What Really Matters: Connection

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – 11/27/22

What Really Matters: Who Your People Are – Matt. 1: 1-17

Now that the leaves have left the trees it’s easier to see the sunset out of the western facing windows of my home. And on morning walks through the neighborhood, I am noticing all manner of things that must have been there all summer but until now were obscured by the leaves. Now I can see the homes of squirrels, the nests of birds, forgotten kites, and a big hive of hornets not far from my favorite picnic spot. 

It’s not just the coming winter that can reveal things otherwise hidden. Many of us have experienced a number of major life stressors that have thrown into stark relief the gifts and challenges before us that we may have otherwise been able to ignore. I know that those early lockdown days of the pandemic did that for many of us. When our schedules stopped and so many of our normal supports were taken away. What was it that was revealed to us then? Were there uncomfortable truths we were forced to face? Were there precious gifts we realized we had taken for granted? What did we notice about what really matters to us?

To the writer of the Gospel of Matthew, what really seems to matter is who your people are. This scripture text doesn’t always get read in church. It doesn’t have a lot of juicy narrative for preachers to sermonize on or church-goers to relate to. But Matthew includes it–even starts the Gospel with it. So, the writer must have deemed this list of Jesus’ ancestors to be of imminent importance.

According to Matthew scholar and Highland Avenue member Rick Gardner in his new Covenant Bible Study we have the privilege of sharing together this season in Sunday School, “the author of the first Gospel…inhabited a culture in which genealogies were important. …Among their various functions genealogies could serve to establish the extent of kinship, an important source of identity in a tribal society. They could also indicate whether someone had the lineage required to hold a particular office, such as king or priest.” For the writer of Matthew, there was no other way to reveal who this Jesus really was.

Although I haven’t engaged in it very deeply myself, I’ve noticed an interest in genealogies to be trending these days.  Indeed, ancestry interest seems to be big business with a well-advertised research service you can subscribe to for an annual fee and a field of popular television shows about genealogy, including Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.—a show that thrives on introducing famous people to surprising news about their ancestors. Viewers are often treated to a few moments of introspection from the celebrities in focus as they seek to assimilate any new information about their heritage into their own stories about what and who makes them who they are.

In the Gospel of Matthew, the genealogy of Jesus has some surprising characters in it, too. There’s some expected and impressive male ancestors listed there like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Jesse, David, and Solomon. But there are also some women who make the list–women who were the victims of violence or who engaged in scandalous activities but who nonetheless became heroines in the story of Judaism. Come to think of it, some of the male ancestors on that list had their own well-known scandals, suffering, and shortcomings. But while the men are of unquestionable Jewish heritage, the women are all outsiders.

For a Gospel that ends with an admonition from Jesus to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,” I think it’s safe to assume that these outsider women are not slipped into Jesus’ genealogy accidentally. Rather, they show up on this list of ancestors by design.

The genealogy of Jesus also doesn’t seem to shy away from scandal, listing Bathsheba as simply the wife of Uriah and in doing so, underlining the cruel abuses of power by King David. There’s no purity being sought in this lineage. There’s no preoccupation with insider blood or blameless conduct. For better or worse, this is the earthly ancestry to which Jesus will be born. Or, it’s the line of Joseph at least, the man who will adopt him, despite the scandalous circumstances of Mary’s pregnancy.

There’s a story I love that goes around the internet every year at this time. It’s the story of an unrelated white woman and black man who have had Thanksgiving dinner together every year for the past seven years. They met by accident. Wanda Dench was trying to text her grandson an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner. Unbeknownst to her, he had a new number. And a stranger received the text meant for her grandson.

Jamal Hinton texted back, “You’re not my grandma. Can I still get a plate though?”

She answered: “Of course. Grandmas feed everyone!” That was 2016 and the two previous strangers have knit their families together every year since. They’ve adopted each other in a way that gives me and so many others hope for our connection to each other.[1]

The good news of God’s love for the world as known in Jesus is not just good news to a particular group or to people who behave a certain way. It’s good news for all of us. Because that means we, too, are adopted into the people of God. In Jesus, we are all connected to God, and we are all connected to each other. We are God’s people. We are each other’s people, too.

In that unbreakable connection we can find hope. In that unbreakable connection we can live by the star of what really matters: the never ending love of God. 

There’s one more little detail in today’s scripture passage. A few odd verses about the number of generations. Matthew tells us: “So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations; and from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah, fourteen generations.”

This might not mean a lot to you or me. But for the writer of Matthew and his original audience, the number fourteen meant completion. It meant Jesus had been born in the fullness of time. The time was just right for him to be born.

The time is just right for us, too.

The time is just right for us to welcome the birth of Christ once again into our hearts, our homes, our families, our world, and the family of humanity, so that we will learn from all that has been revealed to us and find the holy hope, peace, joy, and love of being the family of God unbreakably connected to each other and to all that really matters.                                                                    

May it be so. Amen.

1] https://theblackwallsttimes.com/2022/11/23/black-man-white-grandma-plan-to-share-7th-thanksgiving-dinner/

Have We Seen the Lord?

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – November 6, 2022

Have We Seen the Lord? – John 20: 19-22

I feel like most days in the Midwest are windy. I don’t know if that’s scientifically accurate, but it’s the perception that I have after a full decade of Midwestern life. In this small city outside what’s affectionately known as “The Windy City,” I have basically given up on umbrellas, since they’re as like to become wind sails in a rainstorm as to keep any water off your head.

 The wind is tough to take in the dead of winter when it’s already below zero. But on hot summer days, I am a fan of the wind. I am a fan of the cool relief it offers. I am a fan of the smells and sounds it carries from backyard barbecues filled with neighborhood laughter.

 On days like those, it is easy for me to think of the wind as the very breath of Creation, moving in and out of the lungs of our planet. On days like those, I remember how God breathed life into the nostrils of the first humans, and how in today’s story Jesus breathed on the disciples gathered in that upper room, in order to give them the Holy Spirit.

He tells them “Peace be with you. As my Father sends me, so I send you.” And then he breathes the Holy Spirit on them. Rather than the spread of an unwanted viral-laden particulate, this breathing close to others is a way of sharing something holy.

Those disciples had been cowering, fearful, behind a locked door. Now they are filled with the Holy Spirit as they proclaim, “We have seen the Lord!”

Before this pandemic, I, for one, did not fully appreciate how sacred it can be to share air space with someone else. Throughout this strange time we have lived through, it has become clear to me that every shared breath is in essence a measure of trust, a possible point of negotiation, and a precious gift.

The air Jesus breathed with his disciples was decidedly holy, tender, and compassionate. Notice how, even though everyone in the room had abandoned him and Peter had denied him, Jesus does not berate them. He sets them at peace. He forgives them, and he fills them with the Holy Spirit that they might share it with others.

This risen Christ, in all his physically resurrected glory, resurrects his relationship with his disciples and he resurrects the disciples’ ministry to the world. He breathes on them and fills them with the Holy Spirit so that they may go forth to transform the world.

The wind is a powerful force that we cannot see but like God it has an energy that moves and changes people and landscapes. We don’t need to see the wind to understand its power. We can notice an uprooted tree across a busy city street or watch the massive arms of wind turbines swinging and know that the wind is a substantial force capable of providing energy and power.

In the same way, we see God at work in the world loving the lost, suffering, and broken-hearted, standing up for the least of these, blessing all that is broken, and forgiving the unforgivable. We see it in God’s unstoppable love and grace that goes far beyond the work of humans, and we see it also through the acts of modern day disciples.

Have we seen the Lord? Have we seen the body of the risen Christ?        

I know I have. I have seen the body of the risen Christ in healthcare workers, in teachers, in small businesses owners, and in other essential workers who found a way to persevere with as much kindness and compassion as possible through an exhausting pandemic.

I know I have seen the risen Christ in the kind acts of folks who despite the world still being understaffed, refuse to be unkind to the folks who have shown up to work on a given day.

I know I have seen the risen Christ in the members of this church who have tried to find ways to persevere with each other despite the conditions we face and the disagreements between us about how to face them.

I have seen the risen Christ, too, in all of us who needed to take a break from certain responsibilities or relationships in order to show mercy to ourselves and to others.

The body of the risen Christ has holes in this chapter of John. It’s scarred and bruised and messy. Its new life won’t be the same as its old life but it is still the body of Christ. It is still flesh that God has blessed and sent into the world to witness to love and to life. 

Lots of us would like to pretend everything’s okay now. But for most of us it's not. Our lives are still being affected by the pandemic even if it's just in the exhaustion of having lived through the last few years. Maybe we feel bruised and more hole-filled than holy lots of days. How is it we will catch our breath? How is it we can support each other as we find ways to do so?

Because that’s still you, church. Maybe bruised and hole-filled in certain ways but still entirely holy. Through pandemic and culture change and losses all our own. That’s still you. That’s still us. We are the body of Christ, the inheritors of the gift of Holy Spirit-laden breath shared with those early disciples.

What fresh, Spirit-bearing wind do we yearn for these days?

How will we share a breath of fresh air with each other in life-giving acts of love, forgiveness, and mercy that all may proclaim, “We have seen the Lord!” and know it to be true?                                       

May it be so. Amen.

Reflection on the World Council of Churches 2022 Theme - written by Cheryl Brumbaugh-Cayford

Scripture: John 4:1-15

Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, “Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John” (although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized), he left Judea and started back to Galilee. But he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.

A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

 Children’s time: Loving our differences

Today we’re going to talk about loving our differences. I’ve got a couple of questions for us to think about.

First, who here has sisters or brothers or step sisters or step brothers or cousins or other people in your family that you like to hang out with? Or who here has friends that you like to spend time with?

Second, are those people all the same as each other and are they the same as you?

So what are the differences that you like about them?

Here’s my own answer to that question: my brother Steve likes to do long distance bicycling and has done long distance walking trips. I don’t do long distance bicycling, and my longest walks are maybe just a couple of miles at most. But I love seeing my brother’s photos and videos of his long-distance bicycle and walking trips – they make me feel like I’m going along with him to all sorts of interesting places, and when I look at the photos and videos he sends from those trips, I feel like I’m also walking along or biking along through those beautiful landscapes. My brother Steve is really different from me in many ways, but I really appreciate how his differences can make my life better and more interesting.

So here’s a challenge for us this week: think about one person you like, who is different from you in some way, whose differences make your own life better and more interesting. And whenever you think of that person this week, say a “thank you” prayer to God for them. Please pray with me: Dear God, thank you for how all these different people are all your children. Thank you for each person. Amen.

Sermon/meditation:

“Christ’s love moves the world to reconciliation and unity.” That was the theme of the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches, WCC for short, held in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany, on Aug. 31 to Sept. 8. I attended as part of the Church of the Brethren delegation, in the role of observer and reporter.

The World Council of Churches holds an assembly every 8 or so years. At this assembly, there were close to 4,000 people in attendance, including delegations from the 352 member communions, plus a wide variety of observers and guests, and local hosts, and young adult “stewards” or volunteers who served as assistants, among others. This assembly is thought to have been the most diverse Christian gathering ever held.

There were critical conversations held, and crucial work done during the business sessions. I’d highlight as most crucial the statement on climate change, called “Living Planet: Seeking a Just and Sustainable Global Community,” which calls for the churches worldwide to take immediate action on the climate. This statement and the other public statements that were adopted are published on the World Council of Churches website, please do search them out.

Among the important conversations were discussions of inequities facing several groups of people in the churches and in society, and the need to include them in leadership. The groups receiving focused attention were indigenous people, people with disabilities, and youth and young adults. There also was concern for a new and just relationship between women and men. Pre-assembly meetings were held on each of these concerns.

Amid the crucial conversations and critical work, what really grabbed and held my attention was the diversity of this gathering. I experienced the assembly as a uniquely diverse, egalitarian, and respectful event, more welcoming of and celebrative of human differences and variety than I’ve experienced anywhere else.

The leadership was remarkable in this regard. The moderator, Agnes Abuom from Kenya in East Africa, set the tone of gentleness and affirmation and welcome for each person. Witnessing her in leadership, seated at the head table, I was surprised by my own visceral reaction of delight. In reality, when do we ever see an African woman at top levels of leadership in our world? It was an incredibly moving experience for me. There she was, flanked by a white American woman bishop and male leaders from Christian Orthodox bodies serving as her vice moderators - a remarkable statement of radical welcome in and of itself.

The assembly progressed through some eight days of morning and evening prayer services, plenary sessions, business sessions, workshops, Bible studies, small group meetings of various churches including the Historic Peace Churches – which I sat in on, plus meals eaten together onsite, and weekend excursions to see the work of the churches of the area. Through those eight days, the meaning of two of the words in the theme statement – “reconciliation” and “unity” - were enlarged and expanded for me. Reconciliation and unity became both more complex and more relatable, less cut and dried, less certain, and more to be desired.

In the Church of the Brethren I fear that, too often, reconciliation is thought of as a process in which people arrive at some kind of working relationship despite their differences. And unity is assumed to be a state in which different groups become the same. 

As the assembly progressed, it became clear that I needed to be open to new definitions of these words. Reconciliation may be more real as it welcomes differences and divisions and disagreements. I saw people’s differences being respected and valued and called forward in discussions. The whole point of what was called “ecumenical conversation” was to speak with others who worship and follow Christ differently, in order to gain more understanding and respect for those differences.

That’s what I saw moderator Agnes Abuom doing from the head table – not always perfectly, of course, because she did make some mistakes – but with real intention and grace. As people came to the microphones to speak during the business sessions, which included extremely difficult and contentious topics, like the situation in Israel and Palestine, she spoke affirmingly and respectfully even to those who were antagonistic or angry.

The WCC uses a consensus model of decisionmaking, in which delegates hold up orange cards to show warmth toward, or agreement with a statement or proposal, or blue cards to show coolness or disagreement. The moderator repeatedly and actively called those who held up blue cards to come to the microphone to speak, or as she put it, to “make an intervention.” Even as the wording of statements was worked over by the delegate body, it was clear that the leadership would take into account both the things that made it into those statements and the disagreements as guidance for moving forward. The decisions taken during that week and a half were in a way signposts and indicators, and not ends in themselves. It was said several times that without different points of view, and even disagreement, good decisions cannot be made.

One of the most impressive instances of work at reconciliation was the inclusion of a delegation from the Russian Orthodox Church – which is a longterm member communion of the WCC – and a delegation from the churches in the Ukraine including the Ukrainian Orthodox Church – which is now applying for membership. At the meetings of the peace churches, people wondered if there were behind-the-scenes conversations going on between the Russian and the Ukrainian delegations. I found out from a WCC staff member that yes, those conversations were going on away from the public eye. The assembly was an opportunity for Russians and Ukrainians to speak together out of sight of their respective governments and politicians. I don’t think we’ll ever know more about those conversations. But here are the simple successes: the Russian Orthodox Church actually sent a delegation; that delegation was not thrown out of the assembly – which some people had been calling for; a Ukrainian delegation also attended; Ukrainian church leaders were given opportunities to speak and tell their stories. These are successes. Can we call it reconciliation? Probably not...but that’s a question worth thinking about: how far down the path toward the goal is considered reconciliation, do we have to arrive at the conclusion? Or is it a pilgrimage, which is one of the favorite words at the WCC these days. If we participate side by side in the body of Christ, each received with respect, each expressing and living out differences.

In our usual understanding of how things work, reconciliation moves toward unity. But what does unity mean, if reconciliation requires respect for and the expression of difference? Does unity subsume our differences? Or do our differences continue to be part of who we are when unity is attained in the body of Christ?

One of the Bible stories used in the assembly prayer services was the story that Chris read for us this morning, the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well. I began to wonder if my understanding of that story has been too simplistic. I’d always thought that it was a choice Jesus made - because of God’s love for all people – to stop in Samaria on his way through, and there happening to meet the woman at the well. But what if it wasn’t a choice but a necessity? In order to fulfill Jesus’ role as reconciler between God and humanity, was seeking out differences required? Did Jesus have to hang out with people whose differences made his own life better and more interesting? Because that’s what reconciliation means?

The Archbishop of Canterbury was one of the world leaders at the assembly. In his remarks to the last plenary, he noted that this is a time of unparalleled world crisis, with climate change as the top threat among many,  including renewed threat of nuclear war, the migrant crisis, and more. Great dangers face us, he said, but “we find in this time of crisis the grace of God and the grace of each other.... We are to be a people of harmony across the differences.” He added two layers to what ecumenism means, ecumenism being the word for Christians relating across their divisions: “We live amidst the ecumenism of suffering,” and “God has brought us together in the ecumenism of service.... The luxurious expense of well-practiced Christian division is no longer affordable.”

Perhaps, in the end, Christian unity is simply the harmony of serving God together across our differences, sharing in suffering as we recognize our differences, and, I would add, joyfully celebrating our differences.

The joyful spirit of the WCC Assembly is what I’d like to leave you with this morning – as Josh plays the video of the closing song allow yourself to feel the joy! The song is by an Argentinian composer, written on the theme of the assembly, “Christ’s love moves the world to reconciliation and unity.”

Breathing In, Breathing Out: God’s Gift of Life

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – October 16, 2022

Breathing In, Breathing Out: God’s Gift of Life – Isaiah 42: 5-10

Today’s scripture passage comes from Isaiah chapter 42 and is often grouped with other chapters in Isaiah titled the Servant Songs. If we begin with Isaiah 42 verse 1 we read, “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.”

In the verses we read today, the servant is called in righteousness to be a covenant or promise between God and the people and to be a “light to the nations.” Readers and hearers may then naturally wonder, who exactly is God talking about? Who is this servant set to do such work? For centuries, some Christians have made the case that these songs are referring to Jesus, as the promised Messiah and a servant-leader who makes a new covenant between God and people.  

Today’s passage comes from the portion of Isaiah scholars sometimes call Second Isaiah, because it was likely written in the time period when the conquered ancient Israelite elites living in Babylon were being allowed to go home and rebuild their country and culture. Hearers then, like many Jewish believers today, may have understood the servant to be the people of Israel or the prophet Isaiah himself.

My both/and thinking wonders why those interpretations can’t all have degrees of truth. And, my literary background lifts up one other possibility, because when I was being taught how to read something that gave an ambiguous descriptor or title but no name, I was taught that may mean that the writer is inviting the reader to understand this role as an archetype we may fill in part or in whole. In other words, when there’s a generic name given, we might get a lot out of wondering if the writer is talking about us.   

They’re kind of lofty words here in Isaiah 42 that describe the servant. I would love to say I’m one in whom God’s “soul delights” and who will “faithfully bring forth justice.” But I know that I sometimes fail to do all I can in that respect, although God mysteriously delights in me anyway.

Having read some other parts of the Bible, where God calls even faulty people to great service, I’m certainly not willing to rule out that the divine voice in this chapter could be talking about me and about you, though we may like to answer, who me?

If we hearers are at least partially implicated in this call to be one who serves the glory of God and our neighbors’ good, maybe it has less to do with our high and mightiness and more to do with God’s great power to work through us despite our very human faults and foibles. 

After all, Isaiah reminds us God is the supremely powerful one who

 “created the heavens and stretched them out

[God] spread out the earth and what comes from it,

[God] gives breath to the people upon it

And spirit to those who walk in it” (42: 5).

In my house we have ongoing conversations about how this understanding of God as Creator jibes or doesn’t with what science tells us about the beginnings of the universe. That conversation could be a live one among us here, too. If we were to turn to our neighbors, we may find some of us are very committed to reading the Creation story quite literally. Others will not be at all willing to entertain the idea that the universe was created in any way other than the story science gives us about the Big Bang. Still others of us might find ourselves blending these ideas in ways that honor both the how of science and the what of all it means in Genesis.

However we understand this power that animates the universe, whether it is the flow of ions of energy or the supernatural power of God or all of the above, there is an undeniable flow of energy that shimmers through and beyond us all. Weather flows across the continents. Water runs downstream to the sea. And humans take, eat, and share food that sustains our energy for living. Our human lungs even participate in this energy flow with trees–said to be the lungs of our planet–as we exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide. It is all part of the flow, what Isaiah describes as the God-given breath and spirit of living. We breathe in. We breathe out, and we breathe in again God’s gift of life in a never ending flow.

Now when rivers stop flowing, the water stagnates and grows bacteria. When the weather stops moving, the drought comes or the wind ceases to blow the sailboat home. When we humans take ourselves out of the flow of energy, it is detrimental to our health. Eating nothing but the same thing will not keep us as well as we can be. We can’t keep breathing the same air or we’ll use up all the oxygen. Social isolation is found to be more dangerous for our long-term health than smoking a pack of cigarettes. There are times when we may need to do it but permanently taking ourselves out of the flow of nutrients, air, or social connection will not serve our well-being. We humans are made to flow.

The divine voice speaks in this chapter telling us, “I am the Lord, that is my name.” The first time God gives God’s name to someone in the Old Testament, it is to Moses in Exodus chapter 3 at the burning bush. God tells Moses, “I am who I am”, but I have told this church before how I love the interpretation that those same letters, along with I am who I am, could also be translated as I have been who I have been and I will be who I will be, suggesting that God exists, has existed, and will exist as if God is outside of our flow of time all together or exists on a wholly different timetable from our mere human lives.

I used to think of eternal life as something that happened when I died, but now I think about eternal life as a flowing stream upon which I am a mere but precious wave or ripple. That one little ripple isn’t very powerful, but God’s stream of eternal life is an unstoppable force.        

What if that’s what it means to be a servant like the one called in today’s scripture? What if it means being a good steward of our one little ripple, so that the power of the holy stream of eternal, God-given life can flow into and through us even in small ways?

It’s tempting sometimes to want to close in and ball ourselves up. We may think what we have to share is not enough to make a difference. We may know that opening ourselves up enough to share makes us in some ways vulnerable. I hear that, and I also believe that when we share our time, energy, and gifts, we can joyfully experience that holy God-given flow of life.

We don’t have to be all powerful. We don’t have to share everything or share everything all at once or share so much it hurts. We can simply share what we have to share and in doing so we can serve the glory of God and our neighbor’s good in powerful ways. We can trust that our sharing will be met by others’ sharing and that God will work through our open hearts and hands.

I know it happens because I have seen what you can do together, church, when you each share simply what you have to share. You can build a community where for more than 100 years people have gathered on a Sunday morning to praise God and hold each other up. You can change here-and-now lives with the power of a listening ear, holy prayer, and loving action. You can feed hundreds of people more than a thousand pounds of food every month for more than 30 years.

This is what can happen when you share what you have to share. This is what flows from your open and generous sharing one household, one person, one year, one month, one day at a time. 

One little bucket will not put out a house fire. But before there were high-tech fire trucks and fire hydrants there was something called a bucket brigade. Bucket brigades are still in use the world over where large machines are unavailable or cannot otherwise operate. If you’ve never participated in one, it’s a long line of people who are essentially an assembly line passing buckets to more efficiently move water or objects from one place to another.

A house fire will not have been put out by one bucket alone. But all those buckets poured in succession, may quench the flame. No one person can be a bucket brigade by themself, but a line of people can build a steady, saving stream that works the magic of water to stop fire.

So, too, we join together in sharing our time, our energy, and our gifts, trusting that God will use our faithful, generous service to continue that holy flow of life.

May it be so. Amen.

Healing Mercies and Hallelujahs

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – October 9, 2022

Healing Mercies and Hallelujahs – Luke 17: 11-19

 There are really only three prayers we need, writes the foul-mouthed modern Christian mystic, Anne Lamott. And they are: Help, Thanks, and Wow. It may not be the words they use, but in today’s story, I hear the lepers cry out a prayer for help.

On its face, today’s scripture story may be a simple, charming one. While on a journey to Jerusalem, Jesus came upon some lepers and healed them. One, a Samaritan, even came back to say thank you. But for those of us who pick up the Bible asking who and what is God, and how are we to live, this story may be troubling.

For there are plenty of us who live with chronic disease, a terminal illness, a persistent depression, a form of disability, or the challenges of aging. We’d like to be made well. We’d like to go skipping off to the priests with good news. If his faith made the Samaritan well, then what about us? Can’t God hear our fervent prayers for help? Isn’t our faith enough?  This story may be enough to make a person angry or to lead us to despair. Why can’t we and the people we love be as lucky as the lepers in this story? Is there something we have done to deserve our plight or to not deserve healing? For some of us, it’s hard not to go there.

The ancient Israelites struggled hard with that question, too. Lepers, themselves, were commonly believed to have angered God somehow. What’s more there was a concern that God’s judgment might be leveled against those with whom the lepers associated. So, according to the socio-religious law as recorded in Numbers and Leviticus, “any person with a leprous disease was required to live ‘outside the camp,’ and cry out ‘unclean, unclean,’ whenever anyone approached. If a leper were fortunate enough to recover, a priest had to certify that the person was clean before he or she could return to the community.”[1]

I can’t imagine that in my isolation from my loved ones it would help me get any better any faster by contemplating what I must have done to deserve this disease. But that sounds very much like the plight of the lepers in today’s story who greet Jesus outside the village and keep their distance.

I find it odd that Jesus doesn’t use any medical tests or ointments or even healing touch with these folks. He just says, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” That’s all it takes to make them clean. Maybe it’s Jesus’s miraculous power that does it. Maybe it’s that they were never actually sick but rather unfairly outcast by some priests abusing their authority, and that troublemaker Jesus is calling their bluff. I wasn’t there, but even if I had been, I’m not sure it’s anything I’d ever truly understand, as a mere, finite human being.

I’d like to be able to explain suffering. I’d like to tell the folks with whom I visit that there’s reason and a purpose for their suffering. I know folks who do, and I know folks who find that encouraging. But I don’t tend to find that encouraging. It doesn’t really work for me.

It seems to me that bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people, and all of us are a messy mix of good and bad. I certainly can’t figure out who deserves what. And at this point, I think it’s because deserving ain’t got nothing to do with it.

In her book, Help. Thanks. Wow., Anne Lamott, offers a similar take on suffering. “Human lives are hard,” she writes, “even those of health and privilege, and [they] don’t make much sense.”

Lamott writes, “This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horse[pucky]. God tells Job, who wants an explanation for all his troubles, ‘You wouldn’t understand.’"[2] 

Maybe that’s not a source of obvious comfort to everyone here. But I find it comforting, because I have come to believe that suffering is like the weather. I’m not talking about climate change. I’m talking about the weather. I’m talking about naturally occurring conditions that are largely beyond our human control. Yes, we can take steps to put ourselves in the way of more favorable conditions. But try as we might, our human efforts will not stop suffering from coming our way.

I have known top athletes who have died of heart attacks. And I have known pack-a-day smokers who have lived well past the age of 100. I have known PTO president mothers of three who have died in their prime, and I have known child abusers who have lived to a ripe old age. We can’t always count on some kind of medical or ethical math to tell us how many years we get or of what quality those years will be.

So, let me say it again in my worst grammar so that you know I mean it, deserving ain’t got nothing to do with it. We cannot control the weather, and we can never fully control our suffering. So, let’s not make it any worse by telling ourselves we deserve it or by telling someone else they deserve it or by telling ourselves–or others–we really shouldn’t be suffering when we just are.

Instead, we can try dealing bravely with the conditions before us, trusting that through the love of God as known in Jesus we are being made well in one mysterious, miraculous way or another. The word “well” that Jesus uses in today’s passage can mean healed, but it could also be translated as made whole, saved, or delivered. 

Me? My suffering most often has taken the form of insomnia, anxiety, and panic attacks. You don’t need to pity me. I know it could be better. I know it could be worse. These are just the conditions I have to deal with.

I have not yet found it helpful to berate myself for not being asleep. What seems to be much more helpful is to try to accept that I’m still awake, but I’m also still loved. And though it doesn’t necessarily allow me to sleep, it allows my spirit to experience a greater sense of wholeness, ease, and rest. At least, it doesn’t make it any worse. I don’t know if that sounds like very much to you, but to me, that is a mysterious medicine and healing mercy on the level of the miraculous.

Jesus tells the leper, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.” Maybe that doesn’t mean, if we just had enough faith we wouldn’t suffer. Maybe it means that even when we suffer, we can trust we’re still loved, and that’s how the miracle gets in, if we let it, through the teeny-tiny cracks in our armor–cracks we might call faith. 

I think that’s the only way I could find myself running back to Jesus, giving thanks and praising God like the Samaritan. If I knew that it’s God’s love that makes me well in a way that goes far beyond my persistent suffering.

One thing I will say about suffering is it can have a funny kinship to gratitude. It doesn’t have to. Sometimes, if I get a cold or have a flat tire or whatever, I just get angry, because it’s getting in the way of my plans. I take for granted that things will go as I expect and that my life will have a certain level of ease–I feel entitled to it. But sometimes, I get over a cold or a stranger helps me fix my tire or whatever it is, and I am moved to tears of gratitude. Like, how have I never realized how beautiful the sun can be in the fall? And, isn’t walking around the block a miracle? And, how is it that even in our oft-maligned nowadays a stranger will still stop to help fix a tire?

In Help. Thanks. Wow, Anne Lamott writes about praying for a friend’s daughter, Angie, who has young children and a diagnosis of aggressive lung cancer. Lamott imagines the whole family held in healing light. She prays for them “to get their miracle but she writes, too, about wishing she had a magic wand or even better that God had a magic wand.

“I’ve never seen evidence of it,” she writes. “But…I have seen miracles, although they always take too long to make themselves known, if you ask me… I have seen many people survive unsurvivable losses, and seen them experience happiness again. How is this possible? Love flowed to them from their closest people, and from their community, surrounded them, sat with them, held them, fed them, swept their floors… I know Angie and her mother will get a miracle, although it may not be the one they want–the one we pray for, in which the doctors break the grip of the cancer and help Angie live. But the family will come through, even if Angie dies. The little ones will need their grandma on board. Time will pass. Death will not be the end of the story.”

Whether it comes in sighs, tears, or angry curses, when we’re honest we too, can cry out a prayer of help to God. When our faith in persistent love in the face of persistent suffering brings us merciful, holy healing, may we too be moved to prayers of thanks.

When we catch our breath at the miracle that is our living and our loving, may the prayer rise from our lips, too:

Wow. Hallelujah. Amen.

[1] The Gospel According to Luke. New Interpreters Bible Commentary, 325.       

[2] Anne Lamott. Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers. (Riverhead Books: New York, 2012), 24. 

Being Ready

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – August 7, 2022

Being Ready – Luke 12: 32-40

During those early months of the pandemic my computer began sending me messages. They would pop up when I opened my computer and let me know it was time for an update. “When would I like to update and restart?” it would ask. Day after day, week after week, I hit “remind me tomorrow.” Then I would do it again tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. I was too busy for an update. I feared unplugging and letting my computer restart. What if I missed something or lost something? I just didn’t feel like I had the time.

Well, it turns out, computers like bodies will eventually make the time. One Sunday morning, I logged onto Zoom worship with many of you–I don’t remember which morning it was or if any of you remember but–just as I was formally starting worship my computer went blue, logged out, updated, and restarted. It seems it had had enough. I was forced to make the time. And I was humbly reminded that being ready is often undermined by being worried.

Today’s scripture selection ends ominously: “‘But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.’”

This message was likely meant to wake up complacent hearers in Jesus’s day and in the days that came after when followers who had once expected Jesus’s imminent return were beginning to wonder if he was ever coming back. Perhaps it can serve that purpose for us today, too. At its best it may be able to wake us up, update, and restart us in the places we have grown sleepy and complacent.

Out of balance though, I fear this text may set us unnecessarily on edge. Those of us given to worry, may find this text one more piece of kindling for our anxiety fire, which may already be piled high with the news of the day and the uncertainty of life. Yet, as many times as Jesus and the angels tell disciples to not be afraid in the Gospel of Luke, I feel confident in saying the main take away of this passage would not be best understood as “be afraid” or “be worried.” Rather, the message I hear in today’s scripture text is “be ready.”

Be ready for the hereafter. Sure. I hear that in the text. But I also hear: be ready for the here and now. For I believe we can glimpse the hereafter and experience eternity in single, solitary, sacred moments even in this life while we yet breathe.

It’s hard to do that though if we let the wakeful message of a scripture like this one tip us over into unmitigated fear, over worry, and over work. Like my simple, silly computer story, that’s not being ready, that’s being worried.

In her book Unstressed, writer and researcher Dr. Alane Daugherty writes of how her practice of paying attention to her body’s stress signals kept her ready for an important moment in her life. As a busy professor, Alane was having one of those days where the stress and the pressure were setting off tell-tale trouble signs in her body.

Do you all experience any of those? Racing heart? Stomach pains? Digestive distress? There are so many.

Well, the subtitle of Alane’s book, Unstressed, is How Somatic Awareness Can Transform Your Body's Stress Response and Build Emotional Resilience, and she was beginning to believe her own research which told her about the benefits of noticing those signs of stress and taking even just a little time to give herself a reset. So, she paused. She did a breathing exercise she appreciated, and she moved on to her next task which was meeting up with her dad between classes and meetings.

Because she had taken that reset, she was able to be very present with her dad. They stood in the rain. He held an umbrella. They shared stories and smiles. He told her he wasn’t feeling too well, so he was going home to rest. At home he had a massive heart attack. That was the last time she saw him alive. She writes of being grateful that because of that practice of noticing and resetting, she was able to really appreciate that lovely last moment with him, rather than letting stress overrun the moment.

In the middle part of today’s scripture passage Jesus teaches:

“‘Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks.”

There are some more bits about slaves and masters in the following verses and the rest of the chapter, which I can only understand to be descriptive of the time and place in which the historical Jesus lived and not as lending any legitimacy to the practice of slavery or even self-martyrdom. No, the teaching that most captures my heart here is the command to “keep our lamps lit.”

While it is a good safety practice to keep fresh batteries in our flashlights, I receive these words as encouragement for the metaphorical lamp of my spirit. I know some of us are finding the oil in our lamps pretty low these days. Maybe others are feeling pretty full but also wondering how to keep that up amidst the challenges life will surely bring our way.

Being and living “ready” with full lamp oil is going to look different for all of us. We have different challenges, different resources, and different preferences. But if this scripture is to be believed, keeping our lamps lit is not merely an optional activity if we want to experience the fullness of the realm of God. It is a lifestyle. It is a practice. Not one we will always get right. But one with deep, life changing, and yes, live saving rewards.

 I loved the story I read on social media this week. It was short. Maybe some of you read it, too. It was from a parent who was helping their child with the first week of school homework for fourth grade. The child was asked to describe themself and wrote: “I am kind. I am brave. I am a good writer.” The parent cried reading those sweet, self-affirming words and gave thanks for the teacher from third grade, who told their child those words so often the child took them deeply in and believed them.

When we live ready, with lamps full of holy love, we not only shine, others around us shine, too. We’re not going to be perfectly full of light and love all the time. But if we show up as often as we can, God will surely use us to make the world around us a more whole and holy place.

I look for others around me who shine like this. They inspire me to shine, and they include so many of you. They also include incredible colleagues like one female colleague who takes on heavy leadership at the denominational level. This summer I watched from a distance as a man approached her clearly upset. I could tell by his body language that he had a deeply felt complaint to share. And this woman, her body language was clear, compassionate, and calm. Even without hearing the words exchanged, I was impressed by how she navigated that conflict.

So, I called her this week and asked her how she keeps the lamp of her spirit lit. Sure enough, she has some foundational spiritual practices in her life like exercise, prayerful scripture reading, and mindful breathing. She also, wisely, has a couple of trusted folks in her life to whom she can blow off steam and who help fortify her with care and courage when she doesn’t handle conflict well and needs to make amends.

But then she pointed to another colleague who taught her a thing or two about shining. That mutual friend of ours had a practice in her camp ministry of very persistently telling everyone around her that “Everybody is a beautiful child of God. Everybody. Everybody. Everybody.” That was the guiding principle this woman leader named, that helped her show up as often as she could with care, confidence, and compassion. That’s where she set her heart. And to me it shone very clearly this summer.

“Do not be afraid,” Jesus teaches, “Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Are we ready for a reset? Are we clear in where we set our hearts and where our treasure lies?

I pray that we will not be afraid, that we will help each other live ready, and that we will shine in ways that give glory to God and serve our neighbors’ good.                                                                              

May it be so. Amen.

Keeping the Sabbath

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – September 4, 2022

Keeping the Sabbath – Luke 14

This weekend ends with a federal holiday honoring the Labor Movement of the last century. A hundred years ago, nationally and internationally, the Labor Movement advocated for limiting workdays to 8 hours and giving workers the weekly two days off we now know as the weekend. These accomplishments added to the quality of life for workers, families, and communities across the world where they were adopted.

Whether it's because of the gig economy, our cultural idolization of overwork, rampant understaffing, this recent significant inflation in the cost of living, or a number of other reasons, we may feel that some of those accomplishments of the Labor Movement are being eroded or were never fully realized in our particular industry to begin with. Many of those pressures on workers are beyond the control of any single individual. They involve a whole host of factors impacted by organization-wide, community-wide, industry-wide, and nation-wide expectations.  Comprehensively lightening the load of those pressures on workers, families, and communities takes many of us working together. Yet, as individuals we can adjust our own expectations, attitudes, and approaches to work and rest that support the well-being of all and give glory to God.

Honoring the Sabbath and keeping it holy was an important aspect of the Jewish religious and cultural life into which Jesus was born. R. Alan Culpepper reminds those reading his Luke commentary that the observance of the Sabbath was meant “as a gift of rest and restoration.”[1] Even before New Testament times, it was a day of assembly for worship and a day to share a common meal with family and friends.

There were certain rules and much debate over what work could and could not be done on the Sabbath. It was generally accepted that when human life was in danger the Sabbath rules could be set aside. The ordinary practice of medicine, however, was considered a violation, and while the Pharisees allowed the rescuing of an animal, the Essenes did not.[2]

Few Christian groups today observe such strict standards about a Sabbath day. Yet, I believe we miss important aspects of holy patterns of rest and work if we pay no attention to the idea at all. I know that observing a weekly Sabbath day and taking a season of sabbatical in 2021 are and were important times for me to remember that I am not God, that I have limits, and that I am called to rest and restoration at least as much as I am called to meaningful work. But, like many, I am still growing in my understanding of Sabbath.

Perhaps that’s why I felt for a new dad who recently wrote into an advice columnist I like to read about how he feels like he is drowning every day. He wrote about the pressures of working 50 hours a week and taking several hours a day on top of that for relaxation which then leaves him no time at home with the new baby and leaves his wife, also working a full-time job, to handle all the caretaking responsibilities. He wrote to the advice columnist to ask whether he should divorce his wife or quit his job or make some other change in order to stop “white-knuckling it” through his days, “snapping” at his wife, and “hating his life.” I suspect there are a number of us here who have felt backed into that kind of corner at one-time or another or who have been the abandoned caretaker on the other side of the letter also backed into a lonely, miserable corner of our own.

Jesus was backed into an equally tight, if slightly different corner, as he sat down to dinner one Sabbath with some Pharisees. They were watching him closely because they already knew that he was a rule breaker who healed people on the Sabbath. The story doesn’t tell us if the man with the atypical and I assume uncomfortable swelling was purposely placed in front of Jesus to test him. I think though that since we are told “[The Pharisees] were watching him closely” it makes sense to understand the whole scene as a setup.

It would be easy to cast the Pharisees as the clear villains of this story. Keep in mind though that they think they’re doing the right thing. They are the devout religious types who want to honor God completely by keeping the Sabbath perfectly and teaching others how to do the same. They’re the pastors and church leaders. If you’re attending worship now, you might think of them as more or less me and you. How many of us also want to do things right? How many of us also want others around us to do things right? How many of us could use a reminder that hard and fast judgments of ourselves and others–even if we have the noblest of intentions–is missing the point entirely?

After Jesus heals the man he tells a story that both the Pharisees and we can learn from. It’s about status and honor again, an ongoing theme particularly in the Gospel of Luke. He says to the one who just invited him to a party in a room probably filled with high-powered people, if you want to throw a party you can feel good about, invite the folks no one else would. It may not make you as popular with these high status people here but it’s what will please God.

This story reminds me of how Jesus is nothing if not cheeky with those in power in basically any situation. I don’t think he had the same people-pleasing tendencies some of us struggle with. Maybe that’s what makes him so good at reminding the Pharisees and us today that all too often it’s our striving for status that keeps us from what we really seek. It’s our trying our best to hold up the weight of the world’s expectations that keeps us from experiencing real health, wholeness, and security.

Advice Columnist Carolyn Hax responded to the drowning dad’s question as to what he needed to change with two words: “your worldview.”[3] “You are your circumstances,” she wrote. “They’re not some oppressive outside force. And with that mental change, you can also change your priorities to fit how you see yourself in that world.”

For me, her tough words shared a kinship with the disruptively convicting and ultimately compassionate, if cheeky, advice of Jesus. She encouraged the drowning dad to seek support in a therapist who could help him with aspects of his life that could be symptoms of anxiety and depression. She encouraged him to readjust his priorities keeping in mind the negative impact his current priorities were having on his family and himself. Finally, and perhaps most germane to today’s examination on work and rest, Hax invited the dad to adjust his workload and, importantly, his expectations. “What can you spare?” she asked. “Money? Rest time? Ambition? Either downsize strategically” she warned. “Or lose it all.”

She could be right. I’m not usually sold on either ors though. So, I might add that I suspect there’s a whole lot of uncomfortable adjusting while downsizing, in order not to lose it all. In my experience, finding a pattern of work and rest that serves the well-being of everyone in my life is an ongoing, messy work made more manageable by the company of those who love me, and who are trying their best too to let go of unhealthy pressures and expectations that have so much more to do with status than they do our neighbors’ good or the glory of God.

In today’s story Jesus healed the swollen man and asked the Pharisees, ‘Is it lawful to cure people on the Sabbath, or not?’ … ‘If one of you has a child or an ox that has fallen into a well, will you not immediately pull it out on a Sabbath day?’ And they could not reply to this.”

I don’t think it’s that Jesus doesn’t care about the Sabbath or that we should work all the time or continuously overspend ourselves in the service of others. No, I think the point he’s making with the Pharisees, is that our rules, goals, and expectations–even really noble ones–matter a lot less than the human needs before us. 

Kids get sick. Parents and partners fall ill. Our own bodies have limitations. So do our bank accounts and our hearts. If we ever feel we are speeding through life at a breakneck pace, I believe Jesus tells us in this story and others that it’s okay to let up on the gas pedal of life and respond to the needs around us. That’s what he did in today’s story despite the expectations laid upon him.

Lutheran church planter and writer Nadia Bolz-Weber shares in a widely-watched video interview that she doesn’t hear the message “You can have it all” as a liberation. Rather, she hears it as an accusation.

She shares that years ago she was trying to prove that she could “have it all.” She even included self-care in her “have it all” plan with a strict 8:30pm bedtime and six days a week of an intense fitness program. These habits assured her over-functioning, until one day when she seriously disappointed someone she loved. That person responded with forgiveness that allowed her to realize that she didn’t need to have it all. She needed to be set free. She needed to be set free from the torturous fear that one of the many plates she was spinning would drop. In the end, letting the plates simply drop was much healthier for everyone in her life than serving that fear.

“Faith” she shared, “tells us [we are] already enough. [We are] loved quite apart from anything [we] do or don’t do. “Faith,” Bolz-Weber proclaimed, “tells us our worthiness is not in our busy-ness.”[4] 

Maybe that’s what it means to keep the Sabbath holy and honor God.

Maybe it means leaning enough on our faith that we are loved to be present to the real and human needs before us.

  May God grant rest and restoration to us all. Amen.

[1] R. Alan Culpepper. “The Gospel of Luke: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections. New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary. (Abingdon Press: Nashville, 1995), 285.

[2] Everett Ferguson. “Sabbath.” Backgrounds of Early Christianity, Third Edition. (Eerdman’s Publishing: Grand Rapids, MI, 2003), 557.

[3] The whole column can be found here if they Washington Post hasn’t raised a paywall on it yet: https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2022/08/28/carolyn-hax-dad-work-family-impossible/

[4]https://www.facebook.com/MAKERShavealittlefaith/videos/no-one-has-it-all-have-a-little-faith/185413442126189/

The Wisdom of Children

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – August 28, 2022

The Wisdom of Children – Luke 18: 15-17

As a child or an adult, have you ever experienced a time when a child’s lack of experience led to a creative insight that adults failed to see? Neuroscientists might explain this as a function of the default mode network that adult humans develop over the course of our lives and which has not yet fully come online in children.

The default mode network helps adults make decisions based on assumptions and knowledge from prior experience. It saves time and energy but it can also cut those adult brains off from easily accessing the most creative solutions. Children, on the other hand, are still growing in experience and knowledge of the world and therefore regularly expend more time and energy solving problems than adults but often doing so in more creative ways.

Researchers are still testing their theories about this way the human brain works, including exploring whether an out of balance default mode network may be at play in a variety of mental health challenges.[1] But one of their early conclusions is that children are tapped into awe, connection, and creativity in ways that adults no longer find as easily. I suspect that when Jesus teaches, “Truly, I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it,” these innate gifts of children are at least an aspect of what he is talking about.

How do we receive and enter the kingdom of God? If becoming like a little child is part of it, as Jesus teaches, adults would do well to look to the wisdom of children.

In the time period of this text, babies and children occupied the lowest rung on the social ladder of status. Their survival was questionable and their value seen primarily through the lens of their potential to contribute to their family’s ledger of honor and shame.

I’d like to say it’s very different today. But I wonder how different it is. Yes, there are ways in which the dominant culture worships youth and disdains aging. But at the same time, children are often granted severely limited agency and are often still viewed primarily through the lens of their potential to bring honor or shame to their family rather than valuable and unique individuals unto themselves.

TV star Lori Loughlin and other rich Americans have been in the news in recent years for bribing college admissions officials to accept their children at prestigious schools. The news coverage has been accompanied with much conversation about the line for parents between helping and hurting and between wanting good things for their kids and wanting their kids to make them look like good parents. And as a parent, I know that issue does not only arise for parents navigating higher education opportunities with their children.

In her book, Raising Free People, Akilah Richards talks about something she calls the “adult gaze” to describe her experience of the expectations of the other adults around her. Specifically, she finds it helpful to ask herself whether she is prioritizing the relationship she has with her daughters or prioritizing the relationship she has with other adult’s opinions. Does this serve my daughter, she asks, or does it serve my seeking approval under the “adult gaze?”

In redressing the disciples’ attempts to block the children from him, Jesus is making clear that he prioritizes his relationship with each individual regardless of their social status, including children, over his own ledger of honor and shame in the eyes of the dominant culture. His disciples, understandably, want their teacher to be shown the respect due to him as a person they so highly value. But once again, Jesus challenges those disciples to grow in their understanding of what is valuable, honorable, and respectful.

Are there ways in which our faith community does a good job of honoring and respecting each person regardless of their age or any other status? Are there ways we can continue to grow in our capacity to do that? I think the answer is yes to both those questions. And, I think if we ask those same questions of our families and ourselves, we will find the answer is also, yes.

The book of Luke is an excellent place to turn for guidance on this aspect of faithful community living. From Mary’s Magnificat to the Sermon on the Plain to this chapter 18 we read today, the book of Luke highlights God’s special concern for those who are undervalued in their community as well as the call of Jesus followers to give up the ways we make idols of gaining status in our culture’s ledger of honor and shame.

Taken together as a part of what we know as The Gospel According to Luke, I understand a clear theme that all of our clinging to earthly status and security will not lead us to receiving the kingdom of God in its fullness–a place where all are loved, valued, and made whole and well. No matter what age we are, I believe we have the opportunity to expand our experience of that kingdom more fully as individuals and as a community.

Earlier this summer, I enjoyed an online panel of three sets of parents and their LGBTQ+ children who shared about the impact of parental support and the ways we can create more nurturing communities for all. One parent remembered children hear what the adults in their life say. They hear the jokes they make. They hear the judgments they pronounce on others who can’t hear them.

The insights that caught my breath though came from a parent and child who identify as being part of the Latinx community. The child recalled coming out as LGBTQ to their abuela, describing it as really hard and painful. “It was tough,” the child shared, “because I know she doesn’t understand. That’s not her context. But it was worth it to sit down and take the time to explain it to her. And there are still things we have to explain to her. Because pronouns are a thing, because of Spanish being such a gendered language. There is no neutral. Like, they/them isn’t a thing.

Here the mother interrupted to say “It’s becoming a thing. It’s becoming a thing because language can change. And people can change. I always try to tell folks,” she continued “that we are the ancestors for the people who are coming after us. We are their role models. So, right now there might not be someone you can think of who will be a role model for you. But what kind of role model will you want to be for that next person?”

We are the ancestors–all of us sitting here of every age. How we treat each other and nurture community among ourselves makes a difference for those who come after. What kind of ancestors do we want to be?

Today we dedicated ourselves to be faithful, nurturing community for these three children. How will we live into that call? How will we honor our own child-like wisdom, whether we are 9 or 90? How will we keep our connection to holy awe, treasured relationship, and life-bringing creativity alive? How will we cultivate a healthy respect for each other, ourselves, and God? How will we give thanks for all the lessons learned from our ancestors as we become ancestors ourselves?

I trust we won’t always live into the dream of doing our best in any of those areas. And, I also trust that when we humble ourselves before God just as we are then we will indeed experience the love, nurture, and peace that is to be found in the kingdom of God.

                                                                                               May it be so. Amen.

[1] You can read more in Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind along with a lot of other interesting information on the new research on neuroscience, mental health, spirituality, and psychedelic drugs.

What We Don’t See

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Written by Kendra Harbeck – July 10, 2022

What We Don’t See – John 9: 1-11

Have you ever acted as if you couldn’t see someone? Maybe it’s someone you’ve had a disagreement or embarrassing situation with and don’t want to talk to. Maybe it’s someone who’s under the influence of substances and is acting in a way you don’t know how to react to. Maybe it’s someone who is asking for money that you don’t want to give to. Wouldn’t it be great if the person you’re pretending not to see can’t actually see you?

The Bible mentions blindness a lot. The variety of verses range from God striking people with blindness, people being accused of spiritual blindness, prophetic promises that God will give the blind sight, and tales of Jesus healing the blind, such as in today’s Scripture passage.

There is a lot happening in this passage from John, and the story continues beyond what Josh read out loud. There is a lot of material that could be unpacked theologically. However, I am not a theologian, so instead, I want to unpack a bit about the situation I imagine this blind man to be in, and how it can connect to the topic of blindness in our current time and place.

Just short of 3 years ago, I left my job with the Church of the Brethren to start a graduate program in teaching students who are visually impaired, and I’m now one year into a career as a teacher and an orientation and mobility specialist. But before I go any further, a huge disclaimer: before starting the program, I’d never had any personal interaction with people who are blind, and I’m obviously still quite new to the field…there is so much I don’t know, and I may be talking to some folks who have much more experience with it than I do. And no matter how long I may work in this field, I recognize that, as long as I still have functional vision, I can never truly understand what it’s like to live without sight; I don’t want to try to speak for the blind community. But I can speak for the sighted community, and through observing and listening to those who can’t see, I have started to become more aware of what the rest of us don’t see.

We don’t see how much we take for granted.

Yes, I think all of us with vision realize at some level that life would be a lot harder if we didn’t have it – that’s pretty obvious. But the more I get to know, listen to, and try to teach people who are blind, the more acutely I’m aware of how completely sight-reliant almost all elements of my life are. Think about all the steps you’ve taken today to get here, from getting dressed, preparing and eating a meal, using transportation, even your literal footsteps from one place to another, and consider how you could do all of that without vision. Almost everything takes so much more thought and effort.

What’s more, though, is that we don’t see that this world was built for us. Pick anything and all things in our society: our modes of transportation, our means of entertainment, our educational systems, our ways of worship, and it’s clear that they are all built by sighted people for sighted people. Sometimes, modifications and accommodations are attempted for people who can’t see, but they’re often given low priority. Our world would operate a lot differently if no one could see.

We don’t see that vulnerability is strength, not weakness. We don’t see that putting our trust in others and asking for help doesn’t mean we can’t be independent.

The writers of the Bible tend to portray blind people as weak and helpless, and I think that mindset exists in various forms today. But moving about this world without sight takes extreme strength and boldness. I don’t want to put people who are blind on a pedestal, but let’s give credit where it’s due. Walking by faith and not by sight is a common adage in the Christian faith, but to literally walk without sight is terrifying. A significant component of my grad school training was working on skills under the blindfold. Going down stairs, using a stove, crossing the street…it was all so intimidating in a way I couldn’t quite comprehend until I tried it. Living without sight is living with the vulnerability of not knowing what’s on all sides of you; it’s living with the trust that drivers will pay attention and not turn without looking. It’s living with the vulnerability that at some point, you’ll likely get hit in the face by a low-hanging branch or bump into a table and living with the hope that it won’t hurt too much. Part of orientation and mobility instruction for street crossings includes knowing when to solicit assistance as part of independent travel – living without sight means acknowledging that regularly asking for help doesn’t make you less of a person.

We don’t see people who are blind. Not really, anyhow.

In today’s story, the blind man’s neighbors can’t tell for sure whether it’s really him once he’s been healed. This confusion is repeated later in the passage by the Pharisees who were trying to criticize Jesus, causing writer Sarah Dylan Breuer to note that: “And so it may be that the most damning point this scripture passage has against Jesus' accusers is one that we easily miss: they did not know the blind man who was healed. He sat and begged there daily, and every day they walked by him, but when the time came, they couldn't be sure of who he was.”

Unfortunately, invisibility and isolation continue to be challenges for people in the blind community. Paradoxically, it’s like sighted people sometimes act as if they can’t see the blind person in front of them. This past spring, I served as a one-on-one aide to a high school freshman, who had lost all of his vision only two years earlier. I attended some of his mainstream classes with him so that I could help explain the concepts and modify materials, and something that always saddened me was how utterly ignored by his classmates he was. Without any peers initiating communication with him, he had no way of knowing who was around him and thus sat in a bubble of isolation. There were even some instances when his teachers would ask me questions about the student as if he wasn’t there.

My guess is that most of us have not had much personal interaction with someone who is totally blind. And when it comes to other people, what we don’t have much experience with tends to make us uncomfortable. It feels awkward to talk to people who can’t see us, so we don’t. We notice their inability to see, but we don’t notice how we consequently rob them of the opportunity to talk. We don’t see how this robs people who are blind of their integrity and individuality. Just as the neighbors and Pharisees only saw the man for his blindness, something to be pitied and likely disdained, we often fail to see people beyond their disability.

We don’t see how people who are blind can accomplish the same things we can. We don’t see that there are other ways of doing things.

In the Scripture story, one of the things we can gather about the blind man is that he is destitute – the neighbors talk about how he used to sit and beg. It would have been unheard of at the time of this story for a blind man to work and make a living. This is not still the case, but barriers and discrimination in employment continue to be a major challenge for people who are blind. Various sources indicate that there is only about a 40% labor force participation rate among people who are visually impaired. Last summer, as part of a class assignment, I interviewed my friend and classmate Raven, who is blind, and she told of being passed over for a job because of her blindness, despite having experience for it. She explained: “I feel like they didn’t even ask me, ‘how would you do this?’…Many people don’t understand that these things can be done. So when the understanding is missing, blind people don’t get jobs, or blind parents get their kids taken away. People don’t understand that there are ways to get things done that are different but effective.”

She’s so right…because those of us in dominant, ableist society can’t imagine doing many things without vision, we assume that blind people can’t do them. I have to admit that when I got to know another classmate who is blind and who is a father to two young children, I found myself wondering how one could adequately parent without vision. Our society delegitimizes the strategies and methods that blind people have to accomplish tasks in a different way.

We don’t see how we’re afraid of blindness.

Today’s Scripture story starts with Jesus’ disciples asking him whether in the case of someone born blind, it was that individual or his parents who had sinned in order to cause the blindness. At that time, the fate of blindness likely seemed random and very scary, so it would make sense if society tried to come up with an explanation for it, a desperate hope that as long as they didn’t sin, their family wouldn’t be affected by such a thing.

Today’s science tells us many of the ways blindness happens. But I don’t think that makes us any less afraid of it. To live in darkness is fear-inducing. But beyond this, we don’t see how we’re agitated by other people’s blindness. We feel uncomfortable with ways of living that are so drastically different than our own. We’re afraid that interacting with people who can’t see us may be too awkward. We get annoyed at having to wait for a blind person to continue their path of travel or at the time needed to make modifications for them. We don’t want the discomfort that someone else’s way of being puts upon our own psyche.

I’ve been talking all about blindness, and while I think it’s good to expand awareness about what is called a ‘low-incidence disability,” a point I believe is key is that all of these things we don’t see in regards to blindness also ring true for all angles of privilege. In the spheres in which we live with privilege, we often don’t see it. We don’t see that the world was built for us. We don’t notice how everything is built for those who can walk easily unless we start to experience mobility issues. We don’t realize the heterosexual-norms that exist in our culture until we take a moment to honestly consider them. We’re oblivious to the policies, practices, and structures of white privilege because they’re so ingrained that we can’t see them until we learn new ways of looking. In regards to any disability that we don’t have, to any minority group that we’re not a part of, we so often don’t truly see the individual beyond the label. We don’t admit that we’re afraid of the difference, that we’re uncomfortable with what we don’t truly understand. We don’t want to see how we resent that someone’s way of doing things, of living life, differently, encroaches upon our security and comfort.

This is all a bummer, I know. But let’s go back to our Scripture story and remember that it has a happy ending. Jesus heals the man and restores his sight, after all. Of all the Jesus healing stories in the Gospels, I think this one might be my favorite, because it’s in this one where Jesus is playing in the mud. Based on all the other stories, Jesus can heal without lifting a finger – he doesn’t need anything else. But in this story, he’s using his own spit and some dirt. To me, this act bestows value in the earth we walk upon and from which we are nourished. To me, this shows that a difference can be made if we’re willing to give of ourselves and get our hands dirty.

And yet, the question of how and to what extent Jesus physically healed the man’s eyesight is secondary to me. Because I don’t think Jesus is calling me to give sight to the blind, not even with some really good mud. What matters most to me in this story isn’t so much that Jesus allowed this blind man to see; it’s that Jesus really saw this blind man, and helped others to see him too.

That’s the good news: that once we get to know even one person who is blind, or who has any significant difference from ourselves, we start to see better. Before, when I took walks, I didn’t pay much attention to the sidewalk, but now I look at each crossing to see if it has the raised bumps and whether those bumps are actually aligned with the crosswalk or if they’d send someone into the middle of the intersection. We can start to see the challenges that our infrastructure, physical and societal, pose for different people, and seeing can lead to speaking up, which can lead to change.

In the interview with my classmate Raven, when I asked what message she’d want to give about blindness, she stated that “so many people are concerned about curing blindness, but what most of us really want is the ability to have equitable access. … A lot of people look at blindness like it’s a tragedy. But being blind isn’t the hardest thing; the hardest thing is the lack of accessibility, which can be fixed! Yes, my vision can’t be fixed, but we can take down these barriers.”

So this is my call for us today: that we may start to truly see. See the barriers that our society has put up for so many people. See the ways we shut out those whose differences make us uncomfortable or who cause us extra hassle. See ways to give each individual a place at the table.

Lord, give us eyes to see. Amen.

Needing Forgiveness

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – 4/10/22, Palm Sunday

Needing Forgiveness – Luke 19

Like many of you, I’ve never been to the Holy Land. And, as many of you know, while I can make words all day long, I’m somewhat lacking in spatial intelligence, and I struggle to find my way using cardinal directions. I often need to stand in a place or hold something in my hand to understand where something is, how it works, or how it will look.I have empathy for days, I love stories about feelings, but I have a hard time imagining physical things with detail. And, I’ve never stood in the city of Jerusalem and looked up at the Mount of Olives. So, no matter how many times I have read this story that we celebrate on Palm Sunday, some of the logistical, physical details have often escaped me.

But this year in reading this story I found myself interested in the physical details of the place. Jerusalem is a tangible, physical place after all. It’s still a city today, if a different one. There are more computers and cars and such there now than in Jesus’ day, but it’s still made up of humans, animals, plants, buildings, stones, and dirt.

The Mount of Olives is a tangible, physical place, too. There are fewer olive trees on it now than in biblical times, but it's still a mountain range east of and adjacent to Jerusalem’s Old City. It seems like if you were down below in the city that day making all the preparations for Passover festivities and the influx of family, friends, and visitors that would be crowding in, that if you stepped out into the street from most places in the city you would be able to see someone coming down that hilly path from the Mount of Olives. If there was an incredible shouting, running, and ruckus, you might especially take a moment to stop what you were doing to look up, see it, and maybe even join in.   

You might notice that the humble colt the man who seemed to be the cause of all this commotion was riding was a far cry from the Roman war horses that arrived with Pontius Pilate. You might notice that the high up religious leaders watched this spectacle with reserve, disdain, and distrust. You might know that it has happened before that around this time of year someone has shown up claiming to be the long awaited Messiah. But maybe you’d heard of this particular carpenter from Galilee with his strange teachings and wild miracles. You might have wondered–even hoped–that he was different–the real deal.

I can imagine that. I can imagine joining in those hopeful cries of Hosanna! I can imagine throwing cloaks and palm branches on the road like a prayer. There are so many ways now and then that the world is messed up. There was real harm then and there is real harm now. I am harmed by others and unfortunately, I am also part of the harming.

And here comes this man, parading into town for all to see, his every action, from healing miracles to eating with sinners to flipping tables to confounding the religious leaders, reveals the harm–especially, it seems, the harm so many of us have learned to deny, keep secret, or pretend not to see.

He’s laying it all bare. Like a nurse starting to clean an infected wound, he’s revealing all the rot and while it may sting, it may also be exciting to know that this is a step toward real healing. That’s what Hosanna means. It means, roughly, save us. Save us. Save us.

Then and now the rot was all around. It’s in our government, in our religious practices, in our communities, in our families, in our relationships, and much as we’d like to deny it, it’s in our own actions, too.

One of the religious leaders who profited and got power from the rotten status quo, couldn’t bear the sting of having it all revealed. “Teacher,” he stepped forward to demand, “order your followers to stop.” But Jesus just replied, “I tell you if these were silent, the stones would shout out.” The stones. The stones. The stones would shout out.

Do you know what we’ve been using in our Book of Forgiving Sunday School class to symbolize hurt and grudges and forgiveness we’re not ready to give? Stones. We’ve been using stones. 

Like I said, I tend to be a thinky, feely person. So, walks in the woods, winding through labyrinths, good yoga stretches, and having physical things to touch and move like stones all help to balance me out. I don’t know about you but there are things my head and heart don’t process without some physical outlet or connection.

I know I’m not alone in that because I know a number of people who have dealt with their heartache, trauma, anger, grief, and depression by finding physical things to do like shooting hoops on a basketball court for hours every day or playing the same strand of music over and over or mowing their lawn obsessively and everyone else’s in the neighborhood, too, or taking off to hike the entire Appalachian Trail.

Sometimes, we don’t even realize why we’re doing what we’re doing. We just know we gotta do it. In his book, My Grandmother’s Hands, Resma Menakem writes about the noises his grandmother made when she felt the trauma of her life catching up with her. She had ways of blowing out her breath and shaking her limbs that let it all go. When grown-up Resma studied trauma and neurobiology, he saw anew how profoundly wise his grandmother had been in listening to her body’s need to process the anguish she was holding inside.

It can be such a mercy to not have to process our hurts all at once. The brain and the body have mysterious ways of shutting out what’s too much to handle in the moment. But not dealing with it doesn’t make it go away. Sooner or later that hurt we thought we had so carefully hidden will make itself known. It will cry out like the stones.

Walking the path of forgiveness is one way to find healing. Sometimes we need to forgive others who have caused us harm. Sometimes we need to forgive people we love for dying. Sometimes we need to forgive ourselves for causing harm or for just causing disappointment or for just being limited in our ability to stop harm from happening. Sometimes we need to ask for forgiveness for all that we have done and not done.

In walking my own path of forgiveness, I have often found that forgiveness is as much as anything about canceling my expectations of safety, comfort, or perfection and learning to trust that despite the inescapable reality of suffering and wrong, true safety lies in the inescapable reality of my unbreakable connection to God, the one who mysteriously called the atoms of this universe into being from the oceans to the mountains to the stones. 

While there are times when it seems God is very far away and we have been cast into the outer darkness, I trust that God is with us still. I trust that God is not afraid of our suffering and our wrongs, because God in Jesus was not afraid to take on a frail physical body,  to bear the emotional grief of rejection by his own people, and to endure suffering and death on a wooden cross. When we need courage to face the hurt in our lives that we have caused or that has been caused to us, we can turn to this one who knows what it is to suffer and who knows the healing power of letting go.

As we read later in this same gospel of Luke, even on the cross, Jesus prayed for those who harmed him, “Forgive them for they know not what they do.” To the wrongdoer hanging on the cross next to him who admitted his wrong and acknowledged the harm he had caused, Jesus assured him, “today you will be with me in paradise.”

I do understand forgiveness as a pathway to paradise, even if I understand it a little differently than I used to when I was first taught about sin and forgiveness as if it were a math equation. I have personally found it less than helpful to swim in a sea of shame about my depravity as a human. Neither have I found it helpful to pretend I don’t have any flaws. What I have found helpful is being able to hold sin and forgiveness with both hands. I do things that are harmful. I do things I wish I didn’t. I don’t do things I wish I did. Others do things that are harmful. Others do things I wish they didn’t. Others don’t do things I wish they did. And, yet, forgiveness remains. And yet, the capacity for healing remains. And yet, God remains, full of grace and transformational, new-life-creating glory. That’s the paradise I’m most interested in these days–one where we are all being healed, made whole, and reconciled in God’s all powerful love.  

Maybe it’s like a garden full of roses that are not diminished for the thorns. Maybe it’s a place we will only know in full when these physical bodies have returned back to the blessed stardust and stone from which they have come. Maybe it’s also a place we can experience now in small or large life-saving and relationship-healing moments of storytelling, hurt-naming, forgiveness-giving, and new-life-bearing.

For me that would be the good news of great joy of which the angels sang, for unto us is indeed born a savior, Jesus the Messiah, and in the fully revealed love, mercy, truth, and forgiveness he embodies in his life, death, and resurrection, indeed, we need not be afraid.

                                                            Praise God that it is so. Amen

Renew, Release, Reconcile

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – April 3, 2022

Renew, Release, Reconcile – Luke 6: 27-38

The logic of Jesus is different from the logic of ordinary humans. You hit me. I hit you back. To do anything different would be to show weakness. It would be to give up. It would be to accept fate as a doormat. And there are times when we humans have decided allowing ourselves to be stepped on is a means of survival–miserable as it may be.

Jesus doesn’t accept those two extremes. His logic is on an entirely different plane. If a Roman soldier hits you with the back of their hand, the standard logic dictates that should be the end of the story. You should remember your place and give up. Some folks sick of being beat in such a way were ready to violently overthrow the next person who dared try and to stage a violent revolution over the entire situation.

Jesus counters with an entirely different option altogether. What if we turned the other cheek instead? What if we refused to be treated like less than human? What if we refused to see ourselves that way or anyone else either? What if we refused to be afraid of violent repercussions to living and loving out loud? What if we refused the logic that says might makes right, revenge equals power, or it’s either hit or be hit? Many of us in the peace churches have been interested in this other logic for living for a long time.

This very tradition we now call the Church of the Brethren began 300 years ago, shortly after the end of the religiously motivated Thirty Years War in Germany which killed one third of the human population, wiped out thousands of animals, and left miles upon miles of roads, bridges, and buildings in ruins. Our spiritual ancestors saw how the flawed logic of violence and revenge destroyed lives, communities, and countries. They read the Bible together in their own language and set out to find another way of living. To their ears, this different logic of Jesus held enormous promise.

Over the centuries, we have continued to expand our understanding of that promise. Sometimes we have read passages like today’s text and concluded that if we are to “love our enemies,” then we must have no enemies at all. We must never be angry. We must never allow ourselves to be hurt.     

But the people Jesus was talking to in Luke had enemies. The Roman Empire was built on the backs of the people of Judea. The peasants sitting on the plain before Jesus were the very people whose bodies littered the streets and ports of that empire. They were the tenant farmers and the fishermen. They were the widows and the beggars. They knew what it was to have an enemy. Their people had written ancient, violent psalms brimming with anger and rage about the generational injustices faced by their people and sometimes committed by their people. These were no mere misunderstandings they had with their enemies. They were matters of life and death. Ask the people of Ukraine if those kinds of enemies exist today. Ask transgender women if those kinds of enemies exist today. Ask parents who have to give “the talk” about police to their young Black children if those kinds of enemies exist today. Ask anyone who has ever been terrorized or abused if those kinds of enemies exist today.  

It’s not that we don’t have enemies. It’s not that the threat of physical and emotional violence isn’t real. It’s that Jesus offers us another way of living with the reality of enemies. We don’t have to kill or be killed. We can choose to love.

Now, the word for love here is the Greek agape. It’s not filial love - that’s the sibling I love you because you love me. It’s not eros love - that’s the romantic I love you let’s get together. It’s agape love - the I love you because we’re all a part of each other.  

Practicing agape love doesn’t mean we can’t be very, very angry and hurt. Practicing agape love doesn’t mean we have to accept the way things are as the way they always have to be. No, practicing agape love for enemies means acknowledging the anger, hurt, and wrong by working to change the way things are while also acknowledging that we share a common bond.

The logic of agape is a whole different logic altogether. It’s a new creation taking shape. It’s another way of living in this life and the next in which we can find true salvation and security. When we practice that agape love, I believe we find the freedom to be “merciful just as our heavenly [parent] is merciful.”

Mercy doesn’t erase the pain. Mercy doesn’t erase the need for repentance or change on the part of the one doing the wrong. The verses just before the ones we read today after all pronounce woe upon wrongdoers. Real reconciliation will come only when the wrong has been named, repentance has been made, and forgiveness granted. Even then the rebuilding of a relationship takes time and work. I trust that God’s agape love and mercy has the power to eventually reconcile us all to each other and Godself, whether in this life and the next. And yet, I also believe that sometimes, in this life, when we practice mercy, we get to see its miraculous fruits.

It’s just a fictional story but let it stand in for all the personal, private stories I have heard and lived in real life.

In the Disney movie Encanto, the family Madrigal’s whole house comes crashing down. The foundation is rotten to the core because it is built on the belief that the family must be perfect to be worthy of the magic. This belief creates a terribly painful burden for the family that wrecks their relationships and causes real harm.  One granddaughter, Mirabel, has the courage to name the harm their grandmother, the family’s matriarch, has caused due to her unreasonable expectations and related emotional abuse.

At first, the matriarch refuses to see the cracks in the foundation, but when the whole house has fallen in on itself, she finally sees the harm she has caused and agrees to change her ways. Mirabel, too, comes to a greater understanding of her grandmother’s story and good intentions that have gone awry. They go through all the steps of the Tutu’s four-fold path of forgiving. With magical musical numbers they tell the story, name the hurt, grant forgiveness, and finally, choose to renew their relationships. The whole family returns to the ruined house and with the help of the whole community, they rebuild their home brick-by-brick. That’s reconciliation. That’s the power of mercy, forgiveness, and agape love. It’s possible. I have seen it happen in real life. I have been present to those kinds of miracles.

But we don’t always get a Disney movie ending in this life. There are times when those who have wronged us refuse to see their wrong, let alone change their ways. There are times when we forgive but renewing the relationship is not yet an option.

Jesus has a teaching about this situation, too. It’s in Matthew 18: 17. In a teaching about those who refuse to hear how they have been in the wrong, he implores, “let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”

It’s not like being a Gentile or a tax collector makes you irredeemable. That’s the logic of the Pharisees who were irked at Jesus for always eating with such people. Rather, what Jesus means here is that Gentiles and tax collectors, while they may change their ways, operate by that same old standard logic. They’ve not yet been transformed by that reconciling agape love. At some point, it has to be their decision to step into that warm river of eternal grace. But just because they’re not there yet doesn’t mean they won’t be some day, and it doesn’t mean we can’t choose to release ourselves from the pain they have caused. I have seen and lived these relationships, too.

Maybe it’s like a farmer who finds a field where nothing will grow. The farmer doesn’t have to give up on that field entirely. The farmer may still prefer that something grow there someday. Maybe the farmer even comes by once in a while to see if anything is growing or to spread some nutrients or seed. But the farmer cancels the expectation that something must grow, because some things are simply out of our control. Some fields can only lie fallow before they are ready to yield any harvest. In some things, we can only forgive, let go, and trust that God, the healer of our every ill, may yet work a miracle well beyond our power in this life or in the life to come.

                                                                      May it be so. Amen.

Granting Forgiveness

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – March 27, 2022

Granting Forgiveness – Luke 15: 11-32

This is not the first time we have read the story of the Prodigal Son together since I have been your pastor. We have come to this well-known story several times in the past six and a half years, and over the years what I have heard from a number of you is how much you identify with the older son.

Truth be told, I do, too. Like many of you, my identity was formed early as a rule follower, a good student, and a compliant member of my community. I have been guilty, like the Pharisees, of expecting that all my good rule-following would make me favored by God and get all the good things I deserve. Like the older son and the Pharisees who are grumbling at the beginning of this chapter because Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners, I, too, have been disappointed and even angry when I have learned that God and life don’t work the way I expected.

Mean, mistaken, and even violent people sometimes seem to have all the luck in the world. And those who are suffering at the hands of their own mistakes or from a human-made system that puts only bad choices before them, are the ones in Bible times and now for whom Jesus has a special concern.

In the story, the older brother refuses to join the feast. He’s too angry. We don’t know if the father’s explanation moves him or not. We don’t know for sure if he ever goes in. Perhaps it’s up to the original hearers, the Pharisees, and today’s hearers, us, to decide what we will do. All I know, is that when I sit with the older son, refusing to go in, I realize that my refusal to soften my heart locks me out of the party and puts me in the position of the lost.

Like the Pharisees, if I set up a dichotomy in my mind of myself as all good and my brother as all bad, I lose sight of our shared humanity and I lock myself out of the party in a world of hurt. It’s only when I allow myself to hear the heart of the parent who rejoices in the returned sibling, that I can accept that it’s okay for me to be my own flawed and forgiven self, and it’s okay for others to be their own flawed and forgiven selves, too. It’s a hard lesson for me and for the older brother to hear: that it’s not my striving for goodness that saves me from that locked-out fate. Rather, it’s my acceptance of the healing power of forgiveness for us all that allows me to come to the party.

After all, if we’re honest, I think we all have parts of us that are the younger son, too. We have made mistakes. We have hurt others. Even if we have kept a balanced household budget, the degradation of our shared planet shows us how we have collectively lived beyond our means for far too long, and our generation will have to answer to our children and grandchildren for that all too “loose living.”

Destitute and humiliated, the younger son remembers that the nature of his father is to take good care of even the lowliest members of the household. So, he decides to return home to humbly ask forgiveness.

This lesson is the one the tax collectors, mistake makers, and social outcasts learn, too, I imagine, when they are welcomed to the table alongside Jesus. They learn that persistent graciousness, joy, and festivity are characteristics of the nature of God. Like the father who sees the younger son coming from far away, God, too, runs to meet us and gathers us up in the warm embrace of forgiveness, no matter what we have done or where we have been.

God forgives. God forgives. God unconditionally forgives.

Sometimes, we can, too.

In the Tutus’ The Book of Forgiving, “granting forgiveness” is the third step of the four-fold path of forgiveness after we have first told the story and named the pain.

In the movie Encanto it’s the song Mariposa in which Mirabel is able to see her grandmother’s shared humanity and forgive her for the unreasonable expectations that have caused real harm to her family.

In The Book of Forgiving, Ben Bosinger tells his story of granting forgiveness for his father.[1] For the first eleven years of his life, he writes, all he remembered was fear–life or death fear of his violently abusive father who tortured, humiliated, beat, and terrorized Ben and his siblings until his mother was able to leave.  

Ben grew up angry, too. Ben caused hurt to his own children, hated himself for it, and hated his dad all the more. His dad never apologized. His dad never made amends. His dad never became a different person. But one day, Ben decided to forgive his dad anyway. He turned spontaneously up his dad’s driveway on his motorcycle. There in the driveway he talked to his dad about their shared love for all things motorcycle. There in the driveway he noticed his dad’s growing wrinkles and long gray hair. There in the driveway he saw another flawed human and without saying a word out loud to his dad, forgave him.

It didn’t make everything okay. It didn’t change his dad in that moment. But it changed Ben. “I felt lighter. The world seemed a more hopeful place. I learned not to take things so personally, and I learned that I was the only one responsible for what kind of father I turned out to be to my children…When I forgave my father…I was free… It saved me.”  

In church, we often talk about God’s forgiveness for us saving us. I haven’t heard so much talk about how saving and healing it is for us to grant forgiveness the way God grants forgiveness. But even when I read Ben’s words I feel lighter. And when I imagine myself in the place of the father running to meet the younger son I feel joy. I feel it in my body, in my bones, in my heart, and in my gut.

That’s what the story says about the father. It says, “But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion.” The Greek word for compassion here is splagchnizomai. One of its meanings is “to have the bowels yearn.”

It reminds me of all the neuroscience in The Book of Forgiving about how the body processes trauma and about how healing it is–in scientifically measurable ways–for the brain and body to release that trauma by granting forgiveness. It doesn’t require repentance. It’s not reconciliation. That’s a different choice we can choose to try for or not. We’ll talk about that next week.

But forgiveness is a profound expression of compassion–the yearning in our guts to loosen our hold on the pain and to not have to carry the weight of the world in our muscles and bones. We can let go. Let go. Let go.

We will be all the characters in this parable in the course of our lives.

We will be the jealous brother in need of humility.

We will be the wayward brother in need of forgiveness.

We will be the wronged one with the opportunity to forgive.

Whatever turn we are taking right now, God invites us to the party of graciousness and joy. What will it take for us to accept the invitation to join the feast?

                                                   May we all be welcomed in by and by. Amen.

[1] Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu. The Book of Forgiving. (New York: Harper One, 2014), 129-132.

Naming the Hurt

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – March 13, 2022

Naming the Hurt – Ephesians 4: 25-32

Is it okay to be angry? Nice Christians don’t always seem to think so.

I don’t know if it’s as familiar to you as it is to me, but there’s a scene in the beginning of The Wizard of Oz where Aunty Em is upset with Elvira Gulch. She tells her, “For twenty-three years I’ve been dying to tell you what I thought of you and now, well, being a good Christian woman, I can’t say it.”

She sort of gets her point across to Elvira who turns into the Wicked Witch in Dorothy’s dream of Oz, but in that line Auntie Em also evidences a conflation many of us carry that anger and sin as unbehooving of a good Christian are inextricably linked.

What then are we to make of today’s passage in which this early Christian letter written in honor of the Apostle Paul implores us to “be angry” but not to sin? How do we best tease those two things apart? And how might doing so help us to tell the truth and practice forgiveness?

In The Book of Forgiving Desmond and Mpho Tutu lay out a four-fold path to forgiveness which includes 1) Telling the Story, 2) Naming the Hurt, 3) Granting Forgiveness, and 4) Renewing or Releasing the Relationship. Like many other scholars in the fields of psychology and pastoral care, the Tutus point out that anger in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, what anger often tells us is that something is wrong or that we are hurt.

In explaining the second step of the four-fold path, “Naming the Hurt,” the Tutus point out that refusing to feel our anger and acknowledge our hurt often leads us to harm others or to harm ourselves. Today’s passage seems familiar with that human penchant to hide our hurt until it causes us to lash out at each other.

The letter of Ephesians advises Christ followers to “speak the truth” and “to not let the sun go down on [our] anger,” lest we “make room for the devil.” I don’t know about you but this passage has my number. My emotions are usually bigger, slower moving, and more uncomfortable than I often find convenient.

Anger for a woman can be an especially inconvenient emotion. Those of us who identify as men can often feel that anger is the only acceptable emotion to display rather than the hurt that lies beneath. Those of us who identify as women, in contrast, have often been taught to be nice, polite, and never angry. As an adult, it has taken me a lot of work to notice, acknowledge, and be curious about my anger instead of pushing it down and allowing it to fester.

Neurobiologists who study anger are now telling us that we have at most 90 seconds between the stimulus (whatever provoked our anger) and our response which can sometimes include physical or emotional violence and always includes a cascade of stress hormones meant to aid our survival. My belief is that acting out in violence is the kind of sin the writer of Ephesians would have us avoid. But letting the sun go down on our anger or ignoring that uninterrupted internal cascade of stress hormones can be just as harmful since it can lead to serious physical, mental, and emotional problems for ourselves and if undealt with can still lead to violent outbursts later on.

We can’t always catch ourselves in that first 90 seconds of anger, but whenever we realize we are still stewing on something, we can choose to slow down, care for ourselves, and name the hurt. It’s not weak to acknowledge hurt. It’s actually strong and courageous. It’s also truthful, and it’s what leads to the ability to heal.

In the Disney movie Encanto, Mirabel’s sisters Luisa and Isabel have big beautiful songs that describe the hurt they are holding in related to the pressure they feel to always uphold the image of being strong or perfect. But muscles and rose petals are not all these women are made of. Sometimes they cry. Sometimes they are more prickly than pretty. Acknowledging their hurt and their fears to their sister and to themselves is part of their family’s journey toward forgiveness, healing, and reconciliation.

I think that kind of truth-speaking is what the writer in Ephesians is inviting Christians to be about. “Speak the truth” the writer implores, “and let no evil talk come out of your mouths.” I’m glad it says both those things, because it helps me to understand that it’s okay to name my hurt. It reminds me that doing so is actually one of the best ways to avoid evil, hurtful words or actions. And it allows me to move along my forgiveness journey.

The Tutus’ book and the internet are full of amazing stories about forgiveness–about people who have forgiven the most heinous crimes against themselves or their loved ones and in some cases become like family with the very people who maimed and murdered their own family. But I don’t want to tell you those stories today. Because I don’t want any of us to be deluded into thinking that that kind of forgiveness comes easy or can always be wrapped up in the neat packages that make for a good NPR article. Those stories can be inspiring and instructive. But if we think that the work of forgiveness is done by someone else or some superhuman without big feelings then we will never catch it’s healing promise for ourselves.

The journey of forgiveness is not polite. It is not always easy. It cannot be done only with the head. It involves the heart and very often the body, where memories of hurt and trauma tend to reside.

Like the writer of Ephesians, I have no doubt that God in Christ forgives us our every transgression, and I find that to be a precious, genuinely life-saving-in-the-here-and-the-hereafter gift. Yet, we are not God or Jesus. Our practice of forgiveness can include a lot of messy, inconvenient naming-the-hurt times before we can feel ready to be anything like kind, tenderhearted, and forgiving.

Those beautiful stories of forgiveness can be our stories, too, if we’re willing to walk through the not so beautiful, hard, messy reality of anger and hurt. The path to forgiveness does not go around but travels through those dark woods.

Auntie Em is on the verge of it when she tells Elvira Gulch that “just because [Elvira] owns half the county doesn’t mean she can control the rest of [them].” Her anger is breaking through. It’s helping her stand up to Elvira. Maybe, just maybe it will lead her next to a place where it's safe to feel the hurt and let go of the pain she’s been holding those 23 years. How much stronger would that little part of Kansas be with an Auntie Em who could be angry and speak her mind with compassion?

I think that when we take time to really feel our anger and name our hurt, we allow all our defenses to be broken down–all our denial and pretending. That place, I suspect, is the place where we can best understand the humanness that connects us all and the way we are all connected in Christ. After we have been to that place, then we can better consider how to “speak the truth in love” as Ephesians chapter 4 tells us, and to hear the truth of others who are also part of the body of Christ “ joined and knit together… promot[ing] the body’s growth in building itself up in love.” After all, what leads to terrible violence between neighbors and between countries but unmet needs, unaddressed anger, and unnamed hurt?

We cannot single-handedly end all violence in the world. We can, however, hope to avoid adding to the violence by naming our own hurt, asking for God’s help to forgive, and acknowledging our connectedness to one another.         

May it be so. Amen.

Telling the Story

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – March 6, 2022

Telling the Story – Luke 4: 1-13

 In this traditional scripture text for the first Sunday of Lent, we accompany Jesus into the wilderness for a 40 day fast. The text tells us he was famished and alone in terms of human companions. I imagine he was also downright exhausted. That’s precisely the moment when the devil comes along with three tests.

 The devil offers food, power, and wealth. Now, these are not exactly bad things in and of themselves. Food sustains our living. Power is the ability to do what needs to be done. Wealth can be a basis for shared prosperity and health. As biblical commentator Dr. Nicole L. Johnson suggests, “In moderation and in the right forms, these things may be blessings from God; but in excess and in the wrong forms, they are a curse.[1]”

In other words, in each case, the devil offers Jesus plausibly healthy things by definitively harmful means. Jesus, as the foundation and model of our faith, aces these tests. It’s understandable, however, if it's quite often much, much harder for us.

We humans are mortal. We are finite. We make mistakes and cause harm to others and ourselves. We fall short of all that God intends for us.

Thankfully, we are not called to be perfect. Thankfully, we instead can follow the way of forgiveness, a practice of living in which we may develop deep, sturdy, repairable relationships with ourselves, others, and God. 

At first read, perhaps this story seems to have little to do with forgiveness. But if forgiveness begins with telling the story of our hurt as Desmond and Mpho Tutu suggest in their Book of Forgiving, then I see the footprints of forgiveness written all over this scripture text. To begin with, Jesus is one who knows his own story. He knows how it began and he knows how it will end. It’s a truth he sometimes stumbles under the weight of or swears disciples to secrecy about but it’s a truth he never denies.

We humans seem to struggle mightily with stories and truths that are too hard to tell. It often seems easier in the short term to forget, to deny, to paper them over with lies or excuses instead.

In the Disney hit movie Encanto the magical family Madrigal lives in a magical casita–a little house with its own mind and its own personality. The only problem is that the foundation of the casita is growing cracks. No one in the family wants to see them. They are all too busy keeping up the perfect facade of the family Madrigal. 

Only Mirabel sees the cracks and raises the alarm. She is not thanked for pointing out the problem–far from it, rather. But her noticing the cracks and talking about them are what starts the family on a journey of healing, forgiveness, and reconciliation.

Those cracks in our foundations, if left to fester, will eventually bring the whole house down. There are things that all of us get wrong. There is wrong that has been done to all of us. It is wise to choose carefully how we tell those stories of wrong and to whom. It can be merciful for us to wait until it's safe to process those stories. But like the cracks in the foundation, if we never tell the stories, if we never attend to them, or if we pretend they didn’t happen, they will bring us down in painful ways.

In The Book of Forgiving, the Tutus write about the experience of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the end of brutal, violent apartheid. They write about how liberating it was for victims to speak of the ways they had been harmed and to be heard by the whole community. Regardless of where their journeys took them next, the act of telling the story was an important step in the healing process.

In their book, the Tutus also share stories from around the world. For Kelly Connor from Perth, Australia, not telling the story of her own wrong nearly took her life.

When Kelly was a young driver, she hit and killed a woman with her car. It was terrible, tragic, and unintentional. She was never prosecuted in a court of law. That night her mother passed an edict that no one would ever speak of what had happened. Not telling the story haunted Kelly. She moved frequently, afraid that someone would find out what she’d done. She never developed close relationships for the same fear. And eventually she attempted to end her pain permanently. It took Kelly decades to tell the story and to begin the road to self-forgiveness.

In the scripture story, the devil tempts Jesus with unfathomable power, if only Jesus will bow down to him. But Jesus responds with his intention to worship and serve only God. We may not come face to face with the devil quite the way Jesus did in the story. But many of us face a temptation to take power and control into our own hands by refusing to tell our stories and by burying them deep, as though somehow that facade will save us.

Those stories can be painful to tell. When we have been wronged, we cannot always trust that we can tell our perpetrators without risk of further harm. When we have done wrong, we cannot always trust that our admission of guilt and our work to make amends will lead to reconciliation. What we can trust in is that God has the power to save and heal us. That power does not lie in our half-truths and carefully clung-to denials. Those things will not save us, heal us, or make us whole.

Only God can do that. And one way to let God do that, is to begin to walk the path of forgiveness by telling the stories we have to tell. Whatever those stories are for us, maybe this season is a good time to find a safe place to tell them. Telling them might be painful. But not every telling them will be more painful still.

It is possible, with the help of God, to find abundant relief from the pain of holding those stories in. In today’s scripture, the devil takes Jesus to the pinnacle of the Temple and tempts him into putting himself in harm’s way, claiming the angels will come and save him since he’s the son of God. Jesus responds, “‘It is said, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” Jesus, who will go to the cross at the end of this long Lenten season, does not seem eager to put himself in harm’s way unduly.

We’re not Jesus, but maybe we can stop hurting ourselves, too. Maybe, this season, we can accept God’s help, come down off the pinnacles of our pain, and begin to tell the stories that lead us to holy healing.

Forgiveness is not forgetting. Forgiveness is not weakness. Forgiveness is not easy. Forgiveness is re-membering. Forgiveness is courageous healing. Forgiveness is nothing less than joining in God’s work of bringing peace to ourselves and to the world. If we are to enjoy nourishment, to get good things done, and to share wealth, well-being, and prosperity, we too must seek these things by good and healthy means.

We will always keep making mistakes. But with God’s help, we too can deny the temptation to trust in anything other than God who holds us in the truth in all of our stories and who calls us to follow the healing path of forgiveness.

                                                                                             May it be so. Amen.

 THE MAIN SERIES POINT:  Forgiveness as a way of life in which we may develop deep, sturdy, repairable relationships with ourselves, others, and God.

[1] Dale P. Andrews, Dawn Ottoni-Wilhelm and Ronald J. Allen, Editors. Preaching God’s Transforming Justice: Year C. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012), 127. 

150 Ways to Pray: Song

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – February 20, 2022

150 Ways to Pray: Song – Psalm 98

Some days my life feels ready to be scripted as a musical. That’s not to say that every day is easy by any means. But it is often music-filled. In our family, in fact, we are apt to improvise songs to accompany our day and make each other laugh.

 My favorite is the off-season example: “Do you know what I know? The cheese, the cheese is just rotten milk, but it tastes really good. But it tastes really good.” Never mind that making cheese requires the appropriate strains of bacteria and a carefully monitored scientific process. That’s not what the song’s about. In any case, when the Psalmist implores us to “sing a new song to the Lord,” I like to think, yeah, we’re on top of that.

The ridiculous songs make me laugh and if innocent laughter isn’t a song of joy-filled praise, I’m not sure what is. But it’s not just ridiculous songs in my personal prayer soundtrack either. Like some of you, my knowledge of the hymnal is at least on par with my knowledge of the Bible. And the songs I grew up singing in church and Vacation Bible School are a huge part of what I call the hymnody in my bones.

Song is sometimes the easiest expression and first crutch of my faith. For example, I’ll always remember that when my first child was born my joy bubbled over into the doxology. Before I knew it I was singing “Praise God from whom all blessings flow…” right there in my hospital room and not caring very much about my tone or pitch either.

Although I have only learned the song in the past ten years, I have noticed that lately grief-filled or confused prayers often bubble out in the form of the Shawn Kirchner piece we sang last week titled Called or not Called.

One of the things I pray folks might take home from this series on prayer is that prayer is not relegated only to Sunday mornings. Prayer can happen anywhere and it can happen in the ways that make sense to you and no one else.

Maybe in this series you have been introduced to a form of prayer you would like to do more of. Maybe you have been reminded of ways you are already praying and given yourself more permission to do so. Maybe it’s been a long time since you did much praying at all and you’ll be inspired to start a regular practice or even just do it for the one time.

You may well find a powerful experience of God’s love, healing, and grace will meet you in those prayerful moments. And even if you don’t, it doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It’s called a practice not a perfect after all. 

As I’ve shared, the Psalms are filled with more than 150 ways to pray and so are our lives. But if you’re a lover of music and feel that indeed singing is praying twice, then you’ll find good company among the psalms, including today’s Psalm 98, and Psalm 101, Psalm 40, Psalms 95, 96, 97 and so on.

Psalm 98 tells us that even the sea joins in songs of praise with its roar, that the floods clap their hands, and that the hills may sing together for joy. If you love music as a powerful form of prayer then you are in good company even in the natural world beyond human beings.

Yes, if you love music as a powerful form of prayer then you are also in good company in this Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren. If you’ve been around long enough you know about our annual music Sunday, and you can remember a time when yes, we had at least three different age groups of choirs who sang together here in the sanctuary. I trust someday we will do that again, too.

I can’t say it’s true to a person but I can say that there are a lot of us here at Highland Avenue who love music and who meet God in song. When the Psalm says “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth; break forth into joyous song and sing praises,” we might have reason to think, yeah, we’re on top of that. And in some ways we very much are.

But I’ll tell you something, church. That “make a joyful noise” line stopped me this week. It captured my attention. Because there have been times here in church when I’ll admit I have been much less focused on making a joyful noise and much more focused on making a pitch perfect noise. There have been times when I have been less focused on praising God and much more focused on sounding good.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I spend all week preparing for worship, and I’m not about to stop. I do think practicing music enough to feel confident and comfortable can help us be more focused on making a joyful noise. I do think bringing our best offering to God is respectful and faithful. And, also, I think it’s really helpful, valuable, rewarding, and faithful to all of us gathered for worship to keep our focus on what we’re about when we share a song of praise. For me, I believe that’s “making a joyful noise to the Lord,” first and foremost.

I lived in California for a brief time and regularly frequented chapel services at the school I was attending. One of my classmates, I’ll call him Rori, taught me a lot about making a joyful noise and praying to God with our whole selves.

Rori got my attention right away when I moved there. I came from what we sometimes call a “frozen chosen” worship culture in which a small sigh or fervent head nod would be a lot of worship feedback during a sermon and where songs rarely required much movement.

Well, at these chapel services, songs often invited movement, which I was open to. But I won’t lie, Rori’s worship feedback made me uncomfortable at first. Although he was white like me, Rori’s worship background and current practice was very different. He would answer the preacher with Amens and Hallelujahs. He would clap and shout. He would stand up, wave his arms, and dance. Now, to be sure there were other folks there who worshiped like Rori but no one did it with as much gusto.

Like I said, at first it bothered me. That wasn’t what I had been taught was respectful behavior in worship. But my time at that school exposed me to new ways of understanding God, worship, prayer, and faith that opened me to all that I didn’t know, didn’t understand, and hadn’t experienced.

It changed me. And being with Rori in worship changed me, too. I figured that if Rori was going to worship with that much embodied energy then no one would much mind if I relaxed a little bit and let my emotions show a little more, too. I found that I liked worship better and experienced it more powerfully when I felt comfortable responding verbally to the sermon or at least feeling free to laugh, clap, cry, and sing to my heart’s content.

Psalm 98 ends curiously. After all that praise and worship talk, the Psalmist tells us God will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with equity. If you remember Josh Brockway’s sermon from a few weeks ago, you might remember to wonder whether righteousness is that same word that also means justice, and yes it does. If you’ve been learning about the difference between equality and equity, you might recall that equality is everyone getting the same thing and equity is everyone getting what we each need. It reminds me of the definition of shalom as a true wholeness and peace, where justice and righteousness meet, where everyone is cared for, and everything is set right.

That’s pretty much how Eugene Peterson helpfully paraphrases it in The Message version: “God’ll straighten out the whole world, God’ll put the world right, and everyone in it.”

Maybe these verses show up at the end of this Psalm just to give us a good reason to praise God. God’s the one who’s setting everything right. We could certainly use that. Praise be to God. Hallelujah! Amen.

When I consider that this Psalm about making a joyful noise concludes with an assurance of God’s yearning for equity though, I wonder if it also speaks to our different needs to express ourselves in prayer. Maybe we can take comfort from these 150 Psalms that prayer comes in all different forms and it is less important that we do it right than it is that we figure out how to make our own meaningful connections with God, the Holy Source of All Life and Love, that is just right for us for today. If there’s no one right way, then maybe that frees us up to make it our own. Maybe it frees us up to respect each other’s means of prayer, too. Maybe it frees us up to try new things and not worry so much about perfection.

When it comes to congregational singing, so many of us have been missing it for so long, and some of us, at home attending virtually still very much are. Whenever we do find chances to sing together–now or later, maybe this Psalm can help us worry a little bit less about how we sound and instead appreciate a little bit more just how grateful we are to raise our voices in song at all. Personally, I hope I will never take that for granted again.

I pray whatever prayer practice you find that works for you that you will pursue it with gusto, patience, confidence, and grace. For I trust God hears us, however it is we find to pray.                                          

May it be so. Amen.

Staying Soft

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – 1/16/22 Staying Soft – John 2: 1-11

In today’s story there was a wedding in Cana. Weddings then and now are about a couple getting married and often about so many other things, too. Whether consciously considered or not they might include a statement about a family’s values, economic status, honor in the community, and ability to provide hospitality. So, when the wine ran out, keep in mind, it wasn’t just the folks over-appreciating the free bar who would be disappointed. It might be a big mar on a family’s reputation in a culture where your family’s level of honor or shame was as good as actual currency.

Still, perhaps we could be forgiven for wondering if running out of wine is really such a big deal. As COVID cases surge astronomically, hospitals are stretched to capacity, and folks all over reach their breaking point of stress, grief, and finances, we might like to have such seemingly trivial problems as running out of wine at a wedding.

Yet, regardless of the particularities of the problem, I suspect most of us can relate to reaching a dead end, to running out of something we were counting on, to being worried, disgraced, and painfully disappointed. In such times, we may be tempted to give in to despair and to accept that the terrible way things are is the way they will always be.

Mary knows that’s not true. She sees possibilities where others see dead ends. She also faces the reality of this dead end. She doesn’t pour herself a big glass of water and with a nod and a wink pretend it's now very good wine. No, she’s real about the problem, and she finds the thing that she can do to help the situation.

We can do this, too, in the-wine-has-run-out, dead-end times of our own lives. We don’t have to accept that we have no way out of such situations. Despite messages that implore us to stay positive or count our blessings, neither do we need to pretend that real problems aren’t real problems or that our big feelings aren’t big feelings. We can, though, be clear eyed about the reality of suffering, and we can also be grateful for the gifts and possibilities that remain despite it. We don’t have to engage in either/or thinking, as though everything is bad or everything is good. Rather, we can lean into a both/and perspective on life (Footnote 1: In some Advent gatherings this past December, I brought up this article and the difference between “toxic positivity” and “tragic optimism”, which is another way of getting at what I am trying to convey here. Go to https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/0/tragicoptimism-opposite-toxic-positivity/619786/)

Yes, maybe we are experiencing deep grief. Maybe we are experiencing fear and uncertainty. Maybe there are challenges before us that are too much to bear alone. Yes, the pandemic is raging once again with dangerous and dispiriting consequences. We can take time to be with that. We can feel those feelings. With support, we can face the fact that all the wine has run out at this party or much, much worse, and we are not sure what to do next. And, and, and, and, then with support we can make it to a place where we can also experience gratitude for all that remains and for the possibilities that may yet come from somewhere unexpected.

In today’s scripture passage Mary trusts that she knows whose help she can call on to save the day for this would-be-disgraced family. She turns to Jesus, her son and miraculously, mysteriously, God made flesh. Their dialogue is scant in the story, leaving me to wonder whether more was being communicated than what was written down. Somehow she knew that Jesus could do something about it and would. “Do whatever he tells you,” she directs the servers. What he tells them is pretty weird. But they do it, and they are rewarded with something far better than they could have imagined.

It reminds me of my grandmother. When her husband, my grandfather, finally succumbed to lung cancer, she thought she’d never love again. They were married for more than 50 years and had four children together. It wasn’t as though she didn’t have any prospects. She declared herself offthe-market for good. She would tell me in laughing tones, though, about the men who called her up wondering if she’d like to go out with them.

In her own assertive way, she turned them each down flat. What nerve they had! She was sure that was not for her. But then there was this one guy who shyly came around. She had known him all her life, too. And he seemed okay–maybe better than okay. Before we knew it, this new man was a part of our family, and deep in their eighties, there were new wedding bells.

The whole family is tickled by this later-in-life love affair. She’s happy and I think it gives us all hope for good new chapters to come out of painful endings.

Yet, one of the things I admire most about my grandmother in light of her new marriage is that she never forgets my grandfather either. She never hesitates to talk about him even in front of her new love. He had his own previous love, too. They seem to know, in their hard-won wisdom, that the one love doesn’t negate the other. They seem to be able to hold their lifelong grief for their spouses passed alongside this new joy in their lives.

I marvel at them. I don’t know if I could do it. I’m pretty into the guy who’s in my life right now, and we’ve only been married for 15 years–not 50. But I want to learn how to soften my heart the way she did. I want to do it in other areas of my life where I need it now. I want to believe that this cold, hard, pandemic-ridden January is not how things will always be. I want to stay open to the possibility that the spring will come and with it good things I only now dare to imagine. I want to trust that God is in those good things, that like the spring that comes after the winter and like Jesus turning the water into wine, God makes a way out of no way, and I can trust that new life has a way of being born after every difficulty and ending.

I pray you will join me, too. We don’t have to harden our hearts, even in difficult times. Rather, we can stay soft, vulnerable, and complicated. We can feel our fear and our grief, and we can remember that we believe in that God who brings out the best wine just when we thought the party was over.

I encourage us to stay soft because that’s the way we stay open to the mysterious, miraculous beauty and possibility that our turning-water-into-wine God is bringing even now.

May it be so. Amen.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built

May 29, 2022 - Genesis 1-2: 3

In Becky Chambers’s delightful fantasy novella A Psalm for the Wild-built, main character Dex, discovers an urgent call to hear live cricket song. Crickets no longer live among humans in this imagined future, a product of massive environmental degradation. The songs of crickets can now only be heard on recordings utilized by monks like Dex to create a calming atmosphere. But there is something in Dex that longs to be among wild crickets, a longing that leads him to the wild places no longer tended, tilled, or ventured through by human beings.

The creation story we read in these first few chapters of Genesis takes us to a time before human beings and attempts to address questions asked across cultures and time like: Where do we come from? Who are we? Why are we here? What is life about? Like Jesus and his parables, the ancient people who shared stories orally and eventually wrote down this account, were apparently fond of getting at such large questions with illustrative stories.

While I know both folks who, for understandable reasons, want to read this story as factual and folks who, for understandable reasons, want to reject this story as non-factual, personally, I believe stories can tell truths that go to rich, mysterious places where facts and either/or thinking dwell only uncomfortably.

One of those truths that I hear in this story and hold dear is that as each piece of creation is called into being God deems it good. Some scholars like to term this the “original blessing,” and in this first creation account it is extended to the land, the sea, the plants, and the animals–including humankind or adam, earth-being, made in God’s image. All are called “good” or towb in Hebrew, which means good and also beautiful, bountiful, well, and at ease.

I sometimes think I might be worthy of such a blessing if I do certain things, if I live a certain way or have certain beliefs. But this blessing is bestowed before any of these parts of creation, including human beings, have done anything at all. Yet, they are good. They are beautiful, bountiful, well, and at ease. I don’t know about you but when I imagine the song of crickets, I can feel that goodness, beauty, bounty, wellness, and at ease deep in my bones.

As I followed this character Dex through Chambers’ short little book, I wondered if that’s what Dex was hoping to feel and bike toward. But it caught my breath when a scene in the story hinged on this question of doing good and being good. Dex is convinced that finding their purpose–their best work in the world–will bring them this feeling of being good. It is an unlikely and unexpected companion who points out to Dex that simply     being    is good–more than good, wonderful even.

That’s not to say perfect or without suffering or without causing harm. This national Memorial Day holiday was created to remember those who gave their lives at the hands of such harm. The horrific harm we have seen in the news the past few weeks is sure to convince us of the imperfection, wells of suffering, and unspeakable violence of which human beings are capable. Perhaps that fresh evidence even makes it harder to hear or believe a message of the wondrous goodness of being. But I would argue that it is precisely the rejection of that wondrous goodness of being that leads us to such harm in the first place.

That rejection of our goodness of being perpetuates the cycle of violence and does little to interrupt it. From our hurt and insecurities we hurt others. Rather, it is faith in that goodness of being–not doing–that allows us to see the goodness of ourselves and everyone else, too. Not the lack of harm. Not the lack of evil-doing. But the persistent, inherent goodness and beauty that remains despite all the harm and wrong.

I’ll admit that is very difficult for me to see when I learn about the Buffalo shooting and the Uvalde shooting. I can’t judge anyone for not being ready to see goodness and beauty in the midst of all that. I can feel so numb, exhausted, infuriated, and heartbroken. It has a kinship, too, to the numbness, exhaustion, anger, and sadness I feel when I try to take in the breadth and depth of what human beings have done and continue to do to woefully harm the natural environment.

Those incredible waves of emotion can cause me to feel frozen, to shut down, or to want to fight anyone who seems to be causing harm. It’s helped me to have trusted friends and long walks to process those emotions with. It’s also helped me to ask myself, so what am I doing about it? Is this a moment where I can say to myself,  “And that’s why I do what I do?” Or is this a moment where I say to myself, “Maybe there’s something different I’d like to start doing?”  

It’s not that doing something will make me good. It’s that doing something might help others and myself better live in the truth of that persistent goodness, beauty, bounty, and wellness.

In Genesis there are at least two accounts of creation woven together. The second comes after the one we read today. These stories offer slightly different perspectives on how human beings are to live and operate in the created world. Sometimes translators have chosen words like subdue or have dominion over for the first story’s take on humans within creation. The second uses a word most often translated as till, garden, or cultivate. My interpretation of both these stories is that humans have a special role within creation that we might understand as a call to be connected caretakers. We need not do that from a place of superiority. For according to these Genesis stories we are called into being out of the very soil and breathed the ruach breath of life into.

Scientists confirm these atoms and elements that make us up, at their core are the same throughout the known universe. It’s all the same dust from the core of the earth to the farthest flung stars. We are the earth and the earth is us. The song of the crickets is our song, too. We are not separate. We are blessedly connected and humbly called to live out the truth of the goodness with which we were created and to which we will return in this life or the next.                      

May God help us live like it is so. Amen.

Come and Have Breakfast

May 15, 2022 - John 21

In the gospel of John chapter 21, Peter announces he is going fishing and his friends join him. By now the disciples had already lived through unspeakable grief, stress, and uncertainty. They had already seen the death of their Lord and teacher. They still had ample reason to wonder if they were next. Despite all the signs they had received, I’m not sure they were quite ready to believe in the risen Christ. I’m not sure that they knew what to do now. 

So, they do what they know. They go fishing, and they come up empty, empty, empty. They come up empty until a mysterious man on the beach calls out to throw their nets on the other side. That’s when the miracle happens. That’s when their nets fill to capacity and there is more–much more–than enough.

I guess I thought I knew what side of the boat to fish on. I had certain expectations for what I was doing in my life, in my family, in my church, and in the wider community. But when the pandemic hit, my calendar was wiped clean, my family hunkered down in isolation, and gathering for worship as we knew it was deemed unsafe. So many things I had taken for granted were radically changed. And it became clear to me just how much more of the twists and turns of life were out of my control than I would have liked to believe.

Throughout the grief, stress, and uncertainty that the pandemic has brought upon our world, I have heard Jesus’ steady, sturdy call upon my heart to give up my illusions of control, to get clear on what really matters, and to trust as wholly as I can in the grace of God as known in Jesus Christ. For me, that has been how I have thrown my net on the other side of the boat, and I can attest that there I have found the sweetest abundance for my heart, mind, and soul.

As we wonder what the new normal and the next normal looks like, I want to keep my net on that abundant side of the boat. As we ask, “O Lord, what do we do now and now and now?” I want to keep listening for the voice of Jesus calling from the shore.

When my grandmother died the only thing I felt like I could do was make chocolate chip cookies. My grandmother was a beloved matriarch. She took care of my sister and I from the time we were small, while my mom and dad both worked full time to support us. We were lucky to have her as long as we did and that she could offer our growing family so much support. But when she died it was like the end of the world. It was a deep grief for 14 year old me. It was the kind of grief where you wake up and feel mad at the sun for still shining and at all the world for going on like nothing so big had happened at all. I didn’t know what else to do. So I made chocolate chip cookies. It was what she would have done–showed up with food to meet someone in a deep ache.

Now, I wasn’t like a real good cook at 14. So, I don’t know how those cookies really turned out. But they became a thing between my grandfather and I. He survived her by almost ten years, and for every August 15th birthday of his that I could, I would show up with homemade chocolate chip cookies.

He remarried and I got married. And life went on. But between us those chocolate chip cookies were a symbol. I think they were a sign to us both of comfort in the midst of grief and of hope in the midst of loss.

In the midst of the disciples’ grief, exhaustion, and confusion, Jesus is doing something familiar and comforting, too, in John 21. As the disciples haul themselves and their catch up out of the water, Jesus tells them, “Come and have breakfast.” He offers them bread and fish, and no one asks who he is because they know. Because he has done this before. In the midst of hunger, exhaustion, and seemingly depleted resources, he has already turned a few loaves of bread and some fish into enough to feed five thousand. 

Ask me about resilience.

Ask me about how we overcome the hardships of our lives.

Ask me about how we put the pieces back together when we fall apart.

Ask me about how we respond to a global pandemic–to a planet, to communities, to families and lives in crisis.

Ask me and I will tell you.

We rely on Jesus. These churches–yours and mine–we rely on Jesus.

We rely on Jesus–the one who turns water into wine!

We rely on Jesus–the one who fed the five thousand!

We rely on Jesus–the one who makes a way out of no way!

–the one who rises even from the dead!

–the one who calls to us in our grief, in our hardship, in our fear, in our uncertainty, in our anger, in our confusion, in our exhaustion, and in our coming up empty after a long, hard night of striving.

He calls to us, “Come and have breakfast.”

We each have pandemic stories to tell. We have our own stories of loss, grief, stress, change, and uncertainty. Despite how much we have already experienced, we are still living out this story, too. What we can do right now might look different from each other. It might look different from the things we used to do. It might look different from what we do in the future. But what we have in common is that invitation from Jesus to “Come and have breakfast” and to be breakfast makers, too.

Sometimes making breakfast looks like actual breakfast with French toast, scrambled eggs, and bacon. But it can also look like a church ministry that supports victims of domestic violence and works to break that generational cycle. It can look like a Soup Kettle that serves a free meal every Saturday night of the year come rain or shine or COVID-19. It can look like the friend who calls to check on us when we’re sick or a church who rallies around whoever needs help. It can look like the hard work of forgiveness and reconciliation. It can sound like music that uplifts us and sets us free. Whatever it is that offers hope, comfort, and a reminder that our real safety and security lies in the never-ending love of God, that’s the breakfast to which Jesus invites us and that we are called to serve.

We may not be able to control a lot of things that we would like to control but what we can do is start finding ways to share a little breakfast. When we do, I trust we’ll find our empty nets filled with more–much more than enough.

                                                                                        May it be so. Amen.

Hungry Hermit Thrushes

May 8, 2022 - Luke 24: 28-43

There has been a Hermit Thrush sighting in my backyard this year. And several Yellow Rumped Warblers have been around for a couple weeks. If you’ve never heard of a Hermit Thrush or a Yellow Rumped Warbler, you’re not alone. Until I spotted these new-to-me backyard visitors this spring, I had never heard of them either, despite my growing interest in birds and birding.  I don’t know what my neighbors think I’m doing with my binoculars eagerly trained out my back window, but I hope to be able at some point to reassure them all that what has my attention so rapt are the wild, feathered visitors.

Over the past few years I’ve started to expand my backyard feeders and to work in more native plants, all in hopes of attracting increased numbers and diversity of feathered friends. And my attempts have yielded some limited success, pulling in more woodpeckers, goldfinches, and even an occasional Blue Jay. But several mornings this past month, I have been delighted to see birds out my window who I had never met before and who I needed help to identify.

It could have something to do with the cold, wet spring. That could be driving these hungry Hermit Thrushes into my vicinity. But I want to hope that it also has something to do with my humble efforts to respect and tend to the needs of my wild friends.

In the middle of today’s text Jesus appears to a whole group of disciples who believe him to be a ghost. There’s this lovely partial sentence in that part of the story that begins “While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering…” It’s not exactly the risen Christ I’m looking at out my back window. But I feel in my joy a disbelief, and a persistent wondering about how faithful people may tend to a planet in peril. 

When it comes to the environmental crises we’re facing, I can feel incredibly disheartened about the inertia on the part of big governments and big corporations to face this monumental challenge. I also feel the limits of my little spoonfuls of action to move this mountain to the sea.

So, where I find the most hope and possibility these days is in places where ordinary people meet to amplify and organize around helpful action–in churches, community groups, local governments, and more. When we talk to each other and hear each other’s concerns, I think that’s when we can find a new way forward together.

In response to their joy, disbelief, and wondering if he is a ghost, the risen Christ looks at the disciples and asks, “Do you have anything to eat?” Apparently resurrection is hard work because the risen Christ is hungry.

Now, this kind of story is a rich place for our imaginations to dance around the question of bodily resurrection. If the risen Christ is hungry and has physical needs, then when we, too, rise from the dead will our bodies take a similar corporal form? And if so, ought we to preserve our bodies as well as possible even after we take our last breath?

I have current friends and relatives as well as many predecessors who certainly think and thought so. For me, I am humbled by the mystery of life after death. I choose to trust that however it works, God’s love and grace will find me and carry me on. When I imagine bodily resurrection, it’s easier for my science-interested mind to focus on the holiness of these atoms I now call me going back to the eternal process of life, death, and resurrection that are part of the DNA of all creation.

Me, I’d rather my ashes be scattered or become part of a new growing tree. But perhaps what my well-preserved ancestors and I can agree on is that stories like this one speak to the preciousness of bodies to God. I think they also speak to the preciousness of that which sustains our bodies, including food and the source of all that food: this Earth that we call home.

Last year a group called the Wild Ones of Northern Kane County and the Gail Borden Public Library District hosted a community read and various events around the Doug Tallamy book titled Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard. In the book, Tallamy suggests ordinary people have the power to create a new national park that will re-wild and sustain the natural life around us, if together we work to restore native habitats in our local parks and the very yards that surround our houses, condos, businesses, churches, municipal lots, and apartment buildings. This restoration aids both the carbon capture that we so dearly need, if we are going to evade the worst of a warming planet, and, it restores food sources and breeding grounds for native wildlife, making our neighborhoods more lively and healthy naturehoods for all of the inhabitants–including us humans.

These ideas are included in the “Gardens and Garbage” Sunday School lessons our church’s young people are discussing this month with the help of our Green Team. And more ideas are in the works for how the faithful people of this church may together tend to the body of this planet which God has given us to sustain these bodies and to call home. Who knows how the Holy Spirit may yet lead us to join in this resurrection work.

On the road to Emmaus, two disciples meet the risen Christ, but they don’t know it. They ask him, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” This was the man they thought to be dead. This was the man the women told them had risen from the dead. But they had trouble believing. They did not recognize the risen Christ on the road because they were, understandably, not expecting him.

There are times when I, too, am so focused on the reality of suffering and death that I have a hard time seeing the ways new life is already on the way. I do want to be the kind of person who takes time to lament and grieve. At the same time, I know that life is not only about pain. Life is also good, beautiful, and surprising.

It’s overwhelming at times to carry a both/and approach to life—to be aware of the pain and the joy at the same time. But if we don’t, I’m afraid we might miss the depth of beauty all around us.

In her talk about climate anxiety, Stanford University’s Dr. Nicole Ardoin cites a 2021 report from the Pew Research Center that “suggests 80% of people are willing to make changes to how they live and work to reduce the effects of global climate change.” 80% of people is a lot! Imagine what 80% of people could do. Imagine what they are already doing! Imagine how the new life possibilities we need are already underway.

As we journey together, share our joy and pain together, and break bread together, may we, too, keep our eyes open for the ways the risen Christ is among us even now, showing us the way to new life and hopeful possibilities.

                                                                                           May it be so. Amen.

Wilding Our Faith

May 1, 2022 - Matthew 17: 20-21

Just before the few scripture verses we read today, the disciples fail to cure a boy with a demon who Jesus dispatches with quickly. When the disciples ask why they could not do what Jesus did, Jesus answers, “Because of your little faith.”

How many of us have not faced a challenge or wrong that seemed so big and insurmountable that our faith –either in ourselves or even in God–faltered? Though in the story it disgusts Jesus, it seems to me a perfectly understandable part of being human.

For me, the environmental crisis facing our planet is an example of just such a seemingly insurmountable trouble in the face of which I struggle to maintain faith, and that’s when I even have the courage to think of it at all. In this experience, it is very clear that I am not alone.

Dr. Nicole Ardoin is the Director of the Social Ecology Lab at Stanford University, where they study people’s relationship to the environment and where one of their areas of study has been something she calls “climate anxiety.” “Climate anxiety,” she says, “is very real, and people all over the world are feeling it–like this heavy umbrella hanging over everything... And until we name it,” Dr. Ardoin counsels, “we don’t know how to take action on it.”

It’s understandable to feel doom and gloom about news headlines on the environmental crises we face. Around the world we’re facing immense climate-related challenges, including intensifying weather events, devastating wildfires, freshwater scarcity, and ecosystem degradation, just to name a few. But Ardoin shares “what we know from decades of psychology is that catastrophizing rarely leads to productive, action-oriented outcomes…and that by shifting our perspective even just a little bit, we can start to empower ourselves by feeling more capable and ready to take action.”

Ardoin shares that no matter the challenge we face, we can get up every day with a “fresh start” mentality, ready to try again despite the reality of the obstacles before us. We can celebrate the gains we have made toward our goals whatever they may be. And, we can look for positive actions we can take now both individually and collectively.

When they fail to cure the boy with the demon, Jesus tells the disciples. “If you only had faith the size of a mustard seed” you would be able to move mountains. “Nothing would be impossible for you.”

Now, I think it is a harmful idea to espouse that people who are unwell, who struggle, or who fail in their health, wealth, or any other matter simply don’t have enough faith. I think that idea is akin to the harmful prosperity gospel that keeps the rich rich and the poor poor by assigning a morality and supposed blessing to wealth accumulation that the Jesus I find in the gospels would have considered upside down and evil. That’s not an interpretation of this text I could share as good news.

No, rather, I think the good news is even a little bit of faith and hope can indeed have a powerful impact on our lives and the world around us. When it comes to learning something new or doing something difficult, for example, if we believe it is impossible we are unlikely to accomplish our goals. But if even a little part of us believes we can do it, we are much more likely to get where we want to go.

I read a research study once that claimed one of the best indicators for whether a child will grow into an adult who is happy and healthy is if there is at least one person outside their family who supports and believes in them. I have never forgotten that claim, because I have seen how precious it is to have even one person in our lives who helps us develop faith in ourselves and a trust that good things can happen in the future.

Another education-based research track that has long held my attention is the philosophy of expeditionary learning. Outward Bound is an organization that leads young people on various adventure-based learning experiences. On those adventures, one of the chief philosophies they impart to their students is that there are no passengers here. Everyone is part of the crew. If there’s something that needs fixed, done, or cleaned, and you can do it, then you do it. You’re part of the crew. There are no passengers here.

What is within our power individually and collectively? How can we claim and utilize even our little mustard seed-sized faith that what we do can make a positive difference?

My favorite Midwest-centered environmental comeback story is that of the Sandhill Cranes. These tall, lanky creatures that make a rattling call as they migrate in large numbers high above the Fox River Valley were once threatened and endangered. “In the 1930s, only two dozen breeding pairs of Sandhill Cranes lived in Wisconsin. Today, researchers estimate, the population in the upper Midwest is between 65,000 and 95,000.”[1]

What aided their comeback? Scientists believe the biggest boost for the Sandhill Cranes’ re-emergence across the Midwest has been the conservation and restoration of wetlands, marshes, and prairies, since these places are the birds’ preferred habitats for nesting and breeding. Individual and collective human efforts helped to bring this species of bird that dates back to the Pleistocene era back from the brink of extinction.

We could tell similar stories about the Bald Eagle across the U.S. and about the wolves in Yosemite. What’s more is that protecting the natural resources for these species to survive and thrive also serves the survival and thriving of the human species–of our own yet to be born descendants.

Whenever I see the Sandhill Cranes or rather, whenever I hear them, since that usually happens first, I am reminded of the hopeful story of their comeback. That hope makes it seem a little more possible to me that together we may well yet avoid the worst of the forecasted environmental crises of the coming decades.

In Matthew, when the resurrected Christ meets the women after they have been to the tomb that first Easter morning, he tells them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to meet me in Galilee.” We serve a God who deals in resurrection promises and impossible possibilities, who meets us in every place we make our homes and in whom we may bravely put our faith.

With such a God leading us on and calling all creation good, what do we really believe may be possible?  Do we really believe we can move the mountain to the ocean?

That’s a tall order isn’t it? But aren’t there times when the challenges of our lives and our world really do seem so immovable and insurmountable as a mountain?

As a woman who names coal miners among her immigrant ancestors, I know that humans can indeed move mountains. I also know the generations-long environmental perils of trying to move a mountain all at once. That wisdom of my ancestors matches up with the unique wisdom of a teacher who once told me “real change is more like erosion than explosion.” With those words ringing in my ears, whenever I meet a metaphorical mountain that needs moved to the sea I find my hope and faith buoyed by imagining it being done by many hands one spoonful at a time. With steady, hopeful perseverance, and the grace of the God of resurrection possibilities, I believe we can face any challenge before us–be it global, local, or personal–with a sturdy, strong, and despite its size, mustard-seed-like faith.

 May it be so. Amen.

[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-met-sandhill-cranes-20171115-story.html