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help me up

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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help me up

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

what love looks like

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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what love looks like

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

we had hoped . . .

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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we had hoped . . .

I veered from the lectionary this week to look at Jesus’ encounter with the two on the road to Emmaus, one of the stories I most love.

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One of my favorite things about reading scripture is coming across the gaps that remind us that we don’t have the whole story. We have talked about them often. We read a name we haven’t heard before or become aware of a relationship we know nothing about or see a connection we had missed, like the man who had the donkey ready for Jesus to ride into Jerusalem or the man who knew Jesus would need the Upper Room for their last supper together.

Jesus knew more people and had more disciples than the ones who made it into the gospels. And Jesus did a bunch of things we don’t know about as well.

Our story this morning offers us another one of those gaps, as we read about the two walking from Jerusalem to their home in Emmaus, a town about seven miles away, on what we would call Easter night. The two who were walking home are also identified as disciples, though they were not among the twelve. We are only given the name of one of them: Cleopas. The other guy remains anonymous.

Luke tells us the two were walking and talking about what they had seen and heard involving Jesus’ death and resurrection when Jesus joined them and asked what they were discussing. His question brought them to a halt. They stopped in their tracks and responded to Jesus query with a question of their own, “Are you the only person in Jerusalem who doesn’t know what happened?”

Luke also offers an interesting detail. He says their faces “were downcast.” Perhaps, then, the tone to their question might have sounded a little harsh, as in “Have you not been paying attention?” or “How did you miss this?”

Nevertheless, they were followers of Jesus who had heard news of the empty tomb and yet they were walking home covered in gloom. Luke doesn’t say why. Their question to Jesus seems to intimate that they were involved somehow in, or at least adjacent to, all that had happened, but we know nothing of their stories: who they were, how they met Jesus, what they were walking home to in Emmaus. All we know is they were down-trodden and sad as a result of what they had seen and heard, the empty tomb included, and maybe a little edgy as a result.

We also know they didn’t recognize Jesus when he asked what had happened, which is why they told him the story as best they could, ending with news that the women had found the tomb empty that morning and received the angelic message that Jesus was alive, but no one had seen him. In the middle of it all, they said something that grabs me every time I read it:

“We had hoped he was the one to set Israel free.”

We had hoped . . . .

If I can be a grammar nerd for a minute, it is the present imperfect tense, which is to say it describes an action that was ongoing in the past but has now stopped in the present.

We had hoped . . . .

There is a poignant and powerful sadness in those words. As one commentator writes,

I have heard families use that phrase when they were packing up the things they had brought with them to the ICU. “We had hoped … ,” they say, and then they go home alone. I have heard families use this phrase when addictions return, or jobs go away. Although theologies of hope focus on a dawning future, the moment that catches me is that moment of deep disappointment, when only a painfully imperfect verb tense will express what needs to be said.

They had hoped Jesus was going to free Israel from Roman occupation. Blinded by their disappointment, they couldn’t see the Risen Christ walking with them as they talked about how their lives had fallen apart.

When Jesus speaks, his response sounds harsh, especially in the way our translation reads this morning: “You foolish people! Your dull minds keep you from believing all that the prophets talked about. Wasn’t it necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and then enter into his glory?”

Much like what we saw when Jesus spoke to Thomas about seeing and trusting, I think something has been lost in the translation of this scene. For one, Jesus had a better sense of pastoral care than to listen to two grief-sticken disciples pour their hearts out and then say, “Are you really that stupid?”

Just as we entertained the idea that Jesus was telling Thomas and the others that it must be nice for the few that can trust without seeing, perhaps we might infer a tone here that would translate Jesus’ words as something like, “Are you so blinded by grief that you can’t see how God has shown up all through Israel’s history? Weren’t you listening to anything I said about how God worked through me?”

Still not overly pastoral, I know, but perhaps Jesus was also reflecting the tone of their earlier question to him when then asked if he had been the only one who didn’t know what had happened. Jesus, too, was saying, “How did you miss this? Have you not been paying attention?”

Luke says Jesus went on to spell it out for them, which means he would have reminded them of all the stories about God’s presence and care—of being brought out of Egypt, of the quail and manna that fed them in the wilderness. The history of Israel was one of struggle, captivity, and oppression and it was also the story of God’s steadfast love and presence.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want . . . .

What he had to say must have taken up most of the seven miles, because when they looked up and they were home. When this stranger walking with them looked like he was going to keep walking, they invited him in for dinner, still not able to recognize him through their grief, and then he picked up the bread and offered it to them and they recognized that it was Jesus who had been with them the whole time.

And then he vanished.

The got up and went back to Jerusalem—seven miles—to tell the others who were in hiding because they couldn’t see beyond their fear and disappointment either, When they got there—and by then it must have been late at night—the eleven in the room told them Peter had seen Jesus. Cleopas and his friend then told their story, which was interrupted by Jesus appearing in the room to all of them and asking, “Do you have anything to eat?” which I find humorous because he had just disappeared from the dinner table in Emmaus. If he had stayed for dinner with Cleophas, he might not have been so hungry. Or maybe it was that Jesus liked sharing a meal anytime he had a few people together.

That he was hungry made him real and human and present. He was right there with them.

Still, even though seeing Jesus alive mattered a great deal to all of them, it didn’t change the reality that what they had hoped for didn’t happen. Cleopas and his friend were so enlivened by recognizing Jesus that that got back to Jerusalem as quickly as they could, but their hope that he would free them from Roman oppression didn’t come back to life. It had ended at the crucifixion and stayed that way.

They had hoped . . . .

This is one of the reasons I love telling and listening to stories in scripture: they say out loud what we sometimes find hard to say. “We had hoped” are words most all of us have known to be true. Perhaps in the past, maybe this very morning we hear the present imperfect tense and we understand it, even if we aren’t grammar nerds. We know what it means for crucial hopes to collapse. We understand the reality, the truth, of the present imperfect.

What we need is help to see life beyond those broken hopes.

How do we live after we had hoped the surgery would go differently, or the job we wanted didn’t materialize? How do we live after we had hoped family relationships would heal and the rift remains?

I don’t need to keep posing hypotheticals. We can each name times in our lives when we had hoped and then hope ended in the imperfect present. We can also name times when we learned that imperfect present wasn’t forever. Where hope finds new life is when something happens that allows us to recognize God in the middle of it all—not to make it all turn out okay, but to call us to keep living. To eat something. To find those who can help us. To keep going.

Luke ends his gospel soon after this story. Jesus takes them all back to Bethany, says a few things he wants them to remember, and then leaves. Most of the stories of what happened after that are lost. We have a lot of blank spaces to fill. What we do know is we are here this morning, because we are people who belong to a a legacy of love, who share an ancestry of lives that came to see beyond the grief, fear, busyness, or whatever it was that kept them from seeing God was still there even after they had hoped and what they hoped for didn’t happen, but life kept going. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

hand of kindness

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1
hand of kindness

This is my sermon for this week, based on one of my favorite stories in the gospels, which I came to see in a new light based on the way life has been crashing down around here lately. It was a Communion Sunday for us, so my sermon led us into the meal. I hope you find something that feeds you here.

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I have spent most of the last week driving back and forth to Yale New Haven Hospital, as many of you know. Our week started with Ginger taking Rachel, her mother, to the Emergency Department at Goose Lane, which led to her being admitted and then having surgery on Wednesday. She is still there as we try to figure out what comes next, which is not so easy to figure out.

Most every day this week, I read the passage for this morning and tried to think of what to say to you that felt true to the story and true to life.

Perhaps it is my heightened sense of how fragile we all are that made me more mindful of the fact that none of the gospel writers spends a lot of time on Jesus’ appearances after his resurrection. All four of them bring their books to a close rather quickly. You can almost count the times Jesus shows up on one hand, which makes me think perhaps Easter mattered to them not because it is the day that death was somehow vanquished, but that it opened the door to trusting God in a more profound way.

First, let’s look at the story.

After Jesus had appeared to them in the room with Thomas, it seems at least some of the disciples made their way back home to Galilee—Thomas being one of them. Maybe his realism was contagious. They were just trying to figure out what to do next.

We don’t know how much time had passed when they decided to go fishing, which was what they had done before they met Jesus, but Peter, Thomas, Nathaniel, James, and John were out in the boat together—and I think that’s the part that mattered most to them.

When you don’t know what’s coming, stick together.

After a night of nothing in the fish-catching department, they were just a little offshore when someone on the beach asked if they had caught anything to eat. When the said they had not, he told them to try one more time on the other side of the boat. Since they had nothing to lose, they followed the stranger’s instructions and their catch almost sunk their boats.

John looked at the man on the shore and said, “It’s Jesus,” which prompted Peter to jump in the lake and swim to shore. The others pulled the boats and the bursting nets on to the sand and found Jesus, who already had breakfast cooking. He didn’t even need their fish in order to feed them, though he told them to bring some anyway.

In the middle of it all, someone counted the catch: 153 fish.

That piece of information has always fascinated me. What are we to make of that? Trust me, you can spend a whole afternoon on the internet about what that number means. Some of the most helpful are these from theologian Karoline Lewis who says to take it as a clear statement about the grace of God. She says,

Don’t metaphorize this. And I don’t care if that’s not a word. What if it was really true? 153 fish? That is a crazy amount—and why? Because that is how much God loves us. . . . What good is the incarnation if you can’t touch, taste, smell, see, and hear it? So, 153 fish is that very truth. This fourth resurrection appearance is to reveal that grace upon grace is true. . . . To show, by a ridiculous amount of fish, that God’s grace cannot be limited to the incarnation, to the crucifixion, to the tomb, to the resurrection, and certainly not to the end of a Gospel story called John. . . . Resurrection is abundance.

Resurrection is abundance. Just when we think it was over, we pull up more fish than we know what to do with and we have to figure out how to take it all in.

This is not the only place in his gospel that John made this point. He is the one who tells of Jesus’ first miracle at a wedding in Cana where Jesus turned the water into wine so the party didn’t have to stop—and it was really good wine, too.

John also told about feeding the masses on the hillside with the five loaves and seven fishes. The disciples could only see too many hungry people and one little lunch and when the meal was finished there were twelve baskets of leftovers.

Resurrection is abundance. Just when we think it was over, God shows up with more than we know what to do with and we have to figure out how to take it all in.

How then do we learn to digest it? How do we learn to trust the extravagant abundance of God?

God’s grace upon grace. Let’s talk about that word.

Biblical translator Sarah Ruden points out the word grace is hard to translate because it is so “heavily abstracted” in English, which is another way of saying we know how to make things more complicated than they need to be. Ask a minister or a theologian what grace is, and they are likely to say something like “unmerited favor,” which doesn’t clear up much. Ruden points out that the Latin word means “thankfulness” and the Greek word we translate as grace means “kindness,” which she says, “seems more useful than our theologically overwrought grace.” Indeed.

Grace upon grace: kindness upon kindness.

As long as I’m digging up roots, let me give you one more. The root of the word kindness is linked to kinship and means “with the feeling of family.”

My friend Bob Bennett, who is a singer-songwriter, wrote a song called “Hand of Kindness,” which says it like this:

forgiveness comes in just a moment
but sometimes the consequences last
and it’s hard to walk inside that mercy
when the present is so tied up to the past
in this crucible of cause and effect
I walk the wire without a net
and I wonder if I’ll ever fall too far
but that day has not happened yet

there’s a hand of kindness holding me, holding me
there’s a hand of kindness holding me, holding onto me

Resurrection is abundance, grace upon grace, kindness upon kindness, gratitude upon gratitude. To digest all of that means to talk about something other than hypotheticals. To take it all in, we need to talk about where it hurts, what we need, all that we can’t see coming. When the net is empty and the wine is gone and we are trying to feed the world with a sack lunch is when we find once again how much God loves us.

Morning by morning new mercies I see . . .

I know I’m pulling in all kinds of folks whose words can help us find “the feeling of family” this morning because I feel like one of those in the boat on the Sea of Galilee—I have been fishing all week and my nets are empty. And I feel you there with me, whatever your week has been like.

We all need to feel the hand of kindness that is holding us. Here is another one of the voices that speaks to me in times like these: W S Merwin’s poem, “Thanks.”

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

This morning with Rachel in the hospital and our country going up in flames, with wars around the world, with all the hurt and grief we are carrying, with our questions and our struggles, our dreams and our failures, with tag sale leftovers and coffee hour waiting, waiting for the rain that was supposed to come and didn’t, living day to day without knowing what is coming next, we are saying thank you.

Thank you that resurrection is abundance, that grace is kindness, that God’s love is extravagant and untiring, even when we are exhausted. That is one of the big reasons we keep coming to this Table to be fed, just as Jesus fed the fishers when they came up from their boats.

This meal is more than a metaphor, it is a statement of trust. We are here together, caught and held once again by God’s hand of kindness. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

 

get out of the room

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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1
get out of the room

My sermon this past Sunday had less to do with trying to explain Thomas and more to do with what lies beyond our fear. It’s a little site specific, since I was preaching before our congregation’s annual meeting, but I hope you find something here.

__________________________

Over the past few months, I have become enamored of a South American animal called a capybara. It is the world’s largest rodent, weighing up to nearly two hundred pounds full grown. Capybaras are extreme extroverts and crave community, which certainly shows why they caught my attention—and they are just fun to watch.

As you might imagine, my social media began to fill up with not only capybara videos but also links to other exotic animals, one of which was the quokka. It is a marsupial—a cousin of the kangaroo–that lives on a couple of islands off the coast of Australia, and it looks like it is constantly smiling.

When I mentioned them to our friend Jenny in Durham, who is a vet, she said, “Yes, but they also throw their babies when they are being chased predators so they can get away.”

When we got back to Guilford, I started reading more and learned that they the way they “throw” their little ones is actually to loosen the muscles around the pouch that holds the baby so it falls out.

Fear makes us do strange things.

When we left the story last week, most everyone had seen the empty tomb, several of the women had seen and talked to Jesus, and they had all gone home bewildered, not really knowing what to do next. They were still scared.

Easter morning had not brought a tsunami of trust and confidence into the world, or the disciples, for that matter. They weren’t out throwing each other at the Romans, but they also weren’t out telling people what they had seen or shouting, “Alleluia.” They went into hiding, afraid that those who had executed Jesus would be coming for them as well, afraid that life would never be the same.

All of them except Thomas.

As a result, when Jesus appeared in the room where the groups was hiding and passed the peace, offering them hope and trust instead of fear and dread, and telling them–as he had told them many times before–that God’s presence in their lives made them agents of change–agents of forgiveness, compassion, and justice–Thomas missed the reunion.

Do you ever wonder where he went after the crucifixion? What he was doing?

Wherever he was, he handled his fear differently.

Though the enduring label for Thomas was that he was a doubter, theologian David Lose sees him as a realist–the kind of person who relentlessly took stock of a situation before making a decision. He writes,

Thomas wasn’t with the other disciples when they were cowering in fear in the upper room. We don’t know where he was, but I’m guessing he was out getting on with his life, figuring out what was going to come next and getting on with it. Because Thomas is, first and foremost, a realist.

And here’s the thing: reality came like never before on that Friday just two days before this scene, when Thomas watched as they nailed his Lord, teacher, and friend to two slabs of wood. Jesus was dead, and with him all the hopes and dreams of the past three years had perished as well.

So when the disciples come saying that they had seen Jesus, Thomas doesn’t merely doubt them. He out and out just plain doesn’t believe. And so I suspect that his demand to see and feel the mark of the nails in Jesus’ hands is less a request for proof than it is mocking the disciple’s claim. He makes that demand, in other words, because he knows it will never happen; it’s a request as absurd, even ridiculous, as what his friends are claiming.

Jesus appeared to them in the room again eight days later–basically today. (Maybe that’s why the lectionary offers this passage every year on the Sunday after Easter.) We don’t know what their week had been like. We don’t know if they had seen Jesus otherwise; it doesn’t appear that they had been together much. We do know they were still gathering in that room.

Maybe Jesus showed up again to get them out of there, to help them grasp what God could do through them.

When Jesus turned to Thomas, he didn’t offer him the chance to touch his wounds in order to assuage Thomas’ guilt; he did it to change Thomas’ perception of reality, of what was possible, of what God could do through him.

And Thomas, responded–without touching Jesus–by saying, “My master and my God.”

Then Jesus said something that feels a bit puzzling, “Do you believe because you see me? Happy are those who don’t see and yet believe.” Too often those words have been read as a sort of corrective, a back-handed criticism of Thomas and the others, as though Jesus was saying the best believers were those who trusted without questioning.

New Testament professor Dr. Jennifer Garcia Bashaw notes the Greek word that is translated as happy in our passage is not an indication of God’s blessing, but simply an adjective. She says,

People who have that simple kind of faith, the kind that doesn’t ask questions or have doubts or require evidence, are pretty undisturbed, blissfully happy, even. But is that the goal? Is John trying to tell us that we should all believe without seeing, without reasoning or questioning? I don’t think so. No one in this story believes like that. It takes Jesus’ voice to bring Mary around to recognition. Peter and the other disciple require a glimpse into the tomb, and even then they don’t understand. The other disciples need Jesus to show up miraculously in their midst. So, Thomas’s delayed recognition of the resurrected Jesus is not an inferior form of faith but just another way that people might move from doubt to belief in order to follow Jesus.

Faith–trusting God–was hard work for them. I think it is fair to say that is probably true in one way or another for most of us in this room where we are gathered. We are, after all, a UCC church. (That’s intended as a joke.) The reality is the history of our congregation and of our denomination is filled with faithful people who did the hard work of trusting God in the middle of all kinds of realities.

This is our 260th annual meeting, which puts the inaugural meeting a decade before the Revolutionary War. We have held annual meetings through the Civil War, two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, 9/11–and that doesn’t even cover all the wars. We held annual meetings during two worldwide pandemics (most of you were here for the last one), through the Great Depression, through elections when our parties both won and lost. We have also held annual meetings without loved ones, in the middle of family tragedies and difficulties, in between settled pastors when folks didn’t know who would come next.

Those annual meetings, like the one we will hold in this room shortly, were statements of our faith in God and in ourselves as the people of God. I won’t assume everyone was happy at all those meetings. I will assume most every meeting had several questions as the congregation worked out the details of whatever they were voting on, as leadership changed, and as our financial situation fluctuated.

Our story about the disciples offers us the chance to look at our forebearers as those who gathered to further understand how to get out of the room and see what God could do.

We are still gathering not because those who came before us just simply trusted that everything would work out. We are still here because people generously chose relationship over doctrine, over politics, over uncertainty, even over the really crucial things that divide churches like what color to paint the walls, or whether or not to hold annual meetings in the sanctuary or in the fellowship hall.

We are still here because people were willing to trust God to show them a new reality, the way Thomas and the others were willing to trust that Jesus was alive and standing there with them.

We are still here because they got out of the room and followed God’s call. We are also still here because every year we get out of the room as well and do the things we trust will share God’s love with those around us and with one another.

As we gather for our 260th meeting, our task once again is to do the work we have to do to continue to trust God and to trust each other. Let us ask the questions we need to ask, let us listen in love when folks respond, and let us remember there is not one detail in any of the reports or in any of the decisions we face that matters more than the relationships we share as the followers of Christ here at the Mount Carmel Congregational Church, no matter what is going on around us so that we can move past our fear, our realism, whatever it is that blocks us from seeing what the Spirit can bring to life in us.

Let us follow Jesus out of the room. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

stone rollers

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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2
stone rollers

My sermon for this morning.

________________________

No one remembered exactly what happened.

They knew the tomb was empty when those who came to anoint the body got there—but the list of exactly who went to the tomb with Mary Magdelene differs from gospel to gospel, though all four make it clear that it was the women who first learned that Jesus was resurrected.

The men—the ones who get called “the disciples”—had fled the scene of Jesus’ execution and had gone into hiding. The women were the ones who stayed until Jesus had died. And they were the ones who went to care for the body once the sabbath was over.

The Roman practice was not to take the bodies of the executed down from their crosses, but to leave them to decompose, both to even further humiliate the one who had been killed and their families, and also to serve as a warning to others. Intentional humiliation was part of the plan.

Jewish tradition said the body had to be buried before the sabbath began. It was an essential kindness. Joseph of Arimathea, who was a follower of Christ and also quite wealthy, had a tomb (actually one intended for him) and also had the influence, as a rich man, to negotiate with those bent on death and to see to it that Jesus’ body was taken down and cared for rather than being left to rot in public. Jesus was placed in the tomb just before sabbath began on what we would call Friday evening.

As we know, right about dawn on Sunday morning, the women went to the tomb to finish the anointing, which, in those days, was work only done by women. They were neither rich nor influential. Most of the graves to which they might have attended would have held more than one body and probably had some way to open the crypt. Jesus’ body was sealed in a tomb intended only for one, and for a wealthy one at that, so it would have been well secured.

When it comes to the stone, each gospel account tells of its removal a bit differently. Matthew says there was an earthquake that made it roll away, even frightening the security guard. Both Luke (which we read today) and John simply note that the stone was moved. Mark recounts that as the women were walking to the cemetery, they asked themselves, “Who will roll back the stone from the tomb for us?” because they knew it wasn’t something they could do themselves.

I know I was supposed to focus on Luke this week, but that question grabbed me as I read the gospels again: Who will roll back the stone from the tomb?

Whatever happened that turned the crucified Jesus into the risen Christ could not have happened unless someone had rolled away the stone. Resurrection requires a rolling stone—and I don’t mean Mick Jagger.

Resurrection requires stone rollers.

Which brings me to the other thing that struck me this week as I prepared.

Ginger’s church has a sunrise service at Jacobs Beach in Guilford every Easter Sunday. That’s right, I’ve already been to church—at 5:35 this morning! Since my guitar is more portable than the church organ, I was the accompaniment for the hymn we sang—the same one that will close our service—“Jesus Christ is Risen Today.”

As I practiced, the opening lines struck me differently than ever before:

Jesus Christ is risen today, alleluia!
our triumphant holy day, alleluia!

Particularly the second line—“our triumphant holy day”—I stopped practicing and said out loud, “One day? That’s all the triumph we get? No!”

The schnauzers were puzzled by my outburst, but it was a revelation for me that tied in with my musings about rolling stones. We are not singing this morning because of something that happened one time on one morning so long ago that we don’t even have exact details. We are singing this morning because stones have continued to be rolled away across millennia, giving us the chance to trust that every last one of us are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved.

I did something in that last paragraph I work hard not to do: I used the passive voice. I said, “We are singing this morning because stones have continued to be rolled away.” I abhor the passive voice because it puts distance between the action and the actor. Politicians use it all the time: “Mistakes were made; actions have been taken.” It drives me crazy.

When I realized what I had written, I started to go back and fix it, but I decided it would be better to correct myself in real time because I want to underline that rolling away the stones requires an active voice. Stones aren’t just rolled away. Someone has to roll them.

And so I invite us on this Easter morning as we celebrate Jesus’ resurrection, to think in the active voice (I think that’s possible) about what stones we need to roll away so God’s resurrecting power can continue to bring new life into the world for more than one triumphant day.

We are called to be stone rollers; we are called to be those who practice resurrection—those who look for ways to make room for life in the face of all that would kill us and in the face of all that takes life from those around us.

The phrase “practice resurrection” is the last line from a poem by Wendell Berry called “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” which describes what it means to be a stone roller. Listen to this excerpt:

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands. . .

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts. . . 

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Berry was by no means a perfect man, and he worked hard to deal in specifics when he talked about practicing resurrection. What, then, are we talking about when we say we need to roll the stones away?

(Bear with me here—I’m going to stretch the metaphor a bit.)

We might say some stones are small and can be rolled away with ease; we just have to take the time to do it. What I mean is not all stone rolling is the stuff of Easter morning in terms of impact.

Now I’ll mix my metaphors to make my point: I spent part of yesterday cleaning the beds around our hosta and peony plants who are just poking their heads up through the soil for this year’s round of resurrection. I rolled away the debris that could impede their growth. It was a small and essential act. I rolled some small stones.

What small stones can we roll—what small, intentional acts can we do—to create space for growth and connection, to create room for new life to break forth?

What words of apology or clarification do we need to say? What habits do we need to change? What patterns do we need to reevaluate? How willing are to examine our presuppositions, or to imagine that we still have a lot to learn? How quickly do we judge instead of asking questions when we don’t understand something?

Some stones are larger and require greater effort and intentionality—even risk—on our part, calling us to ask how we can create room for new life rather than dig holes for more graves. To be able to speak the truth to power we first have to speak the truth to ourselves.

How can we start a conversation with the person in our neighborhood who has a sign in their yard that we disagree with or even detest? How do we turn our anger into compassion? How can we bring ourselves to feel what it would be like if our family members were the ones being accused and deported without due process of law? How do we give up having to be right so that we can choose to be loving? We are all going to need help rolling that stone.

Some stones are giant boulders and require continued effort over generations. Will we play a part in rolling them even just a little, or will be slip into the passive voice and just hope that stones get rolled away without costing us too much? In the poem, Wendell Berry said we should plant sequoias. (Again, I’m mixing metaphors to make my point.)

As many times as I have said that love wins in the end and if love is not winning it’s not the end—and meant it as a statement of hope, I want you to hear me say this morning—on this Resurrection Morning—I am pretty sure love is not going to win in my lifetime. Any stone I try to roll is going to be some version of planting a sequoia.

In the wake of the Civil War Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the carol “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” The next to the last verse says,

and in defeat I bowed my head
there is no peace on earth I said
for hate is strong and mocks the song
of peace on earth goodwill to all

He doesn’t end there, but that is the verse we are living in. We have followed Jesus from his birth to his death—a death that came about because he told people that God sided with the poor and those on the margins and those who were deemed to be of little value to society, other than to be the workforce.

So the powers that be executed him.

This morning, we have followed the women to the tomb to find that Christ is risen. If all that Easter means is that we have one triumphant holy day, then the power of the resurrection will last about as long as the forsythia bushes in the church yard. Luke says that those women and the frightened men they went to tell all went to their homes that night wondering what had happened.

They weren’t triumphant; they were bewildered. And so they kept gathering together and they kept telling the stories that mattered most and they rolled the stones of fear away from their hearts. Those are the stories we will read in the weeks to come.

Easter is about more than triumph, about more than a single victory; it is about more than one empty tomb. Jesus’ resurrection calls us to new life every day, to be stone rollers any time we see an opportunity, day after day with death all around us, planting sequoias we will not see grow large, offering invitations that cannot be reciprocated, taking care of people who cannot pay us back, clearing space for new life to grow and thrive, whether we’re talking about peonies or people.

Christ is risen today. Alleluia. And that only continues to matter if we keep rolling away the stones. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: choosing life

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0
lenten journal: choosing life

choosing life

when we moved to
Connecticut almost
a decade ago
I had an idea to plant
a tree each year

as a way to mark time
and to leave something
growing when we left
and so I planted two peach
trees over two summers

today I cut them down
not because they were dead
but because we also tell
time by schnauzers
and one who was not here

when I planted the trees
but has been here
when the meager harvests
fall to the ground faster
than we can pick them

and then after the fallen
fruit has rotted away
Loretta carries in the pits
as if they were prizes
to be treasured and

chewed to bits
and swallowed
which turns them into
life-threatening
schnauzer hazards

I chose one life
over two others just
as they were blooming
which gives me pause
as I await the resurrection

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: ice age

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
0
lenten journal: ice age

ice age

if you have to go out in
winter ice is not your friend
whether the white ridges
or the translucent layer

disguised as asphalt
ice will take you down
maybe that’s what they
had in mind when it

became the acronym for
those who knock down doors
and scour streets scraping
people into oblivion

it chills me to think that
evil appreciates metaphor
freezes me in my tracks to
watch the hail of hatred

break hearts and windows
and leave us all shivering
the arctic temperature of
such hate cannot sustain life

humanity loses its footing
in such frigid heartlessness
we need to burn things down
so we don’t all freeze to death

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: mirror image

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0
lenten journal: mirror image

mirror image

what is it about grief and loss that
makes life feel as if the clouded glass
through which we gaze carries the same
caution as the passenger-side mirror:
“objects may be closer than they appear”

the old songs sing of crossing rivers
and farther shores, of flying away
like a bird freed from prison bars but
life is so much more than a sentence
we are meant for more than an escape

as you travel, check your mirrors
get a sense of those fellow travelers
who have merely shifted dimensions
even if the view still feels clouded
we will understand it better by and by

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: living among the dead

Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0
lenten journal: living among the dead

living among the dead

one church member stood
during prayer time to mark
five years since his wife died

at coffee hour another said
next Sunday will be two years
since her husband died

when I checked email I saw
a request to help with a burial
of who died last night

and then at lunch Ginger
told me that my spiritual
director had died in her sleep

those are just the ones
I heard about today
no doubt there are more

not a day goes by that
isn’t attached to someone
who is no longer with us

as we are wont to say
even as we keep bumping
into their absences

and marking our calendars
so we can recognize
today’s particular ache

Peace,
Milton

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