Spirit of Truth

John 16:12-15

House of Hope Presbyterian Church

15 June 2025

               Yesterday’s events—the assassination of Speaker Hortman and her husband Mark and the attempted murder of Senator Hoffman and his wife Yvette, plus the ongoing search for the gunman—have underscored that we live in violent and dangerous times.  The escalation of political violence in the last few years has been a frightening development, an assault upon our deepest values and our dreams for our nation and our world.

               Much of the Bible was itself written in the context of violence and in response to trauma.  Scholar David Carr claims that the Bible emerged precisely as a people’s response to suffering.

               So, we can turn to these ancient words to find human beings grappling with some of the same concerns we have, including how to handle our grief and anger, how to muster resilience, how to heal, and how to keep dreaming and hoping and working for a better world.

               Today’s Gospel passage is part of a long discourse Jesus gave to his disciples during the Passover gathering the night of his arrest, according to the telling here in the Gospel of John.  Jesus is preparing his followers for the trauma they are about to experience, and providing them encouragement for what will come—when the Holy Spirit arrives to fill them with power.

               Hear now these good words of Jesus:

When the Spirit of truth comes,
They will guide you into all truth.
They won’t speak on their own initiative;
rather, they’ll speak only what they hear,
and they’ll announce to you
things that are yet to come.
In doing this, the Spirit will give glory to me,
for they will take what is mine
and reveal it to you.
Everything that Abba God has belongs to me.
This is why I said that
the Spirit will take what is mine
and reveal it to you.

The town of Tilden, Nebraska lies near the Elkhorn River in the northeast part of the state, about halfway between the larger towns of Norfolk and Neligh.  Tilden’s population is currently just under one thousand. 

               There’s a vibrant little church in the town—Peace United Church of Christ—that maintains a strong music and children’s program for the benefit of the wider community. 

               If you were to visit Peace UCC you’d find the church history corner and in that corner a section devoted to the memory of beloved pastor August Brueggemann who served there almost a century ago. 

               But what you might not realize standing in that little white church is the giant impact that Peace Church has had upon the Christian church as a whole.  Because that beloved pastor had a son Walter who grew up in that church and who then became the greatest Biblical scholar of our time.

               The great Walter Brueggemann died last week at the age of 92.  Ordained pastor in the United Church of Christ.  Professor at Eden and Columbia Theological Seminaries.  And author of over 100 published books.  I think it is safe to say that no other contemporary scholar has had as deep an impact upon the practice of Christian ministry in our time, particularly in the Mainline Protestant churches.  Brueggemann wrote and spoke for preachers, helping us understand the Bible and how to communicate its stories and themes to the people in ways relevant to the concerns of the modern world.  I frankly can’t imagine being in this career without new wise words from Brueggemann, who was always there to provide guidance.  For example, he published a book on how to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic that came out in either April or May of 2020, just weeks into the lockdowns. 

               This week I was perusing some of his books that have deeply influenced my reading of the Bible and my preaching and teaching.  And ended up writing my next Anchor column about the influence of his prophetic imagination.  One of those books was his comprehensive Theology of the Old Testament, which has been a constant companion.  In the preface of that book, which was published in 1997, Brueggemann wrote that the scholarly consensus about the Bible that once existed in the middle of the twentieth century was now in disarray.  There were now many different voices and perspectives and no one set of theories dominated Biblical interpretation.

               Of course, many might find such a landscape confusing and disorienting.  Maybe even troubling.  But Brueggemann delighted in that disarray, because, as he wrote, it permitted “venturesome efforts at Old Testament theology.”  He enjoyed the many different voices and perspectives and taught us ministers to appreciate it as well.

               But there were two deeper, more theological reasons that Brueggemann delighted in the multiplicity of interpretations in our postmodern era.  First, he said the disarray better reflected the nature of scripture itself.  The Holy Bible is not monolithic, speaking in one voice.  The Bible is full of differing voices and perspectives, and much of his academic scholarship was oriented to teaching us to hear those various witnesses and be open to the reality of God’s word spoken in various, different ways. 

               But, there was an even deeper reason Walter Brueggemann delighted in the pluralism of our time—he thought it better reflected who God is.  As he wrote in the premise to his Theology of the Old Testament  “the unsettlement is a reflection of . . . the unsettled Character who stands at the center of the text.”  With “character” having a capital-C, indicating that he means God.  God is the unsettled character at the center of the Biblical story.   God cannot be contained by any one name or set or titles or one particular voice, perspective, or witness.  God, and our human experiences of God, are too big, too diverse.  They exceed our understanding and our ability to contain them, to pin them down.

               A fitting reminder on this Trinity Sunday.

               In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus tells his disciples that he will send the Spirit of Truth who will guide them into all the truth.

               In his commentary on this passage, Eugene Bay, encourages us to see that the Spirit works within the community.  This gospel text isn’t about individuals receiving private messages or special knowledge.  It is, rather, about the Spirit speaking and working through the fellowship of Jesus’ followers. 

               God might speak to individual people, but those various perspectives and voices need to be in dialogue and conversation with one another.  It is together that we discern the Spirit’s guidance.  It is together that we discover truth.  Which means that skills such as listening and empathy and working to understand one another are vital to the work of the Church, and to our health as a society.

               The Christian community the Spirit desires is one that is open and receptive.  Eugene Bay adds this to his comments on the gospel:  “What the text wants most to do is encourage within the community an openness to fresh encounters with the revelation of Jesus.  John intends to shape a community that is receptive to Spirit-guided growth.”

               I hope that’s what we want to be as well.  That we at House of Hope can be a community receptive to the guidance of the Spirit into fresh encounters.

               Eugene Bay writes that such a community—one that is open and receptive to the Spirit’s leadership—“can face the future with confidence.”  He adds, “John is confident that, relying on the guidance of ‘the Spirit of truth,’ the community will be led where it needs to go.”

               But sometimes it is difficult to muster that confidence, right?  To trust that the community is headed where it needs to go.  One reason we struggle with the confidence and trust necessary to take the risk is that it isn’t clear anymore what is true.  Or what is the way to discover truth.  Our social and political discourses include debates about basic facts.  People seem to exist in alternate realities with radically differing moralities.  Plus, now we have the growing quality of deep fakes and AI generated images and videos.  How to discern what is true will become even more complex and complicated.

               In response to yesterday’s events, Brian Klaas wrote in The Atlantic, “The United States is a fraying society, torn apart by polarization, intense disagreement, and ratcheting extremism.”  He continued, “We don’t know when or where the deadly conflagration will strike next, but more flames will no doubt come.  We may still be shocked . . . but we can no longer feign surprise.”

               In a society becoming more violent and dangerous, where cynicism and nihilism become serious options, how to form the courage to trust the guidance of the Spirit and be an open and receptive people?

               Among the temptations in a time such as this are to seek for certainty and to participate in unhealthy nostalgia.  Some people will retreat into ideologies that seem to have all the answers.  Others will try to compel a return to a time period they idolize.  Some will resort to force to get their way.  Others will give up entirely.

It’s clear why folks might yearn for what seemed simpler times, when maybe there was more confidence and a sense of certainty about many matters, including Biblical interpretation and theological ideas.  As Walter Brueggemann always understood, for many folks the proliferation of perspectives and voices and interpretations seems challenging, or even threatening, to the way they make sense of the world and organize their lives.  There is a deep appeal in a sure foundation, a center that holds.

               One of the great challenges of faith in the twentieth-first century is to learn to let go of that sense of certainty and to live more comfortably with uncertainty, ambiguity, nuance, and doubt.  And to learn that it is through this multiplication of voices, ideas, and interpretations that the Spirit is leading.  The present pluralism is the movement of the Holy Spirit.  Our challenge is to trust in the Spirit’s guidance and face the uncertain future with confidence.

               So, how do we learn to embrace the plurality of interpretation as a good thing that can still lead us to truth? 

One of my guides in that adventure is the Reformed philosopher James K. A. Smith who teaches at Calvin College.  In his book The Fall of Interpretation he argues that one of the lessons from the story of the Tower of Babel is that attempts to find one monolithic way of approaching God in one common language is wrong.  Because God thwarted the endeavors of those tower builders, multiplied human language, and spread people out into different social groups to evolve their own unique cultures and ideas.  He writes, “The sin 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.”

[A reminder of how often attempts to uphold one perspective as certain truth leads to violence and harm.]

               Smith claims that “plurality of interpretation is not the original sin; it is, on the contrary, the original goodness of creation.”  And this original creation is recreated in the moment of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit arrives and is poured out on the diversity of flesh who then begin to prophesy, dream dreams, and have visions. 

To be a human being in this world is to live with risk and uncertainty.  Our faith is how we stay rooted and find guidance through all the noise, confusion, and danger.  Smith identifies  the “primordial trust” of the Spirit’s guidance that roots our faith.  But this trust in the Spirit is not achieved by challenging reality or the human condition with an attempt to establish certainty—one interpretation and one way of life.  Our primordial trust in the Spirit should come through embracing the goodness of the diversity of God’s creation.

               Smith calls this a “creational-pneumatic hermeneutic.”  Which is a fancy academic way of saying that our approach to interpretation should be centered on God’s creativity and the inspirations of the Spirit.  What Smith describes is that this approach, this “creational-pneumatic hermeneutic” opens up a space—(and listen to this great quote)— “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.”

               Doesn’t that sound amazing?!  That’s a party we want to go to.  Fortunately, Jesus has already invited us.

               In essence, if we learn to let go of our need for certainty and take the risk of listening to the Spirit, the Spirit will speak to us, speak truths to us, and will guide us through these challenging times.  And where the Spirit is guiding us is into a new, better, healthier humanity, and a newly recreated world of love.

So, let’s do it.  Let go of our need for certainty, take the leap of faith, trust the guidance of the Spirit, and, be like Walter Brueggemann, delighting in the adventure that leads us closer to God and who God dreams we might yet become.

Filled with the Spirit

Acts 2:1-21

House of Hope Presbyterian Church

8 June 2025

               This week, while reading the very familiar story of the coming of the Holy Spirit in the Book of Acts, I was struck by the final bit of the text—the passage from the book of the prophet Joel—that sets the context as “In the last days” when there will be portents of the coming, glorious, Day of the Lord. 

               The passage from Joel is apocalyptic.  Which is not the usual perspective we take with this story from Acts.  Maybe that perspective leapt out at me this week because of the troubled times in which we live?  Many people read or watch the news these days and see portents of worse to come.  I’m sure many feel that we are living in apocalyptic times.

               If so, if a similarity of feeling exists between us and the time of the prophet Joel and the telling of the story of Pentecost in the Book of Acts, what word from God might we hear for us, that helps us see portents not of doom and destruction, but of the glorious coming of the Lord?

               The last few weeks I’ve started getting to know you better.  Your staff, your systems, how you do things, your worship, the many things going on every week, the big projects and issues, and your building.  If you follow me on Facebook, you know I’ve been delighting in noticing all sorts of little details around this building. 

               This beautiful building, of course, is rich in detail, and I assume I will sit here for years and still see something new.  The prospect of that delights me.  Mark, our office administrator, has challenged me to find the cricket in the stained-glass windows, and I haven’t located it yet (please don’t tell me if you know, I want to find it myself).

               Monday morning, after I finished reading this week’s lectionary texts, and began the process of thinking through them, this apocalyptic perspective leapt out at me.  When it leapt forward I then had an idea—go look at the Apocalypse window. 

               You can’t see it right now, as it is behind you, and the wonderful Fisk organ impedes your seeing it, but the grand window that adorns the choir loft and the front of this building is the Apocalypse window.  I know that our Bible study class recently spent one of their sessions in the choir loft examining the window.

               I had, myself, not carefully looked at it, so on Monday morning I left my office to stroll over here to look.  Funny enough, on the way down the stairs, I ran into Peter Swanson, a man who was here on Monday studying and taking photos of some of our windows, those by the stained-glass artist LeCompte, and he and I got into a lively conversation about stained glass.  I pointed out the serendipity that I was that very minute headed the sanctuary to examine one of our windows.

               So I climbed the balcony steps, pulled up a chair, and just sat, looking carefully at the window.  I didn’t take any of the descriptions of the window with me, wanting to first see what I could see.  I read the in depth descriptions afterwards.

               And you know what you don’t see in our Apocalypse window?  Dire portents.  Blood and fire, smoky mist and darkness, are not there.  Oh sure, there are obvious images from the Book of Revelation—the seven golden candlesticks, the angels sounding the seven trumpets, the Agnus Dei—the slaughtered and risen Lamb of God.  But this window is no dark image by Albrecht Durer or Peter Bruegel.  Not even the mix of hell and heaven of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement.  In fact, for an Apocalypse window, ours is rather serene.

               Because our Apocalypse window reveals the coming glory of the Lord, and that is ultimately a vision of beauty and peace.  What I see in that window are images of God’s sovereignty and grace extended to the world, the final fulfillment of God’s dream for creation.  David Johnson’s description of the window, in the book he wrote about the church, is that “it represents the Kingdom in fulfillment, Christ in his glory in the company of the redeemed.”  A window that was intended to “throw a brilliant illumination into the church.”

               Our Apocalypse window reveals something about the nature and vision of God.  Which is really what apocalyptic is all about in the Biblical understanding of the concept.  Apocalypse isn’t about end-of-times portents of doom and destruction, but a pulling back of the curtain, a lifting of the veil, a revealing of what’s truly going on behind-the-scenes and underneath the surfaces.  What our window proclaims is that when one really looks, with eyes that can see, one beholds the peace and glory created by God’s sovereignty and grace.

               The story of Pentecost is also a revealing of who God is and what God dreams for us.  In our own troubled times, God speaks words to us in this story, and if we hear them, if we open ourselves to be filled with the spirit, God’s words to us can calm our fears and bring us peace.

               Which is not the same as saying that the story itself is calm and comforting.  For it is not.  There is a wildness to this story.  A wildness that evades our attempts to contain it.  For the Spirit isn’t too keen with our proper order, she likes to blow wherever she wants, on whomever she wants, doing surprising and new and sometimes discomforting things.  She wants to fill us, to embody herself in us, in ways that lead to bold new happenings.

               One of my United Church of Christ colleagues, Dr. Bruce Epperly, says that Pentecost is a day for the mystics and spiritual adventurers.  He writes, “God is doing a new thing and we must prepare for the breakthroughs of divine spiritual novelty.”  Pentecost teaches us that “God is imaginative and we are to embody divine imagination in our daily lives.”  Bruce Epperly proclaims, “Don’t be afraid. Be bold. You are God’s beloved and God is at work in [you].”

               Our own Jimmy Hoke goes further in pointing out what’s happening in this story.  He describes, in his commentary on this passage, “the wild and messy multiplicity of queerness that moves around Pentecost.”  After all, there are pyrotechnics (tongues of fire) and speaking in tongues and people criticizing the whole thing as a drunken mess.  To be filled with the Spirit is not a cautious and orderly enterprise.

               June, being Pride Month, fits well with seeing the queerness in this Pentecost story.  The multiplicity of voices, of people from all over, speaking and hearing and understanding one another.  Of finding unity in our acceptance of diversity, not in some enforced conformity.  As Jimmy writes, “When we look closely at the meaning of ‘tongues’ we understand how this story is really about language and difference—the queer multiplicity of many different people being able to access community without having to change their ways of speaking.”

               He draws the conclusion that “Pentecost is a queer invitation to chaos, to chatter, to a wild and critterly multiplicity, and to making our world and our history more complex and just.”

               These colleagues who draw out the mystical and the queer possibilities in this story help to lift the veil for us to see in fresh and new ways what God is doing in this story and what God dreams for us.

               The Christian Church does believe that this story helps to teach us something about who God is.  We meet the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, as she descends upon the gathered disciples and births the movement that becomes the church.

               One of my favorite theologians is the Baptist James McClendon, who wrote a rich and wonderful systematic theology that approached the great topics of the faith in novel ways.  For example, he began his systematic theology with an exploration of human embodiment and with discussions of what we learn from the Blues, and the love letters of the Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards, and the prison writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  He concluded the enterprise with a Pentecostal vision of God’s dream for creation that flows from the very nature of who God is.

               And who God is, in McClendon’s words, is “an ecstatic fellowship.”  That’s what is revealed in the concept of a Trinitarian God—a God who is in constant relationship that overflows.  A relationship of deep, mutual, ecstatic love that births creation.

               And this ecstatic fellowship is what God dreams for humanity.  God desires that we too are caught up in the ecstasies of genuine fellowship with one another and mutual love that brings about a new and better world.  This is the adventure of life that God calls humanity to.

               And in order to bring this vision for the world and for humanity to fulfillment, God has given birth to a church.  I love how Julia puts it, that God’s church doesn’t have a mission, God’s mission has a church.  The church is God’s great instrument to bring about God’s desires and dreams for the world.

               And what we see here in the Pentecost story is a church of many voices, stirred to new and wild and messy expressions by the winds of the Spirit.  A church that dreams dreams and has visions.  Where young and old and all genders speak boldly the prophetic words that God has given them to speak.

               In my candidating sermon last February, I presented to you some of my sense of the vital need for the church during these troubled times in which we live.  Last week I read yet another great thinker making a similar claim, this time the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa.  My son Sebastian and I attended our spring church retreat up at Clearwater Forest, our Presbyterian campground, and what a lovely place that is.  We hiked in the woods, played on the ropes course, chased each other in games of tag, paddled the lake, and enjoyed each other’s company.  And what I most needed and most enjoyed was sitting beside the waters in an Adirondack chair and reading a book.  In all the busyness of moving the last few months my own reading life had suffered.  So, to get away from all the boxes and to do lists and tasks and just sit, and rest, and enjoy the natural beauty, and read, was a blessing. 

So while the heron skimmed the water and the loons made their plaintive cries, I read a leading sociologist analyzing the troubled times in which we live, explaining why the church is needed right now to embody the spiritual and humane values. 

I feel this conviction deeply—humanity needs the resources, traditions, and skills the church possesses: from our stewardship of the arts to our work for justice in the streets; our quiet contemplative practices and our moments of fellowship and belonging over a cup of coffee or a picnic on the lawn. 

Humanity needs us, and God is calling us to meet that need. 

Because God is calling us, we are not alone in this adventure.  No, Jesus promised to send us another Advocate.  And so the Spirit comes and blows among us, filling us with power and gifts and glory, that we might be who God desires us to be.

If we open ourselves to the Spirit.  To the queer, mystical, diverse, wild, messy, ecstatic, and prophetic voices of Pentecost.  To the bold adventure of the new.  Then God will use us to meet the world’s need and help fulfill God’s mission and dream.

And then, we will arrive at that vision of the glorious coming Day of the Lord we catch a glimpse of in that window up there—the beauty, joy, and peace that results from God’s sovereignty and grace.  In the last days, God declares, I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.  On that great and glorious day, everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.

That this vision may be so, this Pentecost, let us here, today be filled with the Holy Spirit.

The Last Word

Luke 23:44-49

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

Kountze Memorial Lutheran Church

18 April 2025

               Christian theology over the last century has taught us that “God and God’s will for humanity is best discerned from the authoritative standpoint of suffering, especially the suffering of those on the underside of history,” so writes the theologian Elizabeth Gandolfo.    It isn’t usually the rich, powerful, and in control who get us closer to the truth.  It is those on the underside, the outside, the oppressed, the victims of violence and injustice.  Their perspectives reveal the lessons we need to hear, learn, and understand.

She quotes the Spanish Jesuit Jon Sobrino, “The sign is always the historically crucified people.” 

Look to where crucifixions are happening, and there you will find Christ.

In the Gospel, even the centurion who has overseen the execution admits that Christ was innocent.  This story reminds us of all the innocent victims of state power, including the African-Americans unjustly shot by the police, the civilians bombed in their homes, the trans kids denied health care, the immigrants kidnapped and disappeared to a prison in another country.

We cannot read and listen to this story with faithfulness and integrity if we do not see the victims of crucifixion in our own time.

While we’ve been at this Good Friday service, the local organization Mothers and Others: Justice and Mercy for Immigrants has been standing in silent protest at the offices of our congressman and senators.  The explain, “we must make connections between Jesus crucified and the crucifixions that are taking place in our name.”   

Every day in the news now we see the innocent victims of state power.  We watched in horror as Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk was assaulted and kidnapped on the street by masked agents of our own government.  All for writing an op-ed.

This week we watched as a Guatemalan family in Massachusetts had their car windows shattered so they could be dragged violently from the automobile where they were sitting waiting on their attorney to arrive.

This week Mohsen Mahdawi showed up for his citizenship interview in Vermont and was disappeared.

And we’ve all been shocked at the continuing case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father, illegally abducted and sent to an El Salvadorian prison, exacerbated by the continuing violations of a unanimous Supreme Court order to return him.

And that’s what’s so horrifying about watching all of these and other atrocities occur.  It is our own government perpetrating this evil, inflicting unjust violence upon the innocent.

And what to me is most horrifying is the low level officers and functionaries cooperating to make all of this happen.  We are watching Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil play out in real time and livestream.

Watching all this horror is causing us 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 we are, the more vulnerable we are to moral injury.  Rita Nakashima Brock, who has done much work in this area, writes that “When chaos strikes and [people] cannot see how to do the right thing or doing the right thing is no longer possible, they can be devastated by relentless failure.”

Which, I’m certain, was the experience of those who witnessed the crucifixion of Jesus.  The Gospel also draws our attention to those eye-witnesses and their reactions.

               How do we witnesses respond to the crucifixions we see?

               We know from Hannah Arendt’s studies of totalitarianism, fascism, and evil, that such efforts only succeed because ordinary people cooperate.  She demonstrated how often active resistance wasn’t even what was called for, but simply refusing to cooperate.

               But how should the church respond to this state violence against the innocent, to which Good Friday calls us to pay attention?            

               The Luther seminary professor Cody Sanders had a good essay published this week entitled “Following Jesus Means Choosing Sides, Making Stands, and Taking Risks.”  So often, he writes, churches refrain from taking risks because they don’t want to make people uncomfortable, don’t want to upset anyone, think it’s more welcoming to be vague or indecisive. 

               “But,” he writes, “when you decide not to decide over a matter of justice, you’ve already taken the side of whoever is powerful enough to enact their will in the situation–usually the side of the oppressor.”

               This, however, is not what Jesus wants from us or expects of us.  Sanders writes:

actually following Jesus means choosing the side of the most vulnerable, taking a stand in the face of injustice, and being in solidarity with specific people facing particular risks. It means living with the possibility of rejection, and even division.

Discipleship—actually being a disciple of the crucified Jesus—means being invited deeper into risk and saying “yes” more often than shying away.

               If we truly learn the lesson of the crucifixion story, it is that we must take the risks and stand with the victims of oppression, violence, and injustice.  Sanders summarizes the point, “the church has had enough custodians of comfort. The faith of Jesus is a faith of risk that summons us into courageous solidarity with the vulnerable.”

               So, how will we respond to this last word of Jesus from the cross?  Will we see the crucified in our midst?  Will we stand with them and for them?  Will we take the risks of being faithful followers of Jesus Christ?

The Stones Would Shout

Luke 19:28-40

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

13 April 2024

            Jesus goes up to Jerusalem like a pilgrim, following the traditional pilgrim route, as commentator Brendan Byrne points out.  The route from the Mount of Olives, down and up through the Kidron Valley, and into the Old City, remains the main pilgrimage route all these millennia later.  If you travel to Jerusalem, you too can walk this path and even sit on stone steps that are old enough Jesus might have sat upon them too.

            But on this pilgrimage, Jesus does something wild, he lays claim to the city as its King in an act that many describe as street theater, a form of protest.  Unlike the Roman governor Pilate, entering the city with soldiers and riding a great steed, Jesus comes on a colt of a donkey.  As Brendan Byrne writes, “Those who would rule with force and power do not enter cities on donkeys.”

            All the symbols here point, once again, to the topsy turvy way that God does things, not with the normal trappings of power and authority.  Jesus is modeling a new way of being human, a new way of exerting power.

            One of the details of this story is that when the crowd begins to shout their lauds and honors, those aren’t directed to Jesus.  Luke tells us “the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice.”  The collective praise is aimed at God.  A reminder that God is the true sovereign of this world, not any human power.  Our allegiances are to what God desires of us, not any state or ruler.

            And what does God desire of us?  Here the crowd begins to sing of peace.  Just like the chorus of angels at Jesus’ birth, here is a parallel, near the end of his life, humanity responding with their own song of peace.

            Some of the religious leaders are bothered, of course.  As some always are going to be bothered by such wild and frenzied displays.  They want Jesus to tell the crowd to stop. 

            Of course there’s some prudence in their request.  If the Romans see or hear what’s going on, they are likely to arrest some people.  Maybe even execute some people.  The Romans, Pilate in particular, doesn’t brook challenges to his power and authority, particularly from rabble like this.  Best to settle down and not anger him.

            But Jesus doesn’t take the prudent path.  No, he pushes on ahead with the wild challenge to the status quo.  And that challenge will get him arrested and executed, of course.

            In response to some of the Pharisees he says, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

            The Baptist pastor Stephen Shoemaker, in his commentary on this story, draws our attention to this amazing and provocative answer that Jesus gives.  Shoemaker writes, “Here is faith in the sure triumph of God.”

            Shoemaker then teases out three layers of this faith—“First, here is a truth too good to have its mouth shut.  It may be temporarily silenced, but not for long.”

            I find that’s a helpfully blessed reassurance to keep in mind any time we feel that there is an assault upon the truth.  The truth will not be forever suppressed.  The truth will come out.

            The second layer he draws our attention to is “if disciples fall away by cowardice or complacence, God will raise up more!”  If for whatever reason the current followers of Jesus can’t or won’t keep up the work, God will find others.  The forces will not quash the will of God.

            And the final layer Shoemaker identifies, “Injustice will not long prevail.”  He notices that this answer of Jesus has a parallel in the writings of the Old Testament prophet Habakuk who declared that if a house is built upon corruption, then the very stones of which the house is built will cry out. 

            This final layer is a prophetic warning to any who would try to suppress God’s people, God’s truth, God’s peace.  The truth will come out, justice will prevail, peace will be achieved.

            So, there’s much that is encouraging to us as followers of Jesus in this wildly wonderful answer that Jesus gives when challenged to stop his trouble-making.

            How do we achieve this peace the disciples sing of?  I believe one way is by pursuing truth.

            Linda Zagzebski, the great Catholic epistemologist, writes “To have a true belief is to have your mind aligned with some bit of reality in the right way.”  And she argues that the best way to achieve true belief is to cultivate good habits, the virtues that most reliably lead to truth, understanding, and wisdom. 

            What bits of reality are revealed in this story of the Triumphal entry?  That God is the true sovereign.  That God’s work and God’s people will not be silenced.  That peace is one of God’s goals.  And that Jesus wants us to do the good and trouble-making work that advances that goal.

            We should develop the spiritual practices that help to align our minds to these realities.  Through prayer, worship, Bible study, paying attention, and more, we align ourselves with the reality that is God.  And this takes some effort in a culture and a politics that is designed to constantly distract us with trendy consumer products or the latest outrage.

            We Christians must cultivate the skills to live well in our times.  That takes discipline and focus.  It also takes winsome delight and joy.

            The theologian Elizabeth Gandolfo, in her wonderful book The Power and Vulnerability of Love, poses the question, “How can we get closer to the truth?”

            She writes that it is not by appeals to scripture or tradition to be our authorities.  Nor is there some one objective standpoint from which we can answer that question for all time.  No, “All human apprehension of truth is situated and perspectival, including our interpretation of what we consider to be authoritative sources of divine revelation.”

            Which is why it is so important for us to engage with others and listen to a diversity of voices and perspectives, a point I’ve made over the last few weeks of our Lenten worship. 

But Gandolfo adds a further important point—“we need to deliberately seek out perspectives . . . that can bring us closer to the truth about reality and the will of God for reality.”  There are simply some perspectives that get us reliably closer to God’s truth.

And much Christian theology over the last century has taught us that “God and God’s will for humanity is best discerned from the authoritative standpoint of suffering, especially the suffering of those on the underside of history.”  It isn’t usually the rich, powerful, and in control who get us closer to the truth.  It is those on the underside, the outside, the oppressed, the victims of violence and injustice.  Their perspectives reveal the lessons we need to hear, learn, and understand.

She quotes the Spanish Jesuit Jon Sobrino, “The sign is always the historically crucified people.” 

Look to where crucifixions are happening, and there you will find Christ.

Another Jesuit, the American Kevin Burke, influenced by the El Salvadoran Ignacio Ellacuria, put it this way, “the truth of reality becomes most manifest where reality has been crucified.”

In this Holy Week, when we walk with Jesus through his arrest, torture, and execution, we are invited to tune ourselves to these deep theological truth.  This week, in particular, we can align ourselves with these facets of reality.

Gandolfo is deeply influenced by these liberationist ideas, but she pushes back against the idea that poor and marginalized people must always be victims, lacking agency.  And so she broadens our notion of what perspectives help us find the truth.  She says the experience occurs not only when we are the victims of suffering brought on by others, but in our natural forms of human vulnerability.  In natality and maternity and just the ordinary ways we humans are vulnerable.

Ever since I first read her book, I’ve returned to it again and again in my preaching, and her basic point that our health, well-being, wholeness, and spiritual growth are to be discovered in the awareness and embrace of our own vulnerability.

We humans generally don’t like being vulnerable.  We normally have two responses to our vulnerability.  One response is to ignore it.  To deny it.  To act like it isn’t true.  To distract ourselves, which can be the source of addiction.  Denying our truth is a very, very unhealthy response that usually catches up with us sooner or later.

The other common response is to try to control our world to protect ourselves from our vulnerability.  This is the source of harmful privilege, where we try to live within enclosed communities of people just like us in order to avoid seeing poverty, pain, or even racial difference. 

And we try to control our vulnerability through all sorts of products and self-help approaches.  Or through the politics of resentment.  Blaming other people for all our troubles and trying to make sure they get what we think is coming to them.

Gandolfo, drawing on the ideas of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, writes, “But refusing to be vulnerable to pain carries with it the price of closing oneself off to Beauty.”

Instead, she encourages us to become peaceful souls.  How do we do that?  By accepting and embracing our vulnerability, to embody it, which is honestly just to follow Jesus in the way of the incarnation and along the path of Holy Week. 

She writes, “Peace entails an understanding and an acceptance of the tragic structure of existence, and thus frees us to appreciate the Beauty that continually and infinitely emerges. . . . Peace manifests itself in human life and civilization as a power to survive and even thrive in the midst of tragic existence.”

We align ourselves with reality and will more reliably discover truth, when we follow Jesus in embracing our vulnerability.

This is the path to peace.

This is the good news that cannot be suppressed by those who attempt to control us.

This is what the very rocks would shout.

Anointing

John 12:1-8

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

6 April 2024

            Let me begin today with a reflection on what one expects when they first go to church.  It’s written by Meggan Watterson:

            I’m not sure what I was expecting when I first went to church as a little girl.  Yes, I do.  I was expecting the outside to be like the inside.  I wanted the great big, unsayable love I felt within me to be seen or witnessed outside of me.  Back then before I felt separated from it, there was this wide expanse of love inside me, like my own private ocean.

            And so, I guess I was expecting church to be this place where everyone walks around and greets each other, from one ocean to another, their innermost self, right there on the surface, their inner world rising up from the depths for a breath of fresh air.  A place where we can hang our masks at the door, and just help each other be human.  A place that reminded me how to be here in this world while not forgetting the part of me that is not of it.

            But, then she writes, “But that wasn’t what [church] was like.” 

            Instead, she encountered a place, a group of people, that did not affirm her vast inner ocean of love, but instead, corrected her behavior and taught her to experience guilt and shame, to see herself as less, as sinful.

            How many people have experienced toxic and harmful religion?  I encounter it all the time when I meet someone and tell them I’m a pastor.  There is almost a recoil.  Most people begin explaining why they’ve rejected faith and religion, and it usually has to do with something bad that happened to them at church or, at least, their general perception that religious people are judgmental, cruel, or just plain ridiculous and out-of-touch.

            Which is among the reasons that we work so intentionally and diligently to form a very different kind of community here at First Central.  One that is hospitable and welcoming, inclusive and caring, supportive and affirming, deeply thoughtful and engaged with the world and real life, where genuine and authentic connections are made.  Which means we don’t go around policing people’s, including kid’s, behavior, and we sure as heck try to refrain from judgement, guilt, and shame.  I hope the people who come through our doors find a place where the vast inner ocean of love inside of them is seen, affirmed, and allowed to flourish.  I believe we are trying to help each other be human—at least that’s one thing I’ve aimed for in my pastoral leadership.

            Meggan Watterson describes this kind of faith as “The Christianity We Haven’t Tried Yet.”  The kind that affirms our inherent goodness, that helps to lift us up out of our egos, that views sin, as she writes, as “simply forgetting the truth and reality of the soul—and then acting from that forgetful state.”

            The queer contemplative podcaster Cassiday Hall puts it this way, “The true self shows up most authentically when it is dedicated to the well-being of all, amid a deep understanding of oneself.”

            The story of Mary anointing Jesus at this final dinner with his followers, before the events of his passion begins, is a story of physical, emotional, and spiritual intimacy, where our human vulnerability is centered.  There is a realness to this story.  The touch, the tears, the closeness.  We witness a deep love and affection and a story that emphasizes our bodily experience.

            Michael Koppel, a professor of pastoral care, writes that “anointing channels God’s life force and favor into the one being anointed,” and does so through a practice that relates to the bodily senses.  Not only do we see and hear what’s happening in this story, there is the smell of the oil, the feeling on the skin.  A multi-sensory moment of embodiment.

            For me one of the most profound moments of pastoral care every year is Ash Wednesday.  Partly it’s because I touch people on their foreheads, a place I don’t usually touch people and where people aren’t used to being touched.  And I’m marking them with ashes mixed with oil, which has a distinct feel and smell and look to them.  Finally, in the marking I’m reminding them of their mortality, of their physical vulnerability.  The ritual is intimate, humbling, caring.

            The same can be said for foot-washing, which I’m personally a big fan of in the worship life of the church.  It is a deeply spiritual ritual precisely because it is awkward and unusual, intimate touching.  And we generally don’t even have the calloused and dirty feet of a first century Middle Eastern peasant.  Our children have recently been exploring it as part of learning the story of Jesus, so you should ask one of them about it.

            Anointing with oil is one of those rites we perform occasionally, less often than we probably should.  In the Christian tradition it is most common as a symbol of healing or an act of blessing.  Also used to consecrate a person at significant moments—like King Charles at his coronation.

            Michael Koppel writes that “an overflow of life energy is associated with the anointing.”  Here is a rich, ancient, physical symbol of life, healing, salvation, wholeness. 

The wisdom teacher Cynthia Bourgeault encourages churches to do more anointing because this is a rite of spiritual transformation.  She believes greater emphasis upon the ritual will help us to recreate Christianity as that kind we haven’t fully tried yet, one that lifts up “imaginal wisdom and mystical love.” 

            She believes that a greater emphasis upon anointing will awaken our creative imaginations to the presence of the holy within us.  Helping us to overcome our own egos and to embody love.  Through that we will encounter the presence of the Risen Christ.  She writes, “Present, intimate, creative, ‘closer than your own heartbeat,’ accessed through your vulnerability, your capacity for intimacy.”

            These lessons are among the wisdom revealed in a story like today’s gospel.

            Mary’s anointing of Jesus’ body is so powerful because it is a physically intimate action that is connected to preparing his body for death and burial.  Deeply loving, radically compassionate.

            Michael Koppel, the pastoral care professor I quoted a moment ago, has written a helpful book entitled Body Connections: Body-Based Spiritual Care.  I’ve taught from it some in our Wednesday night classes in recent years.  I love this main idea which anchors the book—“Caring for our bodies is faithful moral activity in a world that fragments, torments, and traumatizes.”

            That, of course, is part of the power of this story in the Gospel of John.  We know what Jesus’ body is about to go through.  The ordeals it will endure.  The pains he will suffer.  The absolute horror and affliction that is torture and crucifixion.  A body that will definitely be fragmented, tormented, traumatized.

            Yet, here is Mary, intimately, affectionately, compassionately, caring for that same body, with tenderness and grace.  What she does is deeply moral activity. 

            Judas, of course, with his limited moral vision doesn’t see that.  In this story, he’s one of those folks focused on the bottom line.  The utilitarian calculus.  And thus he misses the moral depth of Mary’s action.  Stewardship and prudence are tools, but sometimes the extravagant act is what is called for. 

            “Touch,” Koppel writes, “makes us feel real.”  And so he works to correct a religious tradition that often alienated spirituality from the physical, and instead he advocates a more holistic and healthy approach that sees the deep “connections between our embodied experience and faithful spiritual care.”  Because, as he writes, “God moves in and through our body experience to lure us toward transformational change.”  We engage in spiritual growth through embodied practices.

            The psychologist Hillary McBride, in her book The Wisdom of Your Body, which I’ve also taught from in our Wednesday night classes, teaches that most of us have to learn embodiment, because we’ve often grown up in traditions that didn’t teach us to be aware of our bodies and to appreciate, honor, and learn from them.  So, to learn embodiment, she writes, “requires curiosity, attention, sensation, and acceptance.”  

            But McBride makes a further, supremely important point—that we cannot learn our own embodiment, or experience healing and wholeness, without collective action.  She writes, “Our individual healing can’t happen without addressing our need for collective healing, culturally and as a collective human body.”

            The primary reason for this is, as she states, that our “experience of being a body in a social context.”  Our experience of our bodies is shaped by cultural and social expectations, stereotypes, laws, etc.  Societies try to define, control, limit, problematize bodies. 

            We’ve seen a resurgence of that in America the last few years.  Instead of cultivating a culture of compassion, where we help each other be more human through acts of physical care that affirm our authentic selves and the deep ocean of love that resides within each of us, contemporary American politics has returned to a previous era where women’s reproductive choices were controlled by the state, where parents of trans kids are prohibited from seeking medical care for their children, where trans adults are told they don’t exist, and more.  These actions are revolting.  Assaults not only upon civil and human rights, but contrary to the wisdom and compassion of an enlightened and mature Christian faith.

            Last week most of us were horrified watching the video of the kidnapping of Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, studying here on a Fulbright scholarship, assaulted on the street by masked agents of the US government.  It was like watching something out of Soviet Russia or the East German state police.  It was horrifying to watch, clearly inflicting moral injury upon all of us observing it.  We never thought our government would do such things in our lifetimes after all the achievements of civil and human rights.  But, here it was, happening before our very eyes.

            Writing in The Christian Century this week, David Dault, who is an assistant professor of Christian spirituality at Loyola University of Chicago, said this about the incident:

The first man to approach Ozturk on the street calls to her. Ozturk looks up in surprise, not fear. That quickly changes. A moment later, the man is directly in front of her. She makes a move to step back, and he grabs her.

When I watch that, something inside me twists. . . . I think of all the ways that what is happening in that moment is a violation. I think of how, in a country that claims to respect and protect religious liberties, a non-Muslim man feels at liberty to put his hands on a Muslim woman. I think of how, when she clearly protests, withdrawing any possible consent to what is happening, the man ignores her. And through it all, even as the camera angle makes it hard to see, I can’t help feeling that I know how his face looks in that moment. I can’t shake the feeling that, above all else, this man is enjoying himself.

            Dault focuses attention not on the larger humanitarian and civil rights concerns, but instead on the immediate act of physical violation.  The act of force and its violence and fear.  How that overrides basic rules of consent, of human dignity and autonomy.  A physical act that is the opposite of what we encounter in the Gospel of John.  This is the repudiation of care, compassion, openness to vulnerability.  This is an act to inspire fear and moral injury.

            So, we followers of Jesus must condemn such evil.  And bear witness to what Jesus expects of us, which is a better humanity.  Dault concludes:

If we look to the horizon beyond the churning repetition of sovereignty, discipline, and control, what do we see? I’d like to think that what comes next, where Jesus is leading us to go, is a society of consent, where the violence embodied by that man who grabbed Rumeysa Ozturk might be interrupted at the source, instead of after the fact, as we are attempting to interrupt it now.

            And we interrupt it at the source by doing and creating better.  Learning embodiment as a moral act, that can bring about healing and spiritual transformation.  Let’s begin by helping each other become more human, acknowledging and affirming that vast ocean of love inside each of us, and treating each other with the respect and kindness we deserve.  Learning touch that isn’t violent or forceful, but, like Mary’s, caring, compassionate, vulnerable, loving. 

            And when we do that, when we learn the lessons of anointing, the life energy will flow.

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.