every day an angel or a spirit stirred the water and whoever made it into the pool first after that was healed. Over time, the area around the pool filled up with people who were debilitated by their conditions. Our passage mentions those who couldn’t see, couldn’t walk, and were paralyzed. They were people who were mostly forgotten by those around them. The pool, it seems, had become their only hope.

The story is also odd because it doesn’t fit the pattern of the way the gospel writers give account of Jesus’ healings. The man didn’t cry out to Jesus for help. No one brought him to Jesus or pointed him out. We don’t know why he caught Jesus’ attention. Neither Jesus nor the man said anything about faith. Often Jesus says something like, “Your faith has made you well.” Not here. We don’t have any indication that the man even knew who Jesus was. Later on in the same chapter when some of the fundamentalist religious leaders stop him and ask why he is carrying his mat on the sabbath (because that was considered “work”) the man said, “The man who healed me told me to do it.”

What we have is an incredibly brief exchange:

Jesus asked, “Do you want to get well?”
The man answered, “I don’t have anyone to help me.”
Jesus said, “Pick up your stuff and walk out of here.”

Once again, the gospel account is full of gaps, of spaces left undefined and undescribed. It feels like there had to be more to the conversation. How, for instance, did Jesus know he had been there for thirty-eight years? I find it hard to imagine Jesus was just walking through this mass of hurting people and sort of randomly stopped and said, “You—do you want to get well?” It feels so abrupt, and even more so because of the nature of the question: Do you want to get well,” which, once again, leads us to trying to discern the tone of Jesus’ voice.

How did he deliver those words?

The man’s response doesn’t offer much of a clue, other than Jesus said it in a way that appeared to make room for a response. Yet the man doesn’t answer the question. Instead, he described his situation, “Sir, I don’t have anyone who can put me in the water when it is stirred up. When I’m trying to get to it, someone else has gotten in ahead of me.”

The Greek word that is translated as “debilitated” or “paralyzed” actually means dried up or withered, painting a picture of a person who limbs were useless to him. Our English word withered shares a root with weathered, which gives us a sense that this man was beaten down by life, that he had been sucked dry by his circumstances, as had many others around the pool. We don’t get a sense from the story that he was even anywhere close to the water. He got as far as his hope could take him, but he didn’t have anyone to move beyond the despair of his circumstance, so he just showed up every day—or maybe he just stayed there—waiting for something that was not going to happen.

For thirty-eight years. We have a clear way to think about how long that is because it is almost the same amount of time Lynda has been our Music Director. For as long as she has shown up here at Mount Carmel to play the organ that man showed up at the pool knowing he wouldn’t get there first.

That’s a long time.

The man spoke truth when he said that he didn’t have any help, but, in an odd way, he was not alone in both his impairment and his desperation. He was surrounded by people in similar circumstances. The pool was surrounded with people dealing with chronic conditions waiting for the waters to be stirred so one person—one person—could be healed. My guess is more than one new person arrived daily, so the odds never improved. Going to the pool to be healed was akin to using the Powerball as a retirement plan. It was hopeless from the start.

And still he felt alone because he saw those around him as competition rather than as community, which makes me think about being stuck in traffic—particularly Boston traffic. To drive in Boston—or certain parts of New Haven, or I-95 and I-91 around the Q Bridge—means knowing what it feels like to be stuck with everyone jockeying for position, trying to get ahead of the cars around you. Ginger and I have always joked that the key is not to make direct eye contact. You look out of the side of your eye to make your move, but if you make direct contact you have to concede and let them in because you realize the person in the next car is not an obstacle but a human being trying to get where they’re going, just like you.

The man had spent thirty-eight years not making eye contact such that more than his limbs had withered. And he sat there surrounded by others doing the same way. They were together all alone because they couldn’t see beyond their circumstance to see each other.

I wonder what might have happened if they had chosen to not make it a competition. What if they talked among themselves and developed a system where they helped each other get to the water. They still would have had to wait, but they would have been able to wait together, and they would have given each other hope.

Maybe the oddest thing we have to come to terms with in this story is the way we as people far too often choose to allow the things that wither and weather us to divide us rather than draw us to one another. Life is a terminal condition. Pain and heartbreak are universal. We know that. And, still, we fall into feeling as though nobody else knows the troubles we have seen. The man in the story is compelling because we know him, we have been him—maybe not for thirty-eight years, but most all of us have spent some time trapped in our despair because we couldn’t get to what we thought would heal us to the point we lost sight of those around us who could help, or that we could help someone else.

It’s like the old story about the person who is walking and falls into a deep hole, so deep that they couldn’t climb out. They cry out for help to no avail until another person stops and offers to help. The one in the hole expected them to get a rope or a ladder, but instead the second person jumps down into the hole.

The first one says, “How does it help for you to be down here with me?”
And the second one replies, “I’ve been here before.”

When Jesus stopped and asked his question, the man at the pool had been there longer than Jesus had been alive. Every step that Jesus took in his life was taken while the man lied withering and waiting for what was never going to happen. Perhaps the man’s response to Jesus’ question doesn’t sound quite as odd in that light.

“Do you want to get well?”
“I don’t have anyone to help me.”

Jesus’ call for the man to get up and walk was a way of saying, “No you’re not. We’re in this together.” When Jesus told him to get up, he wasn’t making demands or discounting the man; he was humanizing him. He was being human with him and inviting the man to see beyond his predicament.

I am willing to guess that most all of us know what it feels like to feel dried up or withered or weathered by life. Perhaps, too, we can remember those who reached out and invited us to get up and walk. I think about when my father-in-law Reuben died and a friend named Laura came to our house and got Rachel, my mother-in-law to get up and go to dinner every Wednesday night for a full year. Rachel and Reuben had been married for twenty years before Laura was born. She had no experiential understanding of what the loss of a spouse felt like, but she knew how to show up and offer healing and grace by getting Rachel to get up.

My friend Kenny is joining a church today in Texas, and that’s a big deal because in another lifetime Kenny was a minister, but he was also an alcoholic and that cost him pretty much everything. He has been sober now for almost thirty years and in the last couple of years found this congregation that has loved him and gotten him to get up and choose to be a part of them. He wrote a song years ago that still rings true today:

and the depth of God’s love reaches down down down
to where we are until we’re found found found
a quiet word or none at all
pursues the heart behind the wall
and to those who wait with darkness all around
the depth of God’s love reaches down

We are all in this together. We can help each other up. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

We understand some words better when we tell stories. Here is my sermon for this week.

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About fifteen years ago, when my parents were both still living, Ginger and I were in Texas seeing them as well as friends, which meant we did a good bit of driving. As we were going from Houston to San Antonio, I mentioned that we were nearing the town of Seguin, the self-proclaimed “Home of the World’s Largest Pecan.” I had remembered that fact from a family vacation many years before because the town had a large pecan sculpture in the town square to celebrate it.

We decided to stop and see what we could find that late afternoon in Seguin, Texas. We saw the sculpture and, as it turned out, that the only other thing that appeared to be open on the Square was a bar called The Oak. The inside looked like a movie set: a long bar that ran almost the full length of one side wall, an assortment of tables covering the rest of the floor, and any number of neon beer signs decorating the walls. Four or five men sat together at one end of the bar and another stood behind it.

He took our order and then struck up a conversation since it was quite obvious we were neither locals nor regulars. The conversation led us to find that he was not local either. He had moved to the little Texas town from Chicago, which prompted me to ask why and he answered with a story.

He had been in the service—career military—and had done a couple of tours in the Middle East. While he was on one of those tours, he and another soldier developed a strong friendship, so much so that when they came back one of the promises they made to each other was that if anything happened to one the other would take care of his family.

Life led them to live in different parts of the country. The one talking to us moved to Chicago and went into finance. He had never married and didn’t have any children. The other moved to Seguin where he had a family, though his wife died, leaving him with a daughter. When she was a sophomore in high school, her father got cancer and died as well.

The bartender said, “I promised to take care of her, and I couldn’t do that by making a girl who grew up here move to Chicago, so I quit my job, moved to Seguin, and bought this bar so I could keep my promises.” The girl had graduated from high school and gone on to college, but he had stayed so she still had a home there.

I tell you that story because he is who I thought of when I read the verses that close our passage for this morning—“I give you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, so you also must love each other. This is how everyone will know that you are my disciples, when you love each other.”—because they beg the question: What does loving each other the way Jesus loved us look like?

Well, for starters, it looks a lot like a bartender across the Square from the world’s largest pecan, which is to say it costs a lot.

As far as the gospel narrative goes, we have gone back in time to the night before Jesus’ execution. John’s version of events describes Jesus washing the feet of his followers, a true act of service in a land of dust and sandals and then telling Judas to do what he needed to do, which is where we join the story.

Jesus had a sense that the disciples were not only about to face the greatest devastation of their lives, but also that they appeared to have no inkling of what was about to transpire, so he didn’t mince words. He didn’t tell another parable, or stretch out into a long discourse. He gave them one simple, straightforward commandment that summed up what he wanted most for his followers: “Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” And then, he followed it with one more sentence: “This is how everyone will know that you are my disciples, when you love each other.”

What do we call that? A promise? An incentive? An admonition? A hope?

Maybe it’s not so much about labeling Jesus’ words as it is about taking them to heart and examining if the way we love one another, whether the one anothers in this room or the one anothers we encounter wherever we are, looks like the way Jesus loved the one anothers he encountered.

What I mean is I think it’s a pretty safe bet that Jesus would have moved to Seguin, if he’d had the chance. And also loving one another isn’t always that dramatic, though I do think it is always intentional. To love like Jesus loved means to look for ways to connect, encourage, and help—and then doing what it takes to connect, encourage, and help.

Yesterday, Ginger and I drove to New Britain because we caught wind of the Dionysus Greek Festival at St. George’s Greek Orthodox Church there. (It’s still going on, if you want to go after church.) Though they had signs about music and dancing, we were there before all of that began. What we found was incredible Greek food. I ate things I knew and a bunch of other things that I didn’t—mostly pastries—and most every time I complimented them on the food their response was, “It’s all homemade; we did this all ourselves,” which is to say it was everything on the menu was a tangible act of love because those recipes all take time.

It was their forty-fifth annual festival. The reason, much like our tag sales and craft fairs, was to raise money for their church. And it was an act of love, an intentional effort that brought them closer together, that gave people a chance to offer what they do best to further their community of faith. It was a festival of love in action, from the guys grilling the souvlaki in the parking lot to the folks serving it in the fellowship hall.

If loving like Jesus loves looks like moving to Seguin, it also looks like homemade baklava, which is also really hard work.

A couple of weeks ago we talked about how hard it is to understand what the word grace means because it has been so heavily abstracted. Love, as a word, is much the same way, at least in English. We use it to mean too many things. We love our spouses and partners, our children, our favorite movies, our favorite sports teams, and our favorite foods.

How can I say, “I love Ginger,” and “I love a good chili cheese dog,” and that word mean the same thing? (Though I will admit that when Ginger read through my sermon last night she commented, “I think they’re pretty close.”)

When the apostle Paul wrote his famous words to the church in Corinth, he turned to specifics:

Love is patient, love is kind, it isn’t jealous, it doesn’t brag, it isn’t arrogant, it isn’t rude, it doesn’t seek its own advantage, it isn’t irritable, it doesn’t keep a record of complaints, it isn’t happy with injustice, but it is happy with the truth. Love puts up with all things, trusts in all things, hopes for all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”

With those words in mind, we could paraphrase Jesus’ words to say, “Be patient and kind to one another as I was to you. Forgive one another and be forthright with one another the way I was with you. Trust and encourage one another the way I did with you. That’s how people will remember both of us. That is what will matter most.”

We may not have a giant pecan in our town, but we do have a Sleeping Giant who holds history for many in our community—and for many in this room. When we walk out of here and look across at the well-known profile, we recall dates, gatherings, proposals, summer happenings, walks—the list could go on. The Giant reminds us of something larger than ourselves, from those who settled here all the way down to where we are right now, which is to say it is a visual reminder of a legacy of love because love is what keeps us alive, whether we are in Central Texas or New Britain or in the shadow of the Sleeping Giant.

Love puts up with all things, trusts in all things, hopes for all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

Theologian Debi Thomas writes,

When death comes knocking, and [Jesus] has mere hours left to communicate the heart of his message to his disciples, he doesn’t say, “Believe the right things.” He doesn’t say, “Maintain personal and doctrinal purity.” He doesn’t say, “Worship like this or attend a church like that.” He doesn’t even say, “Read your Bible,” or “Pray every day,” or “Preach the Gospel to every living creature.” He says, “Love one another.” That’s it. The last dream of a dead man walking. All of Christianity distilled down to its essence so that maybe we’ll pause long enough to hear it. Love one another. . .

Can I go back to the baklava for a minute?

I have tried to make it a couple of times and it is really hard to do. There are a bunch of steps, and you have to pay constant attention to the phyllo dough. Every detail to the recipe has consequences. The same is true of Jesus’ commandment to love one another. Love, like baklava, has lots of layers and every word and action has consequences.

I am quite sure there were mornings when the guy who moved to Texas struggled as he learned how to become a guardian for a tenth grader, much less adapt to moving from Chicago to a tiny town to keep a promise to a friend whom he loved. And, after seeing how many people cooked and worked to make the Greek Festival happen, I’m sure it held some tense moments. Still what we saw and tasted yesterday was a feast of love in many tangible forms. Here, in the shadow of the Sleeping Giant, it’s fair to say that not a week goes by that one of us is not irritated or upset or confused or maybe even hurt by the words or actions of someone else. And we keep showing up and figuring out how to live together.

That’s what love looks like. And we are commanded—not asked or encouraged—commanded to love one another the way Jesus loved us so that love will be our most recognizable trait. When it comes right down to it, that’s what matters most. Amen.

Peace,
Milton