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lenten journal: time piece

time piece

some time in the night we will
rob ourselves of an hour of sleep
so that we can save daylight

making some vague promise
that the hour saved will be kept
safely and returned in the fall

a story that only works if
we are looking at our wrists
rather than the heavens

the sunrise I saw this morning
on my way to coffee with friends
took all the time it needed

the one that follows tomorrow
will rise unsaved and spectacular
profligate and prodigal

precision and perspective
keep time to different rhythms
one of the matches a heartbeat

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: liminality

liminality

how can two months ago
feel like history?

what was is long gone
what’s next is not yet here

our country is falling apart
like a poorly built rocket

we are left to wait
and hurt and not know

what comes next
but something’s coming

the way things are
is not sustainable

arrogance and power
are no match for

the cosmic imagination
of human possibility

here in the in-between
the breaking open

our institutions fail
and we are still here

making our home
in the middle of it all

grief hurt anger pain
hope heartbreak love

life is improvisation
we are made for this

this passing phase
may last our lifetimes

but we are not
the whole story

living on the cusp isn’t
for the faint of heart

ask the ancestors
who walked before us

and then sing with me
under our sister stars

who have out shone
every petty tyrant

I’ll say it again
we are made for this

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: sing a song

“And, when all else fails, we sing ourselves sane.” — Barbara Holmes

One of the things I’ve come to believe after nine years in Connecticut is the people who built the roads in this state never imagined that people would want to go from east to west. They made it fairly easy to get from New York to Boston, or even New York to Springfield, Massachusetts, but why anyone would want to go from Guilford to Northfield, as I did today, did not cross their minds.

The reason I made the unusual journey was I had the chance to record a song I wrote last summer as a part of the New England Songwriters Retreat, led by Ellis Paul and Laurie McAlister, which was one of the most inspirational gatherings I have had the pleasure of being a part of.

The song I wrote is called “The Belong Song.” When I played it for Ginger she said, “That is the most Milton song ever. It’s a song in search of a youth camp that I wrote during a retreat I attended hoping to strengthen my confidence in my ability to write a melody.

It worked.

The reason I got to record today is the song was voted by my peers as their favorite of the retreat, which came with a day in the studio to produce both a recording and a video, thanks to the generosity of Tracy Walton, who owns and runs On Deck Sound Studio in Northfield. With everything going on in all our lives, today was the day I got to spend in the studio.

Tracy and Eddie, his assistant, were expansively generous in the way they guided and encouraged me. Tracy also played stand-up bass, high string guitar, and drums on the track. In five hours we had all the pieces of both the song and the video in hand. Now they will put their finishing touches and then send me the final versions in a few weeks.

Though it will be almost nine months since the retreat by the time I can share the song, the timing feels pretty good. We need a Belong Song. The chorus of mine says,

you belong and I do too
we belong yes me and you
everybody sing the song
everyone belongs

I can’t count how many times I sang those words today–and they didn’t get old.

I read the quote from Barbara Holmes at the top of this post yesterday and drove him this evening convinced she speaking truth. I didn’t read the news or engage much on social media, I just sang and played with my little village of three in the woods of northwest Connecticut and imagined where the song might go once it gets a chance.

Last night I told Ginger that I have become aware of a level of anxiety in myself that is odd for me. I live with depression, but anxiety has not usually been a significant part of the mix. The state of our country makes me anxious, even frightened. Singing today made a difference. I drove home this afternoon more calm and centered. Nothing changed but me.

Today, that’s enough.

Peace,
Milton

PS–As soon as I have the music, I will share it, I promise.

lenten journal: ashes to go

Ash Wednesday is a busy day in the life of a part-time pastor, and by that I mean I worked a full day.

My morning at work started with talking to a woman whom I met when we invited a local dog shelter to share in our Blessing of the Animals. Actually, I met with her and her husband who have a new baby and wanted to talk about baptism for the little one. Our shared love of shelter dogs opened the door for a deeper connection.

Then I went up the hill to the Lutheran church in Hamden to help Josh administer “ashes to go,” which he has done for a few years now. I helped last year as well. Over two hours, about sixty cars came through holding a wonderful variety of humanity. Without exception, I was greeted with a look of expectation as I approached the car. I asked their name and told them mine and then I called them by name and said, “You are beloved of God. Yes, you came from dust and will return to dust, but even more you came from love and will return to love,” and then I smudged a cross on their forehead.

More than one person teared up as I talked. What might have been nothing more than the liturgical equivalent of a drive through lane became a succession of sacred moments.

Before I got to work I read another chapter in Crisis Contemplation by Barbara Holmes and she quoted Katherine Fritz:

It’s a fallacy of our modern lives to assume that the concept of a “neighborhood” only encompasses a select group of people: our actual neighbors, our coworkers, our family, our partners. In truth, our neighborhoods are vastly more sprawling and interconnected than we frequently acknowledge.

Howard then noted that Fritz

recognizes that neighbors are defined by relationships, brief or recurring, that emerge and recede during daily life. Some neighbors abide and then move on, others share deeply resonant relations, yet others connect to us in brief but recurring episodes. When all the pieces of the life puzzle are moving, static definitions will not do.

My neighbors drove up, rolled down their windows and let me reach in and touch my finger to their foreheads and make a somewhat abstract sign of the Cross and tell them they were loved, loved, loved. And then they drove off into the rest of their lives and I went on about mine.

Incidental contact is not insignificant unless we choose for it to be.

Happy Lent!

Peace,
Milton

what’s the story?

I veered away from the Lectionary passage this week because I was captured by the story in Luke 7:1-10, which is about, well, stories.

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One of the things I like about living in Guilford is being able to shop at Forte’s Market, mainly because they have a real butcher counter where they grind the meat when I order it and are happy to cut steaks to my preference instead of inviting me to choose from an array of shrink-wrapped packages.

It is a family business that goes back almost a hundred years and is run now by Ron Forte—or at least he’s the one I know behind the counter. I say I know him, but what I know of him is a small slice of his life. I come into his store and we greet each other and then I tell him what I need and we usually have a short food-related conversation while he is getting things ready for me. He’s always pleasant, he treats his customers well, and he has a great laugh.

Still, I don’t know much of anything about him beyond his life as a butcher, nor does he know much about me, though if someone were to ask, we would both say, “Yeah, I know him. He’s a good guy.” (At least that’s what I think he would say about me.) But there’s much more to both of our stories than what we share at Forte’s Market.

In a similar way, we see news stories about people in the public eye and we can come away with the notion that we know them as well, perhaps because of the article, or because of a role they played in a movie we loved, or maybe an interview. I’ve heard more than one story about people who finally got to meet someone famous they felt really connected to only to find the person was not at all like they expected.

Jesus appears to have had such an encounter in our passage today.

Not long after he had preached, admonishing everyone to love their enemies, which is another way of saying not to settle for the simplistic story of who someone is, he was approached by the some of the religious leaders who had a message from a Roman centurion—a commanding officer in the Roman army—asking Jesus to help his servant who was deathly ill—and the servant was probably an enslaved migrant who had been forced to move to Palestine from another Roman colony.

The religious leaders were not being strongarmed by the Roman commander. It seems they really wanted to help him because he had been instrumental in making sure the town had a synagogue. “He loves our people,” they said—an odd thing to say about an officer in the army oppressing the country.

Can you hear the multiplicity of layers in this interchange? Most of the time the gospel writers paint the religious leaders as the bad guys, those who are critical of Jesus and do what they can to undermine him.

In this account, Luke tells a different story about them. They came to Jesus asking for help on their enemy’s behalf. And Jesus went with them. Before they could get to the house where the sick man was, another group came with a message from the centurion—this time, Luke says the officer sent “his friends,” and they told Jesus that the commander didn’t feel worthy to host him and trusted that the servant could be healed without Jesus having to go in the house. When Jesus heard their words, Luke says he was impressed and astonished.

“I haven’t found anyone who trusts like this,” he said, “even among those who grew up in faith.” And when the centurion’s friends got back to the house, the servant was feeling better.

Most of the miracles of Jesus are what one of my seminary professors called “parables in event,” which is to say the gospel writers told them to convey a deeper message in the same way they wrote down the parables so we would have to unpack the stories. And most of the miracles created situations where Jesus used the moment to teach a lesson that people don’t seem to be grasping.

It feels different here.

Everyone in the story plays a crucial role in creating the space for the servant to be healed. It’s as though they actually listened to Jesus’ sermon!

The centurion risked asking for help from the religious leaders, who then spoke to Jesus on his behalf. Then the friends came to convey how much the commander trusted Jesus could change things. And Jesus responded with amazement and compassion. Had the centurion or the religious leaders or the friends held to the common stories about each other, none of the conversations would have taken place and the servant would have died. Everyone was willing to be more and do more than was expected of them.

No one’s life can be summarized in a single story—a label, a characterization, an affiliation. I don’t mean to say there aren’t bad people. There are people who choose to damage and who encourage evil. We have to be aware and awake. What I am saying is to be human is to be complex. We are a lifetime full of stories that have shaped us. We are walking libraries, which means we have to be willing to do the work of learning more about each other than the most convenient or most recent or most sensational information if we want to be the kind of peacemakers Christ calls us to be.

The writers Joan Didion and Gregory Dunne were married for forty years. After his death, she wrote a book about her grief called The Year of Magical Thinking in which she said, ““We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.”

She’s a writer, so you have to give her room for a bit of overstatement because I’m sure they knew a lot about each other. Still, she learned, there was more to know—and she gives us something worth remembering: No one’s story is that simple. To love one another means to listen and to learn instead of label. To love means to open our hearts to be caught by surprise, to be curious rather than concise in our understanding so we can truly love our neighbors as ourselves. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

foundation issues

I know I wasn’t the only one who struggled with what to say in my sermon today. I chose the passage a few weeks back—Luke 6:39-49—and it gave me a good jumping off place this morning. As I prepared the sermon, I kept thinking about words from King Lear I first learned reading Frederick Buechner: “The weight of these sad times we must obey, speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”

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When I think back on Bible stories I remember as a child, one of the most enduring ones is the last parable in our reading this morning where Jesus compares building a house on the sand with building a house on a rock. Part of the reason is that it is a great image—you can picture it, even if you are not inclined toward housebuilding. And then there’s the fact that we learned a song to go with it, complete with hand motions (“The wise man built his house upon the rock . . .), which is probably the real reason it was cemented in my mind.

To live in Connecticut means to know what it means to build your house on a rock. The whole state is granite—sometimes so much so that foundations are hard to build.

Our coastlines might tell a different story. Last fall a video made the rounds of a house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina that collapsed into the sea because of beach erosion. Similar things have happened along the New England coast as well, thanks to the effects of climate change. You can bet I started singing the song as I watched the waves take the house apart (“The foolish man builds his house upon the sand . . .).

When we turn to Jesus’ use of the metaphor, which comes at the end of the sermon we have looked at for the last three Sundays, we need to look back to see what kind of foundation he called for us to build for our lives. He started off by saying that God’s Economy is built to make sure everyone gets what they need to thrive and that we all share what we have so everyone is covered, has their needs met, and is cared for. Aren reminded us that Jesus said not only should we love our enemies, but we should love one another in a way that does not demand reciprocity or repayment.

In today’s reading, Jesus challenges our arrogance with an image of trying to get a speck out of someone else’s eye when we have a small log in our own, and then switches to a say that fruit trees are known by the fruit they produce (people, too), and then he moves the person whose words and actions match each other in God’s Economy is like the one who builds a house with a solid foundation. It will withstand whatever storm is coming.

Our house in Guilford was built in 1795 as the schoolhouse for the town. It originally sat on the Town Green. Around 1830, it was moved from the Green and hauled by a team of oxen down the street to where it is now. They did not put it on a true foundation; they just stacked up some stones so it was secure and left it that way—much like the front steps of our sanctuary, which we repaired. Last year, Ginger’s church did what they could to fill in holes because of the number of critters who made their way in and out, but our foundation is not what we thought it was and that has had its consequences.

This past week, I spent the day at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, along with a group from Ginger’s church on a civil rights history tour. The museum is the best I have ever seen. The Equal Justice Initiative, its founding organization, presents an amazing amount of information in ways that speak to different kinds of learners without totally overwhelming them, and also offering difficult and tragic information in a way that offers people a chance to respond with something other than just outrage or guilt.

One of the things that struck me most profoundly—perhaps because I knew I was preaching about building on good foundations—was that the foundation on which we have built our country is not as solid as we want it to be. Slavery was a part of the mix—a crucial part of the mix—from the beginning. The first slave ship arrived in 1619, over a hundred and fifty years before we became an independent nation. In 1730, half of white New Yorkers personally enslaved Black people. By 1776, one in four households in Connecticut enslaved Black people. Many of the big insurance and finance companies who are at the center of our economy made their initial wealth funding and insuring the slave trade. Of our first twelve presidents, John Adams and John Quincy Adams were the only two who were never slaveowners.

I know these are hard things to hear but hang with me.

They call it the Legacy Museum because they want us to understand and come to terms with what it means that this is a part of our story as a country. It’s not the only part, and it is a significant part. The domestic slave trade permanently separated half of all Black families in the United States. Think about the implications of that for all the generations that have followed. The National Peace and Justice Memorial, which gives a visual of the thousands of Black people who were lynched, naming both the people and the towns and counties that killed them, marks the last lynching in 1957, the year after I was born, though I’m not sure those were actually the last incidents of racial terrorism.

This is not ancient history. We are still living the story. We are still building the house on a foundation that has some serious issues.

Jesus talked about how well the houses could survive a storm. (“The rains came down and the floods came up . . .) The one on the rock—the one grounded in God’s Economy of compassion and mutuality—survived. The one built on the sand—on the shifting ground of power and wealth—washed away.

You don’t need me to tell you that right now our nation—our world—is caught in the beginnings of a storm of strife and division and uncertainty. What is going on right now is not sustainable because it is not unifying. Two weeks ago, I said that the oldest meaning of the word economy is “household management,” which has less to do with supply and demand than it does with making sure everyone gets what they need. And I asked you to remember that Jesus talked about poverty, hunger, grief, and reputation, calling us to never lose sight of the fact that what we say and do and spend and eat and feel affects those around us.

How we understand our foundation—how we tell the story about how we became who we think we are, whether we are talking about our nation, our family of origin, our church, even our faith—also affects those around us. If who we think we are and who we actually are, based on what our words and actions show us to be, then our foundation will crumble and our house will not withstand the storm.

And as a country, we have not done a good job at coming to terms with the longstanding cracks in our foundation. We have to figure out how to do to our nation, our town, ourselves, what we did to our front steps when we realized they were not as strong as we thought they were. We tore them out and rebuilt them.

I realize that is a huge statement that is easier said than lived out. I also remember the sinking feeling I got when I saw the front of our church after the steps had been removed and realized how bad things actually were underneath. In the same way that we could not left the stairs without suffering a bad accident, we can’t leave things as they are and expect that things will just keep humming along.

The side of the Legacy Museum was emblazoned with a quote from Maya Angelou that read, “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

The root of the word courage means heart. To be courageous is to live with our heart in it, to mean it, to do what matters most. Our courage begins in this room where we have to continue to learn to talk to each other across our differences—to speak heart to heart—and then our courage moves out in concentric circles. How can we widen the scope of our compassion? How can we engage people outside of our normal patterns? We can make a point to shop at places owned by people of color. We can learn Spanish on Duolingo. We can check in with our LGBTQ siblings to make sure they know we are there for them. We can stack the stones of a strong foundation of love and belonging to build a better foundation. Let us take courage. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

imago d.e.i.

imago d.e.i.

can we talk numbers?
91 different kinds of antelope
11,000 different birds

50,000 spiders 34,000 snakes
30,000 fish and too many
worms to try and count

not to mention us
we humans are one of
522 different primates

but perhaps the only ones
who see themselves
as the image of God

which begs for a reminder
of the first truth of theology
there is a God and it’s not me

better to say an image
among a glorious array
of wonder love and grace

yet we seem determined
to try and distill the diversity
into some explainable elixir

that tastes mostly of fear
when we are imago dei
tiny images of everything

another way of saying
portraits of love
in a cosmic gallery

Peace,
Milton

catch me

I’m working my way through Luke so I am a little off from the lectionary, but this turned out to be the right story for this past week and, perhaps, for the days to come.

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In my days as a high school English teacher, one of the books I loved to read with my students was Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. I won’t say that all the ninth graders in my classes enjoyed reading the book, but I loved it because it presented such a simple and vivid picture of the old man—Santiago—chasing the big fish. Still they had a point: it’s not easy to describe that kind of struggle in a way that the reader can really get it, especially when none of us had been in Santiago’s situation.

A fair part of the story takes place after the fish is hooked and is dragging Santiago’s small boat while the old man hangs on waiting for the fish to exhaust itself. One day, a boy in one of the classes was vocal in his frustration with how long the whole thing was dragging out.

“He’s just sitting in the boat.”

The next day, I came with a big coil of rope and asked him to stand up. I secured one end of the rope to a pole in one corner of the room and then tied the other end around his waist and asked him to lean back so that the rope was taut, much the same as Santiago had to keep his line taut so the fish wouldn’t break it.

“The old man did that for a couple of days,” I said. “I want you to do it for forty minutes.” He was up for the challenge, but he couldn’t last. He still didn’t like the story that much, but he understood the old man better.

I tell you that story because I think we have to remind ourselves of how different life was in first century Galilee, compared to the world we know. That seems obvious, I know, but when we read the would-be disciples were out fishing all night, we have to work hard to picture the small, hand-carved wooden boats they sailed; or the rough ropes that made their nets; or even that they were not independent business people, but peasants who did grueling work but saw little of their profits.

We should also remember that the men in the boats were not strangers to Jesus. They were with him in Nazareth and his other stops across Galilee. In the verses between where we left off last week and today, Jesus went to Simon Peter’s house and even healed his grandmother. This is not a story about Jesus calling these people to something that hadn’t thought about.

Still, something changed in this story. They had continued to go to work, it seems, until now. Jesus got into the boat, first, to get a little distance from the crowd so he could preach to them. Simon and the others were cleaning up from having fished all night, which was the usual shift for fishers in the area. They had come back to port with empty nets, which was probably not that unusual because the pressure from the Romans for product meant that the lake was overfished.

Jesus finished his sermon and told them to sail out farther and dropped their nets. Simon must have rolled his eyes and responded with the Aramaic equivalent of, “You’ve got to be kidding me, Boss,” but he did as Jesus asked and dropped the nets. When they pulled them up, they were so full they were a problem. The nets were ripping and the boats were sinking. They barely made it back to shore with their record catch. And it frightened them. They didn’t know what to say or do.

Jesus said, “Don’t be afraid. From now on you’ll capture people.” It’s a word that means “to take them alive” and “to entrall,” the way we talk about being taken by a photograph or a dramatic performance. And Luke said they walked away, leaving their pile of fish with whoever was still on the docks, and went with Jesus. We could even say they were taken—captured—by what he said and did.

Luke makes it sound so simple—they just dropped everything and went with him—but they were allowing Jesus to change their whole view of the way the world worked.

They lived in a world of scarcity: there weren’t enough fish, there wasn’t enough money, they were oppressed by the Romans. They were accustomed to looking at the world and feeling trapped. Jesus said, “Try again. Throw the nets out one more time,” and with that came an image of abundance: more fish than they could reasonably harvest.

I wonder if it made any of them think of Jesus’ sermon in Nazareth when he quoted from Isaiah– The Spirit of God is upon me, because God has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of God’s favor.—and then said, “Today you are seeing these words become flesh right before your eyes. Luke wants us to make the connection in the way he describes the turn of events.

Jesus was calling for spiritual, social, and even economic upheaval when he proclaimed the Jubilee, the Year of God’s Favor. Jesus still calls us to trust the extravagance of God, to trust that there is enough to share, that we are enough to take care of each other. And that is not a pipe dream. Even now, with eight billion people on the planet, we grow enough food in the world to feed everyone. The reasons people starve has to do with our broken systems that enforce a sense of scarcity and conflict. We have the ability to catch everyone, if we will unclench our fists and open our hearts.

Which takes me back to high school English—tenth grade this time–for Catcher in the Rye. In one of my favorite passages, Holden Caulfield asks his sister Phoebe, “You know that song ‘If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye’? I’d like—” and she interrupts to tell him he is remembering the line from a Robert Burns poem incorrectly: it was “if a body meet a body.” Then Holden says,

“I thought it was ‘If a body catch a body,’” I said. “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around–nobody big, I mean–except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff–I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.”

Part of the reason the people in Jesus’ time were looking for the messiah was they were convinced that they were living in the last days and that things couldn’t get worse. Sound familiar? That perspective has been true for most every generation. We think we are last because we are the newest.

The eight billion people alive on our planet today represent a fraction of the 117 billion humans who have walked the earth. All of us have been in the same boat, wondering how we will make it through or who will save us from all of this. And God’s message to us remains constant: there is enough—enough food, enough room, enough love—if we will only catch each other. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

last days

last days

no matter who has been alive
or what has happened in history
people have been convinced
they were the last act of humanity
because things were so bad
who could imagine a future?

no matter when they were alive
they represented a fraction
of all who lived before them
our 8 billion doesn’t stack up
against 109 billion ancestors
who thought they were done for

no matter how we tell our story
it is more than an apocalypse
more true than an illusion or
a waiting room for Jesus’ return
these days are as crucial as
they are fragile and fleeting

no matter how we try to tell time
we play only a few simple scenes
and are not the big closing act
even though we seem hell-bent
on burning down the house
life will go on last beyond us

what matters is not our importance
but our glorious impermanence
we can’t stay but we can care
make dinner make love make art
plant things and pay attention
till we turn back to stardust

Peace,
Milton

(photo by Steve Harvey)

have mercy

Guy Clark has a song that says, “Some days you write the song. Some days the song writes you.” Some days that’s true with sermons as well.

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A crowd gathers for worship in a traditional setting. A preacher preaches a sermon, initially embraced by everyone. But then, at the end, the preacher reminds the crowd that the point of that “Good News” is mercy and compassion; not just for them, but also for foreigners. And suddenly the adoring crowd turns. The preacher gets death threats and flees.(from Eric Folkerth)

Some days, reading the from the gospels is like reading a newspaper.

The scene I just described may sound like Washington DC this week, but it is what happened in the passage we just read from Luke 4, which tells the story of Jesus’ return to Nazareth, his hometown. As we noted last Sunday, the scene is tied to both his baptism and his time in the wilderness where he was tempted. But this was not his first sermon. Luke notes that Jesus returned to the region of Galilee “empowered by the Spirit” and went from town to town preaching and healing and had created quite a following.

Then he came back to the town where he had been brought up, where he had been nurtured. Perhaps the synagogue where he spoke was the same one he had attended as a boy. One of those leading the service handed him the scroll from Isaiah. We don’t know if they had their own version of a lectionary or how the scripture was chosen, but Jesus turned to a particular passage and read:

The Spirit of God is upon me, because God has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of God’s favor.

Then he sat down to talk to them about what he had read, and Luke says those in attendance were fixed on him. He had everyone’s attention. And he said, “Today, you have not only heard the scripture, you have also seen it embodied.”

People were raving about him and were so impressed by his words that they looked at each other and said, “Isn’t this the carpenter’s kid?”

But Jesus wasn’t through. He said, “I know you’re going to tell me to do here what I did in Capernaum, but a prophet is not welcome in their hometown.” And he went on to refer to two stories from the Hebrew Bible that they would have known well—one about Elijah and one about Elisha, both of which involved God’s grace and mercy expanding to include foreigners. The good news he brought was meant for more than the hometown crowd. God’s love knew no boundaries.

And they were enraged because he wasn’t who they expected him to be and they tried to kill him, but Jesus escaped.

If we look back what Luke has said so far, we should not be surprised at who Jesus turned out to be. When Mary was pregnant she sang a song when she visited her cousin Elizabeth, part of which said,

Holy is God’s name. God shows mercy to everyone, from one generation to the next. God has shown strength and has scattered those with arrogant thoughts and proud inclinations. God has pulled the powerful down from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty-handed.

When John began baptizing at the Jordan and people wondered if he was the messiah, he said,

“I baptize you with water, but the one who is more powerful than me is coming. I’m not worthy to loosen the strap of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. The shovel he uses to sift the wheat from the husks is in his hands. He will clean out his threshing area and bring the wheat into his barn. But he will burn the husks with a fire that can’t be put out.”

And then Jesus went from town to town saying he had come to offer mercy, sight, and freedom from oppression, and also to proclaim the year of God’s favor, which was another way of saying the year of Jubilee.

One of the traditions of Hebrew culture was that a Year of Jubilee was supposed to happen when all debts owed to other people were forgiven, all enslaved people were freed, and all land was returned to its original owners. It meant a fresh start for everyone.

Can you imagine what a year of jubilee would feel like? To have all of your debts forgiven? To be freed from exploitive contracts? To get back things that had been lost?

Or maybe we think about what such a year would cost us. Mercy doesn’t come cheap.

When Jesus started talking about extravagant mercy—choosing the disposition to be compassionate and to forgive—the crowd turned on him. To embody compassion in a way that made it available to everyone was too high a price to pay.

I hear the word mercy and I think of a song called “Mercy Now” by Mary Gauthier. The next to the last verse says,

my church and my country could use a little mercy now
as they sink into a poisoned pit it’s going to take forever to climb out
they carry the weight of the faithful who follow them down
I love my church and country, they could use some mercy now

Yes. We could use some mercy now. And as we read these words from Jesus’ first recorded sermon—that set the tone for his entire ministry—we hear again that we are called to be the ones offering mercy to everyone: the people we like and the ones we don’t, those who look like us and those who seem foreign, those we understand and those who confuse or even agitate us, those whom we think belong and those we wish we could exclude.

The word compassion means to suffer together, to carry each other’s pain. Let that definition sink in for a moment: to suffer together, to carry each other’s pain. Too often, our cultural message seems to be “I just want you to hurt like I do.” How then do we live so that we are sharing pain rather than causing it? How do we learn to see the pain around us and then find ways to share the load?

Jesus calls us to see the pain around us and to embody his words with what we say and do:

The Spirit of God is upon me, because God has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of God’s favor.

As we contemplate what it means to be followers of Christ here in Hamden, here in America, I want to end my sermon by inviting us to read those words together as a pledge of our faith—an embodiment of our understanding of who Christ has called us to be in our time and in this place. The words are printed in your order of service. Let us read them together.

The Spirit of God is upon me, because God has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of God’s favor.

Amen.

Peace,
Milton