don't eat alone

My sermon on Jesus’ parable of the pharisee and the tax collector hinges on a re-translation by Amy-Jill Levine that opened up the story for me.

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In the early days of Saturday Night Live, one of the repeating characters was a priest named Father Guido Sarducci. He was not a priest of course, but he played one on TV. One of his ideas was what he called The Five Minute University. He said people spend a lot of money on college and then forget most of what they learned, so he could save anyone a lot of time and money by enrolling in his university that lasted only five minutes, graduation included.

The idea was that in five minutes you would learn what the average college graduate remembers five years after they get out of school. For Spanish, you would learn to say, “¿Como está usted?” which means, “How are you?”, and also the response, “Muy bien,” which means, “Very well.” Economics class boiled down to supply and demand: you buy something and then you sell it for more than you paid for it. Theology was simply, “God is everywhere because God likes you.”

I was actually in college the first time I heard Guido do his routine and, I have to say, it sounded pretty tempting. Sometimes it feels like it would be nice if more things could be distilled into sentences that were easy summaries that we didn’t have to think about again.

But that’s just not the way life goes.

Jesus’ approach to teaching was quite different that Father Sarducci because he didn’t offer a whole lot of easy summaries or catch phrases. Sometimes he listed things, like the Sermon on the Mount, or he said what he meant in a sentence or two, but there was always more for his followers to learn. Jesus taught in layers that require of us to keep digging, to keep looking, as our Congregational forbearers said, for more light to break forth.

To keep growing, we have to keep learning. Part of that, particularly when we come to scripture and theology, is to read and listen in a way that we can be caught by surprise, rather than living with expected summaries as though it were a course in the Five Minute University.

With that in mind, the sermon is going to feel a bit more like a Bible Study because we need to dig in a bit.

Last week, as we talked about the widow and the judge, we saw the way Jesus took characters that could be stereotyped and broke those images wide open so we could see something else. The same is true in today’s parable.

Once again, the story is brief. Two men came into the Temple to pray. One was a Pharisee. I want to stop there for a moment and ask what image comes to mind when you hear the word Pharisee. My guess is it is not very positive. Across Christian history, we have often painted them as arrogant and even dishonest. We even added the word to our language to mean someone who is self-righteous and hypocritical.

Theologian Amy-Jill Levine, who is a Jewish New Testament scholar, reminds us that to most of Jesus’ audience, the Pharisees were respected teachers “who walked the walk and talked the talk.” The apostle Paul was a Pharisee and saw it as a mark of distinction. They were not priests, so the man in our parable was not on his home turf in the Temple. He, like the tax collector, had come to pray as part of his faith commitment.

The tax collector was a Jewish man who worked for the Roman government, which meant he was not necessarily the most popular man in town. People often thought of tax collectors as dishonest, and he might have been, but this man was in the Temple praying for forgiveness. The conventional reading of this parable would have us hear it much like the painting on the front of our order of service, where the Pharisee appears rich and well-dressed and the tax collector looks poor, worn, and left out. Amy-Jill Levine says that’s not the case. He lived in the center of society and probably did pretty well for himself.

This is not a story of a rich person and a poor person.

Instead of comparing and contrasting the men to get meaning from the parable, Levine invites us to read the prayers of the two men at face value: the Pharisee is offering a prayer of gratitude, and the tax collector is offering a prayer of repentance. She says people in Jesus’ day would have had a hard time thinking that the tax collector’s prayer would have been answered, that he would have been justified. They would have expected it, as far as the parable goes, but they would not have liked it.

Then she went on to say that part of the problem we have with the parable, as modern readers, is that our translations play to the stereotypes that have been handed down. For her, it all swings on one key preposition in the sentence in today’s passage, “I tell you, this person went home justified alongside of the Pharisee.”

If you were to open our pew Bible and turn to Luke 18, the sentence would read, “I tell you, this person went home justified rather than the Pharisee,” as if Jesus were making a point about the religious teacher.

Here’s the thing: Both translations are accurate because the Greek word—para—can mean both things. It comes into English in words like parallel, paradox, parable, even Paraclete, which is one of the names for the Holy Spirit. We are used to it meaning alongside, or with. To understand why most Christian translators have chosen words that separate the two men would mean talking about church history for longer than you would want to stay this morning. For now, let’s stay with the text.

Last week, I said that in the parable of the widow and the judge Jesus was asking us to pray for justice, which meant looking at whoever we see and not seeing adversaries or enemies; but seeing people who hurt like we do; about listening to the voices God puts in our ears and answering them in love.

In this companion story, then, wouldn’t it make sense that Jesus was making connections rather than comparisons as a reminder that God’s love can heal all kinds of brokenness when we come willing to be healed. Whatever issues we might have with the Pharisee or the tax collector, God listened to both of them. As I have said before, faith and life are team sports.

Immediately following this parable, Luke says people were bringing their babies to Jesus to have them blessed and the disciples scolded the parents, telling them Jesus had more important people to see. Jesus intervened to welcome the little ones and say they were the ones who really understood how God was at work in the world. That is followed by a visit from a rich young man who what it took to find peace with God, but prefaces his question about what he had to do to be right with God by saying he kept all the rules, much like the Pharisee in our parable. Jesus told him to give away all of his wealth to those in need—to see himself as alongside of everyone.

The young man couldn’t do it. Can we?

Life is hard and stressful and sad, which makes it tempting to reduce those with whom we struggle to convenient labels, to decide we know who they are and what they think, and then write them off, making our Five Minute University Theology class sound like, “Jesus loves you but I’m his favorite.”

Life is also beautiful and surprising and complicated, which means we are called to drop the labels and look at the people, to tell stories rather than sling slogans, to do the wonderful and messy work of living alongside of each other so that everyone gets to know what love feels like.

May we have the courage to find translations the create greater room for God’s love to envelop us all. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

My sermon this week is from a parable of Jesus often called “The Persistent Widow.” It is not one of my favorites but seemed worth wrestling with. What I found is the title shares the story short. There’s a lot going on in the parable worth talking about.

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I grew up in a family that thought if a story was good–really good–then it was worth repeating, especially to people who had heard it before. Kind of like a good recipe, in a way. You don’t make a dish you really like one time and then stop for fear of serving the same meal to your family and friends. In our house, stories were that way as well.

I don’t mean you told them once a week, but you didn’t have to flinch when the story came to mind and seemed perfect for the moment. You just told it again so everyone could enjoy it.

I know I’ve told some of you this story, I’m sure. It’s worth repeating.

My friend Terry, who lives in Durham, North Carolina taught me how to deal with customer service calls when you need help. You know the kind I am talking about. You have an issue and you spend what feels like four hours on hold listening to the same thirty second loop of music and the occasional robotic voice thanking you for your patience and then finally a human being answers and tells you that you are being recorded for training purposes.

I have had a long and checkered history of conversations I wish had gone differently because my anger and frustration got the best of me in one of those moments of helplessness and frustration. I voiced that one day to Terry and he said when he called and finally got a human being on the other end of the line, he said, “Hi, my name’s Terry. I am calling because I have a problem and I need to know if you are the one who can help me or the one who needs to connect me with the person who can help me,” offering an invitation for the person to be an ally rather than an adversary.

That story changed my life as far as customer service calls go because it works.

I tell you that story (again) because we could categorize the parable we read this morning as a kind of New Testament customer service call, before there were phones and Muzak and robots. Jesus said there was a judge in a certain city who didn’t have any regard for God or for other human beings, and so he was known for abusing his position of power. There was also a widow in that city. Most of the time when widows show up in scripture, it is their helplessness that gets underlined. But this was a widow who was tenacious and persistent in her demand for justice, though we are not told who had harmed her or what kind of justice she was demanding, other than she had an adversary. Nevertheless, she persisted and, after a while, he gave in saying, “I know I don’t care about God or anybody else, but I am going to do what she wants because she is making me look bad.”

(Our translation says, “she keeps bothering me,” but it literally means, “she keeps giving me a black eye.”)

Can’t you picture the widow saying, “Are you the judge that is going to help me, or the one who is going to connect me with someone who can?”

That’s the whole parable. Nothing is resolved. It is even more puzzling that Luke sets it up by saying that Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray continually and not be discouraged, which could set us up to think God is the judge in the story, so it matters that we remember a parable is not an analogy or a fable. It doesn’t unpack that easily or make such direct connections. We are supposed to be puzzled. Jesus told parables to get people to raise questions they had not thought to ask that would allow them to see God and themselves in new and hopeful ways.

The way Jesus described the judge (and the way the judge described himself)—as one who “neither feared God or respected other people”–gives us kind of a baseline of what justice is by giving us the definition in reverse. When we show our awe for God by the way we respect and love other people, we live justly. We help create a more just world. That fits the definition of justice I heard from Dr. Cornell West: justice is what love looks like in public.” It also follows Micah 6:8, which we repeated once again in our call to worship this morning: What God requires of us is to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.

The man whose job it was to mete out justice knew he was not up to the task. And seemed to be not too bothered by that. He had the power and money he wanted. He saw no need to be concerned.

The widow who had nothing left to lose kept knocking on his door. She was relentless in her pursuit of justice and was determined to keep going until she got what she wanted, but my guess would be that she was as surprised as anyone that the judge actually did the right thing. She didn’t expect to win; that’s why she kept knocking. She knew she was probably not going to see things set right, so she might as well die trying, trusting that somehow it mattered to persist.

And it did.

As we work to hear what this strange story has to say to us, I want to add a line from one of my favorite Dire Straits songs says, “sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.” Well, I want to paraphrase it: sometimes you’re the widow, sometimes you’re the judge.

Another thing I have repeated more than once is that our faith in God, who is Love, calls us to trust that Love wins in the end; if Love has not yet won, then it’s not the end. To trust that those words are true is to be like the widow: to keep working for justice even when we know the ears we need most to hear our please are not listening very closely; we keep reaching out to others when they don’t offer much regard for our invitations and trust that God is at work in ways we cannot see comprehend.

On the other hand, sometimes we’re the judge. By that I mean, sometimes we need to ask ourselves, who is pleading that we are not hearing? Who is calling for our help that we are not answering? One commentator put it this way: “Can our communities be the one place where we recognize that while issues and causes matter, the people behind them and affected by them and advocating for or against them matter even more?”

Sometimes we are the people answering the phone when someone like Terry calls and asks, “Are you the one who can help me, or the one who needs to connect me with the person who can?”

How do we answer? How long does it take for us to be willing to help?

Notice that Luke set up the whole parable by saying, “Jesus was telling them a parable about their need to pray continuously and not be discouraged.” Jesus followed the parable by saying, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. Won’t God provide justice to the people who cry out day and night?” Jesus wasn’t comparing God to an unjust judge. Jesus was saying, if an unjust judge could be shamed and pestered into giving justice, how much more can we trust that God will bring justice to every last one of us.

Don’t give up. Keep knocking. Keep showing up. Persist in justice, in kindness, in trust that there is more at work than we can see or understand. If we long for relationships to be healed, keep longing and looking for ways to reach out. If we have trouble reading the newspaper without feeling heartbroken, keep reading and looking for ways to offer healing and hope to those being crushed by the system. If Love has not yet won, it’s not the end.

In that sense, we can understand this parable as Jesus asking us to see that prayer and the need to cry out for justice are kind of the same thing. Prayer is not simply asking for our personal needs to be met, or only holding up those we love and who are in need. Prayer, at its core, is about asking for justice; about crying to those in authority until all are treated equitably; about lamenting the systems and institutions that dehumanize so many; about looking at whoever we see and not seeing adversaries or enemies; but seeing people who hurt like we do; about listening to the voices God puts in our ears and answering them in love.

In that sense, part of praying is to be the one answering the phone and saying, “I am the one who will do whatever I can to help you get what you need.”

If we truly show our awe of and love for and devotion to God by the way we love and respect other human beings our hearts will be changed by prayer, whether we are the widow or the judge. That’s a story worth repeating. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

We almost had a show-and-tell sermon this morning.

I seriously thought about bringing Elena, one of our Schnauzer rescue pups. We have had her almost two years, though we got her thinking it was a hospice situation and she would only be with us for a couple of months. We were going to be her soft place to land.

Elena was found abandoned in a house in Paterson, New Jersey, along with twelve cats. When they found her, she had bladder stones the size of tennis balls—and she only weighs about twenty-five pounds. The shelter paid for surgery to get her out of her misery but thought the bladder infection that had caused the problem would be ongoing, which is why they didn’t expect her to live.

When Ginger drove to Paterson to pick her up, the woman at the shelter told the pup, “You’re moving up: you’re going to Connecticut.”

We named her Elena because we learned she understood Spanish. In the early days, we had to say, “Aqui, aqui” to get her to come inside. She has become bilingual, but one of our nicknames for her is Señorita Elegante. Anita, our vet, bombarded her with antibiotics when she first came home and managed to eradicate the infection we thought would kill Elena, and now, two years later, she is living her best life. She is, as Ginger says, just happy to be in the room.

She is content with her life, which is why I wanted to bring her, because the heart of our passage this morning is about being content. I pictured Elena stretched out on the carpet here next to me, as she does in our kitchen, with her tail wagging like a metronome and a smile on her face. Maybe you can picture it as well.

The writer of Hebrews calls his readers to be content with what they have—to live like Elena—but the spirit of the whole passage is about more than choosing not to be acquisitional or greedy.

In the first part of the paragraph, the writer says first, “Keep on loving each other like family,” but then he widens the definition of who each other is: “Don’t neglect opening your homes to strangers because you never know who you’re letting in—it might be an angel.” Then he says, “Remember prisoners as if you were their cellmate,” and, “Remember those who are suffering and abused as if you were in their place.”

Those are all things integrally connected to contentment. The root of our English word means “to hold within limits” or “to hold together,” which makes the word about more than what we do with our desires for stuff, but also about how we treat each other.

There is not a human being in the world to whom we are not connected. To think of family in the widest definition is to face the reality that the children in Gaza who are starving are not an idea, they are children like ours. The people filling our prisons are not statistics, but human beings with families and friends who are being crushed under the weight of a dehumanizing system. The people who need food stamps are not concepts but hungry people who don’t have a way to get food.

To be content is to see beyond the issues and see the people—to see ourselves in their eyes—and to respond to them with compassion rather than seeing them as competing for the things we need and want to stay comfortable, which is the way the needs of poor and hungry people are often viewed.

Most of the time, we think about contentment being the opposite of greedy or needy. I have already made that connection in this sermon. But the writer of Hebrews adds something else. Right after he says we should be content with what we have, he says,

After all, God has said, “I will never leave you or abandon you.”
This is why we can confidently say, “The Lord is my helper, and I won’t be afraid. What can people do to me?”

Contentment is what holds us together to get beyond fear. Fear of not having enough. Fear of being alone. Fear of . . . the list goes on and on.

A few months after we got Elena, Ginger and I went on a trip and were gone a couple of weeks. Rachel, my mother-in-law, cared for the pups, as she has done for many trips over many years. When we got back, everyone was glad to see us, but Elena was beside herself. She jumped in our arms and let out a mournful moan that felt like it came from deep in her soul. It brought tears to our eyes. We each held her for a long time and she stayed close the rest of the evening.

The meaning of her moaning struck us a bit later when we realized this was a little dog who had been abandoned. Her people left her locked in a house with a bunch of cats and never came back. Every day of our trip she must have wondered if it was happening again, even though Rachel was there, she had food every day, and she could get outside. Her fear of abandonment runs deep, and for good reason, so I am grateful for the evenings when she lays on the rug and smiles at me—when we can help deepen her sense of trust and contentment.

The reality of life in our nation right now is frightening. There’s a lot to be scared of and it seems like it is going to get worse before it gets better. Fear is our greatest commonalty. We are told to be scared of pretty much everyone and everything. As we feel the fear rise up the way Elena worried we weren’t coming back, let’s remember that nothing separates us from the love of God. Let’s remember that, though we have legitimate reasons to be afraid, fear is not the last word. Love and trust are what hold us together, on beyond wars and panics and dictators.

I am not saying it’s going to be easy. I am saying we will survive if we take care of each other—all of the each others. To paraphrase the apostle Paul,

I’m convinced that nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus: not death or life, not angels or rulers, not present things or future things, not powers or height or depth, not social media or artificial intelligence, or any other thing that is created.

May we be content. May we hold things together as the beloved children of God, opening our homes and our hearts to all that love can do.

Peace,
Milton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace,
Milton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace,
Milton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace,
Milton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even the word comparison makes the point.

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

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

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

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

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

Peace,
Milton

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

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

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

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

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

You get my drift.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commentator Kristin Berkley-Abbott says,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace,
Milton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace,
Milton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace,
Milton