don't eat alone

I preached this morning at the First Church of Christ, Congregational in East Haddam, Connecticut. They are a wonderful congregation. The text was Luke 1:67-79: Zechariah’s words after his son, John, was born. Here’s what I had to say.

Our scripture this morning picks up in the middle of a story, which I guess is the case most any Sunday morning. In that way, our worship is a lot like our lives: we are always in the middle of the story—and we don’t have time to catch up on all of the context, otherwise we would be really late for lunch. But let’s look at a couple of things.

Zechariah was a small-town priest and also a new father. He was married to Elizabeth who had just given birth. Their son would grow up to be John the Baptist. Because they were both older, Zechariah had responded skeptically when the angel told Elizabeth she would have a baby, and, as a consequence he had been mute for her entire pregnancy. Elizabeth had nine months of silence, as far as he was concerned—which may not have been bad news, necessarily. Zechariah kept everything bottled up until the baby appeared and, when asked what the boy would be named, he scribbled, “His name is John” on a tablet. Then, according to the verses we read, he just kept going because his heart overflowed with thanksgiving.

The first part of his song, as it’s often called, is a history lesson recounting how God acted in the lives of David and Abraham. But when he gets to the second verse, he talks directly to his new son, telling him that he will grow up to be a prophet and lead people to find forgiveness and then, in most translations, he says,

“By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.”
That’s the part that got me this week: the tender mercy of our God.

One of the dictionaries I looked at said the word mercy has fallen out of use over the last couple of hundred years. It is not a word we use much, other than in church. It means “showing compassion or forgiveness toward someone that it is in your power to harm or punish.” Some of the synonyms include generosity and kindness. The root of the word comes from the Old French word merci—the word they now use to say thank you. From the start, it seems, mercy and gratitude are connected.

If you think that’s interesting—and I hope you do—let me tell you what I learned about the Greek word translated as “tender.” It literally means intestinal. I’m guessing you didn’t think that is what I would say. But where we think of the heart as the seat of our emotions, the Hebrews talked about the bowels–the gut—as the, well, heart of everything. Maybe that’s why the Bible doesn’t contain many great love songs.

When I hear the word tender, words like gentle, soft, or delicate come to mind. Not heavy-handed. But I don’t think that is what Zechariah was singing about. He was talking about the visceral, gutsy compassion of God. John the Baptist was the one who was going to prepare the way for Jesus, the Word Made Flesh. The hope Zachariah saw in his little boy was earthy and tenacious. God was not sending good wishes from afar; God was landing right in the middle of us like a stomach punch.

I was at a Christian festival last summer and saw someone wearing a t-shirt that said, “Compassion is Badass.” Maybe that is the modern translation of tender mercy. We are living in a time when what passes for public discourse is damaging and dehumanizing. It feels like almost everyone one is talking, even shouting, and few are listening. It takes guts to do more than shout at one another or label one another. It is risky to reach out. It is costly to be generous. It takes courage—or maybe faithfulness is a better word—to be vulnerable. And to be grateful.

Our worship guide reminds us that in the lectionary calendar today is “The Reign of Christ Sunday”—the last Sunday before Advent begins, and we start telling the story over again. It’s hard not to hear the title as ironic in some sense. We have lots of hymns that sing about Christ as King, but what monarchs do and what Jesus did seem far removed from one another. Jesus ate with people and walked with them and talked with them. He listened and wept and told stories. He didn’t raise an army or garner power or play to his base. Instead, he showed what visceral compassion looks like in everyday life.

Pádraig Ó Tuama is an Irish poet and theologian who has spent his life waging peace. I want to lean into his words this morning in a poem called “Shaking Hands.”

Shaking Hands

Because what’s the alternative?
Because of courage.
Because of loved ones lost.
Because no more.
Because it’s a small thing; shaking hands; it happens every day.
Because I heard of one man whose hands haven’t stopped shaking since a market day in Omagh.
Because it takes a second to say hate, but it takes longer, much longer, to be a great leader.
Much, much longer.

Because shared space without human touching doesn’t amount to much.
Because it’s easier to speak to your own than to hold the hand of someone whose side has been previously described, proscribed, denied.
Because it is tough.
Because it is tough.
Because it is meant to be tough, and this is the stuff of memory, the stuff of hope, the stuff of gesture, and meaning and leading.
Because it has taken so, so long.
Because it has taken land and money and languages and barrels and barrels of blood.

Because lives have been lost.
Because lives have been taken.

Because to be bereaved is to be troubled by grief.
Because more than two troubled peoples live here.
Because I know a woman whose hand hasn’t been shaken since she was a man.
Because shaking a hand is only a part of the start.
Because I know a woman whose touch calmed a man whose heart was breaking.
Because privilege is not to be taken lightly.

Because this just might be good.
Because who said that this would be easy?
Because some people love what you stand for, and for some, if you can, they can.
Because solidarity means a common hand.
Because a hand is only a hand; so hang onto it.

So join your much discussed hands.
We need this; for one small second.
So touch.
So lead.

Whomever we come in contact with today or tomorrow or next week, we will walk into the middle of their story. We won’t know all the context. But when the checkout person is gruff, or the customer service representative appears not to care, or the server makes a mistake; when our kid gets a bad grade, or a friend disappoints us, or things are tense around the Thanksgiving table because we don’t know what to talk about, remember we are created in the image of our God, who is a God of visceral compassion, of gutsy generosity, and we can live into that image by shaking hands, or maybe by just passing the potatoes instead of passing judgment.

Let us join hands. The world needs this. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

I preached this morning at our church in Guilford. My text was Hebrews 12:1-2. Here’s what I had to say.

I am not a runner.

I never have been. When I was in eighth grade, we had a school-wide track meet in which everyone was expected to participate. I signed up for whatever race it was that we only had to run one lap. As I rounded the last turn–in last place–my mother said I blew a bubble with the gum in my mouth. In tenth grade, we were in Texas and had to participate in the President’s physical fitness program–this time I had to do the hundred yard dash. I tied for last place. After we finished, I learned that the boy I tied had a permanent leg injury.

Like I said, i am not a runner. So there is a touch of irony in the fact that our scripture this morning is about running the race that is set before us. After spending a whole chapter describing people who had been faithful to God, the writer of Hebrews turns to say it is our turn to run. Listen for the word of God in our passage this morning.

Our passage begins with the word “therefore,” which means it is dependent on what came before it, even though it’s the first verse of a new chapter. Hebrews 11 begins with a definition of faith–faith means putting our full confidence in the things we hope for, it means being certain of things we cannot see–and then gives a concise history of some of those whose lives were marked by their faith in God: Abel, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Gideon; the list is not exhaustive. We could name Ruth, Naomi, Rahab, Hagar, and even then there would be others. The list ends with these words:

Not one of these people, even though their lives of faith were exemplary, got their hands on what was promised. God had a better plan for us: that their faith and our faith would come together to make one completed whole, their lives of faith not complete apart from ours.

And then—

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the author and goal of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.

If the writer of Hebrews had known Americans would be reading their words, I’m not sure they would have used a race as the primary metaphor because when we hear the word race our first response is to ask, “Who won?” We are bred for competition. As Vince Lombardi said, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

But this race is not about winning. A better connection is to think of something like the Relay for Life, which is a twenty-four hour fundraising event for the American Cancer Society. Teams work together to keep someone on the track for an entire day and night to both raise money for and show solidarity with those have cancer.

The race of faith is a relay of life, if you will. We are running with all those who have come before us; we are running for those who will follow; we are running together right now. Our task is to finish our leg, to be faithful to our calling, and to be mindful of all that connects us.

To run well, we have to “lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely.” I notice the writer doesn’t say, “Lose weight,” though that might be helpful advice. Instead, they say. “Lay it aside.” And they make a distinction between the things that weigh us down and the sin that clings so closely. To elaborate on that, I want to tell you a story I have told some of you before.

When we were living in Boston, I went back to Baylor University for Homecoming and learned my father 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.”

At his funeral, I told that story and then said, “I learned he was a predicament, too.” We had years of struggle, but we were both able to heed the advice of the text and lay aside both the weights and the sins that divided us.

We have to learn the difference between what weighs us down, as in what things are done to us, and our sin–the choices and decisions we make that do damage to us and to others. When I think of weights, I think of the depression I live with, or my hearing loss. Over the years, Ginger and I have both used this passage in working with young people. When we have talked about the weights, inevitably some have come to find us to tell stories of abuse and neglect.

I don’t think the writer of Hebrews is being flippant when they say, lay it aside. The sense of the verb is like taking off a garment or shedding something. Some experiences in our lives leave deep and abiding wounds. Some conditions or situations with which we live are chronic. We all have predicaments that are not easily discarded. But looking at those who have come before us and had weights of their own, and looking around at those who run with us and share the weight we carry, let us not allow the wounds and weights to define us.

We can say the same about the pain we inflict on ourselves and others with both the things we have done and the things we have left undone. Our sins are not the last word. Don’t let them distract you, says the writer. In our smartphone world, we understand distraction perhaps better than they did. Lay aside our sin–can you hear that in the same tone as someone you love saying, “Put down your phone and pay attention to me”? We can ask for forgiveness. We can make amends. That doesn’t mean the consequences or the scars disappear necessarily, but, again, our sins do not have to be what defines us, or what distracts us.

We have a race to run and it requires persistence. Jesus is our model for how to hang in there. In his gospel, John tells the story of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples on the night before he was executed rather than the Last Supper. John says of Jesus, “Knowing he had come from God and he was going to God, Jesus took a towel and wrapped it around his waist, bent down and washed the feet of the disciples.” Jesus’ sense of his source and goal—coming from God and going to God—let him lay aside the weight of the world as it came crashing down and offer love to his friends in a tangible way because he knew his death was not the last word.

The writer of Hebrews says Jesus is both source and goal of the race we are running, which is another way of saying we, too, have come from God and are going to God. We are running in a big circle, and, like those who have run before us, we can trust that nothing can separate us from the love of God anywhere along the way.

Therefore, let us run the race.

Last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. Many remember it as the games where Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists during the medal ceremony. Some may recall that many of the athletes were affected by the altitude. The story i remember most is that of John Stephen Akhwari, a Tanzanian marathon runner who came in last.

Akhwari had muscle cramps early because of the altitude, but he kept running. About a third of the way through, he got caught up in a group of runners jockeying for position and he was knocked down on the pavement. He dislocated his knee and injured his shoulder. He kept running after they attended to him. The winner of the marathon, Mamo Wolde of Ethiopia, finished in 2:20:26. Akhwari finished over an hour later. The medal ceremony was over when word came that he was still running and a TV crew went out to find him. He entered the Olympic stadium after sunset. Over three thousand thousand people stayed to watch him cross the finish line.

After the race an interviewer asked why he had kept going when he knew he was last. He answered, “My country did not send me five thousand miles to start the race; they sent me five thousand miles to finish the race.”

Though one of the ways we can think about the race metaphor is to think about our whole lives, the truth is that life is full of finish lines. We are entered in more than one event. When the race we are running right now is over, there will be another. You may feel like you are entered in several at once. Whatever the race, whatever we feel is at stake, we have come from God and we are going to God. There is not a step we take that falls outside of the love of God.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, since we know we have come from God and we are going to God, let us deal with what weighs down and repent and reconcile for the impediments we have caused and finish the race, following in Jesus’ steps, so that we like him can say, “It is finished.” Well, this one is . . . Amen.

Peace,
Milton

I’m preaching tomorrow at North Madison Congregational Church UCC, a wonderful congregation in the next town over from Guilford. In light of all that has gone on in the past couple of weeks, and also in light of Ginger’s trip to El Paso, I am using Isaiah 58:9-12 rather than the lectionary passage for the day. Since I am using an amalgam of different translations, I included the verses here.

My sermon title is “Repairers of the Breach.” The post title is how I wish I could begin my sermon.

If you remove the yoke of oppression from among you,
    the finger-pointing, the mean and inflammatory speech;
If you open your heart to the hungry,
    and provide abundantly for those who are afflicted,
    your light will shine in your despair,
    and your gloom will be like the noonday.
God will guide you continually
    and provide for you, even in parched places,
   and make your bones strong.
You will be like a watered garden,
    like a spring of water that won’t run dry.
Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
    you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
You will be called Repairers of the Breach,
    Restorer of Livable Streets.

The last time I was here, I told you that Ginger, my wife, was on her way to El Paso, Texas to take part in a protest at one of the detention centers. She got back home last Wednesday night. On Saturday, we heard the news of the mass shooting there and it hit us a little closer to home. When we looked on the map we saw that her hotel was only a couple of block from the Walmart where people were killed as they shopped. She had walked past it in the evenings. She called the hotel to see if folks there were alright and the woman who had driven her shuttle bus answered. They were unharmed, but they were shaken.

The next morning came news of the shooting in Dayton. Barely a week before El Paso, there was a mass shooting in at a Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California. In all three cases, the terrorists who attacked and people had been exploring “violent ideologies,” according to news reports. Someone asked the man in California why he was doing it and he said, “Because I’m really angry.” The white man in El Paso was trying to kill Latinix people because he saw them as an “invasion”—words he learned from the partisan rhetoric around immigration—the kind of “mean and inflammatory speech” Isaiah condemned.

Once again, we are traumatized. We are left angry, confused, and scared. Even though mass shootings have long ago ceased to be unusual, it still feels like the world has shifted and requires a different response. Layer on to that the polarization of the political discussion on just about any issue, and it is hard to know both what to say and how to say it. If this room of people is like any other sanctuary on the Shoreline, we share a variety of opinions on the important issues of our time. We are not in unison in how we vote, or how we choose our candidates. Often, we are wary of speaking up because we are not sure how we will be either received and perceived.

So I am asking us to risk together this morning. I know the good New England way is to not talk about religion or politics, but avoiding a discussion—not a debate, a discussion—doesn’t give us a chance to build a true beloved community. The verses we read talk about being “the restorers of streets to live in.” How can we build community if we are not honest with each other? How can we come together if we cannot learn to talk about hard things? There is more to faith than worshipping together on Sunday—that is actually at the heart of today’s passage.

The verses we read from Isaiah pick up in the middle of the story. After generations of captivity in Babylon, the Hebrew people had returned to their land and were rebuilding their lives. They had lived in captivity for generations. They were traumatized. In the midst of all that had been lost and all they were trying to build, they had committed themselves to worshipping God—by observing a weekly fast—as a way to show they wanted to make Israel great again. The prophet showed up to tell them God was not impressed because on the days they were not fasting, they were overworking and underpaying their employees, they were arguing bitterly among themselves, and acting duplicitously in their relationships.

Isaiah then drew a different picture of what it looked like to be the people of God, which Carol Anne read. The verses start with conditions—

If you remove the yoke of oppression from among you,
    the finger-pointing, the mean and inflammatory speech;
If you open your heart to the hungry,
    and provide abundantly for those who are afflicted,
    your light will shine in your despair,
    and your gloom will be like the noonday.

The prophet was not saying God would only love them if they did what God said. Isaiah said their behavior would give God room to act among and through them. Their acts of justice and compassion would release God’s healing Spirit in the world.

God will guide you continually
    and provide for you, even in parched places,
   and make your bones strong.
You will be like a watered garden,
    like a spring of water that won’t run dry.
Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
    you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
You will be called Repairers of the Breach,
    Restorer of Livable Streets.

Breach, in military terms, means a break in protection, as in, “the wall has been breached.” A is also “a break in relationship.”

Repair, as you know, means to fix or mend, to make good, to put right, to put back together.

To repair the breach, then is to restore the relationship. It means to do what we have to do to put things right, to mend what is broken, to create a place where everyone belongs.

When we talk about repairing the breach, the call to action seems obvious: we go to the border, we work to feed the hungry, to push for living wages, we work to make sure all children have access to good education, we work to build an economy that doesn’t allow a few to prosper on the backs of the poor, we work to come to terms with our privilege, and we pledge ourselves to do what we need to do to dismantle racism and discrimination on all fronts.

Yes. All of those things. Yes.

And there is another breach to talk about, another healing that needs to take place that is more difficult. We have to figure out how to repair the breach between us and our siblings who feel angry and displaced and who act out that anger in ways that terrorize and discriminate against those whom they see as not like them.

During the last campaign, one of the labels aimed at an opposing group was that they were a “bag of deplorables.” I wish I could say that was the only insult thrown around during the campaign, but it was not. I mention it here because it came to mind as another example of the “mean and inflammatory speech” Isaiah told the Hebrews to stop.

We need to stop it too, whatever the discussion. Ginger quotes one of her former pastors who said, “Actions speak louder than words, but words speak more clearly.” Words that characterize people as “invasive” or deplorable” entice us to divide our nation into “us” and “them,” so that we can more easily dismiss or discard people because they are not like us. That kind of approach doesn’t heal anything; it does damage—to everyone.

This week, in response to the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez offered another approach:

“Here’s what we have to say to all of America’s men and women falling in the grips of hatred and white supremacy: Come back. It’s not too late. You have neighbors and loved ones waiting, holding space for you. And we will love you back.”

“There is a mother waiting for you, I know it. I know there’s a teacher waiting for you, saying, ‘What happened to my kid? What happened to my friend?’ And we will always be here and hold space for you to come back. We will love you back. You are not too far gone.”

Her words challenge me because she chose to offer an invitation, rather than a condemnation. Her words convict me, to use a good Baptist word, of my sin of dividing people into us and them—which is another way of saying who I think is worth listening to. It is far easier for me to think of the refugees and migrants at the border as part of my community than it is to work to feel connected those who foment hate, or those who are so driven by fear that they lash out at people not like themselves. I want to write them off, but that is no way to repair the breach. I only make the divide deeper. We are called to repair the breach—to rebuild the relationship—whatever that breach is.

That means more than “agreeing to disagree.” It means more than correcting their Facebook posts. It means working to find a way to connect, to listen, to invite. It means, as the prophet Micah said, to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God. It’s that last phrase—walk humbly—that may be the first key to how we repair the breach to walk humbly with God means to walk humbly with one another. It means, “Love your enemies; be good to those who hate you”–to quote Jesus.

When people ask me about the United Church of Christ, I have a little spiel in response. I say we ordained the first African-American man to pastor a white congregation before the Civil War; we began ordaining women sixty years before they could vote; and we ordained the first openly gay man in 1970, when the American Psychiatric Association still listed homosexuality as mental illness. That is a rich an important heritage, after which we should probably repeat again, “Walk humbly with our God.”

My other repeatable statement about the UCC is that if Christianity were a neighborhood, we’d be the last house on the left. Maybe that’s where it starts—in our neighborhoods, both literally and metaphorically. Who do we know on your street, or in our neighborhood, or in our town stands on the other side of breach? What can we do to make our street livable for all of us? How can we incarnate the love of Christ in a way that brings healing? What questions can we ask? What word can we offer?

These are questions we can ask about our relationships, whether it is someone who may be undocumented, or someone in a service job that feels invisible, or someone who is so beaten down by the circumstances of life that they are lashing out, or someone so unaware of their privilege that they do unintentional harm. Whoever they are, they are us. There is no them. Whatever the breach, we are called to repair it. Amen.

Peace,
Milton