Not Many People Write of Jesus Kneeling

A poem by David Denoon

Not many people write of Jesus kneeling

Not to pray, or perhaps to pray,

But to wash

To bear the water and the pour

Stripped to the waist as he will be again

All too soon

This time, though, because

This is what the servant does

To wash the feet

One bends

One kneels

Half-naked before the splash and the mess,

A day’s walking is a filthy thing.

Not many people accept Jesus kneeling

Not to pray, or perhaps to pray,

But to wash

Peter, yes, but Judas too –

Neither understanding servanthood,

Leadership –

Disquieted by troubled water

Disoriented by him

Down on his knees

Both stop

Both stare

Disrobed themselves, but not obviously,

Denial and betrayal hidden.

Not many people recall Jesus kneeling

Not to pray, or perhaps to pray,

But to wash

The basin’s clouding contents show

No Savior, no, instead a woman bowed

Flask of nard

Her hair uncovered

Immodestly wiping his feet

Not six days past

Once there

Once here

She clothed the moment in adoration

Disquieting parallels, the two.

Loving the Stranger Prevents Complicity in HatredLet's Get to It!

I propose something new for us as a Christian community at the First Congregational Church of Webster Groves. Really, it's just something to be renewed, but we need to approach it as if we have never done it before. That is, to fearlessly and actively seek new opportunities for hospitality and love with people who do not believe or practice faith in the same ways we do.

We need to recognize and energize around the understanding in our sacred texts that loving the stranger is our greatest goal for faithfulness.

On Friday afternoon in New Zealand, you know by now, an armed white nationalist entered mosques in Christchurch and murdered dozens of people. On Friday afternoon in Ballwin, Missouri, I went to the Daar Ul-Islam mosque of the Islamic Foundation of Greater St. Louis for an interfaith gathering reacting to the Christchurch attacks. After about half an hour of greetings from leaders of Jewish and Christian communities and acknowledgments from the host imam and other Islamic religious leaders from the area, those of us gathered adjourned to a series of informal greetings and embraces with tears and words of affirmation for one another. Circulating around the room I ended up hugging my friend Imam Ibrahim Hasic twice, catching up briefly about our families and communities, and realizing that we don't make nearly enough time for each other outside of work.

As I left the mosque, I was keenly aware of the three uniformed men who were providing security and traffic control. It reminded me of a conversation I'd had, two days before. I had attended a clergy meeting in which a Christian minister and a Jewish rabbi reflected about their communities' experiences with an Islamic center, the three communities together developing a program for little children to teach them about their traditions' mutual values and different ways of expressing those values. The Christian mentioned the importance of a security guard, something he had not considered when he had first imagined the program. At every gathering of the "Sprouts of Peace" program, there is uniformed, armed peace officer for everyone's protection.

There came to my mind my words with church members, after shootings at churches that happened a couple of months ago, that arming our greeters would be foolhardy and that keeping our building's doors unlocked and unguarded is part of our hospitality. I am not sure I was ever quite so profoundly clear about the privilege my religion and my religious community's historic identity (as a liberal Christian group, dreaming of diversity but definitely white in the overwhelming majority).

At least as far as being targeted for being counter to the culture of the mainstream is concerned, First Church is safe from the threat of terrorism. The only possibility I see, of a need for a guard at the door, would be in a case like that which our presenters were providing, in which we might be sharing programming with a predictably targeted group.

On that Wednesday, I reflected about how, on Monday, I had spent the morning in a gathering of leaders from many faith traditions around a table sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council. We were discussing with Prof. David Oughton of St. Louis University the history of Christian anti-Semitism and just how intractable it can be. I ached to have a similar discussion among the people of my church and, by extension, my community generally. I longed to remind them that we are not blameless, even if we have distanced ourselves over the past many decades from the vilification or demonization of these others. The mere statement of suspicion by one faith-based voice against another implicates the first in the persecution of the other.

First Church has concentrated a lot, over the last few years, on anti-racism and the importance of recognizing our unintended complicity in the preservation of racism and racist expectations. We have heralded our church's history of promoting civil rights for people of different colors and cultures than our own. We haven't, however, looked as long and hard lately at the ways in which we perpetuate prejudice against other religious groups, either actively or passively.

Oh, I make our Confirmation students, their mentors, and teachers attend worship, prayer, and meditation gatherings at Jewish, Islamic, Baha'i, and Buddhist meeting places nearby; I assign them the task of attending services in at least two other Christian communities. (And I know some of the adults of my church go to bar and bat mitzvah celebrations, and many attended services at nearby synagogues, the Shabbat after the Tree of Life massacre.) But there needs to be a voice and example coming from among us, active and fearless (even if that fearlessness is based in entitlement and privilege). This voice may be, sometimes, even prophetic in affirming to our wider community those people who believe or practice faithfully, but differently, than we do.

We can face hatred and ignorance with love. We are privileged enough to be able to do this without fear. When we establish new love, when we cultivate our friendships across religions as well as across race, when we invite others into new relationships and networks of care and concern, we generate a process that can bridge the chasm of cruelty, of fear, of hate.

If we are silent and if we do nothing, we are implicated in the murderous actions of terrorist cowards. We can and must fearlessly and actively seek new opportunities for hospitality and love. We can and must change the course of our culture because we change our own expectations of ourselves and of others. We know the price that will continue to be paid if we do nothing.

Loving the stranger is our greatest goal for faithfulness.

Yes, the best way forward is to generate relationships and networks of care and concern that prevent Fridays and other days like the one Christchurch just experienced. This was true on Wednesday, as my clergy meeting heard about those Abrahamic young people in the "Sprouts of Peace" program. It is just as true on Mondays, as my colleagues and I are discovering monthly. It is true, every day, and will be always.

When No News Is Good News (February 17, 2019)

READINGS

Jeremiah 17:5-8

Luke 6:20-26

COMMENTARY: The prophet Jeremiah was convinced that the overthrow of his nation’s government by a foreign power was no accident: it was God’s judgment. His people, he announced as speaking for God, had chosen to ignore mercy and to favor wealth. Their greed got them into the political mess they faced and the historical exile they experienced, as the nation’s ruling and merchant classes were carted off to Babylon for discipline and servitude. Six centuries later, Jesus was able to draw parallels between Jeremiah’s humiliated government and Jewish leaders in his own time who cooperated with the power of Rome in occupied Galilee and Judea. Note in the Luke passage the intentional linking by Jesus between the successful of his own time with those who were the cause of Judah’s judgment in Jeremiah’s time. He does this by referring to the cooperators as if their ancestors were those who were sent into exile, six hundred years before. Indeed, the Beatitudes as spoken in the gospel according to Luke when laid side-by-side with Jeremiah’s preaching ring very familiar.

1 Corinthians 15:12-20

COMMENTARY: Written in or about the year 54 CE, what we call Paul’s first letter to the Church at Corinth is actually the third that Paul wrote to the Corinthians. The first two having been lost to the ages, this one offers correction to misperceptions or misconceptions those Christians had had about their new faith. In the letter Paul demonstrates their misapplication of what he had written before. In this passage the misapplication has to do with the central tenet of the Christian faith – Christ’s resurrection. Paul weaves an argument together out of Jewish thought and Greek thought. His argument is sublimely logical, like arguments of Plato or Aristotle, but his premise and his conclusion are like those of the ancient rabbis. He focuses on a predicted end-of-history event, the raising of the dead, when God will pass judgment on all people. This resurrection will provide for the righting of historic wrongs. It will reverse the fortunes of those who lived unjustly but without punishment and those who lived righteously but without mercy. Jesus’ own resurrection has been proof that the day is coming, Paul says, and the arrival of that day is the lynchpin of Christian faith and proclamation. This claim was as problematic for his Corinthian audience as it may be for us today. There is no physical evidence of Christ’s resurrection, no glorified Jesus who is visible anymore. There is only testimony and theological imagination. Paul counters those who claim to practice this faith without believing in a coming resurrection by suggesting that the dubious are calling him a liar.

A sound file of this sermon may be found at soundcloud.com/FirstChurchWG

Today is the Sunday of Presidents Day weekend. Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were both born near this day. Darwin and Lincoln, those two voices which have had the most defining effect for America in our history, were born on exactly the same day – February 12, 1809.

It’s also African American History Month, and today is our special observance of Science and Technology Sunday. And even though it may seem as though we’re forcing an issue just because of the confluence of those coincidences, I still was inspired to consider that confluence. After all, all of life can seem sometimes as if it’s just a confluence of coincidences that we’re trying to make sense out of – as if the combination of circumstances in our environment are forming a vortex, and we are at the center of it, trying to imagine what all of the randomness means, like Alice in the Rabbit Hole.

Our scriptures for today seem like part of it. Jeremiah and Luke offer beatitudes and curses; Paul scolds the Corinthians (interestingly) not for not believing but for not believing enough! And, I’ll tell you, the Psalm of the day, which doesn’t appear at all in this worship service, is the first of the Psalms exalting the faithful for being like well-watered trees full with leaves. Four disjoint sayings, except that Jeremiah and the Psalm both share similar tree imagery, and Jeremiah and Luke share a similar motif of blessing and cursing.

So you can imagine, I find that reading scripture passages together can be kind of confusing and feel kind of random unless they can be considered with a certain topic. And with the timeliness of considering together both how some of our citizens have been historically mistreated (because of Black History Month and Lincoln’s birthday) and what we do with what we know (because of Science and Technology Sunday and Darwin’s birthday), I thought I might be seeing a glimmer of something meaningful shining through Paul’s remonstrance of Corinth and Jesus’ beatitudes in Luke.

Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Human One.

That’s what Jesus said.

If the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

That’s Paul.

Those two portions really stuck out to me with their emphases of suffering and death and breaking their strangle holds on our existence. I thought, That’s where I want to go with this.

So, on Facebook I asked how other people encounter Paul’s assertions in First Corinthians 15 about Jesus’ resurrection and the coming resurrection of the righteous. Where and how have you met (are you meeting) the Messiah? I asked. Another way to put this, I said, might be to ask, What is real for you about your faith?

Here are some of the answers I got:

If Jesus was not physically and spiritually resurrected he is not Jesus the Christ, the Messiah! I, because of the witness of those who where there, believe in the full resurrection of Jesus. And that the promise of eternal life in Christ is real because God’s promises are real. I have a faith that says that those who die in Christ shall live again and that this spiritual place is a communal gathering of those who have also lived and died in Christ. So to answer the question, it is important because I believe in a faithful God, who has never failed, lied or not come through. I believe that there are many metaphors in the Bible, but that the bodily and spiritual resurrection was testified to by the Apostles and to their followers whom I believe to this day.

A medical professional said, There is a major difference between resurrection and resuscitation. Resuscitations occur frequently in ambulances and hospitals around the world. Jesus’ resurrection is important because it set a precedent. He was the “first fruit” and because Jesus did we have the testimony of this happening in God’s Word, we have faith that we will rise again after death too new life (and not just be resuscitated to live the same old life).

[A Japanese pastor said that she asked] for help with [her] sermon on Twitter! She asked the question, “How do you believe in the resurrection of Jesus?” and got 73 responses to her multiple choice answers. Answer 1: I believe ultimately in the resuscitation of the Jesus body – 30%. Answer 2: I believe in only idea of the resurrection of Jesus – 15%. Answer 3: Not exactly sure what happened but believe in the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus – 55%.

One church member replied, I honestly don’t have a clue about whether there was a resurrection... Jesus presented to us a way of living.

I think the bedrock fact of the resurrection is that Jesus showed up and changed people... And the bedrock meaning is that God is ultimately on Christ’s side, evidence to the contrary sometimes notwithstanding.

To me, it doesn't matter if Jesus rose bodily or in Spirit. What matters is Christ made known that he conquered death itself and that there is life beyond what we know on Earth.

Quoting an Easter sermon I preached about five or six years ago, one church member said, I think of the resurrection as “Jesus loose in the world.” It had a big impact on me and how I think about the resurrection.

I find Christ’s presence in the often surprising evidences of guidance and providence in my and other's lives. A person can be clever and far-sighted in planning one’s own life, but the way things fall into place (or don’t) outside of one’s control does create story-arcs that, to me, are amazing examples of Christ's presence.

I think about the resurrection this way: I think that, as I’ve said at other times, If it could happen for Jesus, it can happen for us. Resurrection, whatever it is or means, indicates the possibility of new and glorified life in God.

We claim to have good news. We use the word gospel a lot, but it can sound mysterious. So, let me remind you that, when Paul or Jesus said the word we say when we say gospel, they said, “good news.” So, that’s what we have: good news bringing meaning and relief, salvation and life, despite the strangle holds of suffering and death. That is the meaning of resurrection.

Even so, even for all his concentration on our good news, Paul points out that it really is no news.

Because of the resurrection of Jesus, he says, and Christ’s glorification by God, we don’t have a Jesus with whom we can make physical contact anymore, the way the apostles once did. This can be a problem, he admits, because we may then believe in Jesus’ actual resurrection, but we may imagine that it was a one-off and that he would have been the only one who gets that treatment.

No, Paul insists, Jesus was only the first. A day is coming... and you can read about what he envisioned for the rest of us in my commentary. But people then weren’t believing it. They were coming up with rationalizations and explanations for their loved ones dying and not being raised. They were doing the things that we do: insisting that people live in our hearts long past their earthly lives, and that this is what lends them eternity. Or that their spirits are still among us, and that this is what proves their eternity.

Paul said, No, that isn’t enough.

And you and I know: Our sentiments are sweet, but they’re cold comfort.

When you think about what he saw in daily life – its cruelty, its futility, and itscrushing effects on some, while others either take for granted their affluence or didn’t take it for granted and insulated and isolated themselves from the suffering that is so often the expense of their luxury. Paul was not satisfied with some sort of “pie in the sky when you die by and by.” Paul insisted that, if there was going to be justice, it had to be real. If, therefore, resurrection happened for Jesus, it has to happen for us too.

Paul, not having lived through the Dark Ages or the Enlightenment, hadn’t come to any sort of notion about democracy or anti-slavery or workers outnumbering their masters and casting off their chains. He didn’t know about such things, except that invariably, when he saw the underclasses rebelling, they were subdued and subjugated again and again.

What he knew was that there came now this good news from on high, a good news that he preached: that the Creator was redeeming the world and that, eventually, those same sufferers and their suffering children would be saved and justified, and their oppressors and all those who did nothing to ease their burdens made to suffer for the sins they committed in this life.

And even without Jesus in his former flesh restored to assert the authority and glory of God, that measure of no news, that He’s not here, still was good news for Paul and other Christians. Keep your eyes on the prize, Paul instructed the Corinthians. Accept no substitutes.

No news is good news.

This was a problematic assertion back then, and it is a problematic assertion in our own time. No news can be dangerous in a world that is growingly more disposed to evidence. The development of science in human history has led us to draw our most assured conclusions about the patterns around and among us. We do this through evidence and, in particular, measurable, quantifiable, repeatable evidence which reveals to us laws of nature and of physics which are only ever poetically referred to in scripture, if they are referred to at all.

Religion, meanwhile taking the sometimes-deadly combination of a lack of evidence (no news) and an abuse of the evidence we do have, has often faced contradiction (and continues often to face contradiction) either with force or with denial. Our refusal to submit to science’s superior knowledge has always led to exactly the suffering we are supposed to prevent.

And a share of that suffering is beginning to affect not only poor people but affluent people also. Up to now, we’ve been able to keep the world pretty well divided between the poor and the affluent (I’m not going to say rich, because most of us don’t think of ourselves as rich). We have been able to isolate ourselves from the kind of despair and misery that exists in two-thirds of the world, and maybe even more than that. We have been able, through our advances, technological and otherwise, to separate ourselves from the pain of existence that people suffer through starvation and famine, or through war and suffering, or through corruption. But now we’ve got global warming. There was a time when affluence could provide insulation from suffering, but no more. Now, we’ve really done it.

Poverty has always been accompanied by violence or destruction, but even what we might consider a small amount of affluence has provided protection from misery. Technology, even the simplest or most basic, has borne the evidence of this. The generation and widespread distribution of electricity, as well as the development of the internal combustion engine, of batteries, and the host of means of providing energy to masses of people have lifted humanity up, as far as our relative standards of living are concerned. But they have brought with them war and corruption and pollution. The advancements in medicine and hygiene, the purification of water, and the development of chemicals for use in everyday life have likewise made possible longer life expectancies. But what is the value of a longer life if violence continues and injustice persists?

Let me be clear. If you are poor, the best you can hope for in the face of violence and corruption and pollution is that you might be able just to live with it. But if you’re affluent, you have the choice of either fighting it or fleeing it. You can get away.

But the way things are today, fight or flight may not exist as an option much longer.

The rabbi Jesus and the apostle Paul call to us with the voice of the Holy Spirit, reminding us that no news is good news! We may not have physical evidence by which to prove our faith, but the truth of our faith is undergirded in a belief that the impossible for one is possible for all.

If it could happen for Jesus, it can happen for us. Resurrection, whatever it is or means, indicates the possibility of new and glorified life in God. And God did this, intervened, raised Jesus. And God will raise us too.

And whether that’s a day of justice at the end of time, or today when we presume to follow in Christ’s footsteps and seek new and glorified life in God: that’s our choice. Resurrection, whatever it is, whatever it means, indicates the possibility of new and glorified life in God.

I’ll tell you why I think this way. If there are so many who are suffering in this life, especially young lives being wasted as Pilate intended to waste Jesus’ young life as an example for others, then certainly in that way if it could happen for Jesus, it can happen for anyone.

So, it may be that our only hope is resurrection.

And here, we soar beyond the limits of what science can tell us. Here in Christianity, we soar beyond the limits of what science can tell us! From science you will only get facts and figures from which you can make premises and assumptions about future outcomes. From religion, and especially Christianity, you get promises of life and truth and beauty in love. Oh, so much love!

That’s when no news is good news, by the way... when you don’t have the slightest evidence in the world and its quantifiable, measurable results, but you have a promise, a promise you can trust. That’s when no news is good news.

And so, I don’t have the evidence to give you, to show you that Jesus was bodily resurrected and lives glorified at the right hand of God. God sort of prevented this, and yet we have that knowledge and understanding that, once it did happen. And it can happen again.

No, it will happen again.

How Faith, Hope, and Love May Abide (February 3, 2019)

Readings

1 Corinthians 13

Luke 4:14-30

How may faith, hope, and love abide?

First, I think that it may be important for us to have some definitions in common – the meanings of faith and hope and love. For the purposes of this sermon, therefore, let me just observe to you that when I say “faith and hope and love,” I am meaning this:

Faith = I am bound to you, either by promise or by grace.
Hope = Better things are coming, and redemption is near.
Love = Unconditional, undifferentiated embrace with no requirement of reciprocation.

When I started researching for this sermon, I was intrigued by the insight that the name of the town where Jesus’ home was throughout most of his ministry, Capernaum, is a word in Aramaic (the language Jesus spoke) now associated with chaos and meaninglessness. I was fascinated that he should have moved from Nazareth to Capernaum, from the place where he spent his childhood to that haven of insanity.

And then we read the passage Erick and I just shared with you from Luke... and you have to realize that Nazareth was pretty crazy too. So, what Jesus proposed to do was to introduce the God who first ordered creation to the chaotic world in which we live. Into this world he would bring

Faith = I am bound to you.
Hope = Better things are coming.
Love = Unconditional, undifferentiated embrace with no requirement of reciprocation.

But because “the greatest of these is love,” that’s where I am going to try and concentrate most of our focus, today.

Faith = I am bound to you.
Hope = Better things are coming.
Love = Unconditional, undifferentiated embrace with no requirement of reciprocation.

It’s kind of nice to have so much in our readings concerning love, here so close to Valentines Day. I can’t find evidence that that is why we just read 1 Corinthians 13, but it feels almost as if we’re reading this in order to prepare for February 14.

Love, Paul argues, is the necessary basis of every spiritual gift he has mentioned in chapter 12. He continues by asserting that, if you have any spiritual gift but you lack love, then you don’t actually have the spiritual gift. If all that is happening is some kind of personal gratification or reward, then what you have cannot possibly be love.

Love is a divine quality, rooted in the Holy Spirit – chesed, lovingkindness – a product of grace, a byproduct of promises kept, pointing toward a potential in human beings that we rarely achieve.

Love (what Paul called, agapé) is the stuff of heaven, abundantly available on earth, and fundamentally irreplaceable, but scarcely employed.

When it happens, it is so unusual that it stands out. Being selfless and unconditional, it is starkly different from what one is accustomed to seeing produced from out of human beings. When love is accomplished successfully, it draws amazed attention. For example, the real estate developer Candice Payne in Chicago, this past week, recruited other merchants to provide housing to people who had been living in tents but whose propane fuel had run out. Together, Ms. Payne and those other citizens put up eighty or so people in sixty hotel rooms on the South Side. She and her husband paid for a third of them... and not just for one extremely cold night but for three.

That’s a nice example of how to remedy a situation in the immediate. But what if you know that remedying the immediate doesn’t actually fix the problem? What if you know that the problem really is rooted more deeply? You know, the old metaphor of pulling drowning people out of the river and then realizing that the solution is to prevent them from being thrown in, in the first place..?

In Utah and New York City, and other places, agencies are dealing with a level of homelessness in our country the rate of which is only exceeded by that which existed during the Great Depression. There are two prominent ways of dealing with homelessness: Housing Ready is the most common, but there’s also a new concept called, Housing First.

Housing Ready provides homes to homeless people who have undergone training on how to maintain a healthy and stable household. They learn skills like balancing a checkbook and cooking simple meals and interviewing for jobs, sometimes responsible parenting, and those sorts of things. Some are given avenues toward becoming sober. There will usually be some transitional living situation provided as a first step toward affordable or even free housing. But the idea is that, once you have completed such life skills development, then you can qualify for a place to live. Such programs can have as much as a 40% success rate among the chronic homeless, but it is usually considerably lower both for the chronic and the persistent homeless person.

Housing First puts people in stable housing situations regardless of whether they have been taught or acquired life skills for stable living, before their drug or alcohol use is abated, providing condoms and clean needles if needed, even before their mental health care may have been normalized for them. St. Louis journalist Aubrey Byron reports that a Housing First program in the state of Utah reduced chronic homelessness there by more than ninety percent in the decade from 2005 to 2015. It hasn’t had a similar effect in other homeless populations, such as those who are persistently homeless – say, for more than three months but less than a year – but the results of this type of intervention for the lives of chronically homeless people, newly housed after perhaps dozens of years, are really remarkable over the long term. They are shown to result in sobriety, lower per capita living costs (most notably because of a lesser need for emergency services and intervention of law enforcement), stabilized mental health, and reunion with estranged family.

Housing First requires a strong investment of volunteer and professional attention and time in those being housed, but as the Utah-based initiative’s founder Lloyd Pendleton likes to say,

I have learned over and over again that when you listen to somebody’s story with an open heart, walk in their shoes with them, you can’t help but love and care for them and want to serve them.

Now, the model isn’t a panacea. It has a magnificent success rate for the fifteen percent of homeless people who are the chronic homeless. But it’s an amazing start.

Persistently homeless people benefit from somewhat different approaches. Utah’s latest initiative for persistent homelessness, which they are boldly calling “Homes Not Jail,” was begun in 2017 by the state with the cooperation of a major shelter in Salt Lake City. It’s still too early to estimate its level of success, but you get a sense in the naming of the project what will be the measure of its success.

Just to make sure you’re remembering with me, here are our definitions again:

Faith = I am bound to you.
Hope = Better things are coming.
Love = Unconditional, undifferentiated embrace with no requirement of reciprocation (which provides a basis for the other two).

In consideration of Paul’s encouragement to other Christians to practice the unconditional love they have received from God, and to base their faith and hope upon it, it should come as no surprise that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Mormon church, has been a major funds provider and advocate for these initiatives in Utah. The Mormons are proving to be significantly pragmatic in their approaches to homelessness and addiction, not placing restrictions, impediments, or expectations upon the recipients of their benevolences.

I wonder what it could be like for UCC churches to associate and move ahead in a similar way for the benefit of our own communities...

Can we love like that? Would it be possible for us, even as individuals, so to set aside our concerns about appearances, or our presumption about others’ laziness and lack of motivation or lack of will, that we might love others in the way that God loves us?

Think about that!

There is something in the way that God has acted toward us, something in our life that has caused us to perceive God’s favor, something in what we have been taught (maybe) that says that God loves everybody and therefore God loves us.

Even if we are not entirely satisfied with the present outcomes of our lives or the circumstances in which we may be living at the present, there has been a time, a blessed time that we cherish, when the goodness, the love of God was so readily apparent that we ended up here.

Or else, we’ve been told that if and when we’re in trouble, we ought to show up here, because this is where God will be. This space and this place, what I say, what we do, how we experience time here are designed to mitigate, to remove the usual daily obstructions and seemingly endless distractions of our attention from the Source of blessing.

We know that, and this is why we are here.

So, what about not only here? If

Faith = I am bound to you.
Hope = Better things are coming.
Love = Unconditional, undifferentiated embrace with no requirement of reciprocation.

then, mustn’t there be some kind of something that we could do that would move those qualities of faith and hope and love from within these walls to beyond them!

This is a challenging proposition, I know, because when we read that story from Luke, about when Jesus upsets those other worshipers from his hometown, we may be led to wonder at just why they got so angry. But it has something to do with what he was saying to them.

When he says, “This prophecy is fulfilled in your hearing,” Jesus directs the attention of his audience to the Isaiah scroll he has just read, about the year of the Jubilee – the poor have good news, the captives are released, the blind now see, the oppressed are free.

But they don’t listen, fixated as they are on what has become of their native son.

So he points out to them that they have become distracted from the message of the prophet: They are potentially the fulfillment of God’s longing for all people to enjoy the benefits of the earth’s abundance.

You’ll recall, they had just requested that he do among them the kind of things that he had done in other places, especially in Capernaum where he had taken up residence. His response, which was based on what he had just read to them from the prophet Isaiah, was to say, in effect, that he didn’t belong to them; his hometown was heaven. And so was theirs. And if they would just act like it, imagine what would be possible! He was proclaiming the Good News, and this was to be good news for everyone.

Because heavenly love cannot be localized. What we do here on Sunday mornings celebrates faith, hope, and love that have to abide as heaven abides – in, with, and through the earth. What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, as they say, but what happens in First – that stuff of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit – must not stay here. How may faith and hope abide without love? And how may love possibly abide in just one place?


I want to go back to what I said at the beginning of this little talk and reassert it, because it really is at the heart of what we are about – as individuals, as an organization, as the Church – and that’s love. Love is the necessary basis of every spiritual gift. If you have the gift but you lack love, then you don’t actually have the gift.

If all that is happening is some kind of personal gratification or reward, then what you have cannot possibly be love. The people around us, the community around us have to see some benefit from what happens here. Or else we’re useless. “If I have the faith that removes mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give everything away, even give my life away, but I have no love, nothing is gained.”

So, how shall any of these abide – faith, hope, or love?

I promise you, the only possible way is that we keep returning to the Source of all three, and that we return persistently to the One who introduced us to them in the first place, introduced us so that they consisted of reality and meaning.

This is how you do it. You find it here and then share it. You take it out, and then you bring it back, over and over again.