don't eat alone

I love that every three years the stories of Samuel and Dr. King intersect because they are both stories about listening. Here’s my sermon from this past Sunday.

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Today is the second Sunday of Epiphany if we mark time by the liturgical calendar. As we know, epiphany is a word that means “awakening,” and points us to the sages who followed the star to the manger–although they had no idea it was Epiphany with a capital E. They were simply responding to the calling they felt when they saw the star.

If we mark time by our American calendar, this is the Sunday when we honor the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Tomorrow we will celebrate him with a national holiday.

On the night of January 27, 1956, towards the end of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, Dr. King got a phone call at his home telling him if he didn’t get out of town they were going to blow up his house and kill him and his family. He was twenty-seven years old. He recounted later that he hung up the phone and went into the kitchen to pray. In the silence, he said he heard a voice call him by name: “Martin Luther, stand up for truth, stand up for justice, and stand up for righteousness.” His epiphany that night led him to lead us and to change how we look at and listen to one another, and, perhaps, how we listen to God.

Our text for this morning deals with another call in the middle of the night—this one to Samuel, a young boy to whom God spoke out of the darkness. Let us listen to the part of the story told in I Samuel 3:1-10:

Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord under Eli. The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.

At that time Eli, whose eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see, was lying down in his room; the lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the temple of the Lord, where the ark of God was.

Then the Lord called, “Samuel! Samuel!” and he said, “Here I am!” and ran to Eli and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” But he said, “I did not call; lie down again.” So he went and lay down. The Lord called again, “Samuel!” Samuel got up and went to Eli and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” But he said, “I did not call, my son; lie down again.” Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him. The Lord called Samuel again, a third time. And he got up and went to Eli and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” Then Eli perceived that the Lord was calling the boy. Therefore Eli said to Samuel, “Go, lie down, and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’ ” So Samuel went and lay down in his place.

Now the Lord came and stood there, calling as before, “Samuel! Samuel!” And Samuel said, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”

The story from the life of Samuel was one that engaged me as a young boy because I imagined him at my age. I didn’t understand how his mother could have sent him to live in the Temple, but I could see him waking in the night and going to Eli, thinking the old man had called him. But the story is bigger than a little boy trying to figure out who keeps calling him.

Samuel’s mother was named Hannah. She had a hard life, to put it mildly. Her husband had two wives and the other woman had given birth to several children, but Hannah had none. As a result, the husband played favorites and discriminated against Hannah because she had not given birth. Hannah went to the temple and pleaded with God to give her a child. Her prayer was so fervent that Eli, the priest, saw her without hearing her and thought she was drunk. Hannah told him her story and Eli said he hoped she got what she asked for.

She became pregnant and gave birth to Samuel. Then she decided the best way to say thank you was to give the boy back to God. We need to understand here that even though the boy was her ticket to some equity in the way she was treated by her husband, she chose a story bigger than her own—beyond the injustice and misogyny of the time. Once the child was weaned, she took Samuel to the temple and left him there for Eli to mentor as a way of expressing her gratitude to God.

Eli was far from being an exemplary priest, to put it kindly. By the time Samuel came to live with him, Eli was old. His sons were priests alongside him, and they all used their positions as opportunities to enrich themselves and take advantage of whomever they could, and they had done so for a really long time, even before Samuel came to the temple.

Our passage noted that a word from God had become a rare thing by the time Samuel heard his name called out in the night. No one thought of Eli as much of a messenger where God was concerned. Samuel went to Eli because he didn’t think anyone else was in the building. The drowsy priest said, “I didn’t call you. Go back to bed.” It happened a second time, and then a third. By then, Samuel wasn’t the only one who was awake, and Eli had a sense that more was going on, even though he hadn’t heard from God in a long time, so he gave Samuel different instructions: “Next time answer, ‘Speak, Lord. Your servant—your follower, your disciple—is listening.’”

Samuel did just that, and his childlike response makes his response to God sound so doable, but to actually say to God, “I’m listening”—and mean it—is a brave thing to say, as we see from the life of Dr. King.

When Samuel listened, God told him to go to breakfast the next morning and let Eli know that his blindness was both a physical reality and a metaphor: he and his sons had lost sight of their calling and their humanity, and they were going to be punished for their abuse of their office. The whole house was about to come down on them. Things were not going to end well.

When they met the next day and Eli asked Samuel what God had said, Samuel didn’t hold back. He chose to tell the truth—his second act of courage and faithfulness.

I had a chance a few years ago to visit the house where Dr. King was living in Montgomery, Alabama when he got the call that threatened his life–and when he heard God’s call that followed it. Shirley Cherry, the woman who was leading our tour, told us the story and said, “He had a choice. Dr. King had a privileged life. He didn’t have to do what he did.” Her choice of words jumped out at me: he had a privileged life. Yes, he got to study at Boston University. He did have some advantages others did not. Yet, when he came to Durham, North Carolina, just days before he was assassinated, to meet with an interracial group of ministers, they had to meet in the private home of one of the pastors because there was not a restaurant in town that would allow them to eat together.

Yet, she said, he had a choice.

The night he stood up to speak to the sanitation workers in Memphis, which was the night before he was killed, Dr. King began his speech with these words:

As you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of general and panoramic view of the whole human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, “Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?” — I would take my mental flight by Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn’t stop there. I would move on by Greece and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality.

He kept saying, “I wouldn’t stop there,” as he moved through different historical epochs and then he said,

Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, “If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy.” Now that’s a strange statement to make because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around. That’s a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that [people], in some strange way, are responding — something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same — “We want to be free.”

And another reason that I’m happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we’re going to have to grapple with the problems that [people] have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demand didn’t force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. [People], for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence.

Samuel made a choice and rose to greatness. Martin Luther King made a choice and was murdered for it. The call to follow God is not a guarantee for everything to turn out just as we hoped, or even that things will turn out well. Not is it a promise that if we follow God we will be set for life.

It is a choice to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly. Or not. How things go from there have to do with a lot of other details and variables. What we can control is what we say and do, how we act: what we choose. Those choices are acts of faith because we don’t know what is going to happen next, or because anything can happen.

What if Samuel had chosen to not answer the voice and just pulled his blanket over his head and gone to sleep? Would Eli and his sons have repented? What if Dr. King had not gone to Montgomery or to Memphis? How would that have changed the history of our country?

I am asking for more than historical speculation here. The point is our choices matter. Our faithfulness matters. Answering a voice in the night was a small act, whether we are talking about a Martin or a Samuel, as are most of the things we do when we do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. Our daily deliberateness is what makes growth and change possible. Even though Rev. Dr. King went to Memphis and made that speech, the power of the bus boycott was in the daily decisions of people to walk to work, to coordinate rides, to keep encouraging one another to keep choosing justice and kindness and hope.

And that is what is required of us as the people of God in Hamden in these days. We need to listen closely for the ways in which God is calling us to live out our faith in our daily relationships so that we are fostering justice, sowing kindness, and living humbly rather than joining the escalating choir of fear and divisiveness that seems to get louder every day. This quote from the Talmud says it best,

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly NOW. Love mercy NOW. Walk humbly NOW. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

May we be those who do the work of love and justice. May we learn—no, may we choose to be more like Samuel: to still ourselves, focus, and then to say, “Speak, God, I am listening” as we do what we can to answer the grief that surrounds us. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

We had our first winter storm of the year over the weekend, which meant we did not gather for in-person worship at my church this week. Instead, I recorded a “service” and uploaded it to our YouTube page—almost all of that an unseen consequence of the pandemic.

The scripture for the week was the account of Jesus’ baptism, which set me to thinking about why Jesus would participate in a “baptism of repentance,” as Mark described it. Here is where that train of thought took me.

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Several years ago, Ginger and I had the chance to go to South Africa with a group of friends. One of the things we got to do while we were there was visit a wildlife refuge where they took care of orphaned animals to try and help reintroduce them to their natural environment. One of the experiences they offered was the chance to play with lion cubs, and so we did.

The baby lions had been taken in after their mother had been killed by poachers. We saw them when they were about eight weeks old; they were growing fast. In another eight weeks they would have been too big for us to be with them and still be safe. We sat down on the ground and the cubs walked around us while the keepers kept watch. One of the cubs was fascinated with my hat. We had a great time and we stayed on edge through most of it remembering that we were playing with wild animals, not Schnauzers.

The scene came to mind as I read Mark’s description of John the Baptist—dressed in camel hide and eating locusts and honey from wild bees—because I felt some of the same tension as I read about this unique and intriguing man in the middle of nowhere attracting huge crowds because of both his wild attractiveness and his invitation to repentance. People kept coming, though I wonder if they had questions about what was happening exactly. It wasn’t like their regular synagogues.

We can see quickly that the baptism John offered was markedly different from what we do. First, it had nothing to do with connecting to a church or a congregation. Second, he wasn’t baptizing infants. (Both rituals of baptism are wonderful; this was just different.) Third, everyone was being immersed, a full-on dunking. (Also not the norm in the UCC, but not unknown; it’s just that most UCC churches are in colder climates.)

The baptism was to signify their repentance—and that is a word we need to pay attention to because what it meant to John and those who came out and how we hear it now are not the same. Our English definition is “sincere regret or remorse;” we repent because we have done something wrong. To those coming out to the Jordan, it meant “a complete change of heart” (as our translation put it), a profound life change. John was talking about creating a moment that had a before and an after.

People were willing to wander miles from town to find this wild man out by the river who helped them trust that God could change their lives, that they were not trapped in their ways, that they could change and grow.

And then Jesus walked into the scene and asked to be baptized.

It helps us to understand the scene if we remember that Jesus and John knew each other. They were cousins. Mary had visited Elizabeth when they were both pregnant. It is fair to assume the boys knew each other growing up. When John talks about the one who was coming, he knew he was talking about Jesus. They may have even talked about Jesus showing up that day. Whether it was planned or not, John was not surprised to see Jesus.

But why did Jesus need to be baptized?

Best we can tell, Jesus was about thirty years old when he went to meet John. In Mark’s gospel, this was where the story started. The others tell the birth stories, but even they drop off when Jesus turns twelve. We don’t know what he did during those years, other than live in Nazareth. Since Joseph was a carpenter, we can picture Jesus being his helper, but that’s about it.

It struck me this week that Jesus wanted to be baptized for the same reason as the other people: to repent. To make a life change. Again, lay aside our definition of repentance that carries notes of remorse and regret and hang on to the idea of creating a moment that has a before and after. Jesus walked into the river and John baptized him.

And Jesus was not the same after that.

His baptism marked the beginning of his public ministry as an adult, and it was not any tamer than John was with his wild honey and camel skin. I say his adult ministry because he ministered in the Temple when he was twelve, astonishing the priests who heard him. His parents responded by admonishing him for making them worry because they thought he was lost.

This time, as Jesus came up out of the water, the skies opened, a dove appeared, and a voice said, “This is my beloved child in whom I delight.”

The next thing that happened to Jesus was the same Spirit who delighted in him led him out into the desert to fast and come to terms with himself by facing his temptations. He came back to town to find out that John had been arrested. He began to call his followers, and then he began teaching in the synagogues. He cast evil spirits out of a man, healed Peter’s mother (among others), and then healed a person with leprosy—all before we get to the end of Chapter One.

And it all swung on Jesus hearing the Spirit say, “You are my beloved child in whom I delight”—words of not just affirmation but acceptance: you belong to me.

It all swung on that blessing.

And, at the same time, maybe it didn’t. One blessing doesn’t last a lifetime. (Does it?) We all need reminders.

The temptations Jesus faced in the wilderness were things he had to stare down his whole ministry: to use his miracles to create a following, to take advantage of his privilege, to choose power over love. Perhaps the same is true about the blessing of his baptism; he needed reminders that he delighted God.

Perhaps I’m projecting.

When we first moved to Boston, there was a billboard at the Museum of Science that we saw every time we crossed the bridge from Cambridge back to Charlestown. It caught so much of my attention that I wrote a poem about it.

daily work

The crush of afternoon traffic finds me
in an unending stream of souls staring
at the stoplight. From my seat I can see
the billboard: “Come visit the New Planetarium
You Tiny Insignificant Speck in the Universe.”
When the signal changes, I follow the flow
over river and railroad yard, coming
to rest in front of our row house, to be
welcomed by our schnauzers, the only
ones who appear to notice my return.
I have been hard at work in my stream
of consciousness, but the ripples of my life
have stopped no wars, have saved no lives––
and I forgot to pick up the dry cleaning;
I am a speck who has been found wanting.
I walk the dogs down to the river and wonder
how many times I have stood at the edge
hoping to hear, “You are My Beloved Child.”
Instead, I skip across life’s surface to find
I am not The One You Were Looking For.
I am standing in the river of humanity
between the banks of Blessing and Despair,
with the sinking feeling that messiahs
matter most: I am supposed to change
the world and I have not done my job.
Yet. . . if I stack up the stones of my life
like an altar, I can find myself in the legacy
of Love somewhere between star and sea:
I am a Speck of Some Significance.
So say the schnauzers every time I come home.

John created a moment that allowed Jesus to hear the blessing that changed his life. How do we do that for one another? How do we remind each other that we are specks of some significance? How do we call each other to trust that we are a delight to God and are capable of great love? How do we express God’s blessing so that those around us know they are accepted, that they belong? That we all belong because we are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved?

May we begin this new year by repenting—by making a life change, a before and after moment—to be people committed to blessing, to accepting everyone in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

The story of Anna and Simeon caught me by surprise as I prepared for my sermon last week, taking me on an interesting journey that I hope is meaningful to you as well.

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When it comes to our Nativity scenes, we know the characters pretty well.

At the center, of course, are Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus, all swaddled up and laying in the manger. Then we generally imagine the shepherds circled around them, along with assorted farm animals, and above them an angel or two. We even throw in the Magi for good measure, even though they probably went to Nazareth some time later, rather than showing up at the barn in Bethlehem.

It’s kind of a static scene. Not much changes from Christmas to Christmas.

But there were others who were not turned into figurines over the centuries, and two of them were Anna and Simeon, who show up in our scripture for today. They didn’t make it to the manger, but they found their way to Jesus when Mary and Joseph took him to the Temple in accordance with Jewish Law, which is a euphemism for Jesus’ circumcision and also meant the family was in Jerusalem, not Bethlehem.

Simeon and Anna were both old, and they both lived at the Temple, both literally and figuratively it seems. The other thing they shared in common was they both thought they would see the Messiah—the Christ—in their lifetimes, and they had spent those lifetimes preparing to meet him.

We don’t get many details about either of them. All we know about Simeon was that he was up in years and he lived in “prayerful expectancy’ that Israel would get help from God. We know Anna was married for seven years and then widowed for eighty-four. If we assume who was married young, as most young women were in those days, she would have been around a hundred and ten at least.

Both lived in anticipation of God doing something important before they died. And both—once they saw Jesus and held him and talked about him—considered their lives complete. They must have been exceptional people because they were willing to devote their lives to finding God.

Luke paints a lovely scene with these two and the child, but what caught my mind’s eye was the juxtaposition of Anna and Simeon declaring their life’s work complete and Jesus at the beginning of his life growing “strong in body and wise in spirit”—well, just growing, period.

Anna and Simeon were kind, compassionate, faithful, and hopeful people. The point I want to make here is not at their expense. They had lived their whole long lives looking for the Messiah, a singularity of purpose that gave them meaning. They enter Jesus’ story at the end of their time on earth, but Jesus was just getting started.

Jesus kept growing. In the next paragraph of Luke 2, Jesus comes back to the Temple at age twelve, again with his parents, and this time Luke wraps the scene up by saying that he “matured, growing up in both body and spirit, blessed by both God and people.”

Anna and Simeon were among the first to bless him because they had spent their lives preparing to meet him.

Yes, Jesus was young and Anna and Simeon were old, but growth is not a function of age, particularly when it comes to faith. That is one of the takeaways at the heart of the Incarnation: God put on human skin and kept learning. Jesus wasn’t born fully formed. He had to grow and mature physically, intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally.

We get glimpses of him as an infant and as a child, and then we get a larger picture of what he was like in his early thirties before he was executed for challenging the political and religious institutions to not be so sure of themselves. What we don’t get is a picture of Jesus as an old person. He never grew to be Anna or Simeon’s age.

What do you think Jesus would have been like at sixty, or seventy, or eighty?

It is interesting to me that when I typed that question into my Google search window I only found one article—a nice piece written by Patrick Reardon, a former Catholic priest who became an attorney. He mused about Jesus joining his group of friends:

If Jesus had joined us for breakfast, he would have joined us in talking about memory lapses—Why did I walk into this room?—and about a close friend who died a couple years ago and about a grandchild and about someone we know who’s grieving over the death of a sibling. He would have taken part in our discussion of trying to figure out how to relate to our adult children who, to our great surprise, have lives that don’t have us at the center.

And Jesus would have joined with us in bemoaning our aches and pains and health worries and limitations. And he would have had his share. He was human, after all.

Yes, Jesus was human. So are we. Many of us in this room may find it easier to identify with Anna and Simeon than the baby in the manger, or even, perhaps, to Jesus in his thirties. As inviting as Reardon’s imagination is that would have Jesus sitting down for coffee to talk about his aches and pains, let’s look beyond how Jesus might be like us and ask ourselves what it means to be Christlike at our ages, whatever those ages are.

One of the ways we talk about age is we say we are growing older, as if we are still learning and age is about more than endurance. Anna and Simeon grew older and more insightful. I suppose they also grew more patient as they waited for the Christ to come.

Whatever our age, how are we growing older? What are we doing to expand our sense of God’s presence? How are we becoming more Christlike?

When my mother turned eighty, she bought an electric keyboard so she could take piano lessons. She had played the piano as a girl but had not kept it up. She told my brother and me that she bought the keyboard because she wanted to keep learning, and what she wanted to learn was how to play her favorite hymns. She went to lessons, she practiced, and she learned to play the songs she loved. When she died, Ginger and I kept the keyboard so that when we turn eighty we can take lessons as well.

Often, in our culture, when we talk about growth, we think in terms of accomplishment or progress, as though growth means we have to do more, earn more, make more, BE more. But Anna and Simeon grew by showing up at the Temple every day. In his whole life, Jesus was a never more than a day or two journey from the Temple where he met them. He grew, Luke says, in body and spirit and also in the depth of relationships with God and the people around him.

Regardless of our age, we have room to grow. May we learn from Simeon and Anna and grow in patience and compassion, in focus and devotion, so we can see Christ in ways we have not before. And may we, like Jesus, continue to grow in our relationships with God and with one another. Amen.

Peace,
Milton