The Time of Mercy

Luke 13:1-9

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

23 March 2024

            What happens when we read, or listen to, a story like this one in the Gospel of Luke? 

            One of my favorite books to help understand how we read and interpret stories is David Jasper’s A Short Introduction to Hermeneutics.  “Hermeneutics” is the fancy, academic word for the study of how we interpret texts.

            Here’s how Jasper answers my question of what happens when we read a story like this one—“The text becomes a ‘world’ which we inhabit for a while, participating in its drama and its claims on us.”

            That’s much easier to see in a rich a full story, the kind that captures our minds and imaginations, where we fall in love with the characters.  Our ways of interacting with such stories have only become more immersive and even participatory.  One reason the most sophisticated and artistic of video games, like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, are so popular is because they bring this idea to greater fulfillment—that a story becomes a world we inhabit.

            The few verses we read today in the Gospel of Luke aren’t that rich or captivating, but they still function by inviting us into a world to see what claims it makes upon us.

            This particular text first draws us in by tugging at our emotions.  We are told that Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, has killed some Galileans.  And given this reference of mixing their blood with their sacrifices, it implies that they were killed while performing a religious ritual.

            What a heinous action!  Our sense of justice reacts with righteous anger at Pilate, and all the Pilates throughout history who have unjustly killed oppressed and occupied peoples.

            But, somewhat strangely, Jesus’ response isn’t righteous anger.  No, instead, he immediately shifts to another topic.  Maybe the people who called Jesus’ attention to this injustice wanted his self-righteous anger, to join them in feeling morally superior?  But, that’s not at all what happens.  Jesus doesn’t react to this news at all; he changes the subject.

            He changes the subject to one of the most central of human problems—understanding the nature of suffering and evil. 

            Now, I’ve been pastoring for decades and philosophizing even longer, and I can tell you that there is no topic that more often comes up in people’s discussions of faith than this one.  People want to know why bad things happen.  They get upset at all the unjust suffering of this world, demanding to know why things are this way and couldn’t they have been different.

            These have been fundamental questions in my own life.  When my Dad died unexpectedly of a heart attack at 41 years of age, when I was sixteen, I struggled with my faith and how to comprehend what had happened.  That’s ultimately one reason I immersed myself so deeply in philosophy and theology, wanting to better understand such things.  My favorite philosophy class as an undergraduate was called “Evil and Suffering.”

            Jesus does not, in these few verses, provide a comprehensive answer to that deepest of human existential questions.  But his changing the subject to this topic, draws the reader and the hearer further into the story, further into the world the story creates, because it now resonates with some of the deepest longings and needs of the human soul.

            What Jesus does say in these few short remarks is that bad things don’t just happen to bad people.  Debunking what is probably the worst theological position any human can take.  And it’s an idea that doesn’t go away.  Despite Jesus criticizing it here or the whole book of Job undermining the notion.  You still encounter people who think when something bad happens to someone it’s because they did something to deserve it.  Or the people who believe that they will be spared natural disasters or life’s calamities if they are simply the right kind of person. 

            The appeal to such a cut-and-dried, black-and-white universe is obvious.  It would seem more fair than the world we actually occupy.  More rational. 

            Part of the implication of Jesus’ response is that this world is not fully within our understanding.  There are mysteries we won’t understand.  Also, it’s not even clear that there is any deep underlying meaning to it all.  Maybe the only thing to understand is that humans are violent and random accidents occur, which means that people end up hurt, harmed, and dead. 

            Maybe Jesus wants us to grasp the randomness of a world that doesn’t follow any tidy rules?

            If we are now asking such questions, then we’ve entered into the world of the story and it’s beginning to lay its claims upon us.

            But, then, the gospel shifts again.  Jesus tells a parable.  We now enter a story within the story.  This new story is a parable about a fig tree.  And it is in no way clear what these verses have to do with the ones we’ve just read about the tower of Siloam and the murdered Galileans.

            Fig trees were and are common in Palestine.  They were staples of the local economy and used often in Hebrew writings as metaphors and symbols.  The others gospels record other parables Jesus told about fig trees. 

            In this one we encounter a fig tree that hasn’t produced figs in three years, and the owner wants to cut it down.  According to what I’ve read, three years is the normal amount of time for a fig tree to mature.  If it hasn’t born fruit, then it is likely infertile.  Rather than waste that space, and any time, effort, or resources, on an unyielding tree, let’s cut it down, and replace it.  Seems wise.  Good stewardship. 

            But the gardener resists that advice.  He wants to keep at it.  Keep trying to get the tree to produce.  He wants to spread some manure around it, to fertilize it, in the hopes that something will happen.

            The commentaries I read point out that the word for manure here is a vulgar term, irreverent in religious discourse.  So, you can use your imaginations to supply the more appropriate English word to use. 

            This vulgar word is also a reminder of humility.  A reminder of the humble and vulnerable, and even messy, nature of our reality.

            Is the gardener a fool?  Is he just wasting time?  What’s going to happen next year?  Will the tree produce or not?  And then, what will happen?

            Well, here’s the most interesting thing about this story, we don’t get the final act.  Jesus’ parable just ends without telling us what happens next.  We don’t know if the gardener or the owner was right.  We don’t know what happens to the tree.  Brandon Scott, the great commentator on the parables, says that this way of telling the story draws the hearer into supplying the missing details.

            The funny thing is how often this happens in Jesus’ story-telling.  In fact, James Breech in his study of the parables says that they always finish without a clear ending.  One of the key features of Jesus’ stories is their openness.  The story goes on; it isn’t over.

            So, why is this?  What’s happening?

            Scott says that the unresolved endings leave open future possibilities.  Michael Curry adds that it’s about future possibility that we neither control nor can manage.  James Breech writes that these open endings emancipate our imaginations.  Breech adds:

In place of closure, ending, or finality, at the end of these stories we have opening and complexity, a sudden revelation of the genuine ambiguity that occurs when the consequences of actions are seen in terms of the way they penetrate the lives of others.

            (That “lives of others” is our theme for Season of Lent.)

            Instead of clarity and closure, we experience ambiguity.  Jesus is inviting us into a mode of living that rests within the ambiguity and messiness of the world.  And, I think that’s what ties together the two parts of today’s Gospel reading!  The first part about unjust violence and our deep human need to understand evil and suffering.  Plus, the parable of the fig tree that doesn’t produce fruit.  Our spiritual task as followers of Jesus—this new way of being human he is modeling for us—means NOT having certainty, not having clarity, not have closure.  But, instead, learning to live fully within the messiness and ambiguity and openness to possibility that is the real world.

            Now, let’s go back to what happens when we read or hear a story.  Here’s David Jasper again, “Interpretation is not a process along a linear trajectory from ignorance to understanding . . . but an endless stimulation to further inquiry and conversation.”  We never arrive at a final answer or understanding.  Interpretation is an ongoing task.

            The theologian Ephraim Radner writes that what it means to be faithful to the biblical text is to understand that reading and interpreting it is an ongoing process.  It is in fact not faithful to reading the Bible to arrive at one final, clear, and conclusive answer for all time.  Radner says our goal is not one point to arrive at, but instead a whole realm, a world in which we can move around and explore, and in that process come to understand ourselves.

            Which also means playing with multiple interpretations.  John Caputo emphasizes this idea in his work, the playfulness of reading and interpretation.  And that the real goal is not one answer, the real goal is to multiply interpretations, to see the text from as many vantage points as we can. 

            Now to a certain type of religious mind this sounds awful, even heretical.  A sign of a fallen and sinful creation.  Surely there must be one final and certain answer.

            But I love how the Reformed scholar James K. A. Smith writes about it:

The sin of [the Tower of] Babel was its quest for unity—one interpretation, one reading, one people—which was an abandonment of creational diversity and plurality in favor of exclusion and violence . . . .  Plurality in interpretation is not the original sin; it is, on the contrary, the original goodness of creation.

            I love that idea.  God created this world rich in perspectives and different voices.  So to be faithful to God is to open ourselves to listen to all that variety.  Smith concludes his book with calling us to a “field of multiplicitous meeting in the wild spaces of love where there is room for a plurality of God’s creatures to speak, sing, and dance in a multivalent chorus of tongues.”

            And because we cannot rest on one final, settled meaning—of the story, of the Bible, of the world, of ourselves—then we should be humbly reminded that we aren’t in this alone, but part of a great, wonderful web of creation.  We cannot begin to understand anything without being open to the ways that the lives of other people and the rest of creation shape us.

            Which then leads us back to the gardener spreading his manure on the tree.  I think Jesus is reminding us to be merciful.  To each other.  And to ourselves.  Because we don’t know what’s going to happen.

            I love how Brandon Scott, then, concludes his telling of this story, “We keep on manuring.  What else is there to do?”

Disappointment & Heartbreak

Luke 13:31-35

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

16 March 2024

            One of the great challenges now facing the Mainline church is the rise of the new Christian Nationalism.  Who Jesus is, what it means to be a Christian, and how we are supposed to care for the vulnerable are now issues being contested in the public square.

            We’ve seen this in the responses to Bishop Marian Budde after her sermon on mercy, the defunding of Lutheran Family Services, and the attacks to Catholic refugee ministries by the Catholic Vice President.  Which generated a strong rebuke from the Pope.

            Of course I grew up a Southern Baptist and was well acquainted with the Jerry Falwell-era Religious Right.  And as a gay rights activist who is also a pastor, I have spent much of my adult career contesting the dominance of the Religious Right in the public imagination and discourse.

            But what we are seeing now is something new, this new Christian Nationalism.  And to better understand it, I recently read the book Money, Lies, and God by the journalist Katherine Stewart, who has spent decades exploring and writing about the Religious Right.

            She concludes that:

Christian nationalism is not a religion.  It is not Christianity.  It is a political identity with a corresponding political ideology, and the ideology in question doesn’t have a lot to do with the way many if not most Americans understand Christianity.  You don’t have to be a Christian to be a Christian nationalist, and plenty of patriotic Christians want nothing to do with Christian nationalism.

            What alarms Stewart the most is that this movement, as she writes, “isn’t looking for a seat at the noisy table of American democracy.”  Instead, “it wants to burn down the house.”  She reveals the various ways in which it is an antidemocratic movement “grounded in resentment and unreason” with authoritarian and fascistic tendencies.

            Her analysis is that the movement is based upon fear.  Fears of the ever-changing world and the ways the culture has shifted over time.  Also fears based upon economic inequality.  It’s a complex brew of resentments and grievances, with little to do with actual theology.

            Stewart writes, “The bulk of this movement is best understood in terms of what it wishes to destroy rather than what it proposes to create.  Fear and grievance, not hope, are the moving parts of its story.”

            She has her own label for the movement, instead of Christian nationalism, she calls it “reactionary nihilism.”

            And so a Gospel lesson like today’s is helpful to us in our current challenge.  Jesus is told of a threat to his life by Herod, who has already jailed and executed John the Baptist.  But, Jesus is not to be deterred.  No threat to his life will stop him from carrying out God’s mission of mercy and liberation.

            But notice Jesus’ attitude here.  Brendan Byrne points out what he calls a “tragic tone” in Jesus’ response.  And Michael Curry, the Episcopal bishop, describes Jesus’ mood further.  He writes, “Jesus speaks in tones of abject disappointment and utter heartbreak at the refusal of his own people to hear and heed the summons of God to draw near, to gather, and to come home.”

            Jesus doesn’t respond to the threat with fear or anger.  He responds with sadness and with pity.  Grieving that Herod and the people have chosen a path contrary to the goodness and blessing that God wants for them. 

            Let Jesus’ response be a model for you as you experience disappointment and heartbreak that the world is not turning out as you had expected and hoped that it would.

            Jesus doesn’t only grieve, however.  He responds and continues to take action.  He tells them to take word to Herod that he will not be stopped.  I’ve always loved that phrase, “Go and tell that fox for me.”  I’ve imagined using it myself a few times.

            Commentator Rodney Clapp sees even more in Jesus’ response to Herod and the threat.  Clapp writes that Herod and the other power players “want to see themselves as masters of the universe, invulnerable and imperial behind their relentless, foxy maneuvering.”

            But Jesus directly challenges the notion that Herod or Rome or the religious establishment is really in charge.  God alone is sovereign over creation.

            Clapp writes, “Jesus calls their death-dealing by name, yet he also sees them as barnyard chicks lost in a storm, too afraid and too stubborn to find shelter under the shadow of mother hen’s wings.”

            Let’s unpack this for a moment.  First is Jesus calling out their death-dealing.  Way back in Deuteronomy, when God’s covenant with Israel was first being implemented, we read about God telling the people that you can choose life or you can choose death.  And then detailing all the ethical choices that lead down either path.

            Jesus calls out the authorities for having chosen the way of death.  Their actions and decisions are harming people and destroying the goodness and abundance of God’s creation.

            They could have followed the covenant, the way of steadfast love, of righteousness and justice, of care for the widow, the orphan, the stranger.  God has consistently offered the path to something good and better, a path to life in all of its fullness and abundance. 

            So, you might expect God’s wrath and judgement then upon the death-dealing forces.  But in this particular lesson of Jesus, that’s not what we hear.  We hear instead God’s pity and compassion, that disappointment and heartbreak.

            These death-dealers, these powerful people who think they are in control, the masters of the universe, are really just frightened and lost chicks, not seeing and refusing to enjoy the protection and salvation on offer to them.

            As Katherine Stewart points out the fear and grievance that animates the new Christian nationalism, we see a parallel with what Jesus says here in Luke.  When we are motivated by fear and let our fears overcome our compassion, we are lost.  Instead of being powerful and in control, we become like little, helpless chickens, scurrying about.

            But God offers mercy.  God offers protection and salvation.  Like a good mother hen, God will take care of her children.  We need only see and respond.

            You’ve heard by baptismal liturgy a lot recently.  Enough times that hopefully some parts of it resonate with you.

            One particular paragraph I want to call your attention to today:

Little siblings, by this act of baptism, we welcome you to a journey that will take your whole life.  This isn’t the end.  It’s the beginning of God’s adventure with your life.  What God will make of you, we know not.  Where God will take you, surprise you, we cannot say.  This we do know and this we say.  God is with you.

            Those words are from Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon’s classic book of Christian ethics, Resident Aliens.  I first read that book in the nineties and marked that paragraph then as one I knew I’d use in baptism.  And now those words have been said over so many babies and children and even adults in my fifteen years at First Central.

            In that book, Hauerwas and Willimon laid down a challenge for the church.  Christendom, they said, had come to an end.  The long era in which politics and culture and the Mainline church were all on the same page.  And rather than bemoaning that loss, they celebrated it as a chance for the church to finally be the church.  To model an alternative way of being human and being community. 

            They declared that “Christians are intentionally made by an adventuresome church.”  An idea that has always deeply influenced my approach to ministry.

            For them, Christianity is a movement that we join.  Here’s one of their best statements of the matter:

Christianity is an invitation to be part of an alien people who make a difference because they see something that cannot otherwise be seen without Christ.  Right living is more the challenge than right thinking.  The challenge is not the intellectual one but the political one—the creation of a new people who have aligned themselves with the seismic shift that has occurred in the world since Christ.

            For them, “Christianity is mostly a matter of politics,” because it is about the formation of a new people, who live counter to much of the way society normally functions.

            In a much later book Stanley Hauerwas explained that he does see himself as a theocrat.  But very different from the way the new Christian nationalism would see itself.  Here’s Hauerwas’ explanation:

I am of course a theocrat.  “Jesus is Lord” is not my personal opinion; I take it to be a determinative political claim.  So I am ready to rule.  The difficulty is that following a crucified Lord entails embodying a politics that cannot resort to coercion and violence; it is a politics of persuasion all the way down.  It is a tiring business that is slow and time-consuming, but then we, that is Christians, believe that by redeeming time Christ has given us all the time we need to pursue peace.  Christ, though the Holy Spirit, bestows upon his disciples the long-suffering patience necessary to resist any politics whose impatience makes coercion and violence the only and inevitable response to conflict.

            So, it’s impossible to be an authoritarian or fascist if one is a genuine follower of Jesus.  Because we genuine followers of Jesus must be patient and persuasive pacifists.  God rules, but God rules through a cross.

            That’s the politics of the gospel, as we see here in Jesus’ response to the threat from Herod.

            In the face of foxy Herods and the death-dealing forces that want to be in control and exert power over others, we should be disappointed and heartbroken, like Jesus was.  And like Jesus we should respond and keep taking action.  We will not be deterred from our acts of mercy, compassion, and liberation.  And while we continue these God-given ministries, we must also practice patience, which can be so difficult.

            And so I conclude with one more bit of advice from Stanley Hauerwas:

The church must learn time and time again that its task is not to make the world [into] the kingdom [of God], but to be faithful to the kingdom by showing to the world what it means to be a community of peace.  Thus we are required to be patient and never lose hope.

To the Test

Luke 4:1-13

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

9 March 2024

            “What we do as individuals and as a species in the coming decade may very well help to determine the ultimate destination of humanity as a whole for the rest of time!”  So declares Alvin Graylin in his book Our Next Reality on how artificial intelligence is going to reshape the world.  He even says that the next few decades “will likely be the most critical years in human history.”

            Now, one never knows exactly how to take a claim like this.  We humans have a tendency to always see the immediate time we are living in as the critical period.  I’m sure that’s how it felt when our grandparents were confronting fascism.  And I know it’s how folks talked about our fears of nuclear war in my childhood.  Climate change also makes our current age seem critical.

            But even if Alvin Graylin overstates the claim, other voices I listen to, more sober ones not involved in the tech industry, are beginning to make similar claims.  Just this week on his podcast, Ezra Klein, for instance, talked about the AI revolution likely coming now in 2-3 years.  He said, “I think we are on the cusp of an era in human history that is unlike any of the eras we have experienced before. And we’re not prepared in part because it’s not clear what it would mean to prepare.”

            If the next few years will be so critical to humanity, why?  What will make it so critical?  Here’s Alvin Graylin again—“The coming decades will bring about a dramatic change in what it will mean to be human, as well as our relationship with each other and the way society functions.”  Ah, yeah, that sounds pretty important.

            In other words, we are living through a time of testing, a time that raises fundamental questions about what it means to be human.

            Which is also what Jesus was doing.  Raising questions about what it means to be human. 

            Here’s Jesus scholar James Breech—“What Jesus conveys is an expanded sense of what it means to be a self.  There is a transformation onto a new level of being, where identity is constituted not by law but by awareness of another’s claims.”

            Our Lenten them is “The Lives of Others” (which is only tangentially a reference to the great German film by that name).  We’ll be exploring how Jesus invites us into a new mode of human being in which we live with open-ended stories that teach us how others permeate our lives.  The chancel decorations, for example, are a representation of the idea that the story never ends.  I’ll be unpacking all of those ideas in more detail over the next few Sundays.

            James Breech says that Jesus, both in the stories he told and in the story about him which we read in the Gospels, teaches us that there are no clearcut endings.  Breech writes, “in real life there never is a point at which the meaning of our experience becomes clear.”  So we can’t operate with certainty, human life is always in flux. 

            Which we can find unsettling, of course.  But into that discomfort comes Jesus who demonstrates that we really find our sense of self, how we truly understand our humanity and who we are in the ways our lives interact with others. 

            The new level of being human that Jesus invites us to is this expanded self where other’s claims upon us are what constitute who we are.

            And we see that here in the temptation story, which is the standard Gospel reading for the First Sunday of Lent.  The commentaries I read point out that this story is less about the temptations themselves and more about how Jesus responds.

            In each of these temptations Jesus is confronted with a decision about what kind of person he is going to be.  Each time Satan offers him a choice that’s really about what a good human life is.  And what God wants for us.

For instance, should Jesus focus upon alleviating immediate human suffering and turn stones into bread?  Notice that this isn’t a bad thing.  The temptations aren’t necessarily enticements to something bad.  They even show how our choices that include some goodness can distract us from who God desires us to be.

Should he gain earthly power so that he might fix all the problems of the world?  Should he compel God to act dramatically on his behalf, wowing people with spectacles?  This would be the Marvel Superhero version of the Jesus story.

No, God doesn’t want Jesus to operate in any of these ways.  Even though each of these paths seems easier.  What God wants is for Jesus to operate through the long, hard work of love.  In which we treat everyone with respect and mercy.  And, as we can see today, that work is on-going.  And as that work gets more difficult, we become tempted to take the easy routes of earthly power, grand spectacles, or fixing the immediate problems instead of the deeper issues.

The temptation story invites us to consider what type of persons are we going to be?

            So, maybe humanity will soon face a crisis of what it means to be human, brought on by artificial intelligence.  But we’ve already lived through a crisis that required us to face these very questions.

            This coming week marks the fifth anniversary of when everything shut down because of the Covid-19 pandemic.  Five years.  Really.  That moment is now moving into the historical past.  And we are still trying to understand what happened and its after effects upon us.

            This last week, the New York Times produced a sobering piece by David Wallace-Wells entitled “How Covid Remade America.”  In detail he described the multitude of ways that the pandemic has changed us.  He wrote, “We tell ourselves we’ve moved on and hardly talk about the disease or all the people who died or the way the trauma and tumult have transformed us. But Covid changed everything around us.”

            And he does not think it changed us for the better.  He summarizes, “America is a harsher place, more self-interested and nakedly transactional. We barely trust one another and are less sure that we owe our fellow Americans anything — let alone the rest of the world.”

            Here are some of the lasting effects he lists:

• It turned us into hyper-individualists. By locking us into our private spaces and viewing everyone else as a potential threat, we became solipsistic and our moral horizons shrank.
• This generated a new age of social Darwinism, in which surviving was viewed as a sign of merit. He writes, what “might have become an object lesson in human frailty and interdependence. Instead, we pointed fingers at one another, scapegoating so as to avoid acknowledging that the threat was beyond our control.”
• Another result he sees is that our faith in public health has been broken. And right now we are watching it being dismantled.
• He says it shattered our cities and disordered society. That year homicides jumped thirty percent.  Alcoholism increased.  As did homelessness.  And pedestrian deaths in traffic accidents. 
• It also destabilized and redrew our politics.
• He writes that world powers became more mercenary, turning inward to care for their own and reducing their commitments to helping people across the globe.
• He even thinks that the backlash to progressive ideas of race and gender flow from the Right’s anger at the behavioral restrictions imposed in 2020. Because that created a fight over what is virtuous behavior and what counts as merit in our society.
• He lists all sorts of other practical effects I haven’t gone into, such as effects on the workplace, education, etc.

After coming through the pandemic, you think we might be celebratory and triumphant, instead, he writes:

the world does not seem now more buoyant or full of hope, but abrasive and rapacious and shaped nearly everywhere by a barely suppressed rage. We have still not reckoned with all we have lost.

            Of course, it didn’t need to be this way.  Our social response to the pandemic could have been a moment of increased solidarity, and it truly was at the very beginning.  We could have come together to face our problems.  Celebrated our scientific and medical achievements.  Grown individually and as a society.  Learned better how to help each other, maybe even made radical changes to a more just and compassionate social order.  It could have been a moment of positive transformation to something better.  Something more like what Jesus modeled and God dreams for us.

            And I do think we viewed it that way here at First Central.  Part of our success in navigating that difficult time and the years of coming back together was because we viewed it as an opportunity for genuine spiritual and personal growth and the strengthening of community. 

            Humanity lived through a time of testing, when we were repeatedly faced with choices about what it means to be a human being and what type of person we are going to be.  Sadly, when we look around us five years later, we see how poorly humans as a whole failed the test.

            This week I looked again at a book that had been very helpful to our ministry here back in 2022—Doing Theology in Pandemics, edited by Zachary Moon.  One of the strongest pieces in that collection was by the great theologian Rita Nakashima Brock.  She wrote about how the pandemic was apocalyptic in the Biblical sense of unveiling truths.

            Brock wrote, “The habits, rituals, and meaning systems of life have been thrown into considerable chaos . . . as we have sought to hold some order and purpose to life, we may have felt our humanity, or our confidence in the humanity of others, slipping way.”

            She believes we all experienced moral injury.  Moral injury is a term that first appeared in treating the trauma of combat veterans.  The injury arises when we cannot integrate our experiences into our meaning-making systems.  The more empathetic, idealistic, service-oriented you are, the more vulnerable you are to moral injury.  She writes, “When chaos strikes and they cannot see how to do the right thing or doing the right thing is no longer possible, they can be devastated by relentless failure.”

            Side note.  Last Sunday the columnist David Brooks used the term moral injury to describe what he is feeling right now as he watches the nation he loves become more cruel.  That observation really resonated with me.

            According to Rita Nakashima Brock, what we experienced during the pandemic and what we learned about each other and our institutions, unmoored us from our previous understandings and left us feeling helpless about what to do.  She summarized her thoughts, “We experienced collective moral injury that upended our habits, our rituals, our national myths and illusions, and our ability to trust each other.”

            She was hopeful that from that experience we actually had “the best possibility in our lifetimes for deep social and political change.”  David Wallace-Wells’s piece in the Times suggests we missed the opportunity and failed the test.

            And, if you believe the AI folks, another test of our humanity is upon us.

            But, of course, the tests of our humanity arrive every day.  Are we kind to strangers we encounter?  Caught in traffic, does our rage overcome us?  Do we put down our phones and spend more time in genuine human connection?

            In her commentary on the story of Jesus’ temptation, Kimberly Van Driel writes, “The devil presents wants as needs, falsehoods as truths, distrust as faith.”

            These temptations confront us every day.

            But, there’s good news!  We can change!  We can decide to do something different.  To become something new.  As my colleague Jim Newby declares, “The most amazing thing about the human personality is that it can be changed, transformed, altered, and redirected.”

            Even better is that God promises to be with us through the transformation.

            So, what’s your response?  What kind of human being do you want to be? 

            Are you ready to trust in God and follow Jesus?  Are you ready to be transformed into a new mode of human being? 

            Because that’s what Lent and the journey to Holy Week and Easter invite us to, every year.  The opportunity to experience spiritual and personal transformation.  And it begins with examining ourselves, honestly.  Confessing our sins, admitting our failures, becoming aware of our brokenness.

            But don’t worry.  Jesus shows us the path to new life.  He invites us into a story that never ends, in which to achieve our full humanity, we must invest ourselves in the lives of others. 

Hope Brightens the World

2 Corinthians 3:12, 17-4:2

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

2 March 2024

            “Our problem is . . . a pandemic of fear,” so writes the Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han.  His description of our times is stark:

We are facing multiple crises.  Anxiously, we confront a bleak future.  There is no hope.  We muddle through from crisis to crisis, from one catastrophe to another, from one problem to the next.  Amid problem-solving and crisis management, life withers.  It becomes survival.

            According to Han, this pandemic of fear prevents us from acting, narrows our horizons, and robs us of a future.  Fear, he writes, is a spectre, haunting humanity.

            We have a sense that these fears are caused by structural regimes that we have little control over, so we turn inward and focus on the self, sometimes isolating ourselves.  Loneliness and even more fear result from this isolation. 

            And our competitive economic environment also generates fears.  He describes the “fear of failing; fear of not living up to one’s expectations; fear of not keeping up with the rest, or fear of being left behind.”  One thinks of the ubiquity of the concept of FOMO—the fear of missing out.  Han writes that these fears are good for productivity, but not so much for our humanity.

            What’s the solution?

            He writes, “Only hope can give us back that life that is more than mere survival.  It is hope that opens up a meaningful horizon that reinvigorates and inspires life.  Hope presents us with a future.”

            St. Paul proclaims “Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness.”

            According to Paul scholar Michael Gorman, hope for Paul is “grounded in the character and promises of God—God’s faithfulness and integrity.”  And because of this, we can look to the future, no matter what is happening in the current moment, even if we are suffering.  And that God-grounded hope “produces confidence, courage, and patient endurance.”

            According to Paul, our hope looks forward to when we will fully shine with God’s glory.  And because of that hope, we can engage in ministry and speak the truth.

            On this Transfiguration Sunday, as we conclude our Epiphany season worship series on the Common Good, I thought we should focus on hope.

            And I thought Byung-Chul Han’s meditation on hope would be worthy of our attention, for some of the fresh ideas he brings to the topic.

            Last fall the Spanish paper El Pais named Han one of the top ten most influential currently working intellectuals in the world.  Fred Nielsen sent that article to me one day.  I had not yet read anything of Han’s, but I had been seeing his name pop up various places, particularly with the publication in America of his latest book The Spirit of Hope.

            Han has been writing short, widely-read books for a while now on the current state of human anxiety and burnout in this time of great change and crises.  His 2015 book The Burnout Society describes how our world is “filled with exhausted people, who exploit themselves at work and optimize their free time by immersing themselves in their cellphones.”

            Han criticizes how we have surrendered to a social narrative about work and consumption instead of doing what we really want to do or what is best for us.  And so much of our work is on superficial things.  He also says that we might have multiple connections with other people but are losing genuine communications in real presence with each other.

            Instead, he encourages that we live more simply, spend more time in each other’s presence, carve out spaces where we disconnect from technology, and make sure we spend time having fun or doing nothing productive at all.

            Han is developing a following for speaking to the concerns of our age.

            His latest book, The Spirit of Hope, encourages hope as a counter-mood to the fears and anxieties that dominate our lives.

            Unlike fear, which narrows our horizons and ability to act, hope has a vastness to it.  Han writes, “Hope effects a widening of the soul so that it embraces the great things.”  When we hope, we can see beyond on current moment and its constraints.  We can imagine new possibilities and make ourselves ready for what new things may come. 

            Han also writes that hope is a form of attention.  If you were here throughout the autumn when I was preaching on the spirituality of awe, then you know that every Sunday attention as a practice came up.  I’ve long preached about the spiritual and ethical importance of being attentive to the world. 

            Here’s what Han has to say about attention and its relationship to hope—“There is also something contemplative about hope.  It leans forward and listens attentively.  The receptivity of hope makes it tender, lends it beauty and grace.”

            He distinguishes hoping from both optimism and wishing.  Optimism has no room for doubt, despair, or anguish.  It overlooks these essential parts of the human condition and ultimately is a passive attitude.  Whereas hope is “searching movement” that leads to action.

            Wishing, he writes, “involves a feeling of lack” but hope is different.  It “possesses a fullness and luminosity.”  Wishes, he says, are never forceful, but hopes are.

            Hope arises from despair, from a deep attention to our human condition.  It is a spiritual mood that breaks out of the constraints of the moment and sees a future of newness and possibilities.

            Hope becomes much like the yes to life that I preached about last week when I was talking about the resurrection power that we Christians can lay claim to.  Han writes, “Hope is the spring, the zest, that liberates us from our depression, from an exhausted future.”

            Hope is a force, a momentum that moves us forward and with that comes an enthusiasm.  Han says enthusiasm and motivation are “hope’s fundamental traits.”  And because of this hope “brightens the world.”

            Han even says that there is a festiveness to hope.  An attitude of celebration and joy instead of being constrained by anxiety and fear.  It makes me think of the importance of having fun, throwing a party, going dancing, laughing with others.  These enjoyments and delights are essential for our spiritual, emotional, and ethical well-being.

            And because hope has all these traits—its attentiveness, its tender receptivity, its searching movement, its vastness, enthusiasm, motivation, and festiveness, then we are able to act.  Han very simply and directly states, “Humans can act because they can hope.”

            Which returns us to what St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians—“since, then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness.”

            The crises and changes of our time cause us anxiety and fear.  Makes sense.  But we cannot become trapped by those anxieties and fears.  We cannot allow our horizons to narrow, our souls to shrink into passivity.  We can claim the yes to life and cultivate the attitude of hope, that looks forward with newness and possibility and embraces great things.  And with that hope we can be people of courage, living in to God’s mission and speaking the truth.

Our Proclamation

Luke 6:17-31; 1 Corinthians 15:12-20

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

House of Hope Presbyterian Church

16 February 2024

            When I was a college student, back in December of 1993, I took a tour of Israel and Palestine and, of course, one of our stops was the Mount of the Beatitudes, the small hill that sits above the Sea of Galilee, and commemorates Jesus’ great sermon.  On the spot sits a lovely church, paid for by Benito Mussolini, which is embarrassing.

Despite being there in winter, it was a mild and beautiful day when we visited.  The sun shining in a clear blue sky.  The landscape still green.  It was easy to imagine the multitudes of people surrounding Jesus to hear his teaching.

As with many of the sites in the Holy Land, the exact location of an event is not always known with historical accuracy, but from this small hill you can see the entire surrounding countryside and know that it was in the area, spread before you, that Jesus carried out much of his teaching and his ministry.

Of course, Matthew places the sermon on a mountain, and Luke says it occurred on a plain.  I don’t think either evangelist was trying to pinpoint a precise location.  Matthew wants a mountain for its significance, that the Sermon can be compared to the deliverance of the Torah to Moses on Mt. Sinai.  Both the Torah and the Sermon of Jesus being words from God that are used to form the people of God.

Luke narrates that Jesus has been on the mountain with his newly appointed apostles and now they come down to a level place to talk to the multitudes.  The location seems to emphasize that this teaching is for the masses, for everyone.  Nor is this some “mountaintop experience”—a moment of ecstasy that cannot be sustained over time.  No, this is a teaching for everyday and for all times.  And placing everyone on a level plain seems to upend any attempt to create a hierarchy—all are welcome into this new people that God is forming through Jesus Christ.

The commentator Brendan Byrne draws our attention to the crowd, when he writes, “It is before this array of burdened and afflicted humanity, longing to access his healing and liberating power, that Jesus” gives his instructions.

Don’t we live in interesting times?

I’m drawn to those thinkers who describe this era as an age of polycrisis.  We don’t get to respond to just one crisis at a time, but a whole series of overlapping and intersecting crises.  I’m amused by the accuracy of those who call this decade “The Terrible Twenties.”

We are living through one of those eras of deep change, brought on by radical advances in technology, similar to previous periods in human history that witnessed swift and dramatic breakthroughs.  Many of the changes we are living through are on a global scale, with much of it beyond our control. 

Which, of course, is not comforting.  Our human brains are not well-equipped for uncertainty; so we get anxious, stressed, afraid, and sometimes begin to act out.

In the midst of this era of change, we’ve now been experiencing all these crises.  The pandemic and all of its effects.  The cultural reckonings with racial injustice and the #MeToo movement and now the overwhelming backlash.  The wars in Ukraine, Palestine, Congo, Sudan, and Myanmar.  America’s epidemic of gun violence.  The epidemic of mental illness.  The opioid epidemic.  The rise of deaths of despair.  The return of political violence.  The rise of authoritarians.  The loss of reproductive rights.  The attacks on the LGBT community, particularly our trans and non-binary siblings.  Mass migrations of humanity and the backlash to that.  And what exactly is happening and is going to happen with artificial intelligence?

Looming over everything–global climate change and the many ways that impact is being felt now almost every day.

Some religious thinkers are predicting that worse is yet to come, that humanity might enter some sort of dark age. I’m hopeful that’s not the case, but I’m paying attention to those voices of warning.

Among the challenges these crises pose is avoiding cynicism, despair, hopelessness, and, simply, exhaustion. 

So when we look around us we see an “array of burdened and afflicted humanity, longing to access . . . healing and [liberation].”  Just like those crowds that Jesus preached to.

I believe this period of crisis presents opportunities for the church.  Precisely because we have values, qualities, and skills that can help humanity in this moment.  Our rich traditions, our spiritual practices, our commitments to care and community, our service to others, our work for justice and peace, even the beauty of our artistry, these are among Christianity’s great strengths.  Our churches are places where people can discover what they need—to belong, to be part of something bigger, to make sense of their lives and the world.

I also believe that the Christian church is needed now more than it has been at any point in my lifetime.  

What the world needs is a group of people formed by the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth who boldly proclaim good news.

But there’s one challenge I haven’t mentioned yet, and that is that the very understanding of what it means to be a Christian, a follower of Jesus, is being contested in the public square in dramatic, new ways.

Most of us have grown up in the time when the basic divide in American Protestant Christianity was between the Liberal Mainline and Evangelicals.  And there were different parts of the American Catholic Church in alliance with those two groups.  We also watched the rise of the Religious Right. And these groups have disagreed about the inerrancy of scripture, the ordination of women, and the place of queer people in the life of the church.

In the last quarter century, the Religious Left regained its voice—opposing the War in Iraq, organizing to respond to anti-Black violence in places like Ferguson, Charleston, Charlottesville, and Minneapolis, providing help and sanctuary to immigrants and refugees, and defending the rights of the Water Protectors at Standing Rock. 

But at the same time, the Religious Right has been changing.  Now we face a new Christian Nationalism that in its most radical forms imagines some sort of conservative Christian theocracy. 

And the traditional voices of American faith are being challenged and threatened.  Bishop Marian Budde’s call for mercy and compassion generates a whirlwind.  Luteran Family Services is being defunded.  The Catholic Bishops of America are having to defend the refugee work of their churches against attacks from the Catholic Vice President.  And this week the Pope intervened to clearly state the teaching of the Christian church and rebuke these attacks.

Francis opened his letter by declaring that this is “a decisive moment in history to reaffirm not only our faith in a God who is always close, incarnate, migrant and refugee, but also the infinite and transcendent dignity of every human person.”  And near the end of the letter, Francis offers this exhortation:

I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of good will, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters. With charity and clarity we are all called to live in solidarity and fraternity, to build bridges that bring us ever closer together, to avoid walls of ignominy and to learn to give our lives as Jesus Christ gave his for the salvation of all.

So, part of our challenge is to proclaim to the wider world who Jesus is, why we believe what we believe, and why we do what we do, particularly our acts of service and kindness for the most vulnerable and the needy.

Didn’t Jesus tell us in this very sermon—“Blessed are the poor, the hungry, those who weep, those who are hated and excluded?”  And didn’t he tell us, “woe to the rich, the full, the mocking”?

On Wednesday, the New York Times ran an article on a religious revival of sorts that is occurring in Silicon Valley.  Long one of the least religious and most unchurched locales in the country.  But apparently as the techno elite have been shifting to the political right, many of them are also finding religion.

The story focuses in on Trae and Michelle Stephens.  He is one of Peter Thiel’s venture capital partners, and she has formed a group called ACTS 17 which is an acronym for “Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society.”  She hosts gatherings in her home, where attendees pay $50, and it is advertised to young tech workers as a chance to network with leaders in the industry.  The events are discussions of faith and theology, with the main speakers often being executives and leaders of the tech companies. 

One of the most telling paragraphs was this one, a quote from Michelle Stephens, explaining this ministry:

“We were always taught as Christians to serve the meek, the lowly, the marginalized,” . . .  “I think we’ve realized that, if anything, the rich, the wealthy, the powerful need Jesus just as much.”

            Yes, the rich, wealthy, and powerful do need Jesus.  Obviously.  But you know who taught us that Christians were to serve “the meek, the lowly, the marginalized?”  It was Jesus himself.  Right here in this sermon and again and again.

            I do not recognize a “Christianity” that focuses on making the rich and powerful feel more comfortable.

            Or leaves them with the idea that their lives shouldn’t be in service to the poor and the vulnerable.

            Because Jesus teaches the exact opposite of that.

            And these words of Jesus don’t make us feel comfortable.  I’m neither rich nor powerful, but I am a rather privileged, well-educated, white American male whose belly is full, and these words of Jesus’ sermon convict me.  They challenge me.  They don’t let me become complacent. 

            In fact, when we truly read and meditate upon these words of the Gospel, they teach us not just that we are supposed to live our lives in service to the poor and the vulnerable, but that that the poor and the vulnerable have insights to teach us.  They have a closeness to God and God’s vision for the world.  So we need to be hospitable and generous in order to learn from them and to receive their gifts, so that we might be changed, we might be saved.

            Here’s New Testament scholar Brendan Byrne again, Jesus “is seeking to inculcate a fundamental attitude according to which one would be prepared to be vulnerable to a degree foolish by the standards of the world, because such vulnerability and generosity is what one both discerns in God and experiences from God.”  And elsewhere he writes, “It is the vulnerable who make the world safe for humanity” and become “instrument[s] of the hospitality of God.”

            Yet we live in an age where it seems to have suddenly become okay to be a bully.  Where what it means to be great is to exert our power and make demands upon others.  Mercy and compassion are signs of weakness.

            But, again, Jesus teaches us otherwise.  Jesus models the generosity, hospitality, and vulnerability of God.  And invites us to become part of a people who embodies those same values.  If we do, we shall be blessed.  And woe to those who do not.

            So, again, what the world needs, in order to meet and respond to all these challenges and opportunities, are groups of people, formed by the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, who boldly proclaim the good news.

            Which is what I’m looking forward to doing together with you, if I am called to be your pastor. 

            From the moment I first read your job posting last year, and throughout my conversations since, I’ve been impressed with your sense of identity, your vision, and your commitment to being instruments for God’s mission in this city and the world. 

            House of Hope, I believe, has the people, the resources, the opportunities to meet the challenges of this critical moment.  God is calling us to be faithful followers of Jesus Christ.  Together, let us proclaim the good news.

We Proclaim

1 Corinthians 15:1-11

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

9 February 2024

            Now I would remind you, my siblings and friends, of the good news that I and my predecessors have proclaimed to you, which you have received, in which you also stand, through which you are also being saved, if you hold firmly to the message, for you have not believed in vain.

            This is a season for proclamation.  For the apostolic work of the church.  For us to be reminded of the good news of the gospel and for us to share that good news with the world around us.

            We live in a time when people hunger and seek after meaning.  They want to be part of something bigger, that helps them to make sense of their lives.  Something in which they can stand.

            The Anglican bishop and Bible scholar N. T. Wright has declared that the current mission of the church is to pioneer a way into a new world, in which we model a new way of being human, rooted in the love of God.  Which includes a reconstruction of how we know, not through abstract propositions, but centered, also, in love.  The church helps us to see our lives as part of a great love story, from which we draw our model of human flourishing, and the courage required for living in these days.

            One of my UCC colleagues told a story a few weeks ago at our annual conference about a young woman who, when she joined the church, asked to address the congregation.  And what she said was “Thank you for this space where my life can be bigger and more beautiful.”

            This is the good news that we proclaim.

            And the message we proclaim is a message of salvation.  We are being saved by this good news.

            The good news that God has invaded the world in order to complete the creation by defeating the forces of sin and evil and setting us free to become a new, flourishing humanity.

            That is the essence of the story of Jesus that Paul tells us here in 1 Corinthians.

            The story begins with acknowledging that we stand in need of deliverance from this world, this age.  Here’s how feminist scholar Beverly Roberts Gaventa describes the situation:

Our deep attachment to corrupt systems of measurement, our distorted quest for identity, to say nothing of the malformed relationships between men and women—all of these are more than attitudes in need of adjustment.  They are symptoms of the persistence of the “present evil age” with which the gospel collides.  No social agenda will correct the situation, and no pedagogical strategy will suffice, because the power of evil is such that it can corrupt even the purest motives and the sternest resolve.

            As Paul scholar Anthony Thiselton states, “the gospel is not a human social construction.”  So it is not wedded to any ideology or party or nationality.  It is God’s power of love at work in the world to bring about a new creation.

            Which is the essence of Paul’s proclamation, that he had received and handed on to the churches—"Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was raised on the third day . . . and appeared” to so many people, including Paul himself.

            This story is about power, it is about love, it is about vindication and liberation, it is about newness and opportunity and hope, it is about sharing in glory.  And this story is the place in which we stand, which gives us courage to keep on proclaiming.

            Gaventa writes:

First, Paul’s apocalyptic theology has to do with the conviction that in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has invaded the world as it is, thereby revealing the world’s utter distortion and foolishness, reclaiming the world, and inaugurating a battle that will doubtless culminate in the triumph of God over all God’s enemies (including the captors Sin and Death).  This means that the gospel is first, last, and always about God’s powerful and gracious initiative.

            God has acted  to bring about a renewal of the cosmos.  An act of compassion, grace, and love.

            And God’s “invasion” of the world, as she describes it, is not your normal human invasion.  God came to earth as a baby born to a peasant family on the far reaches of the empire.  And the man that child became led no armies and engaged in no violence.  Instead Jesus awakened the Spirit within everyone he encountered, setting them free to flourish and become who God dreamed that they could become.  He showed a new mode of human existence, and when others saw it they were amazed and desired the same thing.

            And Jesus not only didn’t use violence; he became the victim of state violence, a lynching, an innocent lamb taken to slaughter.  And in that way absorbed the violence, modeling a sacrificial and peaceful way of being.  A way to end the violence, end the war, end the oppression.

            But that death was not the end of Jesus, for God raised him from the dead, vindicating Jesus and his way of being and making clear for all time that this is the way we should live, this is what God wants, Jesus’s way  should be our way, so that all might live and all might flourish and all might share in divine glory.

            And through that Sin and Death are and will be and are being defeated.  Because we followers of Jesus have become God’s agents of new creation, being used by the Holy Spirit to bring about the common good for all humanity and all creation.

            God is reclaiming and renewing the creation for our liberation and our flourishing and our participation in glory.  Within us lies the germinative energy, as the Russian theologian Sergius Bulgakov calls it.  The seed from which the new creation is constantly growing.

            And this is not merely a spiritual reality we proclaim.  We proclaim a bodily resurrection.  As Michael Gorman writes, “The body is the means by which we encounter others and serve God.”  And that resurrection change is already occurring in our physical bodies as we turn them away from Sin and death and toward God and what God expects of us.

            Our bodies then bear witness to a new humanity and a renewed creation through the acts of support and service we provide one another, all humanity, and the whole creation.  We become vessels and agents of God’s love, that we talked about last week.  And I really enjoy this description of that love, appropriate for the week of St. Valentine’s Day, by Beverly Roberts Gaventa—“When Paul speaks of the ‘love of God in Christ Jesus,’ it is no sentimental valentine but a fierce love that rescues creation itself.”

            Paul proclaims this story and what it means for us as a source of power and courage and hope because it is Paul’s own story.  He has witnessed it.  He has experienced it.  And as an apostle he invites his hearers and readers to make it their story too.

            Paul himself is an example of the new creation.  He once persecuted the church, involved in the deaths of some of Jesus’ earliest followers.  A man who believed that religious zeal meant purity and dogma and even using violence to achieve your religious aims.  But all of that changed forever for Paul when, he encountered the Risen Christ.  He became a man of peace, going about the world trying his hardest to create radical egalitarian communities of mutual love.

            And so he becomes our apostle, our model of the work to which God continues to call us as a church.

            Work that we can only accomplish because of the grace of God that is with us.

            This is what Paul wants his readers to remember.  And what I too proclaim so that you too might remember and believe.  Believe the great story of which you are apart.  Believe in the power, the courage, the hope that are yours.  Because God is at work in you and through you.  God has saved you, is saving you.  Setting you free from all that enchains you, including Sin, Death, and the evils of this age.  Creating you anew, a new human being, in a renewed body, that shines in holy glory.

            This, my friends and siblings, is what we, with authority and humility and courage, proclaim.

Trust by Hernan Diaz
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Despite it being a Pulitzer Prize Winner, this novel just didn't resonate with me.

View all my reviews

Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times by Elizabeth Oldfield
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you are struggling with all the shit of the world right now, then this is a book I recommend to you.

View all my reviews

The Highest Gift

1 Corinthians 13

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

2 February 2024

            One of the most astonishing things about newborns is that they are able to imitate the facial expressions of their caregivers.  One reason this is astonishing is that newborns have never seen their own face.  Which is evidence that newborn human babies arrive with the capacity for empathy.  They almost immediately understand that they can imitate the looks and the feelings of their adult caregivers.  And almost immediately they learn that they can use their own facial expressions and feelings to compel those caregivers to attend to their needs. 

            We are so used to these behaviors in babies that we probably haven’t taken the time to realize how astonishing it is that the newborn brain functions in this way, has these incredible skills from the beginning.

            And, of course, we now understand how important that early care-giving is.  A child who receives care, attention, touch, affection will development attachment, leading to empathy, and ultimately love.

            By one a child assumes that their mind operates similarly to the other minds they encounter.  By two or three they have developed a basic understanding of empathy, understanding that others feel similarly to them.

            And that’s when children are ready for the next stage of moral development—understanding rules—taking the way you want to be treated and extending that to everyone.  If morality only operated from empathy, then we would have a rather small sphere of ethical action.  We also have to learn how to treat people well even when we don’t feel it.  As Allison Gopnik, who had studied and taught this child development, points out, “Simply relying on immediate emotion isn’t going to work. Somehow we need to extend that emotion to people we aren’t close enough to see and touch.  We need to care about people we don’t know.”

It is so much easier to mature and grow in love if we have the grounding early in our lives of being well cared for.  From that stable base of care and affection, we can expand our moral consciousness, ever-widening the circle of concern, to the point that we can extend the ethics of love to all people.

This is the goal of the human life.

James Fowler, in his classic work Stages of Faith, writes about the levels of development we pass through as we grow and mature.  In the higher stages, we become more open to other people and other ideas and do not see them as a threat to ourselves and our beliefs.  The highest stage of human development, stage 6, he calls “universalizing faith” and claims it is quite rare, found in heroes like Gandhi, King, Mother Theresa.  These are the people who express a universal love for all humanity and are willing to sacrifice themselves for that love.  They have an openness to all people and, quite simply, appear to be, as Fowler writes, “more fully human than the rest of us.”  He believes such people embody the future which we long for.

I believe this is the sort of love Paul is praising here in First Corinthians.

He ended chapter 12 by writing that he was going to tell them about the highest gift.  This directed to the people in that congregation who felt they should be developing the “higher” gifts, out of some bent desire to feel superior to other people. 

Paul has been at pains in this letter to knock some sense into those folks.  The church is a radically egalitarian community.  No one is superior to anyone else.  In fact, the folks that seem, by normal human standards, to be less important, are in the church, MORE essential.  So no Christian should lord themselves over another or mistreat anyone who is vulnerable.  Those are affronts to the Body of Christ.

And, if you actually want to be more spiritual, to pursue the highest gifts, then you need to be pursuing this universal, unconditional love.  Because not only is that the most important gift for building up the common good of the church, it is also the goal of what the best human life is.  It’s the kind of life Jesus modeled for us and invites us to follow.

Of course, reading 1 Corinthians 13 today, one can’t help but compare and contrast with the current administration and the actions they’ve taken over the last two weeks, so many of which have been devoid of mercy and compassion.  And you’ve already felt these decisions beginning to harm your friends, your family, your own lives.

It is important for us to gather in church and hear that we have not mistaken the Christian faith, we have not misunderstood morality, we have not been fools—unconditional, universal love and its expressions in grace, mercy, and compassion are what God expects of us, are what the best human life should aim for.

But this moment also means that we have to double-down on love.  We have to continue our own spiritual and emotional growth and maturation. 

So, what is God calling us to?

First, we should remember that this love talked about here isn’t a feeling.  Or isn’t just a feeling.  It is, as New Testament scholar Anthony Thiselton describes, “an attitude and habitual practice for everyday life.”

Yes, love arises for us foremost and most powerfully in feeling.  The feelings we have for our children, our spouses, our closest friends.  But mature love must expand beyond immediate feeling and begin to encompass everyone we encounter and ultimately those we never meet.

And the only way to do that is to make loving actions a part of our daily habit and routine.  Which is something you have the power to do, regardless of what’s happening on the news.  Every day you can be kind.  You can be empathetic.  You can reach out in care and concern and support to someone who is vulnerable and hurting.  You can be generous with your time or money.  You can offer to help.

Make these sorts of actions our daily habits, and we will continue to grow and develop into more loving people.

We also can’t be consumed by rage.  This week I read the book Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times by Elizabeth Oldfield.  My UCC colleague John Allen, who is a pastor in Maine, highly recommended the book, and now I’m passing that recommendation on to you.  It would be great book for you to read, right now.

In one early chapter she explores how appealing wrath is, but how we must learn to confront our rage with the skills of peacemaking.  I liked how she described this emotion—“wrath, in the form of self-righteous rage and contempt, is a compelling, borderline pleasurable emotion.”  Admit it, you’ve felt that.

She says wrath often helps us to avoid the fear, guilt, or overwhelm that we are actually feeling.  Wrath helps to distract us from those other negative thoughts, partly because it feels more powerful.  She also points out that wrath is addictive, like a sugar-high.  And that we can also use it to bond with other people in “our shared contempt.”

Any of that sound familiar?  Yeah.  She’s on-the-nose that that is one of the sins holding us back from experiencing the fully aliveness that God dreams for each of us. 

She is quick and careful to separate anger from wrath.  Anger can be healthy, effective, and required.  But wrath is that feeling that ultimately disconnects us from other people and from who God intends us to be.

So Oldfield invites us to engage in spiritual practices to confront our wrath so that we might grow in peacemaking, which is clearly one aspect of the love we are talking about today.

One practice she recommends is to make two lists.  One of the types of people you are most comfortable with and the other of the types of people you are least comfortable with.  And then to get really specific in writing down why.  Why one type of people makes you comfortable and another uncomfortable.  And she gives the instruction that you can’t write down an attribute of theirs, you have to make it about you.  What has happened in your experience that makes you feel that way?  What is it that you feel?  What is it that you fear?

And she points out that “if your list isn’t slightly painful, you’re probably not being honest.”

What’s the purpose of this exercise?  To better understand our feelings, particularly our fears.  And with a better understanding, then maybe we are less likely to get caught up in fight-or-flight mode.  Because when we are in fight-or-flight mode, we can’t summon empathy.  We can’t calmly stand-our-ground and speak truth in helpful ways.

Our turbulent times require more love.  We can’t just criticize the lack of it in other people.  We also have to focus on our own spiritual and emotional growth and maturation.

Which we can do, because we are powerful people, filled with the Holy Spirit.

In the passage we read last week, Paul contrasted weakness with the normal ways in which humans think of and use power.  And he’s rather critical of the ways humans normally use power.  Paul writes about how God works differently, using what humans consider weakness in order to achieve God’s purposes.  And love is the most important way that God works.

Which really means that love is powerful.  Not powerful in the way humans might ordinarily think of it.  But truly powerful because that’s the way the God who created the world works.  And that’s the way God designed the world to work best.  So when humans operate from love, they tap into the deepest source of real power.

I think many of you, right now, are feeling powerless.  But you are not powerless. 

Listen to these words from the feminist theologian Meggan Watterson:

The good news . . . is that true power rests within us. . . . no one outside of us can keep us from finding this power.  Because it’s not a power over us or outside us.  It’s a power that rests within us, and we can rest in it, be led by it, and be carried by it.

            And what is this power?  You’ve guessed it already.  She answers, “It’s a power that’s the opposite of power.  It’s love.”

            Later she adds, “the love that’s hidden within each of us is the only power that can save all of us.”

            You are a beloved child of God.  You are created in love.  And you are redeemed by-and-in the love that Jesus Christ demonstrated.  A love so powerful that it defeated death and through it we have the power of resurrection.  And that you-are-risen love fills every cell of your body because you are a vessel of the Holy Spirit.  Which comforts you, advocates for you, and gives you the skills and talents you need to live well and fully.  And you’ve been called into the beloved community of the church, where you are not alone, but where your gift is shared with my gift and everyone else here’s gifts, and together those gifts are multiplied to become part of God’s mission to heal humanity.

            No one can take any of that from you.

            So here is what you are capable of:

You can be patient, kind, not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.  You don’t insist on your own way; you aren’t irritable or resentful; you don’t rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoice in the truth.  You can bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, and endure all things.  Because the love that empowers you never ends.

Intentional Leadership: In-Between Seasons by Sarah B Drummond
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sarah Drummond presented at the professional conference I attended two weeks ago. Yesterday this copy of her last book arrived, and it is a good and quick read. Much that's helpful in it that I will put into application in my work.

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In early December, El Pais, named a list of "the 10 most influential thinkers in the world."  One of my church members sent me the link.  As I read through the article I was excited to discover that I had read nine of the ten thinkers.  And, in an amusing coincidence, the only one I hadn't read, Byung-Chul Han, that very day I had added his latest book The Spirit of Hope to my t0-read list after reading a review.  So it floated to the top of said list, and I read it shortly after, rounding out all ten on the list.

The ten are: Judith Butler, Thomas Piketty, Noam Chomsky, Jürgen Habermas, Yuval Noah Harari, Michael Sandel, Martha Nussbaum, Slavoj Zižek, Byung-Chul Han, and Peter Singer.

Let me take them in the order I encountered them.

Martha Nussbaum lectured at the University of Oklahoma when I was still an undergrad philosophy major at Oklahoma Baptist University.  Her topic in that series was the emotions and how emotions have rational content.  It was some years later before I read any of her books, the first one being one she wrote on religious freedom in America (I highly recommend).  Since then I've read many of her books, and she's become one of the thinkers influential in my own thinking.  If you're a non-academic reader looking for a good place to begin, I recommend The Monarchy of Fear.  Much of her best work is on better understanding our emotions, while her justice work has focused on what capabilities all humans need in order to live well.

Jürgen Habermas was one of those names you learned in a survey of the history of philosophy for his contributions to how the public uses reason to make decisions and solve problems.  I probably first read an excerpt in my history of contemporary philosophy class as an undergrad.  While in graduate school I did read his book Justification and Application, though I really don't remember anything from it.  Last year I read volume one of his current project (he's 95 and wrapping things up), which is a history of philosophy explaining how our use of reason has emerged and developed.  

In graduate school I enrolled in one of those intersession courses where you cram a semester's worth of reading and essay writing in about two weeks.  This particular course was on the philosophy of language, using Noam Chomsky as our main text and other thinkers in dialogue with him.  I came to the course initially with a view of language acquisition that believed we start with a blank slate and have to learn everything as children.  Chomsky argued that we are born already wired with the capacity to learn language, that the slate is far from blank.  This course was one of the few times I could point to such a sudden shift of opinion on my part, brought on my reading convincing arguments of one thinker.

Peter Singer and Michael Sandel are two contemporary philosophers I first read in excerpts while in graduate school and only in the last fifteen years finally read one of their books, particularly when I was teaching philosophy myself at Creighton University.  Singer is a utilitarian ethicist who has followed his convictions to make bold statements on animal rights and alleviating the suffering of newborn humans.  In this century he was the source of what became the effective altruism movement (which was until a few years ago quite trendy) in which one determines the most good one can do with one's resources.  One outcome of this was changing how philanthropy worked, with folks maximizing the life-saving potential of their donations--anti-malaria nets, for instance, are one of the most cost effective ways.  His The Most Good You Can Do outlines this perspective.

Sandel taught a course on Justice that became the most popular course at Harvard.  He later turned it into a very good book, that surveys the major approaches to creating a just society.  The book seriously needs an updated version, as the final chapter waxes euphoric about the election of Barack Obama and all the good that portends for the country.  Sandel believes that a society must have some vision of the good life and what it means to be a flourishing person and create the institutions that will help to further these goals, if we are to achieve justice.

I read Judith Butler's Gender Trouble after I came out as a gay man and was in a period of reading queer classics in various genres and fields.  Butler's work was seminal in our contemporary understanding of gender.  Gender is culturally constructed and is performed.  She was one of the key figures in the development of queer theory then.  As gender has become a hot-button topic in recent years, Butler's old work has come under increasing fire.  She's written a newer book trying to understand what has caused all the trouble.  I haven't read that one yet, but do intend to at some point.  

I'd been hearing about Slavoj Zižek but didn't know much, when I was browsing through Powell's, the great Portland, Oregon bookstore, with my friend Dan Morrow and came across a copy of Zižek's Violence, which explores all the various ways violence and our perception of it permeates contemporary culture and economics.  Zižek is a fascinating provocateur, and much of his work as a public intellectual has been online.  A video I enjoyed using in my philosophy courses was his takedown of philanthropy.

Thomas Piketty's Capital I read during my paternity leave in 2015.  Often with sleeping newborn in one arm and the heavy economic tome in the other.  Piketty's book galvanized folks a decade ago as it explained the deep inequalities of the global economy that helped to explain what had happened in the Great Recession.  And it seems that the things Piketty warned about have only gotten worse in subsequent years.

After it was a major global bestseller, I read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, but frankly didn't care for it at all.  So I've never understood his popularity or influence in how we understand human history and use that to anticipate our future.

Which brings me finally to Byung-Chul Han.  I had missed any familiarity with him until the end of this last year and have since seen a few friends commenting on him and his books.  I do plan to go back and read earlier works that I missed, but I have now read his latest book translated into English, The Spirit of Hope in which he writes about the fear that arises in our current moment of history because of all the crises we encounter.  In this period he encourages us to hope, for "It is hope that opens up a meaningful horizon that reinvigorates and inspires life.  Hope presents us with a future."  

A Lantern in Her Hand by Bess Streeter Aldrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the third novel of hers I've read, and I continue to be surprised by how much I enjoy them, even if their old fashioned storytelling and sentimentality. They always move me deeply.

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A Beautiful Ending

Isaiah 65:17-25

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

22 December 2024

            We humans long for a beautiful ending.  Not just the fairy tale happily ever after, but in the biggest and grandest sense of the idea.  We dream and long for history to arrive at a beautiful ending, whether that’s the communist utopia or the kingdom of God or a scientific techno culture that has expanded human habitation into the stars.  The historian John Jeffries Martin has revealed the ways in which this vision of a beautiful ending not only animates our religious ideas but is also embedded in our modern political ideas, which imagine a better, more just world of freedom and equality.

            This Advent we’ve been exploring the beautiful endings imagined by the Hebrew prophets.  And, in particular, how those visions of God’s redemption are rooted in the here and now, with rather ordinary, mundane visions of the good life—old people at rest, children playing, young people making merry, everyone with plenty of food to eat, where work is fulfilling and we can enjoy the fruits of our labor, where the disabled are included, people feel safe and secure, where griefs are comforted, and together we joyfully celebrate with dancing and music. 

            And today’s reading from the Book of Isaiah adds to the wonderful imagery.  The poet dreams of a new heaven and a new earth.  God is about the work of new creation, and that new creation will be filled with joy and delight.  The great Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann writes about this passage, “[God] is moving beyond what is troubling and unresolved to what is wondrously new and life giving.”

            And what will this newness look like?  Again it is very practical, very here and now.  God is creating a new city, a new social arrangement.  Walter Brueggemann identifies three qualities of this divinely new society. 

            First, there will be “stability and order that guarantees long life.”  In a world of violence, where lives are so often cut short by the bombs of war or a random shooter, what a blessed dream that we could be safe enough to enjoy long life free of those horrors. 

            The second quality of Isaiah’s vision is economic stability.  There will enough to go around.  Our work will not be in vain.  We will not live in fear that someone else will take what we have worked for.  Here’s how Brueggemann describes it:

[God] will be the guarantor of a viable, community-sustaining economy. . . .  Nobody is threatened.  Nobody is at risk.  Nobody is in jeopardy because the new city has policies, practices, and protective structures that guarantee . . . an egalitarian possibility.

            And the final quality of the beautiful ending Isaiah imagines—“an agenda of well-being for our children.”

            This October, Wendell Berry, the great American poet, essayist, and social critic, who is a deep person of faith and a Kentucky farmer, wrote a scathing cover article for The Christian Century entitled “Against Killing Children” in which he condemns our society for not “prevent[ing] our own children from being killed in their classrooms—and who do not much mind the killing of other people’s children by weapons of war.”  According to Berry, we have become the exact opposite of what Isaiah envisions.  Ours is not a society that prioritizes the well-being of children.

            Yet, in the face of our troubled, disappointing reality, we return again and again to visions like Isaiah’s.  We want to imagine something new, something better.  We long for this.  We want to prepare for it.  We keep waiting and hoping for the beautiful ending.

            Advent, of course, is the season of hope.  A season of waiting and preparation.  The beautiful ending isn’t here yet, it’s still coming.  We are still longing for it.  We can imagine it, maybe even begin to taste it, but it isn’t here yet.  We’re doing what we can to prepare for it—hoping, loving each other, enjoying life, and practicing peace.  But, we are still waiting.

            And, truth be told, we keep on waiting.  For all the fun and excitement of Christmas morning, we know that when we return to normal routines next week, the world won’t have radically shifted, the beautiful ending will not have finally arrived in all its wonder.

            Which is one of the many reasons I appreciate the liturgical calendar of the church.  In the cycle of the year, our worship focuses on so many human emotions and experiences.  All of us have Good Fridays, for instance—days of deep and despairing darkness when all seems lost.  We also have Easter moments—filled with new life, the bright sunshine of a new dawn, a chance to begin again.  We face Ash Wednesdays, when we are confronted by our own limitations, our mortality, our vulnerability, our weaknesses, our sins.  But there are also Pentecost moments in our lives where we are filled with spirit, on fire with passion, capable of amazing things. 

            It’s not that every year we are in the same emotional place on the same day as the church calendar.  But all these aspects of the human condition are explored each year and over and over again, reminding us that our spirituality and our faith flow from and are present in all the varied aspects of our lives.

            Advent is that season of waiting and longing.  And sometimes what we are waiting and longing for, never quite arrives.

            On the Alban Institute blog this week I read a fine essay on the meaning of Advent.  When I shared it to the church Facebook group, a few of you responded, including one congregant who wrote, “Thanks for sharing....I'm right there.”

            The essay was by Jean Neely, who teaches writing at Azusa Pacific University, and she wrote about the profound depths of this season of longing:

Advent says that there’s room in the church for all of us whose desperate faith is more doubt and longing than steadiness of belief.

Advent is for the eternally bothered, those of us who too keenly feel our own pain and the world’s. The season meets us in our inability to perform “good cheer” or “great faith” when it is not well with our souls.

In Advent, we attend to the heartache over all that has gone awry. We join our yearnings for more love in our homes, our churches and our country; we cry for peace in Palestine, in Ukraine, in Sudan and around the globe.

            These reasons Neely articulates are why it is so important for us to observe Advent and not just rush into Christmas.  Not everyone is feeling as festive.  Each year there are people grappling with new losses and griefs who may want to be in the mood, but just can’t muster it.  Each year there are some people stressed out and made anxious by all the holiday preparations.  Each year there are some people dreading seeing family.  Each year there are some people for whom this season is always difficult, because of their memories of what has happened in the past.  Each year there are some people for whom this darkest and coldest part of the year brings on depression.  There are always folks who are more “In the Bleak Midwinter” than “Joy to the World!”  And Advent is for them.

            Jean Neely continues:

This time of year, we get to remember that we’re still in the waiting season, that though the Light has come, we’re still caught in the place of unfulfillment. It’s for all of us who never feel ready for Christmas or who feel like Christmas never quite comes in the ways we’d hoped.

Advent says that it’s OK to still be waiting through Christmas for God to show up. We’re allowed to “always always long for something.” Advent invites us to come with our fragile hope, our dimly flickering faith and our . . . longing to the Christ who welcomes all of who we are.

            The great truth of Christmas is that Christ was not born once long ago, but Christ is born anew in each of us every year, all the time.  The love, the power, the glory we encounter in Jesus of Nazareth is made available to us in our vulnerability by the Spirit of God that dwells within us. 

            God is present with us, and empowering us, even in our moments of unsatisfied and unfulfilled longing.  And because of that, we dare—despite the present circumstances and whatever might be troubling us—to gather together and lift our praises.  To sing with the angels and proclaim with the shepherds, while also pondering like Mary. 

            Because something good and wonderful and beautiful and true is happening.  In us, in others, in the world.  And we continue to hope for more of it to break out and spread and bring the change we so desire.  And we continue to practice peace, even if this world is violent.  And we continue to love, because that’s the greatest gift of all.  And we rejoice, because joy is our birthright as children of God.

            So, we do all of this together—we wait, we dream, we imagine, we lament and mourn and grieve, we wonder and prepare, we light the candles and ponder the darkness, we sit quietly and we make merry together.  We do all of it.  Because we continue to long for the beautiful ending, and our eyes are open to see all the little bits of it already present among us.

            A Happy Fourth Sunday of Advent.

A Blessed Solstice.

And, a Merry Christmas.

The Spirit of Hope by Byung-Chul Han
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

He was recently listed by El Pais as one of the top ten intellectuals in the world. And, he was the only one on the list I had not read. But, ironically, the day before I had put this book on my to read list after seeing it in an end-of-year best-of list.

I really enjoyed the beginning and the idea of hope as "searching movement." There are definitely sentences I'll be quoting in sermons in years ahead.

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Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Yeah, this is a great read. Don't miss it.

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