don't eat alone

Over the past week or so my depression has made a presence of itself—life feels increasingly heavy and deflated. I can point to some circumstances that are contributors, but one of the difficult things about living with depression is it doesn’t require a cause to make itself known.

The lectionary passage for this week is part of a sermon where Jesus says those who are mourning are blessed because they can look forward to laughter, and that those who don’t know grief have got some hard days coming.

Well, the hard days are here. Here’s what felt worth saying today.

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I’ve been reading a book called The Geometry of Grief by Michael Frame and he made the statement that beauty and grief were next door neighbors: they are not identical, but they live on the same street. He says that what makes something beautiful is the combination of it being familiar and a novelty at the same time—you think you know what you are going to see and it catches you by surprise. Grief, he says, is much the same—you think you know how life is going to go and then you are caught by an irretrievable loss. Moments of deep joy and deep sadness come from the same place.

I wonder if Jesus had something similar in mind as he made his parallel lists in the verses we read this morning.

As I read over the passage it struck me that Jesus had to work hard to get any time to himself—right from the start of his ministry. There are forty verses between the passage we read last week about Jesus calling Peter, James, and John to follow him and the verses we are looking at today. In those short words there are at least two healing miracles, a couple of theological discussions with those who didn’t feel like Jesus was doing it right, a party at Matthew’s house after he was called to be a disciple, and an attempt to get away to pray. When he came back into town, the crowd was waiting. They were clamoring to get close to him to get what they needed.

Rather than getting frustrated at everyone jostling for position, he began to talk to them about four things: poverty, hunger, grief, and social standing. He went down the list twice. The first time he talked about feeling blessed; the second time he talked about feeling miserable.

–how blessed are you who are poor because the realm of God is yours;
–how blessed are you who are hungry now because you are going to have enough to eat;
–how blessed are you who are weeping now because you are going to laugh;
–how blessed are you when you are marginalized because those divisions don’t matter to God.

Then he said

–how miserable for you to be rich because you are trapped in your comfort;
–how miserable to have all you want to eat because you are going to end up hungry;
–how miserable for you who don’t feel loss because sorrow will find you;
–how miserable for you when everyone says nice things about you because you can’t live on flattery.

It feels like Jesus is choosing sides–making a list of who’s in and who’s out in God’s eyes—but if we go back to the idea of grief and beauty living on the same street, we can see more to the story.

Generally, when we read the gospels we are left to imagine Jesus’ tone of voice. I could tell that some of the commentators I read this week thought Jesus was scolding the crowd, but others imagined that he was describing what it was like for the two groups of people. As I read and re-read the passage, it struck me that Jesus wasn’t complimenting and cursing people as much as describing their reality. To say it another way, those who have been caught by surprise by poverty, hunger, grief, and marginalization have a chance to be on the receiving end of compassion and care, and thus are blessed to know how to help others in a way that humanizes both the giver and the receiver. Those who live in a place of excess and comfort find it hard to change for fear of losing what they have; they don’t want a surprise, only what is safe and familiar—and that won’t last.

I’ll give you a concrete example. After my father died, I felt grief I had never known. Ginger’s father had died a year and a half earlier. I said to her, “I feel like we could call everyone we know whose father died before mine and say, ‘We’re sorry. We meant well, but we had no idea this is what you were dealing with.” I remember my first day back at work. At that time, I worked as a trainer in an Apple Store. I felt paralyzed. I couldn’t concentrate. Everyone at work was kind, but I could tell they didn’t get it—and I understood that. One person whose father lived with a chronic illness that made death an inevitability hugged me and said, “I know how you feel. Let’s go get a cup of coffee.” We walked next door to the coffee shop, got our drinks, and sat silently for ten or fifteen minutes. And it helped.

On the other side, do you remember how many of us were driving around trying to find toilet paper and paper towels when the pandemic first hit two years ago? The impulse when we found some was to buy all we could so we didn’t run out. And that was the heart of the problem. The issue was not that there was not enough to go around. It was that people hoarded out of fear of running out or out of greed in hope of reselling it (and I’m sure there were other reasons). But if we had all continued to buy the paper products as we had done so before the pandemic—which is to say if we had thought beyond putting ourselves first—there would have been enough to go around.

It seems like a simple enough truth about life, doesn’t it? Yet it’s one we have to keep coming back to.

One of the recurring themes any time a messenger from God shows up in scripture is the first words they say are, “Don’t be afraid.” We tend to imagine the messengers started that way because the people weren’t used to having an angel in the room, but their words are more far-reaching. When folks were out snatching up toilet paper, they were driven by fear: what if there is not enough for me?

When we begin to accumulate things, we often begin to be afraid of losing them. The more we have, the more we have to take care of—and, often, the less we take care of each other. It’s not that those who live in poverty or who go hungry are not scared, but Jesus is saying they are not as controlled by their fear because they have to learn how to share and how to depend on one another.

Here’s a statistic to illustrate the point: the state of Mississippi is fiftieth in per capita income: the poorest state. It is also second in per capita charitable giving. Mississippians give 7.2% of their income away to various causes. Connecticut is sixth in per capita income; we are forty-fifth in charitable giving. We average sharing 3.2% of what we have.

I share those numbers not to induce guilt, but to ask what we are afraid of. Jesus looked at those around him who just made sure they were fed and safe and had more than they needed and said, “That must be miserable because you and I both know that won’t last.”

We are all exhausted. The pandemic has made frustration and fear far too familiar. It is difficult to see beyond where we are right now. As we hear Jesus’ words, let us remember that to take solace in our comforts will not silence our fears. To move beyond our fears so we can be surprised by joy means sharing what we have and asking for help. It means we are in this together. The way hungry people are fed is by someone else sharing their food. The way poor people survive is by others creating opportunity. The way grieving folks are comforted is by other grieving folks sharing their sorrow. The way those at the margins find a place to belong is by others widening the circle.

We are not defined by our circumstances, but by the way we respond to them. We can be miserable and trapped by our fear, or we can be open to the surprise of blessing. May we be people who choose the blessing. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

In her essay “Soon This Space Will Be Too Small,” Jordan Kisner writes,

Even if we are not fated to circle a single story for our whole lives, perhaps we are obliged to follow a single thought all the way until we have finished it. Thoughts can take years.

This a weekend that retells the beginning of the story Ginger and I are telling in our lives together and the lectionary story of Jesus calling Simon, James, and John to drop everything and follow him. At the heart of both is the single thought I can not exhaust: we are loved; we are really, really loved.

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There was an ice storm in Fort Worth, Texas this weekend.

I know that doesn’t matter much to folks here in New England, other than to feel sorry for them, but it was a sentimental moment for Ginger and me because thirty-three years ago on this very weekend we had our first date in Fort Worth, Texas—where we lived at the time—and there was an ice storm.

We met the weekend before on a youth retreat. She was a sponsor with one of the church groups and I was leading the music. Neither of us expected for the weekend to be life changing. And then we met each other, had our first date going to see Lyle Lovett in an ice storm, and the rest is history.

Whether we are talking about couples or long-time friends, the “how we met” stories are always worth telling.

Our scripture this morning reads like one of those stories, but the more times I read this story, the less I think this was Jesus’ first encounter with Peter, James, and John. The way Matthew and Mark tell the story, it reads like Jesus was walking through town picking up disciples like he was picking up groceries. For them to be willing to just get up and go makes me think they knew the day was coming. I don’t know another way to explain how Jesus could just walk up and say, “Follow me,” and the guys just walk away from work and family and everything else.

Luke takes a little more time to let the story unfold. Though Matthew and Mark say Jesus had begun preaching, Luke has him in the middle of a crowd when he encounters the fishermen. Almost every time there is a crowd in the gospel accounts, they are hungry—for words, for food, for hope. Jesus comes upon Simon and James and John who are washing their nets after a disappointing night at work. Their day is ending.

Jesus got in one of the boats, sat down, and asked them to push out a bit so he could talk to the crowd. Many years ago, Ginger and I went to Israel and Palestine and stood on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Our guide told this story and remarked of Jesus’ understanding of acoustics: talking from the water to the shore made his voice louder. More people could hear him.

What Jesus asked of the men was inconvenient and imposing. They were cleaning up. They had to get back in the boat and take him out and then sit there while he preached. When he finished, he told them to row our further and drop their nets. Simon was less than hopeful, but said, “Because you asked, we’ll do it”—another clue that they were already acquainted.

And they caught so many fish that the nets began to tear and the boats began to sink and, based on Simon’s response, it all felt like a metaphor for how Simon felt about the whole thing: he dropped to his knees and said, “I am not worthy of this. Go away from me.”

Jesus’ response was, “Don’t be afraid. Now you are going to fish for people.”

Luke says they docked the boats, left everything, and followed Jesus. They didn’t walk away from their jobs in frustration after a fruitless night of fishing. They walked away from two boats loaded with fish. From a winning fish lottery ticket. But instead of the fish, they saw the mass of hungry people that Jesus saw as well.

I read a phrase this week that stuck with me: ordinary devotions, which means in our lives we may “undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths” because “such revisitations constitute a life.”

The thing Jesus kept coming back to with Simon (whom he also called Peter) and the others was that they were wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved. We see that theme repeated over and over in the gospels. They appear to have bet their lives on being with Jesus, because when he was executed they were devastated. We observe the crucifixion already knowing about the resurrection; the disciples were not so fortunate. Peter followed Jesus as he was taken into custody and ended up in the courtyard outside the place where the trial was taking place. In the course of conversations around the fire, he denied knowing Jesus three different times.

After Jesus’ death and a couple of days of regret and remorse, Peter went back to what he had walked away from. “I’m going fishing,” he said. And they got in their boats and fished all night. I wonder if Peter made the connection. At dawn, someone called from the shore and told them to try again—and they caught so many fish that the nets almost broke and the boat almost sank.

And Peter said, “It’s the Lord,” jumped in the water and swam to shore.

I think that in that moment Peter not only recognized Jesus but he remembered the ordinary devotions Jesus had returned to over and over. Jesus believed in Peter more than Peter believed in himself. In their first encounter, Jesus had to get them to look up from their nets to hear what he had to say. They were so wrapped in the repetitive details of their days and the demands of their work that they had to be shocked into awareness of who was right in front of them. The boat full of fish helped them see that there was more to their lives than they had ever been able to see—and Jesus was offering to show them who they could become. The second time, they were wracked by despair and guilt and grief that they had to be astounded in order to remember that love is stronger than whatever we might have done.

At the end of the second encounter, Jesus asks Peter the same question three times—do you love me?—and then, when Peter says yes, Jesus says, “Feed my sheep.” Though he’s switching metaphors, I think he’s saying much the same thing as, “Fish for people,” and that is, “You know what it feels like to feel hopeless, or caught, or despairing, or guilty, or like nothing will ever be the same again, and now you know what it feels like to know you are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved. Go tell everyone you can what that feels like and tell them they are included.”

In other words, “Fish for sheep.”

Whoever you are and wherever you are on life’s journey—whether in the boat or on the shore, feeling on top of the world or at the bottom of the pile, wracked by guilt, buried by despair, clinging to hope, hoping for change, longing for normalcy, or just drowning in daily details—Christ’s invitation is still the same: come fish for sheep. This is the story we keep returning to so we can relearn that we are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved. This is the ordinary devotion worth repeating, the old story that has new things to say every time we tell it—and we need to tell as many people as you can. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

The sky is crystal clear this morning after a day of blinding snow yesterday. The ground is covered with the foot and a half of snow that fell in the midst of the storm. It is beautiful. And it is a reminder that I will get good exercise this afternoon when we start digging out our cars and shoveling the rest of the patio.

The picture with this post is from the Town Green. A local artist put a bunch of cut-out penguins on the Green Friday night. They look quite at home in the snow. Once the sky quit falling we had to get out to see them.

One of the consequences of technological advances is we have to come up with new qualifiers. A guitar, for example, didn’t have to be named as acoustic until electric guitars were invented. So it seems our wrestling with technology during the pandemic means that what we used to simply call worship is now “in-person worship” because Zoom has made “virtual worship” a possibility.

Even though we are not gathering in person this morning, I still get to preach. Here’s what I had to say.

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I have known for two weeks that 1 Corinthians 13 would be our text for this morning: the Love Chapter—one of the most familiar passages in the Bible. One of the things I relearned in preparing is that familiar and understood are not necessarily synonyms. We are familiar with this chapter—mostly from wedding ceremonies—but most of what really sticks with us are the lines about love being patient and kind—and in the context of a wedding we think something along the lines of, “How nice for them.” It all feels a part of a lovely moment.

Perhaps we can find some new things here by reminding ourselves of what Paul was talking about right before he wrote these words. As we discussed last week, the church in Corinth was diverse and divided and struggling. They had become competitive with one another. They had become quite judgmental as well, it seems. Paul reminded them they were not a group of individuals but parts of a body—a bundle of relationships—that could not live without one another. Life was not a competition. After trying to communicate what it meant to be together, he says, “I am going to show you a better way,” and then begins talking what it would mean if they chose to love one another.

As we sit on the cusp of February and the aisles in CVS and Walgreens are filled with candy for Valentine’s Day, we do well to keep in mind that the words that make up this chapter are not the stuff of greeting cards. Paul was not talking about romance, or even a love that makes us feels cherished, adored, or safe. The love he describes is love as action, as response, as witness: a love that costs us something. A love that fosters relationships. A love determined to change things.

Listen again, this time from the J. B. Phillips translation:

This love of which I speak is slow to lose patience—it looks for a way of being constructive. It is not possessive: it is neither anxious to impress nor does it cherish inflated ideas of its own importance. Love has good manners and does not pursue selfish advantage. It is not touchy. It does not keep account of evil or gloat over the wickedness of other people. On the contrary, it is glad with all good people when truth prevails. Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. It is, in fact, the one thing that still stands when all else has fallen.

Everything that Paul mentions is something we have to learn how to do: patience, kindness, humility, staying when things get tough. We have to learn how to love, and we have to keep learning. Love is not one-size-fits-all. How we incarnate love to one another—how we live out our love–changes over time; it looks different in different situations.

Sometimes that’s because circumstances change how we are able to show our love to one another, as it has during the pandemic. Sometimes that’s because people change and grow. However it happens, we have to remember that love is not static; it takes work and practice and commitment. Theologian Elena Vassallo writes,

The love that is patient and kind, not jealous or boastful, arrogant or rude, does not belong to us. It takes constant work. It is like the spiritual discipline that we sit down to every morning or every evening because we know it requires practice. I struggle to sit quietly and pray and do yoga each morning because I know that if I don’t I’m too easily distracted. It is too easy to live my life inattentive to what I hold most important. Paul speaks of love the labor, the exercise, the discipline. It is our calling to pay witness to it regularly, out loud, with intention.

Her use of the word witness reminded me of a scene from the movie Shall We Dance. The story revolves around a man, played by Richard Gere, who starts taking ballroom dancing lessons as a way of trying to help settle a restlessness in his soul. He doesn’t tell his wife, played by Susan Sarandon, who ends up hiring a private investigator to try and figure out what is going on. The investigator is a cynical man. When he meets her to give his report, which did not offer anything other than the dance class, he asks her why people get married. She answers:

Because we need a witness to our lives. There’s are billions of people on the planet. I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you’re promising to care about everything–the good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things . . . All of it. All the time, every day. You’re saying, “Your life will not go unnoticed, because I will notice it. Your life will not go unwitnessed, because I will be your witness.”

Paul would say her words apply beyond the scope of marriage. To be the Body of Christ is to choose to care about everything about each: the good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things. To love one another means to say, “Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go unwitnessed because I will witness it.” That is a huge commitment that borders on overwhelming. How can we love everybody? How can we truly witness one another’s lives? How can we care about everything?

We can’t. But we can care about those right in front of us. We learn how to love by starting there.

Remember, Paul was writing to people who had chosen to be a part of the same congregation. When he wrote this letter, he wasn’t trying to write the ultimate definition of love. He had no idea his words would become scripture. He wanted to give those folks a tangible way to think about how to make love real to one another—how to put their love into skin and bones, into action. So, he said, to say you love someone is to be patient and kind and tenacious and persistent and, perhaps, uncomfortable. He wasn’t talking about the scope of love as much as the substance: here is what love is: here’s what you need to learn to offer to one another. Here is how we learn to live together.

One of the people I learned about this week in my sermon preparation is Andrew Elphinstone, who was an English aristocrat and clergy person. He wrote a book about faith and evolution, specifically related to love and suffering.

He said that we have made a mistake in the way we interpret the Genesis account of creation by thinking that Adam and Eve were created as fully formed people who were in a perfect world until the screwed it up and got thrown out. Evolution offers the evolution of human beings has been over a great span of time, most of which was engaged in a long struggle for survival. In evolutionary terms, love is a late addition to the history of human life. But all the hardship set the stage: the pain and discomfort in our lives is part of the raw material that makes love matter.

Let me say that again: our pain and struggle are the raw materials of love.

They are what give us the openings to be patient and kind, to offer help and to ask for it, to keep showing up in both big and little ways. If this congregation, or any congregation, is going to endure—to thrive–it will be because of love lived out in action: love that shows up, love that does what needs to be done, love that listens intently, love that takes care of one another, love that asks for help as well as offering it.

Paul said that what mattered in life boiled down to three things: faith, hope, and love. Even though he ranks them by saying love is the greatest, they are connected. They need each other.

I think faith is best understood as trust rather than belief. To have faith in God is to trust that God is with us. When we trust one another, we put our faith in action. We cannot live together without trust.

Author Margaret Renkl offers a definition of hope that fits here: “Hope allows us to leave what is possible in the hands of others.” Hope is not a micro-manager. Hope understands we can’t control everything. We have to lean on each other, which takes us back to trust.

And leads us to love—our lived-out actions that move us beyond survival and bind us to each other. The commitment to witness one another’s lives and make sure none of us goes unnoticed and then to work together to see who beyond our circle needs to be loved as well.

May we be people who are known by our faith, our hope, and our love. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

As someone who lives with hearing loss, depression, and two titanium knee joints, I found preaching on Paul’s metaphor of the Body of Christ (I Corinthians 12:12-31) to be multi-layered. Seeing ourselves as a body—a connected organism of relationships—is more than imagining some sort of cosmic game of Operation.

Here is where the metaphor took me.

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It was a brilliant idea in the beginning. Paul found a small group of Christians who had ended up in Corinth for one reason or another, so he started a house church where they began worshipping together. They took Jesus’ call to share their faith seriously and began to invite others. As word got out, some folks came on their own and found their place in the fledgling congregation.

But a new city meant a new way of being. The churches that had started in Jerusalem and Palestine had been mostly monocultural. The Corinthian church took on the personality of its host city: diverse, questioning, even a little wild in places. Based on Paul’s words, we know rich people, poor people, free people and enslaved folks, and a variety of ethnicities were trying to figure out how to live together.

It was a brilliant idea, but it started coming apart at the seams once Paul left town. He was the one committed to the idea and maybe he thought he had the “buy in,” as we like to say sometimes, but his dream wasn’t as easily transferrable as he thought. Because he couldn’t get back to them in person, he wrote letters—probably more than the two we have—to give advice, to offer correction, to underline his affection for them, and to try and give them new ways to imagine what it meant to be church, which meant giving them new vocabulary.

One of those new images is at the heart of our passage this morning: the metaphor of the church the Body of Christ. Paul was trying to offer a metaphor that would help them move toward unity and greater acceptance of one another, so he called them the Body of Christ and then laid out what it means to be a body: looking at the different parts, learning to work together, needing each other to be healthy and whole.

I learned from the writer John Berger that in Greek the word metaphor shares a root with the word for porter, as in the porter on a train who helps you and your bags get from place to place, which is another of saying a good metaphor takes us on a journey of understanding. It’s an invitation to use our imagination.

A good metaphor is a wonderful thing because when we find new words with which to define ourselves or approach a problem, we create possibilities. But a metaphor can grow stale if we forget to keep telling the stories behind it, or we decide we know all the angles. And we have to remember that any metaphor has its limitations.

The best example I can think of is using Father as a name for God. Any name for God is a metaphor—a way of describing God that helps us catch a glimpse of one we cannot completely comprehend. If father is the only metaphor—or even the primary metaphor—we use for God, then those who have problematic relationships with their fathers really struggle to find God in that metaphor. And offering a bigger picture of God requires more imagination than just adding Mother to the list. God is more than a heavenly parent. God transcends gender. Even in scripture, God is a rock, a river, and a lion. The more metaphors we employ, the more our faith can grow.

We often talk about church as a family, or a community of faith—like we are our own little village. Paul says we are a body, and not just any body: we are the Body of Christ. Since Jesus no longer walks the earth as the Incarnation of God’s Love, we are the ones who incarnate the love of God in the world. And the metaphor is singular. We are not the bodies of Christ; together we make one body, just as all the various elements of our human bodies all work together. It is the image at heart of our UCC motto: that they all may be one.

I don’t know how people were in Paul’s day, but in our time, I think the body is a complicated metaphor because, as both individuals and as a society, we have complicated relationships with our bodies. We are bombarded with images of what we should look like, and we are offered any number of ways to alter our bodies to try and make them look like those ideals. Many of us struggle with not weighing what we wish we could, or not being able to do things we want to do or dealing with some sort of condition or disability that makes life more difficult. As one who has profound hearing loss, what it means to be an ear, for example, is a multi-layered metaphor.

On the other hand, perhaps it is precisely because none of our bodies work perfectly that we can understand Paul’s idea. He’s talking about what it takes for a body to be healthy. He was addressing a congregation that was, as we said, fairly fractured. Those in places of privilege made a point of distancing themselves from those who were not. People were quick to make sure their rights and their needs were taken care of before they thought about anyone else. The church was a body at war with itself and Paul was trying to move them beyond their self-absorption to some sense of solidarity. He hoped the metaphor of the Body of Christ would help them see how desperately they needed each other and how desperately God needed them to need each other; he wanted them to grasp what real love looked like.

Because Paul talked about the roles people played in the church in Corinth and the different gifts people had to offer, it is easy for us to think that we are valuable to God because of what we can do. That’s particularly true as Americans reading these verses because we are so immersed in a cultural work ethic that thinks the only ones who matter are those who produce. We look at bees and ants as metaphors for good workers, but we aren’t bees or ants. As Katherine May says in her book Wintering,

Usefulness, in itself, is a useless concept when it comes to humans. I don’t think we were ever meant to think about others in terms of their use to us. . . . We flourish on caring, on doling out love. The most helpless members of our families and communities are what stick us together.

We can feel God in the beauty of the sunrise, or the magic of waking up to new-fallen snow. We can catch a glimpse of the extravagance of God’s creativity we when look at the mountains, or stare out over the ocean, or play with a puppy, but we learn what love is from one another. Love is incarnated: it comes in the flesh. It has hands and feet and eyes and ears, and it shows up with soup when we are sick, and it listens when we are struggling, and it admonishes when we screw up, and it forgives.

Most of that will show up in next week’s sermon, which is on 1 Corinthians 13—the chapter after the one we read this morning that most people know as the Love Chapter—but for now let me give you a simple illustration of what love looks like.

One of the things I have learned about my hearing as I have dealt with its diminishment is–well, several things. One is that we don’t hear with our ears; we hear with our brains. If I want to hear better, I have to concentrate. One of the incarnations of love that Ginger, my wife, offers me is room to focus and find my way when I get lost in the noise of life. Often, when we are in a restaurant (remember eating in restaurants?) she will hear a song she likes and ask, “Can you hear the song?” When I say no, she will tell me what it is and then I can usually hear it. I get to be a part of her joy in that moment.

It’s a small thing, but that is what love looks like.

Much is written these days about a growing understanding of the integral connection between our bodies, our minds, and our spirits. None of it is new knowledge, mind you. Ancient cultures knew these things, but, particularly as our technology advanced, we compartmentalized them, so we are having to relearn is that everything is connected and interdependent. Whatever physical issue I have has mental and spiritual implications; what I read and think about plays out in my body. In the same way, the metaphor of the Body of Christ calls us to relearn that to see everyone as a part of the body means to pay attention to one another, not just to make room, or to make accommodation, but to offer invitations to connectedness. To incarnate love.

Earlier in the sermon, I said that when Paul called the church the Body of Christ, he saw it as the continuation of the incarnation: those who follow Jesus are God’s human expression of love.

I love that idea, but I want to add a qualifier: those who follow Jesus are one of God’s human expressions of love. Christians don’t have a corner on the love of God. In fact, we would do well to ask ourselves how expansively we are willing to hear the metaphor. Just how far a journey will we take? How big a body are we talking about? Who is a part of the body? Is it just this congregation? Is it the Southern New England Conference of the UCC? Is it all Christians? Is it everyone in the world? The rhetorical answer to all those questions is yes, but what is our honest answer? Just how far will our attention and intention reach? Are we willing to accommodate the visitor who sits in our regular pew, for instance?

In some ways, that last question is overwhelming because none of us can meet all the needs we are aware of, much less all the needs in the world. I don’t have the capacity to fully take on world hunger and human trafficking and dismantling racism and climate change. Neither do you. But as a body—a bundle of relationships working together—we can do it. When something pulls at your heart, speak up. When someone else speaks up, listen. And then work together. We all have something to offer each other, and we all have things we need from one another. But even as I say that I want to say, again, that reason we are a part of the body is not because we are useful. We are a part of the body of Christ because every last one of us is a person wonderfully created in the image of God who is worthy to be loved just because we are breathing.

Paul was right: church was a brilliant idea in the beginning. I think it still is, even as much as the Body of Christ has been through over two millennia that has left it kind of beaten up and limping along. But we said at the start that this is a complicated metaphor. A body does not have to be perfect to be alive and functioning. As the people of God, we are the human face—and hands and feet and voice and heart—of God in the world.

Let us love one another. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

Every three years in the lectionary cycle, the story of the wedding at Cana (John 2:1-12) is the suggested passage for the Sunday before the MLK holiday. Since neither the gospel writers nor the lectionary committee knew anything about the King commemoration, many churches turn to King’s words in their worship. This year, as I explored the story of Jesus’ first miracle, I found a connection that fed me. Here’s my sermon for this week: “Let Justice Flow Down Like Wine.”

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We don’t know why they ran out of wine at the wedding. Perhaps people drank more than they thought. Perhaps they had planned poorly. We don’t know the relationship between Jesus and the guests. Pretty much everyone in the story remains anonymous except Jesus. Even Mary is not named; she is referred to as “his mother.”

Of all the stories in the Gospels, the story of the wedding at Cana probably ranks as one of the best known for a couple of reasons: one, it was Jesus’ first recorded miracle, or sign, as John refers to it; and two, Jesus turned water into wine to help a wedding party keep going. He didn’t heal anyone or raise anyone from the dead. He made wine for the party.

From a preaching standpoint, the story is interesting because of the various ways people interpret the details. Rebecca Solnit says, “To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem most salient.” Though she was not talking specifically about scripture, I think she describes well what we do when we come back to these stories again and again and find fresh understanding. What’s on the page may be the same, but we are not. What we notice about life, about the biblical accounts, about ourselves are all things that stay in motion.

We don’t know why Mary knew about the problem, or why they were even at the wedding, but she wanted Jesus to do something about it. She finds him and says, “They have no wine.” In most versions Jesus’ response is translated, “Woman, what does that have to do with me?” but in the Greek it reads, “What does that have to do with you and me?” When the question includes them both, I hear it differently: why did the wedding party’s problem have to be their problem too?

In that light, it almost feels rhetorical, but then I think of Jesus sitting at the table with his disciples and I wonder if it wasn’t a teaching moment. Perhaps I read it that way because that’s where I found myself in the story this time around sparked by one commentator in particular who turned the question on himself:

In what way are others essential to my relationship with God? In what way are they indispensably present? Other people are obviously crucially important and integral, irreplaceable. I spend most of my life with them and (hopefully) much of it for them. They enclose relationships of friendship, love, and wisdom that make up much of the richness of life. This seems obvious. But how are they absolutely essential and indispensable to my hope for a relationship with God—so much so that if they were not present, I would have no relationship with God at all? That is what I mean by “absolutely essential.

Even in the few weeks I have been here, I have said more than once that life and faith are team sports. Jesus’ question underscores that truth. We are essential to one another. The answer to his question about who the wedding party was to him and his mother was everything. So, Jesus went to work.

He told the servants to fill up the six big clay pots or pitchers that were there with water. Each one held about thirty gallons of water. Their usual purpose was to hold water for Jewish purification rituals—not just handwashing, but rituals that symbolized internal cleansing—repentance. The servants did as they were instructed and when the caterer drew from the pots he found wine. Good wine. Really good wine. And a lot of it: those six pots would have the equivalent of somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 bottles of wine as we know them. I don’t know how big the wedding was, but whatever size the crowd, that is an incredible amount of wine. The only ones who ever knew about it were the catering staff, Mary, the disciples, and Jesus. No one else knew who saved the party, only that the wine never ran out.

Another commentator focused on the extravagance of Jesus’ miracle:

This is a miracle of excess, and we’re generally more comfortable with moderation in all things. Even grace. There are rules we’d like to see God follow, actually. Jesus comes around and messes with the rules—no wonder the religious authorities wanted to kill him. He seems genuinely dangerous to almost any system, to any plans we might have intended to implement. Jesus turns the purification water into wine. Is he going to turn our laws into gushing streams, our boundaries into blossoms, our principles into feasts for everyone to attend?

Her description of the miracle being one of excess made me think about coffee hours I have seen where the kitchen is full of things people brought to share but those serving the food put it out a little a time to make sure it isn’t all eaten. It’s what we might call a hospitality of scarcity: they mean well, but they don’t know how to trust an extravagant God.

Her question—is Jesus going to turn our laws into gushing streams—helped me find a connection between the story and the fact that the lectionary lets it land on the weekend when we commemorate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In my notes I wrote, “Let justice roll down like wine.” And then when I returned to Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech I heard echoes of both extravagant love and our essential connection to one another. Listen again to what he had to say:

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

As Americans, we are immersed in a culture of scarcity, sort of like the folks running coffee hour. We have been trained to expect that things are going to run out, so we had better take care of ourselves before we care about anyone else. That was true before the pandemic, and it seems to have only gotten worse. I am not saying that as a judgment as much as to say the world we live in makes this a hard story to take to heart because we are inundated with reminders that there is not enough.

It’s a lie.

One of the consistent arguments raised when people talk about living into Dr. King’s dream and creating a more just and equitable society is that there is not enough for everyone to be taken care of. Jesus’ consistent message was that God changes the world—changes us—through relationships. We—together, essentially connected—are enough if we are willing to take care of each other.

Christ calls us to look at our world, our country, our town, our church, our family and ask, “What are they to you and me?” and then to hear the answer that Jesus embodied: “Everything”—an answer that leads to lives, as Dr. King said, that are able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we—all of us–will be free one day.

John finishes the story be saying that the disciples believed in Jesus. They put their faith in him. They trusted him. But it wasn’t long before they were on a hillside covered with over five thousand people who had followed Jesus all day wanting to hear him speak. You know this story, too—about the boy with the loaves and fish. When the disciples noticed the massive crowd was hungry, Jesus didn’t ask a question; instead, he just said, “Feed them.” The disciples were incredulous. “Where would we ever find enough food—or money to pay for it?” They may have trusted him at the wedding, but they had forgotten by the time it came to take care of the crowd. Jesus took the loaves and fish and fed thousands. Even though they walked with him every day, Jesus’ followers had a hard time really trusting the extravagant grace of God that Jesus kept showing them.

In these days, what we need to remember about this story is God dreams bigger than we do. God loves bigger than we do. God welcomes bigger that we do. And God wants us to grow into all of it. God wants us to revel in the audacity of excess, in boundless love, and unfettered grace.

That’s why we keep coming back to this story, and to the life of Dr. King—to allow the Spirit of God to keep telling us that we are essential to each other, not just because we are connected but also because we are each other’s best way to experience the extravagant, unrelenting love that lets justice roll down like wine. Wine enough for every last one of us. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

One of the characteristics of recipe blogs, as opposed to a recipe site, is that you generally have to read through a long story to get to the recipe, so if you are trying to find a recipe in a hurry, you have to scroll for a while to find what you want. But the front part is more than just filler. The writers tell their stories for a reason: they want to connect with their followers, to make it about more than just the recipe.

As I have been preaching more regularly, I’ve started to feel the same way about my sermon posts, since often they include stories I have told before (well, pretty much everything I say and write contains stories I have told before) and I write them for the congregation, so sometimes they are fairly specific and need a little context. This is the Sunday that commemorates the Baptism of Jesus. I love preaching from this passage because it talks about blessing: the unabashed love of God that names us all. I spent a lot of my life looking for a blessing that felt like enough. I have also spent a lot of my life telling other people they were beloved children of God that brought God delight. Embracing that blessing in my own life has made me more determined to pass it along.

Here is my latest version.

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About a month ago, on the Second Sunday of Advent, the scripture for the day pointed us to John the Baptist and we talked about his calling people to a baptism of repentance and forgiveness. During Advent, John felt a little out of place, but he helped us prepare the way of the Lord. Today, as many congregations across the wider Church commemorate Jesus’ baptism, the story fits a little better into the timeline of Jesus’ life.

Of course, the timeline is spotty, as far as the details go. We know John and Jesus were cousins, but we don’t have any accounts of how they grew up together or what brought them to this moment. Because of the connection of the families, it is a fair assumption that they were a part of each other’s lives and Jesus showing up at the Jordan was something John saw coming, even if he was surprised by Jesus’ request to be baptized. Their life stories were already intertwined.

One of the most meaningful metaphors we use for life is to say we are telling–or living–a story. Each life, like a story, has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And it is peopled with characters. One of my favorite quotes (that I never can remember exactly) says something like, “My life is filled with wonderful characters, I’m just not sure about the plot.”

The reality is life is not a story–or not a cohesive narrative–until we begin to shape it by our retelling. And when we do, we think of ourselves as the main character. Rebecca Solnit says,

We are all the heroes of our own stories, and one of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another’s story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others, or break them, to tell stories rather than be told by them. (The Faraway Nearby 29)

It is stating the obvious to say both John and Jesus are part of a larger story, but I think it matters that they both knew that. John got a lot of attention, but he knew he was not the main event. He appeared to understand that in the way he welcomed Jesus, as well as in the way he called people to forgiveness and repentance. Both those words call us to remember we are not the main character but are a part of a web of relationships. Jesus understood as well. He asked to be baptized to “fulfill the Law,” which means more than saying, “We have to obey the rules.” At the heart of the Hebrew faith was a sense of justice, as in the prophet Micah saying what God requires of us is to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God.

His actions challenge our thinking about who he was. If he was sinless, why would he submit to a baptism of repentance and forgiveness? Perhaps because he knew the story was not about him, even if he was the Messiah. He was joining the larger story of God’s love and justice, and that opened him up to receive God’s blessing: “This is my dearly loved child in whom I am well pleased.”

Theologian Cornel West says, “Justice is what love looks like in public.”

In public, Jesus joined the story of repentance and forgiveness that leaned into the love of God and found blessing. We all need the blessing to be able to practice the art of perspective that reminds us we are not the main character. This is an ensemble production.

What does it mean to be blessed?

In French, the word blesser means to hurt or to wound; and in English, we could say, I suppose, that it means to heal. The two languages remind us that to love someone comes with the risk of injury. Opening ourselves to love means being willing to be hurt. Whatever brought Jesus to meet John at the Jordan led to God proclaiming, “That’s my child in whom I delight.” Those words launched Jesus into the next chapters of the story, which carried its share of pain even as he went forward with a blessing.

Who doesn’t need to hear a blessing?

One of the stories of my life is my relationship with my father. He died eight and a half years ago, but the story is still unfolding. Life with my father was not perfect; we lived through several stretches where it was difficult for both of us. I was his namesake, which often made things even more complicated. When we were living in Boston, I went back to Baylor University for Homecoming and learned that my father, who was the university chaplain, had preached that day on campus. I did not hear the sermon, but a friend told me that he had used me as an illustration.

My father said, “In life you have to learn the difference between a problem and a predicament. A problem you can fix. A predicament is something you have to learn to live with.” He paused. “I used to think my eldest son was a problem. Now I see he is a predicament.”

I told that story at his funeral and then I added, “I learned he was a predicament, too.” We loved each other and had worked hard to learn to live with and love each other as we were, which was a good thing. While he was still alive, we found a rhythm as predicaments that let us both be ourselves and be together; we were able to bless one another. Since his death, that blessing has meant my ongoing predicament is I am not going to get over missing him. And I don’t want to.

My mother, who died six years ago this coming week, blessed me in the kitchen. She is the reason I love to cook. As a young boy I asked a lot of questions about what she was doing as she prepared meals and she invited me to help. Then she would say, “You watched me do this last time. You can do it.” And I believed her. I don’t step into the kitchen without being aware of her blessing.

Many years ago, my friend Burt, who was then a pastor in Waco, Texas was preaching on this passage and asked me to write a poem for his sermon. In the way a good story comes together, I had just seen a billboard on my way home to our house in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston that had already set me to thinking. I wrote these words.

daily work

The crush of afternoon traffic finds me
in an unending stream of souls staring
at the stoplight. From my seat I can see
the billboard: “Come visit the New Planetarium
You Tiny Insignificant Speck in the Universe.”

When the signal changes, I follow the flow
over river and railroad yard, coming
to rest in front of our row house, to be
welcomed by our schnauzers, the only
ones who appear to notice my return.

I have been hard at work in my stream
of consciousness, but the ripples of my life
have stopped no wars, have saved no lives––
and I forgot to pick up the dry cleaning;
I am a speck who has been found wanting.

I walk the dogs down to the river and wonder
how many times I have stood at the edge
hoping to hear, “You are My Beloved Child.”
Instead, I skip across life’s surface to find
I am not The One You Were Looking For.

I am standing in the river of humanity
between the banks of Blessing and Despair,
with the sinking feeling that messiahs
matter most: I am supposed to change
the world and I have not done my job.

Yet. . . if I stack up the stones of my life
like an altar, I can find myself in the legacy
of Love somewhere between star and sea:
I am a Speck of Some Significance.
So say the schnauzers every time I come home.

I don’t know where you find yourself in the story of our lives this morning. Maybe you need someone to bless you, to tell you that you are a child of God, wonderfully and uniquely made and worthy to be loved. Perhaps you need the new beginning offered by repentance and forgiveness, both on the giving and receiving ends. Maybe you hold the blessing someone else desperately needs. Or maybe you are just trying to figure out what the story is in these difficult and exhausting days. Whoever you are and wherever you are in life’s story, you are God’s beloved child in whom God delights. And you are not alone.

Let that sink in: you are loved, you are loved, you are really, really loved. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

Since we don’t have a service on January 6, I traveled with the magi today for my sermon, a passage I have looked at many times because it often comes up the Sunday after Christmas—a Sunday I often preach. Though my “go to” sermon is about learning how to go home by another way (thanks to both the magi and James Taylor), I found another way to look at the story. I hope you find something here, too. Happy New Year.

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Our season of Christmastide comes to a close this week with the celebration of Epiphany, which marks the visit of the Magi who came to visit Jesus. Like so many stories in the gospels, we only get a sketch of what happened and are left to fill in the blanks.

We don’t know much about the ones who came to find Jesus. We know they came from east of Palestine–maybe Persia, which is Iran today. We know they watched the stars, so we assume, as our translation did this morning, that they were astrologers or astronomers. In Jesus’ time, the two words were synonymous. As tradition built up around the story, they began to be referred to as kings because the gifts they bought were expensive. Not just everyone can show up with gold. Tradition also decided that there were three of them because there were three gifts, assuming, I suppose, that nobody would show up at the manger without a present. The King James Version translated the Greek word magios as “wise men” and the name stuck, even though their gender is not identified in Matthew’s account.

We have been reading this story with some imagination for centuries it seems. As I was working to see these folks in new ways this year, I came across an article written by a scientist named Roger Barlow who imagined the details differently. He said:

At this point we realise that we have a better word to translate magoi – a word not available to the translators of the Authorised Version of the Bible in King James’ reign, as it was only invented in 1833.

The word is scientists.

Looking back 2,000 years, they and we are not so different. They used their understanding of the universe to predict what would happen in the world – and, working as a group, they investigated their predictions, despite the cost and trouble and hardships. This is something any scientist today can recognise and identify with. Their understanding of the universe is crude and primitive in our eyes – but what will today’s scientific theories look like in 2,000 years time?

So, when we see pictures of the three kings at Christmas, we should spare them a thought, as colleagues who believed in their theories and followed through the consequences, despite the trouble and expense and personal effort involved. The strength of their conviction and their resolution to follow it, 2,000 years ago, can be an example to us today.

I do not have a scientific mind in the sense that I understand equations and so forth. I am drawn to the world of science because of the way scientists are trained to ask questions and to understand failure as part of the process on the way to new knowledge. In fact, when a scientist thinks they have made a discovery, one of the first things they do is put it our for peer review and ask others to help them see what they are missing. They want to know if they have made a mistake or if they failed so they can try again. Though they want to be accurate, the point is not to be right for the sake of being right, as much as it is to keep learning.

The Magi—the scientists–did not make the journey because they were sure of what they were going to find. They paid attention to the night sky and planned their actions to the best of their knowledge. Then they followed their theories and their hearts across the desert to find the child.

The shepherds, we are told, ran into town fueled by joy and amazement. They were serenaded by an angel choir in the middle of the night. What else could they do but run into town and find the baby? The Magi were a different story. They were motivated by more than impulse. What they saw in the sky was not so easily identifiable. They studied the stars nightly and noticed the changes. When they saw whatever astronomical event piqued their imaginations, they planned a journey and then they set out to see who they could find. Their decision to find the child was fueled by inquisitiveness, imagination, hope, courage, and tenacity.

This trip that has fed the imaginations of our Christmas traditions was risky and ripe for failure. They traveled to a country that was under foreign occupation and had the audacity to go ask the king for directions. They traveled on remote desert roads carrying expensive gifts. They traveled a long way without knowing what or who they would find. And then they had to flee for their lives after they saw the child because the king felt threatened by their news.

And so we mark the end of the Christmas season with a reminder that, even though our lives may not take us across the country in the middle of the night, we can learn to be inquisitive, to pay attention to details, to ask good questions, and to be willing to move in unfamiliar directions.

In a world where we have a lot that we don’t understand and so much that feels difficult, it is tempting to hold on to what we know or what feels comfortable rather than risking the journey to see what else God might have in store for us. In a world where things change so quickly and we feel flooded by information, it is tempting to decide we know what is right and dig in there. In a world where so much feels uncertain, it is tempting to decide we have to take care of ourselves first, rather than making sure everyone has enough.

In my article for the Bell Buoy this month I quoted a poem from Quaker theologian and mystic Howard Thurman that has been the benediction for Christmastide since I learned of it several years ago.

The Work of Christmas

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among others,
To make music in the heart.

One of my favorite songwriters, Jason Isbell, wrote these words that have played in my head more times than I can recall and carry a similar tenacity:

I know you’re tired and you’re not sleeping well
uninspired and likely mad as hell
but wherever you are
I hope the high road takes you home again
to the world you want to live in

As we journey together to find Christ in 2022 may we have the inquisitiveness, imagination, hope, courage, and tenacity to take the high road to build a world we want to live in, to do the work of Christmas so that everyone belongs, and to risk being wrong in the name of Love. Amen.

Peace,
Milton