Peace Will Not Fail
Like many good cradle Methodists, I grew up attending a United Methodist summer camp. Skye Farm Camp and Retreat Center in Warrensburg, New York, not far from Lake George. It was the same camp my dad grew up going to, the place my parents worked together as counselors, and where they volunteered as camp directors—even while juggling two small children. They stopped directing once my sister came along, which is fair. I spent a week at Skye Farm each Summer, from the time I started walking to the summer before I started high school. It was a special place for me, and I carry many of the memories and relationships from Skye Farm that shaped my faith and sense of call—common meals shared in the big old dining hall, always served family-style; sleeping out in the lean-to right by the lake; morning worship at the outdoor chapel; the Wednesday night dance party. I remember the challenge of stepping into the wilderness each year for just a week at a time and needing to jump right into being part of a community. There was no choice in it, no option to keep to yourself or do your own thing. You worshiped together, ate together, did activities together, shared bunk beds in small cabins that didn’t even have electric lights in them when I was there—things have changed some since I was a kid. Being dropped off in the wilderness on a Sunday afternoon meant that by the following Saturday you’d have formed a new community, most of whom you’d probably never see again—unless they happened to be your sibling or a member of your church.
We often give the term “wilderness” a less-than-desirable meaning. Wilderness is a place to be feared, it’s a place where you get lost. Wilderness is a place of exile, a place of isolation. When Sarah decides she can no longer stand to keep Hagar around, she casts her and her son into the wilderness. When the Israelites are led out of captivity, they are led into the wilderness—not directly into a place of safety and comfort. Wilderness, as we tend to use the word, is not something to be desired. It’s a place to be endured. It’s a place many of us and many in our world are intimately familiar with. The wilderness is a place on the margins. It’s not the center of culture or power or civilization. It’s a state of being inhabited by migrants in a new and unfamiliar place. It’s a place of exile for queer and trans folks who are forced to flee before the bread rises. It’s a place of liminality for the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated, for those struggling with addiction and mental health challenges; for bodies and brains that don’t work with the ways the world is designed. It’s easy to get swept away in the tumult of the wilderness, to be overwhelmed by need and loss and the fear of isolation. But it’s important to remember that it is in the midst of the wilderness that God encounters their people. It’s in the wilderness, not in the presence of Abraham, that Hagar meets a divine messenger. It’s in the wilderness that the Israelites forge a more direct connection to God through the mishkan, the portable place of worship built from materials donated by those who had nothing.
For some, the wilderness is a transitional space. It is the barren road that hosts the exodus from slavery to a new way of being. It is a place to be endured, to be survived on the way to something else, something normative. For others, though, liberation is found in the wilderness. Because in the wilderness we find fellow travellers, fellow exiles. We might even encounter the spirit that chased Jesus into the wilderness right after his baptism. With time in the wilderness comes an opportunity to create. Not the kind of wilderness creation that brings bulldozers, parking lots, and pipelines. But the creation of community. Womanist theologian Delores Williams describes the wilderness setting not as a barren place, but as one that is pregnant with possibility. After all, the wilderness is, at times, a next step on the path to liberation. For Hagar, the wilderness became not a death sentence, but a refuge from a system of violence. She was able to find safety for herself and her son, free from the abuse and ownership she had endured. Likewise, the Israelites’ escape from captivity led them into the wilderness, and though they suffered at first, they would come to embody a community shaped by radical generosity and devotion to one another. Community formed in the wilderness can be a means of liberation. New ways of being shaped, by experiences of exile and compassion for others. In the wilderness, there is often no choice but to be transformed, to live differently, to live authentically. In a place by which we’re supposed to be frightened—beacuse it’s too disorderly, too dirty, doesn’t fit our standards, has too many plants and wild animals—God calls us through prophets not to be afraid, but to be amazed by what is possible.
There’s a colon in the third verse of this gospel passage, in the NRSVUE, at least. Other versions use quotation marks to distinguish one part of the verse from another. Either way, this verse is typically read as “this is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said ‘the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight.” This prophetic call that echoes through the generations insists that we listen to those in the wilderness, even and especially when we are not there ourselves. It directs us to pay attention to the exiles and the wanderers, those we forget to listen to. But there’s another way to read this, which is the way it is written in the book of Isaiah: move the colon. Rather than saying that there is a “voice crying out in the wilderness ‘prepare the way of the Lord,’” this verse could, and maybe should, say “the voice of one crying out: ‘in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.’” It’s a subtle difference, but I think it is one of vital importance. It does not excuse us from our call to listen to those in the wilderness, but it does call us to go there ourselves. The preparation of the way of the Lord, the making of paths straight (though straightness is not the end all be all of liberation), and the coming of the kingdom of heaven are not tasks and prophecies centering the pre-existing structures of power and the high places of privilege. These are words spoken to the least of these, words that those with privilege were lucky enough to overhear.
But when those with privilege heed the call to the wilderness, how do we go? Do we go like the Pharisees and Sadducees, assured of our righteousness because of our lineage or the ways in which we believe? Do we go feeling self-righteous, patting ourselves on the back for taking the time to step outside and get close to those already in the wilderness? When we heed the call to the wilderness, we must go earnestly, seeking to listen and to become the community of Christ made real. We must go, not only to be baptized and to undergo a ritualistic change, but to undergo a circumcision of the heart, to be radically transformed as people of the wilderness. We must go seeking to bear the fruits of our repentance, showing signs of our verbal commitment to be a part of the community, to “resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.” This is a call to leave behind the old ways of doing things, the ways that perpetuate harm and that prevent justice, and therefore peace, from flourishing. This is a call to abandon the old ways of retribution, of vengeance and violence, and embrace the peace that comes when all are fed, when all have purpose, and when all belong in the Good Community. This is the vision of the prophet Isaiah, the vision of the Good Community not only free from violence, but free from hunger, as Creation grazes together.
The fruit of this wilderness call is this Good Community. The fruit is peace prevailing, new ways of being in the world. The fruit is the humility to be led by the young, by a little child. As we move through this Advent season, as we seek to prepare for the coming of the Christchild and the kingdom, we have already been called to the edge. We have been called to look out with eyes wide open at the world as it is and the world as it can be. Now we are called to step out into the wilderness, into the margins. Not to save, but to be saved. Peace will not fail—not in the wilderness and not in the kingdom. Peace will prevail—through the fruit borne out of repentance, reconciliation, and humility. This is the call of Advent. Let us step out together. Amen.
Hope Will Not Fail
Welcome to Advent! It feels like I’ve been teasing it for a few weeks now—not that it should really be a surprise when Advent comes. It tends to happen at the same time each year. We generally think of Advent as a time of preparation, the season to decorate and clean, to shop and to prepare for guests. We may even think about it as the season in which we prepare for the season of Christmas, the time when we remember that God is present in the world, and that we are not forgotten. While it is certainly true that Advent is a time of preparation, we too-often think of it simply as a path to something else, as a transitional time. That’s if we’re lucky. For many, Advent is simply pre-Christmas, an extension of the Christmas season that we forget, only begins on December 25. I’m not going to pretend that Anna and I didn’t spend part of this week helping my parents set up their Christmas tree or bring bins full of decorations down from their attic. That’s part of preparation. But it’s easy to forget, amid all the shopping malls and secular Christmas-themed events, that Advent is its own thing—a distinct season with a particular call placed on our lives and in the midst of our community. This distinction, the thing that makes Advent special, makes it powerful, and that demands our attention and consideration, is that it is all about the apocalypse.
When I say the word apocalypse, I don’t want us to think about zombies (at least not the literal kind), and I especially don’t want us to think about the rapture. I know that may be difficult, since ideas about the rapture continue to permeate our society. And it may be especially difficult since our gospel text this morning includes a couple of the few supporting verses for rapture theology. But since the rapture is not a part of United Methodist doctrine, and is a modern invention that does far more harm than good, we’re not really going to justify it with a response today. Maybe that can be a study for another time. Even without the rapture, though, this idea that “one will be taken, and one will be left” still has apocalyptic significance. This is because the word apocalypse doesn’t refer strictly to our science fiction understanding of the end of the world, or the end of society. Literally, it means an unveiling or an uncovering. It’s about envisioning something, either by having the divine reveal something or by revealing something in community. It’s why the final book of the Bible is interchangeably referred to as Revelation and The Apocalypse of John of Patmos. Apocalypse is a vision, it’s an awareness, it’s seeing what is happening in the present time and looking beyond at what’s coming down the line. I took two classes in seminary on the book of Revelation and apocalypse in the Christian and Jewish traditions (because I just couldn’t get enough). The professor in one of these classes referred to apocalypse as standing on the edge and looking out at what might be. Advent is this edge, and this text invites us to look out.
When reading texts, one of the things I like to do is look at what the text isn’t saying. We see in this gospel passage that Jesus is referring back to the story of Noah and the flood, when most of the world is said to have ignored the warnings of Noah and just gone about their lives. The people who ignored Noah are ridiculed, seen as imprudent and as having rejected God by rejecting God’s prophet. In using this story as an illustration, Jesus is adding emphasis to his message of paying attention, of staying awake to the moment. That’s something that the text says, or at least that it implies. When Jesus gets to the part of the story about one being taken and one being left behind, after referring to himself in the third person for the second time, the details quickly run dry. We don’t know how one will be taken, who’s doing the taking, whether being taken is actually a good thing, or if either of the two workers saw it coming. We don’t know anything, really. We could assume based on the Noah reference that those taken are the safe ones, the worthy ones. But this passage also comes just a chapter before Matthew has Jesus talk about separating the sheep from the goats and the righteous from the unrighteous, so this could just be more sorting—and the categories are unclear. Are those who are taken the ones on the ark? Are they the ones swept away by the flood? We don’t know. We also don’t know whether those left behind noticed when the others were taken. There’s no indication that they did, no sign that they were alarmed or concerned. Jesus doesn’t tell us that they sent out search parties or that they alerted anyone. Jesus doesn’t even tell us if they glanced over and raised an eyebrow.
We don’t know if those taken were dragged off kicking and screaming. We don’t know if the ones taking them were in plain clothes or uniforms. We don’t know if their papers were checked, if their families were notified, or if they were sent to their country of origin or a place they had never been. All we know is that one day they were in the field or working in the food processing plant, and suddenly they were gone. Did the others know? Did they care? Did they keep their heads down for fear that they would be taken, too? Perhaps they were fired, put out of work for not grinding enough meal. Perhaps they were found to be queer in the wrong place, and sent off for conversion therapy. Perhaps they were taken to the hospital, or to prison. We know as much as their partner in the field or at the mill. We know as much as their neighbors, who may or may have noticed their absence. Christ’s command in this moment to stay awake is a call to apocalypse, a plea to see one another, to know one another, and to care for one another. It’s a call to an apocalypse of the community, to become aware of the struggles and needs of those who live and work right next door. It’s a reminder that the New Heaven and the New Earth don’t come to be with spears and swords and great armies commanded by the Son of Man, but through connection, through community, and through resistance to structures that seek to tear communities apart.
Our theme for throughout Advent comes from a song by David Bjorlin called “Hope Will Not Fail.” It has four verses that take us through each week of Advent: Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. I’ll spare you my singing voice, but the first verse goes “Hope will not fail/No, hope will not fail/Though anguish and apathy seem to prevail/No, hope will not fail/Hope, hope will prevail.” Even in the face of anguish and apathy, even when we occupy ourselves with our own lives, our own busyness, our own preoccupations. Even so, hope will not fail. If we wake to the moment. If we unveil the world as it is now and see the plight and the beauty in our neighbors throughout all of Creation. If we step towards the edge and dare to behold the world that might be. Hope will prevail, when we overcome our apathy, when we come to know our neighbors, to concern ourselves with their wellbeing, to see when they’re not here. We begin this Advent, as we have each year before, with Hope. Hope that does not place us in a dream land where we can ignore all the problems of the world. Hope that does not allow us to keep to our own lives, to disconnect ourselves from the concerns of others, and get lost in the constant flood of everything Christmas. Hope born not out of violence or clamouring for power, but to unwed, unsettled, unlikely parents, and laid in a manger. The hope that is God entering the world in the form of the tired, the sick, the marginalized, the imprisoned, the refugee, the unhoused, and the overworked. The hope that arises when we awaken ourselves to the moment, to one another, and to the Christchild, and the promise that all things are being made new. This is the hope that will not fail. This, siblings in Christ, is the hope that will prevail. Amen.
Reign of Christ
It’s always weird to me when we have these special Sundays in the liturgical calendar, like Reign of Christ Sunday, and the narrative skips way ahead. I think it kinda spoils the mood for the whole season to jump to the part of the gospels when Jesus is actively suffering and dying. Isn’t this week Thanksgiving? Aren’t we getting ready for Christmas? Would it be too much to ask to get a family-friendly scripture about giving thanks or the importance of seeing your parents around the holidays? Rather than a story of Jesus going to a feast or a party, we’re reminded of his death, just as we’re starting to prepare for his birth. As much of a bummer as this can be, I want us to take the time to really encounter this story, and to hear it apart from the rest of the passion story—especially since I know that not all of us attend the Good Friday services when we would usually hear this part of the story. When I was a ministry intern at the Saratoga Springs United Methodist Church, the Christian Education Director there was never shy about the fact that she skipped Good Friday each year because she “doesn’t do death.” I suspect she’s not alone in feeling that way, though I think you miss some important context if you just go right from Palm Sunday to Easter.
Besides taking the opportunity to read the story of the crucifixion on a Sunday rather than a Friday, I also want to take a moment on this Reign of Christ Sunday to make the claim that trying to remove any conversation of politics from the gospel, doesn’t leave you with very much gospel. The statement that Christ is Lord is a political position. The titles we gladly use for him such as King of Kings, Prince of Peace, and Lord of Lords are all political titles. In fact, the Greek word that is translated as “lord” in the New Testament, is kyrios, which can refer to heads of households, minor nobles, and also the emperor of Rome, who was said to be the highest of lords, the greatest kyrios. If we take the position that Jesus is Lord of Lords, then we are saying that no one else is, and that Jesus is above the other powers and principalities of our world, as they exist. A kingdom is a political structure, and a reign is a political administration. The gospel message, and this is made abundantly clear throughout the season of Advent, is about upending the ways in which power is currently exercised and distributed. Any talk of a New Heaven and a New Earth, any rhetoric about filling the hungry and sending the rich away empty, any apocalyptic vision of what the Kingdom will look like one day—those are all political conversations.
So, while we are not called to uphold partisan power structures, we are called to engage in conversations about how power is structured. We’re called to examine critically and speak openly about who holds power, how power is being exercised in our communities and our country, and whether our power structures reflect the vision that God has for the Kingdom. And that’s the key to having conversations about politics as people of faith: keeping those Kingdom dreams at the forefront of our minds.
The Kingdom dream that’s presented to us in this gospel passage might seem more like a nightmare. It might seem a little doom and gloom, but I promise that there’s hope in there, too. That hope lies in a couple of places in which the gospel writer offers glimpses into what the Kingdom reality might look like. The first of these comes when the guard mockingly says to Jesus “if you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” For many of us, this might sound kind of reasonable. At this point in his life, Jesus has healed the sick, multiplied food, cast out demons, and even brought a man back from the dead. Would it really be so unreasonable to think that he could get himself out of this bind? For the guard, it only seemed right that anyone, but especially a person in a position of power, would only act in their own self-interest. Customary power, here, would be exercised through self-preservation. Power would be demonstrated by the ability to save oneself, to protect one’s own body. Because power, in Jesus’ day and in ours, means having control over the bodies of others. Rather than practice self-preservation, Jesus continues to practice solidarity, being incarcerated with those called criminals, and being executed alongside those found guilty of capital offenses.
Jesus’ relationship with his fellow victims of the death penalty tells us more about the Reign of Christ than just that it rejects self-preservation in favor of radical solidarity, though. It demonstrates that the Reign of Christ is about connection and community, especially in the darkest of times. The theologian Karl Barth used to preach regularly in a prison in Basel, Switzerland. One Good Friday, he was preaching from this text and described the three men crucified together at the first Christian community. The two other men “were certainly no believing converts, no saints,” Barth said. But even so, they were bound to Christ out of solidarity, out of a shared experience of incarceration, suffering, and execution. The Good Community, the vision that God has for us, is just that—a community. It’s not about power over, it’s not about the control of any body other than our own. It’s about connection. It’s about feeling for one another, allowing ourselves to be impacted by the suffering and the wholeness of others. In recognizing this connection and allowing it to impact us, the Kingdom where Christ is Lord becomes a place where none hunger, where all are clothed, and no one goes without shelter. It is a place where the Image of God present in Creation is what binds us together—not creed or dogma. That is where Christ leads us, if we are willing to follow.
All too often, this is not the model of leadership we see and experience in our communities. We hear Jeremiah’s cries of “woe” to the shepherds who divide their flocks, and it’s not difficult to see where those shepherds still reign today. There are those who would actively split up the flock, who thrive on division, on polarization, on deportation. Rhetoric of division, rejections of difference, overt quests for homogeneity in race, religion, sexual orientation, and political ideology split the flock and make it more difficult to seek out the reign of solidarity, and the Good Community that feels the joy and sorrow of others. There are those in power, those with authority, who actively seek to split up communities. But there are also those who passively allow the flock to wander, who have not attended to the flock. It becomes a shared responsibility to bring the flock together, to embrace connection and reject division, isolation, and individualism. The Kingdom of God where Christ is Lord is a community. It is a place of humility and solidarity, that lives out the South African concept of Ubuntu—I am because you are. A community that recognizes our common needs, and our common dreams. This is our call, to seek out the Good Community, to build a space in which Christ’s reign might become apparent, and where we can live out our call to be Christ’s people—citizens of no Kingdom but God’s.
This is the message of Advent, after all. It is a message of death—of the passing away of what once was. It is a message of suffering—of feeling the pain, the fear, the despair of others. It is a message of hope—an overturning of the way things are now, and the building of something new in their place. May this be the message that guides us through this season. May we seek out the Good Community together. May we hold one another accountable in love. May we live as Christ’s people above all else, in all that we do. Let our waiting commence. Amen.
Plant the Garden
Just a warning before I begin, today’s sermon does contain spoilers for the novel Candide, but since Candide was written over 260 years ago, I can’t be blamed if you haven’t read it yet. Candide was written by Voltaire in the mid-eighteenth century as a piece of satire and a direct response to the philosophy of optimism. The story follows Candide, a young man from Germany who doesn’t have much of a personality and who is described as being quite simple. He is accompanied through the story by his mentor and tutor, Pangloss, who is the main advocate for this philosophy of optimism. It is Pangloss who repeats throughout the novel that everything that happens is for the best, and that they live in the best of all possible worlds. This might seem reasonable at first, as when we first meet Candide and Pangloss they are living in a castle and leading very sheltered lives. Neither of them wants for anything, they have food and warmth and entertainment. But as the characters move through the plot, these ideas that everything that happens is for the best and that we live in the best of all possible worlds sound more and more ridiculous.
Pretty quickly, Candide loses his home and is captured and forced into military service. After fighting in a significant battle, he escapes the military and travels to the Netherlands where he finds his old tutor again. He learns that the castle he had lived in had been destroyed and many of the people he had known were dead—we later find out that some survived, only to wind up in other situations that were also pretty horrible. Candide forms a ragtag group of travellers, and they make their way down towards Portugal and, eventually, over to the Americas. All the while, they encounter earthquakes, shipwrecks, disease, slavery, poverty, and a slew of other issues. All the while, even as their friends and companions die or meet their ruins in other ways, Pangloss maintains his insistence that everything that happens is for the best and that we live in the best of all possible worlds. I won’t bore you all with every little detail, but the story ends with Candide and his companions purchasing a farm for themselves and planting a garden, in order to fend off the evils of boredom, vice, and poverty. As they set about their work, Pangloss maintains that everything did, in fact, work out for the best, and that this was the best of all possible worlds. A more skeptical Candide sort of brushes him off and says, “sure, Pangloss. But now we must cultivate our garden.”
Odds are, no one is here for a lesson on eighteenth-century French literature. To be fair, I’m not either, and that’s not really my specialty. But ever since I first read Candide years ago, I have been struck by this last line: “we must cultivate our garden.” I especially appreciated how it stood in contrast to the idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and that everything that happens to us or around us eventually works out in our favor, just by happenstance. We live in a time, and have long lived in a time, in which nation rises up against nation. Earthquakes, illness, and famines abound. There is no shortage of pain and suffering, of despair, of loneliness. It doesn’t bring hope to my spirit if all the suffering in the world is just collateral damage in the midst of some larger scheme that would leave the world better just for the privileged survivors. Our suffering is not a necessity or a test. It is a reality to which we must respond.
This response to suffering and to tragedy is what I read in this part of the prophecy from Isaiah. Sure, this is an aspiration, a vision of the kingdom of God as it may look and function. But it is also a model of resilient community that is fundamentally different from what exists today. Last week we talked about what it means to rebuild, and what it means to build something new and radically different in the midst of destruction. This may as well be Isaiah’s pitch for what we can build in the place of the way that the world is now. And integral to this vision of a society in which babies don’t cry and people live for far too long, is the idea of planting. Sure, these could be metaphorical vineyards, an image that Jesus threw around a couple of times in describing his relationship to the disciples or in painting a picture of one who keeps trying, even when no fruit has been borne. But vineyards can also simply be vineyards, a place of organized growing that produces grapes—grapes that can be eaten or, perhaps more importantly, turned into wine. Vineyards provided nourishment, and still do. We’re not far, here, from the Finger Lakes, and it doesn’t take a local to know what goes on over there. Isaiah’s prophecy is a call to build a new community—and that new community cultivates a garden.
What I love about this stated need to cultivate our garden, both in Candide and in Isaiah, is that gardens don’t just happen. Gardens are intentional. I grew up around gardens, whether in the back yard of the parsonages I lived in or at the Smith Family farm over in Vermont. In seminary, I got my hands dirty helping out in our Theological Community Garden. It wasn’t until the seminary garden that I really understood all the planning that went into planting year after year. Different crops need different nutrients, prefer different amounts of sun, different levels of moisture. Rodents and white flies need to be thought of, and you also need to consider where the beans are going to grow and how the tomato plants will stay standing under the weight of their fruit. Timing is also important. You need to know when to harvest and when to plant, when to water and when to prune. There are few aspects of gardening that are passive. Most things don’t just happen, although potatoes and garlic both tend to be pretty low-maintenance in my experience. Cultivating gardens is a rejection of passivity, and an acknowledgement that, if we are to care for one another, build lasting communities, and truly transform the world, we need to take an active role in that change.
As we move closer to the season of Advent, the time of preparation for the arrival of the Christ-child once again, bear this apocalyptic message in your minds. The Christ who is coming will leave not a stone on stone. The song his mother sings praises the God of radical transformation, who fills the bellies of the poor and sends the rich away hungry. The season of Advent is not just a time of waiting passively for everything to work out for the best and for the best of all possible worlds to be realized. It is a time for us to remember our role in the story. It is a time for us to remember that we must cultivate our garden, so that all might be fed, so that the world might be transformed, and so that God’s kin-dom might be realized here on Earth.
Lost in the Details
During and after the second World War, there were two main schools of thought that emerged in Europe regarding how to rebuild the numerous cities that were being leveled. In some cities, such as Warsaw in Poland, city planners emerged from the destruction of the war bent on rebuilding the city, largely as it had been. They used paintings from the 1700s for reference, and reconstructed walls, churches, and castles as they would have existed prior to the war. Today, the “Old Town” portion of Warsaw, a city that has existed for hundreds of years, is really less than a century old. Elsewhere in Europe, especially in the United Kingdom, there were city planners who welcomed the opportunity to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch. The city of Coventry in particular jumped at the chance to completely redesign their medieval layout, in favor of one that would be better suited to twentieth-century commercial interests. Whatever buildings were destroyed by bombs in the war merely saved the time and money it would later cost to tear them down.
In either case, these rebuilding efforts were just that: rebuilding. Each method sought to return to something familiar and comfortable, even if the architectural style was somewhat different. The designs still reinforced inequality, refused to become more accessible, and remained focused on efficiency and meeting basic human needs, regardless of how that impacted the rest of Creation. The only real innovation that was made, and that is shared by each of these methods, is that cars were factored into the plans, pushing pedestrians to the sides and making communities less walkable and, therefore, more disconnected. Each was praised for its vision, its architectural ingenuity, the ways in which they furthered European progress and revitalization following the war. But when the opportunity had presented itself for these numerous European cities, and indeed nations around the world, to fundamentally re-order themselves, to reimagine what their cities, their nations, the world could look like and what purposes they could serve—by and large they chose to maintain their flawed economic systems, their disjointed relationship with Creation, and their social hierarchies. They chose not to build something new, but to rebuild what was, even when it had a new facade.
The prophet Haggai was writing at the end of the period of Jewish history known as the “exilic period.” This was the period of time in which the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah, or at least the inhabitants of the city of Jerusalem, were forcefully removed from the kingdom and made to live in Babylon. It was during this period that prophets such as Jeremiah and Ezekiel addressed the Judeans. It was also in this period that the Temple of Solomon was destroyed in Jerusalem. For decades, Judeans were made to live in a place not of their choosing, cut off from their customs, from their people, and from the dwelling place of God. This period of exile is what prompted the prophet Jeremiah to advise the Judeans to make the best of their circumstances, to plant gardens and live their lives. It’s what prompted the writing of Psalms about sitting down and weeping by the rivers of Babylon. It was a period of despair, a time that caused the Judeans to question how they had ended up in such a situation. It was enough to make them examine how they must have angered God, for God to leave them to exile and ruin.
Haggai’s voice chimes in as the Judeans are returning to Jerusalem. After Babylon fell to Persia, the Judeans were allowed to return from their exile, though when they returned, they still had to contend with a city—and especially the Temple—laid to waste. It was a time of destruction, of despair, of hopelessness. There were those still alive who could remember the house of the Lord “in its former glory.” They could remember times of stability, of comfort, of peace. Times when wages were better suited to meeting needs, when benefits made retirement a guarantee, when home prices were more reasonable. They returned to their home, and the grief must have been overwhelming. Everything they had once known was gone. And what’s more, many of the wealthier Judeans had not returned with them, as there was more money to be made in exile than at home. So who would fund the restoration? How could the poor rebuild the Temple, the city, and the kingdom? There were no corporations or billionaires who could pitch in towards this construction project. Even so, the memory remains of the former glory, and the question remains: how do we get back to that?
Times of destruction, though, are also times of building. In the sorrow of grieving what was, there is an opportunity to build again—and to build something new. Oftentimes in situations such as these, we mortals are limited by what we know, or what we have known. We might fall into the same inclination as the Sadducees, whose argument against the resurrection is that it can’t be reconciled with the law—when the law is pushed to its logical extreme. They place the mystery of resurrection in the context of what they know, leaning on what’s familiar, what’s safe. Surely this Jesus, with his apocalyptic resurrection preaching, can explain how marriage laws might fit into this version of reality. That should be a simple enough question, and an important logistical concern for the son of man. Maybe there are no dumb questions, but sometimes—oftentimes—we ask the wrong questions. I had a seminary professor who was a psychologist, who would get quite frustrated at times when we would ask questions that weren’t going to get us the answers we needed. Dr. Pressley would be very disappointed with the Sadducees, I think.
Jesus turns this line of questioning on its head in just one sentence. “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage.” Bad news for those of us who might be planning weddings at the moment. For Jesus, the Sadducees are asking the wrong questions. They are working within the framework, the institutions, the systems, the boundaries of the society they know. They carry this idea that what is now is what will be carried through the resurrection, as though resurrection is simply a matter of replacing what was. But resurrection inherently follows destruction, and times of destruction are times of building. Not all building is resurrection, though. Some building is just resuscitation or reanimation. There is no new life, no blazing phoenix spirit. Just the same oppressive institutions looking the same as they always have—or with a fresh coat of paint.
We live in a time of destruction. The bombs continue to fall in Ukraine. The ceasefire in Gaza was unsurprisingly brief. SNAP benefits continue to go unpaid as the billionaires—and soon-to-be trillionaires—certainly do not. Healthcare funding is being cut to many of the most vulnerable in our communities. Drought, hunger, illness, war, climate disasters, loneliness, inflation, despotism. We live in a time of destruction. That means we live in a time of building. That means that we have the opportunity to rebuild and to build differently. We live in a time of destruction. That means we have the opportunity to break free from the limitations of what we have known—the systems of marginalization and exploitation, the physical ways of building that are inaccessible and cause us to disengage from community, the ideologies of patriarchy and queerphobia and misogyny and ableism and white supremacy and Christian nationalism and dominion over Creation. We have the chance, the opportunity, the obligation to dream—and to live into a community that looks and loves differently. We live in a time of destruction. That means we live in a time of building, a time of co-laboring with God.
So take courage. Take courage, O Zerubbabel, take courage, O Joshua. Take courage, all you people of the land. Work, for God is with us, and God has plenty of work for us to do. That work begins with envisioning what can be. It begins with getting to know your neighbors, getting to know—really know—your fellow co-laborers beside you. So take courage, because it takes courage to have hope. As a community of faith, we are called to be a place of building amid times of destruction. Not to pray for destruction, to speed things along, or to trigger the end times. But to recognize that we live in a time of destruction, and to see that something comes after it all. This is the resurrection hope to which we are called. May we not be ensnared by what is familiar, by what serves our own interests, and by the urge to hedge our bets. May we build a household that reflects God’s abounding grace, just economics, and radical inversion of the hierarchies we have come to know. May we be bold in seeking justice, practicing mercy, and humbly walking with God into the resurrection. Amen.
How We Remember
One of our favorite idols in this country is innovation. We like new things, even when most of us would probably say that change is scary and we like things the way they are—at least on the personal level. While individuals might try and keep their own habits as consistent as possible, there is still this cultural drive to try the next big thing. It’s that good old model of American progress that has us chasing the most efficient, the cheapest, the most productive way of doing whatever it is that we do. Even in the church, efficiency and ingenuity are driving factors that leave us looking for the next big thing that will spark a revival. I was at a gathering for clergy from around the Upper New York Conference this past Thursday, at which a pastor insisted that our churches would be doing much better if we pastors more readily embraced things like social media and podcasting. Ah yes, because I’m sure that the people would just come flocking if they could only hear every thought that pops into my head, right from their phones each week.
In our common quest for the future, for efficiency and productivity, looking backwards can seem more like a burden than a worthwhile responsibility. It’s a distraction, time that could be better spent looking forward in anticipation of the next thing that will drive our lives, our careers, our society into the next stage of development. We mourn, we move on. Lingering on death, on misfortune, on loss can prolong any pain that went along with those experiences. Why would we want to re-live suffering? Why would we want to remember? It doesn’t make any sense to stop, to look behind us, and to allow our rhythms to be disrupted. Anytime we pause, we’re doing something that goes against our instincts. Nevertheless, each year we set aside time to stop, to look around at where we are, and to look backwards at where we’ve come from.
If you spend any time at all around United Methodist Archives and History folks, you’re bound to hear the phrase “ministry of memory” thrown around once in a while. It’s a tagline, a catchy piece of marketing, a compact little phrase that tells you exactly what the Commission on Archives and History does…without actually telling you anything about what we do. I suppose that’s what makes it good marketing. When we talk about memory, though, we’re not talking about nostalgia, or dwelling on the glory days. We’re not just talking about recalling the numbers of old records about attendance and finance. The ministry of memory is the act of keeping in front of us the people, places, and events that have made us who we are. It’s not about shame, though it is often about the need for repentance. It’s not about glorification or idolatry, though there is much to celebrate. It’s not about longing for a return to a mythologized past, though there are things that we can reclaim. It is about knowing where we come from, knowing who we come from, and allowing that knowledge to shape how we move through the world.
In just a few moments, we’re going to sing one of my favorite hymns: “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Lift Every Voice and Sing was written in celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday in 1900, and quickly grew in popularity. In Black churches and community spaces in particular, it was a means of recognizing shared identity and common struggle. It’s a hymn that looks backwards, that remembers violence endured, that seeks to recognize the places in which God was at work along the way. But it’s also a hymn that looks to the present and even the future, that calls for us to look towards the rising sun, towards the hope of a new day, standing presently where the white gleam of that bright star is cast. As communities, it’s important to remember where we have come from, who we have come from, and what struggles we have endured to get to where we are now. It’s why we gather, each year, to pause and say the names of those we have lost. But it’s also important for us to pair our remembrances with hope for the present and the promise of tomorrow. We don’t live in our remembrances—we are grounded and united by them.
Each time we gather at the table together, we practice our common memory together. Each time, we share the same old story—nothing new. Anyone who was at Bike Trip this year can tell you that this storytelling part of Communion, the part when we recall the events of the Last Supper, is what’s known as the anamnesis. Now you all know one more Greek word than you did when you woke up this morning. Anamnesis, in its simplest sense, is about remembering. In the context of Communion, though, it becomes so much more. It’s not just a memory, a recollection of the events that led up to the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus. It is the bringing forward of all those events into the present time. It’s a statement, a practice that calls the events of the past into the present time. The barriers that we put up between now and then come crashing down. The violence of imperial occupation, the voices of the hungry and the oppressed crying out, the groans of Creation longing to be set free—those are no longer confined to the past. But neither is the grace of God, which was offered to the disciples in the form of bread and cup.
When we gather at the table, when we bring these memories to the present, we bring with them the memories of all those who have said these words before us. All our saints, all our ancestors of faith, become present at this table with us, say these words and sing these hymns with us. We remember—we re-member—the body of Christ. As in, we put it back together. In this act, and in the act of remembering the saints that are a part of who we are, we embody the spirits of those who have come before us. We embody these spirits, too, when we live into the shared purpose to which we are called—the purpose which unites us with saints whether we share biology or not. Anamnesis must become more than just words we say or tired old liturgy—it must be lived out. We must live as those who recall the dark past of struggle. We must live as those who have known sorrow and loss. We must live as those who not only remember, but refuse to forget the suffering, death, and resurrection of the one whose call has brought us together. In the planting and tending of gardens; in our refusal to conform to society; in our welcoming of strangers; in our senses of humor; and in our cries for justice. This is our anamnesis, our recollection—our refusal to forget what has been, our refusal to lose hope in what might be.
So come, let us remember. Even though it doesn’t seem to make sense. Even when our urge is to simply move on with our lives and look to the future. Let us remember in word and thought, and let us remember in the ways we live and move. May we honor the saints of our lives and our communities, not in a way that puts them beyond reproach or polishes them to perfection, but that acknowledges who they were, and are, to us. In rising from the grave, Christ showed us that death does not have the final say. In setting the table to dine with his friends, Christ called us to remember, and to refuse to forget that which has come before. So come, let us remember, let us refuse to forget, the saints who have blessed our lives. Let us remember, let us refuse to forget, the common struggles and common purpose that binds us to one another through the ages. Let us remember, let us refuse to forget, the resurrection call that carries us through the present and into the future. In our living, in our remembering, and in our hope for the future, may we bear that resurrection promise in the company of all the saints. Amen.
Save All You Can
John Wesley: The Use of Money
This may be a big ask, but I’d like us to remember back to the first week of October. I introduced the closest thing I have done to a sermon series: three sermons on John Wesley’s sermon on “The Use of Money.” In this sermon, Wesley talks about how we, as Christians, should relate to money. He presents us with three guiding principles for us to keep in our pockets and consult when we think about money. Let’s see if you all remember what they are. The first is…gain all you can. The second is…save all you can. That should be easy, it’s right there in your bulletin today. And the last one is give all you can. But you’ll have to wait for next week for that one. The idea that we ought to save all we can seems like it should be pretty straight-forward. It seems, like the idea of gaining all we can, to be a part of conventional wisdom. Some here might remember the Great Depression, or might have grown up hearing stories from parents, grandparents, or even great grandparents about what that was like. Subsequent generations have seen their own share of economic downturn, and so the values of frugality and stretching resources have been passed down as part of this generational trauma.
It might be too late, but before anyone thinks “waste not, want not,” I want us to banish that from our heads for at least the remainder of this sermon. As we think of saving all we can, and how Wesley puts forward this idea, it’s important for us to think about context. Wesley worked extensively and even lived with the poor. He had a lot to say about how poor people should live, but even more to say about how the affluent should live in relation to the poor. This whole sermon, but especially this part about saving, is very explicitly directed at the wealthy—or at least the comfortable. We know this for a couple of reasons. First, this sermon wasn’t meant to be preached. Wesley was not a manuscript preacher, unless he was preaching in Latin, and thought that the standard of preaching should be extemporaneous. Since this sermon was meant to be read, and literacy rates were significantly lower than they are today, the primary audience would have been people who at least knew how to read. Since Wesley would have been well-aware of literacy rates among his followers, Wesley would have known to write for the audience that would be consuming his sermons.
The other way that we know that this is directed at the wealthy, or the comfortable, is by looking at the kinds of things Wesley tells the audience not to waste their money on. I don’t think that the coal miners and the dock workers and the seamstresses would have needed Wesley’s voice urging them not to spend their money on gold jewelry, fine clothing, and gourmet cuisine. I do think that the folks who had the money to spend on these things, and who generally wouldn’t think twice about doing so, would be exactly the kind of people Wesley would want to speak to. After all, it’s not the working class and the poor who need to be told to “despise delicacy and variety, and be content with what plain nature requires.” It’s hard to despise something that isn’t even a part of your day-to-day living, or to be tempted by something that is so completely out of the realm of possibility. Finally, Wesley also talks about long-term savings and passing wealth down to the next generation, things that only his more affluent audience would have been worried about. In case you’re wondering, Wesley says that it’s ok to put aside money for the next generation, as long as you think the next generation won’t waste it. So as you think about inheritance, or institutional endowments, or estate planning, know that Wesley was thinking about that, too, and would have supported those things as long as those involved stuck to his principles.
So, as Wesley is admonishing his readers not to fall into the trap of trying to impress others by showing off our wealth through flashy dress and other ostentatiousness, let’s remember who he’s talking to: those with money to spend not just on necessities, but also on luxuries.
This section of the sermon, the ethic of saving all we can, is the first part of Wesley’s argument about what we should do with our money once we’ve gained all we can. “Save all you can” is, primarily, about what we should not do with our money—what we should do comes next week. So, what shouldn’t we do with our money? I’ve already mentioned that Wesley wouldn’t have us seek out the designer brands and the finest foods, and that partly comes from his very strict, pietistic, almost puritanical upbringing. But Wesley isn’t concerned with total self- deprivation to the point of us not caring for ourselves. He was very concerned with healthy living, and starving ourselves or going without adequate clothing would not be something that Wesley would advocate for. If we think back to the week we talked about gaining all we can, we might remember that the general guiding principles are to gain all we can without harming our own bodies, minds, and spirits, and without harming our neighbors’ bodies, minds, and spirits. This same guidance can be applied to our saving, as well.
What we buy is a moral decision. The products we engage with, the corporations we support, and the ways in which those corporations use our money all ought to be considered in what we do with what we have gained. For those who have the economic freedom to choose where they shop, consider the consequences of supporting particular industries. Fast fashion, single-use products, gambling. I know JB Pritzker went to Vegas and won $1.4 million, but odds are, you won’t. What politicians are supported by the businesses we patronize? What governments are? Are we supporting union-busting, monopolizing, tax loophole-exploiting, environment-destroying, poverty-producing businesses? Is it necessary to? For those who have the choice, the ability to divest, the ability to shop elsewhere or nowhere at all, we are called to save all we can. And that means spending less, and spending more intentionally. It’s not about clipping coupons and grocery store rewards to save more than we spend, although I know how exciting it is when we’re able to do that. It is about being aware of how our spending impacts our own bodies, minds, and spirits, as well as the bodies, minds, and spirits of our neighbors.
Wesley’s idea of saving all we can is not just a personal finance aspiration or sound advice for making our dollars have the most impact. It’s certainly not an endorsement of lower wages, cutting corners, or seeking to rid ourselves of our financial obligations to one another. It’s about rejecting the culture that would have us constantly buy the newest piece of technology, flashiest clothes, and bigger and better everything year after year. Does that mean you can’t go on vacation or have a nice dinner to celebrate a birthday or an anniversary? Absolutely not! But the Kingdom economics of Wesley call us to spend mindfully and with reservation—not out of scarcity or an obligation to hoard what we have and keep it to ourselves, but so that we might do the least harm to ourselves and our neighbors, and so that we might not lose sight of what really matters. The economics of the Kingdom would have us see that each of us, and indeed all of Creation, gets what we need before any of us go back for seconds. May we live out this Kingdom economic in our own lives and in the lives of the community, ensuring that the way we spend does not harm ourselves or our neighbors. May we save all that we can, not out of scarcity, not out of self-deprivation, not out of greed or a need to hoard what we have. But so that we might do the most good and the least harm. May it be so. Amen.
Earn All You Can
John Wesley: The Use of Money
It’s no secret that October is the month that we talk about money. All throughout this month, we will be talking about stewardship and pledging and trying to make sure we can get a decent sense of our financial picture as a church so that we can properly plan for doing ministry in the coming year. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that most of us probably don’t like talking about money very much. Which makes sense. It’s not really a part of our culture to talk about how much money we make, how much money we have, and what we do with our money. Sure, there are times when we’ll speak vaguely about money—when we announce that we got a raise, or a promotion, or that we finished paying off our student loans, car loans, or mortgages. Sometimes we speak a little more openly about money, like when discussing how much houses cost, although websites like Zillow also make it kind of pointless to try and hide how much our houses cost. As much as we might not like to talk about it, though, it is important for us to do so. And it’s important for us to be transparent here about how much it costs to do what we do, and to think theologically about how our spending reflects our values, and whether it does.
As we move through this month, thinking about money and stewardship and all that fun stuff, I’d like for us to keep in mind, and maybe hear for the first time, what John Wesley thought about money. He wasn’t shy about money, and was probably such a successful fundraiser, in part, because he talked very openly about what he was doing with the money entrusted to him. He also wrote extensively about how Christian values should inform our relationship with money. One of Wesley’s best-known sermons, as a matter of fact, is his sermon on “The Use of Money.” In this sermon, Wesley offers us three overarching pieces of advice pertaining to how we ought to relate to money. Which is perfect, because I will be preaching three times this month. These three pieces of advice are: Gain all you can; Save all you can; Give all you can. Sounds simple enough, right? Sounds like things we already aspire to, like things that fit neatly with our run of the mill, capitalist values…right? Come on now, if that were the case, could I really squeeze three whole sermons out of one of Wesley’s?
The first of these guidelines, gain all you can, is where we are going to direct our attention this week. For Wesley, this is the principle that should be the easiest for us to understand, as this is what we’re told to do by the conventional wisdom of the world. It shouldn’t be surprising, though, that this piece of advice comes with a long list of terms that apply. The first of these caveats is that we are to gain all we can, without sacrificing our own life or health. Wesley is largely concerned about things like attending to the sabbath and not sitting in the same position for an extended period of time. I think he would have been a big fan of the standing desk. But he was also very clear that some lines of work are simply not worth the risk. Back in 1760, when this sermon was written, things like lead, arsenic, and coal dust were at the front of many people’s minds. Today, some of the most dangerous jobs are in agriculture, roofing, construction, and sanitation. Many healthcare workers, home health aides, and others working 12 or 24-hour shifts often don’t get adequate opportunity to rest, and often aren’t really gaining all that much. And it is women, people of color, and migrant workers who bear the brunt of the physically dangerous and demanding labor.
But it isn’t just our physical health that Wesley is concerned about us risking as we seek to gain all we can. He also urges us not to sacrifice our mental and spiritual health. Our work ought to be fulfilling, to engage our intellect and help us to grow and use our gifts. Our ability to gain, to prosper, shouldn’t come at the cost of our happiness, our connection to community, or our convictions. These could simply be lines of work that we personally find soul-crushing. Wesley calls out the study of math as an occupation that would really shake his faith and make his spirit unwell—and I tend to agree with him on that. He also specifically calls out trades that are predatory as being detrimental to our spiritual and mental health. Any means of gaining all we can at the expense of another or the expense of our own conscience, does harm, and is not the sort of relationship to money that Wesley would have us emulate. I would argue that this idea of exploitation extends, also, to our non-human neighbors—to the air, the water, the trees, and the soil. We ought to gain all we can, but not at the expense of our connection to one another, our sense of interdependence, and our understanding of the inherent value of Creation that transcends what it can offer to us.
Wesley takes this line of thinking even further. He argues that, if we really do love our neighbors as ourselves, as we are commanded to do, then all of that concern about not harming our own bodies, minds, and spirits—that all applies to our neighbors, too. If we gain all we can at the expense of our neighbors’ health or life, that does not put us in right relationship with God. If we gain all we can by exploiting our neighbors, or by causing harm to their minds, their spirits, or their faith, that does not put us in right relationship with God. This culture we live in, that would have us see the value of others extending only as far as they are useful to our own economic gains—that is not the economics of the Kingdom, and it certainly does not put us in right relationship with God. Even in such a culture, even in such a system that prizes ruthlessness and elevates those willing to exploit and oppress their neighbors, we are called to do the least harm and the most good. We are called to gain all we can, all while loving ourselves and our neighbors. That doesn’t always pay the best. But what good is it to gain everything, at the expense of our souls, our community, and the world?
One of the first Weekly Update notes I wrote after I became your pastor included a quote from Bible scholar Jane Schaberg, which read: “the heart of resurrection faith is a belief in God’s ultimate concern with justice for the whole person, the whole body, and for the whole human community.” This is John Wesley’s Kingdom economics. Even as we live and move within unjust systems that draw us into engagement with immoral and unethical means of amassing wealth, even as we focus on simply putting food on the table and sheltering our families—still, we are called to share God’s ultimate concern with justice for the whole person, the whole body, and the whole community of Creation. We are called to be stewards of money as a resource, and to gain all we can without losing sight of this call. To gain all we can, not at the expense of ourselves and our neighbors, but so that bodies might be made whole, communities might be restored, and we might care for one another and for all of Creation. This is how we ought to gain all we can. May it be so. Amen.
Bridging the Divide
My first exposure to the Rochester area was in 2011 or 2012, I think. It was whichever year we had Annual Conference, our big yearly gathering of Methodists from across Upstate New York, in Rochester. I don’t really remember being in the city. I do remember that whichever hotel we stayed in was tall, and we had some great views of the surrounding area. I remember feeling like I was in the Big City, which I was, since Rochester is about 3 times the size of Schenectady, the city I was born in and grew up around. It wasn’t until I met Anna, my fiancee, though, that I really started to spend time around Rochester and get a feel for what it’s like as a place. I didn’t have a car back then, so I would ride the train out—which was fine for me, since I love the train. Anna would pick me up, and we’d spend our time taking trips into the city, when we weren’t poking around in the village here or wandering around Powder Mills or Mendon Ponds. We went to some of the places that were important to her—the Mad Hatter in the Park Ave neighborhood, the Memorial Art Gallery, Highland Park. She did a great job selling me on the city. Such a great job, in fact, that that’s where I live now.
Each time I visited, though, I was struck by how disjointed so many parts of the city felt. Going from the center of Rochester to many of the surrounding neighborhoods felt like going to the next town over. Neighborhoods like Corn Hill or the South Wedge, where I live now (not far from Cheesy Eddie’s) feel sectioned off from Downtown, with its tall buildings and abundance of parking lots. I remember one time walking from the train station to a coffee shop downtown when I was going to have to wait a little while for my ride. That was when I really got a sense of the partitioning of Rochester. On that walk, I had to cross over the Inner Loop—a literal chasm that has been fixed between Downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods. That same chasm contains interstate 490, which is what splits my neighborhood off from Downtown. I-490, which was designed to rush commuters from the suburbs right into the heart of the city, and get them out as quickly as possible. Freeways, sprawling surface parking lots, isolated train stations that are not well-connected with other modes of public transportation—these are symptoms and drivers of urban decay. These are the things that divide communities, that make connection more difficult, and that, no matter how many prophets we’ve had throughout the generations telling us it is so, we never seem to take seriously. After all, who wants to take 31 F all the way from Fairport to downtown Rochester?
The chasms that we, the collective human society, create are not always as dramatic or tangible as the chasms that scar the City of Rochester. If we look for just a moment, we can see the chasms of privilege that turn many of us into the wealthy man, clad in purple, who take for granted the workers who prop up our lifestyles. We take for granted the urban tax revenue that subsidises rural and suburban infrastructure, the migrant workers who feed us, though they often don’t make enough to feed their own families. We leave our gates locked to disabled people, who are too inconvenient to include. And sure, we can take the scraps, the leftovers from our table, and pass them through the bars of the gate or send them across the chasm. But doing so does not truly bridge the divide. It still leaves an “us” and a “them.” It doesn’t force us to actually draw our circle wider, to look into the eyes of God in our neighbors, or to be in any real type of relationship with those who are suffering, whom we keep on the other side of the chasm, behind the locked gate. Clearly, this is not all that we are called to.
But what, then, is the point of this parable? Are the poor, the marginalized, the vulnerable, the sick, and the hungry supposed to take comfort in the idea that when they die they’ll have comfort then? Is Jesus, as portrayed by the gospel writer, banking on the wealthy and the privileged being so scared of eternal torment that they would make things right?
We really ought to look at this parable not as a cautionary tale, but as an observation of reality. The great chasm isn’t something that’s coming—it’s already here. It’s in Rochester. It’s between here and the city. It’s at the Southern border. It’s in our neighborhoods, in our churches, and in our hearts. We’re deeply disconnected, and it only seems to be getting worse. Polarization, political violence, and so on and so forth. A great chasm has, in fact, been fixed between us. But it wasn’t God who put it there as a form of punishment. We built the chasm—or paid someone else to build it. We dug trenches in our hearts, put up walls and barriers to keep those people out. If you want to know how I would define sin, it’s that. Sin is anything that separates us from one another and from the rest of Creation. It’s what happens when we do not honor the divinity in one another, when we stew division, when we reject community. When we see ourselves as more worthy than others, and see others only for what they can do for us. Our work then, in not sinning, is to address these divisions, these disconnections in our hearts and our world.
It also matters how we do the work of bridging the divide. Christ, through the character of Abraham, doesn’t seem satisfied with the rich man demanding that Lazarus cool his tongue. Bridging the divide is not just about getting over things. It’s certainly not about recognizing the value in others simply when it serves us. It demands that we become repairers of the breach, as the prophet Isaiah described. That’s not superficial work. It’s not passive work or temporary work. It is the work of revealing the Kingdom, of seeing God in one another and ourselves. Not erasing our identities, but uplifting and celebrating that which is different and that which is common. It means knowing one another—knowing each other’s stories, pain, struggles, needs, desires. That task is not mine alone. It is the work of this community. It can start right here, because there are chasms even here. But it needs to extend outside, as well. Where are the chasms between us and Fairport? Where are the chasms between Fairport and Rochester? How are we going to be true repairers of the breach?
These are not simply rhetorical questions. I want to know. John Wesley (or it could have been Charles, it’s not really clear) once wrote that “the Gospel of Christ knows no religion but social; no holiness but social holiness.” Oftentimes when we think of social holiness, we tend to think of social justice or works of mercy. But it really means that our faith, as Christians and especially as Methodists, is about how we interact with others. Everything we do, from our private prayer life to our public worship to our engaging with the sacraments, must relate back to how we live together with one another and all of Creation. We are called, not to be doomed to the chasm and to accept this as our unavoidable state of being, but to be repairers of the breach. May all that we do be done for the repairing of the breach. May this be our sign of loving well and loving right. May it be so. Amen.
God Who Weeps
God is good (all the time). All the time (God is good). But it doesn't always feel like that, does it? I want to read the first scripture again, the one we heard earlier from the prophet Jeremiah so that we can hear it with fresh ears and dig into that one to wrestle this morning. Here it is:
My joy is gone; grief is upon me; my heart is sick. Listen! The cry of the daughter of my people from far and wide in the land: "Is the LORD not in Zion? Is her King not in her?" ("Why have they provoked me to anger with their images, with their foreign idols?") "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved." For the brokenness of the daughter of my people I am broken, I mourn, and horror has seized me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of the daughter of my people not been restored? O that my head were a spring of water and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!
This is God’s word for God’s people. Thanks be to God.
Oftentimes in our prayer and sacred music traditions, we love to focus on praise. Which makes sense. In our lives, we love to focus on the good things, on the happy times, on our joys. On our celebrations. Last night I went and had a great time at a grape harvesting party in Troy. And it was a time of joy, of celebration, of making jelly and eating good food and being with fun people and having a good time. We love to capture those moments to feel those over and over and over again. And to thank God for them when we think of it. We also love to lift up the good things about God. Even when we acknowledge the brokenness of our own mortality. When we acknowledge the brokenness of the world around us. Still we sing of the goodness of God. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. But there are entire musical traditions in the church, in particular what’s known as contemporary Christian music, that fixate entirely on this one element of prayer and sacred music at the expense of all else.
There's a tendency towards toxic positivity. This idea that we always need to focus on the good things and that we can sort of manifest goodness by only focusing on the good things. Seldom do we voice our frustrations and really talk about the things that we find challenging. Sure, in our silent prayers and our prayer concerns that we lift up, oftentimes, yes, we do talk about suffering, about sickness, about loss. But so many of our songs, so many of our prayers are just us talking about how wonderful God is. How wonderful we want to present our lives. And it’s not simply an issue with today’s prayer habits or contemporary music. My favorite hymn has long been oh for a thousand tongues to sing. That's a praise hymn. Oh four a thousand tongues to sing. My great redeemer's praise. The glories of my God and king. The triumphs of his grace. That's a praise hymn, more than anything. And yes it does talk about the brokenness of the world. The brokenness of our humanity. But even in the midst of that it reverts back to the goodness. The glory of God in the midst of it all.
But in this passage from Jeremiah, we're reminded that there are multiple kinds of prayers. There are multiple ways that our ancestors of faith have talked about God, have talked with God throughout the generations. I’ve already spoken about prayer as a form of protest, as demands that we make of God as God calls us to be advocates for one another in the world. But we're reminded in this passage and throughout the Psalms, and in the Book of Lamentations, that when we talk to and about God, we don't just praise. We don’t just make concrete demands. Sometimes we just complain. Sometimes we just need to express our sorrow, our frustration, our hurting—and God is the one we trust will listen. There's a genre of Psalms called plaint psalms, which are about voicing our anger or dissatisfaction and lifting up the things that we might blame God for. In his dying moments, some of Jesus' last words are a quotation from the book of Psalms. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Something else I love about this passage from Jeremiah though is that there's some ambiguity about who exactly is speaking here. The section title in the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition, is “The prophet mourns for the people,” but it’s not always clear with the prophets when they’re sharing their own words or messages from the divine. Are these the words of the prophet Jeremiah or are these the words of God? Is it Jeremiah whose heart is sick, whose joy is gone? Is it Jeremiah who feels the pain and the despair of the people around him? Or is it God? Is this the word of God whose heart breaks, whose body breaks, when ours do?
Last week, my sermon more than anything else was about empathy. It was about feeling the pain of others and allowing our hearts to be broken when we see suffering. It was about feeling the pain of another and being moved by it. But empathy doesn't necessarily mean action. You know sometimes when people come to us and bring their anxieties, their brokenness, their complaints they're not necessarily looking for a solution. Sometimes what's best is to simply sit with another, to offer presence, to be a tangible witness. I think of the book of Job—which I’ve designed a pretty cool study around, if you’d all be interested in that sometime. Job who experienced immense suffering, who had his entire life—his livestock, his family, his wealth—stripped away from him in an excruciating fashion. And when his friends came to offer their assistance, before they ruined everything by offering their two cents, before they voiced their opinions about why this might have happened and how Job might make it right with God. They find the weeping Job lying in the dust and they sit with him in silence.
Our God is a God of solidarity. A God of radical empathy. A God who not only calls us to be moved by the suffering of others, to have our hearts broken, but who themselves is moved by the suffering of others, who has their own heart broken. This idea has been echoed throughout the ages. The black theologian James Cone identifies Jesus with those who are lynched throughout America, even today. This idea that God suffers, whether through Christ or as communicated through the prophets. These words from Jeremiah, and indeed the climax of the gospel narrative, point to our God as one who suffers with us. Who hears our cries not only of joy and of praise and of pleasure. But our cries of despair, of loss, of loneliness. Who moves us to sit with one another in our loss, in our pain, in our discomfort if that's what we need. Who moves us also to action when action is needed. Our God weeps with us. Feels our pain. Bleeds and dies with us.
These are the places where God makes Godself known to us in the times when we wish God would do something to make it all better. And so this is how we are to love. Feeling the pain of our neighbors as if we were one body, as if there were not two. Trusting that in the times when we feel we have run out of praises and don’t want to force any more from our lips, God still hears us and remains present with us. And God responds, lamenting, praying for us, that we might be moved as well. May we be God’s presence, God’s breaking heart, God’s radical solidarity for one another. May this be the Kingdom in our midst. May it be so. Amen.