Speaker: Steve Watson

The Voice of God In The Absence of God

Welcome again to the season of Advent, my friends. 

Advent, these four weeks before Christmas, welcomes God with us in the person of Jesus. It’s a season of presents and parties and singing and prayer and family, for some of us the most wonderful time of the year.

But for some of us, so much not that. 

Advent is colder and darker days, sunset at 4:00. It’s busyness and debt and hard family situations and reminders of losses and griefs old and new.  The most ambivalent, or even painful, time of year. Not so good for a song.

This advent, I’m spending part of the evening along with Grace in our church’s beautiful Advent devotional Bless Us. You can find that online at our website. We’re entering Week Two. Highly recommend. 

But in the mornings, on my own, I’m looking at another Advent devotional by Kathy Escobar. It’s called A Weary World. This is a guide for those of us who are less in a Merry Christmas space, and more ready for a blue Christmas. It’s a guide into Advent for those of who are anxious, sad, or lonely. 

Advent, this season of longing for God with us, does not start with where we wish we were or where we want to get. Advent, like we explored in our liturgy last Sunday, advent starts wherever we are right now. 

And so, to help us toward the presence of love, joy, and peace that we may seek in this season, it might help to start by noticing where we feel the absence of those things. 

To see and find the communicating presence of God, Advent is a good time to notice all the places we sense the absence of God.

Where God is not, best as we can tell, is a good space to start. 

Our sorrows, our losses, our pains of waiting – this is where we long for God. 

Or as Fleming Rutledge puts it: Advent begins in the dark. 

Advent begins in the dark.

Friends, I don’t know all the public griefs and anxiety and weariness of our world that is heaviest to you in this season, although I have some sense of that. And I’ll end our sermon on longing for God in public darkness, and we’ll pray and lament together, specifically around the enormous suffering and death of people, especially of children, in Palestine right now. 

This isn’t a taking sides moment. As I’ve shared, I was crushed by Hamas’ violent, brutal murders and kidnapping of Israelis in early October, and I grieve with my Jewish and Israeli neighbors. I continue to do so, in multiple ways.

But in the two months since, Israel’s war on Hamas has resulted in many thousands of deaths in Gaza, and in great suffering for Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank. Jesus of course was born in Bethlehem, which is behind the Wall now in Palestine’s West Bank. And we are living through a kind of massacre of infants as collateral of war in this land. So our team felt like we couldn’t celebrate Christmas without grief and solidarity. We’ll end the sermon there.

And before then, I want to speak to whatever more private griefs or loss or anxiety or weariness you may bring into this season. I know the stories for some of you – for some of us, they are so big, so heartbreaking. 

I too know some of my own grief and anxiety in this season. So we’ll start there.

If at any point in the sermon, you become aware of your own sense of where God seems absent, I encourage you to bring that into this space of worship intentionally. We have papers and pens around the chairs for you. 

I ask you to name a private or public grief, anxiety or sadness on it. Name it as a word or phrase, or name it as a prayer – God, speak to me in XYZ. 

During communion and at the end of service, you can place those prayers, those experiences of weary world in the envelopes on the walls as a prayer for God to speak to you, right where you are. 

Let’s practice. 

Pray with me. 

God, please speak to me in my anxiety over my children. 

God, speak to our world in the deaths of children in Palestine. 

Our loving God with us, please speak to us all in our griefs, our fears, our big, wide messy, weary world. Help us begin again in the darkness.

Amen. 

We’ve got two scriptures for today, both from the first two weeks of our Advent devotional guide. The first is from the very beginning of the Bible, in the tragedy of Adam and Eve. 

Genesis 3:8-9 (Common English Bible)

8 They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

9 But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” 

This year’s theme for Advent is the voice of God.

And some of the times God seems to speak most clearly are when people are walking away.

Some of the best interactions with God seem to happen just while people are giving up on God.  

In the life of Jesus, two friends are walking away from Jerusalem. They’re traveling home on what was called the Emaus road. They are in despair over the absence of God. Where they wanted God most, all they sensed was the failure of God. And Jesus appears to them and speaks. 

Here, in the creation epic, Adam and Eve’s totally beautiful life is turning absolutely tragic. They have listened to the voices of scarcity and fear in their hearts, in their society, when the truth was there was plenty and nothing to worry about. Caving to that constant sense of never enough will break us all. 

And they mismanage their garden and their relationship and descend toward shame and blame and hardship. 

But on the way, God comes looking for them. The poetry of the old story is beautiful. As Adam and Eve are lost in their failure and shame, God’s out walking among the trees of the garden. And God speaks.

In both of these stories, God doesn’t start with a lecture or a statement or a lesson. No, God talks the way God loves to talk with us. 

God asks us a question. 

To the two friends walking down their lonely road, Jesus just asks,

“Hey, what are you talking about?” 

To this couple in despair, God says to them,

“Where are you?”

This is mostly how God speaks to us friends. Not looking so much to declare or teach or explain, but to engage us. To know and be known. To find out where we are, and how we are doing, so God can meet us there. Maybe to help us figure out where we are going and how we are doing so we can find God in those very places.

A psychologist whose work I follow once pointed out that religion tends to focus on the process of humans knowing God.

  • Where is God?
  • What is God like?
  • What does God do?
  • What does God command? 

And fine, this is interesting to us, sometimes helpful.

But for our well-being, our sense of belonging, our finding ourselves at home in our lives – and all the growth and health that comes from that, more important than what we think we know about God, is our faith and our experience that we are known by God.

God pays attention. 

God sees, God hears.

We are not alone. We matter to God. And everywhere, always, God is with us.  

Maybe this is why God leads with questions, because God wants to know us. God doesn’t want to talk at us but engage with us. God wants us to know that we are known. 

Friends, I teach this with you. I mostly try to live what I teach, really.

But as I said, I’ve had my own private spaces where I sense God’s absence. Some of those are old stories in me, but there have been some fresh anxieties for me in this season. Maybe two big ones in particular.

One of them has had to do with my work here at church. I’m not going to share the details, because objectively, this thing I found myself anxious about is going fine, actually going well. But I got my head in kind of an intense place about this that wasn’t helpful. My faith, my motivation, my hope all felt weak, which is some of what the absence of God looks like. 

And the other has to do with a couple of people I’m close to that I worry about. And these stories are private, they aren’t really mine to tell. But let’s just say I come honestly to the anxiety here.

And here too, I’ve felt stuck. I’ve sensed the absence of God. 

Then about a month ago, I started breaking out in hives every day – really red, itchy skin – different places every day. Total drag. 

(By the way, I share this in public at some risk. Friends, I am not looking for medical advice. I have seen a doctor – two doctors. I have a plan, it’s working.)

But before I found my plan, my wife Grace asked me:

Maybe it’s because you’re stressed, do you think?

Now this isn’t what my doctor thinks, but at the time Grace’s question was provocative for me. I didn’t feel defensive, which I can. But this time, I felt curious. I was like: I think I am stressed, why is that?

That question, which came to me through my best friend, I feel like that question came from God too. 

Where are you, Steve? Can we talk? Why are you so stressed?

Other questions emerged. I found myself emailing with two of you at church – a Board member, another trusted leader – about the church thing where I sensed God’s absence, and neither of them asked me a question, but something about opening up the topic, bringing my concerns out into the light was clarifying. 

This is the way life works, mostly. 

In secrecy, bad things grow and thrive. Whereas in honesty, in the open, the light gets in and clarifies and heals.

And so it was. As I was writing one of those emails, this wave of insight just kind of came over me. 

What are you feeling, Steve? And what is this really about?

And I thought: oh, it’s not about what’s happening at Reservoir in 2023 at all, is it? 

This is tapping old stories in my life. This is little Steve Watson, growing up in North Shore in the 70s and 80s, getting activated.

Old family stories of failed plans, and crushed dreams, and never enough money, and things falling apart – those stories were getting activated in me. 

And seeing the truth about where I was at – pretty stressed, old anxieties getting reactivated in me – that clarity about where I was helped me know what to do. 

I know what to do when I’m afraid of failure or not enough money or not enough whatever. I go to gratitude to ground me in truth that there is enough for me in God, and there can be enough for us all in this world. 

So I read and thought about gratitude. I preached on it here two weeks ago. I wrote some thank you cards, did one of those Asha thank yous I told you about where you write a thank you note to someone and read it out loud to them. 

This gratitude made my heart very full. Very full.

Because like I’ve said, it’s hard to be grateful and anxious at the same time. The gratitude shifts things. 

And I started paying attention to the voices of encouragement in my life. Encouraging emails from a couple of you. Encouraging words in my daily Bible reading. Encouraging words I sensed for me from God as I prayed. 

Encouragement strengthens you. It strengthens me. 

It’s not what we call spiritual bypassing. That’s using God, or prayer, or church or religion to avoid bad feelings. It’s encouraged sometimes in the church.

Avoid experiences, realities, truths that are sad or hard. Just look on the bright side. 

That doesn’t help or heal. It only pushes our problems underground for a while, until they show up again bigger and more unruly.

This is different. Telling the truth about where we are, but hoping even a little bit that God is still there, that God has something to say – or at least something to ask – and then waiting and responding to what comes.

That’s faith. That’s Advent, that’s Jesus, that’s the Spirit of God doing its thing in the dark. 

Friends, if you sense God’s absence somewhere, don’t avoid that. Face it. Tell the truth. And hold it before God, and before friends if you can too, in the light, and see what happens.

The whole write it on the paper and put it on the wall today in church – that exercise is a way to start.

Friends, I mentioned that our sense of God’s absence, and God finding us there, isn’t just private, it’s connected to the big public world we experience together.

And I want to read one more scripture to take us there. It’s from the second week of our guide, also from the big, beautiful 8th chapter of the letter to the Romans. Our bit goes like this:

Romans 8:22-26 (Common English Bible)

22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning together as it suffers together the pains of labor,

23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.

24 For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what one already sees?

25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

26 Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with groanings too deep for words. 

This is to me one of the truest and most beautiful bits in the Bible.

What is all of creation doing but suffering?

We see this in Israel, generations of trauma re-evoked by the most violent attack in its history this October.

We see this in Palestine, whose occupation and lack of freedom are often forgotten and neglected by much of the world, but before us now again as thousands of civilians, including thousands of innocent children are killed in Israel’s war on Hamas.

This is big and important. It is the land of the birth of most of the world’s faith. The land of the birth of Jesus. It matters greatly. 

But truthfully, it is also one great suffering that has our attention now, amidst so many sufferings in creation. Deaths of children, degradation of the environment, the suffering of so many people and animals and other creatures. 

It feels so much like the absence of God.  

We’re told here, though, to listen for the groans that come out of suffering. 

For me, in Palestine and Israel, I’ve tried for two months to listen to the grief. And for me, voices of grief I particularly trust are those of The Parents’ Circle – Palestinian and Israel parents who have had children killed in the conflict, and who now work toward just peace by grieving together. 

Two men from this circle who I have met and embraced are a Palestinian Muslim named Basim Aramin and an Israeli Jew named Rami Elhanan. Basim grew up in the West Bank and as a teenager, the only Israeli Jews he ever saw were occupying soldiers. He had seen a solider shoot a child, watched that child die. He understandably hated them. As a teenager, he’d throw things at Israeli soldiers – sticks, rocks, bottles, once at 17, an old hand grenade he and friends found in a cave. It didn’t explode. No one was hurt. But he was arrested, he did seven years in an Israeli prison. Prison mostly radicalized him toward greater resentment and hate, as prison is good at doing, actually. 

But a set of interactions with a single guard began to change this. This one guard treated him with respect and dignity, like a human. This guard acknowledged he was not a settler, but had rights to land and freedom. Basam’s journey toward the humanization of the enemy continued more and more over time. He eventually earned a university degree in history, with a specialization in Holocaust studies, as he sought to advocate for his people, while having empathy for his enemies. 

All this was sorely tested when Basam’s daughter was killed by a rubber bullet, fired by an Israeli soldier into a crowd. 

The same was true for Rami Elhanan. When he was a young man, he served in the military, as all young adults in Israel do. He served in the early 70s, during war time, and most of his friends were killed in that war. He had a great deal of anger and hatred within as a result. 

Years later, his daughter was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber. His anger, his hatred inflamed so  much more. And he stayed in this place for a couple of years, until he began to meet a few Israeli Jews older than him who also had lost children in the conflict, but who had decided this created an urgent need to struggle for peace. Through them, he met dozens of Palestinian Arabs who had lost children as well, and grieved with their Israeli Jewish counterparts. This so surprised and shook him, that he was drawn to join this movement of grieving parents who seek just peace together. 

I listened to them both in an online seminar last week, as Basam continues to insist on the need for freedom and safety for Palestinians, just as he insists upon the same for Israeli Jews. He says – one state, two states, five states, I don’t care, but none of us are going anywhere. We need to see the humanity of one another, and insist upon human rights and dignity for us all.

And even as Rami continues to grieve Israeli losses from October, and the grief of hostages taken, he says – hard as it is now, we need to step back and look at the causes of all this. Hamas is awful, he says, but Hamas did not create the conflict or the occupation. The occupation and the conflict created Hamas. We need to end the occupation, and we need to make peace for us all. 

Hope is hard to find around this conflict right now, because justice and peace can not be seen. Not even hints of it maybe. But in these men, in many others, I hear at least the foundation of some hope. 

Could their groans also be labor pains? This longing, this groaning for better – could there be a birth of more justice, more peace, more shared human recognition of dignity that creates the conditions for peace. Maybe, all we have is a maybe, but sometimes that’s all we get to struggle for what’s good. 

And with the Spirit’s help, perhaps we can hope with them, with groans too deep for words. 

After all, all of creation, the scripture tells us, is hoping for two things – for adoption, for us all to know and be afforded and live within the full dignity of children of God, who are treasure, who belong. And redemption, that good can always grow out of evil, that even the hardest ground can birth something good again.

Friends, I want to lean into these groans, these groans that hope for adoption and redemption to be manifest. 

We’ll do so with this lament over the suffering of Palestine, in hopes that it will be what it is, and that it will perhaps keep teaching us to groan in hope amidst suffering, to yearn for the light to shine amidst the greatest darkness, and to look for the communicative, loving presence of God where God seems most absent.

You can listen if you like. Or pray these words aloud with me. 

LAMENT

The Way of Gratitude

I hope you all had a good long weekend. A belated happy Thanksgiving to those of you who celebrate.

It was a long, interesting weekend for my family. Kids were all home, which is a joy we don’t take for granted, as it’s not true most days anymore. There was some feasting with family in our house and in a local nursing home as well. And probably like your family gatherings, if you ever have those, there was a mix of warmth and belonging and a little bit of loss and struggle too. 

We did something new for us as a family this year on Thanksgiving Day. Beyond the turkey and the turkey trotting, we went to the annual Day of Mourning event sponsored by New England’s indigenous communities, held along the oceanside right by Plymouth Rock. That was a sad and complex event for our white and Asian-American family to attend, but it felt like a valuable way to mark the day as well.

Thank you to our friends there, the Tolles, who let us know about that. Reservoir is a special community, friends. I believe that relationships here can really enrich our lives. I appreciate you all for that. 

However you spent the holiday, friends, I hope you’re not all done with Thanksgiving. Because in keeping with the season, for our final Way of Jesus sermon this fall, we’re going to talk about The Way of Gratitude. And then I hope we’ll practice this way of gratitude – together, and throughout the days to come. 

When I lead us in prayer before communion, you’ll have the opportunity if you like to add your own “thank you” to God.

Our text for today is from the gospel of Luke. It goes like this:

Luke 17:11-17 (Common English Bible)

11 On the way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee.

12 As he entered a village, ten men with skin diseases approached him. Keeping their distance from him,

13 they raised their voices and said, “Jesus, Master, show us mercy!”

14 When Jesus saw them, he said, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” As they left, they were cleansed.

15 One of them, when he saw that he had been healed, returned and praised God with a loud voice.

16 He fell on his face at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. He was a Samaritan.

17 Jesus replied, “Weren’t ten cleansed? Where are the other nine?

18 No one returned to praise God except this foreigner?”

19 Then Jesus said to him, “Get up and go. Your faith has healed you.”

I used to read this passage and think Jesus sounded like a nagging parent. Like: what’s wrong with you kids who won’t write your thank you notes? This reading feels maybe justified – it is good to thank someone who has helped you. And sure, of course one should give praise to one’s creator God. But just because it was justified didn’t mean it did anything. Should’ing all over somebody rarely inspires them. At least not me. 

But I read this a little differently now. Let me share five fun facts about this passage that help me hear something different. Maybe they will for you too.

So fun fact, number one, Jerusalem.

Jesus is on a long, hard road trip with a horrible ending. The whole middle of the gospel of Luke is set during this walk Jesus takes from the region of the Sea of Galilee to the city of Jerusalem. It’s 120 miles, like walking from Boston along the Mass Pike all the way to New York. That’s a long way to walk. Jesus also faces increasing opposition to his work along the way and predicts that he’ll be killed when he arrives there.

When he first sees Jerusalem in the distance, he breaks down in tears, weeping over the city, as he imagines the Roman empire not only killing him that week, but destroying the whole place in the generation to come. So Jesus has every reason to be sad, anxious, and grumpy on this journey – and maybe he is sometimes – but we also see him like he is here, noticing people in need, looking to empower, help, and heal.

Fun fact, number two. The Samaritans.

Three times in this journey Luke brings up the Samaritans.  

The first time, Jesus and his crew walk into a Samaritan village, and not only are they not fed or housed, they are asked to leave. Then two of Jesus’ buddies ask him if they should try to pray down fire from heaven on them. Jesus of course tells them that is an awful idea, but you wonder why in the world are things so tense? 

Well, history tells us that it’s for lots of reasons. First century Jews and Samaritans are neighbors. But they live in separate villages mostly, and do everything they can to avoid each other. The beef goes back centuries. In the 9th and 8th century BC Israel had a civil war. Half of the people from that division got conquered by the Assyrian empire and some of them were assimilated into a people called  Samaritans. Two or three centuries later Jews and Samaritans had a series of conflicts over the new temple in Jerusalem and whose homeland that region was. In the second century, the Samaritans were allies with a Greek empire in a huge war against the Jews, a violent conflict that gave birth to the holiday of Hanukkah. In revenge for that, Jerusalem Jews destroyed the Samaritans’ temple and violently raided the whole area. And then a century after that, right around when Jesus was born, Samaritans – in revenge for that whole temple massacre – didn’t destroy the Jerusalem temple, but they scattered human bones all around the temple to defile it – kind of like when today you hear about a synagogue or church getting vandalized or burned. 

So this was no petty conflict. It was a centuries-old, violent cultural feud between neighboring peoples. Into this setting, when Jesus tells a story about what love looks like, he tells a story of a Samaritan, re-neighboring the land with his kindness. 

And then here, when ten people are healed with Jesus’ help, the one Jesus honors for his gratitude is also a Samaritan. Jesus is trying to heal not just bodies, but old conflicts, as he too re-neighbors the land. 

Fun fact, number three. Skin diseases.

On a number of occasions, Jesus interacts with people who have some sort of skin disease. Mostly, he heals them. Our Bibles have translated this skin disease as leprosy. So we hear that Jesus heals lepers. 

But scientists are pretty sure that there was nothing like leprosy in the first century Near East. Instead, they think this skin condition we hear about is something like severe eczema. 

As a parent of a kid who had severe eczema when he was little, this hits different for me now. I remember how much that kid would itch and itch and itch, unable to sleep at night as he scratched himself redder and redder. I remember a preteen girl I had in class years ago when I was a teacher, and how embarrassed she was by her severely dry, flaky skin. 

And it moves me that Jesus healed people with severe eczema – that he cared about that. 

For Jesus, though, and his contemporaries, this skin disease wasn’t just flaky, dry skin. That peeling skin reminded them of death, so much so that this skin condition rendered you ceremonially unclean. 

This is a complicated part of the Bible’s culture that reminds us that we live in a really different time and place. But in this religious culture, there were a bunch of things that could happen with your body that weren’t anyone’s fault, but made it so you couldn’t go to the temple. One scholar who writes about this time calls all this calls these conditions the forces of death. People had these superstitions about these conditions because they reminded people of death. 

And it turns out that these are many of the conditions Jesus healed, because he wanted people to be able to participate in the spiritual and religious life of their communities. And he just hated death. He wanted people to live and in their bodies and hearts just be full of life! I love that about Jesus.

So I wonder if here Jesus heals this skin condition, because people think it’s a force of death. And I wonder if Jesus sort of harshes on nine people’s ingratitude because not being grateful is its own kind of force of death in our life. 

Speaking of healing – Fun fact, number four. Faith.

Jesus was quite insistent that he is not responsible for people’s outcomes. They are responsible at least as much as him. That’s pretty deep when you think about it. Everything in our life – all the bad stuff – it might not be our fault at all. But in the end, everything in our life is our responsibility. We have to live with ourselves.

When Jesus says goodbye to this grateful Samaritan with the now shiny, healthy skin, he says to him: it wasn’t magic. It wasn’t mostly me. He says: your faith has healed you.

Your faith has healed you. Jesus says that a lot. And I think he really means it. 

Now this doesn’t mean the opposite is true. Life is not just an algebra equation.

Don’t ever say to someone else that they didn’t get what they wanted from God because they didn’t have faith. Please don’t ever think that about yourself either. Life is just more complicated than this. There are so many reasons things get better and things don’t get better.

But we know that mercy and kindness, including the mercy and kindness we welcome from God, matters. And we know that faith matters too. 

In this case, Jesus’ mercy, plus the Samaritan’s faith create the conditions for healing.

And now fun fact, number five. Gratitude. 

Ten people are making their way to the priest, as Jesus recommended. And they all start looking at each other – like hey, what has happened to your skin? You are looking so fine now. And they: thank you, and hey, wait, you are looking pretty smooth and shiny yourself. How about that? It must have been kind of wild. 

What happens then? I wonder how many keep going to the priest for their ceremonial reentrance to the religious community. And I wonder why the Samaritan is the only one who goes back to say thank you to Jesus. Would that Samaritan even have been welcomed by the priest anyway? I don’t know.

Whatever the reason, Jesus notices. He’s like:

this is a good thing, this gratitude, this giving praise to God.

What does Jesus mean by this?

  • Is he commanding us all to thank and praise God?
  • Is he annoyed at the ones who didn’t?
  • Is he honoring the good character of this grateful Samaritan?
  • Being honest that it feels good when someone says thank you?

I don’t know. Maybe all four.

I think it’s OK to acknowledge that our gratitude is good for God. God isn’t petty or needy, I don’t think, but God is relational. God appreciates attention and love and gratitude, like any good parent. So sure, thankful people make God happy.

But I guess in light of all these things – Jesus’ interest in healing enmity between people, Jesus’s awareness of the healing power of our outlook on God and our outlook on life, Jesus’ desire to destroy the forces of death among us – I think in light of all that, it’s fair to say that Jesus wants more gratitude in our lives because it’s good for us as well.

Gratitude helps people live longer, happier, healthier. Gratitude bonds people in relationships. It cultivates less resentful and entitled communities, and more generous and grateful ones.

Gratitude is really good for us. 

This is one of the foundational points of Diana Butler Bass’ really powerful book called Grateful. It’s about the “transformative power of giving thanks.”  

Bass starts her book with what seems like a riddle. The great majority of Americans report experiencing profound gratitude at least every week. 

And yet, as a society, we also are growing in the bitter fruits of ingratitude. We are more anxious and resentful than ever, less optimistic and less trustful, and more compulsive and addicted.

What’s going on here? And what to do about it? 

Well, it may be that our gratitude is too narrow and too personal.

We may be grateful for our good luck or our material blessings. 

But gratitude isn’t just a happy feeling when something good surprises us. It’s an ethic of humility, relationality, and wonder. Gratitude notices the many unearned goodnesses in our lives – from the very breath in our lungs on. Every good gene in our body, every person who’s ever loved us or even done us kindness, every good in the world that we enjoy or depend upon. We didn’t make that happen. It has come to us as a gift. 

To cultivate attention to these gifts and to thank our Creator and to thank our fellow creatures who have gifted us gives credit where credit is due. It’s a kind of healthy and freeing acknowledgement of how interdependent we all are. No one does life alone. 

And it better connects us, grows optimism and resilience in us, opens us up to more smiles, more joy. Protects us from our worst selves. 

Diana Butler Bass points out that gratitude also isn’t just a “me” thing, it’s a “we” thing. Gratitude in our relationships, among our family and friends and acquaintances, and in our public life heals our communities and our society. 

It’s really hard to be grateful and greedy at the same time. 

It’s hard to be grateful and critical at the same time. 

It’s really hard to be grateful and resentful at the same time.

Maybe you can do it, if you try, but it’s hard. 

It’s really hard to be grateful and violent at the same time. 

So I think the Spirit of God would long for more gratitude in our public lives. 

One place I’ve seen this is through our partners in India with the organization Asha. Asha is a public health and community development NGO in New Delhi, India. Their health care and education and empowerment programs among the urban poor are transformational. When I’ve traveled to visit them, I’ve done so with teachers and social workers and doctors from our community who have volunteered with them but also learned from their powerful, effective work.

But the thing that grips many friends of Asha the most is the way they do their work in community. Their model of community empowerment is driven by a series of spiritual, relational values, one of which is gratitude. 

Asha’s leader, and friend of Reservoir Dr. Kiran Martin puts it this way. She writes:   

Gratitude is not just a feeling of thankfulness in response to a gift or a kind gesture. Gratitude is a way of life. It is a conscious choice to focus on life’s blessings rather than on its shortcomings. It magnifies goodness and therefore blocks toxic emotions such as envy, resentment or depression that destroy one’s optimal well being.

One of the ways Asha has lived this value in their communities has been through gratitude campaigns. One form this has taken over the years has been encouragement for people to write thank you letters to another person and then instead of just mailing or delivering that letter, to read it out loud face to face to the person you are thanking. 

Have you ever done this? Written a thank you note to someone and then read it to them, face to face? Has anyone ever done this for you?

I don’t think I’d ever done this before I got to know the work of Asha. But I have since then, a number of times. And each time a few things happen. 

Sometimes the person receiving the thanks is a little awkward or shy about it. But mostly they smile, it surprises them and makes them happy. They say thank you. 

For the person who wrote and read the letter, the effect is at least as powerful. The gratitude releases joy. There’s almost always a hug or at least a handshake. Gratitude sparks love and connection. It’s so good. Highly recommend this, my friends. 

Another place we can see gratitude happen together is civic gratitude. Our own Ed Gaskin is behind a project in Boston that honors the contributions of Black women to life in our region. There are 212 banners along Blue Hill Avenue in Roxbury in Dorchester, each of whom names and shows the picture of a Black woman who made contributions to a better community or a better city. 

There are authors and activists, seamstresses and politicians, bishops and educators and grandmothers to families of foster children. So that as you walk or drive up and down Blue Hill Avenue, you’re encouraged to give thanks for the contribution of mostly unsung leaders of our past, and wonder who are the unsung leaders among us now, who is the unsung leader within us even. 

This isn’t just a long overdue act of recognition and respect in Boston. It’s also a profound gift to our community. Ed, we appreciate you for spearheading this incredible initiative. It’s an example to us all. Thank you, Ed. 

You know, we have leaders in public life – lots of them – who lead by making us more fearful, more entitled, and less grateful. Once you start looking for this, it’s easy to spot. Because fear, entitlement, and resentment stir their own kind of loyalty, their own kind of action. But it’s just terribly toxic for everyone involved, and it brings out all the ugly among us. Don’t follow leaders like this. Don’t be one.

Instead, we can respond to leaders, we can be leaders who lead by cultivating hope, gratitude, and love. One simple way Diana Butler Bass encourages this is that in any public sphere where we have leadership whatsoever, create space for gratitude. This can be in a family, a household, or a friend group, encouraging little daily or weekly rituals of gratitude. If we ever lead meetings – even small ones – we can open or close the meetings with invitations to thank someone for their help at work or to connect around our gratitude. 

I’m going to wrap up here, with an invitation to two ways we can practice public, community-based gratitude together right now.  

There’s more to our lives than goodness and blessing. Some of us are fresh off of complicated family gatherings. Some of us enter these holiday seasons, and these dark, early days of winter are sad, lonely, or scared. I mentioned being at a Day of Mourning event on Thursday. There’s lots to grieve in our lives and in this world. We’re not thankful for everything. We can’t be.

But we can have more joy, more connection, more health and goodness in us and around us, when we can be thankful in everything.

So in just a moment, I’ll lead us in prayer before communion. And I’ll leave space where as many of you as want to can call out loud something you are thankful for. Be as loud as you’re able, so it’s easier for us to share in your thanks. Keep it short, just say: Thank you God for…. (whatever you like). And don’t worry if more than one person goes at once. Let’s have a kind of festival of thanksgiving moment together.

And then communion itself. When we eat these bits of cracker, drink this bit of juice together in memory of Jesus, we are practicing communion – connection, fellowship together with God. And we are also practicing what Catholic Christians call “the Eucharist” which means giving thanks. We’re thanking God for feeding us, and thanking God for sharing God’s forgiveness and love and life with us, in the person of Jesus who walked among us, lived, died, and rose again, and who is with us still by the Spirit of Jesus. 

So friends, let’s give thanks together.

The Way of Resurrection

I serve on the Board of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, with which our church partners to pursue justice in this city. 

Board members take turns chairing those meetings and usually at the start, there’s some sort of brief question that lets us connect personally. And our chair last week’s opening connection question was a really simple one. He just said:

what’s your word of the day? What’s your word of the day? 

People were like, I don’t know, and we said stuff like: joy or troubled or ready or whatever. And our chair that day said:

my word of the day is resurrection. 

And on we went with our meeting. And it was a doozy. We had a lot to talk about and the meeting went long.

But just as our chair was about to wrap things up, he said:

I told you at the start that my word was of the resurrection. And I want to end by telling you why.

Back story here that we all knew already: many of us on the Board were recently in attendance at my friend’s public hearing for termination of his parole. 

This friend and colleague of mine is older than me. And a long time ago, when I was a baby, and he was barely a man – 18 years old – he committed a violent crime. After conviction, he served many years of prison time. And since his release, despite being a model citizen and community leader, he has been on probation for decades, which has continued to cost him money and opportunities and hardship. Recently, he had an opportunity to go before a panel to consider termination of his probation – to some 50 years after his crime – to at last be a truly free man. And many of us had been there in support. 

And now our friend says:

Today, my word of the day is resurrection, because today is the exact anniversary of the day I committed that horrible crime so long ago. And once I had nothing but regret. I have regret still. I wish I could undo the harm. But today I also have resurrection, because I’m a new man. I have a new life. And I wanted to honor that this day.

The way of resurrection, my friends. That’s our subject today. 

In this season in which we reflect on the way of Jesus – some of the most important ways we can live in and honor the life and teaching of Jesus, that we can find love, joy, peace – all the good things here, we are remembering the death and resurrection of Jesus, which are so prominently featured in the Bible’s reflections on Jesus Christ. 

Last week I talked about the way of surrender, how to die.

And this week I want to talk about the way of resurrection, which really is how to live. 

We’re not going to read a passage about Jesus, but a much older one, also a kind of story of resurrection. 

Genesis 18:1-15 (Common English Bible)

18 The Lord appeared to Abraham at the oaks of Mamre while he sat at the entrance of his tent in the day’s heat.

2 He looked up and suddenly saw three men standing near him. As soon as he saw them, he ran from his tent entrance to greet them and bowed deeply.

3 He said, “Sirs, if you would be so kind, don’t just pass by your servant.

4 Let a little water be brought so you may wash your feet and refresh yourselves under the tree.

5 Let me offer you a little bread so you will feel stronger, and after that you may leave your servant and go on your way—since you have visited your servant.”

They responded, “Fine. Do just as you have said.”

6 So Abraham hurried to Sarah at his tent and said, “Hurry! Knead three seahs of the finest flour and make some baked goods!”

7 Abraham ran to the cattle, took a healthy young calf, and gave it to a young servant, who prepared it quickly.

8 Then Abraham took butter, milk, and the calf that had been prepared, put the food in front of them, and stood under the tree near them as they ate.

9 They said to him, “Where’s your wife Sarah?”

And he said, “Right here in the tent.”

10 Then one of the men said, “I will definitely return to you about this time next year. Then your wife Sarah will have a son!”

Sarah was listening at the tent door behind him.

11 Now Abraham and Sarah were both very old. Sarah was no longer menstruating.

12 So Sarah laughed to herself, thinking, I’m no longer able to have children and my husband’s old.

13 The Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Me give birth? At my age?’

14 Is anything too difficult for the Lord? When I return to you about this time next year, Sarah will have a son.”

15 Sarah lied and said, “I didn’t laugh,” because she was frightened.

But he said, “No, you laughed.”

So this is a story about a lot of things.

It’s a story about hospitality. Abraham and Sarah are with all their animals, all their people one day, just chilling in their giant tent, as one does in the ancient near east, when three strangers come on by. 

And they cook them an enormous meal. Abraham’s like: how about a little bit of bread? And then he yells: hey, Sarah, get like gallons of flour. And he and a house servant slaughter and roast an entire cow. Young cow, maybe baby cow, but still, that’s a large animal. And it takes a long time to do all this cooking. 

The tradition tells us: this is the way. Go all out for your guests. Centuries later, the New Testament book of Hebrews looks back on this tale and says:

never forget to practice hospitality, because in doing so, you might entertain angels unaware. 

Beautiful, you all. Have a ton of food on hand. You never know. 

The three men, angels bit too – this is also a story about the mysterious nature of God. After all, the tradition, even the text itself, can’t decide who these visitors are. At one moment, it says they are three men. But then at the beginning of the passage and in the bit right after it too, it says God appeared to them and spoke. 

Who is it – people or God? 

A lot of the tradition, like that book of Hebrews, splits the difference and calls angels. But that doesn’t help much, because we don’t really know what angels are – the word just means messengers.

Some Christian artists imagine these three people to be three persons, three manifestations of God as Father, Son, Holy Spirit. The famous beautiful Russian icon of this story is simply called Trinity. 

Who knows, my friends? Not me. 

I do know that the Spirit of God can be present to creation in many ways, and God can speak in many forms. We can sometimes sense the presence, even the voice of God through a book, a film, a song, a friend, an ocean. Who am I to say what happened here? 

So again, it’s a story about a lot of things.

But among them, it’s a story of resurrection.

Resurrection is the rising of the dead, that which is dead coming to new life. And there’s a story of resurrection here.

Abraham and Sarah’s dreams were dead. Their sense of God’s greatest, most important promise over their lives was dead as far as they were concerned.

As a young couple, Abraham and Sarah, Abraham’s brother’s family, his nephew, his father – they had all left Babylon and traveled West in search of a better land and a better life for their children. 

Theirs is the dream of migrants, of immigrants – to chart a better future for their family. Like all immigrant dreams, there was suffering too. A grown child – Abraham’s brother – died too young. Abraham’s father was overcome with grief. But even in the suffering, the dream lived on.

And for Abraham, this dream got real spiritual too. Everything he knew or hoped about God was bound up with this dream of a future. This worshiper of the gods of storms and wind and farming and moon believed that a single creator God was speaking to him – promising him a hope of blessing. That blessing to him looked like good land to live on, a good future for his family that would in time become a clan and then a nation, and mostly that blessing looked like descendants – children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and so on to see the blessing forward.

But what happens to a dream like this that seems so sure but year after year doesn’t come true?

He and Sarah move through their youth and into middle age, and year after year, there are no children. New moon after new moon, Sarah sees her menstrual cycle continue over and over, and no pregnancy, until her cycle slows and then stops entirely.

And though there are so many ways we can have a legacy and a blessing, to them, in their imagination, the dream is dead. No children. No legacy. For all they know, no land – they’re still living in a tent after all. No blessing. Perhaps no God.

Maybe it was all an illusion, wishful thinking. 

Until these men, or these angels, or these gods – whoever they are – come on by and share a big, long meal, and then get up, saying,

“By the way, we’re coming back next year to meet your baby boy.” 

Sarah’s like,

“Ha! How can it be!” 

Or maybe,

“Ha, ha. How can that be?”

But the messengers insist it will be so, and the story tells us it was.

Life where there was none to be. Renewed dream. Renewed blessing. Renewed faith. Resurrection.

Let’s pause here, and notice what resurrection is not.

Resurrection is not an undoing or a reversal of the past. Where there is resurrection, something or someone has died. That still happened.

Resurrection is a second chance, a new life, or a new lease on life. That’s amazing. But it also doesn’t change the past. 

Abraham’s brother is still dead. Abraham’s father still died grieving his lost son. We meet the survivors of that family line, and they’re pretty jacked up. And Abraham and Sarah don’t get back the 25 years they’ve been waiting for the child they didn’t have. 25 years of dying hope, 25 years of dying faith is a hard thing, friends. This couple knew a lot of suffering. They made some pretty awful choices as they tried to find their way together. 

They can’t get any of that back. They’re also going to be pretty old parents, and that’ll change their experience, and what they do and don’t see too. 

I think of my friend I serve with in GBIO. He’s a man he never knew he would become. He has a good life. I’m proud to know him. But he still doesn’t know if he’s getting off probation. And he still has to live with the guilt of what he did so long ago. And the lost years, the loss of his twenties and thirties while in prison, many other losses that come with that. 

New life, new freedom, new faith are beautiful gifts. Resurrection is a mighty work of God that opens up life and joy, faith, hope, and love in the present and the future, but it does not erase the death in the past. 

I got a card recently for someone I love who I think can brood over lost chances in the past a bit. The card’s got a quote from the actress Marcia Wallace that says,

“Don’t look back. You’re not going that way.”

The past is over and dead. 

Dreams of returning to some better past, real or imagined, are not God’s dreams.

Making your country great again – whatever that’s supposed to mean – is folly.

Getting back to that way you felt when you were __ (you fill in the age that comes to mind) – it’s not happening. 

Our relationships, our health, our churches, our families, our whole creation has no reverse gear. 

The past is dead. We can enjoy the memories. We can grieve the losses. But we’re only alive today, and we can only go forward. 

But in the present and with our future stretched out before us, the best alternative to regret or anxiety, to illusion or despair, is to hope in God for resurrection, trusting that we never know when new life will appear. 

Earlier this year, I was talking about some of the griefs of my life with a mentor of mine, someone I think of as a pastor to me. 

I was talking about a couple people I love and wondering why certain things were hard for them. And as parents and pastors do, I had regrets – would things be different now if I had been a better or more effective person a few years ago? And I had worries – real, legitimate concerns about how things were going to turn out? Mostly, though, I was just stuck – like things seem bad and I have no idea what to do. And I was a little angry too, if I’m going to be honest. I wasn’t sure if I was angry at God, angry at myself, angry at life in some generalized way. But I was frustrated. 

And my mentor, who knows me well and has heard a lot about the people I was sharing about, he said: would it be alright with you if I share what I see, maybe a different perspective 

And I said:

of course, please?

And he said:

what if what you’re seeing right now are actually stories of resurrection?

I wasn’t expecting that. I was talking about people whose lives I wanted to going better.

And he was like:

well, what do we know about the risen Jesus? 

And I was like:

I don’t know, this one of those “what is the teacher thinking” kind of questions.

And I said:

I know. What do we know about the risen Jesus? 

And he reminded me:

well, he rose with scars, didn’t he? He rose with scars. 

Like Abraham and Sarah’s resurrected dream – having a baby in late middle age, after 25 years of waiting, doubt, bad choices – that is not the same thing as having that baby young when your hearts are full of God’s promise.

The same with Jesus. When he is risen from the dead, his closest friends don’t recognize him at first. But in time, they do, in part because of his scars, the marks of his suffering. 

And my mentor shared his perspective on the stories I’ve told. How this person is alive when that wasn’t guaranteed, how this other person may have struggles, but is in a far better place than last year, how a relationship between me and one other had mended and grown so richly. 

He wondered with me – maybe things aren’t quite as you’d hope, but look what God has done? New life with scars maybe, but new life still.

I felt like Jesus’ friends, like how had I not seen it? What my mentor was saying was true. But my despair over things not being perfect made it so I missed the new life that was present.

This shift of perspective was interesting, because it didn’t just lift my spirits, make me more hopeful and thankful, it somehow helped me get unstuck too. 

Like if God was working resurrection, if new life was growing, then there were things I do to help. There were new shoots growing I could water, like little flames I could blow some oxygen on. 

Because resurrection is like this, right? God can work redemption stories, second acts, new possibilities. But we can invest in those new things with our hope and our help. Most things God creates, maybe all things God creates, God co-creates with the universe. We are invited to co-create with God, to co-labor with God in the work of resurrection. 

So with this child, I can write to them and praise all the growth and resilience I see. And with this other person, there’s a way to communicate my trust and availability and love and prayers. 

We’re not always passive in resurrection stories. If we’re people who believe in redemption, if we’re people who believe in second acts, second chances, better futures, then we hope and pray and help see those into being with God. 

This is why I have a semicolon tattooed on my wrist, right where I’ll see it all the time. I was an English teacher, and I just like semicolons, so there’s that. But it’s also a reminder that there’s always more to say. When a dream or a hope or a possibility, or a life seems over. Like there’s a big period there. Done. Full stop. I remember that for God, that’s never true. There’s always something left to say. There’s always something more to do. We can’t ever turn life backwards. But there’s always possibility for some kind of resurrection. And I want to be a person who believes that and who works for that with all I’ve got. 

But it doesn’t come naturally. I need this reminder. So it’s here, to keep me hoping and working for resurrection.

Still, though, no matter what we do, resurrection is the end a gift of God. It isn’t earned or merited. There’s no spiritual algebra equation – like put in this much prayer, and this much hope, and this much work, and this much faith, and here is the new life God will raise. No, it’s a gift. It’s a gift. 

I think about Sarah and Abraham and the joy of their late in life baby. 

They’re a founding mother and father of faith – for Jews, Christians, Muslim. So they have this lofty reputation. But even in the Bible’s stories, they are not good people. 

Their marriage is full of scars from periods of deceit, doubt, unfaithfulness, cruelty. They barely make it as a couple. It’s not always clear they should have. 

And I’ll spare the details right now, because it would be a real downer at this point in the sermon, but they do horrible things to others too. Just violent, horrible things. 

And yet still, they are beloved. They too are children of God, who wants to work to help write the best story possible in their lives. And in their case, resurrection takes this particular form of a long promised, but still quite unexpected child. 

No wonder there is laughter. 

Sarah’s afraid to admit it in front of these holy, important guests of theirs. Like is laughter undignified in their presence?

But really, what is there to say but laugh? It’s just too good to be true. 

But in the end it is. And they name their baby Laughter, because they just can’t help themselves, the joy is so deep. 

There’s a psalm – a song of praise in the Bible – and I wonder if the one line about laughter is in part a reflection on this story. 

It’s Psalm 126. A psalm of resurrection. It goes like this:

Psalm 126 (Common English Bible)

126 When the Lord changed Zion’s circumstances for the better,
    it was like we had been dreaming.

2 Our mouths were suddenly filled with laughter;
    our tongues were filled with joyful shouts.
It was even said, at that time, among the nations,
    “The Lord has done great things for them!”

3 Yes, the Lord has done great things for us,
    and we are overjoyed.

4 Lord, change our circumstances for the better,
    like dry streams in the desert waste!

5 Let those who plant with tears
    reap the harvest with joyful shouts.

6 Let those who go out,
    crying and carrying their seed,
    come home with joyful shouts,
    carrying bales of grain!

I love this prayer. I really love it. 

It’s so full of joy – mouths full of laughter, tongues filled with shouts, nations full of praise, hearts full of joy, arms full of grain. 

But it’s actually a psalm for hard time, for when you can’t see resurrection.

“Lord, change our circumstances for the better, like dry streams in the desert waste.” 

This is a psalm prayed through tears, but prayed in hope.

It’s a psalm for when peoples are at war around Zion, and people are grieving, and children are dying. 

It’s a psalm for when you don’t know if you’re going to get your probation or not. A psalm for when your kids are hurting, but they’re alive, and they’re growing. 

A psalm for finding laughter again through our tears. 

In the Way of Jesus, friends, we never stop looking for resurrection. Where there is death, there also can be new life. It might not be what we call perfect – since there’s no such thing. It might have scars. But it can still be beautiful. God can do it. 

Spirit of the living God, Spirit of the resurrection yet to come, 

We call to mind our hurts and tears and desert wastes. 

Change our circumstances, we pray, God. And reveal something of the resurrection you are working. So we can hope with you, water with you, laugh again with you, God, and open our arms in gratitude to your abundance. 

The Way of Surrender

This Way of Jesus series we’re in is a look at what people call discipleship or spiritual formation. We’re talking about the most enduring qualities of the life and teaching of Jesus and asking what this means for us, as we try to find peace, as we try to live more just and joyful and flourishing lives. 

And any discussion about the way of Jesus has to reckon with the two most famous things about his legacy. One is that he was crucified, executed. And the other is that his followers claim he rose again. 

So this week and next, I want to talk about the way of death and the way of resurrection. Not so much what that meant for Jesus – what happened and why? And not so much for the theological meaning of these events – what do we learn about God or how does our connection with God change as a result of Jesus’ death or resurrection. That’s important. 

But death and new life aren’t just events in the life of Jesus, or in the life of God. The Way of Jesus talks about these things with participatory invitations, like crucifixion and resurrection, death and new life, surrender and victory, are patterns in a life of faith we are all invited to. 

So next week, we’ll talk about the way of resurrection. 

And this week, the way of death, or as I’m calling it, the way of surrender. 

Let’s read a text I’ve often thought of this fall. It’s one of the turning points in the story of the life of Jesus the way it’s told in the book of Luke. It’s from the 9th chapter. It goes like this. 

Luke 9:51-62 (Common English Bible)

51 When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.

52 And he sent messengers ahead of him. On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to prepare for his arrival,

53 but they did not receive him because his face was set toward Jerusalem.

54 When his disciples James and John saw this, they said, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?”

55 But he turned and rebuked them.

56 Then they went on to another village.

57 As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.”

58 And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”

59 To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”

60 And Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

61 Another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home.”

62 And Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

I lead a Bible study on Saturday mornings here, and a week ago, we read this passage together. 

And we were like what in the world is going on here? 

It’s grumpy Jesus. 

Someone’s like – I’m coming, Jesus. Let me join your movement. And he’s like:

sure, if you want to be nothing, have nothing. 

Other people are compelled by what he’s doing but have these reasonable sounding excuses for why they’ll catch up to him later, when they’re not so busy. 

And Jesus seems insulted, offended. 

Jesus has a reputation for love and kindness. Why so serious, so intense here?

Another person in our group was like:

Why is he telling people to follow him? He’s going to Jerusalem where he thinks he’s going to be abandoned and killed. 

What is the invitation here? Suffer with me? Die with me? 

Is the way of Jesus masochistic? A way of death and suffering?

Well, for some people, yes. 

Jesus knew that his message of the Beloved Community, of the coming Kingdom of God, was disruptive to the world as it is. And so for him to speak his truth, to speak God’s truth of life as it was meant to be, was a death sentence. 

And the same was true for many more when these gospels were first written. Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s accounts of the life of Jesus were written in the second half of the first century – times of great distress and persecution for Jewish communities in and around Jerusalem and for the early Christian communities throughout the Empire as well. 

Many of the early leaders in the Jesus movement were, like Jesus, executed for their faith. 

A friend of our church from years ago sent me a book that a friend of hers published recently. It’s a fabulous illustrated children’s book called Stories of the Saints: Bold and Inspiring Tales of Adventure, Grace, and Courage. 

There are these two-three page entries about all of these highly admired people in the first centuries of the Christian movement. The book doesn’t try to sift out what in these saints’ lives is history and what is legend, so the stories are epic, fun.

These people choose truth over power and justice over wealth. They do good and love boldly. They have integrity, they’re humble. It’s pretty refreshing actually, because this is not the kind of stuff Christian heroes are famous for anymore. But in the end, they suffer.

Now these people – in the legends – are hard to kill. Sometimes the soldiers sent after them become followers of Jesus instead of arresting them. Or they’ll be thrown to the lions and the lions will curl up for a snuggle. But eventually, power finds a way, and they’re killed, martyred for their faith. Like Jesus was. 

So you know, at times the way of Jesus has been a way of suffering and death, of literally taking up your cross as Jesus did. And since that was so common in the early decades of the faith, the gospel accounts in the Bible prepare people. 

They’re like: be ready to follow Jesus to death.

Nowadays, we have to receive this message with some caution. 

Some religious people have a persecution complex. Anytime someone speaks ill of them or doesn’t do things their way, they call this persecution. But not having power, or being criticized or resisted for your meanness is not persecution, it’s not the Way of Jesus. It’s natural consequences. 

There’s another caution we might think about. Which is that suffering in the Way of Jesus has sometimes been expected of people who already have suffered enough. Christena Cleveland has said, for people with privilege, the way of surrender is great. Give up power, yield to someone else. But for people of color, she says, we don’t need more of the way of surrender. We and our ancestors have suffered enough, thank you. We need power. We need the way of resurrection. 

I find this helpful as we meditate on surrender and resurrection in the Way of Jesus. The way of surrender isn’t for everyone, all the time. Sometimes suffering is just bad, best avoided. So next week, the way of resurrection.

But I’ve been thinking about at least three ways the way of surrender has power for us all.

One is that sometimes, we face opposition for doing good. Let’s call this like martyrdom, Extra Lite.  

A friend of my mine was telling me about a conversation she had had a work. She had asked a co-worker some appropriate but hard questions about the improvements their company had committed to, and he was incredibly defensive. Kind of persistently so too. That was obviously discouraging to her. Is it worth it to do the right thing at work, if it just makes your life more difficult?

And I quoted this line to her about Jesus setting his face to Jerusalem. Or really, the poem in the Hebrew scripture of Isaiah that it probably alludes to. There’s a lot of poems about a servant of God in Isaiah that sometimes gets compared to ancient Israel personified. But sometimes Christians have also seen echoes of the life of Jesus in these servant poems too. 

And one of these poems talks about the servant setting his face like flint. Strong, sharp. It says my face is set like flint, and I know I will not be put to shame. 

Jesus was steadfast in his purpose to go to Jerusalem, regardless of the suffering he’d meet there. He was steadfast in his purpose, let distractions, opposition roll off of him. 

Grace used to tell our kids when they were young that when someone said something mean to them, they could be like ducks. Let the water just roll off their back. This is an image like that. 

I was trying to encourage my friend – that co-worker’s defensiveness is their issue, it tells on them how much they need to change. Don’t take it in. Don’t let it hold you back from the good work you’re doing, making good changes. 

Friends, when we suffer, it’s not a sign we are out of God’s will or God’s favor. And when we suffer for doing good, we in some sense suffer with Jesus, who’d encourage us: be undefeated. Be steadfast in our purpose. Also, unlike Jesus’ disciples who wanted to call down fire on the Samaritans for their lack of hospitality, Jesus would say, don’t be distracted by your own outrage either. Let that go too. It’s probably not fruitful. 

Just keep going. Let it go. This is the way of surrender. 

This is kind of related to my second set of thoughts, which is about how we do hard things, not just how we face opposition, but all kinds of hard things. 

There’s an empowering way of surrender for this too.

I’m a new yoga practitioner. But I’ve been at it long enough now that I have a sense of the rhythm of how an hour will go.

And there’s this moment like 20, 25 minutes in where things kind of go off the rails. At that point, I’m pouring sweat already – it’s really hot in there. And several times already, we’ve had to sit down but with no chair. It’s called chair pose, really should be called no-chair pose. It’s hard. And we’ve done this several times for just a second or two. 

But then we hit this moment where we have to hold the pose with our lower half, and then kinda twist our body way to the side with our upper half, and just hang out there.

I have no idea how long it lasts, other than too long. It seems impossible to hold this pose. I’m pouring sweat, my thighs ache, my breath is speeding up. 

And then I hear the teacher saying:

surrender. Breathe. Hold here, keep your focus.

There’s nothing like the power of surrender. 

And I slow my breath, and check my technique, keep the pose, the pain kind of washes over, until I realize I can release. It’s over. 

And afterwards, every time, I have to catch my breath. I’m exhausted. But I’m also calmer, more focused – it feels like peace. And I feel stronger, more confident. 

Yogis tell you it works like this because you’re leaning into the experience, and you’re getting free of your resistance. That surrender to what is, instead of wishing for what isn’t, that’s peace. And that’s power.

We can do hard things. And with the help of God and friends, we can do them with a measure of peace, of love, of calm. 

Jesus shows us the way. Maybe he’s grumpy this moment, but he keeps going. He opens up a training clinic, expands his followers from 12 to 72. He teaches people patiently, how to love, how to pray, how to not be a religious hypocrite. He tells the truth about Samaritans – that they’re not the enemy, but that they too are infinitely valuable children of God. He faces immense resistance to his work, greater day by day as he heads to Jerusalem, but he stays connected to his purpose. He stays connected to his heart, emotionally available, healthy, never hides in flight mode or lashes out in fight mode. He has what Palestinian Christians call sumud – resilience. 

The way of surrender honors and imitates this sumud in Jesus. Faced with hard yoga poses, we breathe, we focus our gaze, and we hold on. More importantly, faced with people hard to love, work that is hard to do, families and workplaces and nations and worlds that are pumped full of chaos and pain, we breathe, we focus our gaze, and we do what we can to walk with love and peace.

Friends, the best way I know to try to have this Spirit of Jesus rub off on me is to pray it be so, daily. 

In my morning prayers, I have a variety of written prayers that I use – not all of them every day. But I have a number of them that I come back to. One of them is a prayer attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi. 

It’s famous. Perhaps you’ve heard it. Perhaps you’ve prayed it. It goes like this.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

That’s a prayer of surrender, right? Letting go of my need to always be understood and loved. Because I won’t be. That’s true whether I surrender to it or not. 

But the surrender doesn’t make me weaker, it makes me stronger somehow, gives me a better shot of being that peace and love and hope I want to be. 

By surrendering my rights to some things, I feel like God makes room for these better things I want to become. 

I don’t fully understand how this works, but praying it helps make it so. 

For decades, a prayer of surrender has been powerful for millions of us in recovery. 

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

the courage to change the things I can,

and the wisdom to know the difference.

Power to let go of what I can’t change. Courage to go after what I can. 

This is the way of surrender. It prepares us to do hard things. 

Like choosing freedom over addiction.

Or even like dying well.

Friends, I know most of us think death is a long time away, and may that be so. It’s good to live, and it’s good to live long if we can. Thank God for life, every day!

But eventually, we will all die. 

And years ago, a small group of pastors and I studied and talked about the good death. When you’re a pastor, you learn something about good death, because you talk to people about death. Sometimes you visit people as they are dying, sometimes a lot. 

A good death, we all agreed, is to minimize pain and to be with people we love. But it’s more than that too. It’s surrender.

When I was a new pastor here, one of the first members of the community I accompanied in dying was Jim Carson, a man dying of cancer in his early 60s. We held his funeral right here more than nine years ago. In his final months, I remember asking him if he was scared of dying, or what he thought would happen.

He was slower with words at that point. His breath was a little labored. But after a moment, he shook his head no, and then said, “No. I think I’ll lean back into the everlasting arms.” I’ll lean into the everlasting arms of God. Jim knew he’d be OK. 

I don’t know that any of us are ever really ready to die, but when the time comes, if we are, it’s like life’s greatest chair pose – long, hard, painful beyond words. But if we can lean toward God, we get free of our resistance, and that gives us energy for other things – to say things we want to say before we go, to welcome the kindness of friendship of our loved ones, to have peace. 

I think this is what happened when on the cross, Jesus called out the words of the psalm, Into your hands I commit my spirit. 

Surrender. Peace. Right there, in the hardest of things. 

With the help of God, we can do it, friends. We can do it.

Friends, this makes me want to say one more thing about the way of surrender before we close. If we can overcome death with Jesus, maybe we can overcome stagnancy too, the going nowhere, committing to nothing struggle of our moment, for a lot of us at least. 

One of you sent me a speech recently, by the democracy activist Pete Davis.

It was called “A Case Against the Culture of Infinite Browsing.” 

Davis talks about what it’s like when we get on Netflix, spend so long browsing through our options, that we just get tired, and go to bed having not watched anything at all.

Back in the late 80s, my friends and I did this kind of thing at the VCR rental shop.

This infinite browsing seems appealing – so much choice – but it’s actually boring, it’s tiring. Browsing’s not where the art is, not where the joy is. It’s just the hallway to those things.

But what happens if we don’t leave the hallway?

That’s Davis’ metaphor for a lot of life these days. Particularly in communities of so much privilege and wealth and opportunity like ours. 

When it comes to careers, purpose, partners, we feel like we want more options, that it’s good that we have so much dang choice. 

And Davis is like, choice, hey, cool! No one wants to be trapped behind a locked door. But you know what else no one wants? No one wants to live in a hallway.

Davis says:

The most menacing dragons that stand in the way of reforming the system or repairing the breach are the everyday boredom and distraction and uncertainty that can erode our ability to commit to anything for the long haul.

I love that the word dedicate has two meanings— first, it means to make something holy; second, it means to stick at something for a long time. I don’t think this is a coincidence: We do something holy when we choose to commit to something. And, in the most dedicated people I have met here, I have witnessed how that pursuit of holiness comes with a side effect of immense joy.

We may (want to) keep our options open, but I (believe) that the most radical act we can take is to make a commitment to a particular thing… to a place, to a profession, to a cause, to a community, to a person. To show our love for something by working at it for a long time — to close doors and forgo options for its sake.

So good, the holiness, the joy, of dedicated commitment. This, friends, in my marriage, in my work, in friendship, in parenting, has been my experience. 

This now is how I read that bit where Jesus is so harsh with all the excuse making.

“Let the dead bury their own dead.”

Come on, Jesus, what an awful thing to say. 

Unless what Jesus is saying is really, there’s never a great time to commit. There’s always doubt. There are always other options. There’s always the endless fears of what if, would’ve, could’ve. 

But man, who wants to live in a hallway

Davis one more time:

We need not be afraid, for we have in our possession the antidote to our dread — our time, free to be dedicated to the slow but necessary work of turning visions into projects, values into practices, and strangers into neighbors.

There are Jerusalems that need to going to, friends. There’s hard work to be done in our families, in our professions, in our communities, in our democracy, even in our church. It takes money, it takes time, heart, sweat, most of all, it takes commitment. 

But the long, slow work of projects, practices, and neighboring, of doing healthy and beautiful things together is where the power in life is. It’s where a lot of the joy is too. 

One more quote, a poem I came upon, also through my yoga teacher. 

Go to the Limits of Your Longing

Written by Rainer Maria Rilke

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand

Oh, friends, the hand of God is stretched out to us today, offering us the strength of surrender. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me. 

Nearby is life. You will know it by its seriousness.

Maybe, doing hard things, committing to people, work, causes is serious business. Staying committed to the way of Jesus is too.

But the peace, the possibility, the joy we find in the way. 

Words fail. It’s too powerful. It’s too good. 

One more announcement: 

This is our weekly word this month about our 25th anniversary campaign. 

We started this campaign early in the year to fix up some old infrastructure issues on our property, pay off our debts, and begin new long-term investments in ministry beyond the walls and membership of our church.

We are ⅔ of the way to our total goal of $1.4 million. With the help of this whole community, we hope to raise the final third between now and New Year’s Day.  

We have listened to ideas from the community about how we can spend the large cash flow we free up once our mortgage is paid off from this campaign. We asked for hopes and dreams consistent with our church’s vision to share about and reflect Jesus’ Beloved Community as widely as possible. That listening campaign has resulted in four big areas of hope and possibility!

Last week I shared about encouraging the health and growth of vibrant, inclusive Christian ministries. Another big hope of ours is to make significant investments in community and mental wellness.  

We’re asking: What could our church do to help in our mental health crisis? And what more can our church do to promote spiritual and mental wellness?

This area is a research project, not an action plan at this point. But I’ve been meeting with a lot of mental health and wellness practitioners around this question, and it turns out there is a lot we can do! It’s actually incredibly exciting. 

We’re learning about where the gaps are between people’s need for affordable, culturally responsive mental health care and their ability to get it. And we’ve started conversations with a partner we might be able to work with to help close those gaps around here.

We’re learning about the kinds of groups and workshops and programs we can run for members of the Reservoir community and for our friends and neighbors that will support wellness, help with people’s recovery, empower regular people like you and me to better friends and resources to people in our communities who are really struggling. 

We’re learning about community mental health and wellness volunteers and how to help train more of those.

We’re thinking about spiritual direction and spiritual formation resources, for people who go to church and even for people who don’t. 

Over the next six months or so, we’ll be putting a team together on this and making more concrete plans about which of these opportunities we can move forward with first. But it’s going to take completing this campaign, and freeing up some of our debt payments to make it happen. 

I think we’ve a generational opportunity here for our church to be a huge asset and light in our region. For all those who have pledged and given already, know that we are so thankful. And We’d love it if more of you could pledge or give today. All amounts are welcome, really. We have paper pledge cards on that table in the dome. You can drop those in the black boxes this week or next. There’s also an online pledge form in the giving tab of our website – reservoirchurch.org – where it says 25th anniversary campaign. 

I look forward to sharing more in the weeks to come. You can read a summary of our campaign on the giving tab at our website, and we also have some paper copies on the table in the dome. Thanks for your partnership, really. With all of our help, we can do some great things together.

 

Healthy People Help People

Maybe you’ve heard this phrase – Hurt People, Hurt People. It’s really true, right? That people who are filled with unhealed, maybe even unacknowledged hurt, can do a world of harm, whether they mean to or not. Hurt people hurt people. It’s a warning.

There’s a flip side to that line, though, a more hopeful one, which is that healthy people help people. People who are healthy from the inside out can do a ton of good in the world, sometimes whether they even mean to or not. 

My therapist talks about this with me. She’s really over the top about it. Maybe she can tell I’m an unmotivated client sometimes. But when I take some baby step or another to try to be a more integrated, compassionate, healthier person, my therapist will be like: This is the path to world peace. This is how we save the world. 

And it’s not like she’s just all: woo-woo, blowing smoke in my ears. (Well, maybe a little bit. But not mostly.) She means it. Healthy People Help People. This kind of work saves us all. 

So that’s the talk day – Healthy People Help People. And just so you know, I’m not going to tell you five things you’ve got to do to be your best self. I’m not going to really tell you to do anything at all. That’s up to you. But I’m to share a few words of Jesus, talk about how the work we put in with the help of God and friends to get healthier, how that’s part of the Way of Jesus for us. And I’ll tell a couple of stories, share a couple things I’ve seen and learned, and my invitation to you is just to pay attention to what sticks out to you. What lands for you. And if anything does, just notice that, hold onto that, get curious about it and see where it takes you, all right? 

Here’s the scripture. It’s some little excerpts of a longer teaching in Matthew 5, part of a whole set of teachings called the Sermon on the Mount. I’ll give you a few little bits and try to fill in the gaps. 

Jesus said: 

Matthew 5:20, 21-22a, 27-28, 43-44, 48 (Common English Bible)

20 I say to you that unless your righteousness is greater than the righteousness of the legal experts and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

This line has been a confusing start for a lot of people over the years. Because some people think Jesus is setting just crazy high expectations. Be more righteous than the most righteous people you know. After all, God demands the best. Perfection. God deserves it, so you’ve got to try. 

And that’s led to some weirdly convoluted ways of receiving this whole teaching, like Jesus was setting up some super high standards for our lives, just so we wouldn’t be able to meet them and then we’d reach out to God for help.

That’s messed up, though. That would be devious and strange and it also just doesn’t fit the flow of what Jesus is saying. He says:

The people you might think of as righteous, they’re living by a certain moral code, sure, but you can do better than that.

And then he proceeds to show them the way. He’s like-

You’ve heard this before, but let me show you a different way, a better way, a healthier way. 

Let’s catch a bit of that. He says: 

21 “You have heard that it was said to those who lived long ago, Don’t commit murder, and all who commit murder will be in danger of judgment.

22 But I say to you that everyone who is angry with their brother or sister will be in danger of judgment.

So, murder’s bad, beyond bad. We’ve been trying to process murder recently every day… murder up in Maine by mass shooting, murder of civilians by large, organized groups – Hamas, how many would argue Israel. We can’t process this level of organized violence, trauma, death. It’s horrible. No dispute.

But Jesus is like,

avoiding murder – good as that might be right now – is not the goal. It’s wider and deeper than that, it’s avoiding the ways of being out of which murder could even possibly flow – unregulated anger, vengeance, judgment. To get healthy, we don’t avoid just the worst symptom of our problems, we’ve got to go to the roots. 

And on Jesus goes, a whole list of: You’ve heard it said, by I say to you…

27 “You have heard that it was said, Don’t commit adultery.

28 But I say to you that every man who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery in his heart.

Here’s another.

43 “You have heard that it was said, You must love your neighbor and hate your enemy.

44 But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who harass you

Jesus is taking Torah, sacred, foundational law for his culture and faith, and he’s not arguing with it, mostly. Like a good rabbi, he’s exploring its foundational depths. 

He’s like it’s one thing to prevent the very worst behavior. It’s another thing to heal the heart, to become a radiantly good person from within. It’s one thing to regulate symptoms of sickness, but it’s another thing – a better thing – to really get healthy. 

And he ends this bit with this line.

48 Therefore, just as your heavenly Father is complete in showing love to everyone, so also you must be complete.

Here’s the upshot, Jesus says. 

It’s simple: be like God. 

Which, OK, maybe that is a little intense of a thing for Jesus to say.

Like we should all start speaking whole universes into being.

Except, I don’t know, maybe that’s just it. Not quantitatively, like we could be as big or eternal or powerful as a divine being.

But qualitatively so, like human mini-gods, not perfect exactly, but perfectly loving, completely what we are meant to be. We’ll get back to this, but maybe in this mode, we too can indeed speak universes of something into being. 

I think I agree with my therapist and, as it turns out, with Jesus too. This just might be how we save the world. 

Do you mind wondering with me a little bit about this? 

Let’s try. Let me tell you what I hear in this. It’s three things. The first is this. I think Jesus is like:

Know your vulnerabilities.

Know your vulnerabilities.

Friends, I am not a naturally healthy person. 

As a child, I was apparently very accident prone. That’s the main thing my parents like to say about my childhood. You were very accident prone. What’s one to say? Sorry? 

I guess it was true, though. I was an impulsive kid. Still am, sometimes. But I made some weird choices. Got stitches left and right. 

My favorite foods might be ice cream and chocolate, which I’ve learned are not the recommended base of anyone’s healthy food pyramid. 

And you know, it cuts deeper. In ways that matter more, I’m just not by inclination the healthiest person. None of us are.

Interestingly, the night I accepted the call to be your pastor, 10 ½ years ago, I felt like God reminded me of this, but it didn’t feel harsh, it wasn’t a criticism. It was gentle, kind, but serious.

It’s weird to try to talk about our experiences of God, like moments when we are keenly aware of divine presence and we think something is being communicated to us. But I’ll try here, just for a second.

On a Sunday night in 2013, I was getting ready for another week on the job at the school I served. It was a Saint Patrick’s Day, a Board member from this church called me up and officially offered me the position I still hold. 

We had kind of pre-negotiated it. After saying no for a while, I had basically at that point agreed to say yes if I was formally asked. But still, this was the moment. There had been a prayer meeting at church that afternoon for members and some more discussion around the prayer, another Board huddle, and this was the moment. I was being called. 

And you know, it felt real now, it was serious. So I told the Board member I needed to take a walk and pray one more time before accepting.

So I went out that night and walked up the hill near where I live to a little park there, not exactly sure what to pray, but just kind of holding the weight of this moment and asking God if there was anything else I needed to know, that I needed to pay attention to.

And I had this weird sense there was an answer to that question from God. And it kind of took the form of a phrase in my head, which was:

Watch your Achilles.

Watch your Achilles.

So, this wasn’t the weirdest thing. It had a context. At the time, I’d been running marathons and stuff for a few years, and like a lot of runners, just blowing my way through pain signals here and there, and I had some issues with my Achilles at that point. I needed physical therapy, I’d wear a boot for a while. 

So the Achilles was on my mind some, but it came to me in that moment as more of a metaphor, like in the Greek legends, like: tend to your weakness, Steve. 

And whatever part of this thinking was inspired by God, and whatever part was my own free association, where my mind went in prayer was to feel like God was affirming that I had some of the skills to do this work, like I had been prepared. But if I was going to do it, the biggest work was going to be internal. The most important work I’d do to be your pastor, to be a healthy pastor, would be work you wouldn’t see. It would be tending to my vulnerabilities, doing everything I could with the help of God and friends, to be safe, to be healthy, to be complete. 

In Jesus’ invitation to be righteous people, to be healthy people, he speaks about unregulated anger, unbridled lust, and failures in relationships. 

This is the stuff, right? Unhealthy people, toxic leaders, hurt people who hurt people, they pretty much fail in at least one of these areas. 

Because they matter, they’re serious. When we fail in these areas, it can be devastating.

Who and what you want. 

Why and how you get angry. 

How you relate – in words and deed – to the people in your life – friends, foe, intimates, strangers. 

Jesus doesn’t shame anyone for our weaknesses or proclivities here. We are all in part hurt people. We all have our Achilles, our places miss the mark. 

But if we’re to have a kind of health, a kind of wellness that exceeds the ways of the thin self-righteousness and compliance that can get praised in religious circles, Jesus would encourage us to know our weaknesses. 

By ourselves, we may or may not be able to do anything about it. But we can start by being honest with ourselves, maybe letting others be honest with you. 

So we can move to what I see as the second part of Jesus’ teaching here, which is to open up for healing. 

Open up for healing. 

I was talking about this phrase with one of our kids – healthy people help people. And he was like: that’s alright, Dad, but I’ve got a better one. He saw it on a T-shirt, or a coffee mug or something, but it stuck. It said: Healed people heal people. 

You know, like people who have had problems, vulnerabilities, but they’ve gotten help, they’ve grown, so they’re not full of themselves, not cocky, they know their way around real problems. But they’re not stuck there, they’ve found some paths through. My kid was like:

These are the people you want in your life. Healed People Heal People. 

Which – like what do you say when your kid talks that way – like that’s sacred. You say, thank you for saying that. That’s so true. And my God, thank you for being the kind of person that would know that at this age. Glory. That’s beautiful.

Healed People Heal People. 

Maybe it’s not obvious in this teaching alone, but if you scope out to everything the gospels tell us about Jesus, it’s clear that he was a healer. He was a healer of bodies to be sure, sometimes. But also a healer of whole selves. Looking to help people find their depths, their center. Find home, find peace, find acceptance, find forgiveness, find their heart again. 

See a lot of people use religion to help themselves feel better by feeling superior to others. Like God’s chosen ones, God’s favorite, unlike the people that God and we both judge. Jesus was familiar with this dynamic. 

And he was like:

naw, judge not lest you be judged.

That’s not the way. In the way of Jesus, we reject this attitude. We commit to a generous, non-judgmental attitude toward others, and we get curious about our own story of healing. 

I’ve got two metaphors for how I think about the healing journey, both of which I got to see at work in someone’s life this week. One is composting. The other is a basket.

So composting. When you compost, you take trash – all kinds of nasty organic mess, and with time and oxygen and motion and bacteria, you turn it into something that gives life. 

The composting healing journey is when you see the muck and junk and crap of your life, and you trust that with the help of God and friends, it can be useful, maybe even beautiful. One of the stories of compost pile healing that’s just taking my breath away is a new friend I’ll call Mark. Mark is the young man that three of us have been visiting in a Massachusetts prison, where he’s been held for many, many years on a sentence given to him for a crime he was connected to when he was just 17 years old.

At 17, you’re not involved with the kind of crime that could put you into prison deep into your adult life, if you’re not a hurt person. And Mark is no exception. As a kid, he was done wrong by life in so many profoundly unfair ways. And some bad luck and bad choices crashed onto his head, harder than he ever deserved. 

But you know, with the help of God and friends, he’s been composting all that crap. Opening up the pain, getting to know himself, finding God, getting help, making amends where he can, growing, growing, growing, in the toughest of conditions for growth. 

When we visit him, as we did on Friday night, I sometimes feel like: who is this holy man? Deep, thoughtful, gracious. Healthy. And so eager to help people, if he’ll just get a second chance at it. I think he will. So we believe. We hope.

My other metaphor for the healing journey is the basket. I got this from my old mentor when I was young, my principal, my boss, Bak Fun Wong. He was always like:

Our lives are like a big basket.

Bad things, good things get put in. Bad things, good things can come out. It’s easier to put things in than take things out, though, so be careful what you put in someone else’s basket. Careful what gets put in yours.

Jesus agrees. Some of his teaching on healthy people is like:

Bring in what makes you whole, cut out what does you harm. 

Easy to say, hard to do.

Hard, but possible.

Last week, I was spending some time with one of you probably young enough to be my kid. But I was like, my God, glory, this person has had a few tough knocks but they are just so impressive, so healthy. Beautiful. 

And as we’re talking, I’m looking for the cracks. Like where is this person faking me out. But I don’t think so. I don’t have them on a pedestal. But the health I sense, the root of serious, good health seems like the real deal.

And as I listen to the story, get past a couple of tough dynamics, you just hear the grace with which good person after good person has come into this person’s life. And they’ve welcomed good influence after good influence. And the things that have been harder, the less good stuff that went into the basket, they’re asking:

How do I not lean into this? How do I stop believing that? 

So good, to be on the healing path, so young. Why not, right? Why wait? Never too soon, never too late. 

So know your vulnerabilities, get on the healing journey, and then one more thing. Let’s end where Jesus does, with this invitation to be healthy by becoming perfected in love.

This comes from the Wesleyan branch of Christian teaching, this idea that a person can be perfected in love, like all the parts of you shaped by love. 

Sounds illusive, maybe, to be all love, all the time. And maybe it is. But it’s part of the good news call of Jesus. And I got a taste of it the other week. 

I was at an award night at our son’s school. This was an award night for a single person, a once every five years award my kids’ school district gives for excellence in school administration. And the man being honored was the dean and director of two of my kids’ high school programs. I was there out of obligation, really, but ended up surprised by just what an awesome evening it was. So inspiring. This wasn’t just honor for a fine school leader – it was a celebration of a life well lived. 

This program director is named Dan Bresnan. And this night a whole bunch of students sang Dan’s praises, in the charming and big-hearted and quirky ways only teens can pull off. And then there were his many family members, and alum, and parents and colleagues – lots and lots of them, proud of the work he was doing to make school a kinder, more humane place. Telling stories about his flexibility, his mentoring, his skills. 

You got the sense, at least I did, that we weren’t being asked to honor this really impressive individual, as much as we were all stopping to give our attention to the healthiest of lives, a life being just really well lived. Humble, funny, kind, out there, showing up again and again for the good of the world.

Near the end, Dan made a speech himself. And he described what he did in a way I wasn’t expecting. He compared his work as a school leader to being a forest ranger. He said: a forest ranger can’t control what’s happening in the forest. There’s no such thing as a perfect forest ranger. The forest is too wild, too big. But a ranger gets out there and tries to help the conditions best support the safety and the flourishing of everyone and everything. Same with him – there’s no such thing as a perfect school leader. They can’t control teachers or kids or learning – it’s too complicated, there’s too much happening beyond your control. As it should be. But a school leader/ranger, Dan said, can try to work with the community to make it safer and kinder and more connected – a healthy place, a place where people can try new things, and make mistakes with grace, and learn and grow and flourish. 

I know Dan’s right because I met a real life forest ranger out in the woods this past week and told him this story, this analogy – he liked it. And I know this is true because it happened for my kids. I’m grateful for Dan Bresnan.

At the heart of this speech, beyond the ranger metaphor, though, was his steadfast commitment to some simple beliefs about education and life. I don’t remember exactly how he put it but it was something like:

I think love is the heart of life, always the most important thing. And so if love is the way we do everything, that’s the best of ways. 

You don’t hear enough educators talk this way. You don’t hear enough any kid of person talk and live this way: that love is the heart of life, that love is the most important thing.

This is the Wesleyan vision of perfection, though, to not worry about being perfect in some abstract sense, but to learn to be perfectly loving, everywhere, to everyone, all the time. 

It’s the vision of Jesus too, to let love be our guide in all things, and so to be just like God, who loves so deep, so constantly so well, that like everyone who loves, God can birth new universes of possibility into being.

So it is with us.

No one’s asking any of us to be perfect. Mostly, to be honest, no one cares. Same with God. But the world is crying out for more healthy people. People who know their vulnerabilities. People on the healing journey, wise to what we take out and what we put into our lives, people getting help to compost the crap of our lives into something good. People learning the ways of love.

Healthy People Help People. And that saves us all.

The Way of Jesus When the World Breaks

Hello, friends, it’s an honor to be speaking with you today. 

Today I’m going to be talking about the way of Jesus when the world breaks. That’s the title: The Way of Jesus When the World Breaks.

We’ll unpack those words some more.

You’ll be hearing that phrase “the way of Jesus” a lot in the weeks to come, probably well beyond that. 

And “when the world breaks” is the title of a recent book by a fellow pastor in the post-evangelical collective. His name is Jason Miller. The subtitle of that book is “the surprising hope and subversive promises in the teachings of Jesus.” It’s a good book. It’s a reflection on the scripture I’m about to read for us, a famous passage the tradition has called the blessings, or the beatitudes. 

Words like these – hope, promises, blessings – they can be hard to access, strange words to say when the world breaks. And yet they are words we need, they are words faith calls us to. 

We’re going to talk about different ways the world breaks, about the kinds of wounds that don’t heal, or at least that don’t heal all the way.

That means we’re going to talk about the wounds of war, and specifically the conflict, the war in Israel and Palestine. 

And we’ll talk a little about personal wounds like trauma as well. 

I don’t aim to say anything graphic or retraumatizing or anything today. But I’d planned on speaking on something like this to start our “Way of Jesus” series, and then personal and global events both pushed me into proximity around so many wounds. So I’m very tender this week. Perhaps you are as well. If so, let’s be tender for a moment together, trusting in the kindness of God and the kindness of this community. If you need to step back or step out at some point, though, that’s welcome too. We value freedom here. 

These are huge topics. When it comes to the trauma of war, the pains of multigenerational trauma and violence, even the topic of personal trauma, none of us have the answers. It’s too big. When it comes to wounds that don’t heal, world-breaking pains, we only ever have the beginnings of what to say, but we’ve got to say what we have, I believe, and not be silent. 

And I think what I have to say is a couple things about the way of Jesus toward finding God, finding life when the world breaks, or maybe about God’s ways of finding us, and helping us find ourselves and one another again when the world breaks. And I think that’s important, I think that’s good news.

So let me read today’s scripture, and pray, and get into it.

This is the fifth chapter of Matthew, the first 12 verses. It’s set in Matthew at the beginning of the longest, maybe the most important set of teachings of Jesus that the world has. People call it the Sermon on the Mount. And it starts like this.

Matthew 5:1-12 (New Revised Standard Version)

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him.

2 And he began to speak and taught them, saying:

3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

5 “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

7 “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

8 “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

9 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

10 “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

11 “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Blessed are you. Happy are you…. as your world is breaking apart.

Jesus’ words are so strange.

Matthew sets Jesus up within his tradition to be a new Moses here: a mountain-top revelator, a wisdom maker, a law giver for his people. 

But Jesus doesn’t start with law old or new. He’ll get there. We will too in a couple of weeks. But Jesus begins with these blessings, these pathways to God, these promises of the good life. 

The Greek word we translate as “blessed” or “happy” is makarios. Jason Miller calls this “the blissful existence of the gods.”

And Jesus says that god-like blessing – comfort, peace, mercy, an inheritance befitting the children of God – it can all be yours.

And the way in is poverty, humility, mourning, hunger. The hard work of kindness and peace-making and love in the face of opposition. 

Some commentators think Jesus is commending a way of being in the world. If you want the blissful existence of the gods, here’s the way. It’s purity of heart, it’s mercy, it’s peacemaking.

Some commentators think Jesus isn’t commanding a way of being, but promising a path to happiness and blessing for people who think they’ve missed it. If you’re poor, if you’re small, if you have suffered loss, if you long for a better life or a better world, you’re not excluded from the happiness of the gods. No, no, there’s a way in for us all.

A promise for those who think the gates have been shut on us. Or a surprising path to what’s best for us all. I think it’s some of both of those things.

But they’re strange words. They’re meant to catch us off guard, I think, to stop us in our tracks for a minute, so we can shift our assumptions. So we can break open a little more and let the light in. 

One of the years when my life broke open was in 2017. It felt at first like it was just breaking apart.

I don’t want to swim into the details too much, but I’ll tell you three things.

In 2017, Larry Nassar was on trial for the sexual abuse, the sexual assault of hundreds of girls in America’s national gymnastics program. I found myself following the coverage relentlessly and sitting in my car or my living room just crying and unable to focus on much else.

At the same time, someone I knew and trusted sent me a critical email which casually mentioned by name the neighbor who had sexually abused me when I was a preteen. This person mentioned what had happened to me as a bad thing that happened to me as a kid, but at least not so bad – after all, I turned out OK, didn’t I?

And then thirdly, in response to that email, and the sadness and anger it provoked in me, I looked up that neighbor to discover that in recent years, he had reoffended again, had abused another pre-teen boy, and was tried, convicted, and returned to prison. 

Those three things were hard for me to process.

I was well into my forties. I had done a lot of healing and growth work around my childhood and these issues, but that year broke my world open again. 

And I needed help.

To be clear, I am not thankful for any of these things – the horror of widespread sexual abuse and assault of children, my own scarred wounds, people who touch our wounds without care or kindness. 

These are curses, not blessings. 

But with the help of God and friends, amidst these curses, I was drawn deeper into understanding the beautiful and broken story of my life in ways that in time increased my peace, hope, and faith. I am so grateful for this life of mine. It is so good. I was also drawn deeper into love – love for myself, love for the living God, love for life, love for you. 

Jesus says it can be like this. The poor in spirit, the meek, the humbled – God’s kingdom, the beloved community, is especially for them. Comfort, nourishment, the full inheritance of the children of God is for them. For us. 

How is this so? I don’t think I can reduce it to a formula, but I find the words “mourn” and “hunger” helpful. 

To mourn is not just to be sad, not just to grieve, but to do something with that grief – to bring that grief into the light of day, into relationships or community of some form.

And to hunger and thirst is to want things to be made right. This word “righteousness” – dikaiosune – really means righteousness and justice. It’s not just about personal morality, it’s about all things, all things, being set right, just, whole. 

In my case, I was so sad, so angry, day after day, that I couldn’t function fully. I knew I needed help. I asked a few people I trusted to help me in finding a therapist. And after a couple months, I found someone I thought would be OK, maybe just good enough, but who turned out to be great. 

I also chose, I chose very carefully, two other people to talk with these wounds about. Our wounds are not for everyone. We can’t trust everyone to be safe with our wounds. But if we trust nobody, things usually get worse. Time alone never heals. Time alone never heals.

We need the help of God and friends. 

In my case, the therapy and the friendships helped me to feel and express and understand some very old griefs. It was a time of mourning for me. Thanks be to God, my therapist, my wife, one other trusted mentor and friend met that mourning with great compassion and encouragement for me to more deeply learn and practice compassion for myself as well. 

Knowing I’d hit a moment in life where I needed more time and space for healing in my inner life, I also embarked upon an ancient, year-long structure of reflection and prayer designed to come more deeply into an awareness of God’s great love for us and into discovering the reality, the presence, and the work of God’s spirit with us, day after day. 

That’s the way of Jesus. Part of it, at least. To live in a beautiful, but terribly broken world, and out of our poverty of spirit, to mourn, and to hunger and thirst for things to be set right. And to hope that God is with us, that we still have an inheritance of blessing. And to ask for help in finding it. 

Some people call trauma that wound that doesn’t heal. 

A clinician in Psychology Today published an article on the 7 Hurts that never heal. They are:

  -the death of a loved one

-mental illness or chronic illness

-addiction

-betrayal

-permanent injury

-and trauma.

These are wounds that cut so deep, or persist so much, that they never fully leave us. Pain can lessen, but it may return. And the healing that comes will still leave scars. 

The article said that we cope with these hurts that never heal by sharing them – not with everyone, but not alone either. We share them. And we look for pathways for growth, and for some way they can become incorporated in our purpose. We hope to become wounded healers for ourselves and for others. 

There’s nothing about fixing or removing these things. Not possible. But we heal in part when we don’t bear them alone, and when with the help of God and friends, this garbage starts to compost into material through which we grow and help. 

Bad religion shames us for these hurts. Or like another addiction, it tries to offer us ways to deny or escape these wounds that never heal. 

The way of Jesus names our wounds. None of us go through life without any of them. But it names our wounds as beloved children. It names our wounds as access points to pathways of healing – to mourn, to long for a better way, to ask for help, to give and receive mercy, to grow into peacemakers ourselves, no matter the cost. And to take joy in the goodness that comes our way in all this. 

The way of Jesus does promise a life free from hurt. I can’t promise you that either. But the way of Jesus promises that our wounds can take us into the holy, to be held, to be accompanied, to taste the bliss of the gods, amidst the hurt of this life. 

Friends, if our world were not at war, that’s the talk. The way of Jesus in our hurts that do not heal. But remember those seven hurts that do not heal – death of a loved one, permanent injury, trauma, etc. – they’re all playing out in Israel and Palestine right now, and for many who have loved ones there. 

And to be alive right now and to care about this is to be in a constant state of exposure to trauma.  

A lot of people have had a lot of words to say this past week. Many of those words have missed the mark, have dug into one wound or another. 

But with the help of God, and with your trust, in prayer, and in relationships with many who are grieving, I’ll do my best for a minute.

Last weekend, Hamas militants from Gaza attacked civilians in Israel. Hundreds of civilians, perhaps over a thousand, including children, elderly, were killed, brutally, in a large-scale terrorist attack. 

Friends and colleagues of mine, world leaders as well, have named this as the largest attack on Jews since the ending of the Shoah, the Nazi Holocaust, nearly 80 years ago. Each victim a beloved community member, an image bearer of our Creator God. 

It’s also true that this attack, and these deaths, have occurred within a context. Palestinian people and lands have been occupied by Israel for decades. Numbers are contested, but many, many, many thousands of Palestinian Arabs have been injured and killed in the generations-long conflict. 

Israel proper is a very small nation, and it is filled with Jews and Arabs who have suffered losses in violent conflict. It is also filled with people whose parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were killed in the 20th century’s largest, most infamous genocide.

It is also true that Palestinian lands are occupied and encircled. Palestinians are a stateless people who suffer large rates of poverty and suffering and human rights violations. Israel has declared war against Hamas, the perpetrators of the terror attack. That war now includes a siege of Gaza, a strip of land the size of an American city, containing over two million people, half of whom are children, all of whom also beloved community members and image bearers of God. Access to electricity and food and medical supplies is being cut off, which is its own war crime. 

There’s more to say. And it’s changing every day. I don’t want to keep describing world events and trauma to you. I will likely not get it all right or say it all right. I am not an expert on any of these things.

But I say this to say that children of God have suffered, and are suffering, enormous wounds that do not heal. Most of us are proximate to this suffering not just through the news but as American tax-payers. And many of us, in our networks of family and friends and travel, are proximate to these wounds relationally. I know I am. I’ve reached out to and heard from friends, neighbors, colleagues and partners in our interfaith justice work. I’ve been offering my shared grief and listening to what people had to say. 

Let me just pass on some of their words to you – as models of grief that hold wisdom and compassion as well. 

From one rabbinic friend: I am sad to see the news of innocent civilians killed & terrorized in Israel with surprise attacks by Hamas. I am also worried about the innocent civilians in Gaza who may pay a terrible price. This horrific cycle of violence is endless. May God not extinguish our hopes for peace.

From a Palestinian Christian with ties to our church: You can condemn the killing and kidnapping of civilians. And you can condemn eight decades of occupation and oppression. There’s room enough for both.

From an Muslim scholar and journalist who has preached with me here before: In Islamic law, non-combatants are never legitimate targets in war. There are no exceptions for “colonial settlers” — which Muslims themselves could be, in various contexts. It is a principle all Muslims should defend — and call on Israel to respect.

From the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:

You can’t have it both ways: It’s morally indefensible to kill Palestinian civilians, even when framed as a fight against terrorism. And taking the lives of Israeli civilians is equally inexcusable, even when framed as a battle against occupation.

Lastly, from leaders Telos, Americans working for just peace for Palestine and Israel and in other global conflicts:

There is no doubt that Hamas committed a war crime against Israel and Israeli citizens. These unjustifiable atrocities must be condemned and prosecuted. Hamas must be held accountable. All hostages must be returned home safely and at once. Israel has a right to defend itself from Hamas. And to pursue justice for the victims of its crimes and freedom for all hostages. Israel does not have the right to indiscriminately retaliate against the millions of civilians in Gaza. International law and the rules of war prohibit collective punishment in any form. War crimes do not justify more war crimes. Atrocity does not justify atrocity. 

Friends, as I listen, there’s a lot that I don’t know. But here’s four things I do know about this suffering when the world breaks. 

One, I believe that victims, the wounded, need the way of Jesus. I’m not saying Israelis and Palestinians need to become Christians or believe in Jesus or anything like that. That’s an offense. People can choose their faith, their religion, and their lack thereof. No, I’m saying victims, the wounded, need the way of Jesus we’ve talked about here. They need to grieve and mourn in the kindness and relationship of others’ compassion. They need to grieve and mourn their community’s losses, and as I hope you heard in some of our friends I quoted, for our healing, they’ll need the power, the love to grieve their enemy’s losses as well. This giving and receiving of mercy saves us all, even if that mercy is in the hows and whys of how we defend or resist. 

Secondly, If we have passion around this conflict, if we find ourselves thinking unmerciful thoughts or saying or writing unmerciful words, we might want to slow our roll for a minute on our most strident opinions and try to listen to someone else’s pain. So we can be sure that when we advocate, we do advocate for a justice that is merciful, a justice that heals. This week, I’ve tried to listen more than talk and have reached a place where I have some clarity about what I’m asking my national representatives to do and not do, as well as things I will and won’t say in the court of public opinion.   

Three, if we’re not directly impacted by this conflict, we still have the opportunity to mourn with those who mourn, and so to walk in this way of Jesus as friends. People who mourn with others listen more than talk. People in mourning need to be embraced, they need our presence more than answers or judgment. That gets complicated sometimes because grief includes anger, and people can say some pretty raw things when they’re angry. Mostly, though, when we show up for others in their grief, they experience this way of Jesus immediately. There’s a blessing that comes. I’d invite you, my friends, to join me, in showing up for the grief of your neighbors. You can do that personally, with anyone you know that might have ties and stakes to Palestine or Israel. You can do that publicly too. On Monday, I went with my neighbor to a Jewish organized event for Israel, and then later I went to a Palestinian event by myself as well. There was more going on at both events than grief. There were things said at both events that I can not abide. But I stood there in silence to grieve with those who grieve. 

Lastly, in addition to advocacy and shared grief, I urge you to pray now. To turn your questions and grief and anger and humility and poverty of spirit to God and ask for peace, ask for access to your inheritance, ask for help and mercy. 

In our GBIO community, an ancient prayer has been circulating the past few days. A prayer from two hundred years ago, prayed by a rabbi in what is now Ukraine. I’d like to share that prayer with you all, to close in praying this prayer together, that in the worlds’ hurts that are not healing, and in our own world-breaking hurts as well, we could know the presence, the help, the nourishing love and blessing and peace of God.

Rabbi Nachman’s prayer for peace:

May it be Your will,
Holy One, our God, our ancestors’ God,
that you erase war and bloodshed from the world
and in its place draw down
a great and glorious peace
so that nation shall not lift up sword against nation
neither shall they learn war any more.

Rather, may all the inhabitants of the earth
recognize and deeply know
this great truth:
that we have not come into this world
for strife and division
nor for hatred and rage,
nor provocation and bloodshed.

We have come here only
to encounter You,
eternally blessed One.

And so,
we ask your compassion upon us;
raise up, by us, what is written:

I shall place peace upon the earth
and you shall lie down safe and undisturbed
and I shall banish evil beasts from the earth
and the sword shall not pass through your land.
but let justice come in waves like water
and righteousness flow like a river,
for the earth shall be full
of the knowledge of the Holy One
as the waters cover the sea.

So may it be.
And we say:
Amen.

Our Biggest Changes the Past Ten Years

This weekend was very special for Reservoir! In addition to Steve celebrating his 50th birthday, we also celebrated Reservoir’s 25th anniversary.  Then this Sunday, Steve also renewed his ordination vows as a minister and as the Senior Pastor of Reservoir!

Read or revisit Sunday’s inspirational Renewal of Ordination vows in-person sermon from Rev. Laura Everett as well as the online sermon from Steve.

In-person sermon with Rev. Laura Everett.

Online sermon with Steve Watson (below).

Hey, folks, we did some special stuff in our live service that we aren’t able to replicate here online today. After 10 years of ministry at Reservoir, I renewed my vows as an ordained minister of the gospel.

It’s one of the great surprises and joys of my life that I’ve been asked to do this work. And, whoo, I’ve made a ton of mistakes these past 10 years, but with God’s help and the help of this community, I am still on the path, so to speak. So I’m grateful to be able to promise to God again before this community that with God’s help, I will love and worship God, love and pray for all God’s children, care for the community I serve, and live in and teach the good news of the way of Jesus. 

A few local pastors who mean a lot to me and to this church helped with this, but we couldn’t really get all of this into the studio for YouTube today, so I thought: is there anything else we could do in our online worship that would also be a part of Reservoir’s 25th anniversary and mark the 10 years of service I’d had here.

And a recent conversation came to mind. 

One of you – a longtimer in this community – was noticing something in this church that had changed. And this person realized as he was thinking about it that the change itself didn’t seem bad to him, but at first it had made him uncomfortable.  

Because – and now these are my words, not his – change is really hard. It’s unpredictable, sometimes disappointing. Some changes we really hate, and even the ones we end up liking, well the process can be really difficult. Change is hard. And yet change is constant. Everything – the cultures and politics and economies we live in, the relationships and experiences and technologies that fill our lives, even the very atoms that make up ourselves, are in constant change and motion. And if anything, we live in times where change is accelerating more than usual.

That’s a lot. 

My friend who’d noticed this change was like:

Hey, Steve, you’ve been part of this church for most of its 25 years. And for 10 years of it, you’ve been the senior pastor. Maybe sometime you can talk a little more about what’s stayed the same and what’s changed. 

That seemed interesting to me. 

So I decided I’d give that a first shot today. I’m going to share the biggest way I think our church hasn’t changed and the two biggest things that I think have changed in this church the past 10 years. 

In some ways this sermon is very inward looking. It’s a pastor thinking about what’s happened in a single church during a single pastor’s tenure. 

But I hope there’s some perspective here that might help you beyond just that topic. Maybe something about anchors we drop in the few things in life we don’t want to change. And maybe something about getting a little less white knuckled about the inevitable constancy of change in every area of our lives – our bodies, our health, our churches, our work, our everything. Change can be hard, but it’s not going anywhere, so what do we do about that?

Three weeks ago I taught this message I called Old and New, about how preservation and innovation, old and new are part of all the best things in life, faith included. 

I read these two scriptures we’ll read again, the first a line Jesus says about teaching and about professional lives of all kinds.

Matthew 13:52 (Common English Bible)

52 Then he said to them, “Therefore, every legal expert who has been trained as a disciple for the kingdom of heaven is like the head of a household who brings old and new things out of their treasure chest.”

And we said that in all our lives, in all of our professions, it’s like this – we’re best off when we can mine the heritage of our traditions, holding on to what is good and true and beautiful there. But then we also said that in all areas of our lives, we of course need to keep learning and trying new things too. 

We have to adapt to new rules in our professions. We have to keep up with all that our kids are experiencing that is different than when we were young. We age, and we face new choices in our health and our housing and need to be open to new treasures, not just old ones.

Jesus makes it explicit in another scripture that we read that this applies to what God is doing in the world too. His life and teaching were grounded in an old tradition but it was also a renewal movement.

Jesus taught:

Matthew 9:17 (Common English Bible)

17 No one pours new wine into old wineskins. If they did, the wineskins would burst, the wine would spill, and the wineskins would be ruined. Instead, people pour new wine into new wineskins so that both are kept safe.”

In this little bit of folk wisdom, the idea is that the new work of God requires new containers to hold it. It’s new religious systems and structures, but maybe more than that – new imagination, new habits of mind and heart. 

It’s clear from history and even from within the pages of the Bible itself that this wasn’t a one time adaptation that Jesus required during his lifetime. 

The Bible is full of moments where people come to believe not only have their lives and circumstances changed, but what God is doing has changed as well. Look, God says,

I’m doing a new thing!

The New Testament has all these little moments that hint at the tensions that were occurring even within the first century of the Jesus movement. The scope of what this movement would become kept broadening, and that required a lot of change in its communities. 

Early this week, as I was getting ready for today, I wrote like five pages of notes about the evolution of attitudes toward traditional dietary laws among the first generation of leaders in the Jesus movement. This was super interesting to me, still is. But I realized, probably not to most of you. So we’re going to skip that for today, but the upshot is that sometimes things that seem really important to us have to be reexamined in light of a better today and a more hopeful tomorrow.

Even in the parts of our lives we can sometimes think of as anchors – our faith, our religious heritage, our churches – sometimes we discover we were wrong about something or whether or not we were wrong before, new opportunities call for new ways of meeting them. 

All to say, for all of history, people have had to make choices about roots and branches, about where we stay tied to unchanging convictions and practice and the ways we adapt and branch out and grow in new ways. 

Faith communities are no exception to this. In our faith, we figure out over time where we are going to lay anchors, where we stay moored to beliefs and traditions that serve us well, that connect us to God or what’s best in life. And where we’re going to set sail, to integrate new ideas and experiences and change. 

So all this true of our church of course. We have roots and branches, anchors and sails, old and new. We have ways that we’ve been in the same church for the past 25 years and hope to be for the 25 years to come. And we have ways we’ve changed a lot over the past 25 years, even over the past 10 years. 

Whenever I think about where Reservoir has come from and where we are going, my first thought is over how much we are still the same. Over 25 years ago, some young adults with big dreams wanted to start a church in Cambridge, Massachusetts that would be a fresh expression of Christian community for this city. Cambridge was way ahead of the curve on the story of what got called the “rise of the nones.” This is the huge increase in people who don’t affiliate with any particular religion at all, let alone belong to a faith community.

Our founders imagined a church that could be helpful in a time and place like this – that would be anchored in the deepest, most beautiful parts of the Way of Jesus, but that would use fresh language, that would engage creatively and non-defensively with the science and ideas and experience of contemporary culture. A church that would practice a form of Christian faith that would genuinely feel like good news to many people. The church was a hit at first. It grew really fast in its early years. Charles Park tells some of this story in one of our 25 stories for 25 years videos. You can check that out right here on our YouTube site. 

What’s fun to me is that we’re still very much that church. We’re still committed to plumbing the deepest, most powerful parts of the ancient Way of Jesus – the stuff in this faith tradition that empowers love, peace, justice, healing, and joy. And we’re also as committed as ever to an expression of that faith that is good news to everyone all the time. Right here and now, in this particular beautiful and broken and just plain weird time to be alive. 

That’s still in our DNA as a church, the dream of our founding mothers and fathers, so to speak.

So in some ways this church hasn’t changed all that much. But in other ways, we’ve changed a lot. I started listing the ways. There are a lot of things. But for me at least, most of them fall into two categories. 

Here are the two biggest ways our church has changed over the past twenty-five years, or especially I’ll say over the past 10+ years I’ve been with us as a pastor. 

The first is that we’ve prioritized health more than growth. 

I’ll say that again. We’ve come to care more about health than growth.

Now let me clear that when I talk about the change in our church, I am casting no shade on our church’s early years or any of our founders. This church was a dynamic, amazing community in its early years. And our founders and early leaders were genius in many ways. We owe this church’s very existence to them.

I’ll name some of them. People like Dave and Grace Schmelzer, my predecessors in this role of senior pastor. And other founders and early leaders, like Christopher Greco, Val and Andrew Snekvik, Charles Park, Rich and Lisa Lamb, and many more. One member of that high octane founding team, who moved from the West Coast just to be part of starting this community, is still with us. Cheers for Titi Alailima, who plays bass sometimes on our worship team. Reservoir OG. 

These folks were all part of a crazy success story in our early years. A church in Cambridge, MA that in 10 years from its founding had grown from 30 people to a thousand, had touched the lives of many hundreds more, had gone from a little church plant meeting up in a high school cafeteria to owning this big and beautiful campus. 

The story of those early years was one of explosive growth!

And that was really important to the church. We were part of a network of churches that had been really influenced by a whole series of strategies for growing churches in America and it had worked here. 

My family first showed up here in 2005, right near the end of that early period of super-fast growth. I remember in one of the first Sunday sermons we heard, the pastor talked about the story of this church’s growth, and how it was a troubling thing that the church had leveled off. And it was true – the peak size of this church in terms of both attendance and budget – was in 2007 to 2008. And it really bothered the church that the church wasn’t growing anymore. I remember wondering, is it us? Like things slowed down when my family showed up. What did we do?

Even in my early days as a pastor, I remember saying in a sermon, healthy things grow. I had picked that phrase up from the American church growth movement myself, or maybe from American entrepreneurial culture. Which – they’re the same thing anyway. But the line, Healthy things grow.

And one of you came up to me afterwards and politely said:

Steve, maybe don’t say that anymore. It’s not true. Healthy things don’t always grow. 

And I thought, oh that’s true, if my middle aged body is growing, it’s probably one of two things. It’s probably a bunch more weight I’m picking up on my dad bod, or much worse, it’s something like cancer. 

Because some healthy things grow. But there are also really unhealthy things that grow too. And there are also healthy things that are beautiful more than big, and that aren’t growing. 

These days, very few churches are growing. The numbers vary, but something like 40 million people in America have left churchgoing in the past 25 years. Around here, churches are a dying industry. Most churches are shrinking. 

That Reservoir as a church is holding steady in terms of budget and membership and involvement is unusual around here. 

It’s not like we don’t care about growth at all as a church. We hope to make it easy for people to find us, if they’re looking for what our community has to offer. We hope that all of us will share the best parts of our experience here with others. 

But over the past 10 years, we’ve paid more attention to being the healthiest church possible than to be the biggest church possible. 

Personally, I want to practice a form of faith that people don’t have to leave, that people don’t have to abandon or detox from years down the road.

We have always had a passion for a community that invites people on a spiritual journey without trying to control exactly how it goes. When I joined the church 18 years ago, I was told the church values openness, not conformity. 

But turns out back then, we still had some blind spots on this front. We had some unwritten rules that could get you kicked out of leadership for instance. A lot of communities do this – they say they welcome everyone but it turns out that if you cross this or that line, you’re not welcome anymore. So we’ve tried hard to make sure that we have no unwritten rules here, because that’s what’s safe and healthy for a community. 

Some of the journey to healthy church shows up in boring ways. When I was hired, we’d had a senior pastor with a lot of integrity, thank God. But we were set up for abuse of power to occur. No one evaluated our senior pastor. Our bylaws gave way too much power to one person. We had a culture of a single leader having kind of a dominant, outsized voice we all trusted. 

Again, this mostly worked out okay for us in our early years, but it’s because we were lucky. It’s not healthy to have too much power in the hands or the heart of a single leader. That goes bad for organizations of all kinds, certainly for churches, in lots of ways. So we’ve changed how our Board operates, edited bylaws, practiced new habits of leadership. Stuff that on the surface looks sounds kind of boring, but the stuff that makes us healthy. 

One of the parables of Jesus I love is the parable of the mustard seed, where Jesus compares the ways of God on earth to a tiny mustard seed that grows into a great big plant that does wonders for its ecosystem.

Many people’s take away from this story Jesus tells is that with God’s help, little beginnings can grow into big successes for the world. And maybe that’s true sometimes. We should never despise small beginnings.

But in teaching this passage in more recent years, it’s been important for me to notice that Jesus chose the mustard tree for his story. Had he wanted to talk about the biggest growth story in the plant kingdom of his region, he would have chosen the mighty cedars of Lebanon. They too started small and were real wonders of impressive growth. Mustard trees are biggest for a bush, but they’re still just that – shrubbery – valuable and significant but no great wonder of the world. 

So it is with most things we are and do, even with the help of God. We should care most not that they’re impressive or ever-growing, but that they are healthy. Healthy things do no harm. Healthy things serve their purpose well. So we’re much more focused on being a healthy church.

The second big change I’ve noticed over the past 10 years is that we are no longer an evangelical church. 

We were never the most typical evangelical church, I suppose, but we sure were one when we got started. Evangelical Christians in America were a mid 20th century rebrand of the conservative, more fundamentalist side of Protestant Christianity. Those that rebranded as evangelicals wanted to keep their conservative theology and Bible reading but engage more constructively, more intellectually with the rest of society. 

On the plus side, evangelicals in the 20th century tended to be very passionate about the unique value and significance of Jesus. They were very motivated to help people learn to read their Bibles and to pray and to gain value from these practices. They were also serious about the power of religious and spiritual experience to change one’s life for the better and to motivate people and communities to change the world for the better too.

And we benefited from having roots in all that. We too have been and are still passionate about the value of the Bible and prayer. We too have always called ourselves a Jesus-centered church. Our spiritual roots are in the life and teaching of Jesus, and we try to draw upon the best and deepest wells in the Christian tradition. Many of us have seen the love of God and the power of God’s spirit transform our lives in some way and give us power and motivation to do good in the world as well.

So I’m grateful for these roots I have and that this church has in evangelical Christianity. 

That said, the down sides of this movement have gotten more pronounced over the years. They’re sort of screaming out louder, it seems. 

There’s the patriarchy, the homophobia. There’s the Trumpism, the anti-science and anti-intellectual strands. There’s the way that a hope in God’s saving power becomes triumphalism – thinking that God’s going to make sure every story in our lives is going to have a happy ending. 

I could go on, but I won’t. 

We were never the most typical evangelical church, but our roots were there. And after a years-long drift away from those roots, and a big provocative push from the association of churches we used to be part of, we left.

We used to be called the Cambridge Vineyard, and then as we grew, the Greater Boston Vineyard, because we were part of a group of evangelical churches in America called the Vineyard churches. 

Ten years ago, we were already leaning toward leaving that behind. And then, when I was called as senior pastor, my job was to help us decide for sure, and then to leave and do all the stuff associated with that big change. It was really hard for this community. We lost a bunch of people who left because they didn’t like the decision or who left because the process was so painful. It was terrifying and heart-breaking in different ways for me personally. And I’m not alone in that.

But you know what it hasn’t been, ever. It’s never been a regret. It’s been so good. 

We left the Vineyard because we wouldn’t toe the line with their anti-LGBTQ policy they had just developed. And that matters. Our queer selves and friends and family deserve a safe place to call their church home with the same full seat at the table as anybody else.

But it was more than this too. It was a chance to really get off the bus of American evangelicalism. 

And boy, has that been good for us. 

Just a few ways:

  1. One, we’ve been breaking the habit of over-promising. That triumphalism I talked about with the happy ending to everything if you have enough faith. It also gets labeled the prosperity gospel. That was never our Vineyard main thing, but we were sick with it still. We had annual campaigns where we encouraged our members to name the one thing we most want God to do for us, and to fast and pray, and to trust that in faith, it would be so. There were some beautiful stories, some miraculous stories, that came about in this. But some crushing heartbreaks and some self-blaming and some loss of faith too. We tried to avoid that. We said many of the right things as we did this. But we over-promised. One of our taglines for a while was that we were empowering impossibly great lives. But a lot of times, even with the help of God, our lives are never impossibly great. Maybe they’re 10% better, maybe we still fail but we do so with dignity and grace. Maybe in our mixed bag of suffering and victory, of delight and disappointment, we find more joy, we love better, we live in more peace. If that can happen, that’s pretty good news. That’s worth celebrating. 
  2. Two, we’re as serious as ever about the Way of Jesus. That’s the theme for our mid and late fall preaching – the Way of Jesus. But we’re also more serious than ever about no one-size-fits-all way that the Way of Jesus looks. Reservoir isn’t here to tell you exactly how to live your life. We’re here to create conditions for a life connected to a loving God and a rich community, in which you can sort that out for yourself. 
  3. We’ve come into a richer vision of the work of Jesus on earth. Our more evangelical vision of the Kingdom of God really majored on a few things – on people becoming personal disciples of Jesus, on good churches growing and thriving, on more prayer and personal goodness growing in people’s lives. And all that can still be great. But our vision is deeper and wider and richer than that. I listen to a sermon like the banger of a message that Ivy gave last week, with its call to generous personal kindness and its call to the healing of everything – from broken hearts, to broken and evil systems that do harm. And I think, oh a vision that big didn’t used to be possible for us. 

As we work on this 25th anniversary campaign we’ve had this year and will come back to later this fall, we’ve been asking you to name some aspect of Beloved Community vision you’d like to see our church do more with. Because we’re trying to imagine what we’ll invest in more as a community when we pay off our debts and don’t have to keep writing monthly checks to our bank.

And it’s been so good to listen to the vision of what the people of Reservoir care about and think is possible. No one is saying that this church needs to be at the center of our hopes. We’re not imagining as we used to in our evangelical days that we are always God’s best hope for our city, that we the church of Reservoir have to be God’s big cedars of Lebanon. And that’s healthy.

But we are believing that the seeds we have here can grow to something good. Or to use a different metaphor of Jesus’, we think our life together has given us some yeast to mix into the dough of the life of our region. And it’s not just the explicitly spiritual things we’ve always cared about – things like eternal salvation, and more worship, and more prayer and all. Those are great. But more and more, it’s recognizing that everything is spiritual. So we’re asking how we can participate in more flourishing of the arts, and in better community mental health resourcing, and environmental impact, and in resourcing the dreams and vocations of people in under-resourced communities. 

Leaving evangelicalism has helped us get more holistic, to have a humble but wide ambition to better enrich the whole of life in our communities. And that’s good news for all of us.

So in some ways, we’re the same church we’ve always been. And in other ways, we’ve changed a lot. No longer an evangelical church, but up to something we like better. Less about growth, more about health.

Roots and branches. Anchors and sails. That mix of old and new is what we need for all the changes of our lives and our communities. 

Friends, if you call this church your home, know that we’re so grateful to be on this ride together through both constancy and change. 

And if you’re tuning here online but don’t have a church you call home, I’d love to talk to you sometime about how Reservoir could be that home for you or how you could find another church to call home if you like. Just send me a note. We’ll talk.

That’s it for me today. Peace to you all, friends.

I Am, You Are, They Are, We Are the Image of God

I’d love to tell you a couple things about where I come from. 

I grew up in the outer suburbs of Boston in the 70s and 80s. My little town of 4,000 people had no stoplights; it was still pretty rural. It was also almost 100% white. 

Greater Boston’s culture and its media were still pretty overtly racist my whole childhood. Boston’s bussing crisis around school desegregation happened not long after I was born. And the sordid Charles Stuart affair occurred right near the end of my childhood. If you’re not from around here, you can look that stuff up if you’re interested. Super-racist, though. 

Like most all-white places in America, my town wasn’t so white by accident. We lived on indigenous land that was taken by white colonists in the 1600s. Fun fact – my house as a kid was less than three miles from where most of the executions took place after the Salem witch trials. The area of Boston’s north shore I lived in had been developed by Boston’s wealthy white elite in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

The most famous of them might have been Henry Cabot Lodge, a longtime US senator a hundred years ago. Some of his ancestors had gained their generational wealth like a number of New England white families – through the shipping industry, transporting opium, rum, and enslaved persons. Parts of those businesses were eventually made illegal, but no penalties, no reparations were ever paid. Lodge himself, like many early 20th century politicians, was a xenophobe who disparaged Catholics and immigrants and tried to keep America as white and Anglo as possible.

My town wasn’t white by accident. There was the cultural heritage I mention. Also, like a lot of Boston suburbs, loans and sales weren’t made to people of color there for a long time. And then zoning laws were changed to require you to own more and more land to be able to build a house, keeping people with less income out.

My own family and ancestors weren’t flaming racists. They were nice, white folks who were only casual, mostly unconscious racists. No racial slurs or anything like that, but all my family could remember vividly where they were and what they were doing when JFK was assassinated. None of that when Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed. Just not informed or curious about the flourishing of non-white peoples in their country, so not especially committed to them or their concerns either. 

I dated a biracial person for many months when I was a teen, but despite evidence to the contrary, I didn’t fully process that she wasn’t just white. I just didn’t have much category for culture and race beyond whiteness. It wasn’t until I was 18 or 19 that I really understood being white in America didn’t just mean you were normal, the norm, the standard, and that it wasn’t just other people that had culture. I had a lot of catching up to do to be a healthy member of society. Let alone to be able to be a safe friend and partner and colleague and family member in interracial and cross-cultural relationships. A lot of work to do. 

Just a couple more things about me that may not seem related at first, but are. My family was churchgoing almost all of my childhood. I didn’t perceive that as important or valuable to my life until I was a teenager, but even then, not a single person ever pointed out that the forms of Christian faith I inherited were exclusively shaped by the culture and writing and practice of white people. People could mention things like the Black church, but no one ever noticed that we were part of the white church, who sang white songs, were shaped by white colonizer European Christianity, and had pictures of white Jesus and white Bible characters in our Sunday School rooms. Totally white-washed Christian faith. No one talked about that.

Also, the religious heritage of my youth – in addition to being super-white – was also kind of shame based. Some of that started at home, but then in the church, I also learned that without Jesus, my existence was a moral offense to God. That God loved me, but God could only be in relationship with me, because Jesus was better than me, and Jesus died for me, so when God looked at me, we were all good, because God didn’t really see me anymore, he saw Jesus instead. 

When you’re basically ashamed of yourself, as I was as a teenager, that sounds like good news at first. But in the end, that’s messed up. We want to be loved because someone – God included – sees and loves us – not because someone pretends we’re as good as somebody else. 

I share all this about my background because it helps you understand how I came into two different questions that I think are still critical to ask about any church or place of worship, any faith tradition and any part of the Christian tradition.

We should ask:

is this church, is this faith, going to make people and communities more or less racist?

In our case, we can ask:

is Christianity a racist or an antiracist tradition, and what’s this church doing about that?

And two, another question that sounds different but is actually related.

Does this church, does this faith teach us that it’s good or it’s bad to be a human? Do we mostly need to be punished or do we mostly need to be healed and set free? Is our humanity the problem or the answer?

First the first question, then the second. Let’s read a very short excerpt from the New Testament letter called Colossians. It’s from the third chapter.

Colossians 3:9b-11 (Common English Bible)

Take off the old human nature with its practices 10 and put on the new nature, which is renewed in knowledge by conforming to the image of the one who created it.

11 In this image there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all things and in all people.

So is Christianity a racist or anti-racist religion?

Well, the truth would be: both.

Later in this same chapter, there are instructions to Roman households, including instructions to slaves in those households. The heads of those households are given instructions too, but no one tells them to repent of their ownership of human beings and to set them free. 

This is horrible. It’s one of the worst things in the New Testament. And it’s not just here but one other place, in the letter called Ephesians as well. There may have been reasons, there may have been change getting promoted more slowly, but still it’s horrible.

Later the Christian story gets worse. As Islamic empires rise and take land and influence people in majority Christian countries, Christianity starts to organize itself against Muslims, demonizing them as the enemy and weaponizing their faith and scriptures against them. In the European colonial era, all that demonizing and weaponizing language gets turned on indigenous people and enslaved African peoples, sometimes immigrant peoples too, as most of the Christian world sanctifies and justifies racism and race-based violence. It’s just a horrible, horrible turn for the Christian faith and an evil betrayal of its best origins. 

So yes, a lot of the Christian religion has been and still is racist.

On the other hand, not entirely so, at all. 

The most vibrant expressions of Christian faith in the United States flourish in communities of color, and the global Church is largest and most vital in South America, Africa, and East Asia – not in the old seats of Christian empires in Europe or North America.

I think this can happen because at its core, the Way of Jesus isn’t racist or oppressive at all. It’s liberative, it is anti-racist.

This excerpt I read is one of just many examples. 

This bit of Colossians echoes a baptismal formula that you also get in the third chapter of an earlier letter in the Bible, Galatians. A baptismal formula is something pastors would say to people, that people would repeat themselves, as they were participating in a ritual that marks them as a participant in this faith community. 

And here it’s a kind of creed about the universal dignity, worth, and mattering of all members of the human family, created in the image of God.

Greeks, Jews, men, women, slave, free, people of hybridity who don’t fit those categories – biracial, non-binary, dual citizens – all the human family gets to proclaim: I am the image of God. It’s me! And also, everybody, if they want to be in the way of Jesus, has to say of their brothers, sisters, siblings in the human family: You too are the image of God. It’s you. They are the image of God. 

We all reflect God. We all, no matter what we think of ourselves, no matter what we think about one another, we all look a little bit like God. We’ve all got that family resemblance to our Creator. And we’re even better together. We best reflect God together, in diverse community.

I am the image of God, you are the image of God, they are the image of God.

But most fundamentally, we are the image of God. 

At the beginning, in telling my story, I brought up this question of human worth and human shame in the context of racism and anti-racism. Here’s why. They’re connected.

In the Western Christian tradition – that’s Protestant Christianity, that’s Catholic Christianity too – in the Western tradition, it’s our humanity that is the problem that we need saving from. Our humanity is messed up at its very heart, it requires transcending for us to be saved. 

So Western Christians have assumed that people without saving faith in Jesus are an offense to God, worthy of punishment. The problem is that if you really believe that, it’s easy to hate yourself. Unless you count yourself as one of the lucky, or blessed saved ones; then it’s really easy to hate all the people who aren’t saved. 

This is one reason that Western Christianity, with this doctrine of universal human depravity, fits so well with colonial oppression and racism. It’s easy to punish, subjugate, and dehumanize people if you think that people’s humanity is a bad thing at heart. It’s easy to damn people to a living hell if you think they’re already damned to an eternal one.

On the other hand, there are Christian traditions more to the East that don’t teach this. These include the Orthodox churches. Now the Eastern Christian tradition can also be crappy. The leaders of the Russian Orthodox church have been spewing violence and all kinds of toxic stuff lately. 

But in the Eastern Christian tradition at least, humanity isn’t the problem. Humans are after all created in the image of God. We are good. I am good. You are good. We’re all good. Being human isn’t the problem. 

The problem is the accumulated stains of sin, harm, and hurt laid upon the human condition. We don’t do right by ourselves, and we don’t do right by one another. And into this mess of hurt, Jesus comes as the true human to restore the glory, dignity, and the beauty of our humanity. 

Christianity has been dehumanizing for sure. But at its best, the Way of Jesus is profoundly humanizing. We are good. We are beautiful. We are loved. 

In this early baptismal creed, new followers of Jesus would be invited to remember we are all in the image of God. And as they named these categories – Greek and Jew, slave and free, male and female, the significance of these categories isn’t eliminated. But the idea that any of them could make us higher or lower is eliminated. All of us are worthy of survival, of celebration, of love, of access to everything that helps us flourish. 

There’s even a shot against the idea that there could be better or worse cultures in this list. Greek and Jew refers to the two dominant cultures within the first century house churches, as these people of different cultural and religious heritage are invited to figure out how to be in community together, and how to look at one another and say – there I behold the image of God.

But there’s this more obscure pairing too – barbarian and Scythian. Barbarians are what Romans called outsiders to their Empire that they feared or resented or looked down upon. But Scythians were also a people outside the empire, slavic and Persian folks with roots in modern day Iran. A good chunk of Scythians, however, were assimilated into the Eastern edge of the Roman Empire, and became prosperous within it. They were kind of like some first century version of a model minority – people the empire considered other, different for their cultural heritage, but whose assimilation and participation in the Empire, the dominant culture praised. 

And the early faith says: knock it off with this rank-ordering of cultures, with trying to stereotype and pit people against each other. 

Who we are matters. 

But none of us get to claim status, privilege, inheritance higher or lower than any others. And none of us get to degrade or demean the status, privilege, or inheritance of people we don’t naturally belong to or like or understand. 

This is what it means that the Way of Jesus is anti-racist. It says a loud, interruptive NO to anything that would rank order humanity as more or less worthy. It calls us to operationalize this truth in our lives and in our societies. 

Let me share a word on that for this church and the other communities we’re part of. And then a word on this for our personal faith and living.

For our communities. 

We all remember that in 2020, more of America was finally starting to come around to the Black Lives Matter movement. Covid shutdowns had slowed us all down, and more white Americans started paying attention for a minute to violence against Black people and other people of color in America. 

A ton of companies and communities started creating divisions of equity, diversity, and inclusion and making all kinds of pledges to fund racial justice, or to change hiring patterns in their company, or to better attend to the rights and safety and cultures and flourishing of people and communities of color. 

A lot of promises. Three years later, we’re learning, a lot of those pledges and promises have disappeared. Funding’s been cut, positions have gone unfilled or people of color asked to make these changes happen have had to walk away because their work was so unsupported or resisted. This has happened to people in this church in their professional lives. Yeah. Parts of our country have said that telling the truth about racism in America is a shame or a crime. And parts of our country have just lost interest. Yeah, it’s messed up. 

Into this climate, the Way of Jesus, the faith of the universal human bearing of the image of God says our universal mattering, our universal access to the conditions of flourishing, our universal equality at God’s table and at every table is sacred. 

Interrupting the racist heritage of Christian religion and interrupting the racist habits of American life remains central to Reservoir’s vision for Beloved Community. Our staff still commit to measurable goals for this in our ministry responsibilities. Our teaching and spiritual formation continues to draw upon the theological and spiritual resources of communities of color. Our attention to representation throughout this community in our leadership continues. We’re committed to an experience of beloved community that really feels like that to everyone in our church. I hope that if this is your church or if you’d like it to be, you’ll help to make this so. 

Friends, I also encourage you to stop and ask how honoring the image of God in you and honoring the image of God in others can be a more central part of your spiritual and relational and professional journey. 

White friends, for some of us, continuing to just admit that we may not have been raised to do this well is a start. Everytime America has any kind of hope or progress on becoming more of a Beloved Community, white people seem to interrupt it with waves of denial and defensiveness, over and over again. 

And if we’re honest, there’s a little bit of that inside a lot of us. For me to become a better friend and neighbor to the people of color in my life in my 20s, I had to interrupt the habits of thinking my culture was normal or that people of my race deserved everything we had. It took finding the places in my life where I could learn, where I could be under the leadership of people of color. And this continues.

It wasn’t until my early 40s that I noticed that 90% of the books I’d ever read, and 90% of the theology and Christian thinking I’d ever confronted came from white people and that had shaped my imagination and thinking and faith in ways that needed correcting. The temptation when you realize stuff like this is to deny it – this can’t be so. Or to be defensive – it’s not my fault. But we all know that denial and defensiveness have never been paths to human growth or a better world. And let’s be real, shame isn’t either. Fellow white friends, no one needs more white shame or white guilt. That’s not a path to anybody growing or getting better either.

What we need, what the world needs, is truth-telling about ourselves. Being humble enough to notice where we need to grow. Listening to the truths of the people of color you know and trust. Or if you don’t have those people in your life, listening to the people you can meet on the internet and in books and who speak up at your church. Getting curious, and then showing up. Image of God-honoring antiracism isn’t about having some right set of progressive ideas in your head, it’s about not doing harm. And it’s about showing up for the rights, dignity, and welfare of people and communities of color. Telling the truth, staying humble, listening, showing up – good stuff comes from this. 

I want to say too, for many of the people of color in our community, many of us have accumulated all these layers of hurt and anger over the course of a lifetime in white-centered spaces in a white-centered country and culture. 

Some of us find that for a season, we just need to be around less whiteness. We need media and food and circles of friendship and community that center and affirm our bearing of the image of God. We talk about this in my marriage for instance. A few years ago Grace started getting into Asian drama shows more. After decades of watching people of her race and culture assigned bit parts, being made to live out stupid stereotypes and white fantasies in Western media, she found this so refreshing.

To the extent that she decided that at least for a while, maybe for good, she was mostly done with white entertainment. It took me a while to get this, let alone respect it. Because as much as I love her, I don’t have her life experience. I appreciate it now. If you’re a person of color and you want a little or a lot less whiteness in your life, that’s normal. No one should be offended by that. Do what you’ve got to do. 

Sad for me to say as a pastor, I’ve known people of color who have needed to spend less time around Reservoir for a season because it’s been better for them to be part of a church community – or simply social communities – that centers their race and culture more prominently. Sad for me, because you hate to see anyone go, but if anyone here needs that, you can do this with God’s blessing and for whatever it’s worth, with my respect and blessing too.

One way we try to make space at Reservoir for this need while people stay here, though, is by valuing and respecting the need for people who aren’t centered in the life of society to have affinity spaces where we are. This is why we have some spaces in the church, for instance, for men or women of color or for LGBTQ affinity. We all need spaces in our lives where our bearing of the image of God is honored and celebrated. This is part of anti-racist work in the way of Jesus too.

There are so many anti-racist, affirming the image of God, stories to celebrate in this community.

  • I celebrate the town meeting members in the suburbs, using your voice for more affordable housing and more hospitable experience for people who have been marginalized in your communities.
  • I celebrate our Somerville residents who are working to have elected bodies and public spaces better reflect Somerville’s multiracial and immigrant past, present, and future.
  • I celebrate those of you who are volunteering in relationship with incarcerated individuals, getting proximate to the crazy racial injustice of our prisons.
  • I celebrate those of you who in your professional lives are changing news coverage, or changing hiring patterns, or changing leadership cultures so that our companies and our region works better for communities of color, not just white people.

Some of you all are reckoning with your industry’s favoring and preference of the culture and flourishing of white people. You’re helping make Greater Boston’s present and future less racist. Way to get it! So many ways to live out the anti-racist, image of God affirming Way of Jesus. 

If you’re looking for your way, start asking. You’re in a good place for that. The answers will find you. 

Where do you need to better know that you are the image of God?

Where do you need to better know this for someone else?

I am the image of God. You are the image of God. They are the image of God. We are the image of God. Different shades and colors, different ways and styles, but no more, no less, no exceptions.

Old and New

A few years ago, it seemed like an old friend and I were drifting apart. At least one of the reasons was that we’d both changed over the years – changed some in our faith, our religious practice, some of our values and lifestyle. It was bothering me, because I knew other people who had lost old friends, who had even best friends cut them off when they went through these kinds of changes, like friends can’t worship differently, or live differently, or believe differently. I didn’t understand this, but I also didn’t want to lose an old friend, so I flew out to visit him and asked if we could talk about this. 

Long story short, we haven’t lost our friendship. We’ve stuck in it across our differences. But part of how this made sense to him was interesting to me. He was like: Steve, some of us are really focused on innovation – looking for new and better ways to do things, to live, to believe. And that’s good. He used the spiritual language of calling, like maybe for some of us, our purpose, our destiny, our way of living in God’s call for our lives, is to focus on innovation. 

But for some of us, my friend said, we’re more interested in preservation – how to hold on to old things and transmit them to future generations, how to not lose ways of doing things, ways of living, ways of believing that we’ve inherited from the past. He said:

This is good too. Some of us are called to preservation, especially when everything is changing so fast. 

He said it seemed like he was more about preservation – in his religious life, in some of his beliefs, and that maybe I’m called more to innovation. Different interests, different calls maybe, but why couldn’t we respect and appreciate each other? Of course we could still be friends. And we are.  

I’ve kept thinking over the years about my friends’ categories, his values for both preservation and innovation. He had churches in mind, for instance. 

He thinks of us here at Reservoir as innovators. This church started in the 1990s to explore the life and teaching and ways of Jesus for a very secular, not very churchgoing culture. And that’s given us a commitment to some things which haven’t always been traditional our faith –

  • to use ordinary language for religious ideas,
  • to chip away at the patriarchy and racism in our tradition,
  • to value the love and the relationships of queer people,
  • to integrate faith with science and day to day working lives and other parts of so-called secular culture.

We’re not the only ones doing these things, but they’re really important to us. I guess that makes us innovators. 

This summer, though, while I was on a sabbatical, I took a couple of retreats and worshiped with a very different Christian community nearby. More than they read the Bible in worship, they chant it, kind of like you would have heard in a church seven, eight hundred years ago. They remember and celebrate the faith and example of other believers that have been dead for hundreds of years. They’re preserving an old tradition, so their worship is very unfamiliar to me but also beautiful and rich. 

This goes way beyond church and religion of course. There’s a business in my neighborhood that does all kinds of delicious things with the flavors they add to the croissant. Innovators. And there’s another business that likes to say they serve the best Middle Eastern falafel in Greater Boston. Friends who are from that region are like – meh, it’s nice that they try. But still, A for effort. They are preservationists.

I taught middle and high schoolers for years in a small, start-up public school in Boston. We were trying to do something really special for the kids in our community. And so we merged some best practices we could find for small school innovation in public schools, with a holistic approach we borrowed from a Christian ministry in Hong Kong, and a kind of elite private school college prep curriculum. I know we were the only school in the world playing with the combination of sources we were using. Innovators.

But then I went to be the principal of a comprehensive public high school in a nearby city. It was the only high school in town, it was something like 150 years old, and for a lot of the community, what they most wanted to see was that their kids’ high school experience would be just like theirs. Change sometimes came hard and slow. There were a lot of preservationists around.

Old and new. Some of us focus on preserving the old, some of innovating the new.

The more I’ve sat with this, though, this doesn’t seem quite right. I feel like at least the best things in life value the old and the new. The best things are preservationists and innovators. 

That old-school falafel joint – they’ve gotten into online ordering.

That trendy croissant store – they’re working with a miracle of butter and flour developed in the 13th century.

The monastery I like to visit. They may chant 12th century hymns, but one of the monks texts me the security code to get around the building when it’s time for one of my retreats.

Even us at Reservoir, we may be doing new things to be an accessible and winsome community for the times and place we live in. But we’re still committed to the Way of Jesus, an itinerant 1st century rabbi, himself an innovator in an ancient wisdom tradition. 

The best of just about everything is old and new. It’s preserving and innovating. Maybe this sounds obvious, but it’s something Jesus felt the need to affirm and say some stuff about. 

Here’s one place, in the 13th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew.

Matthew 13:52 (Common English Bible) 

52 Then Jesus said to them, “Therefore, every legal expert who has been trained as a disciple for the kingdom of heaven is like the head of a household who brings old and new things out of their treasure chest.”

Treasures old and new. 

Jesus is most specifically talking about a group called scribes. They were religious experts in his culture, but also legal experts. So these were the people who drew up contracts like marriages, land sales, mortgages. 

Jesus has a word for teachers, for pastors, lawyers, real estate agents who want to do their work God’s way. 

He says it’s like a person who has an old family heirloom, passed down for generations. And they also have the newest gadget they picked up this year. And they love and use them both.

Old and new, preservation and innovation. 

This is good life advice. In any profession, we should draw upon the established norms, the best practices, the accumulated knowledge passed down over time. Preserve it, use it, learn and be wise. 

And we shouldn’t only be stuck in the past. Teachers can adapt new technologies when they make classroom learning more efficient or more engaging. Pastors, lawyers, property managers, you name it, we can do things differently when we find a better way.

Old and new, preservation and innovation. 

It’s part of the Way of Jesus as well. 

There is wisdom in the roots and heritage of the faith – in the ancient sacred texts, in the tradition – that is worth learning and using. And yet the Way of Jesus is also ever-evolving. Nothing stands still, everything is changing, religions, faiths, spiritual quests as well. 

This wisdom of old and new reminds me of something else Jesus said, something a little more specific, this one from the 9th chapter of Matthew. 

Matthew 9:14-17 (Common English Bible) 

14 At that time John’s disciples came and asked Jesus, “Why do we and the Pharisees frequently fast, but your disciples never fast?”

15 Jesus responded, “The wedding guests can’t mourn while the groom is still with them, can they? But the days will come when the groom will be taken away from them, and then they’ll fast.

16 “No one sews a piece of new, unshrunk cloth on old clothes because the patch tears away the cloth and makes a worse tear.

17 No one pours new wine into old wineskins. If they did, the wineskins would burst, the wine would spill, and the wineskins would be ruined. Instead, people pour new wine into new wineskins so that both are kept safe.”

This is a friendly conversation between old and new. A few folks are like – we fast. This religious practice is really important to us. Part of our heritage, our faith. And notice, Jesus isn’t like – that’s stupid. You don’t need to do that. 

He respects their practice. He says his own disciples will return to it at some point. But something else is going for them now, so they’re doing things differently. 

And then he tells this little anecdote from the worlds of clothes-mending and wine-making. Everyday life. He’s like: if you want something new, you can’t only use the old to get it. Old wineskins are great for holding old wine – which can be a treasure. The container and the wine have aged and stretched together. But to get something new – to make new wine – you need a new container as well. 

Jesus is not saying the old is bad. 

He was what we’d call poor. Everyone in his circles kept wearing and passing along old clothes. And Jesus has a word about how to best preserve them. 

Jesus lived in the patterns of an old faith tradition. He didn’t start anything from scratch. He learned how to pray from the psalm book in his Bible. He learned about rest and joy and justice and the goodness of God from the best ancient wisdom and practice of his tradition. 

Respect and preserve what’s worth keeping. 

But he also said:

there are some things I’m doing differently for a reason.

New wine in his culture can be a metaphor for the new activity of the Spirit of God. The hope, the redemption, the new possibilities God is making available at this time in history. And Jesus says:

to keep up with what God is making possible, you have to innovate. You have to try new things, to not be afraid to adapt and change. 

This is the nature of life, the nature of God, and the nature of this church community too. 

When I worked in schools, there were always debates going on between old and new ways of doing things. What books kids would read, what assignments they would do and how those would or wouldn’t be graded, how teachers would impart material to their students and lead discussions, just about everything in the profession had these old vs. new debates around them. 

And a lot of those debates went nowhere because they got stuck in old vs. new, right vs. wrong, when the truth is that there are things about education and learning that have been practiced over decades or centuries that are worth preserving and there are also new things we’re trying to accomplish that require new tools. 

  • What’s worth keeping?
  • And what new things do we need to try to accomplish new goals?
  • Were much more interesting questions than is the old or the new better?

Same with almost any area of life. When our kids were little, we picked up on so many debates on the best way to parent young children.

  • How do you help them sleep better?
  • Teach them right from wrong?
  • Help them learn how to read?
  • Do you want them to depend on you more or less, and in what ways? 

And again, it felt like everyone in the conversation was like: the old way is good. It worked when I was a kid. Or the opposite – the old way sucks, it’s gonna ruin your kids. Now we know this way is better. Old or new, right or wrong. I wish it could have all been a little less judgy, a little humbler, and we could have asked more: what’s worth keeping? What do we appreciate about the old ways? And what new things are we trying for, that might take some new tools? 

Friends, I believe that life isn’t just like this. God is like this as well. In our faith traditions, we like to emphasize the unchanging nature of God. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. 

And to a degree, this is right. God’s nature is unchanging. Three times the Bible says God is something…. That God is Spirit. That God is Truth. That God is Love. I don’t think that ever changes. God is always omnipresent spirit, never sometimes all contained in the body of one cricket or something. God is always true. God is always love. And you could add things… God is always just, kind, creative, and so on. 

But the Bible at least teaches that God tries new things. God does new things. God doesn’t just set a plan for the universe in motion and lets it go. No, God adapts. God responds. God improvises. 

For instance, let’s say God hopes one good thing for our lives. Maybe God hoped that last year we’d break some toxic pattern in our lives, some addiction we use to numb out, some habit of criticism or meanness or self-sabotage. And God was helping people and resources show up to help us. But we missed it. We weren’t paying attention. We resisted the growth. We just didn’t have it in us. 

God’s not going to just hit replay on last year’s experiences and hope it goes differently. God notices the same fail and might try something different and hope we have it in us to respond this time. 

That’s what Jesus was saying in his generation. He was embodying a tradition of spiritual teaching and of prophetic witness. He was revealing ways to be in relationship with God, to be in loving connection with self, neighbor, enemy, and creator, and to live more fruitfully and justly as well. All of this was shaped by the best of an old tradition, but the ways Jesus was doing that were new. New wine. New divine activity. New possibility. 

So Jesus says to these curious seekers, don’t be distracted by the tradition you don’t see. Notice the new thing God is doing. It’s here for you. Receive it, adapt and change. It’s worth it. 

This by the way is what Reservoir is up to. 

This week and the next four weeks, we’re in our annual We Are Reservoir series. It’s a time when we remember some of our shared values and purpose. We try to make it easy to connect or reconnect with others. And we invite everyone to find ways to belong and to contribute to a community that we hope nourishes each of us while also connecting us to something bigger than ourselves.

So you’ll hear a lot of invitations… invitations to belong, to connect with community, to eat together. Invitations to become a member or to remember why you’re still a member. Invitations to give and volunteer – to contribute to the good our community is shaping together. We hope you’ll say YES to the invitations that seem right for you, and know that for anything you don’t say YES to, that’s OK as well. You’re in charge of your own life, and we all can trust one another to find our ways. 

This month, our sermons will in part explore part of the vision of Reservoir, the way we do things, the life together we’re promoting, that we think has value of the church, but also has value for our lives beyond the church too.

And part of that vision is our spirit of innovation, our willingness to stay rooted while adapting, not being afraid of change. It’s our way of old and new. 

So, on the most basic level, Reservoir is a Christian church. It’s a community that is promoting a way of being human that is rooted in a deep and ancient tradition. 

We read and study and teach sacred texts that are millennia old. They teach us about God and humans and justice and the good life, and how to be in community, and how to live in our bodies, and find more love, joy, and peace in a troubled world or in a restless self. 

Some of our technologies of worship and prayer and ethics and learning and being in healthy relationships are super old too. Because we think the Way of Jesus has life and wisdom to it. It’s worth learning, preserving, and transmitting. 

But Reservoir is also trying to be a new wineskin in which God can do new things for us, our neighbors, and our broader communities. 

When we were getting started, people were realizing that the age of churches as the moral cops of their communities had passed. More and more in this region of the Northeast United States, and really much of the country and the world, people just aren’t looking to churches to tell the whole world what’s right and wrong anymore. That age has passed. To be honest, churches blew it. That’s part of why that age has passed. 

So Reservoir doesn’t do that, even when some people want us to. We don’t lay down the law for all our members, let alone for the community at large, saying if you want to be part of this church, or you want God to approve of your life, you’re going to live exactly this way. 

We don’t do that. We try to create a community where people can be in meaningful relationship with an ancient and wise spiritual and moral tradition, where people can be in a safe and kind community that values personal growth and goodness and justice, where people can even learn relate to an all-wise, all-loving unseen spirit we call God. And we trust that to work. We trust that to help us move in greater love, purpose, health, and goodness.

A generation ago, more followers of Jesus started to realize that people of different sexual identity or orientation shouldn’t be stigmatized anymore, that there are healthier and more helpful ways of re-reading a few ancient texts in our Bible that had been condemning of our queer siblings.

We were like, we want in on that. We can learn how to practice some of our old values while also respecting the love and dignity of our queer siblings and queer selves, and celebrating some different expressions of holy and good gender expression and faithful loving relationship.

Same with a lot of things. Reservoir is at its best when we set our anchor in the deep well of an old faith while at the same time setting our sails to catch the new winds of the Spirit of God. 

I know that metaphor breaks down as all metaphors do, but I hope you get the picture. This is a community of old and new, of preservation and innovation, of profound respect for the ancient faith tradition we keep returning to and of bold and hopeful embrace of new ways of living that faith, when those better match the new wine, the new possibilities that God is presenting in our times. 

I hope you find this community a beautiful and helpful place to support your own best life and faith. I also hope for your lives as a whole, you can enjoy asking those questions in all the arenas. What is worth keeping? What is worth preserving? Since the old is sometimes good and helpful and true. While also not being afraid when lives change, when times change, when needs in your life change, and asking: what new things are worth trying this day, this season, so I don’t miss the new things God is doing around me too.

Everyday is Your Birthday

PRAYERS

Students, and Parents and Caregivers of Students, and Educators

May you be safe from harm this year, safe from over-worrying, safe from threats and bullies, and when you do face something hard or scary, God give you gentle strength to ask for help and make it through. 

May you stay open this year, open to learn new things, even from people you didn’t think could teach you. God help you be calm and curious and open to all the things God hopes to teach you and to every encouragement God sends you.

May you be kind to your friends and your teachers and students and parents and children, since kindness heals others and kindness even heals ourselves. And may you remember that you too are worthy of kindness, that you are God’s beloved child. 

May you be secure, quietly strong in God’s love and purpose for you. Sometimes tests and classmates and maybe even parents or principals or all kinds of other people are going to tell you are not good enough. God help you remember the world is so good but the world can also be a liar. And God help you remember the truth that you can keep learning and growing, and that you are also loved and you are enough today just as you are. 

And God gift you with wonderful friendship too. God help you make a new friend this year. God help you keep an old friend when something hard happens and one of you needs to reach out or say I’m sorry. God even help you let go of a friend if it’s not so good anymore and it’s time to move on. God give you power to be a good friend and to know that like everyone else, you deserve good friends too. And God help you remember you can always be God’s friend too, the person God loves and encourages and comforts. 

You, students and teachers, children and parents and school staff and leaders are loved. You matter to God and to us, and your school year matters to God and to us. And we say, be blessed and go back to school in hope, in joy, and in peace.

AMEN

Psalm 118:21-25 (Common English Bible)

21I thank you because you answered me,
    because you were my saving help.

22 The stone rejected by the builders
    is now the main foundation stone!

23 This has happened because of the Lord;
    it is astounding in our sight!

24 This is the day the Lord acted;
    we will rejoice and celebrate in it!

25 Lord, please save us!
    Lord, please let us succeed!

How does this sound to you? How does it make you feel?

Do you feel happy? Are you like: present-day vibe. This is my song.

Do you feel annoyed? Like: I am not feeling joy and celebration. I have other feelings, thank you very much.

Or maybe it’s just early, and you’re like: come back to me later with all that smile.

Or maybe, maybe you feel pressure: like my goodness, here goes the Lord, or the Bible, or the church again, telling me to put a smile on it when I’m not all that happy.

Let me assure you that this sermon is not about trying to feel any one way in particular. You feel whatever you feel. You be wherever you are right now, that’s just fine with us. I think it’s just fine with God too. 

Even this happy passage makes room for all kinds of places we might be in any moment in life. There’s gratitude for the past, yeah, but there’s some urgency in the present – save us, God, and some fear for the future (could you help us with success?) that it puts out there. 

God’s good with where you are today, my friends. I hope you are too.

And this is what I want to talk about today – how to really be wherever we are, how to be here today, no matter what day it is. We’ll talk about why that’s important, how it’s part of the way of Jesus for us all, and some of how to welcome this gift of today a little more. 

Now you may have noticed I took the summer off this year. I’m so grateful for your support in that. I was actually not too far from here most of the time. My wife Grace was working, my kids had stuff to do, but it was really good just to slow down my pace and be a private person for a while. I’ve been doing this work for 10 years, 50 is right around the corner, and it was really good this summer to relax, to take some stock of my life, and think a little bit about what I want to be the same, and what I hope will be different going forward. So thanks again for your support of pastor sabbaticals. It was really good.

We won a Lily Foundation grant to support the sabbatical too, so that paid for some church things, like the slate of guest preachers you heard. But it also paid for my family to make some memories together. There were a number of small trips, but the big highlight was a long trip to Southeast Asia. We traveled through Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore – seeing the sights, eating incredibly well.

It was all wonderful really, but for all five in our family, I’d say being in Thailand was a highlight. The beaches, the monkeys in the jungle, the temples, the canalled city of Bangkok – it was all extraordinarily beautiful. The meals were delicious. And we found just dipping our toes into Thai culture enriching as well. 

Our tour guide, Nikki, was Thai, and at one point, she talked with us about her experience of what is special about Thai Buddhist culture. She described what it’s been like in the six years since her mother died, her mother being maybe the most important person in her life. 

And she said for us, the past is over here. It happened, it mattered, but we can’t go there any more. And the future is over here – we don’t know what it will be. But in between, here we are with the one time we do have, with the present. 

And she said

Even with my loss, I don’t live with sadness or regret. Because every day I had with my mother was a good day. I hugged her. I said I love you. We said and did the things we wanted each day because we’ve learned to live in the present, like there is no past and no future. Just today. So no regrets.

I could tell Nikki really meant this. Another time when she mentioned she was 39 years old, I made some comment about 40th birthdays and how hard they can be. And she sort of looked at me sideways like she didn’t understand and just said,

I don’t worry about that, every day is my birthday.

Every day is my birthday. 

I found this attitude, this way of life, really compelling.

Is it anyone’s birthday today?

How about this week?

This month?

  • What if all of us raised our hand?
  • What if every day was our birthday?
  • Or maybe not?
  • Maybe some days aren’t for celebrating?
  • And some days aren’t for reflecting on the passing of time?
  • But what if every day was like the whole world to us?
  • Like it was the only day that existed?
  • What if every day was the whole of life?
  • What would this be like?
  • Does this have anything to do with the Way of Jesus?
  • Would this spirit about the past, the future, the present help us?
  • How so?

There’s this interesting progression in the Way of Jesus about how the bit from the Psalm I read goes. It’s like a socio-theological progression. 

See, first Psalm 118 is part of the Jewish liturgy of the Egyptian Hallel.

“This is the day that the Lord has made”

has to do with the Exodus out of Egypt, the deliverance of the ancient Hebrew peoples from bondage. It’s a day of memory enshrined in the culture, in the faith. God has rescued us. So this was maybe the song that Jesus and his disciples sang after the Last Supper, when it says they went out and sang a hymn….

You have helped us God. You have done surprising things in surprising ways. This is the day. And so again, our God, help us. God help us this day.

Later in the Way of Jesus, this language is applied to the first Easter, to Resurrection day. Once again, God has done surprising things, taken the stone that was rejected – now personified as Christ crucified – and has turned it, turned him into the cornerstone of God’s work on earth. Jesus is risen. This is the day of rejoicing.

In the decades to come, the followers of Jesus would start to say and to sing these words every Sunday, celebrating the day of resurrection in weekly worship. God is alive, God is our ever present help, God is doing surprising and hopeful things not just back in the life of Jesus but in our time too. Weekly worship as a time for rejoicing in God this day.

But then of course, you take it to its conclusion, you go all the way and it’s not just the Exodus, it’s not just Easter, it’s not just Sunday, but it’s every day. This is the day – this day, whatever it is – that God has made. This is the day for life. This is the day for God’s saving help. This is the only day we’ve got. And so this is the day in which joy can be found. This day!

It reminds me of something Jesus said, something that became one of my favorite phrases of Jesus this summer. He says,

Matthew 6:34 (Common English Bible)  

Therefore, stop worrying about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

I think it’s the gloomier version of Psalm 118. That one says –

be present today, this day, because it’s God’s creation.

It’s God’s time of life and help and joy. This is the day.

Jesus has the same message, different mood.

Be present today, this day, because it’s the only day you have.

It’s God’s time of life and help, and after all, why think about any other day? Doesn’t today have enough challenges? Doesn’t today have enough trouble? This is the day.

Not every day is our birthday. Some days are full of hard things. Some days are sad, some days seem dull or scary. Jesus knew this. And who knows, maybe Jesus was in a mood when he said this, I don’t know. 

But this presence, the full engagement of today as the only day we’ve got, as our day we share with the living, life-giving God, I think this presence is part of what made Jesus so special, so wise, so magnetic. He saw things other people didn’t see because he was so engaged in this day. He seized opportunities others didn’t because he brought care and attention and love to this day, to the people and places and circumstances before him, again and again, every day. 

And if we see that in Jesus, and if we believe in a living God who as Jesus taught – is never far, always close, who is always good, who is always creatively able to help us in this particular day, then maybe that kind of presence is for us too. 

Friends, I could piece together an Instagram account of my sabbatical that makes every day look glorious, rich, memorable. There were all the glories of the Southeast Asia trip. There were weekends hiking in the White Mountains, swimming in Maine with my kids, lounging around the Cape with Grace. Retreat at the monastery. Some new things I tried, some big rites of passage in the life of our young adult children. Lots of big days.

But a fair bit of my sabbatical was like a fair bit of all of our lives, kind of puttering my way through ordinary life. In my case, though, it was puttering about with all my work responsibilities and schedule removed. And I thought it would be bliss. Like, I don’t know my distant memories of summers as a young kid, lying in the grass, playing around in the pool, just endless chilled-out joy.

But one, you can tell I’m turning 50, a long way from childhood now, because I know my summers as a kid weren’t like that at all. Summertime was boring a lot of the time. And even though there wasn’t school, sad and scary things could happen in the summer too!

And so with me. Even with much lower responsibility, I found on sabbatical that I could still be restless, I could still get very easily stressed out. My stress could just attach to smaller things, like a little drama with the construction company in our neighborhood, or endlessly bugging one of my family members about something I should let go of, or whether or not we were going to be able to afford to repair our fence.

When I noticed myself puttering through a day, just wasting the time, I didn’t like that. Because I thought – this is a sabbatical. I’ve never had one of these before. Most people never get them during their working years. And me, still, only once every seven to 10 years. That’s a long time. I didn’t want to fritter it away.

And when I noticed myself stressed out about something coming up ahead for me or my kids, and not being in the most present, loving posture to everyone in my family, I didn’t like that either. Because my kids are all in the process of launching. Last week, we went from three kids in our home to one kid. And even that one is planning on living away from home next year, at least some of the time. I don’t want to miss these moments with them.

This wisdom of the psalms, this wisdom of Jesus to not miss the joys, the life, even the trouble and the help of this day, seemed true. But not always easy to live. 

Just knowing something is true doesn’t mean you make it your truth, right? 

One thing that helped me, though, is a habit I picked up in yoga of all places. I’ve done a little yoga, a very little bit, in the past. But last year, after my doctor found some arthritis in my shoulder, he strongly recommended a particular form of yoga, even a particular studio, that he thought could help me.

And with all the extra time this summer, I thought: why not now? This is the day to try. So I did one of those 30-day cheap trials, where I could practice yoga at this studio as often as I want. 

And friends, I got to tell you, I got my 30 bucks worth. I kept going back there, day after day after day, no matter how inexperienced I was, and no matter how goofy I must have looked sometimes. 

And it was great. It was great in a lot of ways, but one of the ways was through this attention to what they call “drishti.” Drishti is a Sanskrit word for our view, our focus, our gaze. 

And in yoga, or at least the form I’ve learned, drishti is the visual point of focus during the practice.

I’d be closing my eyes or kind of looking around unfocused while I tried to hold my body in some muscle-achy pose, or stretch some way I hadn’t stretched before. 

And the teacher would be like: pick a point, a single point, and focus there.

And I’d keep my eyes open, relax as best I could, and just focus on a particular point. And wouldn’t you know it, my body would be able to do more. The focused gaze brought more ease of focus to what I asked my body to do.

And the teacher would say:

this is just the beginning of drishti, because if you can focus your gaze here, you start to be able to be in one place, to see one thing.

Instead of zoning out or numbing out so much, instead of thinking about the past or the future, or just checking out, hoping for what we might want to see, we can be here, now, this day, this moment. We can be present to the gift, the opportunity, the life of it. 

Jesus affirms this insight that what we look at and how we focus matters.

Jesus said:

Matthew 6:22 (Common English Bible)  

“The eye is the lamp of the body. Therefore, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light.

Jesus is taking this up a level. He’s talking about what you want. If you want things that are good, if you focus on things that are good, you become more healthy, more good within. Hard to argue with that.

But at a more basic level, Jesus is affirming the value of drishti, the significance of paying attention. 

Don’t see what you want to see or what you wish you could see. Don’t spend your day distracted, don’t spend your energy on the future or ruminating about the past. See who and what is there today. See the good that’s possible. 

That healthy gaze will make the whole life healthy. 

Friends, I’ve spent way too much of my life numbing out or distracted. I’ve spent a lot of days avoiding work that’s hard for me, sometimes avoiding hard situations too. I’ve spent too much time living in the past and the future as well. I mean right now, as our kids become adults and start to leave our home, it’s easy to spend a little too much energy nostalgic about the past or regretful about the past rather than letting go.

And it’s easy to spend a little too much energy worried about their future as well. Instead of being present to this day, the joy we can have in their opportunities and the best of who they are right now, the prayers and the help we can give this particular day, even if they seem small. Even the strange gift of entrusting our kids more to God and to themselves. 

I’m not good at this drishti thing, this present focus. I’m not very good at “this day” mindset. But I know it’s a gift of God for us to receive. It’s not a burdensome command, this thing God’s upset at us if we’re not doing. It is a grace, though, part of Jesus’ way for us into more love, joy, and peace.

And in the times and ways I can receive it, it’s doing a lot of good. Just a few ways how:

Living today gives me more awe. Science tells us that awe – being surprised and amazed, having wonder over something big or beautiful or good, is one of the keys to happiness and well-being. 

This morning, I woke up earlier because I had some stuff I had to do to be ready for today. I was tired and grumpier than normal too. I walked my dog even though I didn’t want to because that’s my morning chore. Sometimes I look at my phone while I’m walking my dog, but this time I didn’t.

And I saw how beautiful the first morning light was. Even the big gray apartment building on my block looked really beautiful in the first rays of sun. And I saw a very small flock of birds fly overhead in their perfect V-formation, and for a moment, I thought:  wow, this world is so beautiful. And maybe it can all be beautiful, even me and even the stuff I stress about. This is the day.

Living today helps us stay in it when things get hard. Keeping a single focus, I can do weird stuff with my body that’s making me stronger that couldn’t do just weeks ago. That’s cool. And living today helps me not run away so fast when someone’s angry or sad. And living today helps me sit down and so some work I’ve been avoiding or procrastinating over. Because living today like it’s the only day means we can’t choose our work or our troubles this day, but we can choose how we face them. We can look for the good, the possibility, the opportunity in them. And that helps us be more courageous, more present, more productive, more peaceful.

And lastly, living today helps us love better. Because we can’t love what we don’t see. Jesus said this sometimes. Like when he was in this guy Simon’s house, and Simon was being so rude to someone Jesus loved. 

Luke 7:34 (Common English Bible)

Jesus turned to the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? When I entered your home, you didn’t give me water for my feet, but she wet my feet with tears and wiped them with her hair.

I live with a son who is incredibly observant. Sometimes he is just so eerily good at seeing people. There was a time this summer when he was insistent that we spend time with certain extended family. Because he was like: Dad, don’t you see, this is important. And he told me the reasons he saw it was. And of course he was right. So we did a bunch of really complicated schedule changes to make it happen, and of course, that was good. The seeing became loving, and loving – real love, generous and kind and gentle attention that comes from really seeing someone – does so much good for the person being loved and the person loving too. 

Friends, it’s a simple sermon to get me back in the swing of things with you all, but it was my sense that this was the best gift we had for this day at the start of this year. The gift of drishti. The gift of more present attention. The gift of presence. The gift of this day that God has made, this day of troubles, this day of joy, this day to ask for and find God’s help, this one and only beautiful day we have to be alive. 

This is the day.