Preaching on:
Luke 18:9–14

Every good story has a hero and a villain, right? Dorothy vs. The Wicked Witch of the West.  Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader. Cinderella vs. her stepmother and step sisters. The best stories have good guys and bad guys. So, in Jesus’ story this morning, who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy? What do you think?
 
Two people go to pray in the temple. One of them stands there in the place of honor and says, Oh man, aren't I a great guy? I do everything right. I tithe, I fast. Woo, I'm glad I'm not like those people who don't. It was a Pharisee. And another is a tax collector, and he stands off to the side—apart from everyone else—beating his breast; he doesn't look up. He looks down and he says, Have mercy on me, a sinner. And the text tells us that one goes down to his house, justified—the tax collector—and the other one, the Pharisee, does not. 
 
Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Was the Pharisee (boo, hiss) a good guy?  Our Bibles tell us the Pharisees were always after Jesus and Jesus was always arguing with them. We know that the Pharisees are no good. And our Bibles tell us that Jesus hung out with tax collectors, he visited their homes and sat down to eat with them, and that two, maybe more, of Jesus’ disciples were tax collectors. So, it’s obvious right. We know that the Pharisee is the bad guy and the tax collector is the good guy, right?
 
Unfortunately, things are almost never that simple when Jesus gives a parable. Today, we think that the Pharisees are no good and the tax collectors are faithful, but that was not what anyone who would have heard Jesus actually telling this parable would have thought. To them the Pharisees were the good guys and the tax collectors were the absolute lowest of the low. Now not everyone would have agreed with everything the Pharisees did and said, but they were known to be faithful, righteous, pious. Today they’d be the people who go to church, the people who stand up for good morals and speak out against corruption, they’d be on the board of the local soup kitchen, they’d be the president of the rotary club, or the longest serving member of the school board or the PTA, maybe the head of the local Democratic or Republican club—upstanding citizens in every way. And tax collectors were universally despised both as traitors to their people for collecting taxes for an occupying empire (the Romans) and as singularly corrupt individuals who abused their collection powers to take more than was required from poor people in order to line their own pockets. Imagine today a spy who reveals information that endangers our troops or agents or telemarketer conman who prayers on the elderly, or a thief at a non-profit who invents children on paper in order to steal COVID relief funds to buy themselves a new car.
 
So, for Jesus, this was not a story about a bad man who thinks highly of himself (the Pharisee) and a good man who is humble (the tax collector). And think about it. We don’t need that story, do we? Nobody really needs to learn that lesson. Instead it’s the story of how a notoriously bad man (the tax collector) is justified or saved, while the unquestionably good man is not.

And, so, this becomes a parable for us and for our times because it is a parable about what we think about our own righteousness, of our own points of view, and what we think about our neighbors. Because there are a lot of people in the world today who know they are on God’s side, they know that they are right, and they despise the people who believe, act, and behave differently than them. It’s all over the place in our culture right now, isn’t it. Now listen to the parable. The parable is not about the dangers of thinking you’re good and being wrong. It’s not about the dangers of thinking you’re right and being wrong. It’s not about the dangers of judging others and being wrong. It’s about the dangers of being actually good and actually right.
 
And, Beloved, it pains me to preach it! Because, believe me, I know I’m a good person! You don’t become the Sr. Minister of Glen Ridge Congregational Church by being a lousy person. I’ve worked hard my whole life to understand and to follow the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to put it into action in my life, and dedicate myself to it. And I can’t read or hear the news without hearing about something or somebody that I really don’t approve of—crime, politics, crime masquerading as politics, social disagreements about policing, about race, about guns, about abortion, even religion—isn’t is a minister’s job to know that I’m right about this stuff? And you know what? The Pharisee was right too! And he knew it! Everyone knew it! Heck, even the tax collector knew it! But being right didn’t do the Pharisee any good. And it won’t do any of us any good either. Beloved, I’m no tax collector. I’m no traitor, I’m no thief. I’m honest, I’m faithful, I’m generous. And I’ve worked so hard to get there. I’m the Pharisee. I’m the good guy and I know it. And that’s the problem.
 
I know, I know. This is starting sound like another one of Pastor Jeff’s crazy Jesus sermons. The reason that my sermons about Jesus are a little hard to swallow is because the Gospel is hard. The Gospel is not hard because it asks us to be good. The Gospel is hard because of how it asks us to be good.
 
Now, what does all this mean? Am I not allowed to have an opinion about what’s right and what’s wrong? You’re allowed to have an opinion about right and wrong, of course. So, you’re saying we’re just not allowed to be certain—absolutely certain, convicted—that we’re right. No. You’re allowed to be sure, to be certain that you’re right. It does open us all up to a certain level of risk because none of us is always right, but you’re allowed to know that you’re right on an issue. You’re allowed to be good. You’re allowed to be right.
 
Here's the rub, good people. A good person also needs to be the kind of good person who doesn’t stand alone, like the Pharisee in our reading, who doesn’t pray alone, who doesn’t fall into the trap of thinking that believing, even that living out, the right thing makes us better than other people.
 
A good person must follow Jesus. And what I mean by that is that a good person is someone who, like Jesus, is willing to sit down and eat and drink with the sinners and the tax collectors of the world. Christians are not called to be better than the world. We are called to love the world, to serve the world, to be in relationship with all of God’s people and all of our neighbors. No good person should ever be “alone” in the Temple, holding themselves up above others. And no person (good or bad, and let God be the judge of that!) should ever be forced to pray at the margins of the Temple or to live at the margins of our human kindness. Being good should not make me think that I am better than anyone else. Being good should connect me to everyone else—especially to the lost, the suffering, and the oppressed. Love your neighbors as you love yourselves.
 
Which brings me to my concluding point this morning. As I was reading the scripture this week and preparing for this sermon, I couldn't help but notice the separation that these two individuals experienced, siloed from one another, the Pharisee praying alone, the tax collector off at the margins by himself. And I couldn't help but think what would've happened if they had just connected to one another, found one another, and maybe even prayed together. Couldn't that have been the beginning of transformation for the good guy and the bad guy? Couldn't that have made everything a little bit better?

Here at Glen Ridge Congregational Church we are really focusing in on how to connect to one another inside the walls of the church and how to connect to our wider community. And in the spirit of that, I want to invite you all to a little program. I'm starting called the Prayer Partners Program. The basic outline is very simple. I want you all to be brave enough to pray with one another. It's simple. You're going to get a prayer partner for the month. Every week of that month, you're going call your prayer partner or you're going meet them in person. You're going to chat for 15 minutes about what's going on in your life—the good, the bad, the ugly—and then you're going to bow your heads and you're just going to pray for one another. And then at the end of the month, if you want to do it again, you'll get a different prayer partner. And so, we are going to connect to one another in a way that is transformational and that prepares us to connect to people in a way that is transformational beyond the walls of our church.

I hope that you'll join me in praying together and in letting your goodness connect you to all of God's people. 

Preaching on:
​Luke 18:1–8

I have always believed in the sacred. You know, the sacred—the space or the time or the symbols or the rituals that God is somehow always touching, always a part of. But I’ve also, as my Christian faith has matured, come to believe in the ordinary as well as the sacred. And my belief in the ordinary has freed me to encounter the sacred in ways that wouldn’t have been possible before.
 
Emile Durkheim’s, who published The Sacred and the Profane in 1912, believed, mostly correctly I think, that the distinction between the sacred and the profane is the defining characteristic of the phenomenon of human religion. For him this was the origin of all religion, it was the thing that all religions have in common, and it’s fairly obvious, the idea is that there are some things that are sacred and there are other things that are definitely not sacred—ordinary or profane things that need to be separated from the sacred things. And when you think about it, this division between the sacred and the profane has a profound impact on the way we see and interpret the whole world around us.
 
This split between the sacred and the profane is maybe the original dualism. Dualism is our culture’s working theory that all of reality is composed of opposing, irreducible, and irreconcilable elements or natures. Dualism is the intentional pulling apart of things that, I believe, were never meant to be fully separated, and then, once they are separated, our dualistic culture places one of them OVER AND AGAINST the other. And so, we have masculinity over and against femininity. Heterosexuality over and against homosexuality. Whiteness over and against blackness. God over and against humans. Humans over and against nature. Mind over and against body.  Reason over and against emotion. Spirituality over and against sexuality. Christianity over and against secularity. 
 
But as my Christian faith has grown, I’ve encountered in Jesus a gift for finding the sacred in very unusual places—low, unacceptable, dirty, unclean, immoral, unexpected, common places—in the socially abandoned widow, in the fungus known as yeast or leaven, in children, in the tiniest seeds of the unremarkable mustard weed, by the well where the women lingered, among the sick and the dead, in the company of a corrupt tax collector, in the Samaritans, in the Syro-Phoenicians, even in the Romans, in the meek, the mourning, and the poor. And Jesus called some other things profane that it was not popular, not even safe to call profane—the Temple, attitudes about the Sabbath, certain interpretations of the Law, the hypocritical intolerance of the pious, the religious and political authorities of his day. 
 
Let’s look more closely at the first example and the example from our reading this morning—the widow.  Some of you know that one of my early job titles in ministry was being Chaplain to New York City restaurant workers. Walking down the street one evening, almost 20 years ago, I ran into a group of workers outside their restaurant who were protesting.  I asked them what was going on and they told me about stolen tips, unpaid overtime, racial discrimination in promotions, sexual harassment on the job, and the federal lawsuit they had filed. I told them I was a seminary student and would love to learn more.
 
They told me that they might have to stop protesting soon due to some legal shenanigans being conducted by their employer’s lawyers. They said to me, “If you could hold prayer vigils outside the restaurant for anyone who wanted to come, it would be a way to maneuver around any legal blockades the lawyers are inventing.”  Of course, I agreed, and our weekly sacred prayer vigils (which lasted for 2 years) became deeply entangled in the profane secularity of NYC sidewalks, and labor disputes, and litigations.
 
I remember the first sermon I preached out on a New York City sidewalk in front of a restaurant surrounded by restaurant workers and their allies. It wasn’t good. Not necessarily because of what I said or how I planned the service but because of my attitude. There was some part of me that felt I had to MAKE this whole thing holy, sacred, spiritual. That was the only way it could be acceptable. I didn’t want it to just be a protest. I had to elevate it. 
 
But then look at Jesus and our parable this morning. A widow fighting for justice, and perhaps not afraid to be annoying and obnoxious in her pursuit of that goal, is obviously not only someone that Jesus admires on her own terms, but someone Jesus considers to be a fitting example for all of us on how to engage in a sacred activity—prayer. Is Jesus saying to us that it’s not sacred prayer that elevates the profane protest, but the profane protest that can teach us something about the sacred?
 
I began to see that I didn’t have to MAKE any restaurant workers’ protest sacred, instead it was my job to bear witness to the sacred that was already there in that protest and to cultivate it—to let everyone know that their noise and their anger and their desire for justice and compensation was a secular and a sacred pursuit.  For me, restaurant workers showed me how to take the sacred to the secular—in the sense that they showed me that it was there all along, wrapped up, struggling, shaped and shaping. Not separate, not over and against, but “in the middle of our humanity and in the midst of our human living.” That is where the sacred can be found in it’s truest form—at the heart of the ordinary thing that God has chosen.
 
As followers of Jesus, and as a Church, this, I believe, should be what defines us. Jesus’ religion is not about guarding the sacred from the secular. It’s not about protecting the inside of the church from the world outside the church. It’s not about insulating ourselves from the neighborhood or from the unchurched hordes surrounding us on all sides. Jesus’ religion is about carrying the good news out into the world to offer it to everybody. Jesus’ religion teaches us that the sacred is dead without the energy of real life, real work, real art, and real people. Jesus’ religion is the religion where an ordinary, poor and outcast widow, fighting for justice (and totally outmatched, but refusing to give up) is the sacred symbol that points to God and God’s Kingdom better than all the steeples, and stained glass, and Sunday sermons in the world.
 
Beloved, our job as Christians is to see with Jesus’ eyes. We do not to separate ourselves from our neighbors or from God. We do not try to protect holy God from this profane world. Our job is to join ourselves without ceasing to this world, to the people in it, and to the dirty work of the righteous causes that fill it. And when we do that, we are also crossing the boundary into the sacred. We give ourselves to God, and God redeems us all.

Preaching on:
Luke 17:11–19

Beloved, lately, I'm finding democracy to be a bit of a contradiction. Democracy, which I believe in deeply as the best basis for politics and governance is only possible because of people, because of all of you. All of us People make democracy possible. And then those very same people ruin democracy, Fake news, conspiracy theories, ex extreme political views normalized in social media streams lately, I've been wondering if democracy for the people by the people can actually survive. The people you see. And I know you know this is true. People are stubborn, they're rude, they're loud, they're opinionated, they're prejudiced, they're selfish, un thoughtful, unkind people have large carbon footprints. And it is a proven fact that the less expertise people have in a subject, the more confident they are that they are right on a topic. And the less they are able to recognize that they are mistaken, people are poorly designed. No offense, <laugh>. I'm saying all this this morning because I know that many of you are feeling exactly how I've been feeling lately, that people are just the worst. People are going to ruin the present and they're going to destroy the future. Maybe I'd be better off without you people. Well, not you people, but you know everybody else. If there were no other people, I wouldn't have to worry about the climate or the midterms or the next session of the Supreme Court or nuclear war in Europe or anything.
 
You've all been telling me how worried you are, how angry you feel, how threatened you feel, how hopeless you are that things are ever going to get better, and how much you hate the people whose opinions and policies and votes have gotten us into all this trouble. Well, it's right to feel despair for a little while, but ultimately we Christians must turn ourselves towards hope. And yes, our reasons for despair are serious and they feel overwhelming. But our reasons for hope and God and for hope in the gospel of Jesus Christ are far greater. And what choice do we really have? Beloved, welcome to reality. We can't get rid of other people. Other people are not just basis for democracy. They're the basis for the whole world and civilization that we live in. Hopelessness for the potential in other people is maybe the very biggest threat to our future together. So let's get into the text this morning. We're gonna go backwards because we need to start with Jesus's despair. Jesus says this morning, We're not 10 made clean. So where are the other nine? Did none of them give glory to God except this foreigner? And do you hear the hurt and the despair and the pain and the worry and the fed upness in Jesus' voice with other lousy people?
 
Jesus was constantly disappointed by people, right? His own disciples did not understand him. His family, when he began his ministry, they started to call him crazy. When he went back to his hometown to announce that he was going to start going around and announcing, proclaiming the kingdom of God, his own hometown crowd tried to kill him. And remember where Jesus is heading to, He, he's being assaulted by the authorities. People are trying to grind him down with every good deed that he does, people come to him for healing. And then some of those very same people criticize him for healing. And Jesus is predicting where all this is going to go. He is predicting the kind of trouble that he is going to get himself into. He is predicting that he is going to die on the cross. Betrayed, abandoned, executed, did. Jesus had a lot of reasons to feel hopeless and to give up on people. But he doesn't give up. He doesn't stop healing people when they come to him and yell at him, Hey, heal us too. He doesn't stop preaching the very message that all those people are criticizing him for preaching. He doesn't stop teaching. He doesn't stop reaching out, and he doesn't stop setting himself up for massive disappointment.
Why not? How was he able to do it?
 
Moving backward through the text. Now we come to these 10 men who have a skin disease. Now that is a recent update in the translation, the nr s v updated edition going all the way back to the King James version of the Bible. You probably have traditionally heard this passage known as the passage of the 10 lepers. Now, the reason that it's been updated to say skin disease is that all biblical scholars and medical specialists and historians agree that leprosy the true leprosy Hansen's disease, the disease we know today did not exist in first century Palestine. Where Jesus was doing his ministry, it's a mistranslation. They saw in the text skin diseases that were causing people to stay away from one another. And it seemed like, well, it must be the worst skin disease you can think of. And so they called it leprosy, but it didn't exist then.
 
And the problem with this translation is that we have come to believe that the reason that these 10 men held themselves away from, from the rest of the people and didn't come close to Jesus is because they were under some sort of reasonable medical quarantine. But they weren't. The skin diseases that they had were not necessarily contagious at all. It could have been a patch of really bad acne. It could have been psoriasis. It could have been a little melanoma. It could have been something that you have or have had or are dealing with in your life right now. There was nothing medically wrong with them that forced them to be on the outside of society. It was a social ostracization. Having something wrong with your skin was something that made you ritually impure. It just meant that you were not able to be around other people because you could transmit this sort of ritual profanity to other people.
 
It was basically a social disease. You couldn't come near other people simply because you had some sort of mark on your skin that made you unacceptable for the temple. And that meant unacceptable for all of life. For all of people who were connected to the temple. It was a very difficult way to live. So it wasn't quarantine, it was exile. They had been pushed out. And yet having experienced the very absolute worst of society's unfairness and unkindness to others, they call out. They haven't given up. They're not yet totally hopeless. They believe that it's worth it to call across the distance of their ostracization and to ask for healing. Why? Why?
 
And I think the answer is very, very simple. It is simply because the pain of being outside of society, the pain of being outside of your community is a pain that is worse than death. We think other people are the problem. But really, what would our lives be without other people? Our lives would have very little meaning, very little joy, very little comfort. We would have no love, no relationships, no friends, no books, no movies, no culture whatsoever, no ability to participate in this world. Not to mention you'd have to do everything for yourself. You'd have to grow your own food. You'd have to build your own house. You'd have to sew your own clothes. You'd have to take out your own appendix. We cannot survive without other people. And the only thing that insulates all of us from this understanding, the thing that allows us to wallow in our despair and to fantasize about a world without all those idiots filling it up is our own privilege. That's it. People at the margins, people forced into exile understand better than we do about the absolute necessity to belonging to a people, to being on the inside.
 
The 10 men with a skin disease. They had no choice. They weren't not allowed to participate. They were thrown out. But we, we have a choice. Will I take the hard path to participation in this world and with people and hope for the future? Or will I remain on the comfortable path of voluntary withdrawal and despair? That's the choice that we have before us. That's the choice that I struggle with every day that I turn on the news. For these 10 men, there is only one choice. And so from a distance they call out. And from a distance, God responds. So beloved, let us remember what Paul teaches us. That there is nothing, absolutely nothing that can separate us from God's love and healing. There is no distance that God cannot overcome. There is no pain that God cannot heal. There is no sin that God cannot forgive. That is true for me. That is true for you. And oh, oh woo. That is true for every other person in this world, no matter who they are, what they believe in or how they behave. That's the part that's hard to accept. I liked it when it was about me.
 
We like to hear that God loves us no matter what. It's a lot harder to hear that God loves our enemies no matter what, and that God expects the same from me. It makes us feel less special. And it reminds us of the sometimes uncomfortable truth that all people are created by God equally. So this brings me back to my despair about democracy. I think lately I've been thinking that democracy is only working when 50.01% of the people in a democracy vote for or support the right thing or the right person. And I think 99.9% of the time, I think that that is usually means that the right one is the same one that I'm voting for or supporting. And I guess that's understandable at a time when we are so equally divided, our tension is focused on the unsure outcomes of our democratic processes. But it is the outcomes that are maybe not the point of democracy. Is it the outcomes that are the most important part of our democracy? Did the founders of this country say that we were going to be a democracy because the people would always make the right choice and that they would never be wrong?
 
No, that's not what they said. When our country was founded, it was not the outcomes of democracy that were the most important. It was the foundations of democracy. And what are those foundations? The foundations of democracy are that all people are created equal and that the individual person created and endowed with rights by God has infinite priceless value. We are a democracy because the individual right to hold an opinion, we must believe is more important than holding and acting upon the right opinion. Well, that makes perfect sense to me as a Christian, but as a person who cares deeply about truth and justice and progress, I admit it's sometimes hard to swallow.
 
But beloved, this is the gospel basis of our hope that nothing can separate us from God, no distance, that all of us have infinite worth, even thank God when we are wrong. And that the truth is that we don't have any choice. We need other people to survive without other people. By definition, we have stopped surviving. So let's open our hearts to God, open our hearts to our neighbors, open our hearts to hope and reach out across the distance we have put between ourselves and others. It's okay to worry and feel despair for a little while, but the gospel demands that we move towards hope and call out to one another.  

Beloved,
 
A few weeks ago, as my son, Romey, was getting ready for bed, he picked up one of his children’s books (Little Toot), opened it up, and declared, “This the Word of God! This the Word of God!” I was a bit surprised. “Where’d you learn that?” As usual he was unable to offer any coherent explanations. I started asking his Church School teachers if he was learning about the “Word of God” in class. I asked his choir teacher, Diane Schaming, if she was teaching the kids any songs containing that phrase. She said no. “I can’t figure out where he learned it from!” “Uh,” she replied, “I think he may have picked that up from you!” OH YEAH! I suppose I am a likely suspect! Be aware, our kids are always paying attention!
 
Some of you are paying attention to the Word of God as well and have been asking questions about what the letters next to the scripture reading in the bulletin stand for—especially because they’ve changed recently. 

Preaching on:
Luke 17:1–5

I was visiting a church once that was dealing with a number of simultaneous setbacks and a lot of blame about what had happened and conflict about how to move forward. The minister was an eloquent and dedicated leader. And he was doing his best to press on. And on worship that Sunday he prayed a beautiful version of a prayer that’s not uncommon in churches everywhere. He prayed something like this:
 
“Yes, Lord, increase our faith! Increase my faith so I can serve you better! Increase the faith of Christians everywhere because we’re nothing without you! Increase the faith of this lost and sinful nation because we’ve left the narrow path of your righteous way! Increase our faith that we might be just a little more worthy of your Gospel! Amen.”

I felt a little bad for my colleague because I’m a minister too and I know how us ministers can think. We get all worked up and worried about the faith. We get to thinking that it’s our job to increase the faith of the congregation, to increase the faith of the Church, or the nation, or the world even. We all do it, us ministers. I do it from time-to-time. If only we just had some more of the good stuff! It’s an understandable mistake. You may not be a minister, but I bet you probably do it too.
 
I want to be a better person, a better Christian. I want to live a cleaner life. I want to do right by the people I love. If only I had a little more faith. Or If only I had a little more money, then I could be generous with people the way I want to be. If only I had a little more talent, then I could’ve been somebody. If only I had a little more time, then I’d sign up to volunteer, I’d get involved in all the places, in all the causes that need me. If only, if only, if only. How many times have you said to yourself, “If only I had a little more, then—watch out world—you’d really see something! But I don’t, so I can’t and I won’t.”

Whatever you think you’re missing, they’re all variations on this theme, “If I had more, I could do more and I could be more.” When times are tough and life gets hard, we blame the problems we face on the lack of some key ingredient that is preventing us from tackling the problem. And if we internalize that missing ingredient, if what’s missing is inside of us, we start to telling ourselves that any effort we might make would be a big waste of time because I am not made that way. Now the problem isn’t the problem anymore. The problem is that something is missing. Do we feel better? Not really. Now we toss and turn all night thinking about what’s missing. We lie there in the dark, our minds racing, and sometimes we start to pray: “God, do you hear what I’m saying? You want me to make something of myself? You want me to serve you and this world, well, I’m going to need you pony up, Lord. Increase my faith!”
 
Beloved, the desire to pray for more faith is just a spiritual distraction. When the disciples asked Jesus to increase their faith, he rebuked them! “Increase your faith?! Increase your faith?! Don’t you realize that with just a mustard seed of faith you could uproot a mulberry tree—a tree with roots as deep as its branches are high—and you could make that tree walk all the way down the shore, and you could make that tree plant itself, not in the soil of the earth, but in the salt waters of the sea.” Jesus is telling us again, as he so often does, that a little can go a really long way—further than you can possibly imagine. And the Kingdom of God that Jesus has come to proclaim is not the Kingdom of the big, the proud, and the powerful. It is the kingdom of the poor, the humble, and the meek. 
 
Beloved, please hear this before you ever again doubt that you have enough faith to be a good Christian. The Kingdom of God is not the kingdom of somebody’s great faith. It’s the kingdom of the tiniest, littlest, barely worth mentioning bit of faith that changed the whole world—it’s the light shining in the darkness, it’s a baby born in a born, it’s the mustard seed weed that just got lucky and happened to land in the right spot to grow and grow and grow.
 
So, we don’t pray for more faith. Because asking is the wrong way to get it. Faith is not being doled out by the angels from on high to anybody who asks for it. That’s not the way faith works. Let’s look at the second half of scripture reading this morning. Jesus asks his disciples (and all of us):

Don’t you treat your servants and slaves like garbage? Don’t you expect them to scrape and serve? Don’t you expect them to do it for nothing? And yet you have the audacity to serve God Almighty as if you were owed something for merely doing the right thing. Faith is not transactional. It is not a way of getting ahead. It is not a way to earn favor or avoid disaster. It is not done to earn eternal salvation or your ticket to heaven. Your faith is your commitment, your reliability, your loyalty to the command to serve God and your neighbors.
 
Faith and commitment are not something you can spend. And they’re not something you can be given. Faith is like a seed. It grows if you plant it. It’s like a muscle. It grows when you use it. It doesn’t matter how much faith you have. What matters is what you DO with the faith you’ve got. 

All around the world, the church is reeling. Up north, down south, the coasts, and middle America, progressive and conservative, mainline and evangelical, everyone is reporting the same thing coming back from COVID—fewer people in worship, fewer visitors, less money, old volunteers retiring and not enough new blood to replace them. Too little, too little, too little, too little. If only, if only, if only, if only. But this, Beloved, Glen Ridge Congregational Church, this is the Gospel of Jesus Christ: A little goes a long way! Don’t waste your time wishing for more. What are we going to do with what we’ve got? Are we going to let ourselves tell ourselves a story of scarcity and loss and circumstances beyond our control? Or do we instead believe what Jesus promised us? That all it takes is a mustard seed of faith to make some wild things happen—things nobody’s ever seen before. What are we going to do with the faith we’ve got?
 
Beloved, you have everything you need! What are you going to do with what you’ve got?