Welcome this afternoon to First Central Congregational Church.  I am the Rev. Dr. Scott Jones, Senior Minister of this congregation.  We are one of the oldest Protestant congregations in this city, and have resided in this spot in the Blackstone neighborhood for 101 years. 

Today we religious and faith leaders are here to support ballot measure 439 and oppose ballot measure 434.  We do so as people of faith, because we are people of faith.

My own tradition, the United Church of Christ, is descended from the Pilgrims and the Puritans who came to this continent seeking freedom and autonomy, and our denomination has long supported reproductive justice and the freedom of people to choose their own health care,
including the right to an abortion.  In 1971 we called for all legal prohibitions to end, and for abortion to be removed from the category of penal law.  We declared that “voluntary and medically safe abortions [should be] legally available to all women.”

And so, as a Christian and as a pastor, I oppose ballot measure 434, which would give politicians control over personal medical decisions and force women to carry pregnancies against their will.  This ballot measure disrespects the fundamental freedoms we are entitled to as children of God--the very liberties that my religious ancestors fought and died for.

And, as a Christian and a pastor, I support ballot measure 439 which will end the current abortion ban and align with the doctrinal teachings of my Christian faith.  We should respect women and doctors, giving women control of their own medical decisions and letting physicians fulfill their vocation to care for the health and well-being of their patients.

In the United Church of Christ we proclaim that all Christians should “work toward a society where a full range of reproductive options are available to all women regardless of economic circumstances.”

So as a Christian and a pastor, I encourage you to oppose ballot measure 434 and support ballot measure 439.

Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology by Jürgen Moltmann
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I've read a few Moltmann books and been deeply influenced by him, but I had never read this early, seminal text. And, despite some gems, it just didn't resonate with me as much as other works. I think many of the ideas he pioneered here he developed more fully and eloquently later.

View all my reviews

The Wonder of Communion

Proverbs 9:1-6

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

6 October 2024

            Often when I’ve been in a group of clergy persons who are relaxing and enjoying each other’s company, we’ll get to laughing about our experiences in church and sooner or later we’ll get around to the genre of the funny communion stories.  Because for every minister something funny has happened to them during the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. 

            One of my staple stories in this genre comes from a youth Sunday in the first church I served.  Four middle schoolers were helping with communion, holding the elements.  Derek had one of the half loaves of bread.  In this congregation actual loaves were used and when people came forward they were to rip their own piece of bread off of the loaf and then dip it in the cup for intinction.

            Now, Derek was at that point in a middle school boy’s life where everything adult and serious was amusing.  But he was trying his best to do this job well.   Which is relevant to the story.

            That’s when one of our older gentlemen, Bill, came forward.  Now, Bill was a retired math teacher.  He was often very serious and very proper.  Which is also relevant to the story.

            Bill reached for the loaf of bread, and when he tried to tear a piece of the crust, he failed to do so, at which point he muttered, “Damn!”

            And that’s when I knew poor Derek was going to lose it.  He turned beet red as he exerted all his will power and focus to contain the giggle that was trying to burst forth from him.  To Derek’s credit, he held it in, never erupting in laughter.

            Another of my funny communion stories is from here, my very first Sunday.  I was standing here in the center aisle serving the bread to everyone as they came by.  And for many folks, it was the first time they’d met me.  Which was the case for John and Dorothy Hill.  Dorothy was a retired minister, using a walker to get around at that time.  And John, her husband, was and is a character (he’s our oldest living member). 

            Dorothy was hurrying down the aisle toward me as fast as a person in a walker can move, clearly excited to meet me, her face beaming with that broad and bright smile she had. 

            And, then, suddenly, John, who was behind her, started chanting.  You know how someone who is losing their hearing often speaks far louder than they realize they are?  That seemed to be what was happening in the moment.

            And what John was chanting was “Boomer Sooner,” the University of Oklahoma fight song.  Loud enough for pretty much everyone to hear.  And then, when he got even closer, he kinda hollered, “We are Sooners too!”

            There’s another genre of communion story besides the funny one.  There’s the profound and moving kind.

            One time, while pastoring my church in Oklahoma City, I received an email from someone who had visited the church the day before.  With overwhelming gratitude they expressed their thanks to me that their daughter had been able to receive communion at our church the day before.

            Of course she had.  We were a UCC church and practiced an inclusive and open communion.  For our part, such a thing seemed routine and normal.

            But not for that family.  Their daughter had a severe disability and was unable to speak.  This parent explained to me how in their previous church the pastor had forbidden the daughter from taking communion because she was incapable of professing Jesus as her Lord and Savior.  Because she couldn’t actually say those words out loud for another person to hear, she wasn’t welcome in the full communion of the Christian church according to that pastor.

            After my candidating weekend here at First Central in May of 2010, my weekly clergy group back in Oklahoma City asked me about this congregation.  I said, “Let me tell you this one thing, and it will reveal all you need to know.” 

            And I told them about how Grant Switzer, who was then just a kid, not even quite in the youth group yet, brought forward a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese to place on the communion table as an expression of this congregation’s food pantry and ministries to feed the hungry in the wider community.  And that was (and still is) Grant’s role every month.

            My colleagues all agreed that that alone revealed this place to be a real good church.

            “Communion is concerned with the ethics of our shared life and always has been,” wrote the longtime UCC pastor and educator Mary Luti.  The celebration of the Lord’s Supper is “a practice that produces just and courageous lives.”  She continues, “By the power of the Spirit, participation in the sacrament is meant to shape us collectively into a body that behaves in a distinctive way in the world: a body that looks, sounds, thinks, speaks, and acts like Communion, doing in the world what we do at our tables whenever we ‘do this.’”

            Mary Luti currently seems to be on a quest to get us in the UCC to think more deeply about how and why we celebrate the Lord’s Supper.  She has a new book published by our denomination’s press entitled Do This: Communion for Just and Courageous Living, and she’s speaking about the topic.  I got to hear her in January when she was the keynote speaker for the UCC Senior Minister’s annual gathering.  And her topic was the ethical imperatives embedded in the sacraments of baptism and communion. 

            She began her talk on communion exploring what has recently become dogma within the progressive wing of the American church—an open communion at which everyone is welcome.

            She said, our “invitations to communion . . . make it emphatically clear that everyone is

welcome, and no one will be turned away. As you know, these welcomes are not warm fuzzies,

but acts of justice, extended takedowns of every possible barrier that sin and shame construct:

Come if you’re this; come even if you’re that. Jesus welcomed everyone to his table; even

deniers, betrayers, and abandoners. You come, too.”

            She explains why we have done this: “the unfencing of the table stems from our current intuition about the profound difference it makes to human wholeness to have a seat there. We’ve reached a consensus that communion is the sacrament of inclusion. Christ’s love is a great feast, abundant, unconditional, and for all.”

            But then Mary Luti pointed out that this is a recent development and wildly at odds with the longstanding practice of Christianity.  She said,

It wasn’t long ago that every church fenced the table—you had to belong to this denomination, or this congregation, or at least be baptized. You couldn’t be a notorious sinner or hold incorrect theological beliefs. You had to be old enough to understand what it’s all about. To extend a fully un-boundaried welcome is a complete break with past ecclesial norms. The universal church has never witnessed, much less countenanced, the kind of openness that is now characteristic of many progressive Protestant churches in the West.

            She doesn’t point this out in order to judge our current practice.  In fact, she’s quite clear that our current practice is working, that we’ve hit upon something vitally important  She said, “Unfencing the table is in part a response to the weaponizing of past sacramental practice, perceived to separate, subordinate, punish, correct, and demean. And it’s proving itself by its fruits: we all know someone who’s been healed by graceful and emphatic invitations from the table.”

            Yes, like the family with the young disabled woman I told you about.  Or Judy, who was one of my church members in Oklahoma City.  A lesbian who had long felt ostracized by Christianity before finding Cathedral of Hope.  Judy, despite having been in that church for years by the time I pastored there, still cried every Sunday during communion.  They were tears of joy that she had found a place where she was welcomed and accepted just as she was.

            What Mary Luti wants us to remember and to think deeply about is how new and radical our open and inclusive communion is.  She also warns us not to get consumed with righteous indignation and moral self-satisfaction about it.  Not to become the mirror image of what we are reacting to.

            She also had a few points of critique of much current practice, and she used those to illuminate further some of the ethical implications of communion.

            For example, so often in our liturgies we talk about Jesus welcoming everyone to the table and so we do too.  I’ve used language like that.  Probably most UCC pastors have.  But here’s something Mary Luti points out:

I find only three instances in scripture when Jesus could be said to host a meal—the improvised feeding of the multitudes; the for-members only Last Supper at a borrowed table; and the post-resurrection breakfast on the beach for a handful of his dearest disciples.  Other than those instances, Jesus doesn’t host, and he never does so at his own table. He doesn’t have a table. He’s always at someone else’s. Pharisees and tax collectors throw dinners for him. Peter’s mother feeds him. And Martha in Bethany. Jesus doesn’t invite: he gets invited.

            What might it mean if we remind ourselves that Jesus isn’t a host, but a guest?

            Mary Luti thinks it will remind us of the same.  We aren’t the hosts of this meal, this table.  We are also all guests.

            These are her words:

So when we say we welcome everyone to our table because Jesus welcomed everyone to his, we’re on shaky evidentiary ground. Which isn’t meant to be clever, pedantic, or picky; much less is it to argue for exclusion or undercut the practice of radical welcome. But it does suggest that the ethical challenge communion poses may not lie so much in Jesus having been such an all-inclusive host, but in his having been such a willing, modest guest.

If our churches are not yet as inclusive as we hope, it’s not for lack of inviting. But it might be, at least in part, because we’ve mistaken ourselves for the Giver of the Feast. We’ve embraced the host’s role. But we’re not hosts. We’re guests among guests. We may have arrived earlier than the others, but that doesn’t give us proprietary rights over the hall. And if we think or act as if it does, we haven’t yet pondered deeply enough the Mercy by which we all got in here in the first place.

            So, if we aren’t the hosts at the communion table, but only the guests who arrived before others have, then how does that realization shape us differently? 

            She answers, “One of the ethical imperatives embedded in the act of eucharistic welcome is to relinquish any sense of entitlement we might have to be welcomers; to cease welcoming others as if there’s such a thing as ‘others;’ and to learn to be good guests, amazed as good guests always are at how generous and good the Giver of the Feast is to us, and to all.”

            She continues, “If we take seriously Communion’s ethics of guesthood, it could shape not only what we do in the church, but also our posture in the world. A communionized Body would gratefully accept the invitation of others, find comfort and strength at other people’s tables, respect their manners, sample their food, nourish itself with their fellowship, and cherish their gifts and graces. And when such a communionized Body does welcome the world to its own table, it would do so in amazement, in thanksgiving, on its knees.”

            One of my clergy friends, who was also at this same event where Mary Luti reminded us of the ethical imperatives of baptism, was traveling this last week from Chicago, where she had spent the weekend preaching and teaching at another friend’s church, to Cleveland for a meeting of the Stillspeaking Writer’s Group at the UCC national headquarters.  She realized that her drive would take her through Springfield, Ohio around lunchtime.  So, she made sure to go to a Haitian restaurant.  And in her broken French she ordered her lunch.   That’s an example of living out the ethical imperatives that we Christians learn at the communion table.

            Mary Luti taught us that the ethical imperatives of the Eucharist are many.  She only covered a few and I’ve got even less time today than she did at our conference.  So I’ve only highlighted a couple.  We could talk also of the truth-telling we learn from this ritual, what it teaches us about remembering, the hope and perseverance that sustain us in this meal, how we learn to share and to feed others, and what resilience and joy we draw from it (some of which was captured in today’s contemporary reading).

            Communion should evoke our wonder and inspire our imaginations to think and feel more deeply about what God is doing in this moment.  What God is showing us.  What we are to learn and how we are to be shaped so that we might more fully live God’s goodness in the world.

            As Holy Wisdom declares in today’s scripture lesson:

Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed.  Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.”

Wild Awe

Psalm 104

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

29 September 2024

            Once again, I asked on Facebook about where and when you have experienced awe in nature, and the list included hiking in the mountains, Niagara Falls, Denali, the Grand Canyon, the turquoise blue of the Aegean Sea, or closer to home like the Nebraska Sandhills or the Ponca Hills north of Omaha.

            Rick Brenneman, still a church member, though he lives in Texas, wrote about two trips to Africa as a zoologist:

I think my moments of greatest awe were on my first two trips to Africa. Early on my first trip we drove through the entrance to Hells Gate National Park and looked down into the valley at many clusters of various species all calmly coexisting. The second was when we first arrived at the Namib Desert, driving to the top of one of the magnificent dunes and seeing miles of dunes before the Skeleton Coast.

            Those sights sound sublime.  But we don’t have to travel around the world, we can find natural awe in our everyday environment, as Jim Harmon reminded us when he wrote about his daily hikes through the Loess Hills where he lives.  He wrote, “I have awe overload from nature.”  If you like to hike, you should definitely arrange to go on one of those walks with Jim. 

            I turned this week to a few writers and their descriptions of wild awe.  For example, the opening lines to William Wordsworth’s The Prelude:

O there is blessing in this gentle breeze,

A visitant that while it fans my cheek

Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings

From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.

Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come

To none more grateful than to me; escaped

From the vast city, where I long had pined

A discontented sojourner: now free,

Free as a bird to settle where I will.

What dwelling shall receive me? in what vale

Shall be my harbour? underneath what grove

Shall I take up my home? and what clear stream

Shall with its murmur lull me into rest?

The earth is all before me. With a heart

Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,

I look about; and should the chosen guide

Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,

I cannot miss my way. I breathe again!

            All it took was a gentle breeze in the countryside to evoke rapture in the poet.

            Closer to home, Nebraska’s own Loren Eiseley wrote beautifully about wild awe in so many of his essays.  Probably his most vivid description is about one time floating in the Platte River:

Then I lay back in the floating position that left my face to the sky, and shoved off.  The sky wheeled over me.  For an instant, as I bobbed into the main channel, I had the sensation of sliding down the vast tilted face of the continent.  It was then that I felt the cold needles of the alpine springs at my fingertips, and the warmth of the Gulf pulling me southward.  Moving with me, leaving its taste upon my mouth and spouting under me in the dancing springs of sand, was the immense body of the continent itself, flowing like the river was flowing, grain by grain, mountain by mountain, down to the sea.  I was streaming over ancient sea beds thrust aloft where giant reptiles had once sported; I was wearing down the face of time and trundling cloud-wreathed ranges into oblivion.

            Such wonder just from floating in a Nebraska river.

            As psychologist Dacher Keltner states in today’s contemporary reading, it’s difficult to imagine anything better you can do for your mind and body than to go outside and delight in nature’s beauty.  Such experiences can reduce inflammation, improve our immune responses, and help to address chronic diseases like depression, anxiety, heart disease, and autoimmune disorders.  It also helps with loneliness and despair.  He writes that awe is pretty much the antithesis to the stressors that affect us.  The stresses of daily life send chemicals through our bodies that lead to inflammation and distress, and moments of natural awe send the opposite chemicals, bringing us calm. 

The affect is so profound, he believes we have a biological need for wild awe.  We have been wired that way.  The clearest evidence is watching a toddler explore the world. 

Also our bodies respond to the signals nature is sending us.  Our vagus nerve activates at the sound of water.  The scents from some plants reduce our blood pressure.  So just being out in your garden can be a healing exercise.  Basil and rosemary, for instance, send signals to our frontal lobes, activating the region where emotions and ethics intersect.

Studies also show that wild awe helps in quieting the ego and promoting sound reasoning.  All around, then, there’s nothing you can so easily do to help heal your body and mind as spending time in nature, paying attention to the beauty around you.

Once again, we arrive at a reminder of the spiritual importance of paying attention. 

One of my favorite, recent nature books was The Forest Unseen  by David George Haskell.  He spent a year observing a one square meter space in the forest, and that resulted in a rich book, filled with details of the seasons and the vast amount of life that made a home in or passed through that small space.  The book is an excellent study in how we don’t need to go to the grand wild places like Yellowstone or the Alps, but how we can find beauty, awe, and wonder in the ordinary, if we only look.

At the close of the book, Gaskell writes, “We create wonderful places by giving them our attention, not by finding ‘pristine’ places that will bring wonder to us.”  Even our urban and suburban backyards can provide us the healing beauty we require.

So, here’s an assignment for this week—every day spend some time outside.  You can just pick a spot in your yard, a comfy patio chair maybe, and for five or ten minutes just quietly absorb the sights, sounds, and smells all around you.  Feel the touch of the sunshine or crisp autumn air.  Magical, wonderful, healing, spiritual things can happen.

And we believe that all of this goodness is a result of God’s creative blessings.  God has created a world abundant with beauty.  And God has created us wired to connect with the world around us.  These are God’s gifts to us.  Good, powerful, transformative gifts. 

The Psalmist begins, “Bless the Lord, O my soul.”  The great Walter Brueggemann writes that these words are a “summons to the self to turn fully to” God.  And the way we do that is by observing God’s glories and gifts in creation. 

Brueggemann goes on, “The psalmist is smitten with the beauty, awesomeness, generativity, and ordered coherence of creation as guaranteed by the creator.  Everything is in its place as part of a coherent, life-giving system.”

So we celebrate creation as the work of God’s hands while also meeting God in the wild.  Robert Alter, the great Hebrew scholar, calls this psalm an “ecstatic celebration” and emphasizes how the poem is a “whole chain of present participles.”  From this grammatical observation, Alter concludes, “The poet imagines the presence of divinity in the world as a dynamic series of actions.”  God is present in the world in dynamic, on-going ways.  The creation was not something done once and over but is God’s continuing action.  God’s continuing gifts and glory.

Yet, this weekend we have watched the horrible scenes from the southeast as Hurricane Helene has laid waste to towns, leaving a path of destruction and death over several states.  Our hearts go out to the suffering people who have lost so much.  And I’m sure in the days ahead, we will have opportunities to generously respond to help them recover.

We know that these storms are worsening and setting new records because of the changes wrought to our climate by human industrialization.  We now live in the era that calls for resilience as we face the consequences of our actions and those of previous generations. 

One of the new words to enter our vocabulary in recent years is solastalgia.  Which is defined as “the emotional distress that people experience when their environment changes.”  Particularly our home environments, those we’ve loved, those we’ve drawn sustenance, nurture, delight, and awe from.

The theologian Hannah Malcolm assembled a book to help the church in this new era.  Entitled Words for a Dying World it is filled with essays from Christians around the world helping us to come to terms with the loss and grief of environments we have loved.  According to Malcolm, we must take time to grieve these losses if we are going to be effective in taking the steps necessary to prevent even worse from happening in the future.

As she writes, “if grief is an expression of love, our grief takes on the shape of the places and creatures to whom we intimately belong.  We mourn the death of the world because it is where we come from.” 

Malcolm believes that “the tenderness of caring for the dying is not a despairing act but a courageous one.”  And so operating from that perspective empowers us, but in gentle, tender ways.  She writes, “Adopting an orientation of grief means choosing to invest in things that are small, that are temporary, and celebrating them in the broken, fragile beauty they bear in the eyes of God.  It is soft, cruciform foolishness.”

So, after watching the weekend’s news, we might not be able to sing today’s psalm with as much confidence as its writer—that everything is in order and all of creation is a blessing.  But, we also learn that even in our grief at the losses brought on by a changing climate, we can train our attention to perceive “the fragile beauty” that is God’s gift. 

God has created a world abundant with beauty.  And God has wired us to connect with the world around us in ways that are healing and transformative.  These are God’s gifts to us.  Good, powerful, transformative gifts. 

Even as we grieve the losses of nature, we can pay attention to the glories and gifts of God still abundant in the world around us. (Even by spending just a few minutes in our own yards.)  God is calling us to work together to protect and restore the creation to the way God intended it.

Then let us join with the Psalmist and proclaim, “Bless the Lord, O my soul.  Praise the Lord!”

A Beautiful Life

Matthew 5:1-16

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

22 September 2024

            This week on Facebook I asked, “What is a movie or story that because of something good that happens makes you cry or get the chills?”  The answers were quite varied:

• Old Yeller, wrote Jim Harmon
• Jennifer Forbes-Baily offered The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
• Teague Stanley said A Man Called Otto
• Places in the Heart wrote Becky McNeil
• Krissy wrote of Homeward Bound “I cried as a child and I cried again as an adult showing the movie to Wyatt. They make it home safe and sound!”
• Charlene Wozny recommended A Stoning in Fulham County and Smoke Signals
• And Linda Gabriel wrote that The World’s Fastest Indian is a gem.
• Matt Gutschick added Cast Away and explained, “After all he’s been through. At that big open crossroads right at the end.”

            I feel like there are so many movies and stories where I cry every time because of something good.  What immediately jumped to mind were It’s a Wonderful Life and E. T. 

The story that really gets me every time though is Les Mis, usually listening to the soundtrack of the Broadway Musical.  And in more than one place—when the young students’ lives are sacrificed for freedom, when Valjean offers Javier mercy and Javier cannot take it, when Fantine dies thinking of Cossette, but the most impactful moment of all is when the Bishop defends Valjean and offers him forgiveness and new life after Valjean has stolen from him.  That act of Chrisitan charity has always felt so overwhelmingly good and so outside the norm of human behavior, that I’m overcome every, single, time.

            When the psychologist Dacher Keltner and his colleagues did a big, global study of awe, they discovered that across cultures, the one thing that most inspires our awe isn’t nature, spirituality, or music—it is other people.  Particularly “other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming.”  This result, as the most common experience of awe, surprised them.  So this is the first of eight wonders of life in Keltner’s taxonomy of awe, that we’ll be exploring the next two months.  He writes, “Around the world, we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty.”

            What a thrilling result!  And I love that phrase too, “moral beauty.”  It perfectly captures the experience he’s trying to describe.  When goodness is on display, when we actually see it, and we find it beautiful.

            That we find awe in one another is one of the reasons that Keltner believes we can find awe in our everyday experiences.  We don’t need to be able to afford travel to sublime locations or a visit the great art museums.  We can meet this “basic human need” everyday in our encounters with people.

            One of the ways other people inspire our awe isn’t about moral goodness but about rare talents.  We’ve just watched the summer Olympics and there we witnessed so many awe-inspiring moments like the new world record in the 100 meter dash or the incredible heights achieved in pole vaulting. 

            But far more common experiences of awe occur when we witness people being kind to others, when we see people overcoming obstacles in their own lives to live well, and, by far the most likely human action to inspire awe—courageous actions taken on behalf of other people.

            Think about some of the people whose moral beauty—through kindness, strength, sacrifice, or courage—inspires you.  Some of the names that come to mind immediately for me—Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero, the passengers on board United Flight 93. 

            When we encounter moral beauty, Dacher Keltner writes, we can be taken aback.  Such moments “have the power of an epiphany,” a moment of illumination.  He writes, “The experience is imbued with a sense of light, clarity, truth, and the sharpened recognition of what really matters.”

            Yeah, that’s exactly how I feel every time I listen to the Bishop forgive Valjean.  An important lesson is being taught about grace.

            There’s even a physical explanation of what happens when we have these moments of awe.  Here’s Keltner’s description:

Witnessing others’ acts of courage, kindness, strength, and overcoming activates . . . [the] cortical regions where our emotions translate to ethical action.  These encounters lead to the release of oxytocin and activation of the vagus nerve.  We often sense tears and goose bumps, our body’s signals that we are part of a community appreciating what unites us.  When moved by the wonders of others, the soul in our bodies is awakened, and acts of reverence often quickly follow.

            So these moments of awe are felt deeply in our bodies, and they are likely to lead us into action.  We will be moved to reverence, gratitude, and appreciation.  Which can then prompt us into our own actions of kindness and courage. 

These very human moments of connection are what we consider sacred.  Over time we’ve turned acts of reverence and appreciation into our cultural and religious practices.  And those rituals can now themselves inspire our reverence and awe. 

Christian worship, for instance, is rooted in the experiences of awe that Jesus inspired in those who witnessed him.  Here, for example, is a description of the Sermon on the Mount, of which today’s Gospel reading is a part, by the German pastor Helmut Thielicke:

Then Jesus opened his mouth and something completely unexpected happened, something that drove these people to an astonishment bordering upon terror, something that held them spellbound long after he ceased speaking and would not let them rest.  Jesus said to the people gathered around him, people who were harried by suffering, misery, and guilt: “Blessed are you; blessed are you.”  The Sermon on the Mount closes with the remark that the crowds were astonished and frightened, even though it was a sermon on grace.  But this is what always happens when God unveils his great goodness.  It is so immense, so far beyond and contrary to all human dimensions and conceptions that at first one simply cannot understand it and we stand there in utter helpless bewilderment.

            Which is a pretty apt description of awe as a response to moral beauty.

            Today we aren’t exploring the entirety of the Sermon on the Mount or even going into all the rich details of the Beatitudes, but let me say a few things about what’s going on in this teaching of Jesus.

            The New Testament scholar Dale Allison writes about how this sermon is intended to inspire the moral imagination.  The beatitudes, he says, were originally intended to startle their audience because they were a reversal of ordinary values.  The folks normally on the bottom or the fringes of human society are identified as blessed and made happy by God. 

            Jesus’s teaching is a revelation of the very heart of God and a glimpse at what God intends for the human future.  This is what God’s kingdom is supposed to look like.  So, here we have an “exercise of the imagination” in what “human experience of the fullness of God’s presence” can be. 

            But we don’t have to wait for some expected fulfillment in the future—we can, and should, begin living this way now.  To live according to God’s dream for humanity will help to address the current human condition with all its griefs and pains.  So the beatitudes become imperatives of what a good and beautiful human life looks like.

            In the Middle Ages, Christian writers taught that the Beatitudes were “disciplines, cultivated habits of the heart” [David Lyle Jeffrey]. 

            So, if we are going to cultivate moral beauty in ourselves, as followers of Jesus, living as Jesus taught us here in the Sermon on the Mount, is the primary way to do that.

            Earlier we heard an excerpt of David Brooks’s book The Road to Character.  Brooks is critical of the narcissism he believes dominates our current culture.  Too often human achievement is now judged through professional success and competition, ambition, self-preservation, and cunning become the preeminent values.  He longs instead for the “aesthetically beautiful” persons of humble character who radiate joy. 

Such character, he writes, is built over time, beginning with an awareness of our own flaws and struggling against our own weaknesses.  We don’t build our character alone, but with the help and support of others in community.  We develop our self-respect through inner triumphs.  He writes, “It is earned by being better than you used to be, by being dependable in times of testing, straight in times of temptation.”

The book is a rich exploration of various people who he believes exhibit this depths of character.  Like Frances Perkins, the New Deal Era Secretary of Labor or General George Marshall or Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham or Civil Rights activist Bayard Rustin. 

At the close of the book, he presents what he calls “The Humility Code,” which he describes as “a coherent image of what to live for and how to love.”  The first proposition of the code, which he says “defines the goal of life” is this:

We don’t live for happiness, we live for holiness.  Day to day we seek out pleasure, but deep down, human beings are endowed with moral imagination.  All human beings seek to lead lives not just of pleasure, but of purpose, righteousness, and virtue. . . .  The best life is oriented around the increasing excellence of the soul and is nourished by moral joy, the quiet sense of gratitude and tranquility that comes as a byproduct of successful moral struggle. . . . Life is essentially a moral drama . . . .

            And our Christian vision of that beautiful life was exhibited for us by Jesus of Nazareth and how he taught us to live.  In places like today’s passage from the Gospel of Matthew.  And lives of such character and moral beauty inspire us with awe.

            Nothing inspires us more than beautiful people.  Not physically beautiful, but morally beautiful.  People of character who are kind, generous, gracious, and courageous, who overcome their struggles. 

            Let us not only admire such people, but aspire to be such people.  For that is the good life God dreams for you and all of God’s children.

Sharing in God’s Life

1 Samuel 25:14-19, 23-25, 32-34, 42-43

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

1 September 2024

               As I said, Wilda Gafney hopscotches through this story, only highlighting some of the details.  So, let me fill in the blanks a little.

            At this point in the larger story of David’s rise to power, he has fled from the court of King Saul after Saul threatened his life, because David had become too popular and powerful.  David then operates as the leader of a band of warriors, living in the wilderness, and occasionally hiring out to one town or another for protection or to fight on their behalf. 

            When the Bible first introduces us to Nabal, we are told that he is surly and mean and that Abigail his wife is beautiful and clever.  One feast day David sends some of his men to Nabal seeking hospitality, but they are insulted and turned away.  In ancient cultures not granting hospitality was an ethical violation.  Eugene Peterson, in his commentary, points out that sheepshearing time was traditionally a period of festivity and generosity. 

            David finds out about the insult and, enraged, decides to attack Nabal. 

            But Abigail hears from one of the servant boys what has happened and she takes action.  She doesn’t tell Nabal what she’s going to do. She takes gifts to David and falls down in front of him, imploring him to save her husband and household.  In her speech she declares that God’s favor is upon David and he is going to rise to power.  And that if he destroys Nabal, he will damage his own reputation and bring blood-guilt upon himself.

            David, apparently struck by the beauty and power of this woman, grants her wish and sets aside his rage.

            Abigail returns home to find Nabal drunk at his feast.  She waits until the next day, when he’s probably suffering from quite the hangover, to tell him what she’s done.  Which, of course, is an insult to his honor.  Nabal appears to immediately have a stroke and lingers a few days before he dies.  And then Abigail seeks after David, who makes her his wife.

            Of this story, the Bible scholar David Jobling writes, “The more I read it the more I dislike it.”  He finds it a distasteful story in which nobody behaves well.  Even Abigail he dislikes.

Wilda Gafney says that David is a “thug” and Nabal a mean-spirited man and “abusive husband.”  Unlike Jobling, she takes a different perspective on Abigail.  She thinks Abigail is a survivor who has learned how to deal with and survive these toxic men.  Doing the best she can in this scary situation to save the day, spare the community violence, and create a future for herself.

            We’ve talked a lot this summer already as we’ve read these stories about toxic masculinity and the clever ways the women of these stories try to survive and thrive and shape the world.  So we want explore those topics today.  Instead, I want to follow what Wilda Gafney thinks is a core theme of the story—generosity and hospitality.  She writes, “While some biblical passages equate wealth with blessing uncritically, these lessons look more deeply at what one does with one’s wealth as a measure of character.”

            Of course this is Labor Day weekend, a good time to reflect upon such issues.

            In her book Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism the Yale Divinity School theologian Kathryn Tanner writes that our current finance-dominated capitalism “is incompatible with fundamental Christian commitments.”  She adds, “there is surprisingly little reason to think Christianity has direct interest in developing a work ethic at all.”

            Christianity teaches us to trust in the grace of God.  And, as Tanner writes, “the fulsome character of grace” means that “one has all one needs now to meet the present challenge.”  Which works against the scarcity mindset, competition, and conspicuous consumption prevalent in our current economic system.

            The world’s value is also not created through human labor.  The things of this world have intrinsic, non-purposive value as part of God’s creative activity.  God created the things of this world to be reflections of God’s glory.  Kathryn Tanner writes, “God simply wants to share God’s life, so that the fullness of that life is reflected” in us and the world.

            Value then is not established by the market, the invisible hand, or even human labor.  Our focus on use and consumption of earthy goods has robbed us of the spiritual practice of attending carefully to what God has given us.  Attention teaches us to appreciate and honor the ways the things of the world share in the glory of God.

            Rather than use and consumption, we are instead invited by God to enjoy God’s gifts.  And to participate with God as co-creators.  The abundance of the earth is for sharing, so that all might flourish.

            That such deeply traditional Christian ideas sound so radical in contrast with current global economics, is because our imaginations have been malformed.  We struggle to imagine how we might live any other way than what we are used to, except with maybe small improvements.  The biblical scholar Ellen Davis calls this malformation of the imagination “idolatry.”  We worship idols and aren’t even aware we are doing it.

            Our enjoyment of God’s gifts does involve work.  The meaning and purpose of our labor is different though from what the market teaches.  We are connected to God through our creativity and making.  This is part of the divine image in us.  Our labor should share in God’s glory.

The artist Makoto Fujimura has reflected deeply and theologically upon human creativity and making and they ways they connect us with God.  Fujimura writes that the goals of our making are to mend what is broken in ourselves and in the world and to cultivate beauty and mercy.  In our making, we should be collaborating with one another, with compassion, empathy, and care.  Our labor is glorious when it moves with the Spirit in these ways.

Earlier we read an excerpt from Kevin Hector’s Christianity as a Way of Life in which he writes about the practices we need to engage in if we are to learn how to love as Christ wants us too.  Points relevant to our collaborative labor as God’s people.  Our spiritual practices train us to see beyond ourselves and our own interests, and instead to see the worth and value of others, to attend to their particularity and see them as images of God.  We learn to offer them our beneficence, generosity, and hospitality.  And to set aside vengeance and forgive one another, seeking reconciliation when we are wronged.  When we do these things, by faith and grace over time, they grow our ability to love and transform us.  And our work shares in God’s work.

Hopefully highlighting these Christian ideas sparks your imagination, curiosity, and reflection.  Because these concepts merit deeper and fuller consideration.  If we are to share more fully in the life of God, how will that change the things we do?  Including our work and how we spend and manage our money.

I’m still learning and growing in these areas myself.  It’s difficult to break out of the ways we’ve done things in the past and make all things new.  Difficult to reform the imagination.

The story in First Samuel provides a glimpse of some of the harms that can be done when we don’t live according to the simple maxim that God wants to share God’s life with all of us.  The failure to be hospitable, generous, and welcome, almost leads to violence.  Grace is required to set vengeance aside and do something different.  Thankfully, Abigail imagined another way.

So, let’s do better. 

We can work at cultivating some basic virtues.  To live more simply and sustainably.  To practice generosity and hospitality.  As kids remind us, “sharing is caring.”  To spend and invest with an eye toward justice and doing the most good.

We can also renew our spiritual practices, particularly the spiritual practice of attending to other people and things in their particularity.  To see the ways they share in God’s life and glory.  And how the world is given for our enjoyment, not use.

Finally, our financial decisions and our workplaces should center grace and mercy.  Our labor, our work, our making should create beauty and mend what is broken. 

When we do all of these things, together, then we will share in God’s life and all of us can flourish. 

What a Covenant

1 Samuel 17:55-18:9; Hosea 11:1-4, 8

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

18 August 2024

               David is fresh from his victory over the giant Goliath.  King Saul wants him for his armor bearer.  The women of the land sing victory songs celebrating David.  And Prince Jonathan falls in love with him. 

            If he looked anything like Michelangelo imagined him, then it’s easy to understand why everyone wanted David.

            The love between Jonathan and David has long inspired the imagination.  It begins in this scene but continues through quite a few others, until Jonathan’s death in battle, and David’s great outpouring of grief upon hearing the news.

            Reading their words of love and affection for one another, it strains credulity to read this story as anything other than some form of same-sex love.  What they have is clearly an emotional bond, transcending any political arrangement between the two young heroes.

            At minimum, their affection became the model of friendship in Christian theology.  Aelred of Rievaulx, the medieval Scottish monk who wrote the classic work on Spiritual Friendship, sites Jonathan and David for his model of friendship that “is the medicine of life.”  Aelred wrote that a true friend is someone worthy to be “the companion of your soul, to whose spirit you join and attach yours.”  With a spiritual friend you hide nothing, fear nothing, but fully entrust yourself.  Aelred writes that with a spiritual friend “you wish to become one instead of two.”

            The late Ted Jennings, who preached here once, wrote of Jonathan and David that they became “the very paradigm for all love.”  He also believes the story reveals a radical change in the culture of ancient Israel.  What we have in the books of Joshua, Judges, and First Samuel is evidence of a warrior culture.  One rises to prominence through feats of bravery on fields of battle.  But David himself represents a shift from a warrior culture to a new image of masculinity and a new culture.  Yes, he’s a military victor, but he’s also celebrated as a poet and musician, and he reveals a vulnerability.

            Part of what Ted Jennings sees in this story of Jonathan removing his armor and giving it to David is “the abolition of male rivalry on the basis of love.”  Jonathan is the prince, while David is the youngest son of the king’s servant Jesse.  David has no status in the social hierarchy.  Yet, Jonathan surrenders his privilege and treats David as an equal. 

            One could imagine the young prince, himself already a military hero, viewing this new young man David with jealousy, as an upstart and a threat to his succession.  But Jonathan is not like that.  Even when it becomes clear that David will one day be king instead of himself, Jonathan never gives up his affection for David.  In fact, Jonathan seems to play a part in helping to assure David’s rise to prominence and power.

            And in that way, they are shifting from a warrior culture based on hierarchy and power to a more equitable version of society and one based on relationships.

            This change is represented in the covenant that Jonathan and David make with one another.  A commitment to each other.  The commitment clearly is emotional and involves affection.  But it also includes their support for and protection of one another.  And it persists, such that later in life, when David is king, he provides for the surviving son of Jonathan and makes him part of his household.

            The Bible is full of covenants.  Some are between people, like this one between David and Jonathan or the pledge that Ruth makes to her mother-in-law Naomi, which I preached about at the beginning of this summer sermon series.  Many of the covenants are between God and individual people.  Like God’s promise to Hagar that she will give birth to a mighty nation.  Or to Sarah that she will have a son in her old age.  There’s God’s promise to all creation, given after the flood, never to destroy the Earth again with water.  And mostly importantly the covenant between God and the people of Israel that shapes so much of the Old Testament.

            The idea of a covenant between God and the people seems to first be spoken by the prophet Hosea, in passages like the one read earlier.  Hosea models the relationship between God and the people upon the commitment that a couple makes when they get married. 

            Yesterday, we celebrated a wedding.  Jake Sharpe, who grew up in this church, married Maives in a beautiful and joyous ceremony.  And I talked about how their love is a sign of God’s love for all of us.  A connection first made in the prophecies of Hosea.

            And this idea of covenant shaped the people of Israel.  Jacob L. Wright, whose book I’ve been teaching in First Forum the last month, talks about how the Hebrew scriptures were a project in forming a people.  That when Israel and Judah lost their kings, nations, and temples, they had to identify other ways to be a people.  And so they created the book we know as the Bible.  And they taught people to read, so they could pass on the stories and laws and study them. 

            And central to this project of peoplehood was the idea of covenant.  That the people covenant with one another and with God.  And the lesson is that if they are to thrive, then they must build a just and righteous society together, by following the laws of God.

            This Old Testament idea of covenant has also deeply shaped who we are as a Christian people in the United Church of Christ.  In the very back of the red pew Bibles is a brief description of who we are in the United Church of Christ and core expressions of what we commonly believe.  Under the discussion of “responsible freedom,” it says, “we are called to live in a loving, covenantal relationship with one another.”  And later it makes clear that our freedom and autonomy as individuals and congregations is  “constrained by love to live in a covenantal relationship” with each other so that the unity of the church can be manifest and God’s mission to the world can be carried out more effectively.

            The idea of covenant is central to all the various streams that joined to form the United Church of Christ.  Covenant language is there in the writings and commitments of our Pilgrim and Puritan ancestors on the Congregationalist side.  The Christian churches, often formed on the frontier of American settlement, emphasized the freedom to associate with one another in commitments of love.  The Reformed Church of German immigrants developed a “close-knit denominational life” in order to support each other’s ministries.  The German Evangelical churches emphasized how the covenant should focus on the mission God is calling us to.  And, the Afro-Christian stream was always communal and justice-oriented, rooted in African ideas of kinship and family.  Yvonne Delk writes that from the Afro-Christian perspective “Covenant can be seen as a way of giving gifts and receiving gifts.”  In fact, that’s why we are here as human beings, she writes, “because you are, I can be also.”

            Randi Walker, one of our UCC historians, writes that the merging of these streams meant that our denomination arrived at an understanding of the church as “the beloved community of followers of Christ, gathered by the Holy Spirit into covenant communion with each other and with Christ, for the purpose of carrying out God’s mission.”

            And in this local congregation, we have covenanted with each other to “pray for hearts that open, minds that understand, and lives that serve.”

            Wilda Gafney, in her commentary on the Jonathan and David story, writes that this language of covenant “invite[s] us to think about the full personhood of each person” and, thus, “we [Christians] are able to imagine and shape a world where we engage people as equal across gender, culture, and ethnic lines as we covenant together to build a world that reflects the love of the gospel.”

            What a covenant!

Frontier by Can Xue
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I just didn't care for this book. It had some magical moments, but overall it seemed a lot of nothing. Not sure on what her reputation rests? I wanted to read her since she is often predicted to win a Nobel.

View all my reviews

Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Eh.

There are some good books on Genesis written by non-specialists, particularly Karen Armstrong's and Harold Bloom's. But I didn't get much from this one.

But upon finishing I do appreciate the general point she seems to be making, that in scholarly discussions of the book what is often missed is the note of grace that permeates story after story. Even if often that note of grace is only relative to the context.

View all my reviews

Christianity in Blue: How the Bible, History, Philosophy, and Theology Shape Progressive Identity by David A Kaden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A really good, quick intro to progessive theology.

View all my reviews

Presence

1 Samuel 4:2, 5-11, 19-22; Psalm 77:1-12, 19-20

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

21 July 2024

               Wilda Gafney writes that in her “exegetical imagination” the voice we hear in today’s psalm is a survivor of the battle that the Israelites lost to the Philistines.  Or the widow of a solider.  Reflecting on her sorrow, in the midst of this awful defeat, the Psalmist asks, “Has God’s faithful love ceased for all time?  Has her promise ceased from generation to generation?  Has God forgotten to be gracious?”

            The psalmist proclaims that she is not comforted, even when contemplating God.  Especially when she remembers God’s past wonders on behalf of the people, the times they have been delivered, and she doesn’t understand what just happened and why the people have been defeated.

            And so the psalm echoes the sorrow of Phinehas’s wife as she suddenly goes into labor on hearing the news of the defeat and the death of her husband.  Today’s reading skips over the story in which the priest Eli hears the news of the defeat and the deaths of his sons.  Eli immediately drops dead.  Now all the bad news comes to Phinehas’s wife in this odd little story that has probably escaped our attention in the past.

            In her shock and sorrow, she immediately gives birth.  The story is rather vivid, isn’t it?  And then she expresses her pain in the naming of her son.  She feels that God has departed from her and from the nation.

            Wilda Gafney, in her commentary on this story and the psalm, writes that these passages are really about the presence of God.  She says, “Each of these texts speak of the companioning God but not always in the way or with the results that persons wish.” 

            The soldiers on the battlefield assumed that God was with them and would defeat their enemies when the Ark appeared.  But that was not the case.  I actually think that stories like this are included in the Bible in order to prevent us from having bad theology.  Bad theology that interprets God’s presence or action always on our side, for our benefit, doing what we want God to do.  Stories like this one remind us that God’s ways are not our ways, and that we should be careful to claim God’s action on our behalf.  Much that occurs in life is just the outcome of normal causation.  Much is just random.  Many things we fill with meaning are probably just coincidence.  Stories like this are there to teach us humility and skepticism in how we understand God’s presence and action.

            In this moment God was there, but not in the ways the people expected.  They made decisions and behaved with false assumptions.  God did not show up as a warrior, fighting on their side.  But God was there.

            This week at church camp with Sebastian, Virgil, and Wyatt, our curriculum was about the ways we are linked by love.  And the second day we learned about being present for each other.  We counselors experienced the beauty of watching the kids live out these lessons, as they were present for each other.  When someone fell and got hurt.  When someone was crying because they missed their parents or their pets.  The kids were wonderful in the ways they gently cared for and supported one another.

            We also learned that we can love one another because God first loved us.  God is the very power within us, making us capable of giving and receiving love, linking us to one another.  We can be present because God is present with us.  In fact, God is present to us in the people who care for and love us.

            And so, we people of faith have learned that God is actually present with us in our sorrow, our hurt, our pain, our grief.  That is where the glory of God resides.  Not in the victories on the fields of battle.  So Phinehas’s wife was wrong.  The glory of God had not departed from her or from Israel.  The glory of God was there in her pain.  God doesn’t guarantee victories in war.  That’s bad theology.  God does give love and comfort and compassion.  That’s good theology.  And these ancient stories teach us and form us in these truths.

            Another of the human problems this story highlights is the way we other one another.  The Israelites believe that God is theirs and only present with them and will assure their conquest over their enemies.  I’m sure the Philistines believed something similar.  And once we believe such falsehoods about God, then we begin acting upon it to treat people as other than us.  We are the chosen, the elect, the ones with a special destiny, and these folks who aren’t us are other than that.  Less than that.  And so we don’t have to treat them the same way we treat ourselves.  We don’t have to treat them with respect and dignity.  We don’t have to honor their autonomy, their agency, their feelings.

            This is a timely story to read, because right now there is a war going on in the exact same place between two people who trace their histories back to the same two peoples at war in this story.  A reminder that contemporary global events can have long and ancient histories.  And those long and ancient histories can contribute to making current resolutions even more difficult to reach.

            And so I as a preacher must handle this story gently.  Because this story isn’t just an ancient one.  This story has meaning and implications for our human siblings in our time.

            And I think we can read the story as a reminder that we shouldn’t believe that God is only on our side, always assuring our victory.  We should instead understand that all humanity are the beloved children of God.  All humans are our siblings, deserving of respect, dignity, compassion, and love.

            It’s interesting what modern archaeology and genetic studies have revealed about the peoples of the ancient near east.  For one, most of the stories about Israel as told in the Bible have no basis in the historical or archaeological records.  I’ll be teaching more about those details in my First Forum series beginning next week.  This lack of support has reaffirmed for us that much of the Bible should be understood as literature, a series of stories written much later than the times described.  And so the Bible isn’t intended to tell us what happened, but to teach us by inspiring our reflection and our questioning about matters of faith and morality.

            This ancient strip of land, known as Palestine, has for four thousand years been the home of a diverse and mixed group of people, often dominated by outside empires, always a major route of trade and cultural exchange.  And it’s difficult to determine any real racial distinctions.  The people always seem to have been a cosmopolitan mix.  The Philistines were not some foreign usurpers, but the indigenous folks who lived along the coast and built great cities that flourished because of international trade.  Some of those cities, such Gaza, survive to this day.  It is only in modern Europe that the term “philistine” took on its pejorative meanings of being uncultured and backwards.  The ancient Philistines were the opposite of that actually.

            The ancient Israelites were the people who inhabited the interior of the land, living in the hills and not the fertile plains.  If anything, they were the rural, more tribal people.

            So this story expresses ancient prejudices.  And our challenge as readers is not to continue the prejudices, but to learn from them and overcome them, so that we might learn to create the global beloved community that God intends.

            One of the great challenges of the 21^st century is for us to become more cosmopolitan.  As the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah writes, cosmopolitanism seems to name the challenge and not the solution to our problems.  How can all of us become citizens of the world, overcoming our biases and prejudices.  Appiah writes:

Each person you know about and can affect is someone to whom you have responsibilities: to say this is just to affirm the very idea of morality.  The challenge, then, is to take minds and hearts formed over the long millennia of living in local troops and equip them with ideas and institutions that will allow us to live together as the global tribe we have become.

            And he admits this isn’t easy.  That cosmopolitanism remains an adventure and an ideal.

            Martha Nussbaum, in her work on the topic, reminds us that “to build societies that aspire realistically to global justice and universal respect, we need a realistic understanding of human weaknesses and limits, of the forces in human life that make justice so difficult to achieve.”

            But this challenge should inspire us, nonetheless.  That all of us are striving to flourish, should inspire “wonder, respect, and awe.”

            This strange, ancient, yet timely and current, story, opens up an opportunity to consider presence.  How God is present with us.  How we are present with each other.  And how we can aspire to the great moral adventure of respecting each other’s presence.  This is our human challenge.  This is the great mission for people of faith and goodwill.

Abundant Lives by Amanda Udis-Kessler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I highly recommend this new book from our denomination's publishing house (Pilgrim Press). It's a quick read that is very thoughtful and good. It presents a clear, comprehensive vision of the good life as envisioned from our theological perspective. I kept wishing I had written the book, or something very like it. I'll have to figure out how and when to develop this into either a sermon series or a class or some combination of both.

View all my reviews

An opinion piece in today's NY Times about the gay marriage fight annoyed me.  The author was critical of the way the legal fight for gay marriage was framed and blames that for some of the backlash over the last decade.  He believes more time should have been spent persuading people about the dignity of gay people.  He writes:

American gay activists would be wise to recalibrate their activism, shifting from a rights-based approach, with its emphasis on litigation, to one more oriented toward citizenship and dignity. They may also want to embrace a more ambitious and idealistic mind-set, aiming squarely at public persuasion.

As someone who was a gay rights activist--and in some of the toughest states of the heartland--I don't recognize this criticisms at all.  In fact I've always said that our most difficult work was changing hearts and minds, much of which we had to do before any legislative or judicial decisions.   I know I was deeply involved in such work, as were many that I know.  We weren't running the national orgs in DC or lawyers taking the cases, but we were in communities doing the difficult work of persuasion, generally by living our lives with authenticity and joy.  And doing it in public, as a public witness, and despite the hateful responses we could generate in places like Texas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska. 

I think one reason the author misses the work he references, is that there is no mention of the role of faith communities.  Troy Perry, the founder of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches was maybe the very first gay leader to begin the work for marriage equality.  And he understood that as a religious rite and sacrament, those arguments would need to be framed in spiritual, moral, and emotional ways.  My current denomination, the United Church of Christ, was the first mainline denomination to endorse marriage equality--a decade before the Obergefell ruling.  The work in our denomination and others centered around precisely the sorts of issues, ideas, and arguments that the author thinks was missing in the US effort for marriage equality.

I was simply shocked at the ignorance the column revealed.

What We Need

1 Samuel 1:19-28; 2:1-10

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

23 June 2024

               Through persistence and faithfulness in God Hannah achieves her goals.  And once again we see her taking matters into her own hands, not intimidated by religious authority or the way things are normally done, as she engages in worship—a ritual to dedicate her son to lifelong service to God.

            This Bible story got me remembering the weekend of Sebastian’s baptism, when family and friends came into town, and we had a house full of folks.  My mother-in-law, Sebastian’s Lola, spent two days fixing homemade Filipino food, and HyVee roasted us a pig, and after Sunday morning’s worship, we feasted together. 

            In January when I attended Conversations, the annual gathering of United Church of Christ senior ministers, our keynote speaker was the professor Mary Luti talking about the ethical demands of the sacraments—baptism and communion.  The sacraments, she said, are

rituals that announce, embody, and enact the good news of Jesus Christ. By grace and faith over time, they can infuse in us the gospel’s revolutionary joy, its indefensible mercy, its liberating honesty, its risk and danger, its distinctive ethics.

            The gist of her remarks was that while we do good and beautiful things with the sacraments, what we normally do is insufficient for the power and potential that they possess to form us into who God desires us to be.  And so she focused on their significance in the ethical dimension, proclaiming:

The sacraments are a vital source of the church’s public witness. And yet when we’re talking about Chritstian justice-making it’s rare that anyone says, “For these moments we have our baptisms; for these challenges, we come to the table. This is a baptismal imperative, this is eucharistic action. We can do hard things drenched in baptismal waters. We will persist, for we have been fed.” 

The sacraments just might be the church’s most underrated source of formative power for persevering engagement with the world. Centering them more than we normally do in our worship and formation could go a long way towards sustaining the public witness of the Body of Christ. 

            Last week we talked about Hannah’s prayers, arising from pain and expressing her faith and desires, as helping to give birth to the nation.  Today we read a story about her act of worship.  Eugene Peterson highlights that in her story there are seven different times she prays or worships.  She seems to be grounded in spiritual practice, and that spiritual practice comforts her pain, gives her confidence, inspires her vision, and empowers her actions.  Peterson writes that Hannah is an example that “worship is a way of life.”

            He also points out—“This story began with Hannah weeping.  It ends with Hannah singing.”

            And the song she sings is filled with power and vision.  Not only that her own needs will be addressed by God, but that God will intervene radically on behalf of the people to deliver them from evil and establish a better, more just future.  Hannah’s acts of worship have ethical imperatives too, just like our Christian sacraments.

            This song is a source for the radical, justice-making vision of the people of God.  At his best, David embodies the vision of this song, and at his worst, he is judged for failing to live up to it.  The words and images and ideas in this song become central to the visions of the prophets and the lyrics of the poets.  It is Hannah’s song which Mary covers and remixes and makes her own—the Magnificat.  And this vision, originating in Hannah’s song, growing and developing over the centuries, is what Mary taught her son Jesus, who embodied as fully as one can the grand ideas of justice that Hannah sang.  What a song!

            And talk about the ethical imperatives we can draw from worship!

            This magnificent song, this act of worship—full of gratitude, praise, thanksgiving, and forward-looking radical hope—arose from the needs, the pain, the grief and sorrow, of this one woman.  Her persistence and faithfulness.  And her confidence in a God who listens and responds.

            This summer I’m leading a Theology Book Club.  We’ll be meeting once a month to discuss a book, and the book for August is Christena Cleveland’s God Is a Black Woman.  Cleveland is a social psychologist and founder of the Center for Justice + Renewal.  Cleveland writes about growing up in an evangelical church and her youthful embrace of faith, religion, and spirituality.  Yet her growing struggles with that faith and her dawning awareness that not only did it not meet her needs, that it actively worked against them.  Specifically, it did not meet her needs as a black woman.  And fundamentally what didn’t meet her needs was the image of God she grew up with, what she starts to call “whitemalegod” and “fatherskygod” (both all one lowercase word).  And the more she studied and experienced life and began to question, the more she wondered if this image of God met anyone’s needs.  If we believe in a God who listens and responds and loves us, then we must reject whitemalegod and all of his negative effects on people and society.

            And so Cleveland went in search of images of God that arise from the Christian tradition and that did speak to her needs and the needs of all humanity.  Like Hannah, she took matters into her own hands, was not intimidated by religious authority and the way things are normally done, but sought out a life-giving spiritual practice and worship of God that met her needs.

Cleveland encourages the use of imagination when exploring God.  She writes that we cannot believe what we cannot imagine, and that too often traditional views have limited and inhibited our use of imagination, which leads to control.

            The divine image she discovered that spoke most powerfully to her were the Black Madonnas of rural France.  In villages throughout France, churches and shrines have centuries-old images of the Madonna and Jesus that are black.  In these sculptures and their stories and traditions, she discovered the God who listens and responds to her need.

            Cleveland argues that whitmalegod not only doesn’t meet human need but seems disgusted by it.  Toxic forms of religion compel us to conceal and repress our needs, particularly teaching women to do so.  Leading to a spiral of shame.  Instead, we must be liberated to identify and express our needs and take action to meet them.  Cleveland writes:

Echoed throughout these imaginings is a desire to authentically express our needs and for them to be cherished by those around us.  In other words, we long for nurturing . . . We yearn for a society that beckons our most authentic selves and celebrates our glorious quirks and foibles.  We long for a community that sees our need as an invitation to deepen our collective connections.  We crave a world in which our humanity is honored first and foremost.

            In the Black Madonna of Vichy, Cleveland discovered an image of the divine “She who cherishes our hot mess.”  For her, the needier the better.  This image of God gets “down into the thick of human experience.”  And God empowers us to create communities based on meeting our needs.

            I feel a resonance with Hannah, who believed in a God who listens and responds to our pains and our needs.  And with persistence and faithfulness, through acts of worship, she took decisive actions to bring about the changes she longed for.  Her worship and spiritual practice led to a set of ethical imperatives.  Cleveland does something similar in her spiritual awakening and her pilgrimage to discover the faith and the God she needs.

            Cleveland draws on research that shows matriarchal, as opposed to patriarchal, societies are “need-based societies that are centered around the values of caretaking, nurturing, and responding to the collective needs of the community.”  Our vulnerability is valued and affirmed.  And society is structured to lift up our needs and respond to them.

            Hannah was alarmed by the corruption, disorder, and violence against women in her time.  She chafed under the patriarchal conditions of her life.  She envisioned something new, different, and better.  A world of greater justice. 

            She became a mother, who dedicated her son to this transformative work, to leadership among the people, guiding them to something better. 

            For Christena Cleveland, the work of creating needs-based communities is what it means “to mother.”  She proclaims, “No matter our gender identity, we are all invited to mother by creating life out of pain, by creating loving, interdependent community in response to violence.”

            Hannah may not have been the paragon of nurture—giving up her son to live at the shrine and be raised in service to God.  But she is an icon of creating life out of pain and taking the steps to respond creatively to the violence of her world.  From her individual pain, she envisioned something better.  She believed that God would listen and respond.  And so she centered her life on worship and spiritual practice—on her own terms, not bound by convention or intimidated by religious authority.  Her acts of worship, of persistence and faithfulness, became the source of a tradition that continues today, in us and the work that we do to nurture communities of care and outreach, supporting and encouraging one another, and engaging in the work of justice. 

            What do you need?  How do you experience God responding to your needs?  What sort of relationships and community would address those needs?  How might your needs shape your worship and your spiritual practice?  And how might your worship and spiritual practice flow back into the ethical dimensions of your life?

            Let’s imagine the more we might become.  And then let us live into the ethical demands of our faith and practice, to be a people who repond to human needs, and in that way embody God, who cherishes our hot mess.

Franklin Foer's April cover story for The Atlantic, which I finally took the time to digest yesterday, is a must read, I believe. Though it is deeply sobering and alarming. 

And it prompts deeper, critical thinking about some of the language and concepts the American Left has embraced in the last decade. 

Here are some important reader responses also worth reading.