Monthly Archives: October 2022

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Week in the Word: Grace Without Limit

Pastor Micah preached this on October 23 at Life’s Journey United Church of Christ in Burlington, NC.

You can watch a video of the service this message was preached at  in which this at https://www.facebook.com/lifesjourneyucc/videos/569045331652563 

Scripture 2 Samuel 11:26-12:35 (read via a reader’s theater at  https://re-worship.blogspot.com/2013/06/readers-theatre-nathan-confronts-king.html )

Sermon  Grace Without Limit

When you really, truly, look at the enormity of what King David has done here, you see it is a moment when God could have wrung God’s hands at what was done, thrown in the towel, and said “I’m done with you!” to David too and been wholly justified. 

Take a moment and imagine King David not as some ruler of the ancient past but as a modern king-maker of politics or king of business or media today.  What would happen if he engaged today in such settings  in the kind of behavior King David is called out for in our reading and news broke about it?   If rather than running his company and caring for his family, David the CEO had been lounging drinking mai tais on his porch while his employees risked life and limb to get ahead and, when doing so, he used his power to be a peeping tom on them, how would we respond?  If our Twitter and Facebook feeds were full of the stories of how, while lounging off the profit and work of others and acting as this peeping tom, he saw one employee whom he found attractive, ha had her dragged to his office where he made advances on her, ignoring her protests that she was happily married to one of his best employees, what would we all say? If both MSNBC and Fox News had interviews with people close to her who shared how, when she became pregnant, David  arranged for her husband to be “taken care of” by another, perhaps by hiring a hitman or David  arranging with Uriah’s foreman for an accident on the job to occur?   This would not be anything to laugh off.  At best, his career would be ruined.  Very likely, he would be rightly deemed a criminal and thrown in jail.  Everyone would wash their hands of him, and consider David ruined beyond redeeming. And I don’t think a one of us would blame them for it. 

God had every reason to throw in the towel and give up on David. Yet not so, here.   David has done what, from a human perspective, is unforgivable.  He has crossed lines that never ought to be crossed.   He deserves condemnation.   God should, by all rights, say “David, you are done. I’m turning my back on you.   It’s over.  I give up on you”.  We do that, don’t we?  We give  up on each other for far less.

Yet God does, in fact, forgive him.   When David really faces into and admits his failure, willing to make amends, God turns toward David, showing that we can never go too far or do too much to start afresh with God.   God’s mercies are new every morning, no matter how much we screw up, no matter how badly we hurt ourselves or hurt others.

God looks at David, with the horrible crimes he’s done, and God says to him “you are more than the worst things you’ve ever done”.  You know God looks at us too and whatever things haunt us, whatever failings and mistakes, whatever traumas and struggles, and God says “you are more than the worst things you’ve ever done; you are not defined by the worst things that ever happened to you”.  God sees beyond all this, to who you are inside – a child of God, of infinite worth.  

             When I was a teenager, at an Assembly of God youth program my buddy Miguel invited me to, a youth pastor pictured this by bringing out a large bill – I forget if it was $10, or $20, $50, or $100, cause on my tiny allowance those each seemed like alot to me.  He asked people how much it was worth, and they shouted out the amount.  Then he had someone got come up and stomp on it.  He then asked “what’s it worth?”  Everyone shouted the same.  He had someone spit on it, and asked the same.  He had someone ball it up.  And the youth pastor held up that stomped on, balled up, spat on bill and said “its still worth the same amount.  And the same is true for you and me.  We’ve been bought with a price by Christ who died for us.   No matter what you’ve done or what has been done to you, God still sees worth in you.  Nothing can change that.”  Far too often, we give up on ourselves, not willing to do as David does here and own up to what we’ve done wrong, make amends, and seek a new start with God and others.  

As a church, too, if we want to walk in this example, we need to be a place that does not hold people’s past against them.  We need to be people who can forgive others and give them a place to begin again.

God’s forgiveness does not give us a short-cut or way out of facing into David’s  failings or ours. A sword lays over David’s house the rest of his life. He must make amends for what he has done and there are painful consequences. Yet, God never gives up on David and God is able to bring beauty out of even the brokenness that flows out of our hurtful actions.   This incident is horrible, is criminal even.  It brings consequences David never can completely resolve for the rest of David’s life.  And yet, it is David’s second son by this same Bathsheba who grows up to be King Solomon the wise.  And it is from one of Solomon’s descendants, Mary of Nazareth, that Jesus is eventually born.  God brings beauty out of the brokenness.  God uses the broken pieces to build a lovely mosaic.

My challenge to you is to realize, whatever sins or failures you’ve made in life, don’t give up.  You’ve never gone too far or done too much to begin again with God.  And realize that beginning again means not sweeping things under the rug but with God’s help facing up, owning what you’ve done, and trying to make amends and do better tomorrow.

As a church, let’s work to be a hospital for sinners, a place where people broken by life and broken by their own harmful choices, can be honest about their lives and find hope and healing to begin again.   

 Let us be people of grace and a church of new beginnings.  Amen and Amen.

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Week in the Word:  As For Me and My House

Pastor Micah preached this sermon at Life’s Journey United Church of Christ in Burlington on October 17.  You can watch a video of this service at You can watch a video of last Sunday’s message at https://www.facebook.com/lifesjourneyucc/videos/438035891746433

As we turn to today’s Scripture, we join the people of God at a turning point in their life together.  They had endured years upon years under the cruel lash of slavery.   Then with one miracle after another God led them out of slavery, out into a new life as a free people.  Once freed they followed first Moses and then Joshua on a pilgrimage in search of a land where they could belong, a place to call home.  Now, as we join them in Joshua 24, they no longer are refugees in search of a home, but have found a place to belong.   Now they must set down roots, to build a home, a community that will last.

To prepare them for this new phase in their life’s journey, God calls them to do a few things: first, to remember the journey they have been on already, second to recommit to what matters most, and then to leave behind any baggage that holds them back from this new and bright future. 

This point in their journey reminds me of one of the more heartbreaking things I’ve ever done – helping my dad, some five years ago, break up house after my mother died of cancer.  Dad and mom had built a life together and dad simply couldn’t bring himself to figure out what to let go of or what to keep without our help.  It was heart-breaking to have to help him decide.  What’s more, it was in part through helping dad move out that we began to realize dad was in the early stages of dementia, as he would have us repeat the same task, sometimes sorting through the same box or room, two or three days in a row, forgetting what we’d already accomplished the day before.

On the one hand, it is precisely because of dad’s dementia that I remember this as  a precious time.  Dad told me stories then I had never heard before about he and momma, as well as my grand parents and great grandparents.  Some stories we unearthed – like when we found one of my Grandma Herma’s notes in which she described her gathering up mom’s toddler clothes as she outgrew them to mail them off to a missionary she had been supporting with her meager income, a missionary whose children did not have enough winter clothes of their own – are memories we only discovered through sorting through his and mom’s things.   And these are stories that otherwise would have been forgotten. After all, daddy, the man who taught me to love spinning a good yarn when I was growing up, doesn’t tell stories anymore.  He does not remember them and even on the rare occasion he does, words fail him .   This time sitting with the past together gave me lessons about where I came from that I can only keep alive because I took that time with him, when he still remembered.

What’s more, that time reminded me of what is important.  Hearing how my poor farmer forebears struggled to get by and still found joy in that struggle, and hearing how they also fought out of their poverty to set aside enough to send both mom and dad to go to school, get an education, and find a better life reminded me of values that my parents passed onto me that still shape me still.   What’s more, realizing then my mom was forever gone from the circles of this world, and all I had of home now was dad and my brothers and sisters, reminded me not to forget that no money, no titles or names, no accomplishments, can ever replace time with those you love.  Once that is gone, it’s gone. You better take it while you have it. 

Finally I learned how hard it is to let go, but also how necessary.   I remember many a time as he was breaking up house that dad got frustrated or upset at the idea that, as he prepared to move out of his and momma’s big townhouse into a tiny bedroom in my brother’s house, he had to let something go.  “But what if I need this?”  “Your third juicer, dad?” “Yes, what if I need juice”.  “I’m pretty sure Matt and Agnes have juice and if you need some you can get it at the store.  And, you know, there are those other juicers. One’s enough”

And those were just items that, as someone raised shortly after the great Depression, he felt he had to hold onto “cause you never know when you will need them”.  When it came to items with deep emotional value though, well, Katy bar the door, let’s just say letting them go was oh so much harder yet.

But ultimately holding onto those things kept him stuck, both in a past that was gone, and most importantly, kept him from coming to stay in a home where family could take care of him as his memory began to slip. 

We each face turning points, moments of change when, like God’s people did in Joshua, like my dad did after mom died, we too need to take stock of where we have been, what truly matters, and what we need to let go of.  

As we try to determine what God has next for us as individuals, in our families, in our partnerships, in our churches, it begins too with reflecting on where we have come.

Taking time to reflect on where your life has taken you, where you’ve come from and how far you’ve come so far is important because it changes your whole perspective.   Rabbi Harold Kushner once wrote that faith gives us eyes with which to see the world, like spectacles that make the scene appear more clearly than it was before.   Science explains it this way — researchers have found that we have a stigmatism on our soul, an in-born tendency known as negativity bias.   If we are told five statements, with four of them being positive and inspiring, we will almost certainly hone in on and worry about only the one we can take as negative, not the many more that are positive.  This is a tendency that allowed our hunter-gatherer ancestors to always be on guard, ready to face potential threats like wild animals ,but in our lives today, unless our negativity bias is put in check, we will lose sight of the forest for the trees, missing many of the gifts and blessings God has sent our way, simply because we do not see them.  To take time to pay attention through prayer and meditation each day to the ways God has shown up in your life, has answered your prayers, has opened doors of opportunity, is like putting on such lenses to correct your vision.  The more you daily take notice, the easier it is to choose to see where God is at work, where God is blessing you, and where God might be leading you, rather than becoming lost in fear and negativity.   Doing so can help make the path God is calling you to clear to you.  

When we let ourselves connect with God as God is moving and at work in our lives, it also will lead us to focus on the values that matter.  This is what it means when Joshua says that as for him and his house, they will serve the Lord.  What are the main things that truly matter in your life?  In your family, marriage, or partnership?  In your work life — in our life together as a church?  What would it look like if you and I made the main the main thing by putting those main things more in the center?

This would make your sphere of influence – your home, your workplace, your marriage or partnership, your family, your community – become more a place where the words we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, were made more a reality.  If we are putting the things that really matter in our lives in the center of all we do, making the main thing the main thing, we can make those circles in which we move become, in their small ways, oases of heaven in the here and now and don’t we all need more of that?

Finally, just as dad had to sort through what to let go of, though it was hard, so do we.  We see this in text how God invites God’s people to abandon the gods of their fathers and mothers, gods that compete with the God of Scripture.  Like my father struggled to let go of things he did not need to bring with him as he moved into the smaller space of my brother’s home, so God’s people could not keep clinging to idols that held them back from the future God has for them.

In our own lives, we also need to ask what idols, or gods of our fathers, are we holding onto that we need to let go of, in order to embrace the bright future God has for us in our lives?  It is an odd question in some ways.  Most of us either were brought up with no mention of God or gods of any sort by our parents or, like me, were brought up with the words of Scripture and songs of Zion echoing from our lips.   How can either type of parent have handed onto us idols or gods other than the God of Scripture?

Yet if we really listen to our lives, I think we can find some idols, some false gods, we have been handed over the years, that we must let go of.  You know, I still remember the jokes older men would tell us at family reunions growing up, which were racist or sexist and which it felt like everyone laughed at.   It might be easy to say “it’s just a joke”, but its harder to square that shrugging response from people at those reunions with the fact that the very land our poor hard scrabble farmer ancestors grew their crops on was not original to them; but was land stolen from Native Americans and at times cultivated using the hands of women and men whose ancestors were carried over to this country as slaves.  There is not a person in our country not somehow impacted by the idol of racism, sexism,  and prejudice.    Perhaps it is high time we let that kind of baggage go and don’t bring it with us.

Daddy too, once I was grown, made his way through to each member of our family telling us about how he had freedom through Alcoholics Anonymous, letting us know he’d given up on the bottle and that he wanted to make amends for harms he’d done to us in giving into his addiction over the years .   Daddy demonstrated he knew that particular idol was one he needed to leave in the past and not carry with him any more. Some of us have addictions or traumas and trauma responses from our families we need to let go of to find what is next for us. 

What are you clinging to which you need to let go of?  It need not be so blatant. It can even be hurts and unforgiveness from the past you keep holding onto rather than laying at Christ’s feet. It can even be nostalgia for the good old days of your past, your family’s, your community’s, or your church’s that becomes toxic and holds you back from embracing the new thing God is doing. 

Until you quit clenching to these gods of your ancestors, this baggage of the past, you won’t have your hands open enough to receive the blessing yet to come that God is just dying to place in them. 

Let’s let go and open up. As individuals, as partners and spouses, as families, as a church family, as a community, we need to take time to remember and celebrate how far we’ve come, we need to ask if we are making the main things the main thing; and we need to abandon what idols we are holding onto which we need to let go of in order to move beyond pasts in which we can become stuck and begin instead  to enter into the bright futures God wants to lead us into.  May we hear God’s call and answer. Amen and amen. 

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Week in the Word: What Will You Do with this One Wild Life?

Pastor Micah preached this message at the first night of 2022 Revival at Hanks Chapel United Church of Christ in Burlington, NC

Romans 12:1-13, NRSV UE

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, on the basis of God’s mercy, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable act of worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.

3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. 4 For as in one body we have many members and not all the members have the same function, 5 so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. 6 We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; 7 ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; 8 the encourager, in encouragement; the giver, in sincerity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.

9 Let love be genuine; hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good; 10 love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. 11 Do not lag in zeal; be ardent in spirit; serve the Lord. 12 Rejoice in hope; be patient in affliction; persevere in prayer. 13 Contribute to the needs of the saints; pursue hospitality to strangers.

One of my favorite poems, by Mary Oliver, asks , “Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean–

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life?”

I remember asking myself this question, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” while walking along the red brick pathways of Campbell University surrounded by autumn leaves, the year in college when I struggled over, tried to deny, and finally ultimately answered my call to pastor.   I remember asking this same question again in my mid twenties, after being ordained and serving in churches in a different denomination, when that denomination sked me to stand in the way of including LGBT people in those churches after a transgender neighbor of mine asked to come with me to church.  I knew in my heart then and there that I could never stand in the way of anyone  of coming into God’s house, coming to God’s table, coming to know Christ, no matter what made them different, so I had stepped aside, refusing to stay with that church and that denomination since staying with them required me to do so.  I knew it was the right choice for me then, knew God was calling me to build wider tables that include not higher walls to keep others out, but it felt like the bottom had dropped out of my life.  I did not know welcoming and inclusive churches where all are welcome, like the church I pastor now in Burlington, even existed at that point, so I thought I would never work as a pastor again. 

“What will I do now,” I asked myself, “with this one wild and precious life?”

Alot of us are asking this same question in one way or another now.  Some of us ask this question of ourselves because the last few years have led us to question the careers we’ve poured years into building.  For some it is because we are asking what to do now, after having made a commitment of faith for the first time, or having recommitted ourselves to God after having been away from our faith far too long. For others we ask this wondering how we can help our communities or our family. 

I think all of us are asking this question some, as we rebuild in these days after a pandemic has turned everything upside down at our schools, at our jobs, in our churches.     What always worked before, does not seem to work in the same way anymore.  In light of this, what will we do now with our one wild and precious life?

Our Scripture anticipates this question, and shows us the steps for discerning an answer.

First, our text calls us to stop listening to the messages of the world around us.  You know, every day the world is constantly bombarding us with messages.   It comes, yes, over the radio and TV.  But now we get messages also in our phones, on Facebook, and for more technologically savvy folks than me, with smart watches, you even get messages about who you are, what you are, and whether you are worth something coming in from your watches.

The world around us far too often hones in on the sensational, the most extreme news and trends, and far too often sends the message that unless you and I  fit some unattainable standard, whether in beauty or in terms of our success, we are disposable.   One of my favorite authors, Henri Nouwen, puts it well, ‘Many voices ask for our attention. There is a voice that says, “Prove that you are a good person.” Another voice says, “You’d better be ashamed of yourself.” There also is a voice that says, “Nobody really cares about you,” and one that says, “Be sure to become successful, popular, and powerful.” But underneath all these often very noisy voices is a still, small voice that says, “You are my Beloved, my favor rests on you.” That’s the voice we need most of all to hear. To hear that voice, however, requires special effort; it requires solitude, silence, and a strong determination to listen. That’s what prayer is. It is listening to the voice that calls us “my Beloved.”’

You know, when people try to get healthy, often they will do something called a detox – where they cut out unhealthy food and drinks, letting their body cleanse itself from what makes it unhealthy.  In a way, some of us need a spiritual detox.  If you really want to know God’s will for your next steps, you may need to put on mute the voices whether in your life, on your Facebook feed, coming from certain toxic people, or even in your own heart & mind saying to you that you can’t do it, that you aren’t enough, that you don’t matter.  And you need to find a way to every day, make space to listen for and listen to God’s voice and what God says to and about you.

          It is out of this putting aside of the unrealistic expectations of the world around us that we can get the fair assessment of ourselves our Scripture speaks of.  The other day, one of the leaders in our LGBT+ ministry at Life’s Journey named Eddie  and I were talking as he shared with me some of the LGBT+ events he was exploring doing with our LGBT group.   Now Eddie is always out and proud as a gay man, and has been known to show up with rainbow flags and pride memorabilia as his outfit for the Sunday services.  Well, Eddie turned to me then, looking all serious and said, “Pastor, you know, I’ve tried for a long time to imagine myself straight.  I sit and wonder what I’d be like if I wasn’t gay.  And I just can’t even.  I can’t even imagine myself any different than I am.”

I thought to myself, “now, don’t you worry, Eddie, none of the rest of us can either”.  I turned to him and then reminded him of what one of the first openly gay candidates for president said.  When put down and challenged for being gay, that candidate said to his hecklers, “If you have a problem with the fact I am gay, don’t take it up with me.  Take it up with the God who made me.  And that God doesn’t make any mistakes.  That God doesn’t make any junk.”

“You can’t imagine yourself as anything different because you are not a mistake, Eddie.” I told him.  “God doesn’t want you to be someone different than you are.  God wants you instead to take who you are and let that be the blessing.”  You see, for all of us, it is not despite who we are or despite our journeys, that God can use us, but precisely because of who we are and how our lives have shaped us, good and bad.  There is something in the world only you can do, something God had been preparing you and the world for.

As Quaker author Parker Palmer once wrote, “Vocation” or your calling in life “does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live—but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.”

    So the Bible tells us here that God would have you and I look at our lives, at what we’ve been through, at what they’ve taught us and ask “how can I use what I’ve been through, use who I am, and turn it around to be a blessing to others?”

    We need to look within and accept ourselves as a gift who can be a blessing to others. Yet, discovering what God is calling you to do with your one wild and precious life does not just come from looking within.   It starts there, yes. We do need to look within, to look at what our heart passions are, to look at what makes us come alive, and what lessons and gifts the broken road of all of our lives teach us which can be of a blessing to others.  Each of these are what our text means by spiritual gifts – those things God has put inside you, inside your life, that you alone can contribute and no one else.   Yet the Bible says here that we need to also look outside ourselves, look to how these gifts within us can benefit others who, like us, are part of God’s body in the world.  As the late Frederich Buechner once wrote, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

    Think for a moment – what brings you deep gladness?  How can that, taken together, with your unique life situation and life experience, be put to work in a way that meets the needs of the hurting, the lonely, the hungry, the forgotten, in the world around us?  The gifts God gives us are not for us to hoard for ourselves, but for us to share with those around us.

    A part of this means realizing you can’t go it alone.  One of the sad outcomes of the pandemic is people pulling back rather than banding together.  At our UCC Association meeting this weekend, a speaker on mental illness talked about the steep rise in depression and anxiety since COVID hit.  And no wonder! Having to keep our distance from each other for own health is hard.  And now that many of us can gather back together after vaccines and increased immunity, for far too many people remaining distant has become a habit when it is not needed for them anymore.

    We were never  intended to be solo Christians, disconnected from other believers; and we are also not intended to be lone ranger Christians, trying to make the world a better place all by ourselves.  No, we need to make space for our gifts to come together with the gifts of others. On our own we will wear out and give up, but together we can do great things that will last. 

    Finally, our Scripture says the ultimate goal of whatever we are called to do is love.  When you find how to put these gifts, experiences, sources of joy, to work to expand the love in the world, you are on the road to finding your calling.  It is important to notice though that the love our Scripture talks of us is not just sentimental feelings but the kind of love Mr. Rogers spoke of when he said “Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle”.  It is the love Cornel West speaks of when he says “Justice is what love looks like in public, just like tenderness is what love feels like in private”.  It is the love Dorothy Day speaks of when she says, “What we would like to do is change the world–make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And to a certain extent, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute–the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor in other words, we can to a certain extent change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing that we can do but love, and dear God–please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as well as our friend.”

What will you do, what will I do, what will we do with this one wild and precious life, my friends?  

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Week in the Word: Building a Windmill

Pastor Micah preached this message on Saturday, October 8th, at the Eastern North Carolina Association of the United Church of Christ gathering, held at Umstead United Church of Christ.

Isaiah 60:1–5a

60 Arise, shine, for your light has come,

    and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.

2 For darkness shall cover the earth

    and thick darkness the peoples,

but the Lord will arise upon you,

    and his glory will appear over you.

3 Nations shall come to your light

    and kings to the brightness of your dawn.

4 Lift up your eyes and look around;

    they all gather together; they come to you;

your sons shall come from far away,

    and your daughters shall be carried in their nurses’ arms.

5 Then you shall see and be radiant;

    your heart shall thrill and rejoice…

I want to thank Association President, Pastor Dian JacksonDavis ,Vice President, Pastor Joy Alford Allridge, and our Association board for inviting me to bring the Word today. I’m so honored to share with you. But I have to confess I almost said no to Pastor JacksonDavis when she called. It’s a hard and hairy time right now at the hospice I serve at as a chaplain.  Things are stretched and the thought of another commitment was hard to say yes to.   I’m doing double duty – working both in the hospice facility on our campus and also in home hospice, which goes into homes and the wider community.  A part of the reason why I’m doing double duty is all of us are doing double duty at the hospice.  We can’t find enough nurses, enough social workers, enough people able and willing to do the work, to do business as usual.  In meeting after meeting we hospice workers are saying “I don’t know what is needed to fix this.  How do we rebuild?”

            But my sense is – and this is why I said “yes” when I was asked to speak today, though I have a ton on my plate and was tempted to say “no” – my sense is that this challenge is not unique to hospice but is a question many are struggling with in all kinds of businesses and careers. I bet some of you are doing double duty right now at the place where you work, on the street where you live.

Other pastors I talk to describe a similar feeling about the church right now.  “I don’t know what to do. It’s like the bottom dropped out from underneath us.  We’ve lost members. We’ve lost funds.   How do we rebuild?  How do we begin again?”

Families and partnerships also face such darkness and losses right now, too, from broken relationships to grief from people we’ve lost from illness, from illnesses of our own to financial upset, from struggles with trauma  or addiction histories, to family members who who’ve given up on you for who you are and who you love.   

Our reading from Isaiah shows us such a moment is not unique to you and me.   Isaiah’s words come at a moment in Isaiah’s day when God’s people had faced the bottom dropping out of an important part of their lives too.   The nation they had called home, which we would today call Palestine , had been destroyed, its palace and its temple demolished and brought to rubble, and its people sent out, scattered throughout the nations as refugees after their own nation fell in war.   Talk about dark days.  Talk about loss.  Talk about uncertainty. They too wondered how they could ever find light and begin again.

The situations many of us face, and the situation Isaiah 60 speaks of, remind me of what happened with a young man William some years ago when he looked around at his life and saw only loss and uncertainty, darkness and pain.  William lived in Malawi.  A son of maize farmers in his early teens, William’s young life was shaken when a drought struck.  That drought dried up his family’s farm.  Not only did it dry up their farm but it also ravaged their whole village.   With no crops left to sell, his family’s meager resources were gone. They could no longer afford his school fees. What’s worse, they didn’t have food enough for themselves and were reduced to each only getting one tiny bowl of grain per person each day.  William looked around and saw his whole community similarly struggling in the face of this drought. 

Many of us today also feel the solid ground has fallen out from beneath us, like our lives have become but so much wreckage, so much darkness, that we cannot imagine any light at the end of the tunnel, or any way to rebuild again. In such situations  it can be easy to throw up our hands in defeat, to give up, to throw in the towel and say “I am done”.  Yet our reading in Isaiah suggests that the darkness we might feel, the failure or defeat that may lay heavy on us at times, or the seeming hopelessness of things we had valued seeming to fall to pieces like so much wreckage, is not the final word on whatever situation we face.  No, the truth is that  God can turn our darkness into noonday sun.  God can even use our pain, our struggle, our heartache, transforming our seeming wreckage – the very things that have brought us heartache –  into the seedbeds from which new life for us, for our families, for our communities, for our churches, can sprout forth.

    In her book Rising Strong, author and researcher Brene Brown describes the process her research showed her we go through when we seek to begin again.  She describes what occurs when we begin again after facing adversity, after facing loss, even after facing seeming failure.  She says those who can begin again afterward and not just survive but thrive learn the art of reckoning, rumbling, and revolution.  To reckon is to face head on what your struggle is and how you got here.   You have to see what brought you to this place before you can move beyond it. To rumble is to really sit with your emotions, your questions, your fears, and face what lessons they give you.  You aren’t ready to move forward until you ask, What is God teaching me through what I’m facing?  Some of us have not done those things yet and we need to slow down and take time to reckon and rumble to prepare ourselves for what God has next. But if you both reckon and rumble, it can lead you to a revolution, where you change your attitude, your game plan, your approach, in ways that open you up to new possibilities.  A revolution is not you returning to the way things have always been before, which, let’s face it, is what far too many of us are hoping for. No, that is dreaming too small. Revolution is you transforming your future into something even brighter, something that learns the lessons that what you have been through in your trial and loss can  teach.

This brings me back to William from Malawi and what he found when he lifted up his head and looked around.  William saw his suffering, looked around, and saw lying around him as the actual wreckage others would throw away the way forward for himself and his family as they  faced  famine and suffering. No longer able to afford school, yet not wanting to totally get behind in his education, William began poring over books others could have thrown away which instead of being discarded had been  put in a local library, particularly books on science.  In their pages,  William found a path out of their suffering for his family and his community — blueprints on how to build windmills, which would harness the power of the air all around them to provide electricity for his community to pump water.   When William looked over these diagrams, he saw concrete steps he could take toward a future without starvation, a future where his family could pump water to grow their crops  so that they could again have enough food to eat.  He knew this would not just help his family alone but would help his whole struggling community have enough food and water to survive. It was not just going back to how things had been before but dreaming a bigger future for all. Trusting he was at a turning point where he could not just wait passively for his new future to come by magic, William saw the garbage of his village and from it gathered the spare parts he needed so that, with the help of a few others, he developed two hand-made windmills, one to provide electricity to his family’s home and another which watered their crops. Together these two windmills provided what was needed not just for his family alone but to save his whole village.

 You see, it is not despite the wreckage around us that we will discover this bright light of new beginning, but precisely through learning to use that pain and wreckage to build windmills of our own, ways we can turn that loss or rubble, pain or sadness, into sources of light for others.  Just as William from Malawi used what others had thrown away to build the windmills that helped his community make it through, so God can use whatever painful journey you’ve been on to birth beauty and healing in the world.  Nothing you have gone through in your dark days will be wasted.  Nothing in your family’s.  In your church’s or communities.  As you and I learn to find the light of Christ and put the whole experience of your loss and pain in that light God too can bring new beginnings and new life out of whatever you have suffered.  May we hear that call and answer.  Amen and Amen.

by

Week in the Word: Poor Wayfaring Strangers in This World Below

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Scripture Matt 2:13-15

13 Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” 14 Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt 15 and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.”

Scripture Exodus 14:5-7, 10-14, 21-29

5 When the king of Egypt was told that the people had fled, the minds of Pharaoh and his officials were changed toward the people, and they said, “What have we done, letting Israel leave our service?” 6 So he had his chariot made ready and took his army with him; 7 he took six hundred elite chariots and all the other chariots of Egypt with officers over all of them.

…

10 As Pharaoh drew near, the Israelites looked back, and there were the Egyptians advancing on them. In great fear the Israelites cried out to the Lord. 11 They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? 12 Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, ‘Let us alone so that we can serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.” 13 But Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid, stand firm, and see the deliverance that the Lord will accomplish for you today, for the Egyptians whom you see today you shall never see again. 14 The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still.”

…

21 Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea. The Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and turned the sea into dry land, and the waters were divided. 22 The Israelites went into the sea on dry ground, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left. 23 The Egyptians pursued and went into the sea after them, all of Pharaoh’s horses, chariots, and chariot drivers. 24 At the morning watch the Lord, in the pillar of fire and cloud, looked down on the Egyptian army and threw the Egyptian army into a panic. 25 He clogged their chariot wheels so that they turned with difficulty. The Egyptians said, “Let us flee from the Israelites, for the Lord is fighting for them against Egypt.”

26 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand over the sea, so that the water may come back upon the Egyptians, upon their chariots and chariot drivers.” 27 So Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and at dawn the sea returned to its normal depth. As the Egyptians fled before it, the Lord tossed the Egyptians into the sea. 28 The waters returned and covered the chariots and the chariot drivers, the entire army of Pharaoh that had followed them into the sea; not one of them remained. 29 But the Israelites walked on dry ground through the sea, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left.

Sermon Poor Wayfaring Strangers in This World Below

As I studied today’s passages this week, I was reminded of a story in the Washington Post:
“Earlier this month, Eliomar Aguero swam across the border separating the United States and Mexico with seven other people. The 30-year-old had been traveling for two months from Venezuela through 11 other countries by foot, bus and train…

“Aguero spent his life in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. The economic crisis and political unrest gripping the country pushed nearly the entire population into poverty, including his family. Millions have fled. Aguero, too, began searching for a way out.

“There was one, but it was dangerous. Aguero and his wife left Venezuela in July hoping to reach the United States. For weeks, they had nowhere to sleep. At one point, they were sent from Chile back to Colombia. From there, they traveled through all of Central America. Finally, after riding a notoriously dangerous train through Mexico, they reached the Rio Grande.

“He and Maria knew how to swim and believed they would make it across. They tied themselves together with others in the group, entered the murky waters and made it safely to land. They were now in the United States, but didn’t have money, clothes or a phone.

“Aguero and his wife were eventually taken by immigration agents to San Antonio, where they were reunited with Aguero’s 23-year-old brother Rafael, who had begun his journey northward a few weeks earlier. The couple spent 72 hours in a migrant aid center before being put out on the street, where they joined Rafael, who was scraping together cash to buy food by working whatever odd jobs he could find.”

Aguero’s story is that of many refugees and migrants in our country – and really around the world – who flee hunger, who flee famine, who flee political or religious persecution, seeking a better life. It is also our story, an American story, as most of us, in one way or another, are descended from people who came to these shores too as refugees and as immigrants seeking freedom and a new start. 

Aguero made the news though this past month because of the two ways people in our country responded to him and other refugees.  On the one hand, the state of Texas rounded him and other refugees up, loading them on buses and planes, and shipped them even further north of the border, deeper into our country,  to Martha’s Vineyard in New England, as their way of saying to such refugees “we don’t want your kind here”.

Yet the people of Martha’s vineyard responded with compassion and kindness when such unexpected guests were dropped on their doorstep.  Since the refugees arrived on the island, residents and organizations stepped up to the plate — providing water, food and shelter. Two emergency shelters – one of which was located at a local church – were quickly established, as community members put together 50 beds and provided a play area for the children.  The Salvation Army Emergency Disaster Services team was one of the first groups that mobilized to provide hydration, snacks and other resources to the refugees.  Rather than shutting their doors and saying “you aren’t welcome here, your type needs to go away”, the good people of that tiny island of Martha’s Vineyard rolled out the welcome mat to the refugees and strangers that landed on their doorstep.

The story of Aguero and the other refugees who were driven out of Texas but found a warm welcome at Martha’s vineyard connects with our texts today because both our reading from Matthew and our reading from Exodus describe refugees as at the center of the Biblical story.

In Matthew, Jesus and his parents Mary and Joseph are depicted as political refugees fleeing from the threat of death by a hostile government in Palestine, fleeing across the national borders separating Palestine from Egypt, in search for safety.  We are invited in Matthew’s story to see the face of Christ in the face of every immigrant, every refugee, and every outcast – and not just the ones with papers. After all, do you really believe Jesus, Mary, and Joseph asked the same king who was seeking to kill them for passports or visas to allow them to legally cross into Egypt in order to flee his wrath?  No.  The holy family were undocumented immigrants then, and in the face of people without papers we too are called to see their faces, and the face of Christ.  As Jesus later says in Matthew 25:40, “’Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these siblings, brothers, and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

Similarly, the people of God are depicted in Exodus as ones quite  literally crossing the waters not unlike the refugees who crossed the Rio Grande to flee persecution, oppression, slavery, and the threat of death, in other words as refugees and migrants seeking freedom in a new land too.  The fact God leads those refugees and migrants from Egypt safely to freedom while those who seek to oppress them – the soldiers who are Egypt’s actual government agents, their equivalent to border patrol – are drowned in the sea for seeking to throw them back into bondage shows what theologians call “God’s preferential option for the poor”.  In other words, Exodus shows that God is on the side of the outcast, the oppressed, the forsaken, those who like refugees are facing  hunger, oppression, and death in their search for  freedom.

Our scene from Exodus invites us to see not just the face of Christ but our own faces in the faces of those who are refugees, who are outcasts, who are oppressed.  

A part of the reason why is we can grow too comfortable fitting into this world and it’s values, when our faith teaches us we are headed to another realm – the kingdom of God.  We are called to say, as that old Gospel song sang, “I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger / Traveling through this world below / There’s no sickness, no toil or danger / In that bright land to which I go … I know dark clouds will gather ’round me / I know my way is hard and steep / Yet beauteous fields arise before me / Where God’s redeemed their vigils keep”.   The trials we face in this world are not all there is. We are headed to a brighter shore, a more joyous future, no matter what we face in this moment. And because of this we are called to live as citizens of this better kingdom, where swords are beaten into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks, and where God wipes all tears away. We live here and now as such citizens in exile, such wayfaring strangers,  by being people who are people of peace-making, people of healing, people of comfort in an often brutal and heartless world.

Yet there is another way we are called to see ourselves in the faces of the most vulnerable.  Our text invites us to say to each other and especially the most vulnerable in our communities and our world what Hezekiah Walker sings in his Gospel song “I Need you to survive”: “I need you, you need me / We’re all a part of God’s body / Stand with me, agree with me / We’re all a part of God’s body / It is His will that every need be supplied / You are important to me, I need you to survive / You are important to me, I need you to survive”

What if we truly said that and meant it? If when we saw hurting people rather than pushing them away, we said “I need you, you need me. We are all a part of God’s body.  You are important to me.  I need you to survive”?

We get glimpses of this reality and what it would be like, don’t we?  Me, I remember it most the year after I graduated from college when I was working with housing at Methodist University.  We had a strong international student program and a golf management program that drew people from all over the country and all over the world.  While I was working there, one fateful September, the Twin Towers fell in New York City.  And suddenly, the difference of what state or nation someone was born in, or what accent they spoke with, did not matter.  Every student and every staff person reached out to each other, in support, and in solidarity.    What I witnessed in small scale among those students – of differences from all over the globe dissolving enough for everyone to be one family – briefly happened all over.   No longer were people Democrats or Republicans, just Americans standing together in our grief.   And nations all over the world reached out and stood beside us, putting their differences aside.

As we learn to embrace the calling of this text – to see Christ in the face of the other, to see ourselves with our fates bound together with the fates of others – we can learn, too, to be open to how we are connected not just with people who look like us or love like us, but all kinds of people; and not just with people who live in our community or neighborhood, but people all over the world, in one global family.   This is what today, world communion Sunday is all about.   On world communion Sunday, we re-enact the story at the heart of our own faith, of God emptying God’s self,being broken, and pouring out God’s own life in Christ’s death for the healing of the nations and we remember that any true healing like that tears down barriers of nation, of politics, of race, of sexuality, of anything that can be used to divide.   May we embrace that call today, not only at the communion table, but through our whole lives.  Amen and Amen.