Preaching on:
Mark 7:24–37

I would guess that our scripture reading this morning made a few of you uncomfortable, right? Let’s be honest, Jesus is acting like a jerk: He refuses to heal a woman’s daughter of a demon just because she isn’t Jewish like him. And worse, he demeans her, dehumanizes her—he calls her a dog. YIKES. For those of us who are deeply committed to acceptance, inclusivity, and equality—who perhaps base these deep commitments on the teachings of Jesus, this problematic piece of scripture can feel like a bucket of cold water to the face.

Then, for his next trick, Jesus hawks a loogie in some guy’s mouth. Gross. Imagine being the Son of God—being able to walk on water and still storms with a word—but not being able to heal someone without the power of saliva. Really? We appreciate the healing, Jesus, we do, don’t get us wrong, but the theatrics are a little lowbrow. OK? Maybe just wave your hands around a little bit if you really need to do something, but keep your spit to yourself.

So, this morning Jesus is being a gross jerk. And that by itself makes us uncomfortable. And we’re also wondering what it is that any of this could have to do with the fact that today we’re saying goodbye to one another.

My hope is that if I leave behind any small legacy in this pulpit, it will be that (like the Syrophoenician woman) I was willing to argue with God. And that I argued with God, not just in a theatrical way, just some phony-baloney rhetoric to eventually come back around to the preordained position and “realize” that it was right all along. No, I hope, I pray that I have argued with God, for you, honestly and sincerely, with all the passion of a mother fighting for the soul of her daughter.

Because I’m of the opinion that our faith requires more of us than just belief. Our faith sometimes demands that we wrestle—that we wrestle with this world, that we wrestle with ourselves, that we even, at times, wrestle with God. As the famous story from Genesis of Jacob wrestling with God (Genesis 32) shows us, it’s in wrestling with God that we’re transformed and blessed. Wrestling with God with and for all of you has certainly been one of the great blessings of my life.

And I’ve come to believe that when we wrestle with God all night long—like Jacob did—that we’re not the only ones who are transformed at the break of day. God cannot emerge from wrestling with us unscathed, unmoved by what has happened between us. I hope that I have demonstrated to you, as your spiritual leader, that I trust God entirely—not because God is perfect, not because God is all powerful, not because God is unchanging, but because God is love. And when you love someone, you listen to them. When you love someone, you argue with them. When you love someone, you learn from them, you change for them. Love changes the one who loves. And the more we love, the more we are transformed.

If God is love, then God is changing. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it: God is the Most-Moved Mover. Here’s the quote in its entirety: “If we put aside the categories and logic of Greek philosophy and try to understand biblical religion in its own terms, we will soon discover that the God of the bible is not Aristotle’s impassive, unmoved mover at all; he can only be described as ‘the Most-Moved Mover’… According to the Bible, the single most important thing about God is not his perfection but his concern for the world.”

I love that Jesus—despite our insistence to the contrary—refuses to be perfect. I love that, instead, a gentile woman from Tyre is allowed to argue with God, joining the sacred and audacious ranks of Abraham, Moses, and Job before her. She argues with God, and she wins, teaching Jesus himself a profoundly Christian lesson: If you believe that your God has great power to save you and there’s not so much as a little crumb of mercy left over for me, then your hope for your own salvation is a fool’s dream. Because if you claim to have bread for yourself, but there are no crumbs for anyone else, then you in fact have no bread. It’s in the very nature of bread to make crumbs that fall all over the place, just as it’s in the nature of the Kingdom of God to be uncontainable, unrestrictable, uncontrollable. The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed that grows into a weed that takes over the whole field and grows into a great bush that all the birds of the air can nest in. The Kingdom of God is like yeast. Scrape a little of this fungus off the rotten grapes in your vineyard and put it in your flour and it will spread and grow until the whole big batch is leavened.

Our commitment as Christians to a vision of the Kingdom of God which “draws the circle wide” and is inclusive of all people is based, in part, on what Jesus taught us. And it is based, in part, on what the Syrophoenician woman taught God. I hope if there is any small legacy to my leadership here at Glen Ridge Congregational Church it will be that I did my best to draw the circle wide. And to do that I let myself be tutored by Jesus and by the kinds of people who Jesus himself was tutored by—those who are standing outside of our circles. We do not build the Kingdom of God through our own perfect theologies, our own perfect ideologies, our own perfect ideas—we build the Kingdom of God through love: through an unending commitment to learn from and to be changed by all our neighbors.

Crumbs and weeds and fungus and growth: That’s the Kingdom of God for you, says Jesus. Oh, and let’s not forget: spit too. Jesus came down from heaven to earth, but he never behaved as if he were something other than an earthling. Sure, he occasionally seemed to bend the rules of this world (at least as we perceive them) when he turned water into wine or something like that, but he never used his powers to make himself powerful or to remove himself from the ultimate limitations or the brute realities of this existence. He lived with us in the world completely and (according to his critics) profanely: He healed on the sabbath, he ate with tax collectors, he drank with sinners, he touched the untouchable, he spat in the eyes of the blind and in the mouths of the mute, and their eyes were opened and their tongues were loosed.

If I have any small legacy here at Glen Ridge Congregational Church as a visionary for what the Church should be, I hope it would be that I was an advocate for worship, for religion, and for community that has a little spit in it: worship, religion, and community that is fully human, fully alive, fully embodied, and not embarrassed by it. If Jesus healed with spit, aren’t we called to embrace the messiness and the intimate rawness of our own humanity? And, Beloved, perhaps one or two of the things that we think of as too profne, too impolite, or too risky, in fact, have every bit as much sacred potential in them as Jesus’ spit.

Yes, we have very impressive stone walls here at Glen Ridge Congregational Church, an incredible and well-loved organ, and beautiful, historic stained glass, but don’t mistake this house of God for the seat of some sanitized religion. Glen Ridge Congregational Church is a place of intimacy, connection, and engagement, full of wonderful people who are not afraid to reach out to one another or to try new things. A church is not a building. It’s a people. And as I prepare myself to leave here, it’s all of you—the church, the people—that I will dearly miss.

Bonnie, the boys, and I moved to Ellenville, NY two weeks ago. And toward the end of that first week my dad and my sister came over to visit and see the new place. For dinner that night we walked one block down our road and got a table an Italian restaurant right in the “theater district” of downtown Ellenville. And I was beginning to feel the finality of the move—that this wasn’t just a visit anymore, that this was my home now, and that meant I was leaving behind a lot of people I love.

I stood up from my table after dinner and turned around and strangely thought I recognized the back of somebody’s head who was sitting at the bar. It couldn’t be. Could it? I walked over and it was, indeed, Cherry Provost sitting with a friend of hers. If you don’t know Cherry, she’s a longtime member of GRCC. And if you do know her, you know that she would want me to tell you that she was only sitting at the bar because there were no tables available, and she was just eating dinner. Well, anyway, we were both surprised to see one another and we had a lovely chat.

As I walked home, I couldn’t believe it. My first real outing after the move, and here was one of my own, sitting at the bar a block from my house. I found it very comforting to be reminded that although I have to say goodbye to all of you and although it’s critically important for us all to recognize the end of my role as your pastor and senior minister, it’s nice to be reminded that I haven’t actually moved to another dimension. And I am sure that God and love will keep us connected in appropriate, boundaried, and maybe sometimes surprising ways—when the time is right.

Well, when the time is right, I look forward to it. But now I really do have to say goodbye. Thank you all for everything. I am deeply, deeply grateful for everything you have given to me. It has been my great honor to serve as your pastor. I have given you my imperfect best. And I have felt that it was received and appreciated. I leave here feeling deeply loved. Thank you.

I’ll ask you now to turn your attention to the front cover of the bulletin. There’s a picture there of Romey and Felix in the parsonage back yard standing in front of an oak tree sapling. I love that little oak sapling. I’m VERY proud of it. I consider it my greatest landscaping achievement and something like my third son. I didn’t buy it at the nursery. I didn’t plant an acorn there. The tree just grew.

The parsonage backyard “lawn” is an interesting and eclectic mix of vegetation. But it was hard to tell what was really back there when I was cutting it all down every week, so in 2020 (during CVOID when a lot of us got some crazy ideas) I just decided to let about half the back yard lawn grow out, just to see what would happen. And one of the things that happened was this little oak tree—in just the right spot too. So, when I started cutting the lawn again, I cut around him. And now, four years later, I hope and pray he’s big enough that no one cuts him down for a long, long time. He’s my greatest landscaping achievement and I didn’t buy him, I didn’t plant him, I didn’t really do a thing. I just got out of his way, and he grew on his own.

Goodbye, Glen Ridge Congregational Church. I’m going to step out of the way now, and I trust that you will keep growing. Amen. 

Preaching on:
Song of Songs 2:8–13

The Song of Songs or the Song of Solomon, which we just read from this morning, is all about love. It’s a love poem—a rather sensual and somewhat steamy love poem at points. It’s inclusion in the biblical cannon has always been a little uncomfortable for some of us.

I remember once years ago in New York City browsing through a big Barnes and Noble bookstore lost in thought. I love just walking the aisles of a library or a bookstore and letting my thoughts wander through the titles—half the time I’m looking at the books without really seeing them, you know? I had just been speaking at a protest nearby, so I was wearing my clergy collar. Well, as I walking the aisles, I was pulled out of my daydreaming by some snickering from two other customers, and from the way they were glancing over at me I thought they might be laughing at me. I snapped out of it, and I looked around and saw that I had wandered—without realizing it!—into the rather secluded Romance novel section of the store, and I had been gazing intently at books with covers full of muscly men carrying off scantily clad women, all while wearing my priestly attire. Well, coming across the Song of Songs in the Bible can feel to some of us every bit as surprising and embarrassing as that little episode in Barnes and Noble.

The poem has been interpreted as being about God’s love for Israel or God’s love for the Church. This interpretation elevates the poem out of the embarrassment of the erotic literature section of the bookstore, but it only solves about half the problem. Even if the poem is really about God and the Church and not two young, beautiful lovers who canNOT keep their thoughts chaste or their hands to themselves, it’s still surprising that an erotic poem—and not a traditionally spiritual or religious poem—is the Bible’s chosen vehicle to describe God’s love for us.

This morning I was planning to tell you all about why I love God. It’s my second-to-last sermon as your pastor, and I thought I should be direct and try to leave you with a little inspiration. But as I was writing and rewriting this sermon, it was just kind of boring. Every angle I took, every sermon illustration I came up with, every good reason I have for loving God—it all just kind of fell flat. It was missing a spark. And so I sat down with the scripture reading and it was all right there—the passion, the longing, the desire, the erotic connection. Maybe more important than telling you why I love God, this morning I should tell you something about how I love God.

First, we have to deal with this word “erotic” and define it because it’s a word that gets misused a lot. Often “erotic” is used as a synonym for “pornographic.” But that’s not how I see it. The erotic, for me, is anything that connects me back to the rhythms, feelings, and experiences of my body. If the word “erotic” is too much for you, you could replace it with the word “somatic” maybe, except that the word somatic is kind of clinical and dead. The word erotic is full of the living energies of the body.

Sexual energy is what we associate most often with the word erotic, but that’s only a part of it. Drinking a glass of water on a hot day, or going to a museum and looking at art, or making a piece of art, or eating a juicy clementine, or going for a walk with a dear friend, or working in the garden, or standing up in church and singing a hymn are all, by my definition, erotic experiences. Because in each of these activities I am connected through my living body to the world around me. Without my body, without the abilities and energy it brings, none of those very good things would be possible.

It’s deeply troubling to me that we live in world where we’re surrounded by the pornographic—which is a sort of exploitation and distortion of the erotic. This is kind of the way our world works—marketplaces want to sell us the highly processed, sugar-added version of things that would otherwise be good for us. The erotic is the whole, healthy food, not the all-sugar version. And so, of course, the church should be a place in people’s lives where you are fed the whole, real food of the erotic. But so often, instead, the church is an erotic desert—a place of fasting and denial.

And there is certainly a healthy place for fasting in our lives, but hopefully that fasting is leading us back to balance, and not just to a life of abstinence. Because another way of defining the erotic is to say that it’s just embodied spirituality—it is spirituality in a body which is the only way that any of us will ever experience the spiritual or the holy or God. Whenever we meet God in life, we meet God in our bodies and that means that God is meeting us and communicating with us erotically. And the Song of Songs reminds us that nothing is left out of that intimate connection—including the clandestine passions of young lovers trying to find a way to sneak out of the house and get away together.

When we cut our bodies off as an acceptable pathway for connecting to God, our faith can become a little too heady and intellectual and talky. It also leads to endless guilt about the natural desires and needs of our bodies. Being taught that hunger or desire or dancing or whatever is bad and sinful causes all kinds of confusion and spiritual distress. You know, there are a lot of really good reasons that young lovers shouldn’t sneak out of the house together, right? The Song of Songs acknowledges this. It says, “love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.” In other words, be careful, young padawan! There are a lot of really good reasons that young lovers shouldn’t sneak out of the house together, but one of them IS NOT that God gets mad about the kinds of things that bodies desire and do, when they desire them and do them lovingly, justly, consensually, mutually, with full regard for the potential consequences, right?

Jesus tells us to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. To me, this means, love God with everything you’ve got. Don’t leave anything off the table. Certainly not our bodies, which are so central to our existence as God’s creatures. Our bodies are not something to be defeated or dominated or gotten over or left behind, they are our only pathways to knowing and loving the world and God.

You know, every time one of my kids bonks his head or scrapes his knee, I feel it on my head, in my knee. I feel their pain. I explained this to Romey and he started punching himself in the arm when he got mad at me. “Do you feel that, Dad?!” But this pain I feel in my body when they feel pain in their bodies is partially instinct—a built in feature of human potential—and partially memory—activating that neural pathways laid down in my brain from decades of head bonks and knee scrapes of my own. It’s my body’s wisdom—a collaboration between God and experience—teaching me something about that most spiritual of virtues: compassion.

Because compassion and empathy don’t live in a disembodied spiritual world, their roots are right here in the flesh. It’s not surprising that our current culture war between extreme right and extreme left is mostly fueled by social media and played out online where our bodies are profanely removed from the interaction. Bodies have wisdom, love, compassion, care, and desire for pleasure and peace and togetherness built into them as basic components of embodiment. Much of Western religious culture taught us to be mistrustful of our bodies, and as those antierotic attitudes have secularized, we’re now moving further and further away from one another physically. I don’t think we can survive as a virtual species—we need to be in our bodies together to really do togetherness at all.

Just like we can’t really have the best virtual relationships with other people, we also shouldn’t have a virtual relationship with God. For me, this means becoming as aware as possible of my physical body: its desires, needs, pleasures, pains, abilities, and activities, and absolutely expecting that God is physically present within all of my physical experiences. God doesn’t have a body separate from mine or yours. But God is as fully present in my physical experience as God is present in my intellectual or emotional or spiritual experiences (all of which are really, if you think about it, physical experiences as well).

When you begin to allow yourself to love God with your body and with your physical experiences and activities, the whole world comes alive spiritually. Everybody should have at least one (to begin with) physical, embodied, regular practice that is specifically about connecting to God. Working in a garden is a good one. Singing in the choir. Walking the dog. The key is to give that activity over to God like it was a sacrament.

When we take communion together, that is a physical activity in which we fully expect God to show up. That’s not the magic of the church at work. That’s the magic of your own expectations. In fact, all of creation, I believe can be a sacrament. And God can show up physically wherever God chooses. The question is: Are you ready to experience it? Do you believe that your body is, indeed, holy ground? That your 15-minute walk with the dog in the morning contains as much potential for God’s activity as the Temple’s Holy of Holies? Because once you release your physical experience form the expectation of the profane, and invite God to show up to you, God will rush in and fill your body.
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God will rush in and fill you with such passion and desire and playfulness and love and attention and care and excitement that you will begin to feel what the author of the Song of Songs most certainly knew: that God does not love us or desire us in a disembodied, intangible way. God loves us fiercely, passionately, even physically. God is panting at the window lattice of our inner-most private boudoir, calling to us to sneak away, to run together in the blooming fragrant world, and to be young lovers together, however old we may grow.

Preaching on:
1 Corinthians 15:35–50

​This morning I’m closing my four-part “fundamentals” of Christianity sermon series. We began with repentance—the opportunity to realign myself totally with the values of the Kingdom of God. In part two that led us to the core values of the Kingdom of God: love and justice. Part three was a reminder that (despite our calling to act out our faith) what we long to be transformed into through love and justice is ultimately something more than human, more than we can do on our own, and it requires God’s activity, God’s grace. So, this morning, where does this journey finally lead us? What are we being transformed into by God through repentance, love, justice, and grace? This morning we’re talking about resurrection.

Now, if you were to ask the average Christian, “Where does our faith journey ultimately lead us? What is our final destination?” the average Christian would respond, “Heaven.” And that’s what we teach our children, right? In Sunday School for sure but also every time somebody dies, we teach our kids that the departed person has gone to heaven, and we’ll see them again when we go to heaven. We believe and we teach that heaven is our ultimate destination. It’s simple, it’s clean, and it’s spiritual.

Our kids do learn about resurrection—mostly in the Easter season. And we usually learn that resurrection is something that happened to Jesus. And if we believe that resurrection has anything to do with us, it’s usually in some kind of poetic or symbolic or perfectly natural sense. Resurrection is about life victorious death. Resurrection is about social renewal and revolution. Resurrection is about springtime blossoms. But resurrection isn’t about me, it isn’t going to happen to us, it’s not on our itinerary. Is it?

The Bible talks a lot about heaven. And if you read your Bible after losing grandma and grandpa and being taught that they’re in heaven waiting for you and after Sunday School lessons that teach you that believing in Jesus is about getting that golden ticket to heaven after you die, then it’s easy to read many of those passages as reinforcement that heaven is our ultimate spiritual destination.

The Bible also talks a lot about resurrection—our resurrections. I mean a lot a lot. But we’re not so sure, right? Resurrection is messy, it’s weird, and it seems a little too physical to be an ultimate destination, right? So, we kinda skip over it. If heaven is the ultimate destination, let me just worry about that and let someone else worry about some of the Bible’s weirder details.

But resurrection isn’t just a detail. You can’t escape the centrality of resurrection in the New Testament or the fact that if you read your Bible naïvely (without any preconceived notions), it’s clear that early Christians like the Apostle Paul believed that resurrection is the Christian’s ultimate destiny. It wasn’t until later that theologians began to develop ideas about an intermediate, heavenly waiting place before resurrection. And over time those ideas about the “afterlife” began to lose their temporary status and began to feel ultimate, overshadowing the core Christian teaching of resurrection.

Now, to be clear, I’m not saying that grandma and grandpa aren’t in heaven. I fully believe that the soul survives death. But what we believe our ultimate destination is matters because we’re called so fundamentally to live out our faith in this world. I think there’s a difference between heavenly faith and resurrection faith.

If heaven is the ultimate destination, it’s too easy to lose faith in God’s creation. We might begin to think that the Earth doesn’t matter—that we can trash it, that it doesn’t deserve the same respect that we would offer to heaven. We would never landfill toxic waste in heaven, right? But this place? It’s just a temporary dumping ground for the time being. And these bodies of ours? Well, they don’t really matter either.  Our sufferings and our pleasures, our desires and our hungers, our emotions and our feelings, they’re all just physical distractions from the spiritual life. The body is in the way—a prison for the spirit that will one day be permanently left behind.

But if resurrection is the ultimate destination, the body isn’t a prison, it’s a temple. It’s not a distraction, it’s an integral part of the evolving process. And so is the rest of God’s creation. The Christian’s resurrection faith reminds her that Christian spirituality is physical from beginning to end. And for the Christian, the physical world is spiritual. It’s not heaven AND earth, it’s heaven-and-earth. Our ultimate goal as Christians is not to escape this existence through death. Our ultimate goal as Christians is to play our part in God’s resurrection and transformation of all creation. We can’t do it on our own. We need God. But God also can’t do it without us, without our commitment to the transformation that we believe is coming. What we commit ourselves to matters.
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We think about resurrection mostly on Easter. And we tend to think that we have two choices of what to believe in on Easter morning. We can either believe in the literal resurrection—that’s the physical one that Bible teaches about. Or we can believe in some sort of allegorical resurrection—that’s the one where we take all those wild Easter stories with a grain of salt, but we still affirm that the teaching of resurrection contains some profound spiritual truth. Literal or allegorical. Physical or spiritual. But this is a false dichotomy. It is the false dichotomy that Christianity is so much a part of perpetuating and also trying so hard to overcome. We see it throughout our culture: Scientific, physicalist progress in the form of new technologies divorced from meaning, miracles, and consequences on the one hand. And on the other hand, old-school, fundamentalist escapism from the demands and the opportunities of the physical world. But what if resurrection redefines all those boundaries? What if resurrection is both literal and allegorical, physical and spiritual? What if resurrection encompasses the entirety of the human experience?

That’s precisely what Paul tells us resurrection is in 1 Corinthians. Paul believed, without any contradiction or difficulty, that the resurrection body—the ultimate destination for me and you and everybody—is both a physical and a spiritual body. This helps us make a lot more sense of those wild Easter stories where people don’t recognize Jesus right away, or he sort of just appears in the room with you and eats a fish off the table. The resurrection is the perfect and final integration, final balance between our physical and our spiritual natures. On the other side of resurrection, there will no longer be physical and spiritual, there will have to be some some new word, maybe like a celebrity dating mashup: Let’s call it a "physiritual" or "spirisical" existence. It’s a harmonious blending of the physical and spiritual, an integrated, transformed life. This is the ultimate goal of our faith journey—a new creation where heaven and earth are united, and the physical and the spiritual coexist without boundaries. And if our culture as a whole were to begin to understand this—were to begin to understand that Christianity is not a war between the physicalists and spiritualists—just imagine how we might develop, what we might discover, how our commitment to love and justice and the values of the Kingdom of God might grow.

Resurrection, then, is not just an event we anticipate after death, but a process we participate in now. It redefines how we see ourselves, our lives, and the world around us. We are called to live resurrection lives, embracing the physical and spiritual as one. To live with love, justice, and grace is to embody the transformative power of resurrection in the here and now—enabling God to work through us in renewing all of creation.

How would your faith change if you shifted your future gaze from heaven to resurrection? How might that shift change how you live in the world? What would it be like to physical and spiritual all at once without any estrangement or contradiction? Is it possible that you and I can glimpse that future existence in the here and now, that we could expand our own capacity and the capacity of our wider culture to experience our existence as a resurrection in progress? May we live as resurrection people, deeply connected to these bodies, to this world, and to their transformation. Amen.

Preaching on:
Matthew 5:1–12

This morning I’m continuing with my closing “fundamentals” of Christianity sermon series. We began two weeks ago with opportunity and repentance. And we discovered that repentance isn’t about feeling guilty to avoid a bad ending in hell. It’s about seizing the always present but always somewhat elusive opportunity to realign myself and my values with the Kingdom of God. And what does that look like exactly? 

We answered that question last week. It looks like love and justice. And we discussed that there can be no such thing as a relationship with God, or a Kingdom of Heaven, or salvation without love (and the public form of love) justice. Jesus taught us so much about love and right relationships because they are the way that salvation becomes real in the world. We must not put grace so far ahead of works that our actions in this world become irrelevant. We are saved by love not when we receive it, but when we emulate it. When we act upon it. That’s when it becomes real, instead of potential.

So, then, Pastor Jeff, you must be saying that this total realignment of my values with the Kingdom of God and the taking up of my cross to remake the world in the image of love, these are things that I can achieve, right? If I just get up off the couch, and wash my face and comb my hair, and pull myself up by my bootstraps, and carpe diem, and read The Purpose Driven Life, and work my fingers to the bone, and run myself ragged, then I—I and I alone—through my action can transform myself, love the world, fight for justice, and fulfill my greatest calling and God-given destiny? Right? It’s all up to me, and I have the power!

NO. There’s a critical piece of the equation that’s missing. And if we don’t get to it, everything goes bad. Everything gets corrupted. It’s called grace. Grace is pretty simple to understand: Human beings are capable of doing a lot of things. But there is one thing within us—that dream, that greatest hope, so big we can barely articulate it, that deep longing for something more (for meaning and purpose and enlightenment and utopia and salvation), that hope for a world that is totally aligned to goodness and love and justice, that greatest destiny within us hungering to get out into the world--that we cannot achieve on our own, under our own power. And if we try? It’s gonna go bad.

On our own, we may be able to conquer the universe. And yet what we know to be true as Christians is that even that great achievement—accomplished up in the stars by descendants who will be so different from us that they’ll seem like gods to us—it will not satisfy them, will not satisfy us. We long for something that is more than us and more than we could ever become on our own. Are we doomed then? No, there’s hope because there is a power that we have access to that can help us. It’s God’s power. It’s bigger than us, beyond us, and it’s given to us freely. We call this grace.

Some Christians talk a lot about the total depravity of the human condition. Oi. I find that to be pessimistic, indulgent, and counterproductive. It’s a way of trying to force us, through guilt and negativity, to pay attention to grace. But I think it’s led to a backlash against grace and God’s power because it simply isn’t true. We’re not all bad. We’re not! In fact, Christianity affirms everything that is good in humanity and in the world. The body is good, sexuality is good, culture is good, art and music and community are good. There is much that is good in us and in the world, and we should pay attention to it, work for it, learn from it all.

It’s not that we’re bad, it’s simply that we’re incomplete. We’re unfinished. We’re a work in progress. That’s all. And the power or the destiny that is shaping what we will become in the next world is not our own. The power that puts that deep longing for something more within us is a power that is not totally us. It is beyond us, it’s God’s power. So, whatever ideas we come up with on our own to be more than human—to start putting computers in our heads, to replace ourselves with AI, to go back to nature, to travel to the stars, to perfect our genes with crisper—whatever it is, it’s not going to truly satisfy or perfect us.

And, in fact, when everybody has a computer in their brain and three arms and we’re all living on Mars, unless those transformations have been guided by the power of grace rather than human power, then things could go very badly for us. It could be a far worse future that we enact for ourselves. And even if that future world would appear to us to be a utopia—a demonstrably much better world by every metric—the people living in it would not necessarily be any closer than we are to our true human destiny because that requires something more than even our wildest sci-fi, utopian fantasies can provide.

So, what’s required? I mean, isn’t the whole thing about grace that it’s freely given? So don’t we then have it? Yes, it’s freely given and accessible to all, and yet in order for this greatest power to have any power, I must act to align myself to it. And so if you’ve really been paying attention, you see that we’re now circling back around to the first sermon in this series on opportunity and repentance and aligning myself totally to the Kingdom of God. But let’s explore this from a slightly different angle this time around.

The sermon on the mount, which we heard read this morning, is a universal sermon. What I mean by that is this: Jesus addresses this sermon to a very specific audience of poor, displaced, disenfranchised, struggling people. And yet, Jesus was not only speaking to marginalized people, he is speaking to all of us. Jesus was addressing the poor, but he was addressing them about the poverty of the human condition, which is true for all of us. No matter how rich, how powerful, how comfortable we may be, none of can ever escape the fact that the sermon on the mount addresses me and the humbleness of our human condition. But Jesus tells this meekness, this hunger, this mourning, this spiritual poverty is our blessing. Why? How could this be? 

It’s our blessing because it is the way of disassociating ourselves from self-power and realigning ourselves to God’s grace and God’s power. The way I understand him, Jesus believed that the poor and the marginalized had a spiritual advantage over the rich and the powerful. The poor were closer to the Kingdom of God than the rich and the powerful because the experience of worldly poverty (which is an evil thing, and unjust) had put them in greater touch with their spiritual poverty and encouraged them to ultimately rely on God’s power and grace.

Another example of this might be addicts in recovery. The first three steps in the 12 steps are these: 1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable. 2. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. 3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. It’s exactly what we’re talking about. And this isn’t just true for addicts. It’s true for everybody! But addicts, if they want to survive, have to rapidly get over the idea that we human beings can ultimately save ourselves and transform ourselves without a power that is truly greater than and beyond us. Jesus recognizes that those who are suffering the most have often come to this great realization while many of us who are well-to-do and comfortable are still able to labor falsely under the illusion that we can save ourselves.

Are you ready for one final twist? Self-power ultimately always fails. It always falls short. And it is ever susceptible to corruption and to gross error. So self-power can never cross the finish line on its own. However, that doesn’t mean that self-power can never do anything good. In fact, through self-power alone you can become a better, happier, more productive, more loving person than you are now. And, in fact, a little ego building is healthy for us, and natural. That’s why my message to the children this morning was a little different than my message to you now. I told them first to try their best. Because we need a little ego and a little self-power to grow up. And part of growing up is growing in power. And so Jesus tells us that the next part of growing up is growing in power to the point of discovering that our power is insufficient and only God’s power can ultimately transform and fulfill us. A child, as Jesus points out more than once, is naturally aligned with God, not yet having grown into power. But an adult must eventually make a choice. Will I choose to continue to try to fulfill myself? Or will I allow myself to be become like a little child again and be fulfilled by the power which is greater than myself?

So, here’s the three fundamentals so far: Now is the time to repent (to change myself) by realigning myself totally with the values of the Kingdom of God. The values of the Kingdom of God can only be understood through love (and justice). Aligning ourselves to the Kingdom of God means acting out love and justice in our lives and in our world. If we act out our vision for love and justice and a brighter future through our own human power alone, we will never be able to achieve the total transformation we long for. And as works in progress, we will always be in danger of corruption and gross error. And so, one of the most important ways we must align ourselves to the values of the Kingdom of God and one of the most important ways we can express love and make justice is by outgrowing the desire to save ourselves and the world by our own power. As we naturally realize and learn the limitations of our own human potential, we discover that the true potential is that which was always there within us from the very beginning—God’s potential within us, given to us freely by grace. So to allow that grace and that power to take total control, we must (as Howard Thurman put it) yield the nerve center of our consent totally to God by embracing the fundamental humbleness, meekness, and poverty at the very center of our human condition.

Next week, we’re going to ask then, what does the future really look like? What is God’s plan for us? What might it look like when we’re no longer works in progress? Next week we’ll be discussing my final fundamental, resurrection and rebirth.

In the meantime, let Jesus’ sermon on the mount allow you to loosen your grip on the idea that you must ultimately help yourself, save yourself, fix the world through your power alone. And ask yourself: Do I believe I have to save myself and fix everything all on my own? Do I act like I have to save myself and fix everything all on my own? What is it that I truly long for? And how can accepting my own imperfect humanity help me become what I most long to be? And remember: As Saint Irenaeus put it, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” By grace, may we all come fully alive. Amen.

Preaching on:
Matthew 22:33–40

This morning I’m continuing with my closing “fundamentals” of Christianity sermon series. We began last week with opportunity and repentance. And we discovered that repentance is not about feeling guilty to avoid a bad ending in hell. It’s about seizing the always present but always somewhat elusive opportunity to realign myself and my values with the Kingdom of God. What does that look like exactly?  Well, that’s what we’re talking about this week: love and justice. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And a second is like it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Bonnie and I were at a street fair this weekend. And one of the attractions was a tent from an Evangelical Bible church. They had a lot of volunteers, and they were bumping with activity. Inside their tent, people were reading the Bible, praying, and (I assume) getting saved. I was handed a tract as I walked past, and the man who handed it to me told me it was very important and asked me to make sure that I read it. There was a picture of hellfire on it. And it assured me that I am sinner (no surprise there). And it told me that because I am a sinner, and because there is nothing I can do to earn God’s forgiveness, and because no amount of good deeds could ever make up for what a wretch I am, my only choice is to accept Jesus’ atoning sacrifice on the cross for my sins by praying the prayer on the back of the tract.

The church had a lot of literature out on their tables about Christianity. There were a lot of quotes from the Bible. I mean a lot. Every other sentence was backed up with chapter and verse proof. But in all that literature, there was not one mention of loving your neighbors as you love yourself. Which seems funny because Jesus said there is no greater commandment (Mark 12:31). There was also not one mention of treating others the way you want to be treated (Luke 6:31). Not one mention of loving your enemies (Matthew 5:44). Not one mention of selling everything you have and giving the proceeds to the poor (Matthew 19:21). Not one mention of the sermon on the mount—that the poor and the mourning and the peacemakers are now blessed (Matthew 5:1-12). Not one mention of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick, or visiting the prisoners (Matthew 25:31–46).

It makes you wonder why Jesus bothered wasting his time telling us anything about love, or about how to treat others, or about how to treat the most vulnerable, if none of it matters enough to even make it into the brochure. Jesus definitely came to teach us about grace, and faith, and salvation. But he taught us about grace, and faith, and salvation manifested through love and justice in this world. The Evangelical and fundamentalist interpretation of Christianity distorts Christianity by putting grace so far ahead of works that works become irrelevant, by making it seem possible that faith and salvation can exist outside of love and relationships in this world.

It’s like trying to tell people that it’s not food that they need, it’s nutrition. Well, we do need nutrition, but how are you going to get it without the food? We need salvation, we need grace, sure, but how are we going to get it without Jesus’ main course—love, and the right relationships among people that love demands?

A few tents down from the Evangelicals there was a United Methodist Church. They had a smattering of people around their tent—nothing too exciting. The brochures on their table were for a ministry they run for people with dementia. Every week volunteers run an afternoon program so the caregivers of the folks with dementia can take a break for a couple of hours.

If the important thing is individual salvation (going to heaven when you die) through a particular belief (in Jesus on the cross) through a particular act of piety (a prayer), then this program for dementia patients and their exhausted caregivers doesn’t matter, does it? In fact, nothing really matters. This world doesn’t matter. And I don’t matter. My character, my effort, my relationships, my suffering, my victories, my compassion, my sacrifices, none of it really matters.

But when we realize that the important thing is love and how we express and organize and live out that love in the world, then suddenly a humble, small-town program for dementia patients held in the basement of a little rundown church IS the Kingdom of God being born upon the earth. It’s not about me getting saved. It’s not about Jesus, my personal Lord and savior. It’s about universal salvation, Jesus the savior of the world, and us, his disciples who he has called to take up our crosses and follow him (Matthew 16:24). The disciples didn’t just believe in Jesus. They followed him! They did what he said, lived as he lived, and worked with him to love others and make justice in the world far from the centers of power and influence. That was the announcement of the coming of the Kingdom of God. That was good news to the poor. And that’s what Jesus is still asking us for.

There’s an old joke: A man prayed fervently every week to win the lottery. Week after week would go by, and he’d never win. He began to lose faith, and so he prayed to God one last time, “God, you told me that anything I prayed for I would get. And you know how hard I have prayed! And you know how much I believe! And you know how much I need this money, and the good I’ll do with it! So, you answer me now: Why, after all this time, have I still not won that lottery?” And so powerful was the man’s prayer that the heavens parted, and God appeared above him on a cloud. And God looked down upon him and said, “Schmuck! You still have to buy a ticket!”

To translate this joke back into our sermon, grace and salvation without action are nothing more than ideas—just disembodied concepts. In order to actually take shape in your life, in our world, in order to become real, action must be taken. When we go out and love people, when we go out to make the world a better place, when we go out to make our society and our culture more fair and more kind, the grace that we all so desperately need begins to take on real form.

Love is God’s primary force. So much so, that the Bible tells us that God IS love (1 John 4:8). When the Apostle Paul talks about virtues, he tells us that the greatest virtue—greater even than faith—is love (1 Corinthians 13:13). And in our scripture reading this morning Jesus tells us that the greatest commandment is love, and that loving God and loving your neighbor are inseparable. “When you did it for the least of these, you did it for me” (Matthew 25:40).

Faith, grace, salvation—all wonderful things, all true, but none of them can be put in front of love, and all of them must be understood through love. And love, as the Bible and Jesus discuss it, is not an emotion. It’s a way of being in right relationship to your neighbors and of doing no harm—even to your enemies or to those who persecute you. This is the very love that Jesus demonstrated on the cross. And that love saves us not when we accept it, but when we emulate it: Take up your crosses and follow me.

There are a lot of different visions for justice in this world. Jesus’ vision is pretty simple to understand, but sometimes hard to follow. Abusers will stop their abuse. Violence will never be justified. Those with too much will reduce themselves down to the right size while ensuring that those without enough are cared for. We will share openly with one another. When we are in conflict, we will forgive and reconcile. We will confront sin and injustice boldly, and we will do it with humility, never thinking ourselves better than others. We will not judge. We will allow the poor and the marginalized among us to become our leaders and teachers. We will all sit at the table together without regard for power or status, never seeking advantage for ourselves over another. We will feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick, and visit the prisoners. We will give everything we have, even our lives, to brining this vision and these values into the world. Simple, right? But can we do this all on our own?

No. You can’t do it on your own. Nobody can. But that’s OK. Because the main course of love is always served by God with a garnish of grace. They go together like mashed potatoes and gravy. The Evangelicals and the fundamentalists are right about one thing, for sure. We live in a world that has convinced itself that the most important things in life are all things that I can earn for myself through hard work, or talent, or brash, narcissistic bullying, or whatever it may be. And so next week, I’m going to be talking about grace, about how important it is, and what it tells us about ourselves and spirituality.

In the meantime, carry Jesus’ vision for justice in this world in your heart this week and let it work on you: "Love God with everything you have and love your neighbor as yourself." And ask yourself: What does it mean to love God with everything? Is there anything in my life that’s getting in between me and my love of God? What does it mean to love my neighbor as I love myself? Do I love myself? What would the world look like if love always came first? What can I offer to my neighbors that make the Kingdom of God a little more real in the world? And remember: Love always wins (1 Corinthians 13:8), but only if you’re willing to buy a ticket!

Preaching on:
Mark 1: 14–20

For a long time, I’ve been wanting to put together a sermon series that would allow me to preach “the fundamentals” of Christianity. Only, I don’t want to preach them “by the book.” And I don’t want to preach them yet to people totally unfamiliar with Christianity. I want to preach on the themes and concepts that most inform my own experience and practice of Christianity, and I want to make my case for why they’re core principles to folks who already have their own sense of what Christianity is. And I want to be able to dialogue about it with you. So, all this month I’ve decided to do a bit of a retrospective on the important themes that have come up in my preaching here at GRCC over the last five years. And I’ll try to be direct, whereas before I may have been a little more circumspect.

Now, it may surprise you to learn after hearing the reading this morning that I’m not really going to be talking about calling, or following Jesus, or becoming fishers of people. Those are all important, but to truly understand them you have to first understand what comes just before them. So, allow me to retranslate for you Jesus’ inaugural message to the world, his first sermon, so you can hear it again for the first time:

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the good news of God and saying, “The perfect moment is right now, and the Kingdom of God is breaking through! Change your self and believe in the good news.”

This message is the context for what happens to Simon, Andrew, James, and John. This message is what gets under their skin. Or maybe it was already living under their skin, but Jesus comes along, and he activates it. Jesus doesn’t tell the disciples the end of the world is coming, he doesn’t tell them to feel miserable about their failures and shortcomings, he doesn’t tell them to believe in him or his saving death on the cross, or any of that. The time is ripe! Our hope is at hand! Transform yourselves! And believe the good news! That’s all Jesus is asking for! No problem!

When we hear the words, “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God has come near,” our imaginations start straying into the apocalyptic. This is some sort of allusion to the end of the world coming. Earth will end, mad meanie God will take over, the good guys will be raptured off to heaven, and the rest of us will be left behind to suffer and die and then go to hell. It’s not our fault that our imaginations go there; our imaginations have been shaped by centuries of interpretation and dogma and orthodoxy. And the unfortunate result is that Jesus arrives literally preaching the good news, and all we can hear is Jesus making some sort of implicit threat of violence or damnation. That threat, I believe, is fundamentally getting in between us and God, fundamentally getting in between the Church and the world. Even if you don’t believe the threat, you still hear the threat. And when you hear the threat that you don’t believe in, you can’t hear the real opportunity Jesus is asking you to participate in.

The joke version of this would be a guy standing in Times Square wearing a sandwich board that says, “The End Is Near!” But I think Jesus’ response to that interpretation would be to stand next to that guy with a sign that says, “The Beginning Is Near!” Every transition, every transformation is an ending, but the ending is not the point. The beginning, which is the opportunity overlapping the ending, is the point. When Simon, Andrew, James, and John left their nets and boats behind, that was a definitive ending. But that is so far from the point. Right? The point is what they will now become. Transform yourselves! “I will make you fishers of people.”

So, now we need to talk about repentance. The Greek word is metanoia, which literally means something like, “Change your mind” or “beyond mind.” Most Biblical scholars agree that the word “repentance” is an inadequate substitution. Metanoia is focused on this idea of personal transformation, but “to repent” in its origin literally means to feel really bad, to feel intense regret. Now word meanings change over time, but it’s hard to shake that baked in idea—which is so prominent in Christianity—that repentance is about feeling genuinely bad. And so I might imagine that Jesus is asking me, under threat of damnation, to feel really awful about what a miserable sinner I am. And that’s the path to salvation: to die in a state of repentance. Instead, Jesus is asking us to live right now in a state of transformation toward the inbreaking Kingdom of God.

It's not that this transformation Jesus is asking us to undertake isn’t connected to sinfulness, however you might define that word. It’s not that Jesus doesn’t “believe in” sin, or doesn’t believe it’s important, or even that he doesn’t believe that repentance or transformation shouldn’t be humbling or spiritually intense. So, let’s be clear: Jesus is asking us to transform away from sin and to totally and radically realign ourselves with the values of the Kingdom of God over and above all the powers and kingdoms of this world. That’s so big. That’s so really big. Can’t I just feel bad about something instead?

And I don’t mean to make light of the experience of weeping at your deathbed, and feeling regret, and taking responsibility, and confessing and asking forgiveness, and dying with an unburdened heart. That’s a beautiful and important experience. It’s just not at all what Jesus is talking about and it, honestly, if you think about it, pales in comparison to the monumental ask that Jesus is actually making of us here. The experience of Simon, Andrew, James, and John isn’t meant to be exceptional. Leaving this world behind is meant to be the natural response to Jesus’ message—not a guilty feeling, not a pious rite of forgiveness, a total transformation of your life. There is your life before this moment, and there is your life after this moment, and no one could ever mistake the one for the other.

OK. So, what does that transformation look like, exactly? I get that this is the moment for change. I get that I’m being asked to realign myself and my values with the Kingdom of God. What does that look like exactly? Well, we’re going to have to wait until next week to talk about that, when I’ll be preaching on the next two fundamentals, love and justice.

In the meantime, carry Jesus’ first sermon in your heart this week and let it work on you: "The perfect moment is right now, and the Kingdom of God is breaking through! Change yourself and believe in the good news." And ask yourself: Why is right now the perfect moment? Where and how is the Kingdom of God breaking through? What needs to change in my life? What am I becoming? And remember: The Beginning Is Near!

Preaching on:
John 6:1–21

I remember being a kid in Sunday School and learning about God. The stuff that interested me the most was God getting her hands dirty in the real world. I loved all the stories about Jesus because they were so real and relatable. But I also loved the stories from Genesis and Exodus and Samuel—floods and plagues and giant slaying and all that good stuff. These are stories designed for the imagination of a little boy, of course, but there was something more there than just great adventures.

God in these stories was not some faraway King sitting on a throne somewhere up in heaven. God was not distant or removed or absent in any way. God was in the world and deeply invested in everything—from the lives and relationships of ordinary people to the politics and history-changing moments of great empires. And God wasn’t like the gods we’re trying to create for ourselves today through artificial intelligence—our future robot overlords perhaps. God was not logical or cool or measured. God was emotional, mercurial, even violent. God had appetites and, apparently, needs. God could be offended and would take revenge.

It’s a funny thing to have your Sunday School teachers tell you (because it’s what we’re supposed to believe!) that God is perfect, and then read you some of these stories where God behaves in—certainly impressive, but not always entirely admirable ways. Lucky for me, I didn’t need a perfect God. That would have been boring. In these stories, God was worldly. That was what was interesting to me. God was in the world with us. God was invested in us. And God seemed to be responding to us. And zooming out to look at the big picture, as a kid, God seemed to be growing up with me.

When it came time to contemplate God intellectually, to memorize catechisms, to be versed in the basics of Calvin’s Institutes, I was not interested at all. I remember being asked a riddle by a teacher once: Could God create a rock so big that even God couldn’t move it? I liked riddles, but this one was boring. Where in all those great stories was God ever creating rocks and carrying them around? And where in all those stories was there any suggestion at all that God was infinitely powerful in the first place? An infinitely powerful being coming down to earth and playing at limitations is boring. If you know the whole drama and tension of the story could be erased with a wave of God’s magic wand, who cares? If God is infinitely powerful and David defeats Goliath, who cares? If God is infinitely powerful and humbles Pharoah, who cares? Of course God wins every time. There’s never even any question of how it all turns out. But is that life? Is that life as you experience it?

No. And that interpretation, I think, is a betrayal to the experiences of the people actually living those stories out. And it's just not true to our own lives and struggles! How will things turn out? We don’t know. We’re holding on by our fingernails here. Faith isn’t the easy experience of believing that a God who always wins will always win. Faith is the experience of holding on by your fingernails, routing for the underdog, defying the odds, refusing to give up, refusing to curse God even when God seems to have failed, and to never stop looking for that small, narrow, dimly lit, barely noticed path which God is laying down in the midst of this chaos into what we hope is a better future. That to me is what is truly admirable about God’s character in these stories. God is fighting just as hard as we are.

It's not easy reading our kids some of these stories where floods kill everybody or everybody gets covered in boils or giants get their heads cut off. It’s far more comfortable to tell them, without any stories, God’s in heaven, God loves you, God’s perfect, everything always comes out right in the end. That’s nice, but it’s boring. And how will those teachings really hold up in our children’s lives when they face real challenges. Because a perfect, all-powerful God would easily and neatly solve our problems for us from outside the world. But how often have you experienced that? So, the Bible tells us stories about a God whose hands are as dirty and bloody as ours with the hard work of fighting for a way forward inside the world with us.

Fortunately, we have our scripture reading this morning. Nobody’s head gets chopped off, but we see the way that God seems to work in the world and in our lives. A large crowd is following Jesus. It’s time to eat. Where are we going to get food everyone? A perfect and “all-mighty” God would merely wiggle his heavenly nose and a banquet table would descend from heaven to feed everyone. And why not? That’s a great way to eat, if you can get it. But that’s not what happens. And if you pay close attention to the stories of miracles, God very rarely works from nothing. God almost always starts from something, something or someone in the world.

Let’s name a few. When the prophet Elijah went to Zarephath during a great famine and asked a widow there to make him some bread, even though she only had enough oil and flour for one last cake before she died, that little bit lasted through the whole long famine and kept them both alive. The wedding at Cana—Jesus’ first miracle in John’s gospel—the wedding reception runs out of wine. Jesus doesn’t create wine from nothing. Jesus has them fill six big cisterns with water—30 gallons each, 180 gallons of eater total. That’s hard work! They didn’t have a garden hose! They had to sweat for that miracle, for that water to become wine. What about David and Goliath? Why didn’t God strike down Goliath with a lightning bolt? Well, it would have been a boring story. And it wouldn’t have been a true story because bullies and tyrants are rarely overthrown by lightning bolts. It takes the little people of the world to stand up to them. So, God takes a shepherd boy, a sling, and some stones and works with them to win an entirely precarious and unexpected victory. Very often, when Jesus performs a healing he tells the healed person that it was their faith that healed them. We call this today the “placebo effect.” It’s a scientifically measurable phenomenon. If you give somebody sugar pills and tell them it’s medicine, they are more likely to get better than someone who hasn’t been given phony medicine. Belief has a measurable healing effect. So, Jesus doesn’t heal from nothing, he uses our faith.

Even in the most famous examples of God seeming to create something from nothing, there’s always a catch. In Genesis 1, for example, where the interpreters and theologians tell us that God created the cosmos from nothing, the very first line is not about nothing, it’s about what was already there when God started the work of creation. The earth was not nothing. It was chaotic, dark, deep waters. Just like today, God didn’t create from nothing. Just like today, God created from out of the midst of chaos.

And so, of course, the feeding of the 5,000 begins with a little kid holding five loaves of bread and two fish. And somehow those five loaves and those two fish feed 5,000 people. Did a miracle occur? Yes. Was it impressive? Yes. Was it the work of an almighty, infinite God who acts outside of all limitations? I don’t think so. Anyway this isn’t the story of a God who can do anything. It’s the story of a God who works within the world, alongside us, with the resources and limitations that we face. It's a story about making do with what we have, and multiplying what little we have for the benefit of others. This isn’t God showing off infinite power. This is God promising partnership, but needing us to join in, to share what we have, and to trust that together, something beautiful and miraculous can happen.

You and I can’t perform miracles. But we can provide the raw materials that miracles are made from. God doesn’t work from nothing. And if we don’t provide God with something to work with, to work through, it’s going to hard for God’s true power to get a toehold on the problems we’re facing. We’re living in interesting times, where it seems like every other day there is some huge event or revelation in the world that in the past might have defined a whole year or even a whole decade. But they just keep coming at us recently—year after year of surprise and tragedy and conflict and struggle. One response would be to batten down the hatches and to wait for God to fix everything. Another—to try to reassure ourselves that this too must all be a part of some crazy plan that God’s whipped up for purposes we can’t yet imagine. But another response, the response of a small child who loves a good story, the response of a small child who is naturally generous and just wants to share what little he has, the response of a small child who has no choice but to believe in the power of small actions, is to offer whatever we have, no matter how insignificant it may seem. And to trust that our small contributions will be multiplied in ways we can't fully understand.

Beloved, we are a part of something greater. Did you hear that? We are a part of something greater. Something greater is growing out of us. So, our little bit of bread and fish might just be enough to feed a multitude. Our little sling might be able to bring down a giant. The water I carry by the sweat of my brow may one day turn to wine. So, we can’t wait for a distant, perfect solution to descend from on high. Instead, we step forward with what we have, trusting that God will meet us there, to build a future out of our hopes and dreams, our loaves and fishes, our courage and our faith.

Preaching on:
Mark 6:30–34, 53–56

Lately, at my house, I’ve been hearing a lot of “Look, Dad! Look at me, Dad! Look at this, Dad!” It could mean a lot of different things. It could mean Romey has just invented some new death-defying stunt involving all the living room furniture, or maybe he’s doing a good job on his big-boy bicycle, or maybe he’s just drawn some new picture of a tractor-trailer truck with like 25 wheels. But whatever it is, it’s going to be more fun and more satisfying, and there’ll be a bigger laugh and a bigger sense of pride, if he knows that Bonnie or I are watching what he’s doing. And if we’re not paying enough attention? We might get some misbehavior to get our attention.

It's a fascinating aspect of human nature. I remember the feeling of it from when I was a kid (maybe you do too): that yearning, that need, to have mom or dad’s eyes on me was so strong. If we’re being rational or maybe pessimistic about it, we might say, “Well, this instinct probably evolved to ensure that the parent protects the child and feeds the child and doesn’t forget about them or neglect them.” But it’s not just the scraped knees and the hurt feelings that our kids want us to attend to; it’s not just tying shoes and cooking dinner and everything else that they can’t do yet that they want us for. They also need us—just as much—to pay attention to the things they can do for themselves and to affirm their joy, and to share in their accomplishments. I remember watching TV as a kid and if something funny happened, I would turn to look at my mom so that we could share the laugh. It was better together.  

For kids, being watched, being paid attention to, seems to me to be a need—a need as real as needing calcium or exercise or school. Being seen and knowing—knowing not just on a physical level, not just on a social level, but knowing on a psychological, spiritual level—knowing that we are not alone is a key ingredient to our healthy development as we grow up. We worry so much as parents. We work so hard to provide. We want our kids to have every opportunity. We don’t want them to suffer any disadvantage or loss or disappointment. We don’t want them to lack for any good or service that money can buy. But maybe what our kids need most from us in our busy lives, in a world full of distractions, is our simple, but undivided presence of mind. Yes, I see you. Yes, I affirm this joy you feel is real because I feel it too. Yes, together let’s turn that joke on TV, let’s turn your make-believe rock concert, let’s turn you climbing a tree into meaning.

Children teach us that life is full—absolutely full—of opportunities to experience meaning in our lives. And they remind us that we come to a healthy understanding of meaning in our lives primarily through shared experiences. An experience doesn’t need to be profound, character-building, or expensive to provide meaning—it needs to be shared, to be experienced with someone outside of myself who can affirm for me that this deep level of satisfaction and joy and purpose which we call meaning—which is so ephemeral and hard to define—is, in fact, absolutely real. Meaning is real. It exists. And we don’t need any science, any philosophy, any book, or even any religion to make it real for us. It’s real simply because Dad saw it too, because Mom experienced it with me.

Now, as we grow up, the ways in which we find and make meaning also grow up with us. But they’re all founded on those early shared experiences. And we all eventually develop a healthy desire for some level of privacy, but the desire to be seen, to be watched, and to share never goes away completely. We still need other people, we value community. Other people continue to help us identify what is relevant in a world full of information and possibilities. But, if we’re lucky, we’re not like a leaf in the wind, being swept along with the tides of other people’s opinions and social media trends. Because, if we’re lucky, we’ve discovered that the One who watches—who when we were young we could only discover outside of ourselves (in Mom or in Dad or some other close adult)—the One watches now lives within us. So, when I sit down and write a sermon alone in my office with the door closed and the lights off, I don’t feel alone. There is a watcher present with me who sees and knows and shares the meaning of that private experience. But that is a spiritual reality that I first learned to access through the intervention and care and attention of my parents.

A 2021 study by YouGov showed that 26% of the general population believes that life has no meaning. And an additional 15% aren’t sure life has any meaning. That’s a crisis—a tremendous crisis of meaning in our world. We’re becoming more individualized, more lonely, more isolated, more online, more polarized. Anxiety, depression, and despair are increasing. Many of the institutions that helped us to make meaning together—like churches—are in decline. We’re less likely to belong to clubs, social groups, sports teams, service organizations than we were in generations past. The pandemic and the precautions we took to stop the spread of the virus had very real and perhaps unintended but not unpredictable consequences, and it added to this growing sense of distancing and meaning loss. But I’m sure that the crisis in meaning also traces back to our most formative years and the intensity of the attention that’s lavished on us. Are the adults around us just providing for us and keeping us safe or are they present with us, paying attention, watching us, and by watching us and responding to us, helping us to discover that highest pinnacle of human consciousness—meaning.

We heard in our reading this morning, “As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.” I think if Jesus were here today, he would find much the same thing. What is it that makes people “like sheep without a shepherd?” Is that we can’t find the best grass to eat? That we can’t protect ourselves from wolves? That we can’t cut our own hair? No, we can do all those things for ourselves. We’re like sheep without a shepherd when we don’t have that sense that someone is watching. And without those loving eyes affirming us, we become anxious and restless, we wander aimlessly and meaninglessly, we become lost, and we stray into dangerous territory.

Bringing your sick relative to see Jesus was not like a trip to doctor’s office to get a prescription for Amoxicillin. It was a trip into the presence of someone whose gaze had the power to hold you, a power so strong that it stayed with you long after you went back home. You felt it there watching you, experiencing with you, affirming you. It smiled with you, wept with you, longed with you, dreamed with you. It was there in every hour of drudgery, and it was in every epiphany of joy. And you felt less lost and less alone because that presence was tapping you into the most important connection of all—the connection to everything, the connection to God, the connection to meaning.

What our world needs in the midst of war, and mass shootings, and frantic social media antics, and political polarization is a new Spirit of meaning making. One of the problems with living in a crisis of meaning is that people will latch on with all their strength to anyone who promises loudly to provide meaning—cults, conspiracies, corporations, trends, subcultures, gangs, fascists. Providing meaning is not about telling people what to believe or not, it’s not about judging the morals of others, it’s not about some system or structure of belief. It’s all about being present, about giving people an opportunity to be heard, giving them a feeling of community, joining them where they are, wherever they are. And we have to do it in a way that challenges the volume of all the false prophets—the media, the markets, the politicians promising meaning that they’re not equipped to provide. We—the Church—need to be more present, more attentive than those false voices.

Beloved, the certain feeling that there is a power within (and beyond us) who is watching us and imbues our existence with meaning is not a psychological trick. It is the truth. It is the truth without which all the food and opportunity and money and success and accolades of the world amount to nothing. The trick, or perhaps the arrested development, is the idea that there is no meaning. And the disease is the desperate wandering and lashing out that arises from unmet need. Like an ignored kid, the world is screaming for attention.

Does Christianity stop at the stone wall that divides the Church from the outside world? Of course not. Do we come to church once a week merely to recharge our meaning battery for seven more days of drudgery and disconnection? No. We go out into the world as ambassadors of the Kingdom of God. We are the messengers of meaning. The world is shouting desperately, “Look at me! Look at me! Please, somebody, tell me I’m not alone! Please, somebody, tell me there’s a reason and a hope to this life!”

​Will you be paying attention? Will you look them eyes? Will you help the world to find the meaning it so desperately needs? The meaning, beloved, which I promise you is within you. Amen.
 

I had planned to sort of eulogize John the Baptist this morning. I was going to tell you about everything John had accomplished in his life, what he stood for, what he wouldn’t stand for, and about what a great influence John the Baptist has had on me personally, on my faith. But I know that the thing that is frontmost on many of our hearts and minds this morning (certainly on mine) is yesterday’s assassination attempt on former President Trump.

For those of you who may have missed the news, a gunman opened fire on Mr. Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania. Mr. Trump was struck in the ear, but—thank God—he’s OK. Unfortunately, one other man at the rally was killed. Two other men were seriously wounded. The gunman was also killed by the Secret Service. That’s about all we know, regarding the details, at the moment. But I think all of us also know and feel that this is terrible news for our country, terrible news for this election, terrible news for those of us who continue to dare to hope that there is a possibility of healing the increasingly violent political polarization that is diving our country. This is going to make everything worse. OR—dare I hope?—maybe there’s an opportunity here to turn things around?

When I arrived here five years ago to become your senior minister, I began occasionally, in my preaching and praying, to intentionally include “political” material. There is no such thing--no such thing—as an apolitical Christianity. A Christianity or a church that attempts to avoid all political issues, that attempts to avoid offending the political sensibilities of its members or neighbors by making the mere mention of politics taboo is avoiding the fullness of the Gospel's call to engage with the realities and injustices of our world. When we do this, we neglect our prophetic role—crying out for justice, for peace, and for the almost forgotten common good.

Religious values are political values and politics are often wrapped up in or reacting to religion, and therefore abandoning political discussion forces a church to abandon its duty to participate in the most important discussions of our time. Imagine a church saying that the discussion of religious values is better left to the politicians. The Church should remain silent on issues like the morality of our leaders, mass murder in our schools, providing healthcare, defining marriage, addressing poverty. It’s ridiculous, but it’s the unintended stance of churches who attempt to avoid anything “political.”

There’s no such thing as apolitical Christianity, but that doesn’t mean descending into the muck of politics. Christianity has always been a path of transcending politics, getting past our worst political instincts, and coming together across very real divides. The Apostle Paul wrote to the first Christians in Gaul, “There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” In Christ, Paul is saying, we do not ignore the world or the social and political differences between us. In Christ, we transcend those differences, not by ignoring them, but by creating a church where—against all the political and social norms of the world around us—we gather, we sing, and we eat—all of us at the same table—class, gender, ethnicity, citizenship be damned—all of us together. That church in Gaul wasn’t ignoring politics, they were defying politics. They were transcending politics and creating something new.

So, when I arrived here five years ago, I began intentionally and gently, inserting not political opinions but political reality into my preaching and praying. And it was hard on some of us. Because it was hard to hear even the mention of politics without thinking that this crazy long-haired guy is bringing up politics in order to try to force me to accept his politics. What I am hoping to do is to open up enough political honesty between us that we can learn to love one another despite very real political differences and disagreements, where we can learn to respect someone different than us even when we can’t accept their opinion. Imagine if I said to you, “I love you—BUT only because I don’t know everything about you. If you spoke freely about your thoughts on—let’s say—Joe Biden, I would probably stop loving you. But as long as you keep your mouth shut, I really do love you.” Would you believe me? Is that the kind of place we want our churches to be? Is that the kind of love we want to practice?

The very reasonable fear, of course, is that if politics come out in the open, we’ll become as profoundly divided in church as we are outside of it. And, yes, that’s a risk. But in the rest of the country, in the world outside these walls, politics and the discussion of politics isn’t going to go away--ever. And our culture desperately needs local, in-person communities of healing and restoration that are willing to do the hard work of loving one another across very real divides and differences. Shouldn’t churches be at the forefront of that political movement?

Imagine if in every town and city across this country there were these historic spiritual communities with lots of social capital and a respected moral voice holding community events, volunteer opportunities, and services where Americans could learn the countercultural values of loving and respecting and maybe even needing someone who is different from myself. Jane is a never-Trumper, but my kids love going to Vacation Bible School with her, and we couldn’t do it without her. Bob is way out there into some lefty stuff that just isn’t for me, but when I was sick, he brought me gluten-free zucchini muffins, and they were good. Who’s going to make that vision a reality if not us, if not the Church? And that vision, if we believe in it, requires us to talk regularly, respectfully and lovingly, about politic reality and to see one another fully in order to love one another fully. The devil’s in the details, of course, and it wouldn’t be easy, and there’d be growing pains for sure, but if not us, then who?

The price of our inaction is pretty clear: more violent rhetoric, violent speech, and violent actions as we lash out against our enemies. This kind of conflict doesn’t just go away. It continues to escalate unless it is somehow transformed. Where would you rather live? In a world where you were empowered to revile your enemies at the price of devolving into political instability and violence? Or a world where you were truly free to love those who were truly different than you with the benefit of an imperfect but evolving sense of the common good?

Beloved, our country needs us. Our community needs us to be bold and courageous. It’s easy to decry violence. It’s hard to respond to the deep-seated polarization and loneliness that are driving people further and further apart—that’s driving us to extremes, to hate and to violence. We can’t overcome this division by ignoring it. We’re going to have to turn around, face reality, face one another with charity and love, and learn through Christ to transcend the differences. If not us, then who?

Preaching on:
Mark 6:1–13

I had a great time on vacation in Italy two weeks ago. It was just Bonnie and me, no kids, so there was plenty of time to really unwind. I swam in the Mediterranean for the first time. I practiced my Italiano. I ate lots of pasta. I discovered the joys of ice-cold limoncello on a hot evening after eating too much pasta. And I saw a UFO—believe it or not, while eating an absolutely delicious pasta.

It was a seven-course wedding banquet, outside, right by the beach on the night of the full moon. Beautiful. When suddenly up over the horizon comes something in the sky like nothing I’ve ever seen before. There were some low fluffy clouds that night and this thing, all lit up, flew up through the clouds and was lighting the clouds up from inside. It was completely silent and looked like just a little dot in the sky. But it was very visible because it had an enormous, bright cone of white light coming out of the front of it and an identical cone of white light coming out the back of it. The two cones of light basically touching in the middle. And flying along next to it was a separate, very thin, bluish light. It looked like a flying snippet of blue laser light, just off to its left.

Through a mouthful of delicious pasta I shouted to the table, “UFO! UFO! Look at that! There’s a UFO! I’ve never seen anything like it!” Of the twelve of us at the table, only about half of us looked up. It came out of the clouds and moved across the open sky towards the sea. “What is that?” I asked everyone. “Has anyone ever seen anything like that before?” A couple people were intrigued and began discussing it at the table. Some were dismissive saying it was just a plane—it was not a plane. But still, even as it moved across the sky and out of view, about half the table didn’t even look up at all! Which shocked me. Even if you’re doubtful about UFOs, wouldn’t it have just been so easy to look up and see for yourself?

So, for the rest of the night, I was thinking about that reaction or lack of reaction. And I began to realize, I was naïve to feel shocked at people’s lack of interest. Much of my life can be characterized by being deeply interested and excited by things that other people think are just make believe. I’m interested—in whatever form it comes in—in the reality that lies at the very edges of our perception. And I have said to that reality—in whatever form it shows up—that when it shows up, I will pay attention, I will be led, I will believe.

If there’s ever been a word that I’ve struggled with in my life, it’s the word belief. It’s really like a contronym—a word that contains its own opposite. Like “fast” means both speedy and stuck; “original” means both the very first and the very latest; “forged” means both to make something and to fake something; “antique” means valuable and obsolete; “refrain” means stop and repeat. I could keep going like this because for a few years I became a little obsessive about noticing and keeping a list of contronyms. I had no idea why I was doing it. I just knew that I had to keep going and if I kept going with it, the reality at the edge of my perception would in time reveal itself to me. Eventually, I realized that I was obsessed with contronyms because I needed to work out my relationship with this one word that had so bedeviled me: belief.

Just like the word “cleave” can mean adhere closely to something or split something open, the word “belief” contains this same contradiction. Belief can mean both strict adherence to a particular worldview that is dismissive toward any new or unexpected possibility that is trying to reveal itself, and it can mean an opening up of a person beyond all preconceived notions to allow an authentic encounter with something truly new and unexpected. Belief can mean (at a linguistic level) both strict closemindedness and intentional openmindedness.  Linguistically speaking, everybody sitting at my banquet table was a believer. Some of us were “look up!” believers and some of us were “don’t look up” believers.

Jesus in his life and ministry makes it clear that God is not a worldview of limitation trying to keep out the new. God is rather the new possibility breaking wildly and silently into the world. There is so much potential in God and God’s potential is so easily overlooked.

An important component of Christian theology is that God is omnipotent—all powerful. I’ve more or less said this to you all before, but maybe not this directly: I don’t think that God is omnipotent. Or I think it’s slightly the wrong emphasis. Instead, I believe that God is “omnipotentiate”: God contains all possibility. Being all powerful means that God can snap her fingers and move any mountain. Containing all potential means that in God there is no unmovable mountain. But actually moving the mountain, if it is moved, will unfold through the possibilities and potentials at play in creation. In other words, God won’t or can’t override us, instead God is working through us.

Jesus makes this clear in our scripture reading this morning. The hometown crowd apparently see his great deeds and hear his wisdom, but neither the deeds nor the wisdom fit their limiting belief that Jesus is just some hometown schmuck. And the text says, “he could do no deed of power there.” The potential for power existed, but the power itself was in short supply because there was no openness to it among the people. It wasn’t that Jesus chose not to perform miracles there to punish them. He was trying his best, but God’s power was limited by our beliefs. All sorts of theological attempts have been made to rescue God’s omnipotence from this reality, but none of them really work. They cleave to God’s power where they should be cleaving open our understanding of the power of our own beliefs. We’re all believers. The question is “what kind?” Are we open to the possibilities? Or closed?

Jesus’ response to his hometown reception tells us a lot about the difference between the two kinds of belief—limited and open. Encountering stuckness at home, Jesus decides to send his disciples out into the world for an opening experience. He sends them out two by two on what seems like an unnecessarily risky journey. The disciples will be sent out with basically no supplies—no bread, no bag, no money, no extra clothes. They will have to rely entirely on the hospitality of other people. Now, if you really just wanted to ensure that they would be successful in spreading their message, you would certainly send them out with a care package of things that would help them along the way. Help them get through the tough times. But that is not what Jesus does because it's not necessarily about them being successful in that sort of worldly way. It's about the inner transformation that they will experience on this particular journey. Jesus understands a psychological reality—that leaving all our comforts and securities behind forces us into an attitude of openness. When we make reservations for a hotel a month in advance, we’re very discriminating. We’ll get the place that suits us best. When we’re rolling into town with no money and have no idea where we’ll be staying or how we’ll be eating, we’re suddenly open to anything.

As you all know by now, my last Sunday as your senior minister will be September 8. What comes after that for me is not yet entirely clear. And that’s scary. And I’m really looking forward to it. Because I know that God is calling me on to something new and the possibility will only reveal itself through me, through my belief, my openness, my willing to look up and to be led and to receive. While this is happening for me, something similar will be happening for all of you—the transition period between settled ministers. There may be pulpit supply, there may be a bridge minister, there may be an interim minister. Almost always in churches there’s a desire to rush through the transition zone and get back to what is known and what can be relied upon. That of course is only natural. And there are real concerns, of course. What if people disengage, stop coming, stop giving? What if we can’t sustain this program or that initiative? We want to continue to give our very best. But every once in a while, the very best we can give is an openness to possibilities. My prayer for you all is that there is some appetite to “look up” in the coming season of transition, that there is some room made for dreaming and visioning. When we open ourselves up to the God’s potential, that’s when God enters in. When we very well-meaningly try to rush past possibility to get back to security, we may sometimes close a door that God was trying to enter in through in a new and unexpected way.