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limit less

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

I was just finishing up at the gym on Monday when I got a text from Ginger asking if I wanted to meet her for coffee at RJ Julia and read for a while. My answer, of course, was yes–the one catch being I didn’t have a book with me, but I was going to a bookstore, so that problem was easily solved. She already had a window seat in the cafe, so I perused the shelves and tables and was captured by this title: The Limits of My Language: Meditations on Depression. I felt like Eva Meijer, whoever she is, had written a book personally to me.

Once I had my coffee and Ginger and I had talked for a few minutes, I opened the book about the limits of language and found this paragraph:

An ending. An encasing, a world within a world (a self inside a self), thoughts that thrust themselves into a nest of other thoughts and ruthlessly push out their healthy foster-brothers and sisters (like baby cuckoos), an ever-present shadow (even in the light), a confirmation, a truth , an illusion, heavy sand where the shore turns to sea, a fungus that a manages to worm its spores into everything, static noise, fading away, a greenness that sucks up every colour, until all that’s left is the memory of colour.

I read it twice to myself and then out loud to Ginger. One way to talk about the limits of language is to start by showing what our words can do, I suppose. Meijer is a philosopher, as well as an author and musician and artist, and her words took me back to a quote by another philosopher, Wittengenstein, who wrote,

“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”

I learned of those words from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig who went on to say after the quote,

Words will never do us justice. But we have to try anyway. Luckily, the palette of language is infinitely expandable.

Koenig embodied his claim by creating a book of newly coined words for situations and feelings that had no words for them; Meijer keeps reusing and repurposing the ones we have. Both of them encourage us to remember we can do far more with our words than we do.

When I started working as a trainer at the Apple Store at Southpoint in Durham, North Carolina, one of my tasks was to teach introductory workshops for people getting new iPhones. The new phone then was the 4S. It was at the same time that the Voyager 1 spacecraft reached the edge of our solar system. Voyager was launched in September 1977, as I was beginning my senior year in college. I am not a big science guy, necessarily, but there was a certain poetry to the space exploration of those days that captured me, so when I read about the spaceship leaving the solar system it stuck with me, as did the note in the article that the computer in the new iPhone was 250 times stronger than the computer that put Voyager into space.

I shared that information with the people in my workshop and then said, “You could launch satellites with your phone. Quit playing Candy Crush and go change the world.”

Eva Meijer seems to issue a similar challenge with the way she launches her words from the page:

Imagine carrying a sea inside your body. It moves at every step, just enough to let you know you’re made of water. You know the water is dangerous, that people have drowned in it, that you can’t live beneath it. You also know you;’re stuck with that sea, and there’s no escaping it. Sometimes the water rises, and then it falls again, like the tides, although not as regularly. Till one day it rises and rises and you slowly start to panic. You can’t escape it, because it’s inside you. No one sees it from your exterior, although your eyes fill with tears more than usual. You’d better lie down somewhere and wait till the water drops and you can move again. You’d better not lie down, because if you do you’ll probably drown–and meanwhile the water is rising and you’ve already been holding your breath for a minute.

That sea is familiar to me; I know what it feels like when the water rises. I am grateful to say that the tide has been out in recent months, so I have not had to hold my breath, to stay with her metaphor, and I know some who have been overwhelmed. Beyond the descriptive and poetic power of her metaphor–and she has more that are just as evocative–I keep going back to her title and wondering where the limits are when it comes to how we choose our words.

I don’t know that language is limitless, but I trust that we could limit less in the way we speak and write, the way we talk to and about one another, the way we express what it means to be in the world. Maybe it’s making up new words like Koenig does, and then maybe it is taking the time to find the word we already know that gives birth to new possibilities, the way God spoke the universe into existence from stars to flying squirrels, from sea scapes to friendships.

Maybe the limits of my language have a lot to do with the limits of my world. I know there are more ways to say “I love you” than I have learned to say, and more ways to say “I need help” as well, among other things. Words may not say everything, but we have far from exhausted what they can do if we choose them well.

Peace,
Milton

distance

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

distance

some days
any distance
is too much
to traverse
I can’t get
there from
here like today

the text from
one to say
the cancer
cannot be
challenged
any care will
be palliative

the picture
from another
of the dog
who has died
the dog who
welcomed
me always

the absence
carries like
an ache
I’m too far
away too
far away
too far . . .

Peace,
Milton

hallowed

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

Today was the second Sunday in my sermon series on the Lord’s Prayer and we talked about the opening sentence: “Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed by your name.” As I say in my opening, it was harder to prepare the sermon than I had anticipated. I was a bit surprised where the sermon took me and I was grateful for the way the sermon was received. I hope you find something that speaks to you.

______________________

Back in May, when I was thinking about our services for the summer, preaching a series on the Lord’s Prayer seemed like a good idea: to take it phrase by phrase and look at the things we pass by when we recite it together each week. Sounds simple enough, right? Yeah–not so much.

As I turned the opening phrase over and over in my head, I thought about a standup routine where comedian Gary Gulman described a (fictitious) documentary about how we got the mailing abbreviations for states. He told as though people thought it would go quickly:

What’s first?
Alabama.
AL. That was easy. We’ll have this done before they stop serving breakfast in the hotel lobby. What’s next?
Alaska.
Okay, set that aside and we’ll come back to it. What’s next?
Arizona.
AR. Now we’re rolling. What’s next?
Arkansas.

It wasn’t as easy as it seemed. As you can tell by the hymns we have sung and the title printed in the order of service, “Hallowed Be Thy Name,” I thought it was going to be about the names we use for God–and it is, in part–but what has challenged me most this week is the word we use almost exclusively in this prayer, other than on October 31: hallowed.

Hallowed be thy name.

I can’t hear that phrase without thinking about the little boy who responded to his Sunday School teacher who said that no one knew God’s name. He raised his hand high and said, “I do. It’s Harold.”

The teacher was puzzled and said, “I don’t think that’s right,” and the kid said, “Sure it is. It’s in the prayer–Harold be thy name.”

Harold is easier to understand than hallowed, which is an old word that saw its best days in the mid-1800s and has been on the decline ever since, unless you go to a church where we recite it every week. My guess is none of us uses the word hallow in conversation with any regularity. King James used it as the English translation for a Greek word that connotes sanctification and reverence. Once the prayer became standardized, we’ve had trouble letting ourselves use a different word.

What do we mean when we pray “hallowed be thy name” or “your name be hallowed?”

The words holy and health (as in wholeness) come from the same root as hallow, which leads to other helpful words–sacred, unique, primary–that can give us some handles. And saying God’s name should be revered is another way of saying God is the sacred, unique, and primary one. A name represents the being, as it does with the names we call each other. To pray “your name is hallowed” is saying “you are The One above all.”

My friend Taylor shared something he had learned from someone else that has stuck with me. He said the word priority should never be plural because it means the first thing or the most important thing. Since we can’t have multiple first things, we can’t have priorities. Something–or someone–matters most. Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said, “Purity in heart is to will and to do one thing,” which is the philosophical version of ther same idea.

When I think of my priority, I think of Ginger. My marriage is the most important relationship in my life. I have others that matter but none as much as my marriage. Another way to think about it is perhaps you have been in work situations where you were given multiple responsibilities. Often part of the task was to figure out which one mattered most. Something almost always does.

To say God’s name is hallowed is to say God is our priority and, more than that, God is the world’s priority. The universe’s priority. That’s cosmic stuff, yet it comes at the end of a sentence that begins by calling God a parent, a father, which is an intimate and personal name. In one statement, God is as close as family and as cosmic as the Universal Priority.

And that brings us to the names we use for God. The Sunday School teacher was right: no one knows God’s name. Hebrew tradition and theology say that no one should speak God’s name aloud. Our English word lord, which we often use for God, comes from a Hebrew work around, if you will–adonai–that was used as a replacement name. Though we as Christians do not keep that same tradition, we have many names for God. Father–the one used in this prayer is one of God’s names; but it is not God’s name.

That’s a subtle but crucial distinction.

Historically, it is a name that has been overused in most Christian circles. It can be a rich metaphor of caring and compassion. But if you grew up with a father who was unavailable or absent or abusive and the only name you hear for God is father, you may have a hard time hallowing that name. My father was a good man, and he had a hard time showing his affection because of how his father raised him. My father was also a pastor—since I went to his church throughout my childhood and teenage years, he held the role of my pastor. I had a hard time separating God and my father, so that metaphor is not always meaningful to me.

My mother is the one who taught me how to be hospitable, how to cook, how to help those around you feel welcome. She was also a tenacious and determined person. For me, mother is often a helpful name for God. But our names for God are not limited to parental metaphors. At different times in Christian history different metaphors have come to the forefront. The Hebrews often thought of God as a king, a royal ruler, in part because they saw themselves as God’s subjects and they were subjects to kings and queens themselves. Jesus talked about God in many different metaphors that went beyond both parenting and gender, all of them pointing to a God who regards us–at all of creation–as worthy of love and care.

I was thinking about this sermon while I was in Ireland and talked to a friend about the words that we have considered this morning. They have struggled with father as a primary metaphor for God, so the prayer is often hard for them, but they said they were talking with someone they trusted and that person said, “I just pray, ‘Hallowed be thy names,’ and that leaves a way for me to bring my names too.”

Mother. Creator. Compassionate Life-giver. Father. Holy One. Great Spirit. All these names people have used in other versions of this prayer in hopes of expanding who can feel connected to our loving God who is the Universal Priority—our God who is Love. That’s as close to God’s name as I think we can get. God is Love.

When we talk about how to make our language more inclusive, or we change words to hymns and prayers we have known forever, we do so to widen the circle of belonging in the name of our God, who is Love.

Every week Ginger reads the draft of my sermon. You should be grateful; she is a good editor. Her critiques usually have to do with making things clearer: I need more examples, I need to rephrase something, I need to explain how I got from A to B. I take her advice because I want to get my ideas across to you as clearly as possible.

The words we say and sing in worship should have the same kind of clarity and intent. We want whoever walks in here to feel welcomed, to feel like they belong, like we are speaking to them in a language of love, whether they are new or they have been coming here their whole lives. Saying familiar things is one of the ways we feel at home, so sometimes changes are unsettling. That is when we need to talk to one another to make clear our intentions and to take stock of our impact to make sure we are prioritizing our relationships.

Some are skeptical of churches because over the history of the church, even down to these days we are living, the priority of God’s love has far too often been buried by those who say they are acting in God’s name, but their words and deeds show their true priority as power or judgment or conquest. Let me be clear: God is never the priority when the words spoken and the actions taken destroy or diminish or dehumanize others.

God is Love.

God is Love, and when we pray “hallowed be thy name” we are saying love will be our priority over tradition, over theology, over politics, over prejudice, over all that would keep us from loving one another in God’s name. That’s what we pray every week. May we be people who live into that prayer. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

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this old guitar

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

Last January I wrote about one of the articles in the New York Times’ “7-Day Happiness Challenge” where one writer described “The Secret Power of the Eight Minute Phone Call” in rekindling a friendship. Someone she had not heard from in a long time asked for an eight minute phone call. The writer agreed, as much out of curiosity as anything. When they got on the phone together, her friend said the eight-minute limit was a way of saying not all the ground had to be made up at once. They knew they were friends; they trusted that. Why not pick up in the present tense and keep going?

I have three or four eight-minute rituals that have become a part of my life since then and I am richer for them. What was required to make them happen was mostly the commitment to make them happen.

It was a lesson worth learning, and I am beginning to wonder if it might be more far reaching.

Since we moved to Guilford (seven and a half years ago), my guitar has never really found a place to hang out. It lives in its case most of the time, which then has to be tucked in behind the chair that Ginger uses when she works from home. As a result, I have played a good deal less over the past seven years–not by choice as much by convenience, I guess.

But I love my guitar. As I was thinking about this post, it struck me that we have been together for forty years. I bought it from another chaplain when I was doing CPE at Baylor Medical Center in 1983. He had bought the Alvarez Yairi to learn how to play guitar–a rather expensive beginning–and then decided it was too much work, so he sold it to me. My guitar has gone with me to close to forty youth camps, caught the glow from campfires, traveled to living rooms and church auditoriums, as well as being handed off to anyone who asked if they could play it.

It has been a good friend, though far too often in recent years I have only picked it up when I was asked to sing, rather than fostering the friendship by playing for the sake of playing.

Through the kindness of another friend, I got a brace that allows me to hang the guitar on the wall so it will be in within reach, rather than tucked behind Ginger’s chair. I’ve had the brace a while as well because I couldn’t find enough open space on a wall in our little 1795 house to hang it. Then still other friends came with a request that changed things. She asked if I would sing Spencer LaJoye’s “Plowshare Prayer” at their wedding in October. I love the song, but I don’t know it by heart. I told Ginger I wanted to start playing it regularly so I would know it well by the wedding. She asked what kept me from playing my guitar more often and I said to her what I have already told you.

We began trying to figure out how to move a few things around so we could create wall space enough from my guitar to be within reach, which required a domino run of moving pictures here and there, as well as rearranging some of thekeepsakes we have on our mantle and other shelves. In all, it took about an hour–and that included walking to the hardware store to get the screws and wall anchors I needed to hang the brace.

One of the early songs I learned on a guitar that preceded my Alvarez was by John Denver and gave me the title for this post. The first verse says,

this old guitar taught me to sing a love song
it showed me how to laugh and how to cry
it introduced me to some friends of mine
and brightened up some days
and helped me make it thru some lonely nights
what a friend to have on a cold and lonely night

When I said I wanted to sing the song all summer to get ready, I wanted more than just to get prepared for a performance–at least it feels that way now. Something in me was asking for the guitar version on an eight-minute phone call: an almost nightly commitment to play and sing at least one song to remember who we are to each other.

Whether the songs are old or new, it will be good to be together.

Peace,
Milton

poetic license

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

poetic license

all I wanted was some water
when I stepped into the Spar
a step up from the gas station
convenience stores I know

I walked past fresh produce
and Irish baked goods a food
counter and a coffee machine
to be surprised by spring water

that bore the name of W B Yeats
my mind flipped through fragments
of poems I didn’t remember well
looking for the right punch line

for a poem as I wandered the aisles
wondering if I might find Heaney
committed to sausages or Joyce
speaking for salt and vinegar crisps

then I went back to the bottle
curious why someone supposed
Yeats was the name that would
satisfy those slouching with thirst

I didn’t buy the water instead I
slated my thirst for his poems
with my phone and free wifi and
read these words in the checkout line

“But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

those who made him into a brand
missed that he wasn’t selling a thing
but I couldn’t get too indignant
I was reading poetry in a gas station

Peace,
Milton

Thanks for reading; I know it has been a while since i wrote regularly. I have continued to write my weekly newsletter, mixing metaphors, which is free and comes out every Tuesday. I would love for you to subscribe. If you would like to support my writing, you can become a sustaining member or buy me a cup of coffee.

 

learners

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

I’ve been back from Ireland for a week and it has taken me that long to get back in the rhythm of the life I know. I preached on Sunday but am just now posting my sermon; my newsletter for the week will follow shortly.

I am starting a summer sermon series on the Lord’s Prayer, looking at it phrase by phrase. I began this week by looking at what it means to pray and why ritual (meaningful repetition) matters. My Ireland connection was the Red L that marks a learner’s permit for a new driver.

_________________________

If you were wondering if I was going to tell any stories about my time in Ireland, let me answer that question by starting my sermon with one—and I am quite sure it will not be the last as we work our way through the summer.

Last week the group who gathered for the Peace Retreat visited the Clonard Monastery in West Belfast, which is the Catholic section of the city. We had eaten lunch at St. Christopher’s Larder, a small congregation that houses a food pantry in East Belfast, which is the Protestant neighborhood. As we crossed through the city center to get from one to the other, Gareth Higgins, one of the leaders of the retreat, commented that we were making a journey no one in Belfast makes. The two worlds stay quite separated.

Clonard Monastery is significant for many reasons, but one near the top of the list is that the Good Friday Agreement that ended the sectarian violence in Northern Island was signed there in Parlor #4, which is a rather innocuous meeting room made famous only because of what happened there. We got to stand around the table, but more importantly we got to hear from a couple of people who have given their lives to waging peace where they live.

One of those was a man named Ed who has worked at Clonard for over twenty years. He is not a priest and he was not a part of the Good Friday negotiations; he came to Clonard soon after. This summer marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of its signing. Ed talked to us about his vocation and his faith. At one point, he held up a white piece of paper with a red “L” (like this one) and told us it was what you had to tape to your car window when you got your learning permit to drive so people could identify you.

Then he said, “When it comes to faith, we should all wear red Ls because we are always learning more about what it means to be a Christian.”

As he was speaking, I made a few quick notes on my phone because it was the image I had been looking for as I thought about today and the weeks ahead as we look at prayer through the lens of what we have come to call “The Lord’s Prayer.”

It is one of the few things that many people who have attended church can recite from memory, though we publish the words each week in case someone isn’t that familiar. Though I think most of us assume there is a standardized version, those who learned it in Catholic worship did not learn the ending lines about the kingdom and the glory—and they know the prayer, mostly, as the “Our Father”—and the Episcopalians add an extra “and ever” where most Protestants settle for just “forever.” Then, of course, there is the whole debts, sins, and trespasses discussion, which can turn into a sort of Red Sox-Yankees divide if we aren’t careful.

The heart of the words said in most congregations goes back to the translation authorized by King James I of England in 1611, just five hundred years ago. If we were to count up how many times we have said the prayer, it would number in the tens of thousands, I’m sure. The words are familiar. They ground us in a way; they make it feel like real worship because we said them. They offer familiar comfort in their persistent presence.

But what if we were to pray them—and think about them—not as words we know by heart or that have to be said a certain way, but as words we want to learn from? What if we approached the prayer the way a new driver approaches an intersection, wearing a Big Red L and open to learning new things about streets we may think we knew well?

The version of the prayer we read this morning (and that we say every week) is from Matthew’s gospel, where it is a part of the Sermon on the Mount. As we saw, it sits in the middle of a whole section on prayer as honest conversation with God rather than a means to other ends. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus’ offering of the prayer is a response to a request from the disciples: teach us to pray. Even Jesus might have repeated the words, it seems.

Over the next few weeks, we will discover—or remember—this short prayer offers much to think about; yet the biggest question it raises, perhaps, is what happens when we pray?

If there is a question that leaves most all of us feeling like learners, that may be it: what happens when we pray? Some think we pray to find God’s will for a situation, which leads to a whole other theological discussion. Some of our situational prayers are for healing, wisdom, comfort, even hope. We pray for one another, even when those for whom we pray can’t hear us or may not even know we prayed. I prayed for you every day I was away, for example, even though I don’t have a grasp what that meant to your lives. I know what it came to mean to me. Lastly, we repeat these words—this prayer—week after week, yet I wonder how often we think of it as a real prayer instead of a ritual.

Over the next six or seven Sundays, as we look at the prayer phrase by phrase, I am going to leave the red L hanging on the pulpit to remind us we don’t have it figured out. I hope the little red letter gives us the freedom to see beyond our familiarity and focus on how we talk to God and how God responds.

Being a learner is risky business because sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know. Then again, faith is risky business, too, because the God we trust is larger than our knowledge and our imaginations. But, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis, one of Belfast’s finest, when we grow God gets bigger.

Come, let us learn together. Amen.

listen

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1

Yesterday was Pentecost Sunday, which pretty much determines the passage for the day: Acts 2:1-21. What most people remember about the story is the gale-force winds and tongues of fire that defined the presence of the Holy Spirit, but the thing that always grabs me is that people understood each other across language barriers. Here’s my sermon.

____________________________

It had been fifty days since Passover, which meant it had been fifty days since Jesus had been executed, and forty-seven days since his resurrection; even less since he had left them. Fifty days after Passover was another feast day on the Jewish calendar—Shavout, the “Festival of Weeks,” which was a pilgrimage festival (that’s why everyone was in Jerusalem) to celebrate God’s generosity by bringing the first fruits of the harvest to the Temple. The name of the feast was translated into Greek as Pentecost, which means fifty, because it happened fifty days after Passover.

A hundred years or so before Jesus, the festival also became tied to God’s giving of the Torah to Moses. One of the scriptures read during the festival is the Book of Ruth, which is an immigrant story—a story about welcoming the stranger. Ruth comes to Israel in need of food and shelter, but she was not of Hebrew descent. To make a long story way too short, she was given space to be by Boaz and his mother Naomi, and she ended up marrying Boaz and making her home in Israel and was an ancestor of King David. At the heart of the festival were these two things: the giving of the Torah, a defining moment for the Hebrew people, and the story of Ruth, which was about including those who are not like us.

Many of the followers of Jesus had gathered in Jerusalem for the festival because they practiced Judaism. They had not gathered to wait for the Holy Spirit; they were not there in protest, or trying to set up something new; they were there to celebrate God’s generosity and inclusiveness with Jewish people from all over the known world. They were not a church. Remember, it had only been a month and a half since the crucifixion and resurrection. They were gathering and working at being together, but no one had it figured out.

When the whole thing with the wind and fire started happening, Luke says they were all together in someone’s house. We don’t know how many people were there, or exactly how things went down except that the noise from the wind and fire was so loud that it drew a crowd, and a multi-cultural one at that, and they all marveled because they knew the people talking were Galileans using the language Galileans used, yet everyone heard their words in their own language.

And there were lots of languages. Since I managed to get through the list of all the nationalities gathered in Jerusalem relatively unscathed when I read the passage, I won’t try to repeat all the names, and I know the wind and fire drew the crowd, but I think the real miracle is right here: that everyone who was listening was able to hear what they were saying in a language they could comprehend. That’s hard enough to do when we are speaking the same language. And each year as I ponder this story, I am reminded of a story my father used to tell.

As I have told you, I grew up in Africa. My parents and I moved there in 1957—I was one—and we moved to Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia (which is now Zimbabwe). Neither of my parents had ever lived outside of Texas.

My father said soon after we moved into our house the toilet clogged up and he couldn’t get it unstopped, so he called a plumber. The man asked what the problem was and my father said, “My commode is broken.”

The plumber said, “We don’t work on commodes,” and hung up.

Dad called back and the same thing happened again. So he called a third time and this time he said, “Don’t hang up. I know what is broken at my house is something you fix. I’m just not using the right word. What do you think a commode is?”

“No,” said the plumber, “you first.”

Dad said, “It’s the thing in the bathroom that you sit on. Now it’s your turn.”

The plumber laughed and said, “It’s a bedside table. And you’re right, I do fix what is broken at your house. What’s wrong?”

My dad said, in his best Texas accent, “It won’t swallah.”

“I’ll be right there,” the man said. When he got to the house, he told my dad he usually sent one of his workers on jobs like that, but he wanted to be able to go home and tell his wife he fixed a commode that wouldn’t swallow.

Both men knew what they were talking about, and they assumed whomever they were talking to understood it the same way. But we all have to continue to remind ourselves that we way we look at and explain the world is not the way everyone else sees and understands it—and that is true even with people who grew up like we did and speak the same language.

Therapists often talk about the difference between intent and impact, which is to say just because I mean well in what I say or do doesn’t mean that is how my words or actions will be received. Because of my hearing loss, I regularly answer questions that I heard, but that weren’t the questions being asked. Most of the time, that makes for a humorous moment, but not all my miscommunications have led to funny anecdotes. That’s why I think that the real miracle of Pentecost was that everyone heard in their own language—in a way they could understand, in a way that made them feel included. And even then, not everyone got it. Some folks thought the disciples had been up early drinking—enough of them that Peter had to start his speech by saying, “We’re not drunk—it’s nine in the morning!” Then he went on to say they were experiencing the outpouring of God’s Spirit, God’s presence. They were sharing a holy moment that was available to anyone who would stop and listen. Still, some of the crowd heard him and others walked away puzzled.

Learning how to speak in a way that others can hear is hard work. So is listening in a way that opens our minds and hearts to things we might not have been expecting. Both are acts of trust and generosity, even hospitality.

Pentecost was an amazing day with the wind and fire, but it didn’t solve all the problems of the church. You don’t have to read much farther into the Book of Acts to find conflict and struggle among the young community of faith. Many of Paul’s letters were written to respond to specific issues in different congregations as they tried to figure out how to live together in Christ. Over and over, they had to keep coming back to how they listened and spoke to one another. And here we are two thousand years later still working on it—and still together, even as the world so often feels on fire around us.

Last week as I spoke to folks after the service, three of you quoted a sentence from my sermon back to me: being unified does not mean being uniform. I’m glad that stuck with you. That reality means that unified and diverse are not opposites. We are not united because we all say the same thing; we are united because we are committed to each other, and part of that commitment is listening: asking good questions, making space to think before we respond, and moving to understand rather than to judge.

Just a bit later in the Book of Acts, Luke says that when people looked at the way the followers of Christ treated each other, they said, “Look how they love one another.”

I wonder what people say when they look at us. I hope it’s the same thing.

Though the story of Pentecost, with the wind and fire, is a good one to tell, what created communities of belonging and kept the message of Christ alive in the world was the way they loved each other—the way they listened and spoke and paid attention to one another.

May we be filled with that Spirit. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

show up

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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I was back in the pulpit this morning after having a week away to celebrate Ginger’s birthday with some dear friends. (I’m sort of blowing the intro to the sermon, but so be it.) The passage for today was John 17:1-11, which is part of Jesus’ prayer the night before he died.

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As most of you know, I was not here last Sunday because I was with Ginger in Savannah, Georgia celebrating her sixtieth birthday. When we began making plans for it several months ago, she said she wanted to pick a place where some of those closest to her over the years could gather. Savannah was a geographical fit—and we could fly from Tweed on Avelo Airlines! We found a VRBO rental that could sleep up to twelve and sent out invitations. Over the course of our week there, sixteen different people came to celebrate. If you were to lay the friendships end to end, they added up to almost four hundred years of relationships.

The point of the time was to just to be together. We didn’t have a list of sights to see or anything that had to be accomplished. We ate together, walked together, cooked together, laughed and sang and stayed up late telling stories. We were not productive or efficient. We had nothing to show for the week other than the memories we made together.

We came back from the week feeling restored and rejuvenated. It was a sacred time—and it was a lot of fun, as well.

Even though I wasn’t at work, I had in my mind that this passage from John was going to be the text for today. It is John’s account of Jesus’ prayer on the night before his death at the hands of the Romans. He could see that his life was coming to an end. The disciples knew things were changing but couldn’t see the bigger picture. When they had asked questions, they asked things like who was going to sit closest to Jesus in heaven. Jesus kept telling them to keep loving people. By the time they got to the Garden of Gethsemane that night, the disciples were so exhausted that they fell asleep while Jesus prayed—and he was praying for them.

What I said about friendship was also true about Jesus’ relationships with his disciples: they were not productive or efficient. They spent three years walking from town to town without much of an itinerary, meeting people mostly by accident and interruption, and listening to Jesus tell stories. Jesus did not leave any sort of mission statement or business plan or five-year projection—and still he prayed and said to God, “I have glorified you on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do.”

What Jesus had done was love people. That was all he came to do.

Then he prayed for his followers who would remain after he was gone and what he asked was that God would “watch over them so that they will be unified—that they will be one,” which is another way of saying that they would love one another enough to stick together.

He didn’t say anything about mass evangelism or big buildings or denominational infrastructure or doctrinal purity or political perspective or endowment funds. He said, love them so they will love one another.

Over the years, as Ginger and I have reflected on our friendships, we have commented that we (and by we I mean pretty much everybody) put up with things that our friends do that we do not tolerate as easily when people who are not our friends do them. Let me say that long sentence again: Over the years, as Ginger and I have reflected on our friendships, we have commented that we put up with things that our friends do that we do not tolerate as easily when people who are not our friends do them. We still may get irritated or frustrated, or even hurt, but we don’t bail on the relationship because we have chosen to be friends.

I have a book I bought back in the 80s by Martin Marty simply titled Friendship, and he starts the book by saying, “We have friends, and we are friends in order that we do not get killed”—another way of saying we need each other to thrive and belong.

The same dynamic works in a marriage and in a family. And in church. We come together here because we have chosen to put up with each other, to love each other, and when we do we answer Jesus’ prayer by choosing relationship over doctrine and opinion and personal preference and politics and whatever else might divide us. We choose each other over, well, pretty much anything.

As though they knew what I was preaching about, there was an essay in the New York Times this morning titled, “For People to Really Know Us, We Need to Show Up.” (NYT gift link) The author, Brad Stulberg, wrote:

For people to really know us, we need to show up consistently. Over time, what starts out as obligation becomes less about something we have to do and more about something we want to do, something that we can’t imagine living without. The spiritual teacher Ram Dass once wrote that “we’re all just walking each other home.” But that’s only true if we don’t constantly cancel our walking plans.

Not canceling plans means, essentially, showing up for one another. If we commit to certain people and activities, if we feel an obligation to show up for them, then it’s likely that we will, indeed, show up. And showing up repeatedly is what creates community.
To be together doesn’t mean we agree on everything, or that life is all sunshine and roses. Community is not efficient or necessarily productive. We are made for each other. We belong together. And when we hit rough spots, we show up, we stick together, and we get through it. The point is not to all be alike, it is to be together—and to make room for others to join us because this kind of love is hard to come by.

We lived out what I am talking about two Sundays ago when we sat down after worship and talked about the possibility of placing the Witness Stone in our church yard. I learned a lot listening to the various responses voiced as we talked together. We listened well to each other, and we didn’t make anything more important than our connection to each other. Our commitment to one another runs deeper than our questions, our anxieties, and our opinions.

I hope we keep saying that out loud to each other: Our commitment to one another runs deeper than our questions, our anxieties, and our opinions. That’s good stuff. When we love one another, we are doing what God made us to do, pure and simple. What an amazing reason to be alive.

To be unified doesn’t mean we are uniform. To be together—to belong to each other—means we start by listening and then by sharing our stories. To love one another means to pay attention to the details beyond opinions, beyond what is comfortable to share; to stick together through difficulty, through anger, through misunderstanding, through successes, through mistakes, through life; to show up. That’s what love looks like.

And when we live like that together, we are the answer to Jesus’ prayer. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

Ps–It’s been a while since I added this postscript, but since Tuesday is the day I publish my free weekly newsletter, mixing metaphors I thought it was worth asking you to subscribe. I’m almost to 400 subscribers. Click the link above or the button in the sidebar. If you would like to help support my writing, you can become a sustaining member or make a one-time donation. I am grateful that you take time to read.

the whole story

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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One of the things about following the Revised Common Lectionary is that texts chosen weeks ago often find serendipitous connections with life events and issues in ways that would be difficult to plan if you were trying to. This is one of those weeks. The story of the stoning of Stephen ran alongside our church’s consideration of placing a Witness Stone on our grounds in memory of a man who was once enslaved in Hamden—and then there was a random connection (for me) to a childhood memory. I hope it speaks to you.

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An old memory found me this week. It was a family vacation. I was ten, my brother was eight. We were driving across Zambia, where we lived, to spend some time in one of the game parks. The car was not air-conditioned, so we had the windows rolled down. It was warm and we had been in the car a long time. I was recovering from one of the ear infections that were consistent through my childhood. My brother Miller and I were both tired of being in the backseat, but I was the one who started poking at him.

We were quiet at first, but then it escalated. My brother tried to push me away and hit my sore ear—by accident–and I yelled. My dad looked in the rear-view mirror and said, “What happened?” Before my brother could speak, I said, “Miller hit me in my sore ear,” and both my parents came down hard on him, telling him to leave me alone. They didn’t ask for the whole story, they just responded to what they saw and heard.

Miller shot me a look that hit harder than his hand. I didn’t say a word. I think he’s still bitter.

The memory came back as I worked with this week’s passage because what we just read together is the biblical equivalent of my crying out when my brother tapped my ear: the scene we saw is the end of Stephen’s story—and Stephen’s life, but we didn’t read how they got to that moment. Stephen didn’t just stumble into a roomful of people angry enough to kill him.

The early church had its growing pains, not the least of which was people who were not Jewish began joining. There was a language barrier: some spoke Aramaic, some spoke Greek. There were economic, political, and cultural divisions, as well as questions about how those in need were being cared for. Stephen was one of those chosen by the church in Jerusalem to help sort things out. He is described as one “who stood out among the believers for the way God’s grace was at work in his life.”

Outside of the young congregation, in the wider Jerusalem community, which was struggling to understand this burgeoning new sect, some struggled with Stephen and the faith he proclaimed, and they began to spread rumors that he “insulted Moses and God,” which led to Stephen being brought before the religious authorities. When they asked him if he was insulting Moses and God, Stephen launched into a Hebrew history lesson, going through Abraham, Joseph, Moses, and Joshua, including the recurring theme of how the people of most every generation and doubted God and ignored the prophets, and ending with a not-so-subtle proclamation that those who were charging him were the ones insulting God with their lack of faith.

This is where we picked up the story. They were so enraged that they dragged him out of town and killed him.

Good story, huh?

Stephen is recognized as the first martyr of the early church, the first one to die for his faith. The sermon most often found in these verses is a call to commitment, a challenge to give our lives to God so completely that we would be willing to die for our faith. I read an article this week that offered another perspective. Enuma Okoro is a Nigerian-American writer who was reflected on this passage and imagined a different perspective. He wrote:

With this week’s reading from Acts, I wonder if most of us automatically see ourselves as Stephen. But if we approach the text with an open and receptive spirit, where else in this martyrdom scene might we find ourselves?

What would it mean if we were among those who stone him, those enraged by a threatening word of truth? We may not literally kill people, but in what ways do we cause grave harm when we react to perspectives that threaten us, or to visions of God with which we do not agree? The mob is made up of the council of religious authorities who are charged with ensuring that people do not blaspheme against God. And they believe Stephen is doing this. But they also seem to hear his witness as blasphemy because they have already decided how God works, how God reveals God’s self and to whom. There isn’t any room left in their imaginations.

That last sentence is striking: “There isn’t any room left in their imaginations.”

I had a friend years ago who used to say, “Never trust a zealot with a clear conscience,” which was another way of saying don’t trust anyone—including ourselves—who think they have a corner on the truth. When we allow ourselves to decide that ideas or theology or whatever matters more than our relationships with one another, our fear and anger can get the best of us, and we can lose our ability to see beyond our sense of the way the world works and how we fit into the story.

Though I chose this passage a few weeks back, as I worked on my sermon over the last few days it connected to our discussion about placing one of the Witness Stones on our church property. As most of you know, we have been approached about placing a small brass plaque on our grounds in memory of Cyrus Gibson, who was enslaved by Simeon Bristol here in Hamden. Bristol was a magistrate and figured prominently in the history of New Haven and of our town.

That Cyrus was enslaved by Simeon is a matter of public record yet it has not been a consistent part of the story that has been told over the years. Our middle schoolers learned about Cyrus and others by going through primary sources: the town records. Like headstones in a graveyard, the Witness Stone is a way of naming someone so they are not forgotten, a way of remembering who he was and who we are—and a way of making room in our imaginations for us to grow and learn. Now that we know Cyrus Gibson’s name, he is part of our shared story—part of us.

We would be far from alone if we choose to place a Witness Stone for Cyrus. A couple of weeks ago First Congregational Church of Stonington placed a stone in their churchyard in honor of Cato Cuff, an enslaved man who also fought in the Revolutionary War. In Guilford, where I live, we have six or eight stones placed around town. So far they have placed almost one hundred and fifty stones across our state—and the Witness Stone Project is just one of a number of projects helping us to come to a deeper understanding of how we got to be who we are.

Last summer I watched the series High on the Hog on Netflix, which looks at the way enslaved people brought to this country shaped what we think of as American cuisine. One episode told the story of James Hemings, who was Thomas Jefferson’s chef while he was president, and who was enslaved by Jefferson. The capital of the young republic was in Philadelphia at that time, and Pennsylvania had a law that said an enslaved person who lived in the state for six months was freed by default. Every five and a half months, Jefferson would send James Hemings back to Monticello for a week or two to reset the clock so he would remain enslaved. That truth sits alongside the reality that Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”

Jefferson articulated a truth about humanity that he could not imagine himself living into. He, like us, was a citizen of the time in which he lived. The way we can imagine a larger definition of us—of who belongs—is to tell the whole story of those who have come before us and imagine what kind of world we want to pass on.

Those who stoned Stephen to death were unwilling to come to terms with their history, with their connections to the past that they chose to leave behind. As they killed him, a young man named Saul held their cloaks. Years later, he changed his name to Paul to signify his new life in Christ. In his letter to the Galatian church he wrote,

There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.

When we aspire to tell and hear the whole story, we can release our need to control the narrative. When we aspire to tell and hear the whole story, we are reminded that there is no “them:” there is only us. We are all a part of the family of God—we have all sinned, we have all been forgiven; we have chosen to live out our faith in Christ in this congregation right here in Hamden, and we seek to live out our faith in grace-giving and equitable words and deeds with the help of the Holy Spirit beyond these walls, beyond our town line, across every barrier—and we can tell the whole story as long as we allow God to keep making room in our imaginations. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

beyond shame

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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I am recuperating well from my surprise gallbladder attack and consequent removal, and am grateful to be able to preach at my church this morning. The passage is from John 21, where Jesus meets Peter on the beach. It is one of my favorite stories in scripture.

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One of my recurring jokes that Ginger has to hear during football season comes when a referee throws the penalty flag and then turns on his mic; “Holding. Number 89. Offense. Ten-yard penalty. Replay first down.”

Then I say, “Why does the game have to be so shamed based? Why not just move the ball and keep playing? No. Instead we have to tell everyone, ‘Things were fine until 89 had to break the rules. It’s all his fault.’”

I’m pretty sure none of that runs through the mind of the left tackle when they hear their number called, still I wonder if it isn’t a small part of why football is our most popular sport: we resonate with the shame, on both personal and cultural levels. For a lot of people, religion has been one of the chief flag-throwers. Yet, when we look at Jesus’ interactions with people who felt penalized and ashamed, Jesus offered a way to move beyond it, a way to see that we are more than the sum of our sins and shortfalls.

Jesus offered love.

So far, we have looked at three instances where people encountered Jesus after the resurrection. He spoke to Mary in the graveyard, he found the disciples and Thomas in the upper room, and he walked with the two travelers on the road to Emmaus, who then ran back to town to tell the others, so we can infer that Peter either participated in or heard about all of them, but we don’t have any record of Jesus talking to Peter until we get to this story that brings John’s gospel to a close.

We don’t know how much time had passed, but the disciples had moved from Jerusalem back to Galilee, which was home for most of them. And they had gone back to fishing, or at least those who had been fishermen previously took to their boats. Johns says seven of them went out at night. We don’t know if it was a way to pass the time or deal with their grief and questions or if they had returned to their old line of work, but they spent the night on the lake hoping to catch something and had come up empty.

It seems like we don’t know much—how much time had passed since the resurrection, how long they had been back in Galilee, what the other disciples were doing—but what we do know is, as the sun rose on their frustration, someone from the shore yelled, “Hey, guys, did you catch anything we can eat?” They yelled back that they had nothing, and the person told them to throw the net over the right side of the boat. I’m sure whatever the disciples said next was murmured out of earshot of the one on the beach, but I guess they figured, “Why not give it a try?” The worst that could happen was they would pull in another empty net.

Instead, the net was so full that it almost tipped the boat over, and in that moment something tipped in Peter’s mind and he realized who was hollering at them (“It’s Jesus!”), and he dove into the water, and swam to shore.

The others followed in the boat and hauled in 153 fish—perhaps one of the strangest details in scripture because you have to wonder who would have taken the time to sit and count the catch in the middle of all that was going on. You can find lots of speculation about the significance of the number; the greatest meaning may be simply this: they caught a lot of fish.

The last time Jesus and Peter had spoken had not gone well. Jesus said Peter would deny him three times, and that was what happened. Peter betrayed Jesus by saying over and over that he didn’t know him. He acted out of fear and confusion and despair. And now they stood face to face on the beach and Jesus was serving breakfast. After they had eaten, Jesus asked Peter, “Do you love me?” and then he asked him again, and then again.

Each time, Peter answered, “You know I love you,” and Jesus told him to feed his sheep. Well, the last time Peter sounded frustrated: “You know everything; you know I love you.” And there on the beach surrounded by fish, Jesus talked about sheep again. What I hear in Jesus’ words is this: You know what it’s like to do damage; you know what it’s like to be a betrayer. Now you know what it’s like to be forgiven, to see that love is stronger than betrayal. Go tell everyone else who needs to hear that.

Peter was not the only one who betrayed Jesus that night. Judas is the one who most often gets labeled as the Big Betrayer. He’s the one who told the soldiers they would be in the Garden of Gethsemane after dinner. He’s the one who kissed Jesus on the cheek so the soldiers would know who to arrest, who sold him out for thirty pieces of silver. But early on the morning of Jesus’ execution, as Judas realized what was happening, he went back to the people who had bribed him and told them he had betrayed an innocent man and didn’t want their money.

They were not interested in his confession nor his well-being. So Judas left in disgrace and despair and killed himself because he just could not see beyond. He could not see beyond the damage he had done. He was dead before Jesus was even crucified.

The stories of Peter and Judas are connected.

Though pretty much every one of the disciples bailed out in one way or another when Jesus was arrested, the two that get the spotlight are Peter and Judas, the denier and the betrayer. Those are harsh labels. I don’t think either one was malicious in their actions. Peter was in the courtyard because he was trying to stay close to Jesus and he outran his courage. I think Judas expected Jesus to actually take on the oppressive government and was trying to force Jesus’ hand and make him act.

The biggest difference between the two is Judas never made it to breakfast. If he had, there would have been fish and forgiveness for him as well.

Let me say that again.

The biggest difference between the two is Judas never made it to breakfast. If he had, there would have been fish and forgiveness for him as well.

Church family, whether you feel like a denier or a betrayer, or that your life is so littered with penalty flags that you can’t move beyond your mistakes, listen closely: we are all invited to breakfast. We can feel forgiven—and we can forgive. Don’t be eaten up by your shame. Look for the fire on the beach, for the friend or loved one calling out your name and swim ashore.

Shame is not the last word. Love is. Love is the last word. May we feed one another with such love and forgiveness. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

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