the grammar of togetherness

Here is the manuscript of the sermon I preached this morning at Pilgrim UCC here in Durham.

For many of us, text messaging is a part of life. There’s much of what comes with sending texts that works for me. I like being able to send and receive messages that don’t require I answer the phone. I like that I can make contact in situations where the phone would be disruptive. I like that people can text from the second floor of our house down to the kitchen to let me know what they need. Still, as one who loves language and spent many years as an English teacher, there’s a great deal about texting that drives me nuts beginning with the use of “texted” as the alleged past tense of an alleged verb to the rampant disregard for the need for correct spelling and punctuation.

(I can’t see Ginger right now, but I assume her expression is a combination of a smirk and an eye-roll.)

Punctuation makes a difference. If I say, “The panda eats shoots and leaves,” I am describing a vegetarian bear until I add commas -- then he becomes a brazen killer. The presence of the comma in the sentence, “Let’s eat, grandma” is the difference between an invitation and cannibalism. And though not quite as humorous, our understanding of today’s passage swings on the punctuation, along with a few participles.

Now I realize I am getting my geek on, but to aid our language study, I am going to ask you to do something out of the ordinary: please open your pew Bibles.

I need you to see this. Turn to Ephesians 5 and find your way down to our passage today, verses 15-21. If you will notice, the Bible in your hand has a paragraph break between verses 20 and 21. Here’s the thing: in the Greek, it’s one big, long-running sentence that ends with verse 21. For Paul, how we sing and worship together was inextricably tied to how we relate to one another.

Let us bring fresh ears and listen again to the passage:

Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.

As we look more closely at the passage, let us recall what Ginger said last week: the church at Ephesus was a strong church. Paul was writing to people who were committed to incarnating their faith in their daily lives to challenge them to an even more profound encounter with God. So he called them to be thoughtful, wise, and filled with the Spirit. I would like to spend our time together this morning focusing on that last admonition: be filled with the Spirit.

And I would like to keep my geek on for a few minutes and talk about the theological implications of the participle. The final sentence of our reading has four participles that describe what the call to be filled with the Spirit means:

• addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs;
• singing and making melody to God;
• giving thanks in all things;
• submitting to one another in Christ.

“Addressing” seems an odd verb choice when it comes to singing. I get this image of the lounge singer saying, “This one’s going out to a very special lady right here in the front row” before he sings some worn out standard. But the word means our manner of speaking to one another; our personal bearing in conversation. Singing together as a congregation is one of the ways we tighten the bonds, we unite ourselves -- even before it becomes a way to offer ourselves to God. Randy Cooper writes,

Singing is more than making a joyful noise. God has given us singing and worshiping to break down categories of gender and age and race and class. In singing and worshiping, we enter the life of God through the Holy Spirit. If God’s Triune life is indeed one of mutual submission and love among the [Creator, Christ,] and Holy Spirit, then as we become one body in Christ we share in God’s eternal “singing” . . . Music and singing can be a means of grace that makes the Body one.

Our singing together -- our addressing one another in song -- then, becomes our worship: we sing together, making melodies for God. The hymns we sing together in this room are not just traveling music or melodic segues; they are at the heart of what we are doing together, actually and in metaphor because the first act of singing is not making sound but listening. For the melody. For the harmonies. Listening so we can sing our parts and help build the song.

As I lean into the metaphor, I understand not all of us sing well. Perhaps that is why the psalmist enjoined us to make a joyful noise. Our making melody together is not about everyone hitting the note as it is about as raising our voices together as we worship the God who created us for one another. The way we address one another, how we show our regard and deference for one another, begins in how well we are listening.

And if you think singing is the hard part, look at the next phrase: giving thanks always and for everything to God in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Two things come to mind for me here. One is the cliche that we are to live in “an attitude of gratitude.” Yeah, I know it’s cheesy, but it’s pretty close to the mark. The other thing that came to mind is one of my favorite poems by W. S. Merwin entitled “Listen.”

With the night falling we are saying thank you

We are stopping on the bridge to bow from the railings

We are running out of the glass rooms

With our mouths full of food to look at the sky

And say thank you

We are standing by the water looking out

In different directions

Back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging

After funerals we are saying thank you

After the news of the dead

Whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

In a culture up to its chin in shame

Living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you

Over telephones we are saying thank you

In doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators

Remembering wars and the police at the back door

And the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you

In the banks that use us we are saying thank you

With the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable

Unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

With the animals dying around us

Our lost feelings we are saying thank you

With the forests falling faster than the minutes

Of our lives we are saying thank you

With the words going out like cells of a brain

With the cities growing over us like the earth

We are saying thank you faster and faster

With nobody listening we are saying thank you

We are saying thank you and waving

Dark though it is

"We are saying thank you dark though it is." And we are not alone. We are singing together and giving thanks together in order that we might be filled to intoxication with the Spirit of God. And in that flow comes the final phrase: submitting ourselves to one another in Christ.

Submit is a difficult verb to me because it carries such a notion of over and under. To submit feels like giving up or giving in. Capitulating. J. B. Phillips offers a different view by translating the phrase as “‘fitting in with’ each other, because of your common reverence for Christ.” Once again, the phrase has to do with how we learn to live together: how we fit together. We worship together, we draw out the gratitude in one another, and we work to learn how we fit together as the Body of Christ. We are, as the old song says, one in the Spirit. In my Baptist days we sang a chorus that said,

We are one in the bond of Love
We are one in the bond of Love
We have joined our spirits to the Spirit of God
We are one in the bond of Love

That’s pretty good four line theology. If we are going to be filled with the Spirit of God, we have to give the Spirit something to fill. As we learn how we fit together, we create a vessel which God can fill to change our world -- and to continue to transform us into thoughtful, thankful people making melody together in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

the imagination of grace

“The Imagination of Grace”
A Sermon for Pilgrim United Church of Christ, Durham
by Milton Brasher-Cunningham
Exodus 3:1-15; Romans 12:9-21

Perhaps one of the reasons I like stories about Moses is he was as rootless as I am.
He was born of a Hebrew mother while she was being held in exile with her people in Egypt, adopted by the Pharaoh’s daughter and given an Egyptian name, and then ended up on the run because he killed an Egyptian guard trying to defend one of the Hebrew slaves. The reasons for my life of moving around are not quite so colorful, but I resonate with his struggle to find his place. We pick up his story this morning as he is herding his father-in-law’s flocks as a means of laying low – of taking care of himself – when God shows up in a bush that was burning, but was not burning up to call Moses out of his anonymity and self-absorption and back into community: “Go and bring my people out of Egypt.”

From the time I first heard this story as a child, I have been fascinated with Moses’ ability to talk back to God. After seeing the burning bush and hearing God’s call, Moses responds, “But why me?” The flames did not burn off either his self-absorption or his insecurity. He was wounded and hurt and alone and struggled to hear the pain of the Hebrew people over his own. Besides, what good had it done to stand up before? Why couldn’t God pick someone else?

Moses talked back to God, and God answered, calling Moses out of himself, to which Moses responded with a second question: “Whom shall I say sent me?” And – this was one of my favorite parts of the story as a kid – God replied, tell them my name is I AM WHO I AM. To the ears of a young boy, God sounded an awful lot like Popeye: “I am what I am and that’s all that I am . . . .” Though translating exactly how God was identifying God’s self presents some challenges in translating from Hebrew to English, one way to read it is God said, “Tell them the verb TO BE sent you.” Tell them you’ve been sent by the Present Tense. Somewhere in God’s answer, Moses moved the focus of his life from his pain and his past and found the courage to listen and respond to God’s call to solidarity in the present tense with the pain of the people in bondage. The story finished quite dramatically, as you know, with Moses leading the people out of Egypt and into freedom.

It’s easy, I suppose, to see the story as finished there, as though the pattern is God sees a problem and calls someone to come forth and fix it. But Moses led the people out of Egypt into the wilderness, into wandering around for forty years trying to figure out who they were together. Life, even in Bible stories, has never been simple.

And what of our present tense? As we are gathered here, Hurricane Irene is lashing her way up the East Coast leaving damage and despair in her wake. People in Japan are still hurting from the earthquake and tsunami from months ago. Over a year later, thousands of people in Haiti are still living outdoors. Birmingham will take years to recover from the tornadoes. New Orleans still bears the scars of Katrina. In Somalia and Kenya, people are dying in a famine that goes largely unnoticed by the rest of the world. The genocides in Darfur and Congo continue as well. Our congressional leaders act in a way that makes middle school playground fights seem mature and they offer policies that have little regard for the poor in our country even as they do what they can to protect the rich. Our schools suffer from a lack of funding and concern. Ginger came back from Israel with pictures of the forty-foot high concrete wall the Israelis built to isolate the Palestinians, while we build walls and fences with our rhetoric about immigration in our country. Our city struggles with crime and violence. Our own faith partner is homeless and unemployed. And we could go around the room and speak of enough pain and grief and struggle to keep us all wondering what to do next.

How should we then live? In the face of all that is a part of our lives, who is God calling us to be in a world we can’t fix?

When I was a hospital chaplain in Dallas many years ago, my supervisor was talking to us about who we were to be in that universe of grief and illness we could not fix and he quoted a line from Alice in Wonderland: “Don’t just do something. Stand there.” Our call, he said, was to be present. To stay past the point of our comfort. To trust God could use us in ways we could not see.

To live in the present tense means, first, to stay present. Karl Barth suggested the best way we could live out our faith was to live with the Bible in one hand and the New York Times in the other. The passage Bob read from Romans offers more specifics on how we might do so. Listen again, this time from the translation called The Message:

Love from the center of who you are; don't fake it. Run for dear life from evil; hold on for dear life to good. Be good friends who love deeply; practice playing second fiddle. Don't burn out; keep yourselves fueled and aflame. Be alert servants of the Master, cheerfully expectant. Don't quit in hard times; pray all the harder. Help needy Christians; be inventive in hospitality. Bless your enemies; no cursing under your breath. Laugh with your happy friends when they're happy; share tears when they're down. Get along with each other; don't be stuck-up. Make friends with nobodies; don't be the great somebody. Don't hit back; discover beauty in everyone. If you've got it in you, get along with everybody. Don't insist on getting even; that's not for you to do. "I'll do the judging," says God. "I'll take care of it." Our Scriptures tell us that if you see your enemy hungry, go buy that person lunch, or if he's thirsty, get him a drink. Your generosity will surprise him with goodness. Don't let evil get the best of you; get the best of evil by doing good.

Several of the commentators I read this week pointed out that there are over thirty imperatives in this passage, which might lead us to respond much like Moses did: “Who are we to live like that?” It makes me think of the words of G. K. Chesterton, who said, “The Christian faith has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult, and left untried.” I’m not sure I’m willing to go quite that far, but he’s on to something. God’s grace calls us to live beyond ourselves and into community, which calls us to a commitment to looking for new eyes and new ways of thinking. Listen to this story from Shane Claiborne, a Christian activist.

I was in Baghdad in March 2003, where I lived as a Christian and as a peacemaker during the "shock-and-awe" bombing. I spent time with families, volunteered in hospitals and learned to sing "Amazing Grace" in Arabic.

There is one image of the time in Baghdad that will never leave me. As the bombs fell from the sky and smoke filled the air, one of the doctors in the hospital held a little girl whose body was riddled with missile fragments. He threw his hands in the air and said, "This violence is for a world that has lost its imagination." Then he looked square into my eyes, with tears pouring from his, and said, "Has your country lost its imagination?"

We, are who are created in the image of God, in the image of the verb TO BE, are called to live with the imagination of those who have been captured by the wondrous raging fury that we call the grace of God, trusting that the God who burns bushes and opens hearts can use our hands and feet and minds and hearts to bring healing in our world. What the commentators called imperatives are invitations to the imaginative.

Katherine Matthews Huey writes:

I'm the first to admit that I find Paul's words hard to live by, but then that was the point about grace, wasn't it? If we opened ourselves up to the Spirit of God at work in the world, through us, loving one another, listening to one another, hoping and sharing and forgiving and not being so proud and self-righteous, welcoming one another (and their perspectives), returning gentleness and kindness for every wrong, well, . . . it would be a new kind of triumph over evil: by civility and hospitality rather than by force. Of course, it would also be a whole new way of doings things, wouldn't it? And wouldn't it be a beautiful thing to behold?

“Earth's crammed with heaven,” wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “and every common bush afire with God: but only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
the rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries.” Let us pray, as we live in a world ablaze in need and pain, that we would see with the eyes of those doused in the imagination of grace, of those who know we are called to live life together in every circle of our lives from our families to our neighbors to the connections to those we don’t even know. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

what love looks like

“What Love Looks Like”
Matthew 5:38-48
A Sermon for Pilgrim United Church of Christ
by Milton Brasher-Cunningham
February 20, 2011

In these weeks leading up to Lent, we have been traveling through the Sermon on the Mount, as it has been called down through Christian history. Early in Jesus’ ministry, it seems, he stood in front of a large crowd who had gathered, trying to understand who he was and what he was calling them to do, and he laid it out for them, and for us, in terms so clear that we have struggled with them ever since. Jesus was leaning into the Jewish law, part of which we heard in the passage from Leviticus earlier, and then taking it beyond those boundaries, beyond what felt appropriate, beyond what seemed even possible. Hear the passage again, this time from The Message:

Here's another old saying that deserves a second look: “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.” Is that going to get us anywhere? Here's what I propose: “Don't hit back at all.” If someone strikes you, stand there and take it. If someone drags you into court and sues for the shirt off your back, gift wrap your best coat and make a present of it. And if someone takes unfair advantage of you, use the occasion to practice the servant life. No more tit-for-tat stuff. Live generously.

You're familiar with the old written law, “Love your friend,” and its unwritten companion, “Hate your enemy.” I'm challenging that. I'm telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves. This is what God does. [God] gives [the] best—the sun to warm and the rain to nourish—to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty. If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do that. If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal? Any run-of-the-mill sinner does that.

In a word, what I'm saying is, Grow up. You're kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.

I like the way Eugene Peterson deals with Jesus’ admonition to be perfect as God is perfect: “grow up,” he says. The Greek word unfortunately translated as “perfect” has more of a sense of wholeness or maturity; be “grown up” is not a bad way to say it. Think of the world as something other than a junior high playground fight. The point is not to get even. In fact, when we read Jesus’ sermon, the point is not even to win. The point is to love one another as God loves us and them. Every last one another.

And I think it’s hard to come to terms with what Rich Mullins called, “the reckless raging fury that we call the love of God.” It’s hard for us as human beings in general, and I think it’s particularly difficult for us as Americans, because our society is built on the premise that the only ones who matter are those who have fought their way to the top. “We’re Number One!” is our national motto, engrained deep in the muscle memory of our culture. Jesus didn’t talk about winning; he talked about loving in a visceral and tangible sense: don’t hit back, don’t seek revenge, don’t live with resentment, love your enemies. Ronald Goetz says,

God’s love is like the rain -- refreshing when it falls in moderation and with regularity, but terrifying and destructive when it comes in blowing, blinding sheets.

Jesus said it falls on us all -- and the point is to make sure everyone gets soaking wet.

The larger applications of the specifics in these verses are the most apparent. Since we live in a world desperately in need of both dentures and guide dogs, the futility of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” seems obvious, and yet we continue to choose retribution over reconciliation at most every turn. So it matters that we say out loud, and to ourselves, that torture is wrong, that the way we treat many of our prisoners in this country is unconscionable, that the death penalty should be abolished.

When we hear Jesus’ words, we can call up images of the students sitting at the lunch counters in Greensboro, or the children being rolled by the water cannon in Birmingham, or Ghandi and his followers being beaten for trying make salt – all of which are visceral examples of Jesus’ admonitions, but where do we see ourselves in those words? In our culture today, which is paralyzed by polarities, bent on making sure our enemies get blamed, and becoming more and more determined to let our national “recovery” happen on the backs of the poor, how are we living out Jesus’ call to compassion and discipleship? How can we?

I think it is perhaps easier to apply Jesus’ words to larger societal issues than it is to talk about how to live nonviolently in office buildings and classrooms and homes and grocery store lines and, well, churches. Jesus did not say, “Blessed are the powerful,” or “Blessed are those in control,” or “Blessed are those who get their way.” At the root of our need for power and control is fear: fear of not being enough, fear of being taken advantage of, fear of losing, fear of not being remembered, to name a few. There is something in us that worries about being forgotten.

I knew a man many years ago who was an excellent guitarist and a studio musician in Nashville. His name was John Goin. He said the trajectory for his profession went like this:

who is John Goin?
get me John Goin.
get me a young John Goin.
who is John Goin.

We will not be remembered by what we built or what we conquered or who we beat. We will be remembered by how we loved. Don Henley was right when he wrote:

I’ve been trying to get down to the heart of the matter
But my will gets weak and my thoughts seem to scatter
But I think it’s about forgiveness – even if you don’t love me anymore.

“How many times should we forgive someone for the same offense?” The disciples asked Jesus. “Seven?”

“Seventy times seven,” was his answer. Grow up and love your enemies.

Mary Gordon points out that, “Nothing in Jesus’ diction could be paraphrased by the words “it would be best if” . . . or even “it would be good if.” His prescriptions are detailed, specific, and unequivocal. . . . But there is a certain thrill to the impossible prescription. And isn’t it possible that only the vision of the impossible makes the great a possibility? Without the challenge of the impossible, would we be doomed to the mediocre?”

Knowing what love looks like, how can we settle for less?

I must say, the more I dealt with this passage during the week, the more one face came to mind when I tried to think of those whom I know who understand this kind of love more than I, and that was our own John Blackburn. I knew him as one who made a point to find me in coffee hour, who was dedicated to teaching English on Wednesday nights, who was passionate about how our faith frames our view of creation. I didn’t know until after he died that he had been Provost at Duke, among many other things. He was what love looks like: full of grace and compassion.

May we all have the courage to grow up and grow into our calling to love one another as God loves us. Every last one of us. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

the last word

I preached this morning at our church here in Durham as the culmination of a study we did on the Book of Job. This is the text of my sermon, "The Last Word."

Only four Saturdays have passed since a group of us gathered to study the story of Job together, and yet way more than a month of life seems to have passed by since then. One of the things that has changed for me is I have returned to teaching high school English, which means I’m once again reading books with my students. My ninth grade class is reading Night, Elie Weisel’s personal account of surviving not one but five concentration camps as a teenager, finally being freed from Buchenwald by the Allied forces, but not before having lived through brutal and dehumanizing things that hit at the core of his faith. As he describes one experience he writes:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky. Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes. Never.

We read those words in class and I thought of Job and the string of surviving servants who showed up to tell him who and what had been destroyed. I thought of Job sitting on the garbage heap, scraping his open sores with a piece of broken pot as his wife implored him to “curse God and die.” I returned to our discussions around the tables in the Fellowship Hall where we listened to Job’s friends try to explain his suffering by blaming him or giving some sort of pat answer, but never really listening, never being willing to share the pain with him. And I wondered why his tragedy didn’t murder God or destroy his faith. “I know my Redeemer lives,” he said, even as he struggled to find God in the midst of his anguish.

We don’t have to look back to Job, or even look far to find similar examples of devastation. This morning, people in Mississippi are digging out from under the damage of the tornadoes that touched down there. The families and friends of the miners who died in West Virginia are gathering for a memorial service. They have still not found the eleven workers who were on the oil rig that blew up earlier this week. Though the stories are no longer attractive to our media, Haiti and Chile and China still live in the aftermath of earthquakes. Ginger and I were in New Orleans this week and heard people tell their stories of life after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. And we have not even talked about Darfur and Congo, AIDS, malaria, or those who starve to death daily in our world, as wellas the personal and overwhelming pain that comes with depression, or Alzheimer’s, or financial hardship, or severe illness.

It doesn’t take long in this life to get to a place where we ask where God is, as Job did, or seek to offer some sort of explanation as to why life has turned sour, as his friends were quick to do. “You’ve done something wrong,” they said to Job. “This must be your fault somehow because God wouldn’t do this to a good person.” “It’s your fault; repent and God will fix everything.”

Isn’t it great to have friends who care?

Job took all that was heaped upon him, including the lectures and advice, and kept calling God to show up and answer for what was going on. Finally, God did show up – or perhaps we are better to say God revealed God’s self because when God spoke the voice came “out of the whirlwind” – from the center of the struggle. God was in the middle of the storm, not as the cause, but as a Presence. And when God spoke, God did not say anything about Job’s sin or who was at fault or why Job had managed to pull the house down on himself and his family. God didn’t give any advice or offer any explanations at all. God asked questions.

Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place, so that it might take hold of the skirts of the earth, and the wicked be shaken out of it? . . . Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know all this. Where is the way to the dwelling of light, and where is the place of darkness, that you may take it to its territory and that you may discern the paths to its home? Have you entered the storehouses of the snow, or have you seen the storehouses of the hail, which I have reserved for the time of trouble, for the day of battle and war? What is the way to the place where the light is distributed, or where the east wind is scattered upon the earth?

God called Job to a different sense of perspective.

Yesterday marked the twentieth anniversary of the launching of the Hubble Telescope (as a follow up to our wedding, I’m sure). NPR has a wonderful story asking different scientists to pick out their favorite Hubble image over the years. One chose “The Ultra Deep Field,” which was taken by aiming the telescope at what appeared to be an empty patch in the night sky and left the lens open for about eleven days, soaking up all the light it could see and capturing the oldest light ever seen by humanity. The frame is full of tiny dots of light, each one, the astronomer said, containing a hundred million stars – all in a space we thought was empty.

“When I gaze into the night sky,” the psalmist wrote, “and see the wonders of your hand, who are we as humans that you are mindful of us?”

We are called to hold together the depth of pain and suffering that makes up our world, as we see at Auschwitz or in Rwanda or in the poverty of Haiti or the aftermath of Katrina along the Gulf Coast or in our personal struggles, and the wonder we have been shown by Hubble reminding us that if we leave our eyes open long enough in the dark the light, the ancient light as old as creation, will finally shine.

Francois Mauriac wrote in the foreword to Night,

We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear. All is grace. If the Almighty is the Almighty, the last word for each of us belongs to God.

All is grace. Listen closely: all is grace. We do not earn suffering anymore than we earn the love that God pours out on us from the moment we are breathed into existence. Life is difficult, sometimes even crushing, but not because we deserve to be crushed.

And our God is one who is acquainted with grief, who bears our grief, who never stops making stars, and who speaks out of the storm. Our God is one who responds to our cries, rather than simply answer our questions. Our God is stronger than death and destruction, more tenacious than any cancer or circumstance, more loving than any sense of alienation or worthlessness.

This is our Resurrection Story: all is grace; the last word for each of us belongs to God. And that word is Love: unfailing, unflinching, unending Love. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

breathe on me

Sometimes, the way we look at the world swings on a sentence.

A small, well chosen collection of words can change not only what we are reading or hearing, but also how we see and hear everything around us. The Great Gatsby holds (at least) one of those sentences for me, as Fitzgerald describes Gatsby looking across the bay at the green light that has mystified him and that he now knows shines on the dock at Daisy Buchanan’s house.

Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to a moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock.

And then comes the sentence:

His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

In nine words he shows us Gatsby’s slide from the heights of romance to the edge of despair and reminds us enchanted objects are fragile and fleeting. There is a certain sadness in love, in dreams, in being human that we all know to well and he named it in a sentence. One of the draws to reading the Gospels is they offer several such sentences that give glimpses of Jesus beyond what is readily apparent. They are bends in the road where we have to stop and think about what we have read, where we have to let the story dig a little deeper into our hearts and minds. One is Jesus’ encounter with the man at the pool who had been there for thirty-odd years hoping for his turn to go first into the angel-stirred waters that he might be healed. His physical handicap meant he moved slower than the rest and, thus, was never first. Jesus came upon him and, before he healed him, asked one question:

"Do you want to get well?"

The very asking reveals the answer might not be so readily apparent. Another favorite of mine reads almost like a throwaway phrase. After the feeding of the five thousand, Jesus goes off to pray and the disciples go fishing. Sometime in the middle of the night, a storm blows up on the Sea of Galilee. The disciples look up to see Jesus walking on the water in their direction, but the narrative reports:

He looked as if he would pass them by.

Yes, they called out to him and he climbed into the boat and calmed the waves. And I wonder if there isn’t something else to learn from this story that seems to say Jesus was out there walking for some other reason than saving his followers from a good soaking.

My favorite is in the foot washing scene John describes as part of the last night Jesus spent with his disciples before his crucifixion. He begins:

Knowing he had come from God and was going to God, he took a towel . . .

In eleven words, John articulates the context of all that we are and all that we do: we have come from God and we are going to God. That arc of life is what enabled Paul to claim nothing – absolutely nothing – can separate us from God’s love shown to us in Christ. As they gathered that night, Jesus knew he was a dead man walking. He knew what was coming next. He also knew from whence he had come and where he was going well enough to care for his friends and to rest in the Love that held them all.

Yesterday, my friend Terry preached at our church and showed me another sentence that I had not seen before, even though I had read the passage many times. He read from John 20 about one of Jesus’ resurrection appearances when he came through the locked door and found the frightened disciples in the Upper Room. Terry pointed to this sentence in the story:

And with that, he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

He went on to wonder how to unpack the sentence, which he described as a “Christian Breathing Ceremony.” Did Jesus say the words as he breathed? Did he breathe on them one at a time, or as a group? Did he breathe, and then speak? He went on to challenge us to consider the possibility of instituting a Sacrament of Breathing, much in the same way we have imitated Jesus’ words and actions in Communion, or for some in foot washing. And then he smiled.

“A little too intimate for you?” he asked. “Are you scared of halitosis?”

For both the Hebrews and the Greeks, the word for breath was also the word for spirit: ruach and pneuma, respectively. (The parallel exists in many other languages and religious traditions, I’m learning.) God breathed the universe into existence, breathed life into the lungs of the first humans; Jesus breathed the Spirit into his disciples. Hear Henri Nouwen:

The Spirit of God is like our breath. God’s spirit is more intimate to us than we are to ourselves. We might not often be aware of it, but without it we cannot live a “spiritual life.” It is the Holy Spirit of God who prays in us, who offers us the gifts of love, forgiveness, kindness, goodness, gentleness, peace, and joy. It is the Holy Spirit who offers us the life that death cannot destroy. Let us always pray: “Come, Holy Spirit, come.”

As Terry described the scene, I imagined Jesus blowing gently into the faces of his followers, each one closing his eyes and letting the breeze, if you will, fall across his face and into his heart. And I thought of a scene I had not recalled in many years from The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, where Aslan breathes on all the creatures the Snow Queen had turned to stone and they came back to life in Narnia as the endless winter began to thaw.

There is power, power, power in the breath.

In most every moment of our lives, we breathe without thinking. It is what gives us life. Were we to stop breathing, we would stop being, just as poets speak of those who “breathe their last.” Meditation practices passed down across the centuries teach us to focus on nothing but our breathing as a way of centering, of letting the distractions fall away, of finding ourselves and God. What is most mundane is also most profound. At our church, Ginger begins the service each week by asking us to get comfortable in our seats, to relax, and to breathe.

“Inhale slowly,” she says, “and then exhale. Breathe in the breath of God and breathe out the love of God.”

We inhale the Spirit and exhale Love; we are coming from God and we are going to God. Every breath we take, if you will, every move we make can be an act of the Spirit and a breath of fresh air. Or, not. As my mind often does, it has wandered back to a hymn of my Baptist days that comes on a fresh breeze today:

Holy Spirit, breathe on me until my heart is clean;
let sunshine fill its inmost part, with not a cloud between.

Holy Spirit, breathe on me, my stubborn will subdue;
teach me in words of living flame what Christ would have me do.

Breathe on me, breathe on me, Holy Spirit, breathe on me;
Take Thou my heart, cleanse every part, Holy Spirit, breathe on me.

Holy Spirit, breathe on me, fill me with pow'r divine;
kindle a flame of love and zeal within this heart of mine.

Holy Spirit, breathe on me till I am all Thine own,
until my will is lost in Thine, to live for Thee alone.

Breathe on me, breathe on me, Holy Spirit, breathe on me;
Take Thou my heart, cleanse every part, Holy Spirit, breathe on me.

(If you want to sing along, you can hear the tune here.)

Peace,
Milton

great love

Because of some wonderful happenings in the lives of our Associate Pastor and her partner, I was the substitute preacher today. Those of you who read the blog regularly will see a few references to some recent posts, though they are in a new context. The passage was Mark 6:30-52. Thanks, as always for reading.

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I’ve been trying to imagine what it must have been like to be a part of the crowd that day. Ginger and I stood on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and saw the gentle slopes of land that come down to the water. The little lake is just not that big, though the geography around it makes for some formidable storms. I imagine the crowd being about like a good turnout for a Bulls game, so I have a hard time picturing a crowd that big gathered along the shore of a sea that small. I know what it feels like to be as hot, as I imagine the people in the crowd were after having hiked around the lake to keep up with Jesus. And I know what it feels like to get hungry, and then to get frustrated, annoyed – well – surly.

And there are other things. Jesus was speaking to a crowd of thousands without the benefit of any amplification. He knew how to use the natural slope of the hillside by getting the people to sit on the hill while he stood at the water’s edge and let the wind off the water carry his voice farther than he could throw it on his own, but I keep thinking about the scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian where the folks in the back of the crowd while Jesus was delivering the Beatitudes say to each other, “What did he say? Blessed are the Cheese makers?”

Palestine, in those days as now, was a land of incredible need and crippling poverty. The people in the crowd, by and large, were not rich; they did not spend many days feeling as though all the bills were paid, all the kids were fed, and everything was going to be OK. Jesus used metaphors of bread and water often because he was talking to people who lived hungry, thirsty lives. Though they had grown up hearing stories about manna from heaven, yet they had not seen it happen in their lifetimes.

I wonder if the crowd that day was getting restless and Jesus knew he needed to feed them if he wanted them to listen. I wonder what it felt like to be at the back of the crowd, away from any awareness of the conversation between Jesus and his disciples about how to feed everyone. Mark gives us some sense of the frustration of the disciples and of Jesus’ insistence that they come up with something other than Reasons Why This Won’t Work. I wonder how the story about what happened was passed through the crowd after everyone had had enough to eat. I wonder if the folks in the back ever knew there was a miracle, or they just thought Jesus and the disciples were gracious hosts. What began as an exercise in frustration and desperation ended with twelve basketfuls of leftovers. And a crowd that still wanted more.

But the story doesn’t stop with supper. The meal caused so much of a stir that Jesus had to flee into the hills to get away. The disciples did what they most often did: they got in a boat – and we’re not talking a yacht here, but a tiny little boat. Here, again, is the account of what happened as translated in The Message:

As soon as the meal was finished, Jesus insisted that the disciples get in the boat and go on ahead across to Bethsaida while he dismissed the congregation. After sending them off, he climbed a mountain to pray.

Late at night, the boat was far out at sea; Jesus was still by himself on land. He could see his men struggling with the oars, the wind having come up against them. At about four o'clock in the morning, Jesus came toward them, walking on the sea. He intended to go right by them. But when they saw him walking on the sea, they thought it was a ghost and screamed, scared out of their wits.

Jesus was quick to comfort them: "Courage! It's me. Don't be afraid." As soon as he climbed into the boat, the wind died down. They were stunned, shaking their heads, wondering what was going on. They didn't understand what he had done at the supper. None of this had yet penetrated their hearts. (Mark 6:47-52)

None of this had yet penetrated their hearts.

How can that be? They had been with him when he healed a woman who reached out in faith to touch the hem of his coat. They had seen him raise Jarius’ daughter from the dead. They had heard his parables and watched as he gave healing and hope to one after another. Now, even after watching him feed the crowd with a plate full of food, they still didn’t understand who he was.

None of this had yet penetrated their hearts.

I wonder, sometimes, if we aren’t in the same boat. We need help and we don’t always know what to do with the love of Christ when it finds us in need.

During my vacation last week, I reread one of my favorite novels, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop that tells the story of two priests, Joseph Valliant and Jean Marie Latour, who are sent to New Mexico to lead the Catholic diocese in the new American West that had once been part of Mexico. Early in the book, Father Valliant says, “Where there is great love, there are great miracles.”

In Cather’s book, the Bishop’s words are prologue, rather than summary: he says the words as they are beginning their ministry together and then, as the story unfolds, nothing dramatic happens other than they spend their lives loving God, loving one another, and loving the people around them. Lives were transformed. People were saved from what they saw as the apparent inevitability of their lives because of the love of these two men in Jesus’ name.

Paul, who traveled the Mediterranean much like those two priests wandered through New Mexico and Arizona, prayed for the folks at Ephesus to come to their own deeper understanding of the deep, deep love of Jesus:

My response is to get down on my knees before our Creator, this magnificent God who parcels out all heaven and earth. I ask God to strengthen you by the Holy Spirit—not a brute strength but a glorious inner strength—that Christ will live in you as you open the door and invite him in. And I ask God that with both feet planted firmly on love, you'll be able to take in with all followers of Jesus the extravagant dimensions of Christ's love. Reach out and experience the breadth! Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:14-21)

And here is a glimpse into the fullness of God. A couple of Sundays ago, Brian Lord told me scientists have made a new discovery about our galaxy. They are expanding our vision of the universe by searching for amino acids in far away places, which would mean the possibility of life emerging on other planets. They found a molecule called ethyl formate in a gas cloud in the middle of the Milky Way. It is the molecule that gives raspberries their flavor; and it also smells of rum. The Milky Way is actually a raspberry daquiri.

The same creative imagination that put raspberries in space is the one who became incarnate in Jesus, who found a way to feed thousands with five loaves and two fishes, and who brings us together here to remember again that where there is great love there are great miracles.

When we look up and out and around, what do we see? Do we see beyond the daily needs and hungers of our lives? Are we blinded by the storms that trouble us? Or do we see food to share? Do we smell raspberries in the stars?

Do we see ourselves as people who are held by Great Love, who share Great Love, and who, then, will also be people of great miracles? Oh, I hope so – because that is who we are. We are people created in Love, who live in Love (even when we lose sight of it), who are called to Love as extravagantly as the Jesus we follow, and who, ultimately, will return to Love.

A friend wrote a song years ago that says it this way:

the depth of God’s love reaches down, down, down
to where we are until we’re found, found, found
a quiet word or none at all
pursues the heart behind the wall
and for those who wait with darkness all around
the depth of God’s love reaches down

Amen.

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Peace,
Milton

close enough

I just got home from a great weekend in Jackson, where I got to preach this morning at Calvary Baptist Church. Here is the sermon.
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You have to wonder how soon it started.

I’m guessing, even in the early church, where two or three were gathered there were two or three differing opinions. Though we have grouped the epistles in the back half of our New Testaments, they were some of the earliest writings we have and they show that from almost the very beginning of the church people were struggling with what it meant to live out our faith together. Paul, John, and anyone else who wrote one of these letters spends some time basically saying the biblical equivalent of, “Don’t make me come over there” or “If I have to pull this car over there is going to be some serious trouble.” And they all spend a good deal of time entreating their charges to love one another; they also do what they can to draw a picture of what looks like. Listen to Eugene Peterson’s translation of the first part of our passage for this morning:

This is how we've come to understand and experience love: Christ sacrificed his life for us. This is why we ought to live sacrificially for our fellow believers, and not just be out for ourselves. If you see some brother or sister in need and have the means to do something about it but turn a cold shoulder and do nothing, what happens to God's love? It disappears. And you made it disappear.

He could not have painted the picture any clearer: when we don’t care for one another, God’s love disappears. Disappears. And – not but, and -- when we do respond and meet the need we incarnate the love of God as God created us to do. God’s love appears.

Yesterday at the Writer’s Conference, Justin shared a story with us that led him to write the song he sang a few moments ago called “Driving by the Accident.” As he talked about how the song came together, he spoke of Jesus’ encounter with the woman who lived with a hemorrhage and knew she just needed to touch the hem of his garment to be healed. Justin said we have to understand “the healing touch of intentional proximity.”

I love that phrase.

By choosing to be church together, we are choosing intentional proximity: we mean to be close. We are also putting ourselves near enough to one another to create the opportunity to incarnate love to one another. Or – not. The truth is we are also close enough to do damage. When we decide to explode, we send chards and shrapnel into everyone around us. Not only must we choose to be in close proximity, we must also choose, day after day after day, to love one another as Christ loves us. We must choose the responsibility that comes with connectedness – knowing that choosing to be together in a world full of suffering and chaos is choosing to enter voluntarily into one another’s pain, even as we choose, perhaps first, to do no harm.

In his book The Will to Power, philosopher Frederich Nietzsche challenged the Christian call to love all humanity, saying love was weakness that denied such values as pride, war, conquest, and anger. As harsh as it may sound to think of pride and anger as values, remember we live in a nation that lives out Vince Lombardi’s notion that, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” Our culture says get what you can and leave everyone else to fight for themselves.

Our faith tells us differently: we are one in the Spirit, as the song says, and we have a responsibility for and to one another.

Since we’ve been a part of the writer’s conference this weekend, let’s play with words for a minute and break down the word responsibility. It’s made of two words: response and ability: the ability to respond. Being close to one another in Christ means we have the ability to respond to one another’s needs, incarnating God’s love in the most practical and meaningful ways.

Gary Chapman has a book Ginger, my wife, uses in marriage counseling called The Five Love Languages, which he defines as the ways we best give and receive love. They are:

• words of affirmation – saying words that encourage and support
• acts of service – doing the “little things” that show we are paying attention
• physical touch – hugs, and supportive touch
• quality time – making time to care for one another
• gifts – again, things that make a person feel known

Though we are all able to speak more than one of these languages, each of us has a favorite we speak when we receive love and a favorite we speak when it comes to giving love. Sometimes they match up well: Ginger’s best receiving language is acts of service and mine is words of affirmation. So when I do something nice for her and she says thank you we both come out pretty well. Sometimes, in the context of community, we operate on the principle of speaking the language we wish would be spoken to us and we miss each other. Incarnating the love of Christ to one another means being multilingual, if you will. It also means being forthright about what we need and what we have to offer one another as we live in close proximity.

One of the other songs Justin sang a few minutes ago was Patty Griffin’s “When It Don’t Come Easy.” I asked him to sing the song because the chorus articulates the kind of hands on love we’re talking about. The lyrics are

If you break down, I’ll drive out and find you
If you forget my love, I’ll try to remind you
And stay by you when it don’t come easy

Here’s what love looks like: if you break down, I’ll drive out and find you.

There’s a couple in our church in Durham. He is a firefighter; she is a social worker. They were driving down a street in Miami, where they were visiting family, when he noticed smoke coming out of a house as a woman was running out the door. They stopped the car and got out. He ran into the house, turned off the gas, and did what he could to stay the fire; she called 911 and then sat and comforted the woman in the midst of the turmoil. Both of them did what they were trained to do in a moment where they happened to be close enough to help.

When the brought the woman to Jesus who had been caught in the act of adultery, which is a euphemistic way of saying they pulled her out of bed and dragged her down the street naked, Jesus knelt down and wrote in the sand when they asked what they should do to her. In that moment, their attention shifted from the woman to trying to figure out what Jesus was doodling in the dirt. He was close enough to offer her grace and, as the scene played out, forgiveness.

After Peter denied Jesus three times, Jesus met him on the shore of the sea of Galilee with breakfast. He was close enough to offer food and, again, forgiveness.

Then Peter, along with John, encountered the beggar at the gate and said, “We don’t have any money, but we will give you what we have. In Jesus’ name, get up and walk.” They were close enough to be healers.

I have a friend who grew up in a family of abuse and violence. She says she remembers as a little girl being in a store with her mother and her mother was yelling and screaming at her. She said there was another woman at the counter who leaned down in the midst of the violence and said, “Remember this is not your fault. It’s going to be OK.”

We are all wounded and hurting. We are all capable of being healers. And we are close enough to one another to make the love of God appear in our midst.

If you break down, I’ll drive out and find you
If you forget my love, I’m here to remind you
And stay by you when it don’t come easy

May we respond to one another in a way that makes God’s love appear at every turn. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

how to grow up big and strong

I preached at our church today so Ginger could take her parents back to Birmingham. What follows is the sermon. First, a quick note to say my brother's surgery appears to have gone well; he is flat on his back in the hospital and not allowed to move until Tuesday, just to make sure. Thanks for all the prayers.

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"How to Grow Up Big and Strong"
A Sermon for Pilgrim United Church of Christ, Durham
Sunday, December 28, 2008

When you’re the fill-in preacher the Sunday after Christmas, you have to turn in your sermon title early. Marty sent an email message to me a couple of weeks ago with the outline of today’s service and asked me to give him a title. I read through the gospel passage three or four times and was caught by the final sentence of the paragraph:

And the child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom. And the favor of God was upon him.

For all of the times I have read this story, I hadn’t realized Luke’s use of repetition. You see the final verse of the chapter, Luke 2:52, which comes after Jesus, as a twelve year old, has been holding court in the Temple, was one of the first verses I memorized as a young Baptist boy in Sunday School, which meant I learned it from the King James Version:

And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man.

Once I recognized the emphasis, I realized Luke wanted us to celebrate the baby’s birth alongside of the shepherds and angels, but he didn’t want us to leave him in the manger for long. And so, recalling the title of an old Mark Heard song, I sent the title back to Marty: “How to Grow Up Big and Strong.” As I have continued to study and reflect, my mind went to two scenes, one from a movie and one from a book, that illustrate the point.

The first is from the noted actor and theologian Will Farrell in the far from Oscar nominated movie, Talledega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby, which tells the story of a NASCAR driver. He and his family sit down for dinner and he begins to say grace by praying, “Dear Baby Jesus, we thank you for this food.” As he continues, his wife says, “You know he didn’t stay a baby. He grew up to be a man,” to which Ricky Bobby replies, “Well, you can pray to whatever Jesus you want, but I like to think of him as a baby.” And then he continues, “Dear eight pound six ounce baby Jesus . . .”

The second comes in a scene early in Prince Caspian and the Dawn Treader, one of C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. I know it’s a movie now, but I’ve only read the story. The four children return to the land of Narnia after a long absence. Lucy, the youngest one, sees Aslan the Lion, who is the Christ figure in the tale. She runs to hug him and then steps back. “You’re bigger,” she says. “It’s because you are,” he answers, and then continues, “When you grow, I get bigger.”

Last week, Ginger called us to allow Christmas to bring out the child – the Christ child in all of us. As the story continues to unfold, we are called to let Christ grow up, even as we do the same. We are called to grow up big and strong, by which I mean to be grownups with childlike hearts and spirits. And Luke gives us two great examples of what that looks like in the persons of Simeon and Anna, who met Mary, Joseph, and Jesus when they came into the Temple, as Allen Culpepper reminds us, to fulfill the "deepest awarenesses and commitments" of their faith:

“They saw God at work in events they had experienced. They lived within a covenant community and they sought to fulfill vows they had made as well as to introduce their son into that covenant community."

Anna and Simeon were also ones who lived in that same sense of deep awareness and commitment. When Anna looked at Mary she must have seen herself as a young, newly married woman. Luke goes on to tell us she was widowed only seven years after her wedding and had lived her life in the sanctuary of the Temple fasting and praying, which probably meant she had no family to take care of her. She was eighty-four by the time Mary and Joseph arrived with Jesus. When Anna saw him, she gave thanks, Luke says, and began speaking to everyone waiting for redemption, telling them, as James Howell says, “"God's blessing was not a continual smorgasbord of titanic experiences and shiny baubles. God's blessing was just one thing, and it was eighty years coming."

Mary and Joseph were diligent in doing all of the things called for by the community of faith. Anna nurtured her faith as she waited in the Temple each day with prayer and fasting, which were rituals of the very redemption she was waiting for. One of the ways we grow up big and strong is by practicing our faith in the sense that we keep the rituals of our community: being together, worshipping together, singing together, praying together, working together, and coming to the Communion Table together.

When we do any of these things, we are answering God’s grownup call on our lives. We are not a community of habit; we are a community of faith. We don’t have worship on Sunday morning simply because we are a church and that’s what churches are supposed to do; we are about God’s transforming work here. We gather together to wait and sing and pray, to love one another, and to point ourselves to God, allowing the Holy Spirit to cultivate the grownup feelings of expectancy, hope, and trust in our hearts. Mary and Joseph went to the Temple because they thought it mattered to do so. The rituals of faith passed down by the faithful across generations helped them continue to grow in their understanding of what God was doing in their family. Anna went through the motions of meaning because it was how she learned God could make something of what looked like the ashes of her young existence.

As James Howell writes: "Notice the order. In the world, it's rise and fall. The rise and fall of the Third Reich, the rise and fall of the business tycoon, the rise and fall of a movie star. But with Jesus it's fall and rise...We fall, and from that lowest point, we rise."

And then there was Simeon, who had also spent his life waiting in expectation because he had been told he would see the Messiah before he died. Each day for decades he had come to the Temple and each day he had gone to bed without the promise fulfilled until one poor couple walked in with their new little baby. Frederich Buechner describes it this way:

Jesus was still in diapers when his parents brought him to the Temple in Jerusalem as the custom was, and that’s when old Simeon spotted him. Years before, he been told he wouldn’t die till he’d seen the Messiah with his own two eyes, and time was running out. When the moment finally came, one look through his cataract lenses was all it took. He asked if it would be all right to hold the baby in his arms, and they told him to go ahead but be careful not to drop it. ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation’ he said, the baby playing with the fringes of his beard. The parents were pleased as punch, so he blessed them too for good measure. Then something about the mother stopped him, and his expression changed. What he saw in her face was a long way off, but it was there so plainly he couldn’t pretend. ‘A sword will pierce through your soul,’ he said. He would rather have bitten off his own tongue than said it, but in that holy place he felt he had no choice. Then he handed her back the baby and departed in something less than the perfect peace he’d dreamed of all the long years of his waiting.

Part of growing up means learning life hurts. Most any choice we make comes with its own share of pain. There’s a whole side of Christian theology that says Jesus came to free us from pain. I’m not sure what they do with Simeon. He’s pretty clear when he starts talking swords with Mary. Life hurts. Period. There’s enough grief and pain in this room alone to more than prove the point. As we embrace the childlike truth that we can never run outside of God’s love, that nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus, we must make the grown up move to make meaning out of our suffering, which brings us again to what it means to be together in Christ. We are called to bear one another’s burdens: to voluntarily take on one another’s pain. And it is the regular motions of faith, the daily doings of church life when we do them with awareness and commitment that create the connections that allow love and hope and trust to flow between us.

Even though I’m the substitute this morning, I would like to close by giving us some homework. Next week is Communion Sunday. My assignment for us is to come hungry. Let us come next week ready to partake in a grownup meal. When we line up to come to the front to be served, or when we serve one another as we pass the bread and cup up and down the pews, we are not completing a duty or acting by habit. We are about God’s work, feeding one another and reminding ourselves of Christ’s love that feeds us. We are stepping into the stream of faith that runs all the way back to that first night when Jesus served the meal in the middle of deep suffering and betrayal and said, “Remember me” in as grownup a moment as I know in the gospels.

We are God’s people who have welcomed the Child, who live in suffering, who wait for redemption, and who, together, are the hands and feet of God’s love in our world. With childlike hearts, may we be hopeful and diligent, feeding and loving one another that we may continue to grow up big and strong.

Amen.

Peace,
Milton