Holy Waiting - Or What to do with our Tree

 This text is from a teaching delivered on Sunday, December 1 at the First Congregational Church, Rochester, Wisconsin. 

This is the first Sunday of Advent, a church season characterized by waiting, and waiting is what I’m going to talk about today – what it is, what makes it holy, and what in particular holy waiting might look like to us specifically at this church. Advent reminds us that sometimes, God intends us to wait. In many churches, no Christmas carols are sung until Christmas Eve, but lots of churches don’t wait. For them, Christmas carols begin early in December and there’s a reason for that. We don’t like to wait. We just don’t. We’re Americans, after all, and we like to get things done. Waiting just doesn’t seem very productive. And we’re impatient, too. Waiting takes a long time—too long for most of us.

But there are some good things about waiting. Waiting itself can be productive because of what it is – it’s very nature demands that we stop doing whatever we were doing and prepare for something else, some goal or looked-for event - usually something pleasant – waiting to turn 16 to drive, waiting for a baby to be born, waiting for school to be out and summer vacation to begin, even just waiting for a light to turn green or the nurse to call your name in the doctor’s office.

There is a lot of waiting in the Bible. In the book of Jeremiah, the Lord makes a promise to send a savior to the people of Israel. They believed God’s promise and waited for it - they waited six hundred years for this promise to be fulfilled. And then, finally, when Jesus was born, it was.  That’s serious waiting. In fact, it’s not only waiting, it’s holy waiting.

There are also examples of holy waiting in the New Testament.  Mary waited for the birth of Jesus as foretold by the angel Gabriel.  John the Baptist waited for the Lamb of God to reveal Himself.  The old man Simeon and the prophetess Anna waited their entire lives, praying constantly in the temple for the consolation of Israel. Mary Magdalene, too, practiced holy waiting, completely confused and weeping outside the tomb of the crucified Jesus. 

These are all examples of holy waiting and what made their waiting holy is that it is always waiting for God. That’s what makes the waiting holy. Holy waiting is different from the waiting we do for summer vacation or the light to turn green. Holy waiting is different because its goal is God.

My favorite of the New Testament examples is Simeon and the way you can almost feel the relief in his voice. He’s finally seen Jesus and could die happy. “Now let your servant depart in peace for mine eyes have seen the Savior, whom you have prepared for all the world to see. A light to enlighten the nations and the glory of your people Israel.” He had waited and was satisfied. But there was a problem and Simeon didn’t know yet what it was. The problem was that Jesus wasn’t the savior Simeon thought he was getting.

Because there’s another thing about holy waiting.  In every biblical example, the end of the wait came with dramatic change, change that was not expected. The Jews, all of them, Jeremiah, John the Baptist and Simeon, expected a king coming in triumphant victory and instead got first a helpless baby and then a humble carpenter. Mary Magdalen, mourning and terribly confused by a dead savior, certainly expected, at that point, a lord and teacher who would stay dead, but instead got a savior who awoke, very much alive, calling her name. And who knows what Mary, Jesus’ mother expected, because she kept it treasured in her heart, but it certainly wasn’t doing a stint at the foot of the cross watching her son slowly suffocate to death in humiliation and then show up again only to levitate into the clouds.

So this lesson is meant to emphasize two things – first that we are sometimes called to holy waiting for God and second, that if we let God have His way, what happens at the end of the waiting is not predictable. In fact, usually the opposite. Hence, the cartoon.

It shows a squirrel sitting in a tree - a tree he's pretty proud of, and he should be. It's beautiful. He knows the tree has come from God but he has cared for it and nutured its growth for years. He thanks God for it, but all the while we know that he's taking most of the credit for what it's become. Still, he says, have your way with it, God, and sure enough, the Holy Spirit shows up peeking around the corner. I get the feeling that the squirrel anticipates a pat on the back, but then we see what God has in mind. He has a hatchet in His hand and the squirrel is  not happy. 

So, who is the squirrel? He’s us, of course, and the tree is the First Congregational Church of Rochester, Wisconsin and we are in our tree, waiting. During the liturgical season of Advent, we are waiting for God. We are waiting to celebrate the anniversary of the birth of Jesus at Christmas.

But we also waiting for something else right now. We are waiting for a pastor. And this is also a kind of holy waiting, not only because we are waiting for God to act in this situation, but also because we have no idea how it’s going to turn out.

I don’t know about you, but I feel a kind of dichotomy, a kind of psychological tug of war. I want two outcomes at the same time, and of course, that’s not possible. One of those outcomes is wanting someone like Paul back – someone who fits right in, who loves easily, who understands God’s world primarily in terms of mercy and grace, who sings with joy, and whose happiness and friendliness is visible to everyone who meets him. Someone we can grow to love and trust. He is a hard act to follow but follow him someone must.

And this is when I remember my second desired outcome – to do like the squirrel in the tree said he wanted to do - to do God’s will. The squirrel reminds me that God’s will is not predictable, but that God doesn’t make mistakes. I remember that we wouldn’t be looking for a pastor at all if God had allowed Paul to live longer. He could have, after all, but he didn’t. So we are waiting and looking. And I remember that we are not guaranteed someone like Paul. In fact, if I understand the pattern of how God seems to work, it is more than likely that God may offer us someone completely different, someone who will fulfill His desires, His plan, not ours. He’s done it before. Remember the Jews who waited all those years and got a savior completely different than they’d hoped for, and for Simeon who held the baby thinking he would be a conqueror, and of Mary whose pain of burying her son was not erased even when He rose from the dead, and of Mary Magdalen who didn’t understand why Jesus had died and was then stolen from his grave. All this confusion, misunderstanding, and suffering was not an accident. It was God’s will – God’s will for the people He loves.

 But change assumes there’s something about us that needs changing and what in us is there for God to work on? As a congregation, we already click. We get along in genuine affection. And because we feel this way about each other, we also get things done not only efficiently, but organically - naturally, and congenially. We have a kind of system, practiced and cemented into place after long years of implementation. We’re a Swiss watch of a congregation. Humming along and knowing our places together. And this is good. It’s almost a miracle, actually, given the amount of strife churches often experience. Our church family is not broke, and there seems to be no reason to fix it. We are justifiably glad about the love and harmony that binds our church family. But at the same time, we are a tree, a tree that is nourished not by one another, but by God. We run the church, but the church, the tree, belongs to God and God could easily come into our church world with a hatchet like in the cartoon. Just because we are good at what we do doesn’t mean that God doesn’t have more for us, something we haven’t yet considered. If He does, He may be hacking some things apart and we may be in for some surprises.

 It’s easy to say that God is in this place, and I think we all feel that in one way or another, but it’s important to remember that the place where He resides isn’t in these four walls but implanted deep inside every one of us. We will not get God’s love or discover His will from our church building or from our committee work or from the Congregationalist headquarters. They can all help us achieve practical ends, but they will not help us find and follow God’s best for us. That comes by a very different path. It comes only through God Himself. So if we are going to care for our tree, we have to connect with its source of energy, God.

 The funny thing is that He’s already here. In the everyday. I learned this in a really vivid way from a bunch of monks. I once did a week long writing retreat at a monastery, New Mellaray Abbey, in Peosta, Iowa, not far from Dubuque. The monks make caskets there, praying as they work, and they also practice of the presence of God, praying as a community seven times a day. People who stay with them do the same and they helped me to understand what a healthy relationship between spiritual and practical work looks like. It’s a funny thing to watch, because the monks work in the wood shop, but when the bell rings they stop their work and all file into the church, wood shavings hanging off their robes, tool belts banging around their waists, and raise their voices together in prayer and chant. My work there was there to write and even I found that, just when I got deep into my project, the bell would ring for the call to prayer and I’d have to break off what I was doing to trail into the church behind the monks. It was as though priorities had been turned upside down. In a world that works first and often struggles to find time to stop and pray, they lived in a world where work took a back seat to conversation with God. Eventually, days no longer framed themselves around the work. They framed themselves around the prayer, around God. One learned to look forward to the prayer more than the project. In the contest between the practical and the spiritual, both were accommodated, but the spiritual won.

 Something similar is always happening in our lives. Even a church makes a conscious decision regarding how spiritual their lives together are to be. This time in our church life might be an opportunity for us to reevaluate our own dynamics. At the end of our holy waiting, we will probably get a new pastor. But it is not the new pastor that is standing at the door knocking. It is Jesus.  It is always Him, and in the knocking, God is showing us a opportunity for a renewed future. He has already declared it by taking Paul home. Yes, I want a pastor like Paul and I want nothing to change, but in the end, I think I want God’s will more. And that might mean that things will be different, that they’re supposed to be different.

God has already changed our circumstances, and He promises that it is for our own benefit. He is giving us an opportunity for something new, not because the old was bad, but because with God, there is always something more. We can embrace His gift, open our arms to welcome the more and all of the relearning and rethinking that comes with it, or we can remain what we were, but this is when we welcome everything He has imagined for us, or we don’t. I’m pretty sure He will not abandon us either way. He will simply give us as much of Himself as we show Him we want.

 So, we are in the time of Holy Waiting. We wait for Christmas, of course, but we also wait for the unknown to show itself. We do not just wait for a pastor. We wait for God. So I call you all today to pray, to read, to sit quietly before God and let Him show you, and thereby show us, what He wants. And then to communicate that to the rest of us. We can do it alone or together, by email, around coffee or a meal or in a quiet corner by ourselves.  This prayer is not intended toward choosing a minister for this church. The selection committee is already doing the heavy lifting for that. This prayer is intended to find the more God has for us, to grow us in God so that we might become as spiritually adept as we are practically efficient.

 We are so lucky to be the little corner church in Rochester, Wisconsin, already trained by God and good pastoral leadership to be faithful and loving, so who knows? We may become not only the neighborly church on the corner but the light on God’s hill. It’s no accident that Advent sounds a lot like adventure.  It will be an adventure, all right, but God has already built a church well equipped to love each other through whatever He brings us. It is up to us to decide whether we will take the community and warmth He has fostered in us and use it to keep ourselves warm and dry, or to let him wield his loving weapon of change to make us something we never imagined. He will tell us. Let us pray. We can find out together.

 Cartoon Credit: John Hendrix, The Holy Ghost

John Adams: Patsy or Prophet?

I've been ruined by the musical Hamilton. It's songs still echo at the slightest provocation. For example, I'm reading a book, Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding by Darren Stadoff and every time I open it to the chapters about John Adams, I hear King George scoff, "Adams? They'll eat him alive!" Well, as it happens, the song and characterizations are catchy, but the musical's version of history is a little off. That's okay, though. It's excused. It's still brilliant. And so, it turns out, was John Adams.

The Enlightenment, you will recall, heralded the age of reason we take so for granted now - the idea that human reasoning ability holds the key to any knowledge worth having, that science trumps faith, and that rationalism is capable of paving the way to as close to utopia that mankind can achieve - and came by the pens of thinkers like Rousseau, Voltaire, and Locke. And all of this at exactly the time this country was being born. So of course, as educated men, the founding fathers of this country were influenced by it, but each had their own wrinkle and I found Adams' particularly compelling.

Adams was not a successful President. He followed Washington and was voted out after one term in favor of Thomas Jefferson, but he had some compelling ideas that made me think of our country, especially as it lines up today, angry battle lines ready to fire at one another at the slightest provocation. 

Adams' take on mankind contemplated the degree to which the equality of mankind was possible. He agreed that people have the potential, even the mandate, to reason, but as they work toward it, are often ruled by pure passion. When we say equality, we don't often mean it, envisioning a mass of people more or less equal to one another, but presided over by, hopefully, ourselves, rising just above the masses or lacking that, presided over by someone more wealthy, more motivated, or more gifted. Equality is fine, in other words, but we are more comfortable when there is someone in power more equal than others. 

Whoa! Whoa!

Don't shoot the messenger!

Think about it a minute. How do you see the world? How does anyone? It's not possible to see the world through any eyes other than our own. We are always the central character in the story, in any world we experience. It can't be any other way. I can't see the world through your eyes or you through mine. It's not possible. We have a deep love for ourselves that automatically makes us self-centered and selfish. That's why our emotions are geared toward individual experience and, inevitably, individual welfare. It is our only reference point. 

That doesn't mean we're corrupt. It only means we care about ourselves more than we care about anyone else. We tend to admire people whose desire for the improvement of others brings them personal notoriety - Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, Eleanor Roosevelt. Their passion for compassion may render them more pure of heart, but even they cannot live the lives they try to improve. They are merely living their own. 

But let's look at most folks. We say we want equality. We want an egalitarian society, where everyone has their say and the will of the people is enacted without interference from an elite nobility. 

But we don't. 

We don't. Think about it. Communism doesn't work. The French Republic drove them to chaos. These happen because the will of an amorphous, uneducated, or uninterested people can't be trusted either. Like it or not, we look at power as a zero-sum game. If one person has more, that automatically means someone else has less. And we want to be on the side of the more. We tend to ignore that with power comes work and responsibility. Many of us don't want that, either. Look at how many people, even in an election as seemingly important as the last, didn't bother to vote at all. More than 35%. What some people want is a comfortable life determined by someone else, someone smarter, richer, or more advantageously placed. They want a kind of equality but at the same time want to be ruled.

Actually, our government is designed to accomodate both camps. The Senate represents the elite, the few. The House of Representatives represents the many, the commonplace folk. The Presidency, designed to maintain a balance, actually operates on one side or the other to accomplish the agenda of the party in power, but the power of the Presidency lasts only as long as the President remains in office. 

Adams understood that a pure democracy will always be short-lived and the source of its own undoing. We do not have a pure democracy, nor do we really want one. 

A modern Roberspierre would inevitably rise up and those looking for a strong leader would support him. America, after all, has its own aristocracy. Every society does. Actors, sports stars, Musk and Jobs and Gates and Trump. They are our modern aristocracy and we expect them, not us, to get things done. 

John Adams knew this and it wasn't more welcome news then than it is now. Yes, they ate him alive for it, but he thought the truth worth the torture. I would probably not stand as he did in front of a firing squad for it, but as difficult as it is, I welcome the divided government he believed to be essential and look to it as the foundation of the struggle that paves the way forward.

Photo: Farside, Redbubble

Why Baking is Dangerous for Philosophers

I made pumpkin custard for breakfast today. Last week, I bought a good-sized whole pumpkin at the grocery for only 99 cents. At the time, I didn't know what I was going to do with it exactly, but since then, it has become a lovely yeast bread and savory soup. Today, with a couple of cups of cooked pulp still left over, I decided to make custard. It was easy - I had everything already and only took a few minutes courtesy of my handy dandy immersion blender. After mixing everything, I poured the silky pumpkin cream into cups, about 3/4 full.

After about an hour in the oven, this is what I got.

Look at them. Eggs and heat made them rise far above the edge of of their rims into things of true beauty, giving me more out of the oven than I put into it. Intellectually, I know at least part of why this happened. Eggs are leaveners and help baked stuff rise and I also whipped air into the mix, so it becomes a kind of pumpkin souffle. 

 

But I've also been reading The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. Dangerous territory for almost any activity because it's Camus' stage for explaining the absurd - the state in which nothing makes sense after a certain point. The natural world will eventually extend beyond our ability to explain it. Our own reason will collapse when it reaches a certain threshold. When we reach those points, we are suspended over an abyss and have to figure out what to do next.

There are ways out of this, of course. God or magic, for instance. In those places, the absurd doesn't matter so much any more. Of course, there's another way to look at the unexplainable, and that's to start with allowing for it. If we assume from the get-go that we won't be able to figure everything out, that reason only takes us so far so we might as well not depend so heavily on it in the first place, that maybe the Enlightenment didn't do us so big a favor after all, well, life gets a lot more interesting. 

So, this morning, looking at my little pumpkin souffle-custards and in spite of knowing at least some of the science that spawned them, I've decided to yield to the inevitable absurd, to allow the beauty of my custards to be magically granted or God-graced miracles. That way, I avoid all looming contradictions. 

But then again, maybe allowing for the beautifully unexplained just makes me feel special. 

For Those Who Woke Up Disappointed - a Lesson From Rosa

 

The morning after a presidential election in the United States always finds some people unhappy, feeling disenfranchised and unheard, maybe even afraid for what the future will bring. A lot of people woke up that way today, and I get it. It's hard to lose, especially when the stakes seem so high. That's why I want to offer us all something to help put our situation in perspective - a reflection that arose from our new president-elect's first term. I read The Soul of America about six months ago and kept it in my Kindle library, thinking I might need to take another look at it and today, I do. 

Jon Meacham isn't just a historian. He's also something of a philosopher in that he doesn't only examine events. He looks at trends, at how events take root over time, how they take their place as part of a greater whole and, in this book, he doesn't discuss only what happened in history but tries to refocus our eyes on the future based on what we've done in the past. His view showcases the line of human striving that rises persistently from mankind's first caves to today's declarations of freedom. Humans, as it turns out, know we are extraordinary and we will not stop trying to realize it. Whatever is happening today, we try to achieve something better. Sometimes, the run to freedom becomes a crawl under fire, but the trend upward has less to do with who is in power than what is in our hearts.

For those who feel there is less hope today than there was yesterday, well, Meacham differs. We've been here before - as a nation, as people - and we have used adversity to rise. Whoever got elected yesterday did so because they promised more people than their opponent to make things better and people believed them. It remains to be seen what will happen now that the collective voice has been heard. 

Our individual voices, however, even those in the minority, do not have to be silenced. In fact, in this United States, it is sometimes the minority voice that raises the loudest cry.

So, this morning, we have a choice to make. If we have raised a concern for decency, for inclusion, for generosity and the freedoms that go with them, now is the time to show we mean it. Now is the time to extend a hand to help, not a fist to threaten. Now is the time to continue to welcome the stranger and immigrant in whatever way we still can. Now is the time to build whatever bridges are possible. Now is the time to show that when we said we want progress and decency, we meant it. What the government may not want to do, we, as individuals each in our own small sphere, still can. What we do now can inspire boldness in upcoming generations. 

We may not have realized our short term objectives, but the election mattered less than we might have supposed anyway. What does matter is showing the world we are who we've been claiming to be - free and decent. 

All Rosa Parks did was to sit on a bus. Surely we can do at least that much. 

Be Ye Holy - Beyond the Ten Commandments

 The following is a teaching I gave at the First Congregational Church of Rochester on September 29, 2024. I was convinced then, as I am now, that human beings were primarily created not with a sin nature but with a God-nature by virtue of God's acknowledgement that we were created in His own image. We are not made corrupt, not by God nor by any of our own acts. We were made to be glorious.

A few weeks ago Rev. Erkle talked to us about being holy and I have to admit, I gave him a lot of credit. Hardly anyone talks about being holy because it’s a tough subject and afterward, when I asked a bunch of people, some of whom are sitting here today, what they thought what it meant to be holy, they still didn’t really know. They did know that as humans, we sin, which isn’t holy. They knew being holy was hard, and they were frustrated because they also knew that God tells us to do it. Just like He tells us to love Him and love one another and not lie, cheat, or steal, He tells us “Be Ye Holy because I am Holy”. Not try as hard as we can, not be as holy as a saint or as holy as the person we sit next to in church, but to be holy like Him, like God. No wonder we’re confused. It just doesn’t seem to compute. After all, we’re only human, right? But there seems to be a disconnect between human and holy, and if God tells us to do it, there shouldn’t be, should there?

It's the sin thing, I suppose. We think we can’t be holy because we sin, because we’re not perfect. Well, the sin part is true. We sin. But sin isn’t what keeps us from holiness, because holiness isn’t perfection. It’s communion. It’s grabbing onto God. Even though we’re not perfect, we can achieve holiness when we’re devoted to God, not letting go, no matter what. God knows that, as humans, we’re not ever going to be perfect.  After all, He made us. Of course He knows we’re going to mess up, but those slipups, those sins, do not break the connection we have with the God who put us together in the first place. Nothing can. We’re His. Period. He says so. Our baptism says so. We say so with our prayers and with our love for Him and one another. The testimony of our lives says so.

When we first get to know God, all of us are babies before Him and eventually, we learn that the Ten Commandments are a good beginning guide by which to learn to live, but we mature as Christians in the same way we mature as flesh and blood people. When we learn better, we do better and in time are able to follow the Ten commandments more often than not, but they do not make us holy, either.

The Ten Commandments are not enough for us to realize the fullness of what God has for us any more than living only by what we learn in kindergarten will teach us how to fix our car or navigate the internet. Holiness is where we get all of God. We join God through holiness. Don’t say you can’t. That’s not true because God has told us that we can. He says it three times in Leviticus and once in 1Peter: Be Ye Holy because I AM Holy. Be like me. My kingdom is within you. Right now. Today. Because I put it there. Whether you know it or not.

It’s been said that holiness is difficult, that we are inadequate to it when we compare ourselves to God who is perfect holiness. Well, of course it is. Anyone who is learning anything is inadequate to an expert, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be learned. We all have the capacity to be holy because we were made that way, but just like growing older and wiser, it doesn’t come overnight. We discover our holiness in stages, step by step, just like we grow up and God helps us because He wants us to do it. We start like toddlers do – with understanding of what we shouldn’t do – the Ten Commandments, the Thou Shalt nots -but what we’re really after is relationship, an understanding of what fellowship with God looks like.

Holiness isn’t easy, but neither is it complicated and we approach holiness by concentrating not on the Thou Shalt Nots but on the Thou Shalts – the whole landscape of opportunities that show themselves when we go past the basics, when we discover the opportunities to walk beside Christ, to do as He did, to do not only what is right but do what is generous and beautiful. Last week, Steve stood up here and confessed that he’d fallen short of what God would have him do and stated plainly what he needed to do to do better. That is the way we learn holiness. Holiness is unveiling the God in us. It is doing what honors and pleases God even though it can look foolish in the eyes of the world,.

But, we say, like Isaiah and Peter, and Paul, I am sinful! And God says in reply, Duh! I know that! That’s why repentance is so important. We don’t repent because God needs to know we’ve sinned. It’s so that we know. So we admit we sin, admit it out loud, and narrow the rift that separates us from God. Repentance brings us closer to God. It makes us holier. I once heard a Catholic priest perform an adult baptism after which he looked at the congregation and the newly baptized and told them that they would hear that being a good Christian will make their lives happier and easier, but that wasn’t true. As Christians, their lives would become harder, requiring decisions they never had to make before, having to consider not only what their family, friends, and employers expected of them, but what God expects of them. As Christians, our lives do become more complex, but that, the priest said, was okay. Do it anyway, he said. Do it anyway. God says the same thing.

We have a relationship of blood with God – both in creation and through sacrifice – that cannot be erased by our behavior. We belong to God. We are connected forever. All that remains for us to do is to identify ourselves with Him, to lean in, to reveal what in us is like Him, and to be proud of that relationship, to carry it in our bones and blood, to let it shine from our countenance like it did for Moses on Mt. Sinai.

EX 34: 34-35 “when Moses went in before the Lord to speak with him, he took the veil off his face until he came out. And he came out, and spoke to the children of Israel.³⁵ And the children of Israel saw the face of Moses, that the skin of Moses' face shone”  That’s what God looks like on us. It makes us shine.

We were not made condemned wretches or full of unavoidable sin. We were made sons and daughters of God. We were made to be like Christ. God became what we are so that we may be as He is. That is our standard and our inheritance through faith. His eternity is already in our hearts and we cannot change that by our own error. Holiness is about who we are, not what we do. Holiness is not being perfect. It is our identity. It is in our spiritual DNA. As we yearn for more of God, He imparts greater understanding of what holy looks like. It is His eternity in our hearts – the uncreated perfection of Him who existed before the beginning of all things.

So how in the world can we become more holy? He did give us some help. Remember the Beatitudes? These are pictures of what holiness looks like on earth and they are pure Christian dynamite. They explode the common sense and rule-following of earth-focused living and show us what can happen when we focus on God and go beyond how we look to the world, letting those examples of blessedness remake our own inclinations.

The beatitudes deal with the nitty gritty of life. They showcase the humble, the mourners, those who hunger for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers and the persecuted. These, says Jesus, are the blessed. But getting there does not come through just actions. It comes when we align ourselves with God. It comes when we live in His world rather than our own. It goes beyond what we do to how our hearts function. Their focus goes beyond doing something to wanting something. Humble acts do not make us humble. Keeping God front and center makes us humble. Keeping the peace does not make us peaceful. Finding righteousness and safety in God and God alone makes us peaceful. The beatitudes are holiness in action.

All the world is God’s, but the only place in His created universe that He has planted his perfect reflection is in our own hearts. Once we have found God’s goodness in our own souls, we can begin to see it elsewhere. We don’t find holiness in the world, not because the world is unholy but because it’s an incomplete reflection just like we are. Too often, we look for God from the outside in – trying to find Him in the world first – rather than looking for God in ourselves first. He has left His deposit in us by virtue of our creation in Him and when we find it, we will be able, like Moses, to see His face. This is why we look to Jesus. Our belonging in and communion with God through Jesus is salvation – not because we are wretched, but because we are beautiful.

God gave the Ten Commandments as part of His old covenant, part of the old Law. Jesus brought a new covenant, one that went beyond rule following to real communion. He said Himself that He came to fulfill the law, that the law did not stop with Moses and the Ten Commandments. The fulfillment of the law is Christ, the same Christ whose kingdom is love and whose love is planted in each one of us so that we might live in holy communion with Him.

Don’t think you can’t attain holiness because you can’t find it in the world or because you still sometimes sin. Holiness isn’t perfection. Nor does it come from the world or the example of other people or is it withheld because we sometimes sin. What we see as holiness is God in men. Seek holiness where God resides, in your own heart and soul, the one He made like His own. Seek goodness in yourself, in goodness and gentleness and faith, and you will see the face of God, not fear any man, and discover a world the way God originally made it, arrayed in light and mercy.

What I Learned In School

 

This is the text of a message given at the First Congregational Church of Rochester on July 15, 2024, only 11 days after the death of our beloved pastor, Paul Ray. 

We are the Prophets

 This was written several weeks ago and a lot has happened since then. There is no way to forget our communal loss and like Ruth last week, I had to decide whether to change up everything to acknowledge and honor Pastor Paul. As it turns out, I didn’t have to. This message didn’t change much because what Ruth said last week – her challenge regarding keeping alive our heritage of freedom rooted in Christ and passed on to the generations that follow us fit right in with both Independence Day and what Paul left us as his legacy.

 I’m going to start, however, not by talking directly about either of those things, but  by talking instead about gardening.

 In theory, gardening is pretty simple. You poke a seed into the ground and wait. Occasionally that’s enough, but sometimes it isn’t. Often the seed needs more than benign neglect. It needs water, sunshine, and nutrients, not just once, but all along the way until the flower comes, or the tomato, or whatever it is you’re growing.We have to hang out in the garden a lot. If it doesn’t rain, we water the plants. If it gets too cold, we cover them. If bugs show up, we get rid of them. We weed. We get dirty.

 Well, Jesus said the kingdom of God was like a garden, too.

Mark 4: 2-8

. ² He taught them many things by parables, and in his teaching said: ³ “Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed. ⁴ As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. ⁵ Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. ⁶ But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. ⁷ Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. ⁸ Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop, some multiplying thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times.”

 Obviously, because this was a parable, Jesus wasn’t really talking about growing crops. He is illustrating a good example of what He does want us to do, however. He wants us to grow the kingdom of God and we want to do it not only because that’s what God has asked of us, but because we can visualize what a world with more of God in it might look like – a world with more justice and peace and generosity and forbearance. A world of cooperation and caring. A world that loves and where everybody grows in God’s good soil. This is the world Paul Ray saw and tried to show us for many years. So, I want to talk about how we might start working toward that today.

 Many of you know that, in 2022, I went back to school. I started college the first time in 1969, but never finished, went on to live a life but got tired of kicking myself for not finishing college, and decided it was about time I did.

 But I had another reason, too. You see, I’d spent a lifetime growing a faith that would sustain my life, a faith broad enough to provide a bridge over tough times and bright enough to enlighten the good ones. But by the time I approached 70, it felt like that faith had been imprisoned in a box and was pushing against the sides with nowhere else to grow. I kept asking questions and wasn’t getting answers.

 Going to school was a way to escape the box, to step outside faith’s traditional boundaries and look at it not from the inside, but from the outside. To see what we, as Christians, look like to people who don’t think like we do. So, I’ve ended up with a Philosophy degree, but what I really learned is a lot bigger than that. I learned what a world that needs God wants from us, and I learned it not from my curriculum or most of my professors, but from intelligent and thoughtful young people who, it turns out, wanted the same thing I did.

 This is what I learned.

 I learned that today’s young adults are looking for exactly what we are – a life based on what is worthwhile, beautiful, and true – but they don’t know where to look. It’s easy to point a finger at them and say that they can’t find it because they spend too much time on their phones, but we’re not telling them anything they don’t already know. They know they’re losing connection with other people but don’t know how to get it back. They retreat into their phones because they don’t feel safe because their world is moving far faster than they can keep up with. When we’re being honest, we feel it too.  

 But the world is not going to slow down. Nothing is going to disappear the internet or any of the other technology that tugs at us. Today’s adults need technology to function in this world. They can’t drop their phones in the garbage and walk away any more than we will abandon television or cars or live without air conditioning just because our grandmother did.

 

Young people know they are living in a chaotic, runaway world and like fledgling plants, they have been uprooted. I first realized this when I was taking a class about the Protestant Reformation and there was quite a bit of discussion about the Bible. When we were discussing Martin Luther’s attitude about the Old Testament, one of the young people raised her hand and asked what the Old Testament was. She had never heard of it. And she wasn’t the only one. She had not even the basic understanding of the Bible. It’s not that her faith had withered or been stolen – she had absolutely no basis from which to form one. And some of these young people had been raised in the church and they still lacked basic understanding of the Bible and often of God.

 Now, at this point, it’s tempting to say that all we need to do is to bring God back into school and into politics – to make God part of daily life. But that ship, as a result of legislation and societal changes, has sailed. Invite them to church, we think, and that will make all the difference. But it won’t. That’s just like poking a seed into the dirt and walking away. To many of today’s adults, church is a superficial form, a dress people put on every Sunday. It’s rules and dogma – lifeless and rigid. They already have plenty of that. Describing salvation to them simply details another way they have failed. Today’s adults want something that lives and breathes, something they can use and someONE who will take their hand and lead them through the maze, then show them how to get home.

 Paul has often said that we are the only Bible that some people will ever read, and it’s true as far as it goes, but in view of this world’s spiritual poverty, we are often the first image not only of the Bible, but of God, that many people will ever see. We not only have to practice our faith in the world, we have to be God to the world. That means we have to be prophets. In Greek, prophesying doesn’t mean telling the future. It means speaking inspired truth. We are to prophesy, to speak from inspiration, in this case, to speak what is inspired by love.

.I remember who I was in 1969, how we used to say that we never trusted anyone over 30. This generation, the one that came to maturity in the pandemic, doesn’t operate that way. They became adults with an understanding that we need each other. I know this because they told me. I know this because they included me in their world when I took the time to listen. I know this because they demonstrate empathy for their fellow humans above any other value. I know this because not one of them said they aspired to personal wealth. They aspire instead to peace, dignity, and common improvement. Their dreams are different from ours. They know they will probably not be able to afford to buy a house or stay in a single job for 30 years. They know they will probably not be able to rely on a government funded retirement. These young people are being liberated from what we came to understand as the American Dream and they are not afraid.  They are going to dream a new dream and they want help.

 Now we know that the help they need ultimately comes from God, but there’s a danger that goes with that knowledge. The danger is being so comfortable in our own faith that we assume what is so familiar to us is accessible to everyone just as easily, and it isn’t. Remember John the Baptist? He faced the same problem. Remember the warning he gave to complacent Jews before Jesus came? He said this:

 “ do not presume to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our father. ' For I say to you that from these stones God is able to raise up children to Abraham".

John is trying to say that our heritage in the church is not what will spread the gospel. This building will not help spread the gospel for someone who has no starting point from which to understand God. Our world is every bit as clueless about God as was Jesus’ and John’s. We need to do what the disciples did. We have to show them.

 So what do we do when just inviting someone to church doesn’t work anymore? We give them what they know they do value. Time. Attention. We listen. We care. We help. We find a way to meet them where they are rather than wait for them to come to us. We encourage. We listen. We help. Of the many things Paul has taught us, he's taught, and more importantly, showed us how to love one another, how to lead with understanding and with an awareness of our common creation. Everybody has their own story we know nothing about and many are lonely. They are confused. They are afraid. But they are listening when we use the language of love. I know this because they listened to me, a 70+ year old lady among fresh faced 20 year olds. They shared and listened and loved me back.

 It’s a new world and new wine needs new wineskins, but it’s still God’s world and He’s still here to shine the way.  It may not look the same as ours, but we don’t have to do anything extraordinary. Just be who we are. If we’re truly following Christ, the words we speak will be inspired by Him. That’s all he wants from us. To follow and imitate Him. This is the goodness we all loved so much about Paul. When we heard him, he sounded like Jesus. In the end, everyone who echoes Christ is a prophet.

 It’s not easy and we might feel like we’re living in a kind of a desert sometimes, but God showed Ezekiel what He can do with a desert:

The hand of the Lord was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. ² He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. ³ He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”

I said, “Sovereign Lord, you alone know.”

⁴ Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! ⁵ This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath^[a] enter you, and you will come to life. ⁶ I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.’”

⁷ So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. ⁸ I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them.

⁹ Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’” ¹⁰ So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army.

¹¹ Then he said to me: “Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.’ ¹² Therefore prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel. ¹³ Then you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. ¹⁴ I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done it, declares the Lord.’”

 God wants us to be prophets. Like modern versions of John the Baptist or the first apostles, but leading with love. If we do this, we won’t ever have to invite anyone into God’s family. They will come because we show them who God is and they will want Him for themselves. If they need a church they will find one because of the longing in their hearts. God, who raises children from stones and makes bones live, will show them.

 I want to leave you with this:

David, when he wrote psalm 27, bemoaned the evil and confusion all around him. He felt it acutely, just like we do, and didn’t know how it would ever get better, but ended saying, “I am confident of this – I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” This is the goodness Paul Ray saw in the world and its people. This world, just the way it is, is God’s land of the living and we are to both experience and impart its goodness.

 “Look”, God says, “I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” The new thing God brings wears the face of this new generation and there are parts for us all to play. May we, as those who prophesy about His goodness, spend our time hanging out in God’s garden with the ones who will come after us and in the process, not only perceive what He is doing, but engage in bringing about the new world He is raising up through them.

 Amen.

Our Lady, Our Promise

 A couple of weeks ago, I sailed across the North Atlantic from England. It was the end off a month-long adventure that included a study-abroad experience called Royals and Rebels that completed my requirements for a bachelor's degree at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, followed by a couple of days in Paris, part of which was spent learning some new cooking techniques, and a week on the Queen Mary 2, which treated me to seven days of nothing by ocean. But when people ask me my takeaway from it all, the first thing on my mind was this - sailing into New York Harbor on a sparkling Spring morning.

After having spent a month studying and talking to Brits about our relative political woes and hypothesizing their contradictions and solutions....well....this. There were nearly 2000 guests on board ship that day, and not since the sailaway party had they all been in one place at the same time until that morning. The top decks were shoulder-to-shoulder as we approached the harbor and all eyes trained on the lady who greeted us on behalf of the United States of America. My companions were citizens of dozens of countries from all over the world, but an unprompted hush came over them all as we looked at her shining in the sun.

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, 

the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. 

Send these, your homeless tempest-tossed, to me. 

I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

Everyone there, even if they didn't know the words inscribed under that raised lamp, knew what she stood for. There we were, a ship peopled with privileged humanity from almost every continent, remembering a French gift to an American people who had done something no one had ever done before and are still trying to figure out how to succeed in it over the long haul.

The morning before, a very distinguished British gentleman had challenged me with this: he encouraged me to picture our country twenty or fifty years from now after we, having relaxed our borders, lived in a land taken over from people from everywhere else. Then I saw that he wasn't talking about us, the United States, but about Britain. England, after having been master of the world and maintaining a stranglehold over, in particular, India, is now a startlingly cosmopolitan nation, with a quarter million Indian immigrants settling there in 2023 alone. He was looking around at what he saw in his own country, didn't like it, and assumed we wouldn't either. 

But there was something that distressed gentleman didn't understand. The UK rests on its tradition and history, one rooted in centuries of kings and queens stretching back in traceable lines. This country does not. The United States is what people from other places made it. 

My grandparents, all of them, made a journey across the ocean similar to mine. They sailed into that same harbor, saw that same monument to hope, and made a life here. A good one. And I'm not the only one. Everyone I know is descended from immigrants. It is immigrants who made this country, ones who trusted the promise made by the monument. Consequently, change may not be that by which the United Kingdom identifies itself, but it is at the root of who we in the U.S. are. 

It's not possible for a people from a foreign country who settles here with the intent to share in our heritage of freedom to "take over". They simply become the latest in the unbroken chain, not of kings and queens, but of people who have a dream for something better. Will we change as a nation because we have welcomed them? Of course, but that, too, is who we are. It's our responsibility to recognize ourselves in them, because a striving toward hope is something we share. 

This is the Fourth of July, a time to celebrate independence from tyranny. That, too, is who we are, even when the tyranny comes from within. As long as this great lady stands at the entrance to our nation, we have a promise to keep to the world and there is a world out there counting on it. 

Photo by the author