don't eat alone

For All Saints Day, I preached at two churches, thanks to the magic of the internet and the reality of remote worship. One of the churches is working their way through the Acts of the Apostles, so I went with their scripture—Acts 6:1-7—for both groups. It is a collection of verses that isn’t in the lectionary cycle, as far as I can tell, but it had a lot to say to me. Here is my sermon “Pulling Ourselves Together” and Warren Zevon’s “Keep Me in Your Heart,” which felt like a good hymn for the day.

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Every time I come to the Communion table as we are today, even though we are doing it remotely, I carry with me a specific memory of a Communion service at a youth camp almost thirty years ago. My friend Kenny was preaching about the Last Supper and talking about Jesus’ words, “As often as you do this, remember me,” and asked, “What is the opposite of remember?”

“Forget,” was the answer that came from most of the young people.

“No,” he said, “the opposite of remember is dismember. Life pulls us apart. We come to the Table to remember–to put ourselves back together in Jesus’ name.”

As I pondered what to say on this Sunday, which is not only Communion Sunday, but also All Saints Day and the Sunday before our Presidential election, the memory came even more alive. Remembering, by his definition, is not just about memories, but is a crucial part of our daily lives. Whether we are holding the memories of those who have died, or trying to figure out how to take care of one another, or just how to get through these crazy days, we have to spend a good deal of our time re-membering–pulling ourselves together, don’t we?

Our story from Acts 6 is a story of re-membering, of pulling together. I think this little section could be titled, “Living Together Is Hard Work.”

After Pentecost, which we remember as the birthday of the Church, the followers of Jesus began to realize they were the ones who were going to have to make the word become flesh, which meant they had to learn how to live together. The people who came to Jesus were a mixed bag. They were not all alike. Many were not well-off economically. They were not mainstream. What they all shared was their love for Jesus. And they shared that they all lived under Roman occupation.

Then they decided to share everything with each other so that no one would be in need. After all, Jesus did say, “I was hungry and you fed me . . .” But it didn’t take long for things to fall apart, or at least for the new system of solidarity to stumble.

What does it mean to share everything, to hold everything in common?

One of their practices was to make sure everyone had enough to eat, which took time, resources, and effort.

One of the dividing lines in the church was between the locals–those who spoke Aramaic and had lived their whole lives in Palestine–and those who were also Hebrew but had grown up in the larger Mediterranean world. They spoke Greek; some even had Greek names. The issue was the Greek speaking group said their widows weren’t getting the same attention as the Aramaic widows. The apostles recognized there was an issue but said they didn’t want to spend their time sorting it all out. They were the Chosen Twelve—the ones responsible for the new and growing congregation; they didn’t think they should use their time waiting tables. So, they instructed the congregation to choose seven people to handle it. To minister. The Greek word is diakoneo, from which we get our word deacon. A few verses down it’s the same word used to describe what the apostles were doing. In fact, it shows up three times in this passage, each time translated differently: it can mean to serve, to minister, or to attend to—to wait on.

But even though they were using the same word, not everyone looked at things the same way. the apostles said, “It isn’t right–it isn’t acceptable–for us to set aside the proclamation of God’s word in order to serve tables–to minister at tables.”

Now, I have to say as someone who spent a decade of his life working in restaurant kitchens and who loves to feed people as much as I love to do anything, I have struggled to understand the tone in the apostles’ response to the problem. I’m not sure it’s fair to paint them as acting superior, but if I had been one of the ones preparing the meals, I might have taken it that way. As we said at the beginning, living together is hard work. They had to deal with expectations, responsibilities, different personalities, varying backgrounds, divergent political views, and money.

Any of that sound familiar? Pulling together, as we know, is not an easy task. And it is the task to which God has called us.

The theological term we use when we talk about the life of Jesus is incarnation—as John 1 says, the word became flesh and dwelt among us. I know enough Spanish to know carne means meat. In carne sounds like “with meat,” which is another way of saying real relationships are embodied, not theoretical. Whether we are talking about a marriage, a friendship, or a church community, pulling together means putting meat on the bones of love. Words alone are not enough. We have to have some skin in the game. The early Christians committed to share everything in common, which meant they had to struggle to figure out how to make sure everyone felt like they were being treated fairly. So, they chose seven people who would be in charge of making sure everyone was fed equitably and they went on with life together.

I started off talking about Jesus’ words at the Last Supper: “As often as you do this, remember me.” In many liturgies, we interpret the first phrase as meaning as often as we share the eucharistic meal, but I think it offers a wider reading. What if we were to understand Jesus to say, “Every time you come to a table, every time you sit down to eat, take the time to pull yourselves together.”

The Greek word for table can be translated to mean a dinner table or a money table. So how about this: as often as we come to the dinner table, the conference table, the coffee counter, the checkout line, or any other chance we have to be with one another, we have a chance to re-member ourselves, to put ourselves back together in Jesus’ name.

For me to say that life has a centrifugal force that throws us all to the edges is not telling you anything new. Pretty much everyone who is a part of this worship has been dismembered by circumstance, left broken-hearted by grief, struggled with disappointment and failure, wrestled with competition and comparison, even as we have opened our hearts to others and loved those around us. We know what it feels like for life to tear us apart and we know what it means to re-member. As we come once again to the Table on this Sunday filled with memories of those who are no longer here and with uncertainty about what lies ahead, let us choose, once again, to pull ourselves together in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

Sometimes when I have a chance to preach, I feel like I have a big point to get across. At other times, like this week, when the whole thing feels quieter—more of an observation or a remembrance than a proclamation. I followed Moses up the mountain to his death in Deuteronomy 34:1-12 and here’s what I came away with.

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If I were to say the words, “Once upon a time,” you would know I was beginning a story. Those words have pulled us in since we were children. Beginnings are wide open doors, whether we are being invited to explore the great outdoors or to come inside the house for a more intimate tale. Endings, on the other hand, are harder to deal with, or to do well. Life is a lot like a Saturday Night Live skit: it starts with a good premise but most of the time the ending never really pays off—and we have a lot riding on how a story ends.

I read an article in the Washington Post this week that asked, “What book has the most disappointing ending?” It was written by a book reviewer who made a point of saying they never give away the ending when they write about a book, but endings are what most readers want to talk about. It’s true for both books and movies: how everything wraps up has a huge impact on how we feel about the story. Though it is considered great literature, Romeo and Juliet isn’t the feel-good play of the summer. And we are still willing to sit through all the hard boxing scenes to see the triumph of Rocky enduring the fight and believing in himself, even though he didn’t win.

Yesterday was a big day at our house because the Hallmark Channel started showing their Christmas movies. Though it is still way too early for me to start watching them, I will admit I enjoy watching them. Part of the comfort they offer is you can see the ending coming from a mile away. About fifteen or twenty minutes before the movie is over, the couple that seemed destined to be together face something that pulls them apart. Then, with about ten minutes left, and after the last commercial break, they realize the mistake they made and find their way back to each other–the very thing we wanted Romeo and Juliet to do. There are lights and snow and love and, well, Merry Christmas. Imagine how the ratings would go if, after two hours of drawing the two people together, the credits started rolling right when they walked away from each other.

One of the observations that we make about the Bible is that it is more of a library–an anthology–than a single book. Or perhaps we would do better to call it a book of stories, some more connected than others, but all of them telling the Big Story of the relationship between God and Creation and how we keep trying to learn how to be human.

The Christian New Testament is interesting because Paul wrote most all of his letters before the gospels were put on parchment. Though the Gospels come first in the way we read the Bible now, they were the last to be written. Paul started by writing down ideas, but the early Christians realized what mattered most were the stories of Jesus.

The Hebrew Bible, on the other hand, is pretty much stories from beginning to end. The Torah, or the Books of Moses, where we have been camped out for a couple of weeks, are a five-part set that starts with Creation and ends with the Hebrew people on the verge of entering the land God had promised to them.

Today’s passage is the last chapter of the five books–the Big Finish–and it gives an account of the death of Moses. It’s quite a scene. The preceding chapter holds Moses’ final blessing to the people and then God takes him back up the mountain. Once again, it’s just the two: God and Moses. It seems Moses knew he was playing the closing scene. He had said what he had to say and then he started climbing. He already knew he was not going to get to cross over into the promised land. God had made that clear. The narrator says God “let him see” the land in every direction, which is not physically possible from the top of Mount Pisgah, so something deeply mystical is going on, not unlike the burning bush.

Why Moses couldn’t go into Canaan is unclear. Commentators offer many different explanations, but what matters most is that he wasn’t going to cross over. He had to live and die with that. For all that he had done and had seen God do, he was going to die before the story was finished. He got to make his big speech and bless the nation, but then he died alone on the mountain with God and was buried in an unmarked grave so the spot would not be remembered. The narrator closes the story by saying there never was another one like Moses.

I have to say one of the things that came to mind for me as I read Moses’ final scene was Martin Luther King’s speech to the sanitation workers in Memphis on the night before he was killed. Though he didn’t know he was going to be murdered the next day, he seemed to know the ending was always at hand. He said,

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people will get to the promised land.

He was shot and killed on the balcony of the Lorrraine Motel the next morning.

Both Moses and Dr. King knew life had to be about more than checking off everything on our bucket lists. Moses lived a long life and King a relatively short one; neither were finished with what they hoped to do, and they both knew the story of their lives was a part of a larger, more epic tale. They are gone and we keep telling their stories because they are still a part of the larger story that has continued beyond their deaths—the story of what it means to be human.

The writer Anais Nin, in a quote she attributed to the Talmud, wrote, “We do not tell stories as they are, we tell stories as we are.” Poet and theologian Pádraig ÓTuama says that telling stories is the only way for life to become a verb. I recently published a book about the way grief connects us to one another called The Color of Together. One of the paragraphs I wrote says, “My father is dead, but my story with him is not over. I am still turning periods into commas and, sometimes, vice versa. I am still remembering our life together and revising how I think of him and of us as new insights arise.” The story of our lives is not over yet; we are still adding pages.

We are a week away from All Saints Day when we will be particularly mindful of those who died this year–and I know those losses are significant for this congregation. We know what it is like to keep telling the story or our lives after some of our most beloved characters are gone. The Hebrew people did, too. They buried Moses in an unmarked grave and went on to the Promised Land carrying his memory and adding to the story. Listen to Pádraig ÓTuama once again:

To live well is to see wisely and to see wisely is to tell stories and to tell stories is to tell of things that are always changing because even if the stories don’t change, the teller does, and so the story always moves.

I have two people in my life whose parents died this week, one from COVID-19 and the other from finally running out of gas at ninety-five. Death comes. Life ends. Things change. And through it all we keep telling the story of our lives to remember who we are, who we have been, and who we are becoming . . . once upon a time. Amen.

Since I am leading remote worship for the United Churches of Durham, Connecticut for the next three months, I have video of the sermon. The song that follows was a favorite my father and I shared:

I love to tell the story
for those who know it best
seem hungering and thirsting
to hear it like the rest

Peace,
Milton

I know. I haven’t been here in a while.

I’ve missed it. And I’m working to change that pattern for the days ahead. I’ll start with my sermon for today. I am preaching in two places this morning: remotely at United Churches of Durham CT and in person at First Congregational Church of Guilford, which was also recorded earlier in the week since not everyone can get into the sanctuary. Here is what I had to say.

“Small Mercies” Exodus 13:12-23

Back in the days of Blockbuster Video and VHS tapes, Ginger and our friend Cherry rented the movie Casino. It was so long that it took two tapes. They popped one in the VCR and were a little puzzled that the movie just started without any titles or credits, but they chalked it up to Martin Scorsese being a creative director. Still some things didn’t make sense. When they got to the end of the tape and the final credits began to roll, they realized they had started in the middle of the movie.

Our lectionary passage this morning is the beginning of the second tape, as far as the story of the Hebrew people goes. It will make more sense if we give it a larger context. The Book of Exodus is telling the story of how the Hebrews became a people, a nation, and a community of faith. It is also the story of their learning to live in relationship to God in new ways. It began with their Exodus from Egypt. Then the wandered in the wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula for forty years.

In one of the early chapters of this story, the people complained because they didn’t have enough to eat. No–they didn’t just complain. They whined. “Why did God bring us out here to die? We would be better off back in Egypt.”

In response, God rained bread every morning like dew–manna–which inspired our hymn for today: “Morning by morning, new mercies I see.” In the evening quail flew into the camp and just sat there. Though this part of the story is told only once, the food supply chain was never broken. I want you to remember that the meals didn’t stop for forty years. Hang on to that detail.

One more piece of this prelude: the chapter of the story we are reading today begins with Moses going up the mountain to get the Ten Commandments. He was gone so long that the people began to think he was never coming back and they got anxious. Their pleading makes me think of the line from the chorus of John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery”—“. . . just give me one thing that I can hold on to.”

So they melted all their jewelry and built a Golden Calf to give them that one thing: something they could see and touch—a god they could grasp. Moses came down the mountain with the Tablets, saw the calf, got mad, threw down the tablets and broke them, and then burned the calf to ashes, mixed the ashes with water, and made the people swallow the consequences of their actions. Moses was mad, God was mad, and they people were distraught.

The Hebrew people, as I said, were in the process of becoming a people. They had spent generations in Egypt being defined by who they were not and as they physically wandered in the Sinai, they were spiritually wandering as well, trying to figure out who they were. To see themselves as God’s people meant they had to come to terms with God. For all the parted seas and giant gestures of deliverance, the Hebrews lived with a basic insecurity that God was not going to hang around. They wanted constant reassurance. They wanted a god they could touch, a god they could understand. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks says,
“We now understand the entire drama set in motion by the making of the Golden Calf. Moses pleaded with God to come closer to the people, so that they would encounter [God] not only at unrepeatable moments in the form of miracles but regularly, on a daily basis, and not only as a force that threatens to obliterate all it touches but as a Presence that can be sensed in the heart of the camp.”

In the aftermath of the Golden Calf, Moses pitched his tent outside the camp. Both he and God kept their distance from the people, who wanted presence most of all, but didn’t know how to ask for it. From the camp, they could see that God came to Moses in the form of a “pillar of cloud, and that Moses and God were in conversation in a way the people had not experienced: it gave the appearance of two old friends talking.

Moses was a man acquainted with powerful revelation. God first spoke to him through a burning bush that never burned up. When Moses raised his arms, the sea parted and the people escaped Egypt. The Torah records more than one conversation between God and Moses where Moses bargains with God. In this passage, Moses asks to see God face to face and God says,

See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.

I want to go back to the detail I asked you to hold on to earlier: the manna and quail had never stopped. Morning my morning, God had showed up and the new mercies had continued, but Moses and the Hebrew people had lost sight of them somehow.

The Hebrew people wandered for forty years across an area about the size of the state of Maine. When they left Egypt, they thought, I’m sure, that everything was going to be okay. They were freed from their enslavement. God was with them. But it was just the beginning. What they thought would end quickly dragged on for generations. They didn’t know when it was going to end. They didn’t know what to expect. They built the golden calf so they could have a deity they grasp. They wanted a quantifiable life and a quantifiable god. They wanted certainty. They wanted another grand gesture on God’s part to give them a sense of presence and what they got was breakfast every morning.

In one of my favorite movies, Miss Firecracker, Carnelle Scott is a woman who is well-acquainted with grief and tragedy, and who is also in the last year of her eligibility for the Miss Firecracker Contest in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Her cousin Elain had won it years before when Carnelle was a child, and Carnelle is sure she can do the same and that winning the title will change everything. She places fifth.

Later, she says to Mac Sam, the come-and-go love of her life, and also one of her biggest encouragers, “I just want to know what I can reasonably expect out of life.”

“Not much,” he answers, laughing and coughing at the same time.

“But something,” she persists.

“Eternal grace,” he says.

We are wandering into the eighth month of distance and isolation connected to COVID-19. In many ways, we are less sure about when this will be over than ever. We are a little over two weeks away from an election that will answer some questions but leave much of our cultural turmoil and division still in play. We are struggling to deepen and widen our understanding of what it means to be a people as we come try to come to terms with the structural racism and bigotry baked into our systems. We, too, want some certainty about what is coming next. We, too, pin our hopes too easily on grand gestures. We, too, want to know what we can reasonably expect out of life.

But, like, the Hebrew people, we will find our hope and our humanity in the small merices. We find our faith in the stories we tell that give us a sense of God’s presence, not in a full-on, in your face kind of way, but in how we remember what God has done in our midst. The cliché says that the devil is in the details. No. That’s where God is.

Micah 6:8 is a verse we quote often: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.” The oldest translations read “love mercy” instead of “love kindness.” The manna on the ground each day was an offering of God’s kindness. With that in mind, listen to Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, “Kindness”

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

In the musical Godspell, one of Jesus’ followers sings, “Day by day, day by day, O, dear Lord, three things I pray: to see thee more clearly, love thee more dearly, follow thee more nearly day by day.”

In the messy details of our lives, in our hunger for assurance, in our trust that we are held by eternal grace, and in all that is uncertain about what lies ahead, our daily kindnesses are our best reminder of God presence and our connectedness. Morning by morning. Evening by evening. Sorrow by sorrow. New mercies we see—day by day by day by day by day. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

I preached this week for our church. The passage was Matthew 14:13-24—the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand—which is one of my favorites. Since our sanctuary is not air conditioned, we filmed in Ginger’s office.

One of the songs that was popular when I was in high school that has managed to stick around for almost half a century is a tune by the Scottish band Stealers Wheel called “Stuck in the Middle with You,” which includes the memorable lines

clowns to the left of me jokers to the right
here I am stuck in the middle with you

A pandemic anthem well before its time, don’t you think?

I did too, as I worked on my sermon this week—only to be reminded that Ginger had referenced the song in her first virtual sermon back in March. But since March feels like it was years and not months ago, the song bears repeating because we are still stuck—or so it seems.

As August begins, we have gone almost five months since we last worshipped together in our meeting house or chatted at coffee hour. I am way behind on my NHQ–my Necessary Hug Quota. Because of my knee surgery in April of 2019, which sidelined me from cooking for most of the summer, our barn has gone almost a year without people gathered around our table for dinner. How I wish we could be together so we could share what we miss and the griefs—yes, plural—we are all holding. Whatever stories we are telling in these days of protest and pandemic, they are grief stories: stories of being stuck in the middle without resolution—and without each other.

I was grateful to find that the lectionary passage was the story we most commonly know as the Feeding of the Five Thousand, which you may not know is a grief story of its own. Our reading starts in the middle of things, as lectionary passages often do. The first sentence is the giveaway: “And hearing this, Jesus withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place to be by himself.”

“And hearing this . . .” The English teacher in me wants to say, “Your antecedent is unclear. What did he hear?

The first twelve verses of Chapter 14 give us that context. The short version is John the Baptist was murdered by Herod on a drunken whim. His disciples buried him and then came to tell Jesus. And hearing this, Jesus did all he could to get away from everyone and everything to grieve the loss of his cousin, colleague, and friend. But he couldn’t get away. The crowds of people hoping for healing were relentless in both their need and pursuit of him and they followed him out of town into the desert, as did the disciples whom, I imagine, were doing their best to deal with their grief over John’s death as well as Jesus’ sorrow, which was new to them as well.

When Jesus became aware of what was happening, Matthew says, “. . . he was moved inwardly with compassion for them” and instead of continuing to run away Jesus turned back into the mass of people and began to listen to their grief stories, to share their loads, and to offer healing. This went on all day and into the evening. The disciples’ response was a little less compassionate, though I think they thought they were trying to help. “We’re out here in the desert and it’s after supper time; don’t you think we should send them into the villages so they don’t starve?” Part of being a disciple, it seems, meant living with the grief of inadequacy, which was wearisome, I’m sure.

Jesus’ response was direct: “They don’t need to go away. You give them something to eat.”

Their response was also straightforward. “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fishes.” In Matthew’s version, they didn’t even have a cute little kid who was offering his sack supper. They just knew they didn’t have enough. The hunger of the crowd was not something they could solve. It didn’t matter what they did, they couldn’t fix the problem.

“Bring them here to me,” Jesus said. Then he turned to the crowd and asked them to recline, as they would if they were going to eat. (For our purposes, let us imagine they were masked and appropriately distanced.) He blessed the food and then gave it to the disciples to distribute. With several thousand people on a hillside, it is hard to grasp the logistics of it all, but the people seemed to know that dinner was being served. They sat down and began to pass the food as it came to them. Everyone ate and there were leftovers.

The willing suspension of disbelief has always come fairly easily for me, so I have never had much of a problem with taking the miracle stories of Jesus at face value, or, as one of my seminary professors used to describe them, as parables in event, which is to say the miracle of this meal is pointing to something other than the amazing set of circumstances.

The state of my life often affects what I see in the story. These months we have spent in quarantine, as many have turned mask-wearing into a violation of their constitutional rights, have helped me to see that the miracle in this story is that a whole mountain of grieving people looking beyond themselves and feeding one another.

I don’t think Jesus knew, necessarily, that it was all going to work out when he started passing out bits of bread and fish. He just knew it was the right thing to do. If you have food and you see hungry people, you feed them. You offer what you have. And then see where it goes.

The lectionary passage stops with the count of how many were fed and, in doing so, leaves the story too quickly. But the next verse, verse 22, says, “Then he insisted that the disciples embark into the boat and precede him to the other side, until he should dismiss the crowds.”

The day had begun for Jesus with an ambush of grief that had sent him searching for self-isolation. It ended with him being not quite ready to leave when dinner was over: “You go on and I’ll catch up. I want to say goodbye to everyone”—and, yes, I realize that is an extrovert’s take on the story. Still, Jesus found some healing there as well. As the disciples walked down to the water, I imagine them hearing Jesus humming,

clowns to the left of me, jokers to my right . . .

And then they went on to the next day, which held new grief of its own, and some old stuff as well.

Jesus didn’t take care of people or tell the disciples to feed the crowd because it made everything better. Healing people didn’t bring John back to life. Handing out fish and bread didn’t eradicate the Roman occupation. But they were the right things to do. The hopeful things.

Vaclav Havel was a playwright who became the president of Czechoslovakia in the late 80s. He told of something that took place just a few weeks before he unexpectedly became a head of state. He was out in the countryside at a dinner party and fell down a sewer pipe. In his words, he almost drowned in that “fundamental mud” but someone had the wherewithal to get a long ladder and saved him. That he was in a sewer and that he became a state official were equally absurd circumstances. In that context, he wrote about hope.

Hope in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy when things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something to succeed. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. It is this hope, above all, that gives us strength to live and to continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now. In the face of this absurdity, life is too precious a thing to permit its devaluation by living pointlessly, emptily, without meaning, without love, and, finally, without hope.

We have more days coming that we can imagine when we are not going to know how long this is going to last, or what is going to happen next, or when life will feel recognizable again. The days ahead are also going to leave us feeling like the disciples, more often than not, when it comes to how what we think we have to offer stacks up against the needs around us. Whatever happens, even in life beyond the pandemic and quarantine, life is not going to feel like the life we think we remember. But Jesus, to use Havel’s words, didn’t do what he did because he knew it would all turn out okay, he did it because he was certain it made sense to share what food they had. And then he stayed to talk, and to listen.

One of the verses of our song for today goes

trying to make some sense of it all
and I can see it makes no sense at all
it is cool to go to sleep on the floor
‘cause I don’t think I can take anymore . . .

So much of life right now doesn’t make sense, from the virus to the vitriol of our national discourse. Truly, there are clowns to the left and jokers to the right. The world feels full of naysayers, nutjobs, and ne’er-do-wells in every direction. It doesn’t make sense to keep screaming at each other. It doesn’t make sense to just wish that life would go back to normal—whatever that was. It doesn’t make sense to just hunker down and take care of ourselves and let everyone else fend for themselves.

What does make sense is to do all we can to let those stuck in the middle with us know that we are all wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved. What does make sense is to see these days as open space that offers us the chance to change, how we treat one another on both personal and societal levels. We are stuck in the middle together. What makes sense is to offer all that we have to a hungry world. To feed one another any way we can—even the clowns and the jokers. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

P.S.—Seems only fitting for this to be our postlude.