Number in Series: Seventh

Healing our Terrible Relationships with Money

When Grace and I got married, and we were divvying up chores, I offered to take care of our finances. Cause I had this very particular plan for how I wanted to do it. 

I had lived for a couple of years as a housemate with a married couple named Jody and Curtis before that. And the experience had been wonderful but also really weird for me because I had never really known people like them. I certainly hadn’t ever lived with people like them. They were so generous and interesting and thoughtful. And also so very structured and orderly about life. I had grown up in a household that was more chaotic, I guess you could say, but Curtis and Jody had a plan, a system for everything – how we’d share chores, how we’d pool our money for groceries and take turns cooking, how we’d share our highs and lows of the day over meals. 

And I even learned that Curtis and Jody had this elaborate system for how they tracked all their money. Which I was so curious about.

Money had been a really complicated subject in my house growing up. One, there was never enough. And two, it was a source of all kinds of arguments, tension, stress and disappointment. Not now and then, but all the time, like a steady soundtrack in the back of our family life.

So it was intriguing to me that Jody and Curtis had this whole system for managing their money. Every week, they’d open up this computer program, and account for all their income and all their spending, by category, to the dollar, so they knew exactly how much was coming in, where it was going out, and they could try to meet their financial goals and align their money with their values. It may have seemed a little obsessive, Type A, whatever, but they seemed really confident and calm about their finances.

So when Grace and I got married, I was like: good news, honey, guess what we’re going to do with our money. Exactly what Jody and Curtis did. We get that program on our computer now, and we put in our budget categories, and every day, if we spend any money, we drop the receipts here, and I’ll enter it all in and we can make sure we know where our money is going, and we don’t run out, and we’ll be disciplined and save a lot and have enough to give away. Isn’t this great? 

And I think if I had been paying better attention, or maybe paying any attention, I would have noticed that Grace was not as excited about this system as me. Like every day? Every dollar? And I was like, yeah, no big deal, I’ll take care of it. 

And so I did. But for us, this approach did not have a happy ending. It wasn’t Grace’s fault. She was basically normal and reasonable about things. But I would bug her – bug her over ten dollar discrepancies, bug her over little budget variances, bug her to work the system with me. 

I was so rigid, and I was not open to being wrong about this. And I’m lucky I didn’t drive Grace away. But I did cause her a lot of undue pain. Until years later, I was finally willing to delete the computer program so we could start to find a different way forward that worked better for us. 

Because I finally started to realize that my rigidity around household finances was controlling, and love doesn’t control. Grace deserved better than that from me. 

And my efforts to control our finances, I thought they were born of principles – principles that at the time in my 20’s, I thought were good and right. But in retrospect, I realize that my rigidity and control were born more out of anxiety. So much rigidity and control are born out of anxiety. 

And growing up in a household where finances were short and so fraught, I had a fair bit of financial anxiety I didn’t recognize yet. And I’d have to find a way to heal from. And Grace and I would have some healing to do from the pain I caused.

I tell you this story because this is one story of a terrible relationship with money. Which I know is not unusual. Lots of us have terrible relationships with money. As do our cultures and countries and economies. 

So today we’re going to talk about healing our terrible relationships with money.

In the Gospel of Luke, our relationship with money is actually one of the dominant themes of Jesus’ teaching and healing ministry.

There’s a lot of passages I could have chosen, but this isn’t a bad starting place. Let’s read a big chunk of the 12th chapter of this book of Luke. And I encourage you to pay attention as you listen to what you like and what you don’t like. 

Luke 12:13-34 (Common English Bible)

13 Someone from the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.”

14 Jesus said to him, “Man, who appointed me as judge or referee between you and your brother?”

15 Then Jesus said to them, “Watch out! Guard yourself against all kinds of greed. After all, one’s life isn’t determined by one’s possessions, even when someone is very wealthy.”

16 Then he told them a parable: “A certain rich man’s land produced a bountiful crop.

17 He said to himself, What will I do? I have no place to store my harvest!

18 Then he thought, Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger ones. That’s where I’ll store all my grain and goods.

19 I’ll say to myself, You have stored up plenty of goods, enough for several years. Take it easy! Eat, drink, and enjoy yourself.

20 But God said to him, ‘Fool, tonight you will die. Now who will get the things you have prepared for yourself?’

21 This is the way it will be for those who hoard things for themselves and aren’t rich toward God.”

22 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Therefore, I say to you, don’t worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear.

23 There is more to life than food and more to the body than clothing.

24 Consider the ravens: they neither plant nor harvest, they have no silo or barn, yet God feeds them. You are worth so much more than birds!

25 Who among you by worrying can add a single moment to your life?

26 If you can’t do such a small thing, why worry about the rest?

27 Notice how the lilies grow. They don’t wear themselves out with work, and they don’t spin cloth. But I say to you that even Solomon in all his splendor wasn’t dressed like one of these.

28 If God dresses grass in the field so beautifully, even though it’s alive today and tomorrow it’s thrown into the furnace, how much more will God do for you, you people of weak faith!

29 Don’t chase after what you will eat and what you will drink. Stop worrying.

30 All the nations of the world long for these things. Your Father knows that you need them.

31 Instead, desire his kingdom and these things will be given to you as well.

32 “Don’t be afraid, little flock, because your Father delights in giving you the kingdom.

33 Sell your possessions and give to those in need. Make for yourselves wallets that don’t wear out—a treasure in heaven that never runs out. No thief comes near there, and no moth destroys.

34 Where your treasure is, there your heart will be too.

So I wonder what you like here. 

I like Jesus’ sense of humor. 

And I like that Jesus seems to get how terrible our relationships with money are. 

I mean this whole section begins with a family’s inheritance squabble. How many of you have seen one of those happen in your extended families? I have. They’re terrible. And I can just sense Jesus backing away – not going to touch that one. 

Jesus also recognizes some of our most primal and least regulated urges come around money – the terrible fears we have about the future, the anxiety and greed and hoarding and comparison and compulsive workaholism we’re prone to. And while Jesus has some strong things to say, maybe some harsh things to say, in the end, he’s trying to help. 

He calls his followers his little flock –

you beautiful, maybe kind of stupid, but so beloved creatures – God wants better for us all. 

I like this. 

I wonder what you don’t like, though. 

I’ve had trouble over the years figuring out what Jesus is really trying to say. I kind of like the vibe of the whole thing – teasing the super rich, telling us to chill out, learn from the birds and flowers, try to have faith for a change. But when I’ve tried to figure out how to apply these teachings over the years, I’ve found them hard. 

Like the guy we call the rich fool – Jesus is poking fun at him, but what’s wrong here? At some level, he’s just practicing what we mostly think of as sound business practices. He’s planning for the future, reinvesting capital in his business so he can keep growing. I feel like his investors might reward this behavior.

Or the advice that he gives afterwards. It seems rigid and extreme –

sell your possessions, give the proceeds to the poor.

Noble, but rare, right?

Or be more like the birds and the flowers.

Jesus takes a shot at the great pride of his culture – Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem. He says

the seasonal wildflowers are more beautiful than the best things we can build with our wealth.

  • So should we give up on our palaces and museums?
  • Should I cancel my life insurance?
  • Liquidate my retirement funds? 

This fall I’ve turned to a scholar and organizer whose work I respect to help me dig into this stuff a little more. Ched Myers published a study of Luke this year that he called: Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics. 

And he highlights some stuff I find helpful.

One thing is about the economics of Jesus’ time he’s taking a dig at. The rich man’s business is what was called a latifundium. This was basically a large estate farmed and sustained by slave labor, or near-slave labor. Like sharecropping in the American south a hundred years ago. 

As Rome conquered Palestine, through heavy taxation and debt collection, more land, more wealth, became concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Hands like this rich man dreaming of his bigger barns and his easy living. 

In this case, the system is inherently exploitative. And then on top of that, you have a person who is materially wealthy but just tremendously relationally and spiritually poor. 

I used to listen to this podcast by Guy Raz called How I Built This, which each episode would tell the story of a successful company and its founder. And near the end, every time, Guy would ask the entrepreneur:

“How much of your success do you attribute to luck, and how much to hard work?” 

I feel like if this rich fool was telling the story of his plantation on the podcast, he would have said:

it’s all been about me, baby.

Jesus says:

this man’s land yielded a rich crop.

But he shows no awareness of the fertility of his land, no gratitude for the Creator who made it, for the good weather that was beyond his control, for the prior stewards of the land that had tended the soil. He shows no awareness of the structural inequities that meant he had all this land – the debtor laws by which he had seized more land, the political connections to Rome or the inheritance by which he had been given land. And he certainly doesn’t indicate any relational sensibility. When he’s thinking about his future, the only person he talks to is himself! 

It’s as if the personhood and the labor of the farmers and servants who work the land are immaterial. It’s as if his spouse and his children and everyone else connected to his land and his success aren’t a meaningful part of the picture in his mind. Just cogs, commodities, anonymous and immaterial.

When it comes to money and wealth – wanting it, having it, and lacking it – we’re prone to think personally and privately. Our culture, much more than Jesus’, reinforces this at every turn.

So when I was growing up, the family narrative was that my grandfather was successful at construction in a way my dad wasn’t, and that was at the heart of our money problems. Maybe, partly true. But it never came up that the conditions in the 50’s and 60’s when my grandpa did construction were exponentially more profitable than the time and place my dad was working in the 70’s and 80’s. The shame and failure we can feel about our financial problems isn’t entirely fair – it’s rarely just about us. Same with the pride and self-satisfaction we can feel about our financial successes – those too are rarely just about us. 

When Jesus says:

don’t seek money first, seek God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness, he’s saying care more about the things God cares about – things more lasting and meaningful than wealth, absolutely. But he’s also saying – care about how we’re in it together, how we’re all connected – humans to humans, for sure, but also humans to all the rest of creation. We are in this together.

In God’s kingdom, persons matter, one by one, but we also matter because we’re part of a collective that matters. We belong to God, not just ourselves. And to some degree, we belong to each other.

This takes me back to my dollar by dollar attempt to control our finances early in our marriage. What if instead of offering (aka imposing) the system I’d learned that seemed to manage my anxieties, I had shared with Grace what I worried about and wanted for our finances. And then I had just as much listened with curiosity about what she worries about and wanted for our finances. And we had tried to discover together a way of managing our money that worked for both of us. That would have been such a better way to start out for us. 

Prioritize our personal wants, our control, our pride, our compulsive need for more – what’s personal and private – and we’ll get ourselves and our worries, where thieves can steal and moths consume.

Prioritize collective well-being – what honors you but also your partner, what honors you but also your co-workers and customers, what honors you but also the land and nation and resources you depend upon – and you might materially flourish still but you’ll definitely get a more loving and sustainable life together.

Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,

Jesus says.  

This reminds me of one more thing from Chet Myers’ work that I found so helpful. He shares an image that was developed in the early 80’s by Hazel Henderson. It’s the image of an economy that looks like a layer cake. 

And I love a good chocolate layer cake. My mom makes this incredible chocolate layer cake that her mother made before her, layer after layer of cake and chocolate, cake and chocolate. So good. And somehow I have failed to carry on this family tradition and learn to make it myself. But both Grace and I agree that this cake is one of the glories of my family in heritance. So I have got to learn to make this cake, I think.

Anyway, in this picture of an economy as cake, the top layers are what have money attached to them. All of our personal market transactions – consumer spending and saving. And then all of our large private sector consumption and investments – corporate activity. And then all our public spending – infrastructure, military, government benefits like SNAP. And then our cash-and crypto-currency based, underground, untaxed economy.

And in modern, industrial societies, we think like Jesus’ rich fool – like this is the whole economy. It’s what we use to measure gross national product. It’s what we ascribe value and worth to. We meet someone and ask them: what do you do? And we’re asking about how people participate in these top layers of the cake economically.

But there are two big, important layers underneath all this. 

There’s what Hazel Henderson calls the social cooperative love economy. These are all our social, and familial, and communal structures. The do-it-yourself economy, where your friend helps you build your patio. All of the household labors of love and duty – parenting and chores and elder care and sick care. Subsistence farming, mutual aid, lots of church life and programming, community organizations and clubs make up this layer. 

And then at the bottom, there’s what she just calls Nature’s Layer, the abundance of the natural world, what we call the natural resources of all of non-human creation. Which we depend upon for all our economic activity and all our survival. 

And the thing about this cake is we rarely notice, talk about, and appropriately value the foundational layers. 

Back to couples for a minute, we think about and notice our careers and our income disparities, but not so much the disparities in childcare, chores, and the mental load of household management, which in straight couples at least, is still mostly carried by women. 

And in all the ways we run our economy, we almost never properly value the natural world we depend upon. We love the pleasures and conveniences and productivity that our latest technologies offer, but we rarely properly price their cost in all the plastics and rare metals and power and water they require and what that all means for the sustainability of our planet. 

I wonder if this isn’t part of what Jesus is getting at when he says: pay attention to the lilies and the birds. He doesn’t mean – don’t work hard or don’t plan at all. I mean birds are incredible workers and in their own way, incredible planners as well. I mean birds have been around longer than we have. 

But I think Jesus does mean – God’s creation is an important treasure and resource, and also an important teacher for us all.

Birds live personally and collectively. They don’t divide their existence, their economy, into the parts that produce wealth and the parts that don’t. 

And birds, best as we know it, aren’t hamstrung by anxiety. They make peace with who they are and what they’ve got, a peace that comes naturally for them but takes faith for us. 

Which takes me to where I want to end, friends. 

Three takeaways on healing our terrible relationships with money. 

One is just what I said. To learn from the birds as much as we learn from the finance experts. Loosen our grip on our plans. Practice a more collective mindset – valuing, treasuring, honoring the layers of our economy we don’t put a price tag on, and valuing the flourishing of the people we’re connected to as much as we value our own. Or at least trying. 

The second take away is giving big. We’re turned off by Jesus’ call to

“sell our possessions”

since we take it rigidly, like an all or nothing, and very few of us are going to sell our possessions and take a vow of poverty. But we can all regularly put back significant parts of our wealth and income into the benefit and blessing of others. 

Using the biblical model of a tithe – the regular giving of 10 percent of your harvest – as a baseline, Grace and I have made it a baseline standard for ourselves to give away 10-20% of our income per year. We learned this separately in churches, thankfully a shared value, not one I tried to impose! And it’s been a baseline for us to practice the faith that our resources are from our work but from the gift of God. And our resources are not just for us but for others and for the communities we’re connected to. We’re part of a bigger whole, and we’re called to live that way. 

Friends, I happen to know that many of you live this way – with open and generous hands as a foundation of your financial lives. And I want to honor your wisdom and faith in this. I pray it keeps giving you joy and freedom!

If Reservoir is your church, I certainly ask that you include this community in your giving. Every church, certainly this one, depends upon its people giving regularly and generously to its collective life and mission. And while we treasure every dollar that is given, what sustains this church are individuals and households that give what for them is big and increase their giving each year their income increases. For those of you that do that, know you are the base layer of Reservoir’s delicious cake. The foundation on which we stand. 

If the baseline of a tithe – the outflow of 10% or more of your income feels like too much or out of reach, I encourage you to try an experiment of faith – the giving out of 5 percent of your income – half of a tithe, or whatever would stretch you a little. Try out what will help you practice more open hands with your money, and see what it does for you.

Lastly, I recommend regular and deep habits of gratitude. Jesus says:

where your treasure is, there your heart will be.

Treasure what you don’t have, and your heart will be there. Treasure all that you do have, and that’s a really different experience of the heart. Gratitude is at the center of the ongoing healing of my anxieties, around finances and lots of other stuff.

Daily, regular, deep gratitude helps us learn contentment with all that God has already provided for us. And it gives us permission to keep wanting, keep asking, but to want better and deeper, not just more. Say thank you for a while at the start or end of your day, before meals, whenever – it doesn’t matter. But it matters that we do it, that we do it mindfully, that we linger over our gratitude.

The focus of our minds, the direction of our attention shapes our character and our lives. Where our treasure is, there our hearts will be.

Three Things to Remember with Every New Beginning

In 1976, back when I was just three years old, I started a new school year for the first time. And for the next 36 years, I kept going back this time of year – first as a student, and then as an educator. 

When I became a pastor here in 2013, I stopped going back to school every fall. But I’ve kept sending kids back to school this time of year, and this year, our oldest kiddo is even starting her career as a public school educator itself, so for me, the start of September isn’t just the beginning of shorter days and sweater weather and apple picking, but it’s back to school season. It’s the start of something new!

I feel it in my bones.

I’m not alone in this city. Here in Cambridge, we’re in a college town. In Greater Boston, hundreds of thousands of college and university students start or resume their higher education. Hundreds of thousands more children start or go back to their primary and secondary schools, and many tens of thousands of educators start a new year as well. 

Raise your hand if it’s back to school time for you as a student or as an educator?

Keep your hands up. We’ve got a special time of prayer and blessing for all of you coming right after this sermon – our first year joining the Blessing of the Backpacks tradition many churches have adopted. Can’t wait.

Keep those hands up please. And parents of kids going back to school, can we see your hands too?

And people starting other new things in your life that may not be about school – new homes or new leases, as it’s moving weekend in our city?

New jobs, new anything, in a new season of life?

So many of us!

Well friends, my hope today is to share a word – three words really – for all those of us who are going back to school as well as all those of us have anything new going on. 

I’ve called this sermon “Three Things for Every New Beginning,” and if your life is all same old-same old usual right now, I hope you’ll tuck something away in your heart and mind today for down the road when you need it. 

Alright? Let’s pray and get into it.

“Our God of new beginnings, ground us today is what’s true and what’s real, that we can be people of courage and hope in every new beginning. Amen.”

So first:

  • God loves every good beginning, even little ones. 

Here’s our first scripture. From the prophet Zechariah:

Zechariah 4:10 (New Living Translation)

10 Do not despise these small beginnings, for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin, to see the plumb line in Zerubbabel’s hand.”

I don’t remember all of my 37 back to school years equally well, but one I remember really well was 2010, my first year as a high school principal. The local paper had done a story on me that summer – and in my interview, I talked about how excited I was for the school year to begin.

But then when it did, and when the teachers and students all came back to school, I remember being so nervous too.

One of the things I did as a new principal was set up these Friday lunches for seniors in my office. And I remember putting a sign up sheet for these lunches on my office door, and very few students signed up, and so I walked around the cafeteria recruiting students to come have lunch with me. And I felt like, oh my goodness, what if no one here even wants to sit and eat with me and talk? And what if they hired the wrong person, and I’m no good at this job? What if I can’t solve any of this school’s problems or make things better at all? 

But at the same time, I was excited. I was excited to have an office for the first time ever, an office with its own bathroom even! And I was excited to make a difference in kids and family’s lives, to help the education they got in this school be a little more interesting, and a little more relevant, and a little more kind and humane along the way. I was excited for all the folks I’d meet and for the special kind of unpredictable, kind of intense buzz that a high school has when it’s full of people and problems and possibilities. 

And I thought maybe we’ll all do some special things here together!

It’s normal in new beginnings to feel kind of scared or kind of excited, or sometimes kind of both at the same time. And you know even God gets excited about new beginnings. Because God is a God of hope and of possibilities. God is always curious about the next best thing God can help us make possible. 

Here, in the passage I took the verse from, it’s a construction project, after the ancient Jews had returned from captivity and exile in Persia. After decades of national calamity since their nation and temple and lives had all been destroyed, they’re just starting to rebuild.

And with all that trauma in their memories and in their bodies, they’re just getting started on reconstructing their new temple. Zerubabbel, the governor of Judea, has got that little tool in his hand, trying to get the first foundation and walls laid straight. And maybe the work seems so big, so hard, maybe so impossible. But the spirit of God is like:

hey, you’ve started. And that’s exciting.

Because any time you start something new, no matter how it’s going, no matter how it feels, you have courage. And courage is beautiful. 

And who knows what good things can happen with this new beginning? So even if it’s small, that’s OK. Don’t despise your small beginnings, because all good things, even all good big things start small. 

When I was a new principal, I wanted so many big and beautiful things to happen in my time at the school, but my little brother pulled me aside one day, and he was like:

Steven, you know what your motto for yourself should be this year? 

And I was like, no? What should it be? 

And he was like.

You should just say to yourself every day: don’t suck. Don’t suck.

And you know, if you’re not awful, that’ll be a good start. And if you’re bad at anything, don’t worry about it. Just say to yourself the next day: try and suck less. Suck less.

He was being cheeky with me but I kind of appreciated his advice. 

We don’t need to be heroes. We just need to try. Trying is a beautiful thing, friends. It’s so good to try. And when we try, God will meet us there, because God doesn’t despise small beginnings. God smiles over them. So we can too, friends. 

God loves every good beginning, friends, even little ones.

And secondly, friends, I encourage you to: trust the slow work of God.

  1. Trust the slow work of God.

One of my first bosses when I was young gave me a lot of terrible advice. I won’t repeat it here, but he did. He actually published a couple of books, and recently I wrote a dissertation – a super-long graduate school paper – and I cited one of his books, only to tear it apart a little for its negative insights. Maybe kind of petty, but it was sort of healing for me.

Anyway, though, this same boss wasn’t just full of terrible advice. He gave some good advice too. And one thing he told me, and told our whole division, was he said several times that most of us overestimate what is possible in one year, but we underestimate what is possible in five years.

We overestimate what is possible in one year. Like we want big beginnings, fast change, dramatic growth, and it’s not usually possible, or not sustainable. 

But most of us don’t bother setting our hopes out several years and wondering about what just might be possible with new efforts, steadiness, and a long time. 

There’s a beautiful poem by a French priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, who lived a hundred years ago. Kids – sidenote – but wouldn’t it be cool if you had a pastor who mostly studied dinosaurs in his spare time. Well, that was Teilhard. Anyway, here’s his beautiful and very wise poem. 

Teilhard de Chardin

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

Oh, friends, none of us knows anything about what tomorrow holds, let alone the whole rest of this year. And sometimes our big hopes will come true quickly and sometimes they will take a very long time. 

So friends, I pray that you can accept the anxiety of feeling yourself just as you are today, in suspense and incomplete, and that together, we can trust the presence and kindness and the slow work of God. 

And the last thing I want to say today is a simple thing about this slow work of God and a couple of simple prayers that I think can help us when we’re starting new things or really anytime. 

I want to remind us, friends, that God is here for us. 

God is here for us. 

 

The Bible’s happy little letter of Philippians ends with a lot of great advice, including these lines:

Philippians 4:5-7 (Common English Bible)

5 Let your gentleness show in your treatment of all people. The Lord is near.

6 Don’t be anxious about anything; rather, bring up all of your requests to God in your prayers and petitions, along with giving thanks.

7 Then the peace of God that exceeds all understanding will keep your hearts and minds safe in Christ Jesus.

I love the reminder that in a world where there’s a lot of meanness and cruelty, gentleness and kindness are still good. That’s what God is like after all. 

And then there’s this helpful line about the anxiety we can feel with new things and hard things. It sounds like we’re being commanded to never feel anxious. Like someone saying:

Don’t. Be. SCARED!

Which is probably the best way to make someone scared, right? 

But I don’t think that’s it. I think we’re being given a pathway through our anxiety and a way out of it. And one way is to tell God our feelings and our needs and to notice what we’re thankful for too and to tell that to God as well. And then see what God can do with all that. 

There’s a structured way to do this – it’s called the daily examen. I’ve taught about that other times. But I try to pray this way every day – to notice what’s good in life and notice what’s hard, to notice my feelings about all that, and to say thank you to God and to ask for help. 

And there’s a lot I don’t understand about prayer, but I do know that this gives me peace. It’s really simple – tell God your feelings about your day, say thank you, and ask for help.

The other prayer is even simpler. It’s just when you’re not sure what to do next, to ask God for a good next step. 

There’s another famous part of the Bible that says:

Proverbs 3:5-6 (Common English Bible)

5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart;

    don’t rely on your own intelligence.

6 Know him in all your paths,

    and he will keep your ways straight.

And like the other passage, there are ways of reading this one that sound like they’re insulting people, or making God seem kind of mean or controlling.

But I think these lines are just admitting that we don’t know what to do a lot of the time, and we lose our way pretty easily. And that we need help, and that God is glad to help us. 

So I find there’s a prayer for us here. To pray:

I don’t know what the future holds, God. And I don’t know which way to go. But I bet you have some good ideas for me, God. Help me find a good way forward, God. What’s a good next step for me?

Praying this way isn’t magic. It doesn’t give us a God-sized perspective on everything all of a sudden. But it helps us remember God is with us and God is good, and helps us be open to new ideas for good steps forward.

Friends, whether you’re starting a new school year, or a new lease, or new job, or new anything, I hope you’re remember that:

  • God loves all our new beginnings, even our small ones.
  • That we might be in a rush, but we can trust the slow work of God.
  • And that God is here for us, and ready to meet us in our simple prayers.

When God Answers Our Prayers Differently Than We Expected

A Sermon on Prayer, Presence, and the Soul Formation of Holding Our Needs to God

Scripture Reading: John 11:17-35

All Shall Be Well?

Friends, it is such a gift to be here with you this morning. This community has been instrumental in my own spiritual formation in ways you probably don’t even know. I was part of a moms group here that helped me navigate the beautiful chaos of early motherhood. My husband and I attended a marriage retreat weekend that quite literally saved our relationship at a time when we needed it most. And I’ll never forget taking that spiritual healing course—something about living water and streams in the wilderness—that opened my heart to God’s healing in ways I’m still discovering.

I have prayed some of the most deeply heartfelt and important prayers of my life within these walls. Prayers of desperation, prayers of gratitude, prayers of confusion, prayers of wonder. So standing here today feels like coming home in the most sacred way.

And I want to begin this morning with a phrase that has been echoing in my heart as I’ve prepared for today. I’m going to say it, and I want you to just notice what happens in your body, in your spirit, when you hear these words:

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

Take a moment.

  • What does that feel like when I say that?
  • Does it feel comforting?
  • Does it feel patronizing?
  • Does it feel enigmatic—like spiritual bypassing that ignores real suffering?
  • Does it feel like empty optimism from someone who doesn’t understand your life?

These words come from Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century mystic who lived through the Black Death, church corruption, and massive social upheaval. Julian experienced a series of intense visions of Christ while seriously ill, and then spent the next 20 years reflecting on what those revelations meant. Her words weren’t born from a life of ease—they were forged in an era of immense suffering.

Here’s what I love about Julian: she never offers us cheap comfort. The Bishop of Norwich puts it beautifully:

“All shall be well doesn’t deny present experience but roots it deep in the faithfulness of God, whose will and gift is life.”

Julian’s optimism isn’t denial—it’s courage that endures.

But here’s what’s fascinating: even Julian understood that “all shall be well” can sound different depending on what we need in the moment. Sometimes we need to understand why all shall be well—we need reasons, frameworks, theological grounding. Sometimes we simply need to feel that we’re not alone in our fear that nothing will ever be well again.

Jesus’s Own Version of “All Shall Be Well” 

This brings me to our passage today, because I think Jesus offered his own version of “all shall be well” to two women who were grieving—but he offered it in two completely different ways, depending on what each sister needed to hear.

Martha and Mary prayed that prayer. They sent word to Jesus when Lazarus got sick:

“Lord, he whom you love is ill.”

That’s prayer language, friends. That’s them holding their biggest need up to God and saying,

“We need you to show up.”

But Jesus didn’t come. Not right away. And Lazarus died.

So when Jesus finally arrives, both sisters meet him with the same words—words that sound less like a greeting and more like a prayer that got answered too late:

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.”

I don’t know about you, but I’ve prayed prayers like that.

“God, if you had just…” “Jesus, if you would have only…”

Sometimes our prayers feel more like negotiations or magic formulas than conversations with the Divine. Sometimes we turn prayer into this transactional thing where we believe if we just pray hard enough, believe strong enough, use the right words, God will give us what we want when we want it.

But what if prayer isn’t about getting God to do what we want? What if prayer is about soul formation—about allowing our hearts to be shaped by bringing our deepest needs into conversation with the God who loves us?

The Two Ways God Responds to Our Hearts 

Here’s what absolutely fascinates me about this passage: Martha and Mary say the exact same words to Jesus, but he responds to each of them completely differently. And I think this shows us something beautiful about how God responds to our prayers.

Martha’s Prayer Gets a Theological Response

Martha approaches Jesus first, and she’s clearly wrestling, processing, trying to make sense of what feels like an unanswered prayer. So Jesus meets her there with teaching. He engages her mind:

“Your brother will rise again.”

When she responds with her theological understanding—

“I know that he will rise in the resurrection on the last day”

—Jesus goes deeper:

“I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even though they die.”

This is God responding to prayer with clarity, with framework, with understanding. Sometimes when we bring our needs to God, the response comes through insight, through Scripture that suddenly makes sense, through conversations that give us perspective, through practical wisdom that helps us navigate our situation.

Martha needed to understand. Her soul was being formed through wrestling with big theological questions:

  • What does it mean to trust God when prayers seem unanswered?
  • What does resurrection really mean?
  • How do we hold hope when everything feels hopeless?

Mary’s Prayer Gets a Relational Response

But then Mary comes to Jesus with those same words—

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died”—

and Jesus responds completely differently. No teaching. No theology lesson. Instead, the text says he saw her crying and was

“deeply disturbed and troubled.”

And then—this is the part that gets me every time—

“Jesus began to cry.”

This is God responding to prayer with presence, with emotion, with shared tears. Sometimes when we bring our needs to God, the response isn’t an explanation or a solution—it’s the sense that we’re not alone in our pain. It’s that moment in worship when you feel held by something bigger than yourself. It’s the friend who shows up and just sits with you. It’s the inexplicable peace that comes not from understanding but from being loved.

Mary needed presence. Her soul was being formed through the experience of being seen in her grief, of having her pain witnessed and shared by the God of the universe.

Julian of Norwich: A Mystic for This Moment

This made me think about Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century mystic who understood something profound about how God responds to human need. Julian lived through the Black Death, church corruption, and massive social upheaval—not unlike our own times of pandemic, institutional failures, and cultural shifts.

At age 30, while seriously ill, Julian experienced a series of intense visions of Christ’s love. But here’s what makes her so relevant for us: she spent the next 20 years reflecting on and interpreting those visions. Her book “Revelations of Divine Love” shows us someone who received both immediate spiritual experience AND years of theological reflection—both the Mary response of felt presence and the Martha response of understanding.

Julian’s approach to God was revolutionary for her time. She presents

“a God who is not angry or punitive but endlessly loving and merciful.”

She experienced God as both mother and father, both the one who gives practical wisdom and the one who offers tender comfort. Her famous words—

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well”

—came not from naive optimism but from someone who had received both God’s presence in suffering and God’s practical assurance about the ultimate nature of reality.

What if this is exactly how God responds to our prayers? Sometimes our souls need the Martha response—clarity, understanding, theological framework, practical wisdom. Sometimes our souls need the Mary response—presence, comfort, the assurance that our pain is seen and shared.

Julian knew both. And here’s the beautiful thing: both are answers to prayer. Both are God showing up. Both are forms of divine love meeting us exactly where we are.

When We Turn Prayer into Magic 

But here’s where I think we sometimes mess this up. We want to turn prayer into a formula. We want to figure out the right combination of words, the right amount of faith, the right posture that will get God to respond the way we want.

Some of you came from traditions—maybe even this community in its earlier days—where there were very specific expectations about prayer. Pray with enough faith and God will heal. Declare the right promises over your situation. If your prayer didn’t get “answered” the way you wanted, well, maybe you didn’t have enough faith. Maybe there was hidden sin blocking your breakthrough. Maybe you needed to pray longer, louder, with more people agreeing.

And listen, I’m not dismissing the beautiful things that came from that tradition—the expectation that God is active and present, the belief that prayer matters, the experiences of genuine healing and breakthrough that many of you witnessed. Those are real and beautiful.

But when prayer becomes a formula—when we start believing we can manipulate God into responding the way we want—that’s not prayer. That’s spiritual manipulation. That’s turning the God of the universe into a cosmic vending machine.

Prayer as Soul Formation

But what if prayer isn’t about getting God to do what we want? What if prayer is about soul formation—about allowing our hearts to be shaped and formed through the process of bringing our deepest needs into conversation with Divine Love?

When Martha brought her confusion and disappointment to Jesus, she wasn’t just asking for her brother back. She was wrestling with fundamental questions about who God is and how God works in the world. Her soul was being formed through that wrestling.

When Mary brought her grief to Jesus, she wasn’t just asking for comfort. She was learning something profound about a God who sees our pain and shares it. Her soul was being formed through the experience of being fully seen and loved in her brokenness.

The Both/And of Answered Prayer 

Friends, what if both the practical miracles and the tender presence are answered prayers? What if God sometimes responds with the Martha answer—clarity, wisdom, practical solutions, even miraculous healing—and sometimes responds with the Mary response—presence, comfort, the assurance that we’re not alone?

I know many of you have experienced both in your journey as a community. Some of you remember prayers for healing that resulted in genuine, documented miracles. You’ve seen God show up in power in ways that can’t be explained away. That’s the Martha response, and it’s beautiful and worth celebrating—it’s part of your story as a community and shouldn’t be diminished as you’ve grown and changed.

Others of you have prayed for healing and didn’t receive it in the way you hoped, but you found an inexplicable peace in the midst of suffering. You found community that held you through the hardest season. You discovered that God’s presence was enough even when the miracle didn’t come. That’s the Mary response, and it’s equally beautiful and worth celebrating.

As you’ve journeyed toward a more progressive theology, you haven’t lost the God who shows up in power—you’ve discovered a God whose power sometimes looks like miracles and sometimes looks like presence. Both are divine love meeting us exactly where we are.

The Ongoing Miracle of Lazarus

And here’s the thing—Jesus does eventually raise Lazarus from the dead. The Martha response and the Mary response both lead to resurrection. But notice that the resurrection isn’t the only miracle in this story. The miracle is also Jesus paying attention to what each person needed and responding accordingly. The miracle is also the way their souls were being formed through the process of bringing their needs to God.

The big, flashy miracle gets the attention, but the soul formation that happens through prayer—that’s the ongoing miracle that changes us from the inside out.

Prayer as Abiding 

In my last sermon, I talked about Jesus’s invitation to “abide”—to maintain ongoing connection with divine love. Prayer is one of the primary ways we abide. Not because we’re trying to talk God into doing what we want, but because we’re allowing our hearts to be shaped by ongoing conversation with the source of all love.

We abide when we bring our confusion to God like Martha and wrestle with the big questions. We abide when we bring our grief to God like Mary and trust that our pain is seen and shared. We abide when we hold our needs—both practical and emotional—before the God who responds sometimes with clarity and sometimes with presence, but always with love.

When Prayer Changes Us 

Here’s what I’ve discovered in my own prayer life: the prayers that have formed my soul the most haven’t been the ones that got answered exactly how I wanted. They’ve been the prayers that changed me.

The prayer I prayed for months about a difficult relationship—God didn’t change the other person, but God changed my heart toward them. The prayer I prayed about a job situation—I didn’t get the promotion I wanted, but I discovered gifts I didn’t know I had. The prayer I prayed when my mama was dying—she wasn’t healed in the way I begged for, but I experienced the presence of God in ways that sustain me still.

That’s soul formation. That’s the ongoing work of prayer shaping us into people who can hold both the practical miracles and the tender presence as gifts from a God who loves us too much to leave us unchanged.

The Community of Both/And Prayer 

And isn’t this what you’ve discovered as a community in your journey? You’ve learned to hold space for both kinds of answered prayer. You celebrate the Martha moments—when prayers get answered in clear, practical ways, when healing happens, when breakthrough comes. And you’ve learned to honor the Mary moments—when prayers get answered through presence and comfort and the mysterious ways love shows up, especially for those who’ve been marginalized or wounded by the church.

You’ve learned that prayer isn’t about having the right theology or the right formula, but about ongoing conversation that forms our souls. You’ve made space for the messiness of real prayer—the questions, the disappointments, the unexpected ways God shows up, even for people who don’t fit the traditional molds of who deserves God’s attention.

This is beautiful, and it’s faithful, and it’s exactly what Martha and Mary show us—that Jesus meets us where we are, not where we think we should be.

A Julian of Norwich Body Prayer 

Before we close, I want to lead you in a prayer practice that Julian herself might have used. Julian understood that we encounter God not just in our minds but in our whole beings—body, heart, mind, and spirit.

Let’s begin by placing our hands over our hearts. Julian spoke of God as mother, the one who nurtures and holds us close. Feel your heartbeat under your hands. This is the rhythm of life that God has given you.

Now extend your hands out in front of you, palms up. This is the posture of receiving—receiving both God’s presence and God’s presents, both comfort and clarity, both the Mary response and the Martha response to your prayers.

Breathe in deeply, and as you do, pray with Julian:

“All shall be well.”

Breathe out, releasing your need to control how God responds:

“All shall be well.”

Breathe in again, trusting that God meets you exactly where you are:

“All manner of things shall be well.”

Now place one hand on your forehead—for all the ways you need God to meet your mind, your questions, your need for understanding like Martha.

Place your other hand back on your heart—for all the ways you need God to meet your emotions, your grief, your need for presence like Mary.

And pray with me:

“God of Martha and Mary, meet us where we are. When we need wisdom, grant us wisdom. When we need presence, grant us presence. When we need both, help us receive both. Form our souls through the beautiful, messy process of prayer. All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. Amen.”

Benediction 

May you go from this place knowing that your prayers are heard—not because you pray with the right words or the right posture, but because you are beloved by the God who created you.

May you find comfort in both the Martha responses and the Mary responses to your prayers—in the practical wisdom and the tender presence, in the miraculous healings and the mysterious peace.

Like Julian of Norwich, may your soul be formed through the beautiful, messy process of bringing your deepest needs into conversation with Divine Love.

And may you discover that prayer isn’t about getting God to do what you want, but about allowing your heart to be shaped by ongoing relationship with the source of all life.

Go in peace, beloved. All shall be well.

Amen.

A Tomb and a Womb

Well, friends, tomorrow is Patriot’s Day. I love this holiday. We remember the shot heard round the world just over in Lexington. There is always a daytime Red Sox game that lets thousands of fans out at the end just in time to cheer for the runners of the Boston Marathon as they struggle through their final mile. I love this city, and that marathon. I am a three-time Boston Marathon alum, and though I cannot run it anymore, I still try to have at least one runner that I can root for. 

This year, that runner is Ben Burgess. Ben’s story is extraordinary. The Globe did a piece about Ben and his mom Lisa who’s also running. See when Ben was just 8 years old, his father put his hands on his shoulders, told him,

“You’re the man of the house now,”

and left home for good. Eight years old. Two years ago Ben was also diagnosed with a significant mental health disorder, one he believes has genetic roots that run back through his father, who was an alcoholic, and his grandmother who suffered trauma in a Canadian boarding school for indigenous children. Ben and his sister were on a panel about indigenous runners this weekend. And Ben and his mother are raising awareness about grief and mental health and wellness. And tomorrow, I will be rooting for them with bells on. I don’t even know Ben personally, only through mutual acquaintances in the local running community, but I am so proud of that young man.

I love Patriot’s Day, and I love Easter too. Today we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And it is traditional for churches to proclaim the life of Christ, and the great hope of our faith, with a three-fold proclamation of the mystery of Easter – to say Christ is risen, Christ is risen indeed. 

So as I proclaim the hope, the mystery of Easter – Christ is risen, please respond after me if you will – Christ is risen indeed.

Christ is risen – Christ is risen indeed

Christ is risen – Christ is risen indeed

Christ is risen – Christ is risen indeed

I’m going to read the final chapter of the first of the Bible’s four memoirs of the life of Jesus, the good news according to Matthew. It’s very dramatic. As you listen, I want to ask you:

see if you can hear at least one thing you like, and one thing you don’t like.

You ready?

Matthew 28 (Common English Bible)

28 After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to look at the tomb.

2 Look, there was a great earthquake, for an angel from the Lord came down from heaven. Coming to the stone, he rolled it away and sat on it.

3 Now his face was like lightning and his clothes as white as snow.

4 The guards were so terrified of him that they shook with fear and became like dead men.

5 But the angel said to the women, “Don’t be afraid. I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified.

6 He isn’t here, because he’s been raised from the dead, just as he said. Come, see the place where they laid him.

7 Now hurry, go and tell his disciples, ‘He’s been raised from the dead. He’s going on ahead of you to Galilee. You will see him there.’ I’ve given the message to you.”

8 With great fear and excitement, they hurried away from the tomb and ran to tell his disciples.

9 But Jesus met them and greeted them. They came and grabbed his feet and worshipped him.

10 Then Jesus said to them, “Don’t be afraid. Go and tell my brothers that I am going into Galilee. They will see me there.”

11 Now as the women were on their way, some of the guards came into the city and told the chief priests everything that had happened.

12 They met with the elders and decided to give a large sum of money to the soldiers.

13 They told them, “Say that Jesus’ disciples came at night and stole his body while you were sleeping.

14 And if the governor hears about this, we will take care of it with him so you will have nothing to worry about.”

15 So the soldiers took the money and did as they were told. And this report has spread throughout all Judea to this very day.

16 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus told them to go.

17 When they saw him, they worshipped him, but some doubted.

18 Jesus came near and spoke to them, “I’ve received all authority in heaven and on earth.

19 Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,

20 teaching them to obey everything that I’ve commanded you. Look, I myself will be with you every day until the end of this present age.”

One thing I like: we have this daring, feminist touch here with the women who are tending to the grave. In a time and place where women’s testimony was not legitimized, they become the first witnesses to the good news of Easter. Angels in Jerusalem tell them: go to Galilee to see Jesus. And then later that day, Jesus can’t help himself, he shows up in Jerusalem too, like:

Surprise! I’m here!

And then when they’re grabbing his feet and trying to worship him – whoosh! He’s off to Galilee again, and the male disciples who haven’t yet seen Jesus are supposed to trust the word of these women, and journey 90 miles north on foot – that’s like four marathons away – to go see Jesus up on that mountain in Galilee. And they do.

There’s a word here, brothers: trust the women. Trust the women. Bible says so. I like that.

What I’ve never liked though is the whole argument about the empty tomb. Over the first century, team Jesus says the tomb’s empty because Jesus is resurrected. And the guards and all the Romans who don’t believe and all the people of Jesus’ own culture who don’t believe – team not Jesus have this whole conspiracy argument about a stolen body that they use, Matthew says.

And this argument kind of annoys me. One, I just don’t like it when people argue, I guess. And two, this argument gets weaponized. In the first century, it’s weaponized by team not Jesus. The colonizers and the persecutors of the Way of Jesus try to mock and dis-validate the faith of the early Christians. And then later, when the Christians have power, this argument is used anti-Semitically to mock and dis-validate and hurt the Jewish faith and culture. So this whole empty tomb argument has never been my favorite Bible moment. 

But, friends, this year the Tomb is speaking to me.

Because it tells me that two things can be true at once – that the tomb can be a tomb, and that the tomb can also be a womb. A tomb is a tomb, but on Easter, the mystery is that the tomb can also be the birthplace of new life: a tomb becomes a womb.

I gave a talk at our church retreat in March about how two things can be true at once, and I used the ancient spiritual imagery of the mandorla to show this.

Mandorla is Italian for an almond. Can you say “mandorla”? So google the word “mandorla” and you’ll find recipes for almond cookies and other delicious things. But you’ll also find images like this.

SLIDE #2: Mandorla Jesus- see image on YouTube video

This is a stylized picture of Jesus surrounded by four creatures that are animals and angels and symbols for the Bible’s four gospels all at once. It’s a weird and creepy image in its own way. And I love it and could say a lot about it, but today I just want to highlight the shape Jesus is in. It’s a glowing orb of light in the shape of an almond. A mandorla. 

And in pre-Renaissance European art, you get these mandorlas of light around Jesus and other holy people, representing how special they are. 

This mandorla shape symbolized a lot of things – God, light, holiness, also the mothers’ wombs out of which we were all born. Because at the end of the birth canal, we all enter the world through our mother’s mandorlas, so to speak. 

This mandorla symbol persists in architecture as the almond-shaped sliver at the intersection of two circles. Like so:

SLIDE #3: Mandorla Two Things- see YouTube video for image

And here, it can represent something else. The mandora can remind us that two things which seem different have a space where parts of both of them can be true. 

This weekend can be Patriot’s Day and Easter, two very different holidays. But here in Massachusetts, we can have Patriot’s Day Easter. Two things true at once. 

You can dearly love your mother, father, son, daughter, best friend, roommate, boss, whoever but on the wrong day, you can also kind of hate that person you love. Two things can be true at once. 

And Matthew’s resurrection story gives us a lot of mandorla paradoxes, two things that can at the same time be true.

Because we know that life can be very lonely sometimes. Maybe your beloved parent or spouse has died. Or maybe you’ve grown apart from an old best friend. Or maybe you’ve moved back home and your friends are moving on with other things, and you feel stuck. Or maybe you’re 8 years old and your father puts his hands on your shoulders and says: you’re the man of the house now, and doesn’t return. And these are hard, hard things to go through. Life can be very lonely. But then here comes risen Jesus who says:

I will be with you every day. Every day. My spirit is with you, until the very end of this age.

And so I pray these words for my mother in law, every time I see her where she lives now, in a bed, in a nursing home, because I think they are among the truest words of all the words, that we are never alone. That God is always with us. 

Two things can be true at once. That we can be lonely, and yet also never alone. 

Or the big commission at the end of Matthew. These disciples are meant to go out into all the world, and to teach people the ways of Jesus. I don’t think Matthew or Jesus ever meant for them to be the arrogant colonizers some of their Christian descendants became. Jesus never told them they have ALL the answers, or ALL the truth. He just said

teach ‘em what I gave you, and – for the people who want – baptize them, welcome them to the faith.

He didn’t say to enslave anyone, or steal their land, or steal their gold, or fly their country’s flags. Because two things can be true at once. You can know you have a great gift to give and offer that gift, without assuming you have ALL the gifts in the world or without imposing your gifts on people that don’t want them.

These mandorla lessons that two things can be true at once are all over the gospel of Matthew and its final chapter, like a tomb can be a tomb, but a tomb can also be a womb. 

No matter what resurrection is, it is not resuscitation, like going back to what was before. The disciples, be it at the graveside, or in Jerusalem, or up on that mountain in Galilee, get to see Jesus again in the flesh. They do. But it’s fleeting. The days of literally following Jesus around as he taught and healed and broke bread with us have passed. To experience the risen Christ through the Spirit of God, to see the risen Christ in the eyes and the love and courage of God’s people, to touch and taste the risen Christ in the bread and the wine of communion takes faith. It’s not always easy. The death of Jesus was real. 

But in Jesus’ resurrection, this tomb also becomes a womb. It is the site of Jesus’ resurrection. It is a new beginning of a great age of the Spirit of God, where all of God is present to all of us, if we will believe and receive.

I’ve had some tastes of this, friends, for instance at this site of resurrection right there in my tiny little yard. 

SLIDE #4: The Azuma Tree – see image on YouTube video

This is a picture of a little ornamental tree in our family’s tiny little urban yard. It was taken just this week, so there are no flowers or leaves yet, just little buds. But it’s a beautiful little tree, ready to flash with all the green of life again any day now. Life that was also born out of a gravesite, another tomb becomes a womb.

My family had for 10 years a sweet, troubled cat named Azuma. He was problematic in some ways, but I still loved him, and when he died in 2020, it was one more horrible, sad, no good loss in a year that was full of losses. But after we buried his body together, my wife Grace planted this beautiful little tree, so that this gravesite could become a place of new life. 

And as it blossoms again each spring, I touch the leaves, which when they’re just unfolding, as they are today, look like a 100 tiny little birds in flight. And I think, my God, you’ve done it again, Life born out of all that’s dying. Another sign of resurrection power. A tomb becomes a womb. 

Friends, while the resurrection of Christ may have taken place in Jerusalem, nearly 2,000 years ago, echoes of resurrection abound throughout this earth. Life out of death, resurrection, is the miracle that can’t stop giving. 

The dissolution of a family unit, mental health crises, generational trauma from American schools that were tools of genocide, a breakdown and a bipolar diagnosis, these things in the life of the Burgess family are tragedies, they are tombs. They are not the work or the gifts of our good and loving God. And yet, by God’s grace, this tomb of the Burgess family is now the site of stories of love and resilience and courage that will have our city cheering and raising to support grieving children. This tomb is the site of new life. Resurrection power.  

And so it is with us. 

When we look around our lives and we see our dead and dying dreams, our struggling children, our failing nation, the stories of flagging finances and fragile bodies and frustratingly struggling mental wellness, we often see a landscape of the tombs of all that has failed and come undone. 

But the witnesses to the risen Christ dare us to believe that death need not have the final word. That all our tombs can one day be places where the spirit of Jesus says: surprise! In the form of redemption and newness of life. 

Think for a minute about a tomb in your life – a place of loss, death, or disappointment. 

What if it’s not just a place of death but of new life waiting to be born?

If that was so, what prayer would you pray? What tree would you plant? What race would you run? 

The forces of death and evil win when we yield to them like they’ve got the last word. 

But the risen Christ dares us to believe that we too can go where Christ has gone. The tomb become a womb is not just for Christ, but for us all. Jesus, the faith tells us, is just the firstfruits of so much newness of life waiting to be born. 

And so a tomb is a tomb – that’s real. But friends, a tomb can also be a womb. 

And if that’s hard for you to believe today, that’s OK. Because even when we don’t believe in God, God doesn’t stop believing in us. Even when we don’t believe in life out of death, God’s still vying for it. 

Because fear and doubt do not need to be the enemy of faith. You can have faith and fear together, and you can have doubt and faith together too. 

After all, the disciples do. Did you hear it? Matthew says:

When they saw him they worshipped him, but some doubted. 

And some of us too. Faith comes hard for some of us. Faith has disappointed some of us in the past. There are terrible things that masquerade as the Way of Jesus and as Christian love and truth these days. 

So our doubt, our fear, our skepticism, that’s fair. Maybe we’ve earned it. 

But what if God’s OK with that? What if right there in your doubt, you can begin to hope to see the life of God made real in this Easter season. 

And what if right here in our fears, we can remember that all authority has been given to no human. Our lives end. One way or another, justice comes. And for even the most braggadocious of tyrants and bullies, their power isn’t as deep or wide as they pretend it is. 

After all, 250 years ago, right up the road from here, a ragtag band of upstart colonists began their fight against the most powerful empire on earth, and they won. Here we are.

And where our cat Azuma died, a beautiful little tree is blooming again in spring. 

And where death in so many forms has tried to destroy the Burgess family of Framingham, they’re running with resilience and life tomorrow.

In just a couple of minutes, I’m going to dunk Naomi Gramling under the water back there, representing the dying of the old self. But less than a second later, she’ll emerge again, soaking wet – the waters representing the life and the Spirit of God, with her now and forever. And she will arise to newness of life!

Friends, baptized or not, some of us are living in that in between moment, under the water, holding our breath, feeling like the tomb of our loss, or our loved one’s loss, or our nation’s loss is the end of the story. 

And with resurrection faith, I want us to say NO to that.

Friends, get up!

For real, literally, stand if you are able. 

Breathe! We are alive.

God has not stopped believing in you!

And our God is not done with resurrection!

Christ is risen.

Christ is risen.

Christ is risen!

Us too. Us too. Watch for it. Wait for it. Work for it. It’s coming. Amen?

Radical Hospitality Is An Upside Down Business

Let me pray for us. Holy Spirit, may the power of your truth speak to us now. That my words will fall and your words will stick. That everything we worry about, stress about, obsess about – may you suspend it for even a moment that you, God will be clear to us, that you will shine your face on us, that your breath will blow through us we pray, amen. 

Matthew 15:21-28 (Common English Bible)

21 From there, Jesus went to the regions of Tyre and Sidon.

22 A Canaanite woman from those territories came out and shouted, “Show me mercy, Son of David. My daughter is suffering terribly from demon possession.”

23 But he didn’t respond to her at all.

His disciples came and urged him, “Send her away; she keeps shouting out after us.”

24 Jesus replied, “I’ve been sent only to the lost sheep, the people of Israel.”

25 But she knelt before him and said, “Lord, help me.”

26 He replied, “It is not good to take the children’s bread and toss it to dogs.”

27 She said, “Yes, Lord. But even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall off their masters’ table.”

28 Jesus answered, “Woman, you have great faith. It will be just as you wish.” And right then her daughter was healed.

Hi My name is Lydia and I’m an Instagram addict. This is the part where you say, “Hi, Lydia.” Look, we’re all creatures of habit. It’s hard for us to change. I’ve been trying to replace my addiction with healthy coping skills, with Spotify, music, Libby, books, YouTube, clips of the Grammys. The dopamine hit is not hitting hard enough and I feel so bored and anxious. The other day my husband caught me pulling out my 6-year-old daughter’s watercolor and painting really ugly dahlias.

‘She’s obviously going through something.’ 

Things feel chaotic. I feel out of whack. Unsettled. These days, I feel grief and anger and then need to escape those things to enjoy something and it all feels like a paradox. How about you? How are you feeling these days? Anyone want to just pull out some watercolor and just paint with me? The bleeding water captures feelings I can’t seem to verbalize. Things feel topsy turvy upside down. 

I want to invite us into this disorienting feeling. When things are shifting, when changes are being made, for better or for worse, it feels like having vertigo. My question has been how can we center down in this time. As we wrap up this sermon series of Radical Hospitality, I was drawn to another story about a table.

It’s a story of Jesus extending his own work, being challenged, learning and growing, changing his mind even. I like to point to this story, on a side note, as a picture of the impact we have on God. I believe that our petitions and prayers move God because of stories like this one. That even Jesus moves through discomfort to accomplish God’s radical, generous, lavish love bestowed upon not just a few but all. 

The story follows a familiar or formulaic pattern of this kind of genre or style. Where the main character is obviously an outsider, asking for something, is then refused by the center of power or authority, but because of their unique wit or clever prompting, the outsider is granted something that would’ve otherwise not been granted according to tradition. It recalls characters like Tamar or Rahab, in which regardless of the impossibility of the situation, these ladies will, through using whatever they already have, get what they want from the place of authority. 

Now one thing I love to do with any story in the Gospels, the first four books of the New Testament, is do a quick check if that story is in any other of the four Gospels. This story from Matthew, Mark also tells the “same” story, but a little different. I think this exercise has great things to offer our modern day folks. In an age of misinformation and disinformation, and really a post-modern world, we have to be more grounded with subjectivity and open, not afraid, of two or in the case of the Gospels, four, sides to the story. The New Testament wasn’t afraid of that. There was no assumption that someone had the best and most reliable source. Now I’m not saying, it’s okay to say whatever you want even when it’s literally and factually false. But the reality is, whether I think that’s okay or not okay, plenty of people, people in places of power and authority, are saying all kinds of stuff. I’m saying that we still have the capacity to hear diverse stories and the ability to gain perspective, understanding, and maybe even truth through foggy cracked lenses. 

I love finding the discrepancies, or rather differences, between Mark and Matthew. Matthew, you have to understand, his target audience was the Jewish audience. He quotes the Hebrew Bible ( the Old Testament) alongside all his storytelling. You can find Matthew’s own commentary and expounding of the story in the story. 

Mark, his style is a bit more succinct, even casual. It’s thought by most of the biblical scholars that Mark probably put down his story first and Matthew, along with other resources, had Mark’s account on hand. 

In Matthew, Jesus “went” to the district of Tyre and Sidon and a woman from that district “came out”. Matthew may be upholding Jesus’ honor in some way, by not entering and residing and finding him in compromised soil. 

In MARK, it says that Jesus “WENT INTO” the region of Tyre and Sidon and

“He didn’t want anyone to know that he had entered a house, but he couldn’t hide.”

Matthew omits this house part.

And even Mark mentioning that the fact Jesus was in this house was a hush hush thing reveals that Jesus being inside of a Gentile, an enemy’s home is noted but not widely accepted. Matthew changes this story. There’s no house Jesus enters.

And then in Mark, she just begs Jesus to cast out the woman, in a narrative style.

But in Matthew, he quotes the woman saying,

“Show me mercy, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely possessed by a demon.” 

She starts with

‘have mercy on me’

placing herself lower than Jesus, showing her humility and her placement in the hierarchy of the relationship, which in that context, hierarchy of relationship is important. She calls him

“o Lord, Son of David,”

a proper use of his esteemed title, like calling someone “Oh the Reverend Doctor” and maybe even add a little curtsy. Which is how you should address me. Just kidding. Shh, not a doctor. 

I point these discrepancies, sorry I mean, differences, out because in one sense it has implications for what they were trying to say. One might gain that, from Matthew, that the Canaanite woman, in order to be healed, had to assimilate and take on the tradition, the dominant and powerful tradition, in order to gain access and power. She had to leave her land, have the knowhow to call Jesus the right name, not only the knowhow but the willingness to submit herself to a tradition that’s not of her own. 

Another reader of Mark, might say, Jesus intentionally and possibly illegally entered the homes of those who were considered foreign and strange. There, he said things like

“Let the children first be fed for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”

in the acceptable ways for others to hear, intentionally, speaking the politically correct speak on purpose, knowing well that he was about to do the opposite of what he just said. Did Jesus really think Canaanites were dogs or was it performance art to those who were watching? I don’t know. But the woman was in the end honored. The difference is that maybe in Matt, he’s pushing a bit more for assimilation, or at least honoring of the old traditions, which isn’t like bad, it’s just his opinion. 

In Matthew, Jesus says,

“Woman, you have great faith. It will be just as you wish.”

In Mark, there’s no prerequisite to the healing. Jesus simply refers to her witty remark, a picture of Jesus’ practical theology, saying,

29 “Good answer!” he said. “Go on home. The demon has already left your daughter.”

You see the slight difference? 

When I’m talking about Radical Hospitality, this is what I mean. I don’t care how we do it. I don’t care if our philosophy or theology is more like Matthew or Mark. I don’t care if we are the place of power and authority, in a lot of ways our church is resourced and filled with people that have privilege and access. And yet in a lot of ways our church is also filled with many many people that are just like this woman in our text today. The woman who is desperate. Coming out of their territory of distress, crying, shouting to the rest of us,

“this is what’s going on and you need to do something!”

The woman who is begging and yet also teaching us, casting a new perspective on old thoughts, spinning well known wise sayings on its head to include her, to serve her, to save her and her family. Radical Hospitality isn’t about just being more hospitable, but radical hospitality is an upside down business. Radical Hospitality is an upside down business. It’s not just about the center of power and authority beseeching its charity unto those in need. It’s flipping it all on its head and putting the vulnerable, the hurting in the center of the story, letting them flip our script, letting them set the tone, letting them be the main characters, the driving force of the story, putting her faith in the center. Radical Hospitality is about becoming “Wrong” about the whole situation and letting the stranger, the vulnerable speak to the time and listen, making space for that voice to be spoken to tell the truth. 

Cause it’s true, that woman, she doesn’t care about religion or politics. She cares about the health of her daughter. She doesn’t care if she’s being called a dog, it’s not important to her. She demands to be fed. She is scrappy and she’ll get it done. 

This is a reason why I have really loved the method of doing justice work through community organizing. Because the foundation of community organizing is listening to the stories of those who are struggling.

“What’s the challenge or struggle that you and your loved ones are facing right now?”

is the question we ask in these Listening Session that Faith Into Action has been hosting. For many of us, this is hard. We think, well I’m privileged. I’m okay. There isn’t a story I can really share. But community organizers from GBIO (the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization) that helps and support Reservoir Church to organize our power, their organizer Sneh pushes me to go deeper. No, something is hurting. Maybe it’s not your finances. Maybe it’s not your access to healthcare. Maybe it’s your conscience. Maybe it’s your deeply rooted faith, sense of justice, shalom, and peace and righteousness. Something is not right for you and you’re not doing well. What is your broken, hurting, suffering part in you that is actually the STRENGTH AND THE POWER to move you? Speak that out. Shout that out and turn that into action and you will see the power of healing that can take place! 

Because Radical hospitality is an upside down, inside out business. It’s moving out toward others but it’s also moving deeper into yourself. 

In the book(The Four Pivots: Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves

by Shawn A. Ginwright PhD

He Talks about this way of doing justice with the first pivot being what he calls the mirror work. I haven’t read the book but one of our members Alicia who currently heads the The Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House (MFNH) which is a nonprofit that was founded in 1902 as a settlement house providing information and services to help immigrants. She showed me the food pantry they run, which you’ll hear more about in a few weeks, and told me about this book. The mirror work is turning the lens through which you see the world, where you see injustice, the wrong in the world and shifting that into a  mirror on you to see the injustices right within you. That this is the first pivot you must make to become better activists and collective leaders. 

Steve talked a few weeks ago in one of our Radical Hospitality sermon series, titled, ‘Can We Be a Friend to All the Parts of Ourselves?’ where he talked about Internal Family Systems theory from the therapy/psychology world. Meaning, there’s inside, a whole family of actors, right within us, that allows us to approach all the parts of ourselves with compassion and empathy. I’ve also heard that in Family Systems theory that the most problematic person isn’t the problem but the megaphone to the dormant unaddressed problems in the family. 

A few weeks ago, one of our very own, Aubrie Hills, who is the Pre/K pastor and a new role in our staff as the Mental and Spiritual Wellness Director this year, taught a Grief Workshop for our community group and other ministry leaders, a training on how to journey alongside those who are grieving in our ministry work. She started the workshop with, Step One:

Question number 1. What is the earliest loss experience you can remember? 

Oh C’MON! I came to this workshop to learn how to be there for OTHER people who are grieving. Not take inventory of my earlier loss experiences. In some ways the workshop is still workshopping me right now. She’s going to be running it again in April for the wider public and I promise you, you are going to want to attend this. 

Cause the thing is, if you want to be there for others grieving, you’re going to have to grieve yourself FIRST. If you want to do radical hospitality to others, you’re gonna have to radical hospitality yourself, to your most vulnerable, most hurt, move locked in and forgotten selves. Because the kingdom of God is an upside down inside out business. Jesus said the First shall be Last and the Last shall be first. What would it look like to implement this kingdom value in you?

And when you do this, it’s going to feel weird. It’s going to feel like you’re an addict to power. You will sit in a room full of all the internal family members of yourselves, including the older sister you that makes everything run (think Louisa from Encanto) and the crazy uncle you (think Bruno), and your opinions, values, intuition and tendency will keep tipping toward the power and authority of your life that has been in place. It will feel WEIRD to veer that 18 wheeler of life as usual toward a radical change in your internal family systems. It will HURT. Some of them will act out. Just like the -The Laborers in the Vineyard: in Matthew 20, the story Jesus shared to illustrate the Last shall be First concept of the kingdom of God, where, same daily wages were given to workers that came to work 9am, 12pm, 3pm, 5pm. And the 5pm received first and the others were like, EXCUSE me? IT will not make sense.  

But listen to little voices. Listen to them. Do you know where they are in the room? Can you place them? What do you think they will say to you? Mine started speaking in Korean to me after that Grief workshop. 

I’ll close with this. 

That woman reminds me of my mom. A first generation immigrant, who even through her broken English, bothered to always tell people about her life, always starting with, “When I lived in Korea…” And I was embarrassed of her. Embarrassed of my accent, that I got rid of it. I was lying earlier when I said I didn’t care if it’s Matthew’s or Mark’s view of Jesus. I like the Markan Christology to be completely honest. Well, now I do. When I first came to the US, I was like the Matthew Canaanite woman. I picked up, “Yo what’s up” and things like “toodaloo” to assimilate and sound American. Aubrie was telling us in the grief workshop, asking us how we engaged with our earliest loss. My biggest dramatic loss was the loss of Korea. I came to the US and I had to chop off everything back there, and only look ahead. 

Aubrie shared this picture with us. Saying that staying connected to the loss in some way is a healthy way to move through grief. And so lately I’ve been re-excavating some chopped off Korean parts of myself. Starting with, 

My Korean name is Injung, and I’m still an Instagram addict. (“Hi, Injung”) 

Let’s stay connected, to the losses, to the grief, and move about from there to rise up and carry on, stand up and make a change. Let’s stay connected to the most vulnerable in our country right now. We have thousands of know your rights cards available. Take a stack. Drop it off in your local communities.  You can join the Listening Session Reservoir Church is hosting for GBIO on Tuesday at 7pm, where you can share your injustice stories, cause that’s where our power lies. Grab a flyer on your way out from some of our Faith Into Action Core team. 

If you’re not rooted down, you cannot reach out. I pray that the radical hospitality of our God, the abundant overflowing grace, mercy, and love may work in you and through you. Amen. 

 

This is Not the End

On Thursday morning, I huddled up with a group of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim clergy to talk about where we were at after the election. We sang together. We prayed in the different languages and spirits of our different faiths. And we talked. I’d got us together to talk about what our people are experiencing and what they need, the people of our congregations. And there was a lot. 

Some of us wondered about our fears.

A community leader in a large, mostly immigrant congregation was wondering about the not properly documented members of his community, wondering if they’d need to fear getting swept up in traffic stops again and detained, as they were several years ago. 

A queer clergy member talked about themselves and their community of gay, lesbian, and trans friends and family, wondering which of their rights would or wouldn’t be stripped from them. They said:

I look to the strength of our queer ancestors who survived and thrived even when no one in the government was on our side. But it would be nice if the government didn’t scapegoat and oppose us again, wouldn’t it?

Some of us were processing our anger.

One of us said

I’m not from this area, but I feel like I can’t go back home. Because my parents, my neighbors, the people I went to high school with where I’m from have betrayed me and my values and my interests again. And I’m just so furious.

More than one parent was so angry at the conversation they’d had to have with their daughters the day before, that America had a chance to elect a competent woman but instead elected a man accused by dozens of women of sexual misconduct and found liable for sexual abuse. 

There were Asian and Black colleagues wondering when they’d next be harassed or endangered and what safety looked like in the months ahead. 

We wondered how we would organize together to protect our rights and communities. We were wondering if we knew enough about trauma care and if we had the stamina for four more years of leading angry and in some cases, divided congregations.

Mostly, though, we were also just tired.

Maybe you relate to some of this. I know that many of you do.

And maybe you don’t. Friends, I know many of our shared values here at Reservoir, but I obviously don’t know all your politics. 

A little over one in three Massachusetts voters voted for Donald Trump. In Cambridge, Boston, Somerville, Arlington and the rest of the communities close to here that was more like one in five to one in 12, but that’s still not nobody. 

So I don’t think we should ever assume in our communities that everyone votes the same way, just like we shouldn’t assume that everyone does anything the same way. 

But I know a lot of us online today are angry or scared or sad or tired or some mix of all those things. And I feel like we need to make some room for that today.

I had been thinking about a different sermon – one about sick people and sick nations and what healing looks like with the help of God and friends. And I still want to give that sermon, maybe sometime soon, but not today. 

Instead we’re going to read one of the short poems in the Bible’s prayer book called the Psalms. Nearly half of those prayers are called psalms of lament – prayers of sadness and anger and doubt, despair, and just plain rage. And in all this, they’re Psalms of faith, and we need that too.

When life gets hard, we pull away from God and we pull away from each other a lot of the time, when we most need each other. And when we most need the deep stuff of God too – when we most need to keep the faith, and to push forward in hope, and to love and be loved harder too. 

So we’ll try to go there today.

This isn’t the only thing we’ll do.

Whatever you think of the election, these are times for people of faith to get focused and organized about renewing our communities, about living lives of meaning and purpose in seeing more just worlds into being. And months ago, anticipating what these times might be like, I invited a national leader in faith and justice to visit us this month. 

Our guest speaker next weekend is Dr. Drew Hart. His podcast, Inverse, hosts powerful conversations about faith in the Way of Jesus and social justice. And his last book: Who Will Be a Witness? Igniting Activism for God’s Justice, Love and Deliverance is an important book that’s been praised by some of the biggest voices of our age in faith and justice. So you’ll want to be here next weekend, and if you’re serious about giving time and energy to our church’s efforts to organize for a more just world in this season, you’ll want to register today for the lunch with Drew we’re hosting next Sunday at 12:00.

And then a couple weeks after that, we’ll move into our darkest month of the year celebrating Advent, the four weeks before Christmas. This year, we’ll be getting curious about how Jesus moved with the Spirit of God and how we can do the same. It’ll be called Inspire Us.

But by inspire us, I don’t mean just feel good peace of Christmas vibes, I mean: Spirit of God, breathe new life and direction into a tired and angry and fed up, weary people, that we can live with deep faith, and fierce hope, and big love in this season, that we be equipped to for joy and justice in a world that doesn’t have enough of either of those.

So that’s some of where we’re going, friends. 

But back to today. I’m going to read Psalm 13 for us, share a few thoughts, and tell you what to do with all those sticky notes around you. 

The psalm is written in the singular. But I’m going to read it in the plural. These aren’t times for solitary faith.

Psalm 13 (Common English Bible)

For the music leader. A song of David.

13 How long will you forget me, Lord? Forever?
    How long will you hide your face from me?

2 How long will I be left to my own wits,
    agony filling my heart? Daily?
How long will my enemy keep defeating me?

3 Look at me!
    Answer me, Lord my God!
Restore sight to my eyes!
    Otherwise, I’ll sleep the sleep of death,

4      and my enemy will say, “I won!”
        My foes will rejoice over my downfall.

5 But I have trusted in your faithful love.
    My heart will rejoice in your salvation.

6 Yes, I will sing to the Lord
    because he has been good to me.

Frederick Buechner wrote:

“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”

Beautiful and terrible things. 

Sometimes we think that being American, or being a person who trusts God, means that mostly good things will happen.

Or we think that despite the bad things, history is just getting better and better, so it’s going to be OK.

Or we think God is in control of everything, so maybe some things might seem bad to us, but God’s really working them all for good, so things must not be that bad after all.

But the prayers of the Bible aren’t having any of this. There we meet people who have good days and good seasons and triumphs and dance their hearts out in joy. And we meet people who are working through their big regrets, or trying to survive exile or war, people who are sad and tired and scared and shaking with rage. 

And all these people say:

come pray with us. Let’s tell the truth. 

So we face the bad and the ugly together. 

  • Have you forgotten us, God?
  • How long’s it going to be? 
  • Why do good people lose?
  • Why do I love?
  • Why do bad people get to strut out in public, saying: I won! 

The good, the bad, and ugly. The Psalms make room for that. If you want to be at home in your body, if you want to be at home in this world and at home with God, you’ve got to tell the truth. 

These Psalms weren’t read in private either. They have been anchors for the public worship of Jews and Christians for millennia. We’ve developed a tradition here at Reservoir of making room for our community’s prayers in the sanctuary through the holy means of the sticky note.

I kid, there’s nothing needful or holy about writing down a prayer but there’s something about writing something down that sometimes can honor the importance of something and can get it out of our heads too. And there’s something about placing those notes of prayer in public  that helps us offer our collective range and sadness and fatigue and questions to a living God who has room for it all and listens. 

So friends, in a couple minutes we’re going to play some music, and I invite you to grab a couple of sticky notes at home – doesn’t matter what color – and write down anything that’s wearing you out, that makes you angry or sad or afraid that you want to say to God. You can make it a prayer, like

“How long will such and such happen?”

Or you can just write the thing down without any particular question or prayer. This is a political week, so political stuff is welcome, but you don’t have to stay in that lane. Life gives us all kinds of terrible things we need to make sure that God knows about and is paying attention to.

Before we do that, I want to say something else though, first. It’s about where the Psalm we read ends, and it’s about something else we need right now, in addition to praying out our worries and our rage. 

During the first Trump presidency, when we were all starting to notice how much division and cruelty and scapegoating and verbal and physical violence had become part of ordinary American life, some filmmakers made a documentary called: The Antidote. You can still stream it on YouTube and on Prime, I think. When it came out a few years ago, my family watched it together because someone we know was featured in it. And a local Boston-based health care organization was featured too. 

It’s a series of stories about good and beautiful things happening in local communities in America, people making communities more just and good and wholesome and kind. If there was anything like a thesis to the film, it was that the antidote to division and cruelty in American life is kindness.

Friends, I’m not so sure that kindness is enough for us at this point. We need kindness, yes, but we need a lot more than that. 

I think the Psalmist agrees. Because in this poem of fatigue and fear and rage, the psalm takes a turn at the end and says this.

5 But I have trusted in your faithful love.
    My heart will rejoice in your salvation.

6 Yes, I will sing to the Lord
    because he has been good to me.

Trusting in God – leaning in toward keeping the faith.

Rejoices in the coming salvation – a heart of hope.

And songs of God’s goodness, God’s hesed, that beautiful word for faithful, big, steady love. 

Don’t get me wrong. In times of anger and of crisis, most of us do not feel these things. And friends, we do not need to. Our feelings matter a great deal, but we are not here to manage and manipulate and brighten them. 

And the Psalms weren’t either. 

But they are a reminder to us that the bad and the ugly are not all there is to life, ever. Terrible things will happen. But beautiful things too. 

The full quote from Frederick Buechner goes like this. It says:

“The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you. There’s only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you’ll reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.”

Even when terrible things happen, especially when terrible things happen, we’ve got to remember that the good and the true and the beautiful happen too. That the gift of grace is still calling out to us to participate in the antidote to all the toxins that poison and choke and threaten us. God is still loving and just and looking to breathe new worlds, new miracles into being. But God can’t do that alone. 

Less pie in the sky, God still wants us to survive, and God even wants us to thrive as much as we can in this season, and get busy making sure that our friends and neighbors whose backs are up against the wall can survive and thrive too. 

And I think that comes down to not running away from the three words that Brother Paul in the Bible says are at the center of the Way of Jesus, the three words that anchor the end of this Psalm too, which are faith, hope, and love. 

Friends, how are we gonna keep the faith – faith that there is goodness and truth and beauty to be made still, that God is here with goodness and truth and beauty in many forms. We’ve got to keep the faith that doing good matters, that telling the truth is still worthwhile, and that making beauty together will help us thrive. 

We’ve got to exercise our muscles of hope. As the great justice leader of our age Bryan Stevenson reminds us, hope is not a nostalgic vibe or wish, it is a muscular superpower. To believe that God can bring good things out of a bad time, that we can shape good outcomes together in a bad season, to keep acting like our worst today doesn’t doom us to an even worse tomorrow. Our children, our colleagues, our neighbors don’t need fake smiles or silver linings but we all need from each other the humor and the creative resilience that comes when we don’t let fools and liars and villains have the last word on our tomorrow.

And we need love. Not just sexy love songs, on holding hands, although those are good too. We need big love, fierce love, the kind of love that says I’ve got the back of my Black children and classmates when they get harassing, demeaning texts like Black youth across college campuses were getting last week. Or I’ve got the backs of our trans neighbors or our immigrant neighbors when they are targeted or scapegoated. This isn’t just personal, neighbor to neighbor, it’s public too. Which is why we’re having this conversation next week with Dr. Drew Hart on how we mobilize for justice in this season. Because justice is what love in public looks like. 

So friends, alongside your words of fatigue and sadness and anger, where you write down the bad and ugly things we need God’s eyes on, I want to dare you to write down some way you’re going to keep the faith, and grow your hope, or live your love in this season. What help will you need to be a person of faith, hope, and love in the weeks ahead?

I invite you to write these things on your Post-it note at home. And then I’ll say a closing prayer and you can place your notes somewhere in your home that’s special and you can return to from time to time.

Communion Prayer-

The table of communion reminds us that we are members of the Body of Christ, joined to the life and strength of God and poured out together with Jesus for the healing of the world. So we join our prayers together at the table.

And the tree of Life reminds us that God is always birthing new life from dying seeds, that our prayers, our anger, our steady presence still here today, and our faith and our hope and our love can be joined together with power for great things. 

So Spirit of God, receive our prayers, take all that we are today and do something good with it. Grow faith, hope, and love in our community, that we say survive together, that we can thrive together, that we can do some glorious good together in the months ahead. Amen.

The Wideness of God’s Mercy

What we call people matters.

I have many affectionate little nicknames for my wife Grace and I get no complaint about any of them. They’re signs of my affection and of our intimacy.

But the other day, she noticed I was using a nickname I often use for her, but this time I was calling someone else with it. Don’t worry, it wasn’t another woman. It wasn’t even another person. But I was using this same nickname once reserved solely for her, with our dog. 

And she was like:

hey, now, don’t call me the same thing you call our dog.

And I was like:

oh, come on, you’re two of my favorite creatures on earth. 

And somehow that didn’t fly. So I was like:

alright, I will not use that name on our dog again.

And I think I’ve held up that commitment pretty well so far, as Grace deserves. 

What we call people – and I guess even non-people persons – matters.

The same is true with what we call God. 

A couple years ago, my prayer life was flagging. 

Some of my views of God had changed over time, and so some of my old ways of talking to God didn’t fit as well any more.

I also had gone through some hard experiences in the months and years prior, and I didn’t exactly know how to talk to God about these things. On the one hand, I deeply believe what the scriptures say about God, that nothing is hidden from God’s sight, that everything is naked and exposed before the one to whom we have to give an answer. 

I didn’t think I had to inform God about my experiences, but I didn’t just want to bottle them up either. I wanted to talk about them, and I wasn’t always sure how.

So I was praying less often, less naturally, probably less deeply. 

I mostly didn’t feel guilty about praying less than I used to, but at some point, I did want this to change. I found myself wanting to learn to pray more again. 

And one thing that helped a lot was a set of written prayers I stumbled upon. A structure for prayer, a set of words for prayer, that I could walk into and make it my own.

And the prayers begin like this:

Prayer Version #1

Eternal God, Creator of heaven and Earth, 

God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, 

God of Israel, 

God and father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, 

True and Living God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 

Have mercy and hear our prayer.

 

The prayer opens by asking for God’s attention and for God’s mercy – God’s solidarity and help in all things. 

But even before that, just like when we ask for anyone’s attention and help, it begins with an address, with a name. 

I appreciate the specificity of this. 

When I was young, I used to start my prayers like: Dear God – and it’s like one, that’s a weird way to talk to someone, it sounds like you’re writing a letter out loud. But also the name “God” – it’s kind of vague, like a name that could mean anything, like a big box someone’s carrying and you have no idea what’s inside – it could be a guitar or a gun or groceries, it’s just generic.

When we say God, we could mean all kinds of things. So saying: dear God, or hey, God, or whatever doesn’t ground me in any particular kind of person on the other end of my prayers. It’s vague, like I have no idea who I’m talking to and whether or not they’re listening. 

So this prayer names God, which I find helpful.

It calls God “eternal” – someone who has been around forever and is very much still here. 

It names God as the creator of everything – me, you, wherever we are or could ever be. Things seen and known to us, things as of yet unseen and unknown too.

Creator God, still yet creative God, could you hear my prayer?

And then it grounds this eternal, creator God in some specific stories. 

God, the one grounded in the story and history of scripture – the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, of Israel – this particular God that Jews and Christians and Muslims have been calling on for centuries, this God who we read about in the Bible.

And not only that, but the God and father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the God Jesus talked about, the God Jesus loves. God who looks and sounds and acts like Jesus, God who is present by God’s Spirit, the God I call my father, who is true and real and very much alive, I’d love to have your attention.

Could you be yet again kind, helpful, merciful, and hear my prayer? 

It both grounds me and opens me up when I talk to God this way, remembering just who it is that’s listening. I have a better sense in my heart, in my consciousness, of who I’m talking to, of the miracle that I have this eternal, creator God’s attention. 

And all this helps me pray. 

But good as this is, I remembered something that would make it even better. When I started using this address, this greeting for God in my prayers, I remembered some encouragement from an author named Wil Gafney. Wil Gafney is a womanist theologian. A womanist is someone who says it’s worth thinking about life through the lens of Black women’s experiences, so a womanist theologian says Black women’s experiences have an important role in teaching us what God is like. 

And the line I remembered from Wil Gafney was her encouragement that when we say formulas like the one in this prayer, like this formula from the Bible – the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Wil Gafney says: say the women’s names too. Say the name of the women in the story as well, and see what that does.

So I decided to keep these traditional words for God in how I start my morning prayers, but to say the names of the women in the story as well. 

So now, this address starts like this:

Prayer Version #2

Eternal God, Creator of heaven and Earth, 

God of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, and Keturah

God of Isaac and Rebekah,

God of Jacob, Leah, Rachel, Bilhah and Zilpah

God of Israel….

And I want to tell you what it’s been like the past couple of years to pray to this God, the God that we name and address like this.

At first it was a memory stretch. Dang, these three men had a lot of women in their lives.

  • How do I remember them all?
  • Like who in the world was Keturah? 
  • Who are these people, and why does it matter?

But the more I say their names, the more I choose to inhabit a particular tradition and faith in God, and the more important places that takes me.

I’m talking about the significance of remembering the founding mothers of our faith, but let me start with even the value of the founding fathers.

God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  This is the God of our broken, yet heroic selves. 

These founding fathers of the faith are ordinary people, in some ways extraordinarily flawed people, that end up on these epic, heroes journeys. 

Our founding senior pastor Dave Schmelzer used to talk a lot about the life of faith as being a kind of a hero’s journey. A hero’s journey is when an ordinary person stumbles into a deeper question or a deeper adventure in life. And the pursuit of this question or adventure calls them into a deeper life. Out of their tried and true comfort zone into the unknown, where challenges and temptations abound. Where new friends and new enemies emerge, where getting what you want in life, or fulfilling the purpose of your life requires great cost but yields great return too. It changes you, and sometimes it changes the world too, or some little piece of it at least. 

I’ve resonated with this. The best and most important things in my life have called me beyond myself, even as they’ve called me to engage some of the deepest, most persistent themes of my life story that run all the way back through childhood. 

When we think of hero’s journeys, often we think of our work. And I get that. I used to listen to the podcast How I Built This, which tells entrepreneurs’ stories, because I respect what I learn about leadership from my friends and our church board members who start businesses. And the arcs of these entrepreneurs are usually hero’s journeys – people stumble into some bold, big thing they want to try, and on their way to anything like success, there are usually moments where they almost lose it all. And all this requires resilience and talent, but also a lot of help and a lot of luck. And I think that’s been true in the work I’ve been called to do as a teacher and a school leader and a pastor, and it’s true of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob too – God walked with them and inspired and strengthened them in the big work to which they were called. 

But for me, I’ve felt this even more in my personal, relational life. I’m trying to be a nurturing father to my kids and a supportive, intimate partner to my spouse, when I come from a long line of aloof men who didn’t always know how to do those things. And I’m trying to be a middle aged man who actually has friends, when again, the men in the culture I come from don’t. And so even this stuff has felt like a hero’s journey, calling me out to new ways of being in the world, and new ways of being in myself.

So when I pray to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, I remember that we’re not the first people God has called to big adventures, to new work and new ways of living, or to challenging circumstances. We’re not the first flawed people trying to do hard things.

Here’s a little snapshot from Jacob’s life.

Genesis 32:22-26 (Common English Bible)

22 Jacob got up during the night, took his two wives, his two women servants, and his eleven sons, and crossed the Jabbok River’s shallow water.

23 He took them and everything that belonged to him, and he helped them cross the river.

24 But Jacob stayed apart by himself, and a man wrestled with him until dawn broke.

25 When the man saw that he couldn’t defeat Jacob, he grabbed Jacob’s thigh and tore a muscle in Jacob’s thigh as he wrestled with him.

26 The man said, “Let me go because the dawn is breaking.”

But Jacob said, “I won’t let you go until you bless me.”

Jacob is a man with a lot of baggage. He’s a polygamist, he’s got a big and messy family where people mostly don’t get along. He’s a pretty wealthy person at this point, but he’s come by it through incessant struggle and hustle, over decades. And in this scene he’s getting ready to meet up with a brother he hasn’t seen in years, a brother he thinks has reason to hate him, because in all his hustle, Jacob has done some people wrong over the years, his brother included. 

But beneath all of this drama, Jacob really just wants a blessing. His father never knew how to love him well, and all his blessing has been gained through hustle and hard work and theft, but Jacob wonders:

is there someone who really knows me and sees good in me? Can I be loved? Can I be believed in? 

This is where that name Israel comes from – it’s a new name for Jacob before it’s a new name for an ancient people. It means “struggle with God.” Because that’s the invitation of faith – to struggle with our deepest questions and longings, to struggle over those with God and find blessing, to find that God sees us and loves us and believes in us even as God humbles us and calls us to change. 

So when I learn to pray to the God of Jacob, I remember that God has room for my biggest questions and fears. God has room for the knotty, ill-formed parts of me. And God knows the ways in which I’m still the same little kid just looking for his parents’ attention, hoping he’ll be seen and loved and encouraged. 

That God had room for Jacob, had time for Jacob, had hope for Jacob. And that God has room and time and hope for you and me. 

What a gift. 

The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the God of our broken selves and deepest longings, and heroic journeys.

But what happens when you add the women? Well, when you restore these women into God’s story, you introduce a lot more. Because adding just the stories of these eight women into how we name God, you add in stories of heartbreak, of infertility, of weeping, of discrimination, and sex trafficking and sexual violence.

You add in rivalries and betrayals, people defined by their physical beauty and people defined by their lack of physical appeal. You get people who use people and the people who are used. All of them mattering to God, all of them worthy of God’s love and attention and place in God’s big story. 

Take Rachel, she’s the archetype in the Bible of maternal yearning and maternal grief too. In Jewish literary and spiritual tradition, Rachel is always weeping. Because that’s part of what mothers do. Mothers grow babies in their bodies, and feed them with their bodies, and birth them into the world. And sometimes things go great, but usually some things go wrong. And mothers worry and weep, and sometimes they lose their children and they keep on weeping. 

The God we pray to isn’t just the God of Jacob but the God of Rachel as well, the God of our weary years, as the song says, and the God of our silent tears. 

And what happens when you add Bilhah and Zilpah in too? 

Well, first you have to find out who the heck these two women were, and then you find out and you think, my God. A man married off his two daughters to a distant relative of his. And then when there were fertility issues, he took two slaves of his and gave them as concubines, as sex slaves to his son in law. 

And now we see God isn’t just the God of our heroic selves and deep aspirations, but God is the God of the victims, the God of our invisible selves and the God of our unthinkable disasters. 

The story of Genesis gives bits of this. We learn this about Bilhah:

Genesis 29:29 (Common English Bible)

29 Laban also gave his woman servant Bilhah to his daughter Rachel to be her maidservant.

It’s more polite than the way I put it. But the story is that Rachel’s father Laban gives Rachel a slave to make her life easier. And then this ensues. ***

Genesis 30:1-6 (Common English Bible)

30 Rachel noticed that she was not bearing children for Jacob, so because she envied her sister Leah, she told Jacob, “If you don’t give me sons, I’m going to die!”

2 That made Jacob angry with Rachel, so he asked her, “Can I take God’s place, who has not allowed you to conceive?”

3 Rachel responded, “Here’s my handmaid Bilhah. Go have sex with her. She can bear children on my knees so I can have children through her.”

4 So Rachel gave Jacob her woman servant Bilhah to be his wife, and Jacob had sex with her.

5 Bilhah conceived and bore a son for Jacob.

6 Then Rachel said, “God has vindicated me! He has heard my voice and has given me a son.” Therefore, she named him Dan. 

So Bilhah isn’t just a slave, now she’s a sex slave. Surrogate is too polite a term. Bilhah has no choice, no agency here. Her children are accounted as Rachel’s, not her own, and she has no standing she gains, no reward. 

Heart-breaking, not part of God’s good longings for the human family that anyone would be used and abused like this, and yet real too. For all our families, if we look long or wide or deep enough, have abuse in them somewhere. They have unbearable injustices and heartbreak somewhere. And some of us, truthfully, don’t need to look long or hard enough in our lives for these stories. 

But God is big enough, good enough, wide enough to include stories like this among the founding mothers of our faith. And when we name God by these stories too – God of Jacob and Leah and Bilhah and Zilpah – we remember that God has room and heart and blessing still for the crushed and invisible people of our generation, and for the crushed and invisible parts of ourselves. 

God is the God even of our great disasters, which God knows and sees with tears and love, and hope and care. 

When we name God like this in our prayers, we signal to God and to ourselves that prayer isn’t a time for thin words and cover up and fake smiles. Prayer is a time for our whole messy selves to engage God in all of God’s deep knowing and in all of the wideness of God’s mercy. And there we can tell the truth about our lives. And we can tell the truth about our world. And we can trust that God has time and love and hope for it all. And see what comes of that. 

There was a 19th century songwriter that wrote a song about this. It’s called “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy.” It was written by a man named Frederick William Faber. 

He was raised as the kind of Christian who thought that God chose some people for salvation and blessing in this life and in the life to come. And that many other people were not chosen or blessed by God. So as a child and a young adult, Faber would have been taught to think that most of the world was damned. Jews, Muslims, Catholics, the indigenous peoples of the earth that his country – the British Empire – was busy colonizing at the time. He wouldn’t have thought they were part of God’s story until Faber had a change of heart, a change of faith and became a new kind of Christian. 

Religious deconstruction and reconstruction isn’t new, my friends. Faber hung on for a deeper truth, and in his last decade of life, ill in bed in his 40s before he died too young, he wrote the hymn “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy,” 

It says:

There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,
like the wideness of the sea.
There’s a kindness in God’s justice,
which is more than liberty.

 

There is welcome for the sinner,
and more graces for the good.
There is mercy with the Savior,
there is healing in his blood.

 

But we make God’s love too narrow
by false limits of our own,
and we magnify its strictness
with a zeal God will not own.

 

For the love of God is broader
than the measures of the mind,
and the heart of the Eternal
is most wonderfully kind.

What we call people matters. What we call God matters. If we just call the God of our prayers something vague like God, we can easily invest the divine with a bunch of garbage, or have God get vaguer and smaller over time until it seems this God is nothing but a figment of our imagination.

But pray to God as eternal creator of heaven and earth, God of Abraham and Jacob and Rachel and Bilhah and all the rest of the founding fathers and mothers, God and father and mother of our lord and savior Jesus Christ, and we remember there’s a wideness in God’s mercy. We’ll get a bigger God, a God with room for everybody – stranger, friend, and foe – and a God who even has room for all of our selves. God of our broken but heroic selves. God of our weeping selves. Even God of our invisible selves and our great disasters. The God who loves to give us attention and solidarity and love and help all of this.  

The Revolution of the Intimate

Last Monday we hosted the Board meeting for the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization. And even though important things sometimes happen at Board meetings, Board meetings can be very boring events. It’s practically the same word – board and boring.

But our Monday meeting wasn’t boring at all. One of the people co-leading with me asked me the day of:

where can we buy good cake around here?

And I wondered: why do we need cake? But I suggested a place. And that night she and our third co-leader showed up with cake from a better place than I’d suggested. High quality cake. 

And it turned out the cake was for someone’s wedding anniversary, a 20th wedding anniversary. It’s fun to celebrate anniversaries. Our church had our 25th anniversary last year. This winter Grace and I are going to celebrate our 28th wedding anniversary. When we had our 20th anniversary, we took a big trip together far away without our kids for the first time since we’d had them. And while we love our kids, that was fun too. 

But the 20th anniversary we were celebrating on Monday was a special one. One of our Board members, Marcia, was celebrating her 20th anniversary of marriage to her wife Susan. And this anniversary also lines up with the 20th anniversary of same sex weddings being legal in Massachusetts. 

This is not a coincidence, because Marcia and her wife were the very first couple of two men, or in their case two women, to get married that day right here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, right after the law was changed. So we weren’t just celebrating Marcia’s anniversary, we were celebrating history too. Which was special.

Marcia said thank you and gave a little speech before we ate cake, saying how much it meant to her that we wanted to celebrate with her. And then one of our leaders, a younger queer person who was only a kid when Marcia got married gave a speech too, and said how important what Marcia and her generation did for marriage equality, and how Marcia’s generation has paved the way for her generation to live safer, freer lives with the people they love. And she was tearing up, and Marcia was tearing up, and a lot of us were tearing up, because we were thinking of our queer kids or our queer friends or siblings, or our queer selves, and what it means to us when we can be loved just as we are and have the same rights and freedoms as anyone else.

But then there was one more speech. One of our founders spoke up and said tonight we’re also celebrating the 20th anniversary of our organization surviving. Because when this law was getting changed, there were people on our Board back then that were for this change, and that were against this change. And it was such a big argument, and such a hard argument, that we didn’t know if we’d be able to stay together as GBIO. But we did because we decided to keep loving each other, and to stay in relationship, even when we disagreed about some really important things. And those relationships kept us together, and they changed us too. Not everyone changed their minds, but many people have. And there are people who didn’t understand or agree with Marcia’s marriage before who celebrate it today. 

And there we were – about 20 people – Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Black, White, Asian – as young as 23 and as old as 77. Celebrating Marcia’s anniversary, and celebrating LGBTQ rights, and celebrating our friendships and our desire to keep getting to know each other across our differences, keep learning together amidst our differences, and keep acting for a better world together, powered by all the stories and all the gifts we bring to the table with our differences.

What a gift, to learn to not only tolerate or compromise but to understand and love and live and grow together across our differences. 

This is what the theologian Willie James Jennings calls the revolution of the intimate. The revolution of the intimate is what Jennings says a Christian holiday called Pentecost is all about. And while Pentecost was on the Christian calendar last week, and our kids thought about Pentecost last week in kids’ church, we’re just getting to it today. 

I’m excited to talk about Pentecost, and how it’s the revolution of the intimate, and some of what that might mean to you and me. Let’s read the story. It’s from the book of Acts, which stands for the Acts of the Apostles. It’s the story of what Jesus’ friends did after Jesus died and rose again, and it’s the story of what they discovered God doing among them. This part is from near the beginning, in the second chapter.

Acts 2:1-21 (Common English Bible)

2 When Pentecost Day arrived, they were all together in one place.

2 Suddenly a sound from heaven like the howling of a fierce wind filled the entire house where they were sitting.

3 They saw what seemed to be individual flames of fire alighting on each one of them.

4 They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit enabled them to speak.

5 There were pious Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem.

6 When they heard this sound, a crowd gathered. They were mystified because everyone heard them speaking in their native languages.

7 They were surprised and amazed, saying, “Look, aren’t all the people who are speaking Galileans, every one of them?

8 How then can each of us hear them speaking in our native language?

9 Parthians, Medes, and Elamites; as well as residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia,

10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the regions of Libya bordering Cyrene; and visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism),

11 Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the mighty works of God in our own languages!”

12 They were all surprised and bewildered. Some asked each other, “What does this mean?”

13 Others jeered at them, saying, “They’re full of new wine!”

14 Peter stood with the other eleven apostles. He raised his voice and declared, “Judeans and everyone living in Jerusalem! Know this! Listen carefully to my words!

15 These people aren’t drunk, as you suspect; after all, it’s only nine o’clock in the morning!

16 Rather, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

17 In the last days, God says,
I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
    Your sons and daughters will prophesy.
    Your young will see visions.
    Your elders will dream dreams.
18     Even upon my servants, men and women,
        I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
        and they will prophesy.
19 I will cause wonders to occur in the heavens above
    and signs on the earth below,
        blood and fire and a cloud of smoke.
20 The sun will be changed into darkness,
    and the moon will be changed into blood,
        before the great and spectacular day of the Lord comes.
21 And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. (Joel 2:28-32)

I mentioned that last week our kids talked about this story in kids’ church, so I’ve invited two of our 4th and 5th grade kids to tell us what struck them most about this story this year.

Pentecost was a holiday already before this story. Pentecost was a Greek name for the holiday. Today, Jews call this day for its Hebrew name, Shavuot. It was a spring harvest festival. And it’s also the day Jews remember the gift of the Torah on Mt. Sinai. So it’s the birthday of words, spoken words and written words of God, through the lips and pens of people. The anniversary of the beginning of the Bible.

Pentecost is another beginning. This time it’s the beginning of a more intimate experience of God. Not just words you read or hear, but a communicative presence of God with us and among us that we can feel.

It’s like wind. It’s like fire. 

A lot of the time we read the Bible from the perspective of the main characters, of the heroes. 

So we read the Pentecost story and we think of the wild experience of Jesus’ friends suddenly speaking languages they’ve never learned. We hear the image of something like wind and something like fire, and we think – these not very educated working class fishers and tax collectors from the countryside are so bold and articulate and powerful. 

And for some of us, this is very attractive. 

This story has become a big deal in the parts of Christianity that are called Pentecostal, or sometimes Charismatic. Our church has some background here too.

And in these parts of the Christian church, we like to be able to experience God super-close, super personally, super intimate. And that can be beautiful and special. This has actually been important to my faith. 

But sometimes too we can be kind of hooked on what I call the big dopamine hits of an experience of God. We don’t just want to pray, we want to pray in a language we’ve never learned before because that feels extra special. People call that speaking in tongues. It’s something the Bible only mentions a handful of times, and it doesn’t always seem to mean the same thing there, but this has become a big deal to some Christians, because it seems so powerful, so intimate. 

Same with other kinds of powerful experiences of God doing something for you, or God doing something through you. And if all this is genuine and authentic and helpful and encouraging to other people, and you can stay humble and open about it all, that’s cool. 

But I want to read this passage and this moment of Pentecost from another angle today, a different experience of what the revolution of the intimate looks like, and that’s the experience the people in this story who aren’t named have. The crowd of diaspora exiles who’d traveled back to their ancestral home of Jerusalem for the festival. See when we read the Bible, we’re not always the main characters, so it can help to read the stories from other people’s perspective.

And for these residents of Mesopotamia and Asia and Egypt and Libya and Rome, the Spirit of God is like wind. And like fire. And mostly, it’s like someone speaking to you the good news of God in your heart language, in your mother tongue. 

The crowd we’re told are people who live far away. They are bicultural people, who speak more than one language, have had to learn more than one culture and way of being in the world. 

Many of you know these experiences – of living in America and having people wonder where you are from, or being surprised that you speak English so well when you always have, or of being underestimated because your English is considered accented. But then you travel to where your ancestors are from and you’re told you don’t belong there either, that you’re a foreigner there as well. 

In my wife’s Cantonese Chinese roots, they call you jook sing – a hollow bamboo reed, like you might look Chinese on the outside but on the inside, it’s not all there anymore. You’ve lost part of your culture. Or some say it’s like you’re not connected on either end, not belonging in either culture. 

This is the pain of bicultural people, of diaspora people. The doors and hearts that are closed to the fullness of who you are.

It’s the pain of colonized people – then with Jews under the Romans and in modern history. Willie James Jennings puts it this way. I’m gonna quote him at length here. 

He says,

“Imagine people in many places, in many conquered sites, in many tongues all being told that their languages are secondary, tertiary, and inferior to the supreme languages of the enlightened peoples. Make way for Latin, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, and English. These are the languages God speaks. These are the scholarly languages of the transcending intellect and the holy mind. Imagine centuries of submission and internalized hatred of mother tongues and in the quiet spaces of many villages, many homes, women, men, and children practicing these new enlightened languages not by choice but by force. Imagine peoples largely from this new Western world learning native languages not out of love, but as utility for domination. Imagine mastering native languages in order to master people, making oneself their master and making them slaves. Now Imagine Christianity deeply implicated in all this, in many cases riding high on the winds of this linguistic imperialism, a different sounding wind. Christianity was ripe for this tragic collaboration with colonialism because it had learned before the colonial moment egan to separate a language from a people. It had learned to value, cherish, and even love the language of Jewish people found in Scripture – but hate Jewish people.” 

Into this horrible habit we have of cultural and linguistic erasure sweeps Pentecost where the bicultural, diaspora, jook sing crowd hear people unlike them speak the good news of God to them in their mother tongue. 

It’s linguistic reinstatement, it’s cultural validation, it’s a decolonizing of the good news message of Jesus. It’s a revolution of the intimate.

Jennings one more time:

“God speaks people, fluently.”

Let me say that again:

“God speaks people, fluently. And God, with all the urgency that is with the Holy Spirit, wants the disciples of his only begotten Son to speak people fluently too.” 

This is the revolution of the intimate, this profound knowingness of God for all of who I am, just as I am. I’m part of the story, as my immigrant self, as by Black self, as my descendant of barely literate Scots-New Yorkers self, as my queer self, as whoever I am, just as I am. God knows and speaks to me and loves me as me.

And God calls us all to know and speak to one another in this same curious, knowing, generous, respectful, loving spirit as well. 

This is why that Board meeting of ours held power. It wasn’t just celebrating an anniversary or eating cake, it was the invitation of the Spirit to know and be known fully and deeply just as we are. We may not have heard all of the good news of Jesus or the mighty works of God in our mother tongue, but we had a revolution of the intimate nevertheless, as we were translated and known to one another. 

And that encouraged us to imagine the stories we dream that will be told some day about our justice work. 

These things are connected by the way. The revolution of the intimate – the safety and knowingness of our whole selves, and the awareness that God knows us, that God speaks us. This helps us flourish. 

As the passage says,

Your young will see visions.

    Your elders will dream dreams.

And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

The revolution of the intimate empowers visions and dreams. And the revolution of the intimate saves us. 

We’re near the end of AAPI Awareness month right now, and this month one of the books I’ve read by Asian-American authors was the autobiography of Grace Lee Boggs. Grace Lee Boggs is someone my wife Grace has been encouraging me to learn about and talk about for years, because she’s this important Asian-American activist whose story so profoundly embodies parts of this revolution of the intimate. 

Grace Lee Boggs grew up in New York City, in the early 1900s, a child of the first waves of Chinese immigrants to American cities over 100 years ago. Her family kind of split apart over time, and she became the one intellectual. She earned a PhD in philosophy way back in 1940, and was interested in radical politics and the transformation of American life to empower the poor and working class.

But her big pivot when she learned about the March on Washington – not the famous one from the 1960s with MLK and John Lewis and all but the one before that, way back in 1941, organized by Philip Randolph, that got the American military desegregated. 

When Grace Lee Boggs learned about the success of that march, she thought: Black Americans have the culture, the religion, the institutions, and the strength to make justice possible in this country. And as an adult child of Chinese immigrants and a PhD in philosophy, she decided to embed herself in the Black freedom struggle. First, she supported and partnered with a Trinidadian radical activist named C. L. R. James. Then later, while living in Detroit, she married a Black union leader named Jimmy Boggs, and together, Grace and Jimmy were instrumental leaders in the Northern Black freedom movement and the beginnings of the Black Power movement as well. 

Grace Lee Boggs lived an incredible life, an incredible story of the revolution of the intimate – two people of two cultures – African-American and Chinese-American, both oppressed and marginalized in this land, largely living apart, amidst mutual misunderstanding and stereotype and mistrust, joined in mutual knowing, mutual respect, and mutual action for the common good. 

These kinds of revolutions of the intimate truly help save us. 

Friends, I wonder about all the ways our world is looking for the revolution of the intimate.

I think about children who are cold to their parents, or even who are estranged from their parents, who need prodigal mothers and prodigal fathers to keep seeing them, keep looking out for them, keep moving toward them, keep loving them.

I think of apologies that could be made, gifts that could be given, love and encouragement that could be articulated. 

I think of communities of great difference – our schools, our city, even our church – where humble, generous knowing and sharing of stories helps us see visions and dream dreams together. 

I think of the anxious places in our hearts that need an encouraging word from God that in the details of who and where we are, we are seen and accompanied, so that our healing, saving journey can keep moving forward.

And I yearn, let’s go. Let’s not give up on the possibility of seeing and knowing one another, and growing the revolution of the intimate among us as well. 

And in all these places, I yearn: come Holy Spirit, speak your good news and mighty works to us again.

The So-Easy-to-Miss Fire of Our Great Love Stories

For the last week of our Lenten season, the theme is the fire of love. 

Our first scripture comes from a bit of erotic poetry, right in the middle of the Bible. It’s from a book called Song of Solomon that tells a poetic coming of age erotic love story that at the same time the tradition has read as an allegorical celebration of divine love. 

The love and fire line is in this bit from the eighth chapter.

Song of Solomon 8:6-7 (Common English Bible)

6 Set me as a seal over your heart,

        as a seal upon your arm,

for love is as strong as death,

        passionate love unrelenting as the grave.[b]

Its darts are darts of fire—

        divine flame!

7 Rushing waters can’t quench love;

        rivers can’t wash it away.

If someone gave

        all his estate in exchange for love,

        he would be laughed to utter shame.

Weird that love, this fiery force as strong, as unrelenting as death, has this fierce erotic longing in it. A kind of impulse in us that by itself may or may not be loving.

Weird that to talk about holy love, divine love, the biggest and deepest love in the universe, the Bible has steamy romantic poetry in it. Weird that these things would be connected. 

And weird that we all know that if someone had love, and someone else that this huge wealthy estate and tried to make a deal, everyone would laugh that person off. Who’d ever trade away a great love story? 

It’s priceless, the best thing in life.

And yet we give up, or skip out on, or even throw away great love stories all the time, all the time. 

Weird but true. 

Last week I met a woman who really wanted to show me pictures of her kid. 

I’ve done this before, tell people all about one of my kids, whether they cared or not. Probably not, but sometimes parents can’t help themselves.

Well, I met this woman because I was meeting with a small delegation of people whose friends or family members have been killed or taken hostage in the Hamas attacks on Israel in October.

She said to me and my friend:

would you like me to show you videos?

And my friend said:

would you like us to see them?

And she pulled out her phone, and we watched videos of her 22-year old son hiding in a shelter, images of her son being kidnapped and taken away, and an image of him as a small child, looking back charmingly at the camera. 

She turned to us emotionally and said:

I know he’s alive. We haven’t had proof of life in a little over two months. But I know he’s alive, and I know he’s coming home. I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but I know he’s coming home. 

A little part of me wanted to go political with the ensuing conversation. Wanted to ask about her about the thousands of Palestinian mothers who mourn their dead children. To ask about the Palestinian families who have no home to return to. 

But I didn’t. One, she knew. Most of the members of this delegation were leftists in Israel, no friend to their own government and its actions in Gaza and the West Bank. They knew.

But also, that wasn’t what this conversation was about. I was being asked to bear witness to the fierce grief and the fierce love of a mother, whose 22-year old son was taken hostage. 

Fierce, holy love, that says:

I know he’s coming home. And you’re welcome to visit me then and meet him. I hope you will.

Love is like this.

Love bears all things, believes all things. Love hopes all things, endures all things.

This day in the church calendar, Palm Sunday, is a weird one.

We remember Jesus and his students walking into Jerusalem, Jesus riding a donkey, the crowds waving palms and laying them down like a green carpet of welcome to the city as they cheered:

Hosanna, here is the one who will save us!

Jesus smiled. He loved the shouts and the singing.

But some part of him must have known it was kind of a fake love story.

On the other side of town, after all, the Roman governor Pilate rode into down on a battle horse, surrounded by soldiers, to bear in his body the glory of Rome, which would fill Jerusalem with its armies on big festivals, to keep the peace, so to speak, which was code for crushing dissent.

Jesus is the one they would crush this week. They would arrest him, mock him, beat him, crucify him naked on a wooden cross, with a crown of thorns atop his bleeding head. 

This day, a week earlier, Jesus had just mourned over his beloved Jerusalem. Pausing on his walk in, he had seen the cityscape before him and broke down crying: saying

– if you only knew the way of peace. But you don’t. And so the day is coming when your enemies will surround you and besiege you, and attack and utterly crush you.

He saw this vision through tears, the angry, weary tears of grief.

And now, he performed this kind of street art mockery of a king’s entrance, riding into the city unarmed, with a scrappy band of rural followers for a royal delegation, atop an old donkey, not a battle horse, determined to bring a great love story to a city consumed with fantasies of fights they could not win. 

Jesus didn’t bring the fight they were looking for.

Actually, the whole final week of Jesus’ natural life, the week we call the passion of Christ, is a week in his life filled with threats. Threats of Rome, threats of religious establishment, threats of denial and betrayal. Threat behind threat. Trauma behind trauma. 

And over and over again, the sort of script Jesus is expected to follow is the scripts we all follow in the face of trauma, threat, or even tension.

He’s expected to fight or flee – the old fight or flight syndrome for our species, for all animals.

Or he’s expected to freeze or fawn – these additions to fight and flight our psychologists help us understand. Because sometimes in the face of threats, we don’t fight, we don’t run away, we just shut down and freeze – silence, no emotion, no action. Or we fawn – we try to people please our way past the threat.

But weirdly, Jesus again and again won’t do any of these things.

No fight, no fight, no freeze, no fawn.

Just passion.

He just keeps showing up, present with his whole body, his whole self. 

And this is a great love story that no one, well almost no one, is ready for.

I’m obsessed with this TV show that ended a couple years ago, This is Us. That’s where I’m pulling this phrase “great love story” from today. Because the show uses that same phrase for the marriage at the heart of it. Jack and Rebecca have this epic, great love story, and who doesn’t like a good love story? 

I met this extraordinary woman named Grace when I was 19-years old, and she and I who later realized we are so different, at that time bonded over the sames we share – some same likes, same values, same passions, same looking for someone to welcome us into their arms just as we are, same longing for authentic in a world of fake. 

I love all this so much in Grace still. She’s stuck with me, even when I’ve mostly been a pain in the ass, and I can’t imagine anything but showing up with my whole self and sticking with her too. Because love is like that. And this imperfect but still great love story is so good. I’m so grateful.

But in many other relationships among family and friends, I’ve sometimes struggled to find my love stories there. Plenty of relationships in my life have gotten stuck or failed.

Which takes me back to This is Us. Because over time, I realized I was drawn to this show not so much by that romance as I was by all the other great love stories in it. Stories of parents and their children, stories of sisters and brothers and strangers and friends. This is Us is really about the us-ness of all of life.

It’s not easy. Misunderstanding, rivalry, addiction, conflict, even death get in the way.

And this is why great love stories are usually a little tragic too, because they usually end, by death or by some other means. Or they never even really get going the way they should because someone or another pisses them away. 

And there’s an ache that comes with that. 

It’s an ache that God shares with us, because God who is love has a great deal of experience of people doing so many other things besides living in God’s great love story for us all. So much fighting and fleeing and freezing and fawning. So little love sometimes. 

That’s part of the tragedy of the passion week of Christ. So little room for love around Jesus. 

But that’s part of why it’s so beautiful that in the passion week, there’s this great love story tucked in there that is so sacred, Jesus says that everywhere the good news of Christ travels, this story must be told.

So before we end today, let’s tell this great love story, and see if its truth, its lessons can’t rub off on us some. It’s in three of the four gospels, here in from the gospel of Mark. 

Mark 14:3-9 (Common English Bible)

3 Jesus was at Bethany visiting the house of Simon, who had a skin disease. During dinner, a woman came in with a vase made of alabaster and containing very expensive perfume of pure nard. She broke open the vase and poured the perfume on his head.

4 Some grew angry. They said to each other, “Why waste the perfume?

5 This perfume could have been sold for almost a year’s pay] and the money given to the poor.” And they scolded her.

6 Jesus said, “Leave her alone. Why do you make trouble for her? She has done a good thing for me.

7 You always have the poor with you; and whenever you want, you can do something good for them. But you won’t always have me.

8 She has done what she could. She has anointed my body ahead of time for burial.

9 I tell you the truth that, wherever in the whole world the good news is announced, what she’s done will also be told in memory of her.”

I have five things I’d love for us to notice.

One is that great love stories don’t have to be sexual or romantic. 

This story is sensual to be sure – this fancy vase and its gorgeous smelling perfume broke open over Jesus’ head. It’s sensual, and with other people at its center, it’s easy to see how it could have gone sexual. But it didn’t. 

Because the woman, whose name isn’t given here, and Jesus don’t let it. They’re not looking for that in each other, and they’re healthy enough in their bodies and their hearts and their self-control to not let a beautiful moment go sideways. 

In our guide this week, Ivy has brought in the wisdom of the poet Ada Limon, who’s got a love poem to her grandfather in there. Limon says there are too many love poems in the world for people who don’t deserve them.

“The bad partner gets a whole book, whereas the friend just gets a coffee.” 

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. Limon’s dead grandfather gets this beautiful poem. Jesus gets the whole bottle of perfume. Its owner gets this story about her great love told throughout the world for all time. 

What great love stories has God given us – human, animal, or divine? The love of friends and family and pets and strangers and all of creation. We don’t get an infinite number of love stories to be part of, so they’re all sacred. Most of them aren’t romantic and sexual at all. But that doesn’t make them any less important. 

Two, great love stories usually break the rules a little. 

In this week’s guide, you get a story of me speeding through the middle of the night from New York to Massachusetts to get to Grace, who’d had a bad concussion, I had heard. She had gone to the hospital and apparently kept asking:  am I pregnant? When she never had been and also asking: who gave me the shrooms? When I’m pretty sure, at least according to her, that had never happened. Funny now, but it freaked me out. 

So I drove to see her at totally unsafe speeds. Speeds I will never be specific about. That I certainly won’t admit to my children. A law-breaking speed at which I would tell you all to never drive. Totally unsafe.

But love often breaks the rules a little.

Like here. Women don’t touch non-relative men like this in that culture. They don’t go into the inner circle of a rabbi with his students. And they certainly don’t pour perfume on their heads. But Jesus basically says:

this is what love looks like. 

She has done a good thing for me. 

This is what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead had in mind about Jesus when he wrote: Love neither rules, nor is it unmoved; also it is a little oblivious as to morals. 

Not all the morals, right? Hurt someone and call it love, and you might be an abuser. Be unfaithful and call it love, and you’re a liar. 

But some of the so-called morals, some of the rules. Love is extra. You have to let it be. 

Related to this, the third thing:

Great love stories are extravagant. 

They’re impractical, wasteful, extravagant. The men here are arguing about this. They’re upset. What a waste. A year’s earnings wasted in this extravagant gesture. We could have done something more valuable. 

And Jesus is like:

you’re right, but you’re wrong. There’s time for value, there’s time for practical. There is. But not every time. 

Love isn’t practical. It may or may not be strategic. But we’ll die without it. 

I was at that event I mentioned this week, with the delegation of those whose family or friends had been killed or taken hostage, because a friend I love had invited me. This friend is a prominent Jewish leader, in their own way. And we show up with our friends. 

I don’t always agree with this friend, and certainly not with some of this friend’s allies and partners in public life. I think the militarism and aggression and the illusion that might ever makes right is always foolhardy. And so whether it be the military violence of Israel or of Hamas or most dominantly in the world, of my own country, I tend to mourn and protest and say with Jesus – as I personally discern the way of Jesus at least – this is not the way of peace.

My friend has told me before:

this is not practical when your enemies are trying to destroy you. What does love get you then?

And I don’t know. I’m not a politician a foreign policy expert or anything, but I dream of what a politics of extravagant love might look like. I wonder what national defense strategies and budgets of extravagant love might look like, because I believe the words of the scriptures that say that love can triumph over evil, and we are to overcome evil with good. 

Away from national defense and politics and all, if we want to be part of great love stories, we have to embrace extravagance. What it means to let someone give us more than we deserve or are comfortable receiving – more praise, more attention, more kindness, more help. And we have to get comfortable turning the dial way up on how to give those to others – bigger compliments, more wasteful presents, deeper encouragement. Longer, fuller, wholehearted presence. 

We can’t do that in every moment. We’re people, not God. But if we never do it, or if we rarely do it, we’ll be like that person that takes the estate, that takes money and time, and stuff instead of love. And how foolish would that be!

Fourthly, great love stories take whole-body, whole-hearted presence.

This big crowd of friends is getting ready for the Passover meal we’ll come to know as the Last Supper. And you know what happens with big dinners for friends and family, people are talking and arguing about all kinds of things. 

Where are they going to eat?

Who brought this or that dish or supply?

Old arguments show up, in this case about what’s worth spending money on. 

And one person, one person has the presence of heart to see the most important thing going on – that Jesus is about to die, and that this is a time to love him.

That’s how Jesus interprets this moment. That one person had the presence of heart and the courage of action to anoint him for burial, to prepare him for his death. 

When you know you are loved, like you really, really know it, you can do hard things. And so Jesus says that wherever his good news goes, what she has done will be told. In memory of her.

This is what love looks like. The courage to show up to people, to gatherings, to wherever we can with our hearts open, with our emotions accessible, with the courage to say and do what love looks like, best as we see it. 

There’s no rulebook for this. Not really.

Just keep wanting to learn what love looks like. Pay attention. And have the courage to go for it. 

Lastly, great love stories are windows into the truest truth of the universe, that God is love and that we are all the subjects of undying, extravagant longing and affection. 

This love is a last parable of the good news of Jesus in the gospel of Mark. 

It’s a thing that happened, and it’s also a story of what love looks like. See others with whole-hearts, and acting extravagantly for their wellness and the wellness of everyone involved too. Seeding another great love story. 

Some of us hear this talk with a sense of the relationships and the communities where we can live it. We know where our love stories lie, or at least we think we do, and I hope we are invited to the giving and receiving of love harder, deeper, fiercer. 

Some of us are lonely or heartbroken, though, and we’re maybe not even sure where our love stories can be playing out right now. 

Friends, I hope that you know that today you are one of the objects of God’s great love story, that the full attention of our Mother and Father of God is yours with delight and affection, hopeful that you can know just how valuable you are God, and hopeful that you can find your next great love stories as well. 

Great Fire of Love we call God, 

Everlastingly Broken, poured out, offering abundant love to all creation, 

Give us the tenderness, the zeal, the courage, the hope to love deep and full, and the courage to love again.