Drawn In: Risk

The word talent stands out to me in today’s scripture. Although we are in the middle of a worship series on holy creativity, the word talent in today’s scripture does not refer to the natural or refined skills of any particular individual. Rather, it was the “largest unit of currency in the Hellenistic world. A single talent was equivalent to fifteen years of wages for a laborer.”  

Even without any precise mathematical calculations for what that would mean for any of our households, I think we can agree it was an amount of currency that would be a great deal of responsibility for all but the most wealthy. Indeed, it was enough currency that the householder did not want to see it sitting idle but wanted his money making more money while he was away.

So, as the bits of the story before the passage we read today tell us, the wealthy man summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them while he was gone. “To one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one, each according to his ability.” Both of the first two invested the money and doubled it, but the one who one who was given only one talent buried it in the ground and gave it back untouched. 

Most interpreters agree we are meant to understand God as the wealthy one and we humans as the slaves entrusted with that wealth. What is that wealth? Is it money? Is it time? Is it indeed our passion and our skill? I think the answer is yes to all of the above, and that we may justifiably respond to this scripture passage by asking ourselves, how is it we are using our God-given talents? Are we sharing them for the expansion of God’s love and grace in the world? Or are we burying them in the ground rather than avoid the risks that come with letting those talents loose from our hands?

I have a lot of compassion for the slave who hid his one talent out of fear. Sharing our God-given talents does not come without risk. Sharing our God-given talents, whatever they may be, quite often makes us vulnerable.

In her book, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, researcher Brené Brown coins the term “vulnerability hangover” for the experience that happens after we’ve risked sharing our gifts and we wonder if we shared too much or if it will have the intended effect. Brown’s research shows this is a common human experience, and she encourages readers to take risks anyway, especially in service of the happiness and well-being of ourselves and others.

When asked in an interview what she would put in a “Museum of Daring Greatly,” she responded she would never found such a project. Instead she would start a “Museum of Epic Failure,” so that we could all see how even the people who we think of as successful also experienced failure and found a way to persevere through the risk. They chose to try again.

There’s another word that catches my attention in this story, and that’s the word slave. I’m not keen on the ways this story sets God up as a slave master and we humans as slaves. I think it comes too close to endorsing the practice of humans owning other humans or the idea that humans are completely depraved, worthless creatures–neither of which I can agree to. But I also don’t love this word because slaves have very little choice about what they risk.

Elsewhere Jesus taught about the love and blessing God shares with all of us. In this series we have read the scripture in which he reads from the prophet Isaiah in claiming Jesus’ own call to “proclaim release to the captives and… to set free those who are oppressed.”

No, Jesus does not condone slavery. Rather, he is using real images of his time to help followers understand what God wants from them and for them. It is our choice how we will respond.

Whoever we are, God has gifted us with something to share, the story claims. It doesn’t seem very important what value our unjust world places on our gifts. We are called to share them just the same, whether the world says that’s worth five talents or only one. What we have to share matters.

We are not at all worthless. Who we are and what we bring matters to God. What’s more, we are called to share those gifts with the world in spite of the very real and often justifiable fear of failure. There’s no guarantee that what we share will be doubled in value, but there is every guarantee that the gifts we never share will never grow –for our good or anyone else’s. For me the story is very clear. God calls us to risk sharing vulnerably of our gifts with the world.

Maybe that idea excites some of us. Maybe there’s someone among us here today who is on the verge of launching a great creative work. If so, I hope you hear the bone deep encouragement of this passage.

For others of us, maybe that idea brings out our skepticism. Maybe some of us are feeling way too exhausted to get excited about being creative, much less taking a vulnerable risk with that effort. Maybe we’ve already risked quite enough. If that’s you, maybe the vulnerable risk you're called to take is one that is oriented toward creative ways of finding rest and releasing yourself from undue obligation.

However, we come today, I wonder if we may agree that even small risks can expand God’s love and grace in the world in creative ways. Psychologist Gillian Sandstrom became interested in the big pay out of the small risk of developing “weak ties” with strangers and acquaintances. For psychologists, “weak ties” are the ones that we have with the checkout clerk we talk to about the weather or the neighbor we don’t know well but who always waves.

Sandstrom became interested in this idea when she went back to school to become a psychologist instead of a computer programmer, her original career. She was ten years older than most of the students around her, and she had a hard time shaking the feeling that she didn’t belong there.

Enter the hot dog lady. On her daily walk from one university building to another, Sandstrom would pass a hot dog stand. “I never bought a hot dog,” relates Sandstrom, “but every time I walked past, I would smile and wave at her and she’d smile and wave at me.”

Sandstrom remembers looking forward to seeing the hot dog lady daily, and she found herself disappointed on the days she wasn’t there. This brief interaction broke the isolation for Sandstrom even though she and the hot dog lady never developed a deeper relationship.

Years later, remembering this recurring interaction, Sandstrom designed a study that investigated the benefits of social connections, including brief encounters with strangers, acquaintances, and anyone outside our close circle of family, friends, and colleagues. While much of the growing research on social connection focuses on the closest relationships in people’s lives, “Sandstrom and other scientists are now learning that even the most casual contacts with strangers and acquaintances can be tremendously beneficial to our mental health.”

Sandstrom’s 2014 study asked 50 participants to carry two clicker counters each and count every time they talked to someone during the day. One clicker counted “strong ties” or close relationships. The other counted “weak ties” with strangers and acquaintances. Sandstrom found people who tended to have more weak ties tended to be a little happier than people who had fewer of those kinds of interactions on a day-to-day basis. 

Sandstrom admits she was never fond of talking to strangers before. It made her uncomfortable not knowing how someone else would respond. Even when it wasn’t necessarily dangerous to talk to strangers, she avoided that risk. Now, she makes a point, when she can, of cultivating those weak ties and recommends others looking for a little more happiness try it, too, especially since she knows how much one of those weak ties once meant to her.

What risks are we called to take big or small? What might those risks we take create in our world?

I believe God calls us to risk sharing vulnerably of our gifts in service of expanding the experience of holy love and grace in the world. When we share of our own passion and creative gifts, not only do we serve our own joy and well-being, but we serve, as the lintel over the Highland Avenue church building door reads: “the glory of God and our neighbors’ good.”

Wherever we go, may we have the courage to risk sharing our passion, joy, and talent with the world.

                                                                                           May it be so. Amen.

Drawn In: Hover

Chapter 4 of the Gospel of Luke begins, “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished.”

For centuries, Christians have taken this scripture as a basis for their own spiritual practice of fasting in order to feel closer to God. I’m not particularly good at fasting, especially not from food. Neither my body nor my mind takes to it very well at all. But I can appreciate the idea that stepping back from something for a while might help us feel better, feel closer to God, and even feel ready for some new creative undertaking.

Over long years of practice, I have learned to love sitting in silent contemplative prayer as a means of stepping back from the torrent of my own thoughts. In the silence, I have learned to seek the presence of God that remains beyond those thoughts, like the presence of the clear blue sky behind the clouds. I have also known the renewal that comes just from resting from certain things, like how much difference a lunch break, a sabbath day, a week of vacation, or a whole summer off can make. And, since I’ve been a child, I’ve enjoyed the strange sensation of pushing my arms out to either side against a narrow door jamb as far and hard as I can for as long as I can until finally stepping out and letting my arms raise up effortlessly in sweet relief.

But Jesus didn’t just fast in today’s story. He was also tempted by the devil. Three times the devil tempted Jesus to throw off his human finitude and to use the ultimate cosmic power that was his birthright. Three times Jesus refused.

Today the world is still full of temptations for us to try to outrun our own human finitude. I often think there’s some arrogance and greed to our striving to pretend we’re anything we’re not, but I also know that pushing past our own human limits often comes from a place of noble intention.

The world is full of sorrow and heartbreak. We don’t have to look far in the news or down the block to find something we’d give anything to fix. Indeed, so many of us would very much like to fix everything.

Don’t misunderstand me. I do believe that when we work together we can do a lot of good. With God’s help, we can move mountains and do things once thought impossible. But we, personally, can’t do everything, as much as we may be tempted to believe and to act otherwise.

I’m still fond of those oft-quoted lines from last century’s Trappist Monk Thomas Merton’s book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, in which he writes, “To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. The frenzy… neutralizes [our] work…” he continues. “It destroys the fruitfulness of [that]…work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.” 

I love and hate those lines of Merton wisdom because I find them both so freeing and so convicting. Maybe some of you do, too. Maybe that’s also why I was so taken with the story of Simone Biles from the last summer Olympics. In case you somehow missed it, the unmatched queen of gymnastics struggled uncharacteristically in her events in Tokyo and revealed that she was experiencing “the twisties,” a very dangerous condition that sometimes afflicts gymnasts and keeps them from accessing their highly refined sense of orientation to their bodies in space.  

What she did next shook the orientation of athletes to the long idolized code of honor in suffering. When Simone Biles pulled herself from events in the 2021 Olympics, rather than risk doing significant harm to herself, she told everyone watching, a different kind of story– a story in which even the gravity-defying greatest gymnast of all time can still respect her own human limitations.

Two years later and two weeks ago at the Now Centre in nearby Hoffman Estates, Biles came soaring back in her first competition after a significant hiatus from the sport. She even performed with success a fourth unprecedented move in women’s gymnastics that will forever bear her name once she successfully performs it in international competition. When interviewed, Biles was quick to credit her successful return to all the mental health support she sought and to the step back she took when she did.

I don’t know that anyone here is planning to make a run at competing in the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, but I do know that all of us are endowed by our Creator with our own creative spark. All of us here are creating something even now whether that is the art of a new floor routine to be performed on a world stage, the art of a carefully cultivated classroom, the art of a well-cared for relationship, the art of a well-lived life, or any other creative thing.

What greater joy and justice may we co-create with God when we allow ourselves to be drawn in not by the temptation of being everything to everyone but by doing well the few things that are ours to do?

What greater joy and justice may we co-create with God when we allow ourselves to step back for a moment and get some dearly needed perspective on our lives?  

Personally, I am too often not nearly as good as Jesus was in this story at knowing, naming, and respecting my limitations. And I know Merton’s not wrong about the violence part. Because more often than I’d like, my lack of limit-setting has caused harm to myself or others.

Maybe there’s something to that big pause Jesus took when he even let himself be tested some. Maybe we, too, can learn more to step back, to take a look at the big picture, and to get our priorities straight before doing, giving, or creating.

Maybe we could even think of this as a practice of holy “hovering” or taking a bird’s eye view before jumping into action.   

It is a dove after all in which the Holy Spirit descends in bodily form at Jesus' baptism in the chapter of Luke just before the one we read today, signifying Jesus’ identity as God’s divine child. Quickly then the story is interrupted by a long list of Jesus’ human heritage as if to underline the belief that Jesus is both human and divine at the same time.

We’re not Jesus, but I do think we’re also beloved children of God, infused with the divine spark of creativity unleashed on Creation by the Creator. We’re also so very clearly human, too.

If Jesus paused to take time with God and to know his own limitations before allowing himself to be drawn deeply to the work of loving people and setting the world more free, then there is no shame in our learning to pause humbly before God’s creative call, too.                 

Thank God it is so. Amen.

Drawn In: Dream

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – August 13, 2023

Drawn In: Dream – Luke 4: 14-21

I know I’m biased but I think of sermons as a kind of sacred art. I like writing sermons. I like preaching them, too, usually. Even more, I like hearing a really moving sermon from someone else.

 And most of all I am enamored with the experience of sitting in little circles of preachers talking about their preaching and about the nature of preaching itself. It’s super nerdy but it’s one of the things that really makes me feel alive. In affirming, Spirit-infused circles like those, I have seen folks come to profound new insights about their faith, their identity, and their art. For me, these circles have included big laughter, ugly tears, and oh so many goosebumps.

 No matter how many formal or informal circles like these I visit, I find there is one question that inevitably rises to the surface: what does it mean to be a good preacher?

Some of you here are preachers. After all, we have an unusual number of ordained ministers per capita around here, and we’re welcoming two more of our membership into the ordained ministry this afternoon. So, maybe the question of what makes a good preacher has crossed many of your minds before.

Others of us may be more familiar with different but related questions like:

What makes a good parent?

What makes a good teacher?

What makes a good employee or organizational leader?

What makes a good sculptor, writer, musician, painter, handy-man, cook, or baseball player?

What makes a good... person?

In the Creation story in Genesis, the first book of the Bible, we find God spoke life into being and then called it good. Regardless of whether you prefer an anthropomorphic, literal understanding of God’s act of Creation or you prefer an interpretation of the Creation myth that is much informed by science, I think you may agree there is a creative impulse at work here. There’s a force that brought life into being and that yet moves through all that makes up the universe. The same creative force that moves in you moves in me.

I would go so far as to call it our birthright to imagine and to create. So many of us though so often deny ourselves a license to create. Or, we deny that what we’re already doing is an act of creation. Are we afraid of whether or not what we will create is good?

What makes a sermon or a song or a parent or a teacher good anyway?

This week I caught an interview with Matthew Lopez who just directed the romantic comedy Red, White, and Royal Blue for Amazon Prime. The movie was originally a well-loved novel, especially in LGBTQ circles as it centers around the romance of two men.

Director Matthew Lopez told interviewer Juana Summers that he felt the pressure of the book’s popularity.

“Every reader of a novel is a film director while they're reading the book,” notes Lopez. “They have control over everything: costume, design, casting. As you're reading a book, it's your little movie in your head. And with a book as popular as this one, you've got millions and millions of people with their own versions of it in their heads. And then there's one person who makes the movie, right?”

Lopez continues, " ‘How do I take a very popular bit of literature and make a movie of it?’ And the answer I really came to was, I have to make the movie that is inside my head. I have to make the movie that is personal to me. I have to make the movie that I'm capable of making — my response to the book, in many ways.”

I’ve never directed a movie but I have had the opportunity to preach in front of some really large groups of people from time to time, and those opportunities have often come with ample lead time to feel the pressure.

I remember asking a friend once, what should I say that everyone would like to hear?

I remember she asked, what could I say that I myself would like to hear? What could I say that meant something important to me? Maybe that’s closer to the word God would like us to hear.

Well, if you have a tendency toward self-consciousness, you don’t love hearing your recorded or amplified self say anything. But you still may be able to discern what matters to you. You still may be able to connect with what makes you feel most alive.

I like to believe that’s where the creative spirit of God beckons us to dwell as often as possible–not in the place of obligation and should and have to and other people’s good opinions–but in the place where our souls are moved in the deepest way. I think that’s the place from which we best connect to God’s unfolding and ongoing dream of a Creation and a creativity that can be called good.

I think that’s what Jesus beckoned us all toward when he picked up the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and read:

“ ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

     because he has anointed me

     to bring good news to the poor.

  God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

     and recovery of sight to the blind,

     to let the oppressed go free,

     to proclaim the year of God’s favor…’ ”

 and “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Jesus was the incarnation of God in the flesh. We’re not quite the same but I believe as followers of Jesus and as inheritors of the blessing of Creation, the Spirit of the Lord can fall upon us, too. And when we allow ourselves to be drawn in by the Spirit of the Lord,

I believe we often end up serving not only ourselves but the well-being of the world as well.

In the beginning of the 2020 Disney/Pixar movie Soul, middle school band teacher Joe, who still harbors dreams of making it big as a professional performer, explains to his band students how he fell in love with Jazz music as a young boy when he watched a piano player being carried away by the music. He goes on to explain throughout the movie that he loves Jazz because it’s music that lets the “you” out.

Through a series of unfortunate events, just before Joe gets his unexpected big break to play piano with a well-known saxophonist, his soul is sent to “the great beyond” and then “the great before,” where he meets a soul looking for her spark before getting her pass to go to earth.

Joe assumes that a soul’s spark is their purpose. And as soon as possible he finds a way to get his soul back into his body so that he can fulfill what he believes to be his purpose: getting his big break as a professional performer.

He has an incredible night but finds that once the show is over, he doesn’t feel any different. He doesn’t feel as though he’s fulfilled any prescribed purpose or that life is really much different than before.

The spark that brings souls to earth it turns out is not necessarily some prescribed purpose or achievement. Rather, in the movie, the spark that those yet to be embodied souls in the “great before” are looking for is what lights up inside them when they’re ready to come and be fully alive. When Joe finds his spark, it doesn’t just help him. It also draws his new found friend to find her spark, too, and the two of them bring enormous beauty to the world together.

At the end of the movie, when Joe gets a second chance at life on earth, someone asks what he’s going to do with his life this time. He replies, “I don’t known but I do know I’m going to live every minute of it.”

Rather than being driven to be, do, and create what we think others will call “good,” what would happen if we let ourselves be more deeply drawn-in to what moves us, brings us joy, and sets us free? 

I trust that the Creative and still Creating Spirit of God will meet us there and use our spark to serve the dream of a whole Creation twinkling with vitality, well-being, beauty, and joy.

                                                                                           May it be so. Amen.

Forever Kindness

Sometimes I suffer because I’m too proud to ask for help. I submit to you this story as Exhibit A: -Heather Ford image (soil)

In May of 2020, like so many, I was expanding my vegetable garden.

And to do so, I needed big bags of soil. I nearly scoffed at the checkout clerk when he asked if I would like help. Of course not. I’m relatively young and able-bodied. I’ve got this. But when I got to the bags of soil in the parking lot, which were soaking wet with rain, I found I could hardly budge them. Still too proud to ask for help, I started grabbing one corner and pulling, making tiny grudging progress despite my grunts and groaning muscles. I nearly jumped out of my skin when a car pulled up right beside me and a person younger and stronger than me asked if they could help. Still too proud, I wanted to say no, but I was pretty sure they had seen how pathetically mismatched I was to the task. So, I finally swallowed my pride and said, “That would be great!”

Before I knew it two more younger, stronger people had jumped out of the car and loaded up my several big, heavy bags of garden soil. Then they jumped right back in their car and pulled away with a wave, barely stopping to acknowledge my profuse gratitude.

Much as I want to always be the Good Samaritan, sometimes I can’t help but end up the person in the ditch. And I have to admit, it’s not my favorite place to be. It’s vulnerable and sometimes vulnerable in much more profound ways than being stuck in a parking lot with bags that are too heavy for me.

Is there a reason Jesus doesn’t name the person in the ditch or give him very many descriptors besides where he was headed? Is it so the lawyer–and us would-be lawyers listening in–would be able to picture ourselves in the vulnerable spot? And if so, what does that have to do with eternal life?

That’s the question after all that kicks off this whole famous section of Luke.

In the NRSV the lawyer’s question is phrased, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Many interpreters are dubious about the questioner’s intentions but being a question-loving person, I want to assume genuine curiosity and a love of learning, if coming from a shrewdly analytical source.

After all, the lawyer and Jesus agree on the basics of the Levitical code: to love God and to love our neighbor as yourself. The lawyer pushes it further then and wants the specifics about neighbors. What’s the ruling there? Who is it Jesus thinks we ought to love like neighbors? What are the limits?

Well, the limits are seen in a whole new light, are they not, when it’s you in the ditch, looking for the kindness? Well played, Jesus.

But this time reading the story, I imagine myself on the outer circle of this conversation, hanging on to the question that started this whole piece. What does the story have to do with “inheriting eternal life”? 

In Downtown Elgin, on the side of a building occupied by Side Street Studio Arts there is a huge mural that says, “Activate Daily Kindness.”        -image

According to a Side Street Facebook Post, the mural is the work of Sara Peak Convery, a Chicago-based artist who enjoys working in a variety of media. Says Convery, “The use of words in art has powerful implications for encouragement and guidance.” She also shares that her “vision for her work and the world has enlarged and she embraces the possibility of expanding her work into the realm of public art.”

Since its installation in June, I have passed by this mural with frequency and it rarely fails to capture my attention. Daily kindness seems doable. It also seems like a practice–something that can become a habit, the kind of thing I do without much thought, day after day, forever and ever.

The word activating is also encouraging to me. It makes me imagine kindness like water in a pipe, as though all I have to do is activate the spigot and let it flow.

That’s my favorite image for understanding eternal life, too. It’s like a stream of water that goes before us and after us and that we are somehow standing in right now, too. Sometimes, like fish, we forget the water is even there. It’s just a part of us. But sometimes we are overcome with the realization that we are part of eternity even as each moment passes into the next. Sometimes we experience individual shining moments that I can only explain as a taste of forever–a taste of the everlasting love that I have come from and that I trust I will return to and that despite all the trouble and trial of this world is yet a part of drawing breath here on planet Earth.

Jesus illustrates that ancient instruction to love God and love our neighbor with this story about love in action. A story is something we experience. It’s not always clear what it means but it gives us some clues as to what the shape of the thing is we’re trying to describe. What does it feel like? What are its height and depth? A story is not playing instructions to a game. It’s not a math equation with one right answer. And it seems to me, neither is experiencing eternal life. It’s nothing we win. It’s nothing we earn. It’s nothing we solve. No. But I think it is something we can practice experiencing whenever we let ourselves be vulnerable enough to give and to receive acts of loving kindness.

Ya know, the one weird thing I realized this week–after I had already chosen this scripture to conclude our series on kindness–is that this scripture doesn’t include the word kindness. Mercy and compassion are there and they’re close. But neither Jesus nor the lawyer talk about kindness per se. They talk about love and the Greek word translated as love in English is agape. That’s the big love, the one we can cultivate for neighbors, for enemies, and even for our imperfect selves. It seems to me a wide, gracious, merciful love. It’s a love that is big enough to go around, to offer reciprocally, to teach us how to give it with grace, and to teach us how to receive it with grace every time we experience that agape love acted out in ways we may even call kind.          -Craig Whitehead image (car in rain)

One Sunday morning, I was driving to church from my home on Elgin’s east side. It was raining and as I pulled up to the stoplight at 31, I saw Star, a friend of many of us from Soup Kettle and other community gatherings. He was getting wet and looking a little lost. I thought, maybe Star is coming to Highland Avenue for worship. He does come, after all, from time to time. So, I rolled down the window and told him he could get in. It turned out of course that he wasn’t trying to go to Highland Avenue that morning but instead, he was headed to St. Hugh’s Episcopal Church, quite a bit farther west down the road.

I had been running on time but now I was going to be late for the mic check, and I hate being late. It was inconvenient but it wasn’t dangerous or really very hard. And it made me happy. So, I gave Star a ride all the way to St. Hugh. He, as usual, was an absolute delight to spend a few minutes with. Indeed, I wished it was a much longer car ride to hear more of his life story. -Markus Spiske image (kids from behind)

And what I remember most was how gracious he was. He was grateful but also not embarrassed out of some sense of pride. I got the feeling we were family and if I ever needed his help and he could give it, he would be there in a heartbeat.

It wasn’t anything nearly as sacrificial or generous as what the Samaritan did in Jesus’ story. But that feeling of connection is precious to me. It makes me want to experience it again and again. It makes me want to practice giving and receiving kindness. It makes me want to lean into that gift of eternal life which we all may inherit,

where we are awash in that agape love and find it easy to be

forever kind.

                                                                               May it be so. Amen.

Loving Kindness

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – 7/23/23

Loving Kindness – Micah 6: 6-8

I wish I could say it was my idea, but it wasn’t. It was my neighbor Toni’s. She’s got to be one of the most observant, thoughtful, and kind people I know. I’m glad she moved onto my block.

You see, she heard our neighbor Val one day, when she sighed and said how much she loved the porch swings three of the rest of us have on Rugby Place. She laughed then and said it was probably because she didn’t have one herself. But she hoped maybe she could get one.

It was a comment that could have been overlooked but Toni took action. She got on our neighborhood text thread and coordinated the financing, purchasing, shipping, and hanging of a swing to surprise Val. It took weeks to get it done. But one day there was a knock on Val’s door. Her husband, two children, and as many of us neighbors as could be mustered stood in her front yard with mischievous smiles on our faces, as her brand new porch swing rocked in the breeze. Later that night, I could spy Val across the street, still swinging late into the evening, a blanket wrapped around her, and a contented smile filling her face.

This act of kindness didn’t stop Val’s breast cancer from taking her from us less than a year later. But it made her heart glad in a way we might even call healing.

The Hebrew word for kindness in today’s scripture is hesed. It can mean kindness between two people. It can mean piety toward God, and it can also mean a favor, a good deed, or beauty. That’s the definition that most catches my attention when I think of Val sitting on her new porch swing, awash in contentment that sparkled like the sun. Kindness can be so very beautiful. Kindness can be easy to love.

There are other words in this scripture selection that I find less beautiful and less easy to love. In this scripture selection those words include sin and transgression.

To be sure, many of us have benefited from the honest if hard-to-hear words of a loved one that helped us change and grow. But I think it’s also true that many of us carry an unhelpfully heavy knapsack of judgment that we fill with the harsh words of marketing campaigns or unkind others or our own too often unkind thoughts.

At their best, words like sin and transgression help us to name and lament harm that we have either caused or experienced. But at their worst, those words can cause harm, especially when leveled like weapons against others or ourselves.

The biggest sins the book of Micah calls out are sins of people with wealth or power neglecting the well-being of others. It’s a lack of kindness and compassion that God is concerned about.

The weird thing I have learned about being kind to others is that it’s actually hard to do that with authenticity, if we are really awful to ourselves and vice versa. Perhaps it has to do with the way we are part of one another as last week’s scripture selection from Ephesians attested. But whatever the reason, it’s not just Christians who understand that true kindness is predicated on loving others as well as we love ourselves.

The mindfulness movement that is largely rooted in the practices of Buddhist meditation has made popular something I have heard called Metta or Loving Kindness meditation. It involves sending loving words or feelings to those dearest to us, then sending loving words or feelings to those about whom we feel ambivalent, and finally sending loving words or feelings to those with whom we have challenges or conflicts. It’s a practice that is meant to grow our compassion muscles. But the first step, before we send loving words or feelings to anyone else, is to send loving words and feelings to ourselves. This is because self-compassion is understood to be the root of compassion toward others. 

If we are going to learn how to name the harm in our lives and to truly love kindness, as we are asked to do in Micah and elsewhere in the Bible, I think we would do well to begin by offering that kindness to ourselves. When we can love ourselves as we are, accept ourselves as we are, and be at ease with who we are, then kindness can flow from us with genuine generosity. And when we can love ourselves as we are, accept ourselves as we are, and be at ease with who we are, then we can be brave enough to see any shortcomings with the kind of compassion that will bring healing and growth.

Sometimes though I think kindness can be hard to notice. We may ignore it or trivialize it as unimportant. But that’s not what the prophet Micah reports as the way to win God’s favor. It’s not sacrificing our first born or our suffering for suffering’s sake that God is after. No, it’s a way of living our lives that includes loving kindness. 

In this scripture, so familiar to me, I have often skipped over this part. I’ve been more interested in the doing justice and walking humbly bits. What does it mean to love kindness and why would we do that?

Well, for one thing cultivating affection for kindness can “raise its capital,” according to one NPR Life Kit episode on “How to Raise Kind Kids.” Any method for practicing gratitude for kindness like a journal, a way of praying at the end of the day, or a time at the dinner table or in the car to share the kindnesses witnessed or acted out, are all opportunities that celebrate kindness and let its effects linger in ways that will make all of us of any age more likely to want to perform those celebrated acts ourselves.

Today we are making a kindness wall together as one means of doing that, but I hope you will consider how you celebrate kindness every day in your own lives and households, too. Noticing it when it happens seems to me like an important step, if we are going to truly love kindness and to let it make a difference in our lives.

And what of those other instructions? Micah tells us God wants us to love kindness, to do justice and to walk humbly with God, understanding all of these as a means of living that is the worship that God truly desires. What does that look like when someone lives in a way that does justice, loves kindness, and moves humbly through the world? What good might that do?

Maybe you’ve witnessed it. Maybe you know someone who used their power or influence to right a wrong. Maybe you know someone who went out of their way to make a difference for you or someone you loved. Maybe you can think of someone who lived their life in a way that inspires you to fill yours with justice, kindness, and a quiet trust in their worthiness to be loved and everyone else’s worthiness, too.

A podcast I love called Hidden Brain with Shankar Vedantum has a spinoff series called Unsung Heroes about people whose kindness left a lasting impression on someone else. One that I recently discovered came from Dorothy Tiernan who sat by her father’s bed in 1986 as he lay dying of cancer. Her father was unable to communicate but his family sensed he was in pain because he was writing around in this bed. Dorothy begged the nurse to do something to make him comfortable, but the nurse told her there was nothing she could do. He had only been prescribed so much morphine every four hours. The whole family felt helpless and in despair.

That evening the nurse manager, in charge of the entire hospital, stuck her head in the father’s room to see how he was doing. Upon seeing his pain, she found the nurse attending the father and told her to “Medicate this man now.” 

“But I don’t have an order,” the nurse replied.

But her superior answered, “You go ahead and medicate him now, I will take responsibility for it.”

The nurse came back quickly and medicated Dorothy’s father. He appeared to finally get comfortable, and within the next 24 hours or so, he died.

Dorothy can’t remember the nurse manager’s name, but for decades she has remembered with gratitude the way the head nurse used her authority to do what she could to ease her father’s suffering. After that day, Teirnan decided to go to nursing school, and for 20 years, she was a hospice nurse. Often, when she was helping a patient in distress, she thought about that nurse’s act of compassion for her father.

Dear ones, there are so many things we cannot do. We cannot fix all the world’s pain. But there are things that are within our power to do justly, kindly, and humbly. When we do, we never know the effect it may have on others. But I believe we can trust that we are worshiping God and bringing healing to the world every time we practice loving kindness.

                                                                                          May it be so. Amen.

Hearing the Voice of God

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Jeff Jenkins, Guest Preacher – July 9, 2023

Hearing the Voice of God – John 12: 20-30

About 10 years ago I had the opportunity to meet Jennifer Knapp. If you are not familiar with that name, let me give you some background. She was kind of a big deal in the world of contemporary Christian music. Knapp started her career in 1994, selling over a million records between 1998 and 2002, but then in 2010 she came out as a gay woman and many fans shunned her. Christian music stations stopped playing her music. Christian bookstores took her albums off the shelves.

I was not familiar with Jennifer or her story until one of the younger members of the congregation where I was serving asked if I would go with her and another friend to the concert. She was in her late 20s at the time and had been impacted by Jennifer and her music. The concert was sponsored by a local UCC church.

Now remember, this was an artist who routinely sold out 3,000 seat venues, but when we saw her she was playing a concert for about 15 people. After the show we had a chance to talk to her and asked her why after all of the hurt and damage that the church had done to her, why she continued to identify as a Christian and perform in churches. Her answer was very revealing and has stuck with me until this day.

She said that although she doesn’t like hanging around in churches or with most Christians, she still identifies with Christianity and has a relationship with God, because when she was a teenager, she had an encounter with God and heard God speaking to her. She can’t deny that. She can’t explain it away, and it changed her life forever. Now she didn’t give us a lot of the details about what this encounter was like, but on some level it involved someone that she identified as Jesus giving her a message that she was loved and accepted by God.

And here is what I took away from that. Jennifer’s youth group leader or her pastor or her many adoring fans, could have all told her that she was loved and accepted by God, and that may have made her feel good, but it would have all collapsed and become just so much cheap talk the moment she revealed her sexual identity and these same people turned their backs on her. But hearing that directly from God made all the difference. It became real and true and something she could build her life around.

And that’s the point. Hearing the voice of God, in whatever shape or form that comes in for you as an individual, changes everything. It gives us confidence – freedom – power to make a difference in our lives and to make a difference in the lives of people around us.

God is still speaking to us today. I believe that or I wouldn’t be standing here today, but it’s tricky, right? We are not always sure of what we’ve heard and don’t always do a good job of discerning the message we think we are hearing. So I have some thoughts on how we can do a better job, but first let’s talk about the scripture.

We know from the 3 synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, that even for Jesus hearing the voice of God was important. It happens twice in the synoptic gospels, at his baptism and at the transfiguration, and both times it confirms Jesus’ identity as the son of God, and that he is beloved of God.

But in John we only get one account of God speaking, and it’s a little different. It’s the Passover, and all of the Jews from around the Mediterranean have come into Jerusalem. And we have some in from Greece, and they tap Phillip, probably because Phillip is a Greek name, and say “Hey, can you get us in to see this Jesus guy?” “They wanted to see Jesus.”

And when they get there, instead of what we might expect as a normal greeting or conversation, Jesus goes off about how he is going to die and then prays to God about glorifying his name. Then God speaks. It’s an Odd passage and John has a certain agenda he wants to pursue with all of that, so I am not going to try an unpack what that may all mean. Instead it’s these last 2 verses that interest me and where I want to land:

29 When the crowd heard the voice, some thought it was thunder, while others declared an angel had spoken to him. 30 Then Jesus told them, “The voice was for your benefit, not mine.”

Here’s my first take-away from this: right from the beginning people had a hard time discerning the voice of God. “I thought I heard this.” “Well, that’s interesting. I thought I heard this.” “No, I am sure it was this.” And while they are debating, Jesus says, “Yeah, it was the voice of God, and it was for your benefit. You were meant to hear this so that it could be a blessing to your life.”

The second thing that I am seeing in this is that the crowd was falling into the same trap that we do today. We try to divide the world into the sacred and the secular. We say that here is God’s domain (maybe the church, mission work, classic hymns), and over here is the secular world (fashion, science, politics, and rock and roll). Listen. If the incarnation of Jesus shows us nothing else, it tells me that this sacred/secular divide is a man-made construct. God inhabits creation. God speaks to us through creation, through art, science, politics, maybe even through rock and roll. But like I said earlier, it’s tricky. We second-guess what we experience.

“What did I just hear. What did I just feel? Was that the universe trying to send me a message? Was it a reaction to my childhood trauma, or was it just my imagination?”

How do we know when God is speaking to us and how do we correctly discern the message?

So that brings me to my main point this morning, that the best way to hear the voice of God is in community.

Our scriptures are the record of how people struggled over the course of 2,000 years to figure out what they think God was saying to them. So how did they do it? They did it in community. They wrestled together, over time, with what they thought the message was. And even after a consensus was reached, and it was written down as “The Word of God”, guess what? The next generation comes along and says “You know, I kind of read this a little bit differently. How about you?”

Let’s be honest here. There are things that you know, that I don’t know. And there are things that I know things, that you don’t know. And there are things that neither one of us knows, and the only way we can get any clarity or understanding is to work through it together, in love, in community, and with patience and grace.

Listen. I say this in all humility, that I feel as if I have heard God speaking to me on many occasions. And I bet you have too, but... none of those messages – none – zero – ever made sense until I worked them out in community. I had to talk to other people about what I thought I had heard. I had to work closely with other people to test whether there was truth there, or whether it was my own ego speaking.

So how does this apply to us today? And I am thinking specifically in the next couple of months to a year.

As a pastor and a prison minister I used to mentor new Christians, and when I met with them, I always asked “Do you feel like you’ve heard from God since the last time we talked?” This is a great question to start conversations, but more importantly for me, if someone knows they are going to be asked, they start to listen more closely for God’s voice.

I think this is a question we need to ask each other more often. And then, not be afraid to wrestle with the answers that we hear. And we need to listen to each other and ask ourselves, “Do I hear God speaking through that conversation, or that artwork, or the tree in my backyard?” God has no limits or boundaries so let’s not limit the ways that God can speak to us.

So in the spirit of “Physician, heal thyself,” I decided to try and experiment with this idea a few Sundays ago when Ralph preached. I tried to be open to what God was saying through Ralph. Here’s what I did: I prepared my heart to listen. I sat in a different pew. I wore sandals. Hey, it worked for Jesus! I thought. And Ralph said 2 things that resonated with me. The first I still haven’t fully processed yet, so I’ll set it aside, but the other gave clarity to something I had already been thinking about.

Here is what I heard:

“How will we prepare to live faithfully and courageously in the future in light of an ever-expanding understanding of who God is? (Repeat) How will we prepare to live faithfully and courageously in the future in light of an ever-expanding understanding of who God is?”

I thought to myself that even if I have nothing else to add, I still need to include it in this sermon today because I truly felt that it was something important, a question that God wanted me to answer and more importantly maybe wants all of us to answer. So now I am throwing it out there to you. How do you hear that? Does it sound to you like a question that God may be asking you or maybe this congregation as a whole?

Three weeks later that question still resonates with me. And I think the answer to that question is important, especially as it concerns what the kingdom of God looks like in this community. Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren has a unique role to play in building the kingdom of God. God’s beautiful and beloved community here on earth and each of us has a role to play in that, and maybe in that question God is asking us to prepare for the next act.

So let me close with a shameless plug for some work that your church board is trying to do this summer. During our Restorative Conversation with the Lombard Mennonite Peace Center last February, the board heard stories of isolation, loss, and sadness as our congregation emerges from the pandemic. The congregation seemed to hunger for more connection and a return to normal. So the consensus was that we need to hear more about this from each other. We need to know where you sense God is calling our congregation.

Several focus groups will be held in July and August to which you are invited to share your input on where we go from here. Please give some serious thought to how you can be a part of these focus groups. Be in prayer. Be listening. Be fearless. And be blessed to know that you are part of a community that values your unique place and perspective within the body of Christ.

I’ll be praying for you all this week, that you will consider being a part of these focus groups and that you will be hearing the voice of God in some way that is unique and meaningful to you. And if you think that maybe God is speaking to you, don’t write it off as an angel or thunder or that spicy pizza you had last night. Write it down, tell a friend,  talk to your family about it, or call the church office and set up an appointment. We want to know what you heard. Because maybe someone else heard the same thing, too.

Amen? Amen.

Being Kind

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – July 16, 2023

Being Kind – Ephesians 4: 25-32

I do the bulk of my grocery shopping at the east side Elgin Aldi. I’m partial to their low prices and their competent, friendly staff. But more than that I shop there to watch the miracle of the cart quarter exchange chain.

Maybe you know just what I mean but in case you don’t, allow me to explain that at Aldi, shoppers must bring a quarter to retrieve a shopping cart. This is a job often fought over in my family: who gets to put the quarter in the cart slot and remove the chain that connects it to all the other carts before triumphantly wheeling it away. It’s the small pleasures that move us.

This system reduces costs for the grocery store by incentivizing the return of the cart back into position in a neat line at the front of the store, since it’s the only way to get your quarter back.

If you’re not a regular Aldi shopper, please know that it’s common etiquette upon entering the store to offer someone your quarter and to take their empty cart from them on their way back from unloading groceries or vice versa. It’s okay to get your own cart but if you’re able, this can be a sweet exchange that saves each other a few steps.

Quite often though someone will forget their quarter or a cart will get stuck or someone will just get a twinkle in their eye and the great cart exchange chain begins. You will know you are part of it when you offer your neighbor your quarter but are waved off and told to keep it. Now you have both a cart and a quarter! Maybe it’s a small thing, but at least for me it feels like it’s my lucky day and that I’m that much more clearly connected to my neighbors. Plus, I spend the whole shopping trip looking forward to continuing the chain by surprising the next person I meet in the parking lot with their own free cart. 

Today’s selection of the letter to the ancient church in Ephesus instructs Christ followers to “be kind to one another.” Surely greater kindnesses exist, or at least ones that cost more to the giver than a mere quarter. But I have come to see even these small kindnesses as vitally important, for they are part of the fabric that connects us all. I would go so far as to say for followers of Christ, these small acts of kindness can be a means of living out our convictions in everyday doable and delightful ways that remind us how much indeed we are connected, even as the letter says, “members of one another,” called to treat each other with “tenderheartedness and compassion.”

Yes, I think being kind to strangers is a great way to follow Christ. Being kind to strangers can grow our muscles, too, for the heavier lifts of kindness: the times when we are angered or even harmed.

At the Church of the Brethren Annual Conference, which I attended last week, I found myself unexpectedly reading the Desmond Tutu book God’s Dream to a group of third through fifth graders. There was still time left when we were done, so I began to ask them how we live out God’s Dream as Archbishop Tutu writes of it in the book: “that every one of us will see that we are all [family–all siblings to each other], yes, even you and me…”

I do find Tutu’s words in keeping with so much of what I read in the Bible, including today’s scripture passage, which instructs Christ followers to “be angry but do not sin… [and] not to let the sun go down on your anger.”

I was overwhelmed by the wise and earnest sharing in that room of young people. They knew more than many adults I know about feeling our anger but not letting it lead us to violence. They even had strategies like punching pillows or counting to ten or an exercise I know as box breathing. Useful in many situations, it involves breathing in for four, holding the breath for four, breathing out for four, and finally, holding the bottom of the breath for four.

This is one example of a tool that helps us do the important thing, the group agreed, which is to take in the information the anger gives us but not to let it alone be what drives our decisions. Anger can tell us something hurts us or others. Anger deserves some sort of expression whether it leads us to stand up for ourselves or for others or just to vent it out in private. Personally, I do not believe anger is entirely bad. I believe the danger with anger is in how quickly it can lead us to hurt others or ourselves, the very opposite of God’s dream for us. The trick is in finding the space between our anger and our action. And I think many of the children I talked with are well on their way to outpacing their elders in this respect. Indeed, I pray it is so for I fear they will need it as much if not more than we do.

When we were done talking about anger. There was still more unexpected time in that conference room of bright, engaged children. So, I asked them about how we say we’re sorry and about how to forgive. We agreed that both could be very hard to do. And I think that’s true no matter our age.

I don’t know exactly how the ancient church members in Ephesus were treating each other but whatever they were up to it caused to Paul to write to them about the rules for living a new life in Christ as he saw them. According to Paul, it should make a difference in our lives that we are trying to follow Jesus, and I tend to agree. I haven’t yet seen that it can make any of us perfect. But I have seen that it has the power to put us on a life-long path of transformation. Taking Christ as the model, Paul writes to the Ephesians, “be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.”

If you’ve ever tried it, maybe you know that forgiveness is not for the faint of heart–not when the hurt has been deep enough. Sometimes forgiveness can be a long, hard process but it is one that leads to healing. 

If revenge is a poison we drink hoping it will hurt someone else, forgiveness is a kindness we perform that opens the way to healing for everyone involved. Forgiveness is what we do to emulate Christ. It’s also a kindness to ourselves. For when we forgive, we begin to let go of our tight grip on the hurt and we turn our hearts over to holy healing. 

The last gift I want to bring you today from Annual Conference is an excerpt from Ruthann Knechel Johansen’s Bible study, which she presented one morning to the delegate body. Ruthann is an interdisciplinary teacher and scholar. She’s professor emerita at the University of Notre Dame and president emerita of Bethany Theological Seminary. She’s also someone with whom I count myself privileged to spend any time in her presence which exudes kindness, grace, and wisdom.

“Some years ago,” begins Ruthann, “I gave a lecture at the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary on Japanese linked poetry (known as Renga or collaborative poetry). I explained how poets from the same area, even from different areas, across generations or centuries would take a line from an earlier poet’s poem and carry it into his or her own. They created an almost endless linking in verse. In the middle of my explanation,” Ruthann continues, “an international student from Somalia interrupted enthusiastically saying, “That’s what we do in my village. We have a tree in the center of the village. We call it the storytelling tree. When there is a conflict, everyone gathers under the tree to listen and link everyone’s view of the conflict until we see it more clearly or it is transformed.”

I know very little of the life story of the stranger at Aldi who swaps a cart for my quarter. But that’s not the only place where my knowledge of other people’s stories fails. In conflict, so often I have found that much of our pain comes from a lack of understanding of each other’s stories. Sharing our side of the story doesn’t change the past or erase harm or even necessarily mean we don’t need to make changes that mitigate the harm from happening again in the same way. But sharing our side of the story and listening to the other multi-faceted sides of any story can lead to better understanding. It can open the way for forgiveness, for grace, and maybe even for kindness.

What stories do you carry today?

What acts of kindness have you witnessed or been a part of?

How will you welcome the new life in Christ that transforms us, heals us, and leads us to be as kind as we can to one another and to ourselves?

Archbishop Tutu closes his children’s book with these words:

“Dear Child of God, do you know how to make God’s dream come true?

It’s really quite easy.

As easy as sharing, loving, caring.

As easy as holding, playing, laughing.

As easy as knowing we are family

because we are all God’s children.

Will you help God’s dream come true?

Let me tell you a secret,” writes Tutu,

“God smiles like a rainbow when you do.”

                                                                                             May it be so. Amen.

Cosmos: It was, it is, it will be.

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Ralph McFadden, Guest Preacher – 6/18/23

Cosmos: It was, it is, it will be – Exodus 3: 1-15, Isaiah 65: 17-25

Cosmos: It was,  it is,  ֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה. it will be.

As you know, I am 90 (ninety) years old. I remember conversations over the years with Martha Bartholomew, who said, “we are not only aging, but we are also sagging.’ Which means, as we grow older, we grow wiser. I can only hope that is true.

It is a privilege to be here with you today. I have been in and out and about this congregation since I was a senior in high school. I am indebted to you for you have frequently supported me and you have enriched my life.

I was thinking about writing these thoughts of today when I ran headlong into the new and fascinating creations of the James Webb Space Telescope. I have had some interest in the past in astronomy: – the stars, planets, and constellations. Then the James Webb Space Telescope, and it’s views. Absolutely amazing and astounding.

Not only have I begun to marvel and wonder at the vastness of this cosmos, but, as a searcher, seeker of truth, of reality, I began to think more about creation, my belief, history, and the promise of the future. I really think that this new – this very new view of the universes that are way beyond our planet, changes radically our perspective, not only of how/when this cosmos came into being, but unequivocally to a thinking being, it must change how we view our own individual lives: our breathing, living being in a fundamentally and profoundly different setting and milieu. At least, it certainly changes my observation and assessment of living today.

“Pastor Katie said something in her sermon this past October. She said in considering Exodus Chapter 3: “The divine voice speaks in this chapter, telling us “I am the Lord, that is my name.”

Pastor Katie said, “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 am, and I will be.”

The Exodus verse and Pastor Katie’s comments reminded me about the James Webb Space Telescope – and what I/we continue to sort out and try to understand about the Universe. It is, it was, it will be. For eons and ages. Immense. Unbelievably enormous and outside of my understanding.

(Jim puts pictures on the screen from the Webb camera.)

I think that the enormity of this discovery is, frankly, beyond the capacity of most folks to grasp. The Space Telescope and its fantastic pictures of the Cosmos opens our view and perspective in a way that I cannot comprehend. I can see the pictures, I can read the information, but it is, nonetheless, almost unimaginable.

With the findings of the Space Telescope, I want to understand more, to take it all in. I want to learn more. I may and probably will live a few more years. Why not soak up more?  Breathe in this beautiful, immense, enormous, colossal, massive, gigantic vast cosmos and universe. And as I consider this cosmos, I have decided to reflect, and be thankful for my life: what it has been, is, and will be. And, at 90 years of age, it just seems like a great idea to be open to this new perception.

If you want to check into this amazing cosmos view… google James Webb Space Telescope. I am now on their list of eyewitnesses, and I get occasional updates on what the telescope is seeing.

About the time of Christ, the Earth was the center of the Universe according to Claudius Ptolemy, whose view of the cosmos persisted for 1400 years until it was overturned — with controversy — by findings from Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. Ptolemy, about 50 AD, posited that the Moon, Mercury, Venus, and the Sun all revolved around Earth.

Through the following centuries, there were thousands of discoveries, inventions, and new developments in astronomy. That was an astronomical past.

And for me …  and you, there was also a past.

I have been thinking about my past as I have been preparing for this Sunday. I have remembered some significant events and beliefs of my life. And while I will not share those memories, it is of enough importance to encourage you, if you have not done so recently, to ask yourself, in light of the very unusual and dynamic cosmos enlightenment, what have you believed and what have I believed and how has my belief been challenged.

And so, It Was. And It Is and It Will Be.

Let us concentrate for a moment on the Space Telescope and on our beliefs.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the largest optical telescope in space, its high resolution and sensitivity allow it to view objects too old, distant, or faint for the Hubble Space Telescope. The JWST was launched December 25, 2021, at 6:20 AM CST. It weighs 13,580 lbs. and was built at the cost of 10 billion USD (2016).

The James Webb Space Telescope is not in orbit around the Earth, like the Hubble Space Telescope is - it actually orbits the Sun, 1.5 million kilometers (1 million miles) away from the Earth at what is called the second Lagrange point or L2. What is special about this orbit is that it lets the telescope stay in line with the Earth as it moves around the Sun. This allows the satellite's large sunshield to protect the telescope from the light and heat of the Sun and Earth (and Moon).

What is JWST doing now? “NASA's Space Telescope is on a mission to study the earliest stars and peer back farther into the universe's past than ever before.” The James Webb Space Telescope can see 13.6 billion light years. Webb's cameras can look deep into space and far into the past — which will be the farthest we've ever seen into space.

For me, facts and figures such as seeing 13.6 billion light years deep into the past certainly causes me – encourages me – to at least wonder about the nature and reality of God – and of creation.

One writer says, “With the first images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the universe has gotten bigger and more beautiful than we’d ever imagined. Naturally that beauty and vastness was already there before the JWST trained its infrared eye on it, waiting to be discovered. But from time to time, God loves to pull back the veil, allowing us to see new wonders of his cosmos.”

And new wonders there are. Looking at these spectacular images, we’re led to wonder: Just how vast is our universe? How many stars and galaxies does it contain? What kinds of variety and grandeur are yet to be revealed? Most crucial of all for religious people, what does it say about our God who created such a cosmos?”

I have wondered if I could find comments that take a different religious point of view, one that examines this new perspective of the cosmos from a truly and genuinely insightful innovative reality. In general, it seems to me, as I review some of the comments on-line, that those who have considered the vastly new cosmos details have not changed their opinions, their views. Their wonderment, if they do indeed, wonder, has not changed their understanding or view of God.

The religious community uses the Old Testament verses to continue to underscore their beliefs that there is a Creator…. It matters not how vast the universe is.  Or matters not if there is life of some sort on other globes somewhere.

I want to underscore this. The vastly new understanding of the cosmos, as we see the possibilities, would seem to dictate that there should be a broadened understanding of what we believe. My thought is that this enormous new perspective, perception, outlook, would demand a different and altered understanding of God and of creation. But I find little effort on the part of theologians to expand their religious perspective.

Some other thoughts to add and to consider for a moment.

There are other elements of this earth that amaze, inspire, and frighten me. As I have been very amazed by the cosmos, way beyond our earth, I am also amazed and frightened about what is happening on and to our earth. I mention this briefly.

In demographics the world population - number of humans currently living - was estimated to have exceeded 8.1 billion as of November 2021. In 1800 the population was 100 million. In 1950 - 2, 557,000,000. In other words, the world population is staggering. The result of more population growth: malnutrition of hundreds of thousands, increasingly less water, homelessness and endless diseases, evil dictators and uncompromising leaders of nations, very mean-spirited followers of evil leadership.

I need only mention Climate Change  and the horrific changes that are likely in the future. In an unwelcoming and an inhospitable juxtaposition to the above quote …… the future climate report is devastating, distressing, demoralizing, and overwhelming.  Two writers wrote an article entitled: “What the World Will Look Like in 2050 If We Don’t Cut Carbon Emissions in Half.” 2050. They wrote in 2020, 3 ½ years ago. 2050 is only 27 years in the future. It is a terrifying article. And it makes sense.”

Personally, I still clarify my point of view as being a searcher. Kind of a searcher, hunter, explorer, inquirer, seeker.

We are in what I call a Juxtaposition.

As we view our planet – and our universe, for me there is nothing more astounding and extraordinary than the view of the cosmos by the James Webb Space Telescope. And at the same time, the coming catastrophic devastation of what is happening in our climate forecasts a tragic and cataclysmic future for our planet.

Where does that leave me? Personally? We state and acknowledge ‘what was, is, will be.” Now, particularly, will be.

Of course, I have no prophecy of future events or times. I am 90. That’s wonderful and sort of fantastic. I think that I may have a few more years of living – and despite the fearful future I have predicted, I want to live what life I have fully. And of importance, today and tomorrow, I want to take in the exceptional new and fresh pictures of the very ancient and ageless cosmos.

At the same time, I have one other note:  we as people of faith MUST prepare ourselves for the future by asking  ..... how do we anticipate we will live/be faithful/be courageous in the coming inevitable times of disaster?

Courage and Comfort

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – June 4, 2023

Comfort and Courage – Matthew 6: 25-34

Jesus’ admonition in today’s scripture against worrying “about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear,” is well-known but difficult to follow, particularly if the circumstances of your life present real and justifiable reason to worry. Those of us who identify as LGBTQ may experience quite warranted worry.

According to a 2022 study by UCLA’s Williams Institute, “LGBTQ people experience four times more interpersonal violence than non-LGBTQ people.” Many members of the LGBTQ community also face discrimination and isolation from their family members, friends, employers, or schools for being open about their identity. In an NPR interview, Elena Redfield of the Williams Institute also named the policy conversations and actions happening at the state legislature level as contributing to a culture of negativity and anti-LGBTQ sentiment in our society. Many churches contribute to this culture by either implicitly or explicitly stoking the fires of discrimination and violence against members of the LGBTQ community.

As much progress as has been made on LGBTQ human rights and acceptance in recent years, there is still a long way to go in pursuit of equity and equality. Especially in a world where followers of Jesus have so often inflicted pain on LGBTQ people, this admonition of Jesus’s not to worry may ring quite hollow in many ears. Does Jesus not understand the reality of those of us who face injustice, those of us who face suffering, or those of us for whom there is real reason to worry?

While it may sound that way on the lips of a Jesus follower who refuses to acknowledge life’s hardships or who assigns hardships to a lack of God’s favor, I don’t think the original giver of this teaching trivialized human suffering, injustice, or worry. I think he knew all about it. As a member of a socio-religious group being violently subjugated by the Roman Empire and who would eventually be crucified, I think Jesus and his followers were quite in touch with suffering, injustice, and worry. Remember that his followers had left behind livelihood, home, and family. Remember that in the chapter of Matthew that comes before this one, Jesus lays out the Beatitudes, offering blessing and comfort for all who suffer and for all who seek a world where the well-being of all in our community is attended to and held valuable.

No, I think Jesus understands that worry is real. But I think Jesus also understands that worry only takes us so far, and worry will never be what heals us or makes us whole. The only thing that can do that in a real and lasting way is the holy Source of Love that moves the universe.

Jesus teaches “Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? … Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.”

You are loved. You are as loved as the glorious, shining lilies. Grounding ourselves in that reality–in the reality of how much we are loved and cared for by God just as we are–can give us the hope and trust we need to set aside the excessive worry and overthinking that drains and depletes us.

That’s at least part of what Pride month is all about. Its history goes back to the riot of Stonewall and continues today in protests, parades, parties, and more. It’s not a time when all discrimination and violence completely disappear but it is a time to come together and to celebrate all that is wonderful about being LGBTQ. It’s a time for LGBTQ folks to take up visible space and to claim their own beauty and belovedness as they so choose.   

I think that’s a vision of the kingdom of God among us that Jesus calls us in these verses to seek. I believe every time we encourage, accept, and celebrate each other as we are, we are living out a glimpse of the kingdom of God.

The Church of the Brethren has often failed LGBTQ folks but what the Church of the Brethren and this particular congregation has that may be helpful to all manner of folks experiencing injustice, is a strong tradition of living out our values even in the face of opposition. We get this ethos directly from Jesus, who in these verses and elsewhere in the gospels encourages followers not to place their faith in public opinion or full bank accounts but in the unwavering love of God.

To me God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness look like being who God made us to be and celebrating each other just as God made us, whether or not it fits someone else’s expectations. To this end, I came across a song this week by the musician corook titled “if i were a fish.” It’s sweet. It’s silly. It’s celebratory of not having to fit into someone else’s prescribed norms, and it’s a response to the very serious question, “why’s everybody on the internet so mean?”

It was inspired by a bad day. “After reading a slew of hate comments online directed at their gender identity, body shape, and how they dressed, the 28-year-old Nashville-based musician needed cheering up, so they and their partner turned to what they do best: music.”

Reports corook, "my girlfriend was supporting me and wanted to do something to make me feel better and decided: 'Let's write a song about it, let's make like a really weird song. Because you know, I love that you're weird and it's wonderful that you're weird. So what's the weirdest idea that you can come up with?'”

corook answered,  “'I think if I were a fish I think that all of the weird things about me would be cool,' and she was like, 'that's weird, let's do it.'" The lyrics of the song that’s now had over 7 million streams on the music platform Spotify go like this:

If I were a fish and you caught me

You'd say, “Look at that fish”

Shimmering in the sun

Such a rare one

Can't believe that you caught one

If I were a fish and you caught me

You'd say, “Look at that fish”

Heaviest in the sea

You'd win first prize

If you caught me

Why's everybody on the internet so mean?

Why's everybody so afraid of what they've never seen?...

…How lucky are we?

Of all the fish in the sea?

You get to be you

And I get to be me

Just let 'em be mean

We're as free as can be

To be the you-est of you

And the me-est of me.

In an interview, corook reflected "I think it's an interesting thing that I wrote the song from a place of like, I don't fit in, I don't have a community, I don't feel like people get me' and then to have a response of millions of people say, 'I get you and I want more of this, and I feel this way, too.' "

I think God smiles every time you are the you-est of you and I am the me-est of me. I think when we build communities where we can practice loving each other into the fullness of who we are, that we are doing the work God yearns for us to do. 

I give thanks to God for each one of you here and online. Whoever you are and wherever you are today, I pray that you take comfort and courage to be the you-est you that you can be. That’s who God made you to be.

So, as best you can, do not worry. Remember you are loved. And let that love bring the healing and the wholeness that lasts for all time.

                      May it be so. Amen.   

Gumbo, Chicago Mix, and Mincemeat Pie

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – May 28, 2023

Gumbo, Chicago Mix, and Mincemeat Pie – Acts 2: 1-12

If you have already read today’s sermon title you may be wondering, what do Gumbo, Chicago Mix popcorn, and mincemeat pie have in common? Well, first, I for one would welcome all those things at a Memorial Day weekend picnic, although I’ve already heard that not all the people in this room would join me in enjoying the mincemeat pie.

Second, If you ask me, although each of those dishes has different flavors, the magic in each one of them is the mix of different ingredients that complements each other while remaining distinctly present rather than blending into sameness. It’s the sweet and savory combination. It’s the way the caramel popcorn makes me want the cheddar cheese popcorn and the way the cheddar cheese popcorn makes me want another bite of the caramel popcorn and vice versa until before I know it I’ve eaten way more popcorn than I intended to eat.  

Maybe you can already see where I’m going and what I want to say today, which is that the church at its best is like a delicious potluck picnic, full of lots of different flavors and gifts and perspectives and life experiences. The Holy Spirit did not flow into the room on that first Pentecost to ensure sameness among Christ followers. Rather, I understand that she came to inspire us to oneness across our individuality. 

Today’s scripture text is sometimes interpreted as the reverse of what happened at the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11, when God quells the would-be skyscraper builders by confusing their language. Today’s story then is interpreted as one in which unity is restored.

I do find that interpretation somewhat appealing. But what I find even more appealing is the caution from Acts scholar Eric Barreto, who points out that such an interpretation sees difference as a problem to be solved, which is an assumption that may lead us to overlook the fact that no restoration of a common language occurs in this chapter of Acts. “Instead, the Galilean disciples are heard in all the dialects represented by their audiences. What we witness, then, is the Holy Spirit validating difference and working through it.”

I believe the theological wavelength this congregation generally occupies is one that sets us up well to be just that kind of delicious, difference-celebrating potluck of a church. That’s not to say we’re always perfect at it or that we can’t get better. But I do believe our congregation’s and our denomination’s historic commitment to non-coercion in religion–that is refusing to demand that we all believe exactly the same thing–is a gift, especially in a world that often seems keen to sift and sort us by our differences.

As you may well know, it’s not always easy to maintain unity across differences. Conflicts inevitably arise and must be navigated with compassion and care if we hope to maintain community.

One skill I wish the Holy Spirit had poured out a bit more liberally on the church and society at large would be the ability to notice and check our assumptions about each other, because they can be the source of so much harm and disunity. Yet, the ability to check those assumptions is sometimes in woefully short supply.

 I may see what you’re wearing, what bumper stickers are on your car, your age, your lack or presence of tattoos, your race, your gender expression, and I may be tempted to assume I know a lot about you. But I find that the more I can check those assumptions and respect that I don’t know something about you until you trust me enough to tell me, the more I am delightfully surprised by each person’s remarkable uniqueness and giftedness. Every time that happens to me I for one feel like the church and the world get a little bit bigger in my understanding, and I feel a little more like God, the church, and the world have room for all that makes me me, too. The more I am able to check my assumptions, the more I find that people are generally not one thing or another, but a complex combination of feelings, stories, and experiences from which I can learn if I have the capacity that day to try.

For me, Memorial Day weekend brings up a boatload of assumptions. One assumption I hope is not true about our congregation is that because we are part of a peace tradition, we have no compassion for the trauma veterans experience, no space to hear their stories, and no time to join in mourning with those who have lost loved ones to the horrors of war. I hope, too, that I can speak of the reality of that pain from this pulpit without it being assumed that I am uncommitted to peace and the end of all wars.

I know though that it often makes us humans uncomfortable to wade into the complexity of human reality. It can be so tempting to assign labels like good and bad or in and out. It’s often a stretch to really, respectfully consider a point of view that is not our own while being honest about our disagreement. I believe, however, that when we make that stretch we are stretching toward a lifestyle of community building that is full of Spirit-infused vitality and deep belonging for us all.

One assumption Christians sometimes make in reading today’s text is that it is a story about the good inclusiveness of Christianity beyond the bad exclusiveness of first century Judaism. I do believe that Christ followers are called to build inclusive, loving communities. And, as I read today’s text, I read that “there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem.” That leads me to believe that an inclusive strain of Christianity is a descendant of an inclusive strain of Judaism. Rather than one being superior to the other, the traditions are a kind of closely related kin. What’s more, the conversation about who God loves, who belongs, and who receives the Spirit is an ancient debate that reverberates throughout the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible and that is still with us today.

We are still making the church. We have two millennia of tradition to draw on but with the Holy Spirit’s help we are called to continue knitting together the ties that bind us into one inclusive body of Christ, serving the particular time and place in which we live.

I would be honored to hear of your respectful disagreement but it is my deeply held belief that we can practice Spirit-filled oneness in Christ without us all being, acting, or believing the same way. We can embrace the beautiful diversity with which we were created as well as the diversity of experience through which we have lived. I believe it is that very embrace that allows us to do our best to love one another into being the beloved community God calls us to be–a place where we all know we are loved, where we feel deep belonging, and where we are enlivened with a holy passion to serve our neighbors’ good and bring glory to God.                                     

May it be so. Amen.

Still with Us

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – May 21, 2023

Still with Us – John 14: 15-21

Today’s scripture text is part of the Farewell Discourse Jesus gives his disciples in John 14, and it takes place at the last supper after Jesus has just washed his disciples’ feet and commanded them to love one another as he has loved them.

The disciples do not yet know the grief of seeing their Lord and teacher crucified. But that is the grief for which Jesus is trying to prepare them. What’s more the early hearers of the Gospel of John had experienced their own grief as a community. They had experienced a painful expulsion from the Jewish community of which they had still considered themselves a part.

When Jesus tells the disciples “I will not leave you orphaned,” those words may well have fallen on ears and hearts in grief–on those who did wonder if they had been or would be abandoned by God.

My friend Gary is good at reminding folks they are not alone. He texts me every Tuesday at 7:00 am. I like to think I’m special, but I also know that I’m part of Gary’s list of Tuesday text messages and that Gary has a list of folks he texts on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, too. He told me he takes Saturday and Sunday off.

He just sends a simple message like “How you doin’?” “Show some love today.” or “Have a great day.” Things like that. I always write something simple and kind back, but I know that if ever I text back “And how are you doing, Gary?” he will reply “Blessed and Grateful!” Blessed and Grateful.

Now, I’ve been on Gary’s text message list since at least 2019. So, I got Tuesday morning text messages all through these last three pandemic- altered years. And there were Tuesdays when I wanted to write back and say, “Are you sure, Gary? How blessed and grateful are you today, Gary?”

Because there have been some hard times for so many of us. And even now that the World Health Organization has declared an end to the emergency part of the COVID-19 pandemic, we know that the virus is still with us and our lives are still different than they were before.

Our churches are still different than they were before. It’s not just Second Baptist Church or Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren. It’s most churches across the country that are experiencing challenges that the pandemic only hastened. In our personal lives, too, many of us have suffered stress and grief either related to the pandemic or experienced alongside of and on top of it. There may well have been some days, weeks, or months when we wondered if we had been left to fend for ourselves all on our own. 

I think Jesus knew about that feeling. If we believe that he was fully God and fully human, I think we can entertain the idea that there were times Jesus felt alone and afraid, too. I think he knew those days come for all of us in this life.

I think those are the days he is speaking to in today’s text when he tells his followers they will not be alone. He will not always be with them in the flesh as he was then, but his spirit will be among them, and he will send another to be with us forever.

This one we know in many Christian traditions as the Holy Spirit. In John 14 though, Jesus uses a word for this one that has been translated as Advocate, Friend, Counselor, Helper, and Comforter. The Greek word is parakletos or paraclete, and the English definition of this word I most appreciate is “one who goes with.”

Lutheran Biblical scholar Karoline Lewis writes about the power of God with us in her teachings and book and blog. She tells a story about the difference it makes not to feel alone and the ways we can embody God’s love by being with each other–not fixing each other, not ignoring each other but, like God, being with each other.

Karoline has a friend and colleague she talks to about life and ministry, and in the years since Karoline lost her dad and her friend lost her husband, they talk increasingly about grief. One of the things they have noticed is how even well-meaning Christians don’t often like talking about or dealing with grief.

Grief can be uncomfortable –our own and other people’s. A lot of us would rather move past it as quickly as possible or explain it away or ignore it altogether. 

Karoline’s friend recounted to her an experience of being at a larger church conference that included time for sharing, learning, and offering mutual support with pastoral colleagues. For Karoline’s friend it was too many times when she was asked to tell her still too raw story of losing her husband and too many times of needing to care for how uncomfortable that grief made other people.

Her friend ended up crying a lot that day. She thought about going home early. After one of the sessions, she went outside to sit on a bench alone. A woman she didn’t really know came over to her and asked, “Is there anything I can do for you?” Karoline’s friend responded, “Just sit with me.” And the fellow pastor did. No words. No touching. Just sitting. Just being with.

I think I would like it if I could fix other people’s pain. But what I have found is that’s not my job. My job as a pastor and a Christian is being the kind of person who will do what I can to help, sure, but my job is also not being afraid to just be with other people in their joy and in their pain just the same way God is with us. For God is still with us. Even when we feel alone. Even when the grief closes in. Even when other people let us down. Even when nothing seems to be going our way, God is still with us.

As Jesus says, the world may not see it, know it, or perceive it--we, too, may sometimes feel our faith tested–but God is with us whatever we go through. God will never leave us abandoned. God is with us, and because God is with us we know we are loved and we can love others. Because God is with us we can say all is well not because everything is easy or right or just or good, but all is well because through Jesus Christ we are loved, known, saved, and made whole by the God of all Creation. Yes, grief will come our way, but even so we can say we are blessed and grateful. Because God is with us, we can still know ourselves blessed and grateful every day of the week. 

My friend Gary says sometimes he thinks about giving up his texting regimen. Some people don’t text back. Sometimes so many people text back or call back that it becomes a major time burden. But he told me every time he thinks about quitting this ministry, he remembers one story in particular. There was a time he got a call from someone in tears–grateful tears. He had been texting this man religiously every Wednesday for three months or more. The man had never once written back. When they got on the phone together the man explained that for the last three months he had been in jail.

His mother had had his phone, and she never turned it off. She even kept it charged. So, every Wednesday morning at 7:00 am she would hear the son’s phone ding, and it would be another text message from Gary–always something uplifting and kind. Every Wednesday without fail for three months the son’s phone dinged even though no one ever wrote back.

When the son got home, the mother told him where he could find his phone. And she said, I don’t know who Gary is, but you better text him back because he obviously loves you and cares about you. When the man picked up his phone and found three months of Wednesday messages, he was overwhelmed to know that anyone was still thinking about him, especially after all he had been through. He felt grateful and blessed and better able to start the new chapter of life in front of him. So, my friend Gary keeps texting because he knows it matters. 

It matters when we live out Jesus’ commandment to love one another as he has loved us. It matters when we take action to be with each other. We won’t always see the change it brings but we can trust that God will do something with our loving action, because we know how much it matters when someone will take the time just to be with us.

I give thanks for all the ways our two churches have been with each other for all these years. We have crossed lines of race and specifics of belief and the historic dividing line of the Fox River to be with each other. I believe it matters. I believe it has made a difference. I believe God is praised every time we dare to be with each other. Every time we do so, I believe we declare God is still with us. God is still with all of us.

                                                                                           May it be so. Amen.

At Home in God

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – May 14, 2023

At Home in God – John 14: 1-3

Today’s scripture selection takes place directly after Jesus has washed his disciples’ feet in the Gospel of John’s version of the last supper. Even though we’re reading from chapter 14, the setting hasn’t changed since chapter 13. Those chapter breaks were added long after the work of the original scribe. So, it is in that immediate context that Jesus teaches about the dwelling place he prepares for the disciples whose feet he has just washed.  

That context adds something to my understanding of what kind of dwelling place Jesus may be talking about. The feetwashing Jesus, I imagine, prepares any place with a vulnerable feetwashing love and hospitality. It’s a place where sandals can be removed, where we give and receive care, and where we feel we belong and we are loved. It’s a place we can truly call home.

Maybe it’s a home that will never be fully perfected in this life, but if what Jesus says about the disciples knowing God because Jesus has been known by them is to be believed, then it seems this place Jesus prepares is a home we can experience at least fleetingly, in the here and now, too.

Personally, I can be guilty of wishing I could control a lot more things in my life in order to feel at home more often. But I am trying to continue learning how to find myself at home in that feetwashing presence of God even amidst all that is outside my control.

The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron gives a great lesson in a video still available on YouTube called Lousy World.[1] Brene Brown also excerpts it in Braving the Wilderness, which some of us read together last fall.[2]

Chodron starts by imitating the way so many of us walk through life bemoaning everything around us: “This lousy world, these lousy people, this lousy government, this lousy everything… lousy weather… It’s too hot... It’s too cold. I don’t like the smell. The person in front is too tall and the person next to me is wearing perfume that I’m allergic to.”

Pema continues: “It’s like being barefoot and walking across blazing-hot sand or across cut glass or a field of thorns. But then you have a great idea! You’re just going to cover everywhere you go with leather. Just pave it all in leather. Of course some things and some people will be in the way. So, we’ll just get rid of them. Get rid of her. Get rid of him. Get rid of them. Things we don’t like will be much easier to ignore paved in leather, too. And while we’re at it, we’ll get the temperature just right–and the weather,too. And we’ll ban perfume (Pema seems to really not like perfume) and we’ll ban anything else that bothers us–including and especially mosquitoes. (Soon here in Northern IL we’ll remember the bane that is mosquitoes. It just has to get warm enough first.) Once we’ve banned everything we don’t like and covered everything else in leather, we won’t have to be in pain anymore. Life will be just right. And we can walk barefoot everywhere.

Or instead, Pema quotes the classic Buddhist teacher Shantideva, we could just put the leather on our feet. We could just wear shoes to walk across the boiling sand and the cut glass and the field of thorns. It’s a metaphor, of course, for the way we can practice knowing ourselves to be at home in this heart and head and skin of ours wherever we go and whatever we encounter. It doesn’t mean we’ll always be happy or that we can’t say ouch. But it’s a different way–maybe a more accessible way–of being at home without having to fix the whole world first. It’s something we can practice as individual Christ-followers. And it’s a way of being at home in God that we can practice as a collective church body, too.

In fact, New Testament scholar Angela N. Parker[3] points out that the Greek behind Jesus' word of comfort to his disciples is actually “Do not let your (plural) heart (singular) be troubled.” In other words, “Jesus’ statement in the Gospel of John highlights the idea of the disciples possessing one singular heart as a collective group of people.”

In the 2022 Tom Hanks film, A Man Called Otto, the title character’s main physical problem is that his heart is too big. His emotional problem is that he lost his wife six months ago and the grief is too big. He wants to join her but people–mainly his neighbors–keep getting in the way of his attempts.

He’s not what you’d call a friendly guy. But if you can get past the gruff exterior, he is the guy who will bleed his neighbor’s radiators to get the heat going, who will teach another neighbor how to drive and then babysit that same neighbor’s children, and take in a trans neighbor who’s been kicked out by his own dad. 

I don’t want to spoil too much of the movie for you. But I will say that although Otto’s grief doesn’t go away, as he renews relationships with longtime neighbors and begins new relationships with brand new neighbors, he begins to find a way to live with the grief and to enjoy the community he creates with them.

The movie brought me to tears several times but one of my favorite scenes is near the end when Otto and his neighbors’ have just celebrated a big win together. They’ve just exposed the corruption of the company that was trying to force senior residents from their homes and in doing so, saved two neighbors from eviction.

It happens in the background. A journalist asks if neighborly neighbors aren’t just a thing of the past. She asks Jimmy what he meant when he said he would take care of his neighbors Anita and Reuben, because they are like family to him and Jimmy answers, “Well, I have dinner at their house almost every night.” It’s a glimpse of the collective heart and the collective community home we can make when we share the sacred gift of connection with each other.

Imperfect as it may be, our collective heart when we knit it together in our homes and neighborhoods and here in church can better withstand the trouble that comes our way, because together we are the body of Christ. Together, and with God’s help, we prepare a place that we can call home in the collective here and now.

It’s only a glimpse of the one that is to come but it is one in which, at its best, we can dwell and find sustenance even now. That’s what we do together here. We remind each other that we are loved and that we belong in a sacred story.

Baptism is one way of claiming that sacred story as our own. It’s one way of responding to the love God has for all of us and the way that love was embodied by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Baptism is one way of saying my home is in God now and forever, and these people in this church are a kind of home for me, too. Whatever comes my way I know I am loved, and I will do my best to live out that love in the world so that others, too, can come to dwell in the place that Jesus has prepared.

As Eugene Peterson’s Message version of the Bible renders this scripture, Jesus tells his disciples, “There is plenty of room for you in my Holy Parent’s home. If that weren’t so, would I have told you that I’m on my way to get a room ready for you? And if I’m on my way to get your room ready, I’ll come back and get you so you can live where I live. And you already know the road I’m taking.”

There’s some confusion that follows next. Thomas wants a literal road map. But Jesus is being metaphorical again. He is the road map. If you follow him, the teacher who has just humbly knelt to wash the feet of his disciples–if you love others as Jesus loves you–then you’ll get there. You’ll experience it. You’ll learn how to dwell now fleetingly and then forever in this love that wraps us all up and calls us all home.

May it be so. Amen.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buTrsK_ZkvA

[2] Brene Brown, Braving the Wilderness, (Random House: New York, 2017), 118-120.

[3] Accessed 5-12-23. Angela N. Parker. Working Preacher Commentary. John 14: 1-14. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fifth-sunday-of-easter/commentary-on-john-141-14-6

The Church at the Corner of Wonder and Awe

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – May 7, 2023

The Church at the Corner of Wonder and Awe – Acts 2: 42-47

Today’s scripture text describes the early church in the season directly following the moment of Pentecost where the Holy Spirit arrived in palpable wind, fire, and miraculous connections of communication. If we read just this section, we get a picture of the church at its highest level of community cooperation and miraculous togetherness. If I close my eyes, I can smell the pots of food being passed and hear the collective whisper of Kumbaya. 

This is the church I’d like to be a part of, where you can taste belonging in every bite of bread, and where there are no worries about finances because everyone’s got each other’s back. Surely this is a vision of the kin-dom of heaven, the reign of God, Jesus talked and taught about and what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the Beloved Community. Unfortunately, we don’t have to zoom out too far to pop this utopian bubble in today’s text or in our own experience of community life.

After all, the story of Acts picks up where the story of Luke left off. Yes, the disciples have witnessed the resurrected Christ, but they have also witnessed Jesus’s crucifixion and have real reason to fear their own violent persecution. Not long after this blessed scene of early Christian community living, the book of Acts will describe community betrayal, painful community conflict, and horrific violence from the wider world.

Our own Christian community can also be far from utopian. We experience conflicts, sometimes deep, painful ones that even if not intended as betrayal can make it difficult to trust or even talk to each other. We, too, live in a world of horrific violence. Even in the richest country in the world, the violence of neglect and poverty is commonplace. Even in a country with the world’s largest military, we are unsafe from gun violence in schools and stores and neighborhoods. Even in a country where many of us pledge allegiance to a flag that stands for an indivisible nation with liberty and justice for all, the machinations of our government, our economy, and our social fabric are still far from that dream.    

In the face of such violence and the reality of human failing, what good is the practice of Christian community? An answer to that question came to me from an unlikely place this week.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Surgeon General released a report titled "Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation." Its findings include this statement, “that even before the COVID-19 pandemic, about half of U.S. adults reported experiencing measurable levels of loneliness, ...the physical consequences [of which have been found to include] a 29% increased risk of heart disease; a 32% increased risk of stroke; and a 50% increased risk of developing dementia for older adults.”[1] According to this new advisory, the United State’s “epidemic of loneliness… can increase the risk for premature death to levels comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.”

US Surgeon General Murthy noted “loneliness isn't a uniquely American problem, but instead a feature of modern life around the globe. Yet, he noted that in the U.S. participation in community organizations — from faith groups to recreational leagues — has declined in recent decades.” He also noted that while social media can provide an important sense of connection, it can also give us a false sense of connection that takes the place of time spent building quality relationships through in-person interaction.

After also naming economic challenges, heightened social division, the fast pace of modern life, and the lack of mental health care access, Murthy concluded, “we're seeing more forces that take us away from one another and fewer of the forces that used to bring us together.”

Did you catch what I caught in that report? There’s a lot to digest there. But one of the things that stood out to me was the US Surgeon General, the government leader whose own website describes their responsibility as “providing Americans with the best scientific information available on how to improve their health and reduce the risk of illness and injury,” named faith groups among forces that bring us together and noted their decline contributes to a culture of loneliness that is hazardous to our health.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not making a Christian supremacist argument. You won’t hear me say that the diversity of religious or non-religious expression in the United States will be its downfall. What I will say is that co-creating loving and non-coercive Christian community can be a vehicle for changing and yes, even saving lives.

I’m not talking about getting a certain number of folks to say the sinner’s prayer. I’m talking about the difference it makes in our lives and in our communities to have quality connections, to know that somebody has your back, and that there is a place and a people you can go to when you need to celebrate or lament.

It will never be perfect. It will never look like that early Acts vision at every moment or in every season. But at its best, church does have the power to strengthen our connection to God, the holy source of all life and love. At its best, church even has the power to challenge us to continue the lifelong work of expanding our hearts and our love to include imperfect others and our imperfect selves. Yes, the church has made 2 millennia of mistakes but it also has 2 millennia of practice and experience to meet the needs of this moment in which we are living. 

Today’s vision from Acts proclaims that “And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.” That is no inconsequential description, and if we take this vision of Beloved Community as a model, it will be no inconsequential promise.

That description from Acts also tells us that “Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.” Another way of describing the irresistible wholeness and health of this community might be with the Hebrew word shalom. Many of you will recall that shalom means peace but not just the absence of violence. Shalom is a peace with justice where all are made whole and well–where everyone has what they need.

In her first book, Shalom Sistas, New Orleans-bred pastor and accomplished cook Osheta Moore describes shalom as the “breadth, depth, climate, and smell of the kingdom of God.” It’s like the dish Osheta most loves to make for building community: a good pot of gumbo we can all gather around.

It occurred to me reading Osheta’s flavor-filled description of the Beloved Community this week that we don’t have to constantly be eating to be nourished. It’s a rhythm. We eat. We work. We rest. We mourn. We celebrate. We eat some more.

Glimmers of the reign of God among us may seem fleeting, but that doesn’t mean they can’t provide us with the sustenance we need along the way. 

In that earliest Christ-following community, we are told “awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles.” We may think that awe-filled wonders and signs may have happened only a long time ago. But if I stop and think about it, I can say I have witnessed these awe-filled miracles in churches from Pennsylvania to North Carolina to California to Indiana to Iowa to here in Elgin, IL. Yes, including all of you, especially all of you.

It was special for me to see so many of you gathered for a Table Grace meal one Sunday this Lent. I tasted soup made with love, and I heard your joyful conversations. I have to tell you though what touched me most was when I turned around at just the right moment to witness an adult in the congregation teaching one of my children how to fold up the table and carry it across the fellowship hall to put away. There was so much patience and camaraderie in that moment that it nearly moved me to tears. Maybe you don’t consider that a miracle. In some ways, it was perfectly normal, but gathering together hasn’t been normal for nearly three years. It’s been enough time that I’ve stopped taking for granted the little gestures of community we make when we’re together, the way it knits together relationships, the way it tells us we’re loved and we belong, and the way it embodies the gentle, patient, life-changing love of Christ. I give thanks for the miracles large and small that I have been privileged to witness this far while creating Beloved Community with all of you.

With God’s help, the Holy Spirit’s leading, and the love of Christ, we can still today create a circle of community, a nourishing neighborhood at the corner of wonder and awe, where lives are transformed and even if for a moment all is made well.

                                                                                         May it be so. Amen.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1173418268/loneliness-connection-mental-health-dementia-surgeon-general

Holy Ground

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – April 23, 2023

Holy Ground – Exodus 3: 1-12

After I had preached a few sermons at my first pastorate in rural Iowa, one of the many farmers in the congregation pulled me aside to share what he impressed upon me was extremely important information for an Iowa preacher to understand.

That was the important difference for a farmer between the words: dirt and soil.

Dirt is dead and unwanted. It’s a good word for what you clean off your clothes, hands, or boots at the end of the day. Soil on the other hand is a precious resource from which food and crops may grow. It requires careful cultivation, and its health is an increasing focus of many farmers. If I wanted to continue using agricultural references in my sermons, he kindly underlined for me, that was a distinction I’d want to start getting right.

Moses is employed in the field of agriculture in today’s story. At the beginning of Exodus chapter 3, he is out tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, leading them, the text says, beyond the wilderness to Horeb, understood as the mountain of God. 

In Exodus chapter 2, just before the chapter we read today, Moses left Egypt in trouble. He was on the run after murdering an Egyptian slave master. But I suspect he was also on the run from a feeling of rage and helplessness in the face of the overwhelming suffering of his people: the enslaved ancient Israelites.

We live in a time of overwhelming trouble, too. Racism and violence are still far too prevalent. What’s more, human actions have now imperiled the health of our planet in ways that many of us often feel helpless to address.

Since 1750, humans have pumped 1,000 gigatons of carbon into the air. To put it mildly, we’ve discovered that’s a bad thing for the health of the planet. It’s warming up our atmosphere at a rate that is causing glaciers to melt, sea levels to rise, mass species extinction, mass famine for human populations, and severe weather patterns. We are already experiencing a climate in chaos, and unless we take effective collective action, the worst is yet to come.  

Climate scientists are clear that effective collective action includes reducing our emissions or the amount of carbon we continue to pump into the air through the use of fossil fuels. But most climate scientists are also clear that reducing emissions globally is very complicated and that reducing emissions alone still leaves a legacy load of carbon in the atmosphere. We’ve put it there over the course of centuries, and left unaddressed, it will continue to cause problems for decades if not centuries to come.

God called Moses to action from a burning bush. If you ask me, I’d say our call to faithful action today is coming in the form of massive increasingly destructive wildfires among other disasters. We may wish we could hide, too, but unfortunately for us there is no metaphorical Midian we can escape to–unless of course you count one billionaire’s still far off dream of populating Mars.

No, I’m afraid we’re stuck with this atmosphere and with this earth under our feet. In the wilderness on the mountain of Horeb from a burning bush God calls to Moses: “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” How holy do we consider the ground on which we stand?

Most farmers I know are convinced of the importance of soil. But these days the stuff has a whole new fan base, as evidenced in the documentary I recently finished watching called “Kiss the Ground,” available now on Netflix. In it, celebrities, scientists, and farmers wax emotional while sharing the good news of this one big, long word: biosequestration. If you’ve never heard that one before, you might want to practice saying it with me: biosequestration.

So, the word bio means life. And if you sequester something you trap it. This documentary makes the claim that since reducing carbon emissions is not enough on its own, what we need is technology that will take that legacy load of carbon out of the atmosphere and put it back in the ground where it came from. The good news is that the technology we need to do this is actually millions of years old. Biosequestration is what trees and other plants, especially plants with good long roots, already do. They take the carbon out of the air and put it back in the ground to feed the micro-organisms living in the soil.

Like my dear Iowa farmer told me. Dirt is dead. It’s been exposed to air so much those precious micro-organisms have all died off. The rain runs right off dirt. If it’s going to grow anything, new micro-organisms need to be pumped back into it–often in the form of fertilizer.  But keeping a live root in the ground can transform dirt into soil. It can capture carbon and feed the micro-organisms and draw the rain down into the underground water table. Healthy, rich soil is the fertile ground from which food and crops can grow. Now, we are learning, it can also be the fertile ground that keeps our air clean and our planet livable.

It may be easy to consider majestic mountains, soaring eagles, leaping dolphins, or dramatic sunsets and be moved by the beauty of Creation. But for those of us who believe that this earth is a gift from God that sustains life and is worthy of our faithful stewardship then we may want to take seriously how holy is the very ground on which we walk.

From that holy ground, God called Moses to action. But Moses needed convincing. If you read chapter 4, you may come to the conclusion that Moses was afraid to do what God asked. He makes excuses and finally simply asks God to send someone else. But God doesn’t let Moses off the hook. God says, no, I am sending you. But God doesn’t send Moses alone and God sends with Moses miraculous powers.

In the United States today, those of us who want to take collective action on climate change are far from alone. Studies have shown that the vast majority or 66-80% of US citizens favor climate policies and action.[1] If you wonder where all those people are, you should see how busy the Earth Day Celebration at Hawthorne Hill Nature Center gets. And if you don’t want to feel alone, you can make plans to visit the Earth Summit to be held at Elgin Community College this coming Saturday, April 29th. Or you could join Elgin’s Sustainability Commission which is working on a number of local projects. Or join another local community organization focused on the health of the planet, including our own Highland Avenue Green Team.

God isn’t going to send someone else. It’s going to take individual and collective action to turn around the damage humans have caused to our planet. But I trust that God does not call faithful people to action alone and that God is still working wonders with us.

·       Those wonders include the natural processes of our planet and the simple miracle of a tree.

·       Those wonders include the simple miracle of farmer after farmer planting cover crops or taking up whole systems of regenerative agriculture, which not only produce more but draw down carbon in the process.

·       Those wonders include the simple miracle of backyard gardeners choosing native plants with deep roots that they know support the health of the planet by supporting the health of the soil and actually pulling carbon out of the air right here where they live.

·       Those wonders include any one of us who will dare to take off our shoes and sink our toes into this holy ground we call earth.

I hold close to my heart the morning over breakfast when my son Noam told me, “Mom, I can’t wait for the time when we have a national holiday celebrating how we fixed the planet and overcame climate change.” I can’t wait for that day either. I won’t sit on my hands expecting it to come. But I do trust that God is still doing wonders and God is still calling faithful people to action, including you and me.                                    

 May it be so. Amen.

[1]  “Americans experience a false social reality by underestimating popular climate policy support by nearly half”, Nature Communications, August 2022. As shared by Kane County Climate Action Plan’s consulting team: Pale Blue Dot LLC. 

Everywhere the Feast

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – April 9, 2023, Easter Sunday

Everywhere the Feast – Matthew 28: 1-10

In Christian tradition, a table grace is most commonly understood as a mealtime prayer. It’s the often simple prayers spoken, sung, sighed, or held in silence before a meal that gratefully mark the presence of God. It’s an ordinary practice that has the extraordinary potential to regularly renew our awareness of our unbreakable connection to the God of all creation.

The gospel accounts give us many stories of Jesus eating with followers, friends, and foes. It’s the ordinary setting where numerous extraordinary teachings occur.

Perhaps then we should be unsurprised that in this extraordinarily miraculous moment when Mary Magdalene and the other Mary meet the risen Christ while leaving the tomb where he was buried, that he instructs them to bring the other disciples and meet him back in Galilee, the perfectly ordinary, backwater region where their story together began. “In Galilee,” he says, “there they will see me.”

In different gospel accounts, the women come to the tomb with spices to anoint Jesus’ body and to continue their cultural rituals of mourning. But in Matthew’s account all the narrator tells us is that Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. What was it they went to see?

Did they come to see the dead body of the one they had loved and followed? Or were they good listeners to Jesus’s teachings on how he would rise from the tomb? Were they hoping for a miracle? And, what kind of miracles are we promised? What do we hope to see?

Too many here and across the world know the reality of death, suffering, and sorrow. It seems to be an all too ordinary part of life. We may be tempted to consider it extraordinary any time when pain and heartache are not all-consuming. But I think the truth is more like the scenes in many spring gardens right now, where signs of miraculous new life bloom right alongside the signs of last season’s end.

There was a news story some years ago that left a lasting impression on me. It was about two men hunkered down inside an embattled Syrian city. Despite the grim reality of their plight, they refused to give up hope and continued the ordinary practices that gave them strength, like daily prayers, eating together, and in overturned cinder blocks or any possible open soil they grew whatever plants they could. They were growing food, yes, but as they said, what was keeping them alive was more than food. It was the ordinary practice of gardening that allowed them to feel as though they were continuing to live as long as they could even in those conditions, and that one way or another their lives would go on.

In today’s story the signs of miraculous new life are large and undeniably extraordinary. There is an earthquake and lightning and a dazzling angel sitting atop the impossibly moved stone outside of Jesus’ tomb.

These are all signs that the powers of the world that used violence to keep people controlled and cowering, in particular the Roman empire that loved its cosmic imagery, was not equal to the power of God as known in Jesus, for whom even death was not the end of his life-saving message of God’s love and grace.

Death, violence, pain, and sorrow, need not have the last word in our lives either. We can trust that God’s abundant love and grace carry us beyond this life and through the trials that come our way while we yet breathe.

And, though God’s extraordinary love and grace are a powerful part of all creation, there is nothing extraordinary we must do to receive these gifts. They are available to all of us no matter how ordinary we consider ourselves to be. To God each one of us is extraordinarily loved and worthy of abundant grace.

Most of the angels and miracles I’ve seen are perfectly ordinary like:

the person struggling with addiction who asks for help,

the mother who gets herself and her kids free of an abusive situation,

the unsheltered or otherwise suffering person who finds a life-saving community of           support,

the one who refuses to live as other than the beautiful person God created them to be,

the one who learns how to forgive and begins a new life,

the one who opens their home to a stranger and expands their family,

the one who gets through each day one moment at a time until life by and by gets a little    easier and they find they can share their gifts with joy again,

or simply the spring that rises from the ashes of the winter.

Yes, I have seen angels and miracles and so have you. I have seen the unending love of the risen Christ embodied in hundreds of life-saving ways.

My friends Brian and Diane Stanton run a bakery and a coffee shop in downtown Elgin. In the those first months of the pandemic, they didn’t know if their business would survive, but they did know that they had neighbors who were going hungry and they had neighbors who even if they had food needed to see some acts of kindness in the midst of such uncertainty and despair. So, they started making bread just to give away.

They’re very smart business people. They know that giving away food isn’t the way you keep a business open, but they knew it was worth doing anyway. They’re still doing it today, and their business is still thriving despite the hundreds of loaves of bread that went out the door for free.

I pray that God would save me from missing the extraordinary that is shining through the ordinary moments of our lives. I pray that God would save each one of us from forgetting to be moved by the miracle that is every meal that reaches our mouths. I pray that God would send each one of us forth from here to proclaim the good news of the risen Christ by sharing precious morsels of love and grace in any way we can.

Galilee is the otherwise unremarkable home of the earthly Jesus and his disciples. But when the risen Christ meets the disciples there later in Matthew, it also becomes the launching point from which he commissions them to go into all the world and make disciples. 

We are those disciples. We are the inheritors of that story and of all the moments of love, growth, and grace they shared around the table. We can also be the ancestors who–in extraordinary acts we may be tempted to consider ordinary–continue to pass on that love, growth, and grace.

When we do so, like the women at the tomb, we may witness the risen Christ alive and at work around us. When we experience, say, and share God’s unending grace, we may find that, despite the reality of suffering and death, we are part of a miraculous, abundant, eternal flow of life not unlike the image Jan Richardson paints in her well-known prayer-poem about a world full of table grace. In which, she writes,

                    And the table will be wide.

                    And the welcome will be wide.

                    And the arms will open wide to gather us in.

                    And our hearts will open wide to receive.

                    And we will come as children

                    who trust there is enough.

                    And we will come unhindered and free.

                    And our aching will be met with bread.

                    And our sorrow will be met with wine.

                    And we will open our hands to the feast without shame.

                    And we will turn toward each other without fear.

                    And we will give up our appetite for despair.

                    And we will taste and know of delight.

                    And we will become bread for a hungering world.

                    And we will become drink for those who thirst.

                    And the blessed will become the blessing.                 

                    And everywhere will be the feast.[1]

Christ is risen.

Christ is risen indeed.

Amen.

[1] Jan Richardson, https://paintedprayerbook.com/2012/09/30/and-the-table-will-be-wide/

Hosanna Hospitality

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – April 2, 2023, Palm Sunday

Hosanna Hospitality – Matthew 21: 1-11

There’s a strange scene that’s been taking place in my kitchen this winter. It involves me standing over the stove and screaming at the top of my lungs. I’m not yelling at my kids or my husband. I’m not even crying out in despair at God for the state of the world. No, I’m screaming at my virtual assistant: the smart speaker mounted on a kitchen shelf that supposedly searches the internet and sets cooking timers for you–all through voice activation. The scene starts calmly enough with me making my breakfast and optimistically once again setting a timer for my morning tea through the wonders of virtual assistant technology. Approximately three quiet minutes later the timer alarm starts beeping. I start asking it to stop. It keeps beeping. I keep asking it to stop. And it keeps beeping and I keep asking it to stop and it keeps beeping and I keep asking it to stop until I realize I’m screaming at artificial intelligence that I could simply unplug from the wall. 

Recently, Parker pointed out that it seems to respond better when you actually turn to face it, when you’re speaking to it. For me, this means putting down my kitchen tools and turning my whole body to face the back wall where it's perched to ask it nicely to stop. And magically, it does now on the first try. It must have something to do with the way the microphone works, but I joked that it must like to have my full attention.

Even if it is the artificial intelligence becoming sentient and emotive, which I suspect it's not, it wouldn’t be alone would it in wanting our full attention? Children, friends, partners, parents, so many of us seem to like it when the person we’re with stops doing all the other things they’re doing and pauses to give us their full attention.

The parade Jesus was with demanded attention as he entered Jerusalem in full view of much of the city down the path from the Mount of Olives. According to Matthew, the crowd must have been hard to miss, too, as they shouted “Hosanna to the son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

Now, hosanna isn’t a word commonly thrown about in American English parlance. It’s a word that comes from ancient Jewish Temple liturgy, and it means literally “save us” though it also came to be used as a shout of praise. In the context of today’s story, it could be understood as an urgent plea though it is just as likely meant as overwhelming praise–perhaps an acclamation that this Jesus is indeed the Messiah. He is indeed the one who offers holy salvation. 

Did those in the crowd all perfectly agree on what they meant when they cried out Hosanna? I suspect not. I suspect they had as diverse beliefs, expectations, and motivations as the twelve named disciples who included everyone from tax collectors to would-be terrorists. Yet, they all cried out “save us!” and praised Jesus together.

In the non-creedal Christian tradition that is the Church of the Brethren, we have room among us for different understandings of what it is that the word salvation means, how Jesus does indeed save us, and from what it is that we need to be saved.

However we define it, perhaps we can find some agreement around the idea that in this world that is both beautiful and broken, there is precious healing to be found in connection with others and with God.

In her 2014 book, Cooperative Salvation: A Brethren View of Atonement, Manchester University professor Kate Eisenbise Crell reminds readers that early Brethren were less influenced by the idea of original sin than their theological neighbors, which was part of what allowed them to reject infant baptism in favor of adult baptism. They were less concerned about baptism as a means of salvific cleansing of original sin and more concerned about baptism as a faithful and freely chosen response to God’s already extended grace.   

Both Anabaptism and Radical Pietism, from which our spiritual ancestors drew, held in common a  “fairly optimistic view of humanity,” writes Eisenbise Crell, believing that patterning our lives after Jesus not only changes us as individuals but also changes the communities of which we are a part and, I would argue, by extension, the world in which we live. Choosing baptism and a life of following Jesus then and now was well understood as a means of finding a spiritual home both in God and with the people of a faith community.

In her book, Eisenbise Crell writes “...the chief problem with humanity is that we are isolated and alienated from one another, not just by our individual actions, but also by the systems and structures that order our lives.”

Personally, I believe that Jesus, through his life and ministry, including his death and resurrection, offers the healing salve that leads us toward reconnection with God, with each other, and with our own spiritual well-being.

There is something about turning toward each other, turning toward God, and turning toward our innermost selves with our full attention that I believe does put us on the road home toward wholeness and healing.

According to the scripture story, “a very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road,” in front of Jesus, and others “cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road.” This would have been a scene that recalled other festivals of the time and place. But it puts me in mind of rolling out the red carpet or doing special things to make someone feel honored and welcome. Holding any sort of gathering at my house growing up meant special cleaning and cooking chores that I didn’t appreciate having to do but that I came to see as an act of hospitality.

Our spiritual cousins, the Quakers, have long held dear the belief that there is “that of God in everyone” and have often spoken and written of this belief as the inner light of Christ. Many Quakers even consider this idea to be synonymous or in kinship with the wider Christian understanding of grace.[1]

How do we offer hospitality for Christ in our midst? How do we believe he shows up? If it is that he often shows up in our lives as a light within ourselves and within others, what kind of welcome are we providing? Are we ready to throw our cloaks on the road?

In a recent Christian Century magazine, Lynn Jost recounted a story of grace-filled welcome shared by a leader in her Fresno, California community. The leader described coming home to visit his parents and to attend church with them. The visit was complicated by the fact that he was coming out as a gay man. He struggled as it came time for the congregation to celebrate communion, considering himself perhaps unwelcome or unworthy at least in the eyes of the church. As the elements came to him in the pew he decided not to take them and let them pass by. But his father, sitting next to him, stopped, turned to face his son, took his own bread and broke it in half. “The Lord loves you and accepts you,” the father told his son and gave him half of his own bread.

I understand that as a moment of healing for both the parent and the child in that story, as they turned toward each other and toward God. I don’t think it would be too bold to call it a moment of embodying God’s saving grace.

Salvation doesn’t arrive in today’s story on a red carpet or a silver platter. It comes in the flesh and blood, riding a lowly donkey and colt. Yet, it was no ordinary moment. When we practice Hosanna Hospitality like the crowd in today’s story, maybe we, too, will come to turn more and more of our full attention toward the way the ordinary moments of our lives can be filled with the extraordinary grace of God.

Sometimes I rush through meals, especially if there’s somewhere I need to be. I don’t always say grace. I don’t always pause and acknowledge that this act of eating is keeping me alive. I don’t always stop to feel the connection that eating brings to all the places this food has been grown and processed and prepared. I don’t always stop to feel the connection that eating recalls to the Source of all that nourishes life. But there are times when I do stop. There are times when I am just about to dive into the first bite when I stop, and I remember. Alone or with others, there are times when I can speak or sigh or sing a word of grace and in so doing feel my full attention fixed on that connection I have to God and to every other living thing. Jesus embodied that connection and taught us how to turn in full toward that saving grace.

Indeed Hosanna. Hosanna in the highest heaven. Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord. 

             Thanks be to God. Amen.

[1] https://quaker.org/the-inner-light/

Dinner Drama

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – March 19, 2023

Dinner Drama – John 12: 1-8

Imagine this scene. Dinner is finishing up. Martha is clearing away the dishes. Lazarus, freshly raised from the dead, is sharing a laugh with Jesus. The other disciples are debating something amongst themselves when Mary walks into the room. She doesn’t say anything to anyone, but there are tears streaming down her face as she sits in front of Jesus, unwraps a pound of costly, high quality perfumed oil, and begins to use her hair to anoint Jesus’s feet. The fragrance fills the house along with, I imagine, the sounds of Mary’s muffled sobs.

We have Judas’s words here but I imagine he is not the only disciple whose face is a mask of disgust, and who rises up in a pose of protest. Whatever Mary is doing, it is expensive and intense and vulnerable and probably seems all too much to more than one guest at the meal. I imagine this, because it seems all too much to me, too. If I really imagine it, there is at least a part of me who finds the whole scene overwhelming and uncomfortable. But maybe that’s because there is still a part of me–and maybe a part of many of you–who finds the whole idea of grace overwhelmingly vulnerable and uncomfortable, too.    

In the Church of the Brethren, we practice feetwashing and handwashing at Maundy Thursday Love Feast just as Jesus washed the feet of his disciples in the very next chapter of the Gospel of John. And just as it made Peter uncomfortable in that story, it still makes many of us uncomfortable today. For many of us, it’s not so much washing someone else’s feet or hands that makes us uncomfortable. Service is an act that often makes us feel good and worthy. More often it’s the act of letting someone else wash our hands and feet that gets to us. Do we really deserve such an act of kindness? Can we really let ourselves be vulnerable enough to receive that gift? If we let it, it can get to us. It can challenge all we think we know about who deserves what. It can remind us that grace is by definition unearned mercy and compassion.

One of my favorite stories about grace comes from a colleague who as a young adult borrowed her father’s car without telling him. It was late when she crashed the car that night, but in a small town word still traveled fast. She saw his broad shoulders getting out of a friend’s pick-up truck at the scene of the crash. She walked up to him in tears, awaiting the inevitable harsh words and the consequences to her actions. Instead, to her surprise he gathered her into a bear hug and told her he was just so glad she was alright. 

That, she explains, is her understanding of grace and unearned mercy.

There are probably parts of all of us who feel entitled to certain privileges in our lives but there are also probably parts of all of us who aren’t sure we really deserve any mercy we have not earned. Feet washing is an opportunity to humble ourselves and to accept a grace we need not earn.

In today’s story, Mary wasn’t washing Jesus’s feet though, she was anointing them. It’s a distinction with a difference.

We wash feet in the Church of the Brethren, and we also anoint. We allow our heads to be marked with oil to call upon the presence of God when we are most in need of the sure knowledge of that holy presence with us, doing so often at points of challenge or change in our lives.

Mary had been mesmerized by Jesus’s teaching. She had seen him miraculously raise her brother from the dead. She saw the presence of God in him as the Messiah. She seemed even to be aware of how the confluence of such power and such love would put him at risk of the kind of harm that would soon come his way. So, she marked it. She anointed him with the most precious things she could find–that costly perfume and her very own hair. It seems to me that, even if it comes with tears, anointing is an act of gratitude and celebration as much as it is anything else.

In his book, Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer writes about one helpful friend who visited him during the depths of a bout with clinical depression. He didn’t try to talk Parker out of the depression or fix him. He rarely spoke to Parker at all. What he did was ask permission to stop by Parker’s home every day and massage his feet for half an hour. This deep act of respect and care helped him feel that he was still loved and seen. It helped him to endure until he could reconnect with his own deep sense of the holy relatedness that he writes, “is the lifeline of all living beings.”

I might see it as an act of anointing or of marking the enduring presence of God even when that presence is not readily evident.

In today’s scripture, Judas protests the expense of what Mary has done, to which Jesus replies, “Leave her alone…You will always have the poor with you but you will not always have me.”

I don’t think that Jesus didn’t care about the poor. I don’t think that the spirit of the risen Christ isn’t with us now either.

I do think that Jesus took on this mortal human form for a limited number of precious days. I believe that although the part of us that is made of love will endure, we too have a limited number of precious days in this life. I do believe that followers of Jesus are called to care for each other and the needs of the world. But I don’t believe that means we need only know pain or deny the reality of our limitations to fix all the wrong around us.

In Sabbath in the Suburbs, MaryAnn McKibben Dana writes about her family’s experiment with keeping a sabbath day for one year. She writes about the challenge and joy of clearing her schedule, putting down her phone, and engaging with her family. She quotes Thomas Merton who writes, “to allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence.” And, she coins the term “holy scarcity.” Rather than a theology of abundance–the belief that there is always enough, “I have found it much more liberating to embrace the idea of holy scarcity,” she writes. With respect to sabbath “...there isn’t ever enough time. Even when we strip away all the inessentials–even when we focus only on the things that are good and nourishing and important for ourselves, our families, and the world–there is still not enough time. But our hope is not in there being enough time but in there being enough grace to muddle through the scarcities of our days.”

Being followers of Jesus doesn’t require us to be perfect or to give ourselves away without limit. Being followers of Jesus means being free to accept grace for ourselves and to extend grace to others.

When we accept the limitations of this life and practice that flow of grace, we may find ourselves more aware of the sparkle of holy scarcity that shines throughout our precious, numbered days. We may find that the spirit of the risen Christ is among us every time we wake or breathe or sit to eat. And that may become all. too. much. not to celebrate with at least a quiet sigh and a word of grateful prayer.

This Lent, whether we find ourselves at a table or not, may we find holy, sustaining grace enough for each day. 

                                                                                           May it be so. Amen.

Beloved Everyone Everywhere

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – February 19, 2023

Beloved Everyone Everywhere

 The February before last I discovered virtualvacation.us, a website where those of us who have that No IL February wanderlust can go to virtually travel the world without taxing our budget. I spent a lovely 20 minutes on a walking tour outside the Louvre in France, all while still in my pajamas.  

Another evening all four of my family members crowded around a computer screen to guess which US city we were virtually strolling through. You may be unsurprised to hear we found it so enjoyable, it was hard for us to stop.

I do know some people who are traveling right now. I know some too who are dreaming of traveling, when the budget, the schedule, and health conditions allow. Many of us, who have been experiencing stress, isolation, anxiety, or boredom over the past three years, are ready to get out and go--anywhere.

While lots of us may be suffering from a case of wanderlust, Peter had the opposite experience. He never wanted to leave the mountaintop he was on with Jesus. Or at least, that’s what I so often hear in his awe-filled stammering. He wants to build three dwellings--one for Jesus, Elijah, and Moses. He wants to stay and dwell in that wildly holy and wholly unexpected moment.

But of course it is not to be. A voice from heaven booms in their ears, and the moment passes before Jesus can so much as laugh at sweet, stammering Peter.  

Maybe what many of us, modern day hearers of this story  have most in common with Peter is knowing what it’s like to want to be, go, or stay somewhere we can’t. Some of us have had more practice than others experiencing life when it doesn’t go the way we’d like.

All of us, sooner or later will live through the hard and beautiful experience of something coming to an end. All of us, sooner or later will live through the hard and beautiful experience of something beginning. All of us, sooner or later will live through the hard and beautiful experience of the mundane muddy middle between beginnings and endings. Like it or not though, change is always with us.

Change was what Jesus was up to on that mountaintop. He was being transfigured or transformed. Metamorphoo is the Greek word here, which sounds a lot like what caterpillars are up to in the cocoon.

I can’t imagine what kind of change this experience must have worked on Peter. He was still getting used to this wild way of Jesus. Peter hadn’t heard the voice that was just for Jesus in the first chapter calling him Beloved. But now, as Jesus stands shining on the mountaintop, surrounded by prophets of old, Peter hears that voice loud and clear,

“This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”

How would Peter have gone down that mountain changed? Even stuck as we may sometimes feel in our own circumstances, are there ways we too, can have a moment like Peter did? How can we find the change we seek--whatever it may be?

I don’t know about you, but for me, that’s the real reason I come to worship. Yes, this is my job and the paycheck is nice. Thank you. But I’ve been showing up to worship on my own account for a long time before that, and I’ll tell you I come to be astonished. I come to meet Jesus, in all his transformed and transforming glory. I sure hope the music is good and the company and the coffee and the sermon, too. But the truth is, for me, all those things are just a vessel for the good stuff.

My oldest son and I have a joke about how various things like baked goods, bread, etc. are all just a vehicle for butter. Anybody hear me on that one? We love butter.

Friends, Jesus is the butter. If you don’t love butter, you can pick your own favorite condiment. But for me Jesus is the butter. He’s the main attraction. And here’s why:

That voice from heaven calls him the Beloved, and that’s the only way he ever treats us, like we are whole, beloved, children of God, too. The world is full of messages that would have us believe we are not enough. We are not enough to be really loved. If anyone really knew all about us, they would know how not enough we really are. No place we can be, stay, or go will make us enough either. It’s a good way to keep us tamed. To keep us fearful and ashamed.

Jesus has a different message. It doesn’t matter where are you are or how long you’re gonna be there.  It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, what you haven’t done, or what you’re gonna do. It doesn’t matter who you are, how you’re made, what you struggle with, or what your gifts are. Wherever, however, and whoever you are, you are enough. You are enough. You are more than enough to be loved.

That’s the message Jesus brings to us over and over again. You are enough. You are loved. You are more than enough to be loved.

Make yourself a mountaintop and go meet Jesus. Find the way you need to receive that message. Maybe you don’t need to go anywhere at all. Maybe all you need to do is find yourself at home in this very skin of yours, beautiful and beloved, despite any broken bits. Maybe the only change you need is the change that comes from believing you, you are enough. That’s a change that has the power not just to heal us but to offer healing to all those who come after us, too.

In today’s story Jesus stands on a mountaintop with the disciples’ ancestors, and whether they knew it or not those disciples were becoming our ancestors, too. They were witnesses to a love that has always been and always will be. We are inheritors of a shining story of eternal love, transformational courage, and blessed enoughness. That story is written in all creation, in the stars and the mountaintops, and it is written in our hearts, too. If we want to pass on that holy, healing love, all we need do is let it shine forth wherever we go and wherever we stay.

May it be so. Amen.

It may be scary to really believe that,  because the changes it brings may be profound. It may seem far too wild and far too good to be true.

Like midwives who accompany women and babies through birth, we too can accompany each other through the fear and disbelief. We can say, yes, yes indeed we are enough. God loves us and everyone else. Imagine the change we could bear into this world together with that good news.

In the book of Exodus, the midwives Shiprah and Puah attended to Hebrew women in bearing children into slavery in Egypt. As devotional writer Anna Lisa Gross puts it,

They knew how to sound domesticated when Pharaoh questioned how all the baby Hebrew boys he ordered dead were mysteriously alive. But their merciful actions were wildly out of Pharaoh’s control. Their wildly merciful actions led to Moses being born whole and set adrift to his destiny in a basket in the bulrushes. That merciful courage and compassion was enough to free a whole nation and it is still setting us free whether it shows up on mountaintops or in seemingly mundane moments. 

Following midwives through the 1918 pandemic in Dublin, Ireland in Emma Donoghue’s novel The Pull of the Stars, I learned that influenza comes from the Italian word for influence. Before viruses were discovered, ancient Europeans had all manner of explanations for the illnesses that cause sickness and death, including the influence of the ever-moving stars overhead.  

We may have come a long way as a species in understanding immunology but we still struggle to free ourselves from influences that would have us domesticated and controlled. We still so often struggle to free ourselves from the yearning to have more of a domesticating, controlling influence on our world than will ever be ours to have.

If we set our course by the star that is Jesus, shining, dazzling, and changing our world with a faithful love, then we need not fear, we need not worry about all that is beyond our control, we need not wish we were anywhere or anyone we’re not. All we need do is be our wild, beloved, enough-just-as-we-are children of God and walk with Jesus, wherever he leads. 

                                                                                              May it be so. Amen.

Daily Bread

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – March 5, 2023

Daily Bread – Matthew 6: 7-14

The Greek behind the words “daily bread” in today’s prayer does not reveal much meaning in addition to what the English conveys. It’s just “daily bread,” sustaining in a vital way, and for any of us who have never known hunger, it can be rather ordinary and even taken for granted. “Give us this day our daily bread.”

I used to not think too much about my dad’s morning ritual. He would sit with his tea and toast, waiting for the moment when my mom, my sister, and I were all finally in the kitchen at the same time in our chaotic morning rush to get out the door. Then he would pounce, revealing The Upper Room daily devotional from under his newspaper pile and proceed to read it aloud, after which he would pray for protection of all his family and friends, naming us each by name.

I had entirely forgotten about it until just a few years ago when I was visiting my parents. My dad had just finished his toast when he said, “Well, I gotta go,” which was apparently the preamble to launch into his morning prayer in which he prayed for God to watch over me, my husband, my kids, my sister and her husband in New York, his mom, my mom, people from his church and his golf league, and of course his favorite sports team.

I smiled recalling all those other mornings and asked, “Do you still do that every day? Do you pray for me even when I’m not here?”

“Every day.” He said with a wide grin, “I pray for you every day.”

I don’t know what that was supposed to mean, but for a long time after that, I would have breakfast at my own table several states away and remember that he was praying for me. It held me up in a way I never appreciated as a child.

It isn’t that he uses fancy words or well-formed phrases that would get good grades in a seminary class on prayer. It isn’t that he’s otherwise the most pious or disciplined person I know. This is the man who, when told by a doctor that he might want to cut back on alcohol and red meat, so that he could live longer replied, “Will I live longer, or will it just seem longer?” No. It’s that he does it every day. It means something to him, and it means something to me, too.

There is no need to heap up lots of empty phrases to get God’s attention Jesus teaches in Matthew chapter 6. Rather, God always hears our prayers. Indeed, God knows all about our needs before we sometimes are even ready to name those needs for ourselves or even give them words. At other points in this chapter Jesus even teaches we don’t need to worry about making sure other people know how good and pious we are. It’s not about checking a box. It’s not about impressing other people. What’s important Jesus is teaching is that we feel connected to God.

I’ve run into all manner of beautiful ways of finding that connection. Some people walk in the woods. Some turn to poetry or photography. Some read devotionals. Some sing. Some bake bread. Some talk to God while driving in the car. I once knew someone who had a prayer white board. They put the white board on their fridge and wrote notes to God on it whenever they felt like it. Sometimes they just wrote, “Hi.”

When I was in my 20s, I got really into silent prayer. It’s not something everyone gets into, but I found it to be an incredible way to feel connected with the mysterious presence of God and to let go of my worries. After I had babies though, I complained to a mentor that I no longer had the ability to spend these long hours in silence like that–just when I could have used the grounding and stress relief the most!

She laughed and suggested that I may be in a different time of life. Maybe my prayer life these days was more like folding the laundry in the presence of God. She was referencing the Carmelite monk, Brother Lawrence, who lived in Paris in the 1600s and wrote what would become an enduring piece on spirituality called The Practice of the Presence of God.

Brother Lawrence never became a priest or anyone of higher authority because he didn’t have the education, standing, or ambition. What he had was a knack for seeing everything as an opportunity to practice being in the presence of God.

He spent most of his days in the kitchen, peeling potatoes and washing dishes. He wrote, “The time of busyness does not differ from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great a tranquility as if I were upon my knees.”

Brother Lawrence and my living mentor, assured me prayer is not so much what I do as how I do it. Can I find a way to approach life with the awareness of God’s presence with me whether I am alone and silent or busy and surrounded by chaos?

Truth be told, some days I do it better than others, and now that my kids are getting bigger, I am very happy to welcome back 15 minutes of silent prayer nearly every morning. I do find that when I’m in the flow of that habit, I’m more likely to catch my breath at a beautiful sunset evening even while caught in traffic or to be genuinely overcome with gratitude the moment all four members of my family sit down together for a meal or to be moved to tears watching a friend having a hard time quietly squeeze another friend’s hand before joining them in a pew for worship. 

Like the likely original hearers of the Gospel of Matthew, I grew up saying a version of the Lord’s Prayer in church. It was easy to memorize because we said it every Sunday. I think habits like that tend to go into us deeply. We may not always notice but over time they become part of us. Like the food we eat, they start to make up our bones and our blood.

All the world’s great religious traditions teach about building habits that bring us closer to the presence of God. These habits can take root in church, and whether we practice them or not in our in-between days, they have a way of holding us up, if we let them.

As a parent, I haven’t always been great about saying grace before meals in our home. But in the thick of the pandemic isolation, I realized without regular worship or Sunday School attendance, saying grace at meals might be my family’s best chance at sharing some spiritual practice together. So, we started singing Johnny Appleseed, and we haven’t stopped. Every night–or every night that we remember to pray at all anyway–it’s Johnny Appleseed. Yep. It’s quite a habit. Someday maybe we’ll learn a new song.  But right now that’s the crowd pleaser, and it’s a habit I’ve grown to cherish.

If we keep reading today’s scripture selection all the way to Matthew 6: 15, we find that it ends with a verse that could be understood as a less than cheery admonition to forgive others or else. I don’t like it, honestly. I’m not sure forgiveness can be forced. In my experience forgiveness takes its own sweet time, if it’s going to come at all. I don’t like the idea that God’s holding out on forgiveness until I become a superhuman at it. That just doesn’t work for me.

It sounds sort of like an equation though. If you forgive then God will forgive. If you don’t forgive then God won’t forgive. If this, then that. It’s like a line of computer code or a law of physics. That I can understand. Because I do find whenever I’m able to let my heart soften toward others, I feel softness coming right back at me. And whenever I harden my heart whether I’m aware I’m doing it or not, that hardness visits upon me, too. Maybe grace is like a law of physics. I trust it swallows us up whole in the life that is to come. But, while we yet breathe, maybe the more we lean into it the more it leans back.

If there are any little ways–any habits, even if they’re entirely ordinary–that help me better experience the flow of that grace, then I want to do what I can to indulge my hunger for them and pray you will for yourself, too.

This Lent, whatever our habits, whether we find ourselves at a table or not, may we find holy, sustaining grace enough for each day. 

                                                                                              May it be so. Amen.

Not by Bread Alone

Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren

Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – 2/26/23

Not by Bread Alone – Matthew 4: 1-4

Why does it seem like the devil always shows up when it’s the most inconvenient? Have you ever observed this in your life? You don’t even have to call it the devil to have experienced times when you are already hungry, hurting, tired, vulnerable, or pushed past your limit, when some challenge seems to choose that exact worst time to get right in your way.

 Well, that’s where Jesus is in today’s story in Matthew. He’s famished and alone in the wilderness, when someone the text calls “the tempter” comes along and says to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.”

 What are the limits of the Son of God? What can he do? What will he do? I’d like to know, and I’d like to know what that means for me, too.

There seems to be a story a lot of us carry about being beyond limits, like we should be too smart or pious or giving or good or kind to ever experience human limitation, and if we do, it must be because we haven’t yet become as smart or pious or good or worthy as we could be. This scripture text reminds me that the pressure to pretend that I don’t have limits does not come from God. Call it what you will, succumbing to that pressure doesn’t have my best interests at heart or yours either. Because, as annoying as it can be and as much of a relief as it can be, we’re not God, and God doesn’t need us to be. God knows we’re human and loves us anyway.    

In his book, Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer writes “The God I know does not ask us to conform to some abstract norm for the ideal self. God asks us only to honor our created nature, which means our limits as well as potentials. When we fail to do so, reality happens–God happens–and the way closes behind us.”

Palmer goes on to list different times the way has closed behind him, which is how he describes running up against human and earthly limitations. But I trust we can name plenty of our own way closings, times when we suffered losses, didn’t meet our own expectations, or simply realized our lives and our abilities are far from limitless.

This is part of the human condition, and it is a part of the human condition Jesus does not forego. Maybe he could turn stones into bread but we can’t, and Jesus has chosen to partake in this life of limitation. So, he turns the tempter down. “It is written,” Jesus responds, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

A few years ago, when I was getting to know this congregation, I spent some meals with guests at our Saturday night Soup Kettle. They were eager to tell me that ours is the best one all week. Those were their words not mine. When I asked why they thought that, one person told me, “Well, it’s the real plates and silverware for one thing, but it’s more than that.” His friend added, “Yeah. It’s the way we’re treated like we’re real guests. It’s like we’re real people.”

I don’t think it’s that Jesus didn’t feel human hunger or didn’t care about feeding the hungry. In the gospels Jesus is often found eating or feeding others. No, I don’t think he underestimates the importance of food. I think he knows that food isn’t the only thing that sustains us.

There were people who brought food over to my family when our babies were brand new and adorable overloads of responsibility. The food was helpful but even better was the idea that someone cared and had our backs.

In the overwhelming affluence so many of us experience in this country, it may be easy to take food for granted. Soaring inflation may have shaken some of us from the delusion that food is a relatively unlimited commodity, but the truth is it is limited and quite precious. Every time we eat, we have the opportunity to pause and remember the preciousness of the food that we take into our bodies. We have the opportunity to remember the preciousness of connecting with each other in the sharing of food. That can mean connecting with each other by sharing time, space, stories, tears, and laughter around a meal.

But even if we eat alone we are connected to the web of humans who put the food on our plates from the growing fields to the supermarket to the kitchen and every place in between. In the moments when we remember the precious limited commodity of food, life, and connection whether we speak a word of prayer or not, I think we can be said to be experiencing a kind of table grace. The more often we do so, the more often we may be able to remember that the bread is no unimportant object, and yet the spiritual sustenance that comes from the source of all life and love that I call God is also part of what is keeping us alive.

Numbers in the Bible have great significance. They carry meaning and connect original hearers to stories with which they would have been familiar already. When original hearers of Jewish heritage heard in Matthew 4 that Jesus fasted for 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness, they would likely have recalled the fasts of Moses and the 40 years the ancient Israelites wandered in the wilderness and were kept alive only by the manna provided miraculously by God each day.

I don’t know about you but that story always kind of makes my skin crawl. I like to plan things out, and I suffer from the delusion that I have everything under control. But the ancient Israelites couldn’t do that. They weren’t even allowed to save some of today’s food for tomorrow. They had to trust that they would wake up tomorrow, and the manna would again miraculously appear. That’s beautiful. And, I hate it because it requires so much trust.

Usually, God tests my trust not with food but with other people. It’s tempting to want to fix other people or the situations they’re in. I just want to make all the bad stuff go away or at least feel helpful and productive. But it turns out other people, including me when I’m the “other person,” don’t want to be anyone’s project. Help is good but when it comes to fixing something, especially in our emotional or spiritual lives, where people tend to invite me, each person is going to have to do that work largely for themselves.

Parker Palmer writes about that in Let Your Life Speak, too. He describes one of his two prolonged bouts with clinical depression during which all manner of well-meaning helpers showed up with buckets full of advice. They advised he should get some fresh air or reminded him how many people he’d helped in his life and how wonderful he was. He didn’t find this advice-giving nearly as helpful as the friend who came to just sit with him periodically and offer no advice at all.

“Here’s the deal,” Palmer writes. “The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed — to be seen, heard and companioned exactly as it is. When we make that kind of deep bow to the soul of a suffering person, our respect reinforces the soul’s healing resources, the only resources that can help the sufferer make it through.”[1]

I do trust that those resources, like holy manna, come from God. I have seen incredible Spirit-led growth take root when folks are ready and able to call upon those resources to do whatever is before them to do. It seems to me that learning to trust my own limits, helps me better respect others limits, too, and that that’s the humble place where God does some great work.

Sometimes in the Bible the word word is logos in the Greek, meaning Jesus, among other things. So, I looked up the Greek word translated into English as word here and found out Jesus is not talking about himself when he tells the tempter, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” The Greek word means utterance. Utterance catches my attention because it doesn’t have to be language. It could be anything that emanates from the mouth of God. I don’t know about you but there are times when I stumble upon utterances that have little to do with language but that sustain me all the same.

I was met with an utterance biking home one day this week. I was biking on the sidewalk at 5:20 in the evening otherwise known as walk your dog o’clock in Elgin, IL. A bike, a leashed dog, and a dog walker are pretty pressed to share the sidewalk safely. The dog walker looked at me, and I looked at him. I had just about decided to stop, when he stopped, got down on his haunches next to the dog, and tucked them both up close to the downtown building we were passing. I rolled by slowly, thanked him, and then I thought about him all the way home. Was I that scary on my bike that he needed to take such drastic action? Maybe. Should I have done something differently? Maybe. Do I wish there were better options for bikes for everyone’s safety? Definitely. Then I remembered some dog training tips I had one time received. I was taught that if you want your dog to be calm in a given situation, it doesn’t help to stand and scream at the dog about it. I have tried this with my now passed on dog, Jasmine. Whenever she would chase cars down the dirt road we lived on in Iowa or bark at strangers, I would yell at the top of my lungs for her to stop. It didn’t work. The tips I got suggested the dog just thinks a yelling human is joining in on the barking. Another approach I learned was to keep the dog close to you in a situation the dog may find stressful. Speak calmly and reassuringly. Give good pats and offer treats if you have them. That way the dog learns even stressful situations are okay because you’re there. I don’t know if that particular dog walker got the same advice I did, but his dog was calm and relaxed as I wheeled by.

Maybe the devil does show up when it’s least convenient. Whatever you want to call it, I’ve found the temptation to deny my limits can be very strong and very alluring. But I’m pretty sure that God shows up, too, in our moments of limitation. I think God shows up like the gentle friend who will come alongside us, gets right down with us, and let us know that one way or another it’s going to be okay.

This Lent, we may do well to remember that we’re not God. We’re human, and that’s okay. Jesus accepted the limitations of this human life, and so can we. If we practice letting go of the need to deny our limits and trusting in the accompaniment of God, then whether we find ourselves at a table or not, we may find holy, sustaining grace enough for each day. 

                                                                                              May it be so. Amen.

[1] Palmer does write about this in Let Your Life Speak. He also puts it more succinctly in a blog post here: https://www.awakin.org/v2/read/view.php?tid=2188. The verbatim quote I use above comes from that blog.