5/18/2025 - Struggling to be Healed - Genesis 32:22-32

Struggling to be Healed

Genesis 32:22-32

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

May 18, 2025

 

Image:  Israel by Mike Moyers at mikemoyersfineart.com

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7DmMZtlem8

This story of Jacob wrestling in the night is one of the iconic stories of Genesis.  It is very familiar to most of us.  Despite its ancient context and details that seem irrelevant (like the origins of certain dietary practices), this is a story that we can relate to – a story of alienation and fear, struggle and perseverance.

It has been a while since we’ve explored Jacob’s life together and this is far from the only interesting incident in his life.  So . . . a bit of background: 

You might remember that Jacob has a twin brother named Esau.  Esau was born just minutes ahead of Jacob, so Esau is the older brother.  The two brothers have never gotten along.  Twenty years before today’s story, Jacob tricked his dying father into giving him the blessing meant for Esau, the first-born.  When Esau found out, he swore he would kill Jacob after their father died.  So, Jacob ran far away to his Uncle Laban’s home. 

Over the last twenty years, he has married Laban’s two daughter, Leah and Rachel and fathered several children.  He left home poor, with little more than the clothes on his back.  Now he is wealthy with flocks and herds of cattle, donkeys, sheep and goats.  His success is due to his deception and fraud.  He has been systematically breeding and stealing Laban’s   sheep out from under him.  Laban has begun to figure that out.  One day, while Laban is away, Jacob gathers his family and everything he owns and flees. 

He is headed for home, but he remembers Esau’s angry vow to kill him.  Esau is likely still as mad and set on revenge as he ever was. Jacob’s scouts have brought back the news that Esau is coming to meet him with 400 men.  That only increases his fear.

Jacob sends his family across the river, presumably to safety, and remains alone.  He is worried about Esau.  Maybe this will be the last night of his life.  He is probably also feeling guilt and regret for what he did to his brother, for breaking his father’s heart, for abandoning his mother, for so many things.  And in the darkness, while he is alone and defenseless, someone jumps him. 

Sometimes his opponent is described or portrayed as an angel.  But the Hebrew clearly says “man”, not angel, not God.  So with whom is Jacob wrestling? Maybe, at first he thinks it is Esau. Maybe he is wrestling with himself. 

Perhaps you have known this kind of experience.  You have been up all night, struggling with your fears, worried about the future or your children or someone else you love.  This kind of wrestling often happens at crisis points, times of difficult decisions, of loss or anticipated loss.  Whoever it is, Jacob is never one to give up easily and they wrestle all night long.  Along the way, Jacob comes to believe that this is not Esau he is fighting.  It is God.

A friend of mine shared with me the story of her darkest hour.  After a 3-martini lunch, her husband caused a car accident in which a young woman was seriously injured.  The young woman was in the hospital for a long time, and it weighed very heavily on the man.  As the year progressed, he spiraled ever deeper into depression.  Then the young woman died, and my friend’s husband took his own life.  A tragic situation, filled with unbearable grief for two families.  The night after her husband died, my friend could not sleep. Alone, she stayed awake all night watching the sky.  In her despair, she was not even sure that the sun would rise again.  Only when the sunrise came, and she had survived the night, did she feel that she could go on.  She said to me, “I just had to get through that night.  I had to see the sun rise again.”  Those words were the closest she could come to describing her own wrestling match. 

We all face those times, those turning points brought on by grief, or tragedy or crisis, and sometimes even by new positive opportunities.    They seem to be an unavoidable part of life.  I would like to believe that in those crisis moments, God is present to hold us, to comfort us, but what if there’s more?  What if God is also present to redeem us, to encourage us to keep on wrestling, to push for better answers?  What if the path through the struggle is also the path to transformation?

Barbara Brown Taylor says, “No one in their right mind asks to be attacked, frightened, wounded.  And yet, that is how it comes sometimes, the presence and blessing of God. Sometimes if comes in the middle of the night, in the desperate wrestling that is – who would have thought it? – the answer to all our prayers.”[1]

Sometimes it happens like that. And sometimes, it doesn’t. This event in Jacob’s life has been decades in the making.  We don’t get to choose when it happens. 

At the beginning of the movie Shadowlands, C.S. Lewis lectures confidently on the problem of evil. "Suffering is the megaphone through which God gets our attention," he tells his students. Lewis speaks as one who has all the answers, because he’s never struggled with the questions. At the close of the movie, Lewis’ wife has died of cancer. Lewis knows that he needs to talk to her son, Douglas, to try to offer a comforting word. He decides to tell the boy about his own mother’s death. Lewis says, "When I was about your age my mother got sick and I prayed so hard for her to get well." Douglas interrupts, "It doesn’t work. Does it?" For what looks like the first time Lewis isn’t sure how to answer. Finally he begins to cry, "No. It doesn’t work." Out of a grief, a struggle, a wrestling match, beyond anything that he imagined, Lewis finds his way to a faith that has been through the fire.

Along towards dawn, God puts Jacob’s hip out of joint, but even then Jacob will not quit.  Jacob didn’t start this fight, but now he is in it to win it. Though his pain, he says, “I will not let go unless you bless me.”  And God the wrestler says, “What is your name?”

The last time Jacob asked for a blessing, twenty years ago, it was from his father Isaac.  And Isaac had said, “who are you?” “Tell me your name” How many times had Jacob replayed that scene in his mind?  How many times had he been unable to sleep, up in the middle of the night, rethinking that decision, remembering that he had said he was Esau. 

And now here it is again,

Bless me.

What is your name?

The same scene again, except this time, he says, “Jacob . . . I am Jacob. . . bless me.”

Roberta Hestenes  asks, “What is it that Jacob wanted more than anything else in life? What is it that we, in the deepest longings of our being, want more than anything else in life?” 

She answers, “Sometimes we don't even know how to put our longings into words. But the word for Jacob was the word "blessing". I want to know the smile of God. I want to know the favor of God. I want to know that what I am doing with my life is pleasing to the one who made me, that my life has purpose and significance that honors the God that has called me and made promises to me.”[2]

The blessing that God gives comes in the form of a new name. A name that recognizes who Jacob has always been and still is.  It represents Jacob’s capacity for struggling well.  If Jacob had not struggled and prevailed, there would have been no new name, at least not the name Israel.  Israel may mean actually something like God rules, God preserves, or God protects, but for the narrator of this story, it means “One who struggles with God”, “the God-wrestler.”

Jacob leaves this encounter with a new name which may reflect a new self-understanding.  He also leaves with a limp.  Blessing comes with a cost. Maybe this text suggests that “we cannot solve the contentious issues of our times until we wrestle with God and hold on to God for dear life.  For without God’s blessing, the problems of humanity will simply overwhelm us, leaving us angry and terrified.”[3]

Jacob/Israel limps away, knowing that he has found favor with God.   The first thing he does is to cross the river and join his family.  And then he sees that Esau is coming and he goes out to meet him. It is probably the gutsiest thing he has have done – going out to meet the powerful brother that he cheated and betrayed.

Unexpectedly, Esau runs to him, embraces him and they weep together.  It is the reunion that both of them need.  Esau forgives Jacob.  Jacob/Israel is able for the first time to see his brother without resentment, fear or guilt.  He says to him, “Seeing your face is like seeing the face of God.”  God’s blessing shows itself as brotherly love, as acceptance of a former enemy. 

Now I don’t want to tie things up too neatly here.  It is not the case that Israel’s life is smooth sailing after this one night of wrestling and receiving God’s blessing.  Esau forgives him, but the brothers soon part ways and settle in different regions again.  There will still be much pain in Jacob/Israel’s life, including his daughter’s rape and the loss of his favorite son.  Don’t hear me implying that finding favor with God puts you on Easy Street, because that is not the Biblical story. 

I suspect that many of us feel like we are currently engaged in the struggle.  This is a time of wrestling, not resolution. The way to fulfilling our deepest longings will involve pain, bruises and brokenness.  We may find ourselves utterly alone . . . like my grieving friend waiting for the sun to rise, . . .  like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying “let this cup pass from me”  and “thy will be done”, . . . caught between our human limitations and the good purposes God is working out in our lives.

But if we can invest ourselves in the struggle, if we make ourselves available for God’s blessing, we may find something within us healed or strengthened.  We may find a new name, something that blesses and values who we already are.  We may find a new courage and determination, a new honesty, or a willingness to be open to what we have long feared.  We may see a long-lost sibling and find the face of God.  I suggest that we keep offering our lives to God.  The life God offers back will have both blessing and injury.  We will struggle, but God will struggle alongside us, until we see the sunrise and know that we have survived the night.   Amen.


[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, “Striving with God” in Gospel Medicine, (Lanham, Maryland:  Cowley Publications, 1995), p. 108

[2] Roberta Hestenes, Wrestling with God, aired on Thirty Good Minutes, December 3, 1995  http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/hestenes_3910.htm

[3] Stan Mast, https://cepreaching.org/commentary/2020-07-27/genesis-3222-31-2/

5/4/25 - With Eager Longing - Romans 8:12-25

With Eager Longing

Romans 8:12-25

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

May 4, 2025

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GhSZkTG-dA

This passage is one of the most theologically dense sections in one of the most theologically books in the Bible. It is one of my very favorite texts, but I still shrink before its mystery.  I cannot say much about it before I run out of words because much of it is beyond my knowledge or experience, but I will try.

One problem jumps out right away.  In this letter to the Christians in Rome, Paul offers a binary that may have made sense in the philosophies of his time, but not so much two thousand years later. He uses Flesh and Spirit to describe to opposing ways of living this world, a way of death and a way of life.  For Paul, living according to the flesh evokes a destructive way of life, while living by the spirit is to pursue life in all its fullness. Now this is problematic because it has not served us well to despise bodily existence and to feel estranged from the earth.  This concept has been pushed to a toxic place.  But as Paul understood it, flesh is shorthand for our entanglement in systems of violence, deception and alienation which oppress and destroy.  “The [systems of ] flesh are not exterior to us; any more than our physical body is something external and alien. It is an [inherent] part of us; it shapes the way we perceive the world.”[1]

Paul invites and implores us to live differently, to be led by the Spirit of God which bears witness that we are heirs of Christ. At the beginning of this letter, Paul says that Jesus was in his earthly life, a descendant of David, but through the Holy Spirit, he was transformed into the Son of God by his resurrection. (Romans 1:1-4). Other New Testament writers say this differently. For Mark, it happens at Jesus’ baptism, when the Spirit descends and a voice announces that he is God’s son.  For Luke, it happens at conception. The angel tells Mary that he will be conceived by the Holy Spirit and that is why he will be called God’s Son.  The timing differs but the consistent point is that Jesus’ Sonship is inseparable from his being marked by the Spirit.  Jesus is God’s heir through the Spirit and then, Paul says, so are we.[2]   

Jesus moved through suffering to glory via the power of Resurrection. Paul is asserting that the same Spirit is at work in us.  God is transforming us into what humanity was always supposed to be, which Christ already is.[3]  

Wendy Farley is professor of spirituality at San Francisco Seminary.  She says that “For Paul, this embrace of life in the Spirit not about individual life after death; it is about the salvation of the entire world—all humanity and the earth itself.  . . . Paul is inviting us into a completely different universe from the one we know. To wake up to the fact that we are children of God is at the same time to wake up to our common humanity; all creation woven into one broken, beautiful, beloved whole.”[4]

Paul says “For the creation waits in eager longing for the children of God to be revealed.”  The entire creation is in bondage, groaning as it waits for freedom.

“I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”

That’s verse 18, a verse I love and yet, one I cannot claim to understand.  Paul knew real suffering – he was beaten, shipwrecked, imprisoned, and lonely.  I have suffered very little.  But Paul says that all of his personal suffering and all that he is witnessing in the systems of violence, deception and alienation – none of that compares to the glory which is coming.  Even though I personally have suffered little, some days it is hard to trust, hard to hope that Paul is right.

If we allow ourselves to hope, we make ourselves vulnerable to the pain of disappointment. Some of us have been so disappointed that we don’t risk hope any more. We may really only hope to the extent to which we can trust.  Trusting the Spirit, whom we cannot see or measure, that’s the only action Paul assigns to us. The rest of the work of moving from global suffering to cosmic glory seems to be in God’s hands. 

Sometimes, I am encouraged to keep hoping by others who have suffered and still they keep rising.  One of those people for me is Alice Walker.  You might know her as the author of The Color Purple.  She grew up in Georgia in the Jim Crow era.  Her father was a sharecropper; her mother was a maid.

When she was 8, her brother accidentally shot her in the right eye with a BB gun.  It took a long time for her to get medical care.  Her parents had to raise the $250 necessary to pay the white doctor.  When she finally saw him, the doctor just gave her a bottle of eye drops and told her that eyes are sympathetic, so she would likely become blind in her other eye as well. She continued to fear that possibility into young adulthood.  

Before the accident, Alice had been a pretty, lively, talkative child. After the scar tissue appeared, she grew self-conscious about her appearance and withdrew to a solitary world of books and writing. During this time, she felt ashamed, alone, and abandoned by her family.

 Six years later, the scar tissue was removed and she recovered her confidence. She went on to become a popular high school valedictorian. However, the years spent in isolation made a permanent impact on her worldview. She learned to feel “empathy and a sense of kinship with other people she perceived to be afflicted” She also developed the powers of observation that serve her as a writer. She was active in the Civil Rights movement and has protested the South African apartheid, the Iraq War, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and female genital mutilation.[5]

Paul writes about suffering and glory to encourage us, to implore us to trust and hope.  Those who have suffered much and still allow themselves to hope – I seek to learn from them. 

 When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, a woman named Sundus Shaker Saleh, an Iraqi single mother of five, lost her home and her property, and was forced to flee to Jordan. A decade later, she filed a lawsuit against six key members of the Bush administration, arguing that the war was not conducted in self-defense and constituted a crime of aggression under international law.  Alice Walker wrote a poem in honor of Sundus Shaker Saleh.

 

Hope Is a Woman Who Has Lost Her Fear[6]

In our despair that justice is slow

we sit with heads bowed

wondering

how

even whether

we will ever be healed.

 

Perhaps it is a question

only the ravaged

the violated

seriously ask.

And is that not now

almost all of us?

 

But hope is on the way.

 

As usual Hope is a woman

herding her children

around her

all she retains of who

she was; as usual

except for her kids

she has lost almost everything.

Hope is a woman who has lost her fear.

 Along with her home, her employment, her parents, her olive trees, her grapes.  The peace of independence; the reassuring noises of ordinary neighbors.

Hope rises, She always does,

did we fail to notice this in all the stories

they’ve tried to suppress?

 

Hope rises,

and she puts on her same

unfashionable threadbare cloak

and, penniless, she flings herself

against the cold, polished, protective chain mail

of the very powerful

the very rich – chain mail that mimics

suspiciously silver coins

and lizard scales –

and all she has to fight with is the reality of what was done to her;

to her country; her people; her children;

her home.

All she has as armor is what she has learned

must never be done.  

Not in the name of War

and especially never in the

name of Peace.

 

Hope is always the teacher

with the toughest homework.

 Our assignment: to grasp

what has never been breathed in our stolen

Empire on the hill:

Without justice, we will never

be healed.

 

I consider that the present suffering (which is real and pervasively harmful and anathema to God) is not worthy to be compared the glory which is about to revealed to us.

Video clip from the performance of the song Glory at the Oscars 2015  

Hope is about choosing to trust.  Awakening to the reality that we are children of God. The ultimate victory has been won; even if God’s intention of shalom is not yet fully realized.  The reign-of-God movement that Jesus started did not disband and fade away.  We are still living by the Spirit of love at work for love and justice.  One day, when the glory of resurrection fully comes, it will be ours, it will be ours. Amen.

 

 

[1] Wendy Farley, Connections, Year A, Volume 3, p. 168

[2] J. R. Daniel Kirk, Romans for Normal People: A Guide to the Most Misused, Problematic and Prooftexted Letter in the Bible, (Perkiomenvill, PA:  The Bible for Normal People, 2022), p. 97

[3] Daniel Kirk, Romans for Normal People, p. 98

[4] Wendy Farley in Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year A, Volume 3 Joel Green, Thomas Long, Luke Powery, Cynthia Rigby, Carolyn Sharp, editors,  (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2020), p.168

[5] Biography of Alice Walker, excerpted from this website https://americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/alice-walker/

[6] ©2013 by Alice Walker, https://alicewalkersgarden.com/2013/10/hope-of-healing/

4/20/25 - Between Grief and Hope - Luke 24:1-12

Between Grief and Hope

Luke 24:1-12

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

April 20, 2025

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ysq27HceUHw

The night before my mother died, my father, my brother and I were in her room, keeping vigil.  It was during the Covid lockdown.  She had been moved from the hospital to a nursing home for her last week of life, for what they called Compassionate Care. Something had changed in my mom’s breathing or her vital signs and the staff had alerted us that the end might come soon.  So our nuclear family – Mom, Dad and two kids— were together, sleeping in the same place for the first time in decades.  In fact, during that night, at some point it struck me that the last time we had all slept in the same room was probably in our pop-up camper on family vacations when I was a teenager. 

But on this night, we didn’t sleep much.  My father was in a recliner next to my mother’s bedside where he could hold her hand.  It had been a hard few days for him and I knew that he was physically tired and emotionally weary.  But he seemed the least ready to sleep of any of us. As the night wore on, he told stories.  Stories of the 63 years of his life with my mother, including some from before my brother or I were born.  Stories we had heard countless times and some brand new ones.  Then he moved on to stories from his earlier life, before he met my Mom.  More and more memories.  They just tumbled out. One story led to another.   I kept thinking that he should really get some sleep, that we all should, but the need to share the stories outweighed that for a long time.

Because that’s what we do when we grieve, we remember.  You and I have shared many funerals, celebrations of life.  At those times, our primary tasks are to remember our loved one and to remember our faith.  We gather photos, trying to capture a life span in images. The photos trigger stories, the stories trigger other memories.  We remember what our loved one used to say, the way they laughed or made an entrance, habits that were endearing or annoying, their favorite things and pet peeves. We remember their accomplishments and special trips and weekly routines. We remember and we grieve for what we have lost in that death. 

The women from Galilee are deep in grief at dawn that day.  They are women of means who have been financially supporting Jesus since early in his ministry. They have undoubtedly been telling stories.  As they gather water and soft cloths to wash his body, as they grind and mix the burial spices, as they reach out to clasp and arm or exchange a hug, they are remembering.  Perhaps Mary Magdalene recalls that day when Jesus healed her, the profound difference he made in her life.  Joanna, was the wife of Herod’s chief steward.  Maybe she remembers Jesus’ own grief when Herod executed John the Baptist.  Some memories make them laugh, like when Peter tried to walk on water, or that time Jesus spotted a grown man up in a tree or his joke about trying to put a camel through the eye of a needle.  They laugh and they cry.  They remind each other of all that was so good and true about Jesus and all that has been lost in his death. 

They are still remembering, still deeply grieving as they make their way to the tomb.  When they arrive and see that the heavy stone is rolled away, their first thought may be of grave robbers.  The nails used on the cross were considered to have magical powers. [1] It may come as just one more gut punch on top of the pain they’re already carrying.  Before they can process that, two beings appear, presumably angels.  They say “What are you doing here?  Why are you looking for the living among the dead?  Don’t you remember what Jesus told you?”

They have been remembering.  It is pretty much all they’ve done for the last two days.  But, as Biblical scholar Sharon Ringe says, the memory of Jesus’ teaching about his death and resurrection “has not been available to the women to help them understand. . . The chaos and horror of the events have blotted out memory.”[2]

Friends, we are grieving. We are grieving the loss of ideals that we believed were bedrock in this country, grieving unfounded attacks on our allies, grieving the wanton destruction of our institutions, threats to agencies that support life at the basic level, like Social Security and Medicare and the right to due process, as well as support for deeper, richer meaning in life like the endowment for the arts and the wide swaths of the histories of black and brown people and women which are being whitewashed, deliberately expunged from official records.  We grieve.  We lament.  We speak and shout in anger.  That is right and good.  But we must also remember who we are and whose we are.  We cannot allow the chaos and horror of these days to blot that out. 

I recently heard about a church that is in danger of forgetting its identity.  This church is one of the most progressive churches I know.  It is old enough that it was active in the abolitionist movement before the Civil War.  In more recent decades, it offered sanctuary to undocumented immigrants and was one of the early leaders in advocating for the LGBTQ+ community. 

But something happened a few years ago.  The church installed a Black Lives Matter sign in a highly visible place on their front lawn.  Some of the neighbors and passers-by objected.  Threatening phone calls were made.  The church Facebook page was targeted.  The sign was vandalized and had to be replaced.  Fear and anger swirled.   After some time, the pastor gave in.  They let the church’s active anti-racism ministry go dormant.  They took down the sign and silenced their own voice on racial justice. In response, some church members left because they were so disheartened and let down by the pastor’s lack of courage.  It made me sad to learn this story.  It seems like the fear and chaos of those events blotted out the pastor’s memory of that church’s long history of courageous, risky, justice-seeking.  The pastor lost courage and along with it, maybe they lost hope.

The women are grieving.  They have forgotten what Jesus said -- that he would be killed and rise again. But when the angels remind them, it seems that they remember. And somewhere between remembering his words and seeing the empty tomb, they dare to hope that resurrection could be true.

On the strength of that hope, they go to tell the other disciples – that the tomb is empty.  That the angels say Jesus is alive. But the disciples are having none of it.  They think it is nonsense, that the women are in indulging in fantasy, ridiculous drivel.  Except, maybe underneath their bluster, they also have a glimmer of hope.  Just a tiny, persistent wish that it could be true.  Something they don’t acknowledge in words. 

I say that because Luke tells us that Peter slips back to the tomb on his own, just to see for himself.  He sees the graveclothes and the empty tomb and he marvels.

What is the hope of the empty tomb? The hope is resurrection.  The hope is that death is defeated. Death, in all its forms, is the enemy, the thing we fear, the thing we rage against.  For Biblical people, death was anything that diminished life – sickness, injury, injustice, cruelty, war, oppression, evil.  Death separates us from those we love. Death dulls our senses and steals our joy.  But on Easter, Jesus overcame Death. In the resurrection, death is definitively defeated.

Rebecca Solnit is an activist and a writer. She advocates for human rights, women’s rights and the environment. After Hurricane  Katrina, after 9/11, after the wars kicked off by 9/11, she wrote a book called Hope in the Dark.  She says this “Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch feeling lucky. [Hope] is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.  Hope should shove you out the door.  To hope is to give yourself to the future.”[3]

Hope is an emergency ax—I just love that. Hope propels the women from the tomb to telling the others.  Hope persuades Peter to check out the tomb for himself. The hope of Resurrection sustained the early believers and sent them out across the known world to share this good news – Death is defeated. Love has won. 

I know that Resurrection is a difficult concept.  Hard for our rational minds to absorb. One of the most compelling arguments for belief in the resurrection is that its first witnesses went on to live so boldly that they died for their faith.  They no longer thought it was an idle tale, but something so true that they shaped their lives around it.   Something so true that we should shape our lives around it.  Something so sturdily real that we can give ourselves to God’s future.

Professor Tom Wright declares: “If God’s world of justice and mercy and beauty has already been inaugurated, then those who believe in Jesus’ resurrection must be . . . people who do justice and mercy in the present, people who, together with [others] in the body of Christ, work for God’s healing love in creation; people who do beauty; people who celebrate art, because art and music . . . are ways in which we can pierce through the imagination, which gets stuck in the old creation, and can help people to imagine . . . that there might actually be a new creation in which the bullies and the wicked empires of the world are not in charge, and in which Jesus is in charge. .”[4]

Friends, some of us are grieving. Some of us are raging.  Some of us are tempted to despair. But we do not grieve as those without hope. We have the hope of the Resurrection.  We know that everything that relies on violence and cruelty and fear and pain, as real as it may seem, is already dying.

In this moment, this critical moment, we see the suffering, we hear the groaning of creation, and we know the world needs the truth of Resurrection as much as it ever did. Friends, we are Easter people and our calling is to proclaim loudly and boldly that death is not the end of the story.  Our calling is to grab that emergency ax and wage peace against violence, to wage love against hate, to wage truth against fear, to wage hope against despair.  Our calling is to follow Jesus all the way to Life because Jesus is in charge. Alleluia! Christ is risen.  Christ is risen indeed.

 

 

[1] Amy-Jill Levine, Ben Witherington III, The Gospel of Luke New Cambridge Bible Commentary (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 650.

[2] Sharon H. Ringe, Luke:  The Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 1995), p. 285.

[3] Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, 3rd edition, (Chicago:  Haymarket Books, 2016), p. 4

[4] N.T. Wright, Resurrection of the Son of God Preview, Published on Vimeo. May 17, 2017. vimeo.com/217829344

4/6/25 - Between Righteousness and Mercy - Luke 19:1-10

Between Righteousness and Mercy

Luke 19:1-10

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

April 6, 2025

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkQ4s3bEu6Y

Full disclosure – I didn’t want to preach this sermon. I went to a clergy Bible study this week.  It’s a group of pastors who preach from the lectionary just about every Sunday.  I preach from the lectionary about half of the time, so I’m often out of step with them.  The story of Zacchaeus is not today’s lectionary text, so I was out of step again.  They were all talking about the time that Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus,  anointed Jesus’ feet with expensive perfume.  The conversation about that story became very rich.  We noted parallels between that time and ours, especially similarities about politics and economics then and now.  I left that Bible study wishing that I was on lectionary this week, because the sermon that we had started to generate together felt better and more comforting than one about Zacchaeus.  It would certainly go down easier than this one.  Or so I imagined.  I seriously thought about changing to that text, but by that time, Dorothy had all the bulletin material and Michael had made his musical selections.  I didn’t want to start over at that level, so I stuck with Zacchaeus and here we are.

If we’ve been around church for a while, and most of us have, we know this story in a certain way.   The way we know the story starts like this:  Zacchaeus was a rich tax collector who got wealthy collecting taxes from his own people and handing them over to the enemy.  

Walter Brueggemann describes tax collectors as revenue men for the Roman Empire.  He says, “The purpose of that empire, like every empire, whether Babylon among the Jews, Rome in the time of Jesus, or the US empire . . .is to coercively extract wealth for the sake of the center.  Zacchaeus served such a regime. . . Zacchaeus was an agent of the violence of the empire.” [1]

Ancient Roman tax systems were regressive which means there was a heavier tax burden on lower income levels and a lighter one on wealthier social classes.  Throughout much of Roman history the tax burden was almost exclusively laid on the poorest people of the Empire while wealthier bureaucrats could avoid taxation. These systems contributed to the concentration of wealth and land in the hands of a small class of aristocrats.[2] Does any of that sound familiar?  Poor people paid proportionally more in taxes than the rich.  In return, they did not get education for their children or healthcare or security for their old age.  They had no way to demand something better.  The government was rigged to benefit those already in power.  Again, this sounds like something we’re very familiar with.

So, the way we have usually been taught to understand this story is that Zacchaeus has found a way to make the system work for him.  He has turned his back on his own people because he is greedy for money and power. In a world of good and evil, we know which side he is on and we have no sympathy for him. But Jesus does.  Jesus does not call him out, but calls him in, naming him a child of Abraham.  Essentially, he says to the crowd, “this man is one of us.”   Jesus gives to Zacchaeus the supreme honor of hosting Jesus in his own home.  And he does it in front of everyone.  Not you too, Jesus.  Are you falling for this?

What we know about Jesus is that he is into forgiveness.  He is into transforming people’s lives, helping them change.  And so, we can kind of stomach this story if it’s told like that. In fact, that’s what translators and interpreters have done with this text for a very long time.  In most translations, after Zacchaeus gets down from the tree, he tells Jesus “half of my goods I will give to the poor; I will pay back four times as much.”  It seems like this is a story of repentance.  Because Zach has encountered Jesus, he will change his ways. The people of Jericho may not believe it.  They may still not trust him, but we know that’s how Jesus works.

Except that’s not a good translation.  Zach actually says “Behold, Lord, half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.”  The verbs in that sentence are in present tense.  He is describing what he already does, not something he is going to start doing from this point on. Jesus does not challenge that narrative

Zacchaeus is already doing good. Maybe he is trying to change the system from within.  Or maybe he realized some time ago that he could use his privilege and his wealth to make reparations, and he has been quietly doing this for years.  But the lines have been drawn between rich and poor, the lines have been drawn between the good guys and the bad guys, between enemies and allies.  We already know who is on our side and who is on the other side. We are suspicious of THEM.   THEY must have an angle.  THEY aren’t capable of change.

This is the hard part of the sermon, the part I didn’t want to preach.  No doubt you have seen the pictures from yesterday, the incredible crowds across the country at Hands Off Rallies.  Emmanuel was well-represented at the one in Albany.  More than a dozen of us were there and maybe more who I don’t know about it.  I saw the images last night, all across the internet.  Mostly people were celebrating the exercise of free speech and being encouraged to know that so many are standing together against destructive power grab.  But I also saw those same images being shared by people who represent a different point of view.  I saw them shared by people who mock the demonstrators for being clueless or stupid or “Leftist Lunatics.” 

I don’t know how this will end.  It seems hard to imagine that the people of this country can find a way to unite around our previously cherished ideals of freedom and justice for all. Some are saying that it will take more violence, more economic pain, more destruction. Some remind us that organized evil will always win over disorganized righteousness, so we better start organizing. 

Here's the hard place this story takes me: There has to be a place for mercy.  There has to be a place for recognizing that your enemy might become your ally.

Let us be very clear:  Jesus is not excusing evil.  He is not glossing over exploitation or gaming the system.    He is on his way to Jerusalem where he will be executed for speaking against injustice, for calling out oppression and systemic evil.  If we're modeling our lives on Jesus, then we also have to name evil when we see it.  We have to pray and hope and resist and act against it, even if we won't personally get to see the benefits.  But at the same time, Jesus is merciful.  Jesus is resolved to give his life in the fight against evil, but at the very same time, he is quick to listen and slow to judge a potential enemy. 

Jesus once told his disciples to be wise as snakes and innocent as doves.  That’s a hard place to stand.  Call out evil, but be alert for good in surprising places.  Pay attention to what is really going on. Stay sharp, but not so sharp that you cut others.

At the Alliance Gathering last week, one of the keynote speakers was Dr. Christena Cleveland, a womanist theologian.  Womanism is that school of thought that is concerned with the intersection of being female and being black.  That is a space where two marginalized identities meet. People who occupy that space, like Dr. Cleveland, are well aware of the cultural forces that would diminish and deprive them of rights and dignity.  They know from personal experience.  Referencing Dr. King, Dr. Cleveland said she believes that the moral arc of the universe bends towards love. She didn’t say justice.  She said love.  And her next words stuck with me.  She said, “I am a stronger, softer, more courageous person when I believe that the arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards love.” 

Stronger and softer and more courageous.  That stuck with me. 

Jesus was strong in his resolve, courageous approaching his execution and still soft as he dealt with people.

He was righteous and merciful and everything in between. 

Wise as serpents and innocent as doves.

Stronger, softer and more courageous. 

Stronger, softer and more courageous.

May it be so for you and me.  Amen.

 

 

[1] Walter Brueggemann, “Vision that Trumps Violence” in The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann, Vol 2 (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox, 2015), p. 235.

[2] DeLorme, Charles D.; Isom, Stacey; Kamerschen, David R. (10 April 2005). "Rent seeking and taxation in the Ancient Roman Empire". Applied Economics. 37 (6): 705–711. 

 

3/23/25 - Between Rest and Growth - Luke 13:6-9

Between Rest and Growth

Luke 13:6-9

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

March 23, 2025

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJUDEYJWHcs

 

On the first Sunday of this year, we received Star Words. That was way back in January.  In case, you weren’t here or don’t remember, Star Words are a relatively new prayer practice used by some Christians.  We’ve only done it about 3 years here at Emmanuel.  The idea is that on Epiphany Sunday, the day when we remember the magi who were guided by a star, we receive a word that might become a sort of companion or guide for us through the next year.  It is not a magic word, but a word that might pop up from time to time, a word that might help us listen for God in particular ways during the year. 

On that first Sunday in January, the cards were facedown, passed around in star-shaped baskets.  When the baskets came back to me, I reached in, mixed up the cards and took one.  When I turned it over and read the word, I had an immediate visceral reaction.  I hated this word on sight; I definitely did not want this word.  You are allowed to turn your word back in and get another one.  But the practice encourages us to trust the word that we receive and wait to see what might happen with it.  So I kept it.

My star word for this year is Grow.  That’s the word I hated on sight.  Every growth experience I can remember has been painful.  The time I went to college and learned that I was not as academically prepared as I thought I was.  The time I left a job that had become bound up with my identify and sense of self-worth.  Jim and I have moved 11 times since we got married 37 years ago.  Almost every time, I felt lonely and out of place.  All of these turned out to be times of important growth and stretching, but still, when I saw the word GROW on my Star card, my first impulse was “No Thank You” – only my mental words were a lot stronger language.

I did not want 2025 to be a year of painful growth.  Absolutely not.  But here we are.  If you’re not having such a great year so far either, I guess we can both blame it on my Star Word.

----

There once was a fig tree. The seed catalog had promised it would bear a crop of figs in 3 to 5 years. The owner latched on to the smallest interval between planting and harvest.  Every year he has gone to inspect the tree, without ever finding even a single small fruit.  It has been at least 3 years.  His patience has run out.  The tree is taking up valuable land and resources.  It must be cut down. 

I wonder what the tree thinks about that.  Maybe the tree is also ready to quit, ready to be done.  Maybe the tree has tried one thing after another.  It has done everything it can to bear beautiful, delicious figs, but the soil is inadequate and there are no other fig trees around for support.  The world is too harsh.  Maybe the tree would not actually mind being cut down.  Becoming firewood might serve a better purpose.

But the gardener intervenes, pleading to the owner “let’s nurture it, care for it and give it one more year.”

This is a Bible story, a parable, so we expect that there is something about God in it.  We often try to interpret scripture through certain unchallenged assumption.  A common assumption is that God is always represented by the most powerful entity in the story. And so, without realizing what we’re doing, we may jump to the conclusion that God is the impatient owner, the one who would cut us down for not being productive.  But if God is any character in this story, the merciful gardener is more consistent with the God we find in the Bible. 

This is a growth year.  I think so, not primarily because of my Star word, because there is so much pressure on us.  All those years when we absorbed the teachings of Jesus.  All those years when we studied Scripture and prayed and told each other in so many ways that our calling was to love justice and do kindness and walk humbly with God.  One of the basic fertilizers of our faith is “love God with everything you’ve got and love your neighbor as yourself.”  There were years when that fertilizer was applied in abundance in the soil in which we were mostly just resting together.

But now, we have such an overwhelming urge to make a difference, to take action.  As a congregation, we are re-examining our purpose, seeking to identify the particular fruit that we can bear, and the soil that we need to be planted in.  As individuals, we are all dealing with something -- a personal wound, a tense relationship, a neighborhood that is no longer neighborly, a fractured nation.  We need the care and coaxing of the gardener. 

Justo Gonzalez is a Cuban-American theologian.  He notes that this fig tree is growing, not in a grove with other fig trees, but surrounded by grape vines in a vineyard.  He says that at the last possible time when the owner might have come looking for figs, the vineyard would have already been harvested and pruned.  All the green would have dried up, leaving the thick gnarled stumps.  In the midst of that seeming desolation, stands this fig tree. The gardener is digging around it, applying special fertilizer.  To the casual observer, it might seem like the fig tree, is the center of attention and the vines are cursed and forgotten.  Gonzalez writes, “ One would think that the fig tree must be particularly valuable if it is treated with such care, but the truth is exactly the opposite. The fig tree is receiving special care because it has yet to give the fruit it was meant to bear.”[1]

Jesus tells this parable, Luke says, in the face of Pilate’s random violence. Jesus tells this parable after Pilate had executed people while they were at worship, because he could, because his power seemed to be unchecked, because cruelty and terror are often the point. 

This story about a fig tree and growth and rest is told at a curious place, in response to an unpredictably harsh and violent world. 

I’m trying to learn all I can from those who have lived faithfully through hard times.  Fyodor Raychynets is one of those people.  He is a Ukrainian Baptist pastor and seminary professor.  If he seems familiar, you might remember that I mentioned him three years ago just after the Russian invasion.  His wife died of Covid just before the war.  At a time of grief and uncertainty, he and his adult children lived in different parts of Ukraine.  Then his son within the next year.  His office and entire library were destroyed when the seminary was bombed.  If there were ever a modern day Job, it would be Fyodor, who refuses to doubt God’s goodness. 

When the war began, he kept a journal.   On Day 15, he wrote "War is when evil reaches unseen dimensions and lowest forms, and when good manifests itself in its highest manifestations against the backdrop of total, uncontrollable madness."

And on Day 20: "War is when you understand changes; when not in theory, but in practice, you especially appreciate the moment-- here in now --and live it more consciously."[2]

Maybe this mysterious parable is about how we respond, not to a punishing God, but to the limits of mortality, to this moment which will not be ours forever.

Fyodor’s own initial response to the war was to cultivate a small group of volunteers to serve elderly people who were sheltering without electricity, without water, in basements.  They were scared to death.  These people had never dreamt that they would experience war again in their lifetimes. And so, he and his volunteers did what they could to deliver food and water and medical supplies.[3] They took stock of the great need and their own capacity and responded, in a small but critical way.

Barbara Brown Taylor says, “I am convinced that the longing to bear fruit – to live lives that matter- is embedded in us as deeply as the longing to eat, sleep, love and be loved.  The problem is that such loves don’t happen automatically.  They require a certain alertness to the way things really are, both in us and in the world; a certain willingness to make choices we would not make if we thought time would never run out, a certain awareness that we need all the help we can get, from any gardener willing to tend our roots.”[4]

Here's the thing – I believe that we are alert to the way things really are.  I believe that we are willing to act.  We would deliver supplies in a war zone, we are ready to speak truth to power, to put ourselves at risk, if only we could identify the specific ways to do that in our context. But that is not yet clear, at least not in the ways that would make the big changes we think are necessary. 

And while we are not bearing the fruit that we want to, we also resist the rest and nurture that we need.  You know I would have welcomed REST as a Star Word.  Napping is my super power.  But these are not restful times.  Anxiety and dread keep naps at bay.

I suspect that is true for many of us. We say to ourselves, “I cannot rest because someone is suffering.  How can I possibly enjoy myself in a time like this?  I cannot watch a funny movie or seek out the beauty of art or music while people are being killed and greed is running rampant and democracy is dying.  All my energy and efforts must be exerted to rage against the chaos and destruction.  I cannot rest.  It would be wrong.”

But then I think about the fig tree and the gardener’s extra care.  Sometimes growth or healing or bearing fruit takes much longer than we ever thought it would.  Sometimes it takes digging around our roots, rediscovering the supports that we actually have, understanding the deep wisdom we already know.  Sometimes it means giving ourselves permission to rest and receive.

Just week or two ago, Fyodor was interviewed again, three years into this terrible war. He spoke about the urgency of now and the challenge of holding onto hope when the world is falling apart.  He said “"If I want to say to someone, ‘I love you,’ I say it. If I want to forgive, I forgive. If I want to do something meaningful, I do it now—because tomorrow is never guaranteed."

He described living fully in the present as an act of resistance against fear and oppression, saying “"The enemy wants us to live in fear, to be paralyzed by it. But to live fully is to resist."[5]

Friends, maybe this parable is about allowing ourselves to be nurtured, accepting the care we need – laughter and love, experiences of joy and beauty, and rest so that we can bring all of ourselves to the life we are now living. Thanks be to God.

 


[1] Justo Gonzalez, Luke in the Belief Commentary Series, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2010), p. 172

[2] https://for-the-life-of-the-world-yale-center-for-faith-culture.simplecast.com/episodes/a-voice-from-kyiv-fyodor-raychynets-faithful-presence-in-the-war-on-ukraine-ZlU7z8o3/transcript

[3] Fyodor Rayschnets, “A Voice from Kyiv: Faithful Presence in the War on Ukraine,” For the Life of the World, Yale Center for Faith and Culture. https://faith.yale.edu/media/a-voice-from-kyiv-fyodor-raychynets

[4] Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Wake-Up Call” in Always A Guest: Speaking of Faith Far From Home, (Louisville:  Westminster/John Knox Press, 2020), p. 144

[5] https://faith.yale.edu/media/the-fear-to-hope-ukrainian-pastor-on-democracy-fear-and-abundant-life-in-the-midst-of-war

3/9/25 - Between Stranger and Neighbor - Luke 10:25-37

Between Stranger and Neighbor

Luke 10:25-37

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

March 9, 2025

 

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7Uo7xxqDE8

This Bible story starts with the question of eternal life and moves very quickly to a street mugging.  Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann says “The great gospel questions are worked out amidst the concreteness of brutality and nowhere else, brutality we work on each other, brutality we observe, but in which we are, by our humanity, implicated.”[1]

If he is right, about the great gospel questions being worked out in the midst of brutality, then theologians must be having a heyday right now.

This is such a familiar story.  We think we know what it says already.  And if you think that it says love your neighbor, spoiler alert – you’re right. 

Maybe we can start by trying to put ourselves in the place of Jesus first listeners.  How might they have heard it? 

They would have been familiar with the Jericho road, particularly that dangerous stretch of 17 miles between Jerusalem and Jericho.  In that 17 miles, the road drops 3,600 feet.  It is a steep, winding road.  It was one long day’s journey to travel this road between Jerusalem and Jericho.  You set out early to be sure you were off the road before nightfall, and even in daylight you were on your guard because it was well known for bandits.  It was 17 miles of watchfulness, 17 miles of potential violence.  

When Jesus first told the story, his listeners would likely have identified with the fear of traveling there, they would remember being vigilant, prepared to defend themselves on that road.  They would identify with the man who got mugged and beaten and left on the side of the road.  The way that I usually hear this story read today, contemporary listeners pretty quickly identify with the Samaritan.  We put ourselves into the story as the hero, not the victim.

But the 17-mile road doesn’t have to be an actual highway.  It might be a long stretch of suffering, a winding path of oppression or violence or despair. We might find ourselves on the side of that road, with our life upended needing care and safety.  I wonder how we might read the story then.

If Jesus’ first listeners have identified with the person who is bruised and bloody in the ditch, then, as the story unfolds, they are most invested in who will help.  Maybe they think they know the answer already.

The first one to come on the scene is a priest.  He keeps walking.  The second one is a Levite.  He also keeps on going. 

I have to pause here, because again with a familiar story, we think we know what it says.  We Christians have tried to make excuses for the priest and the Levite.  We have said that they had religious duties and were forbidden from coming into contact with corpses and as the man was half-dead, he might become a corpse at any minute.  But that is not in the story that Jesus tells.  And it isn’t true.  First, the priest is on his way home.  He is going away from the Temple.  He does not need to be concerned about ritual purity keeping him from his priestly duties because he has already fulfilled them.  And secondly, the rule about corpses doesn’t apply to Levites.[2]  So, if that understanding has been planted in your mind, try not to let it continue to influence you. 

Jesus’ first listeners would have known three standard categories of Jewish people.  There were 1) priests descended from Aaron (the brother of Moses), 2) Levites (descended from Levi, who was the third son of Jacob and Leah) and 3) Israelites (descended from one of Jacob’s other sons). [3] Three categories – Priest, Levite, Israelite. 

They would have expected the priest and then the Levite to help the wounded man because it is the right thing to do.  But as first the priest and then the Levite walk on by, Jesus’ listeners are appalled, but they think they know where the story is headed.  They anticipate that it is going to be the ordinary Israelite who comes to the rescue.  Jesus is putting the clergy in their place.  Oh good, we’re  going to like this story. 

But they are wrong.  The person who stops to help is not an Israelite.  The person who sticks around for several hours to provide tangible, life-saving care, is the enemy.  It is a Samaritan, one of them who doesn’t know the correct theology and worships in the wrong place.  It is someone they love to despise.  

If you have been able to imagine yourself beaten and bloody, half-dead, desperately needing safety and care, imagine now that the only person who offers kindness is someone you identify as enemy.  I don’t know who that might be for you.  For some of us, maybe it is evangelical Christians.  That’s an apt comparison because mainline Protestants and evangelicals and similar to Jews and Samaritans, part of the same religious tradition but at continuous odds with each other.  Maybe your perceived enemy just now is a Russian or a member of Hamas or an Israeli soldier.  Maybe the one you struggle not to hate has aligned themselves with a certain political party.  Whoever that is, imagine them being the one who helps, who goes out of their way to pick you up and get you to safety when your own people have crossed the road to avoid you. 

That’s the gut punch of the story.  Your neighbor may act like a stranger and the one you thought was an enemy may turn out to be the true neighbor. 

The lawyer who started all of this wanted to know “who is my neighbor?”  Who am I required to love, Jesus.  When the final score is tallied, who am I going to get points for?”

Jesus never answers the lawyer’s actual question. Like any good rabbi, he eventually responds with his own question “Who demonstrated neighborliness to the man in need?” And the lawyer can’t bring himself to name the Samaritan.  Instead he says, “the one who showed mercy.”

Who is my neighbor? Who is worthy to receive love?  Jesus doesn’t address that.  Instead, he describes the neighbor as the person who feels compassion and act on it.  The neighbor is the one who can change his routine and identity on behalf of someone else.  Someone who walks towards trouble, rather than crossing the road to avoid it. 

Dr King referenced this story in his final speech before his assassination.[4]  He said it was possible that the priest and the Levite were afraid that if they stopped to help the man, they would also be mugged.  Perhaps the robbers were still nearby.  Or maybe the wounded man on the ground was a faker, a decoy, to draw other travelers to the side of the road where they could be robbed.  Dr. King said, “I imagine that the first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ In another sermon he said “we often ask, ‘what will happen to my job, my prestige, or my status if I take a stand on this issue?  Will my home be bombed, will my life be threatened, or will I be jailed?’[5]

But then, Dr King said, “the Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’

The Samaritan is moved with compassion, maybe because he knows what it is like to be seen as a dangerous enemy, the one that others avoid, the one who is wounded and desperately vulnerable. Maybe he has been there, and so, he wonders, ‘If I don’t stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’  That’s the kind of question Dr. King would ask, the question he would prompt others to ask and answer. 

If I do stop to help, what might happen to me?

If I don’t stop to help, what might happen to the wounded one?

It makes me think about one more question:  If I don’t stop to help, what have I become? 

The temptation many of us are facing now is to be less compassionate, to suppress our desire to be a good neighbor because the cost is too great. The powers that be are overwhelming our capacity to comprehend and adjust and respond.  It may be safer and easier to cross to the other side of the road, to stay behind closed doors, to give up on adulting because we are dismayed and distracted, intimidated, demoralized, overwhelmed and exhausted. 

But if we stop caring, if we can’t be bothered to help, then what will we become?  And what will become of our world? 

We are all on the Jericho road together, every one of us vulnerable.  We need each other, stranger, neighbor, enemy, friend. We need mercy and we also have a need to be merciful.  “Neither of us can be really human, really alive, without the other; and every time we pass someone by and leave them to their own misery, we both suffer for it.”[6]    As Emma Lazarus said, “None of us are free until all of us are free.”

This week, one of you shared some thoughts from an internet philosopher named Mike Brock.  Brock describes the ways that we make moral choices, often quietly, on the spur of the moment, without great fanfare or heroics, like the Samaritan who quickly chose not to mind his own business and keep walking, but to put aside his own plans and help.  Brock says these kinds of actions “simply require the decision to remain morally awake when everything around you encourages sleep.  To maintain your full humanity when systems push you toward becoming a fraction of yourself.” 

He continues “Every minute of every day, you have opportunities to practice standing firm. Each small choice builds the moral muscle memory you'll need for bigger challenges ahead. Each moment you choose courage over comfort, clarity over confusion, community over isolation—you're not just preserving your own humanity.  You’re keeping something precious alive in our collective existence.”[7]  In the concreteness of brutality, we work out the gospel. 

“Who acted as neighbor?”  Jesus asked.

“The one who showed mercy” the lawyer said.

May we go and do likewise.  Amen.

 

 

[1] Walter Brueggemann, “A Zinger That Changes Everything” in The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann, Vol 1 (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox, 2011), p. 7.

[2] Amy-Jill Levine, Ben Witheringtom III, The Gospel of Luke New Cambridge Bible Commentary (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 292

[3] Levine and Witherington, p. 293.

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/02/us/king-mlk-last-sermon-annotated.html

[5] Dr. MLK, “On Being a Good Neighbor” In the Gift of Love: Sermons from Strength to Love and Other Preachings, (Boston:  Beacon Press, 2012)

[6] Frederick Buechner  “The Miracles at Hand” in The Magnificent Defeat, ((San Francisco : Harper & Row, 1985)  p 143.

 

[7] https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-manifesto-of-the-cognitive-revolution?r=3o1n21&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

 

 

3/2/25 - Don’t Just Explain the Alternative, Show It - John 6:1-15

Don’t Just Explain the Alternative, Show It

John 6:1-15

Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Kathy Donley

March 2, 2025

Image:  JESUS MAFA is a response to the New Testament readings from the Lectionary by a Christian community in Cameroon, Africa. Each of the readings was selected and adapted to dramatic interpretation by the community members. Photographs of their interpretations were made, and these were then transcribed to paintings.  from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. 

https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=48287 

 

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGoMR8yibaM

The day that Jesus fed a multitude is such an essential part of our story that it is the only miracle besides the resurrection told in all four gospels, and Matthew and Mark tell it twice.  We know this story so well that we may not immediately notice the unique details that John includes.

John’s details point to a political meaning.  They challenge the policies of the political and religious authorities and demonstrate a radical alternative to those policies. [1]

It was the time of the Passover, John says. It was the time of year when the roads should have been full of pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem, the home of the Temple, the seat of political power.  Instead, thousands of people went to rural Galilee to hear a peasant teach. This is a clue that the locus of power is shifting.

There were men, women and children in the crowd, but only the men were counted.  That’s typical.  We expect it.  What might be significant is that there are 5,000 of them.  We have heard that same number recently.  It is the number of soldiers in a Roman Legion, an army battalion.  Obery Hendricks notes that a gathering of this size without permission from the authorities constituted sedition; a crime punished by crucifixion. They are willing to risk that to be with Jesus, to receive from him. By the end of the story, they wanted to make him king.  More clues that this story has political overtones.

We sometimes forget that this event, the feeding of thousands of hungry people, took place in wartime.  These people were traumatized, fighting for their identity and their land, suffering under the occupation of Rome while King Herod Antipas, supposedly one of them, was focused only on building his own empire and protecting his own interests. 

The event begins with Jesus asking Philip about how to buy bread for the multitude.  It is a trick question, but his answer reveals a lot about the disciple’s mindset. 

He says, “We can’t afford it.  Six months wages wouldn’t even make a dent in the hunger of this crowd.”

Jesus goes on to demonstrate that the difference between feeding the hungry and not feeding them may simply be one of choice, of funding your priorities.[2] 

A country may choose to fund medical care for seniors or it may choose to provide tax cuts for billionaires. 

A country may choose to invest a small amount of its total budget in programs that alleviate suffering and help develop other nations’ capacity to care for their own citizens; a wealthy nation may choose to protect global peace and well-being with that kind of investment or it may choose instead to invest in the latest and greatest weapons of war and thus create more opportunities to use them at home and abroad. 

When a person or a nation that is well-off says they can’t afford it, they are not telling you about their income and expenses.  They are really making a statement about priorities.

But to be fair, Philip is not in that category.  He is not a wealthy person, nor is the band following Jesus sitting on a pile of cash. 

Philip is limited not only by his net worth, but by his imagination. The social political world he inhabits constrains his ideas about what is possible.   Without even realizing it, he only thinks in terms of buying and selling, of hunger and scarcity.  Even Andrew, who stumbles on part of the solution, says “there is a boy here with his lunch, but that won’t begin to stretch far enough.”  We focus on what we don’t have; what we cannot do.  Our moral imaginations are constrained by the political reality in which we live.

Of course, we know that Jesus takes that child’s lunch and feeds thousands with it.  Today, people debate whether the miracle was divine multiplication or whether the miracle was inspiring everyone to share their own little supply with others until everyone’s hunger was satisfied.  I think the answer is yes.  I think the answer is both. 

Jesus thought that the needs of the people were holy, that hungry people should be fed.  He defined the people’s relationships to God and to each other as based on gift instead of debt.  He put those teachings into practice and demonstrated his alternative vision.

I’m a lot like Philip these days. My moral imagination is constrained, limited by the political reality of our day. It is hard to think creatively, when the news is an endlessly numbing or terrifying.  It is hard to know what to do when the power all seems to be in the wrong hands.

But, isn’t that the very context in which Jesus and his disciples were living? Isn’t that the very context in which most of our spiritual ancestors spent their entire lives?

“Christians, for the vast majority of their history, have had no say in who rules them.  Kings, warlords, tyrants – they all came and went without any input from the average Christian.  These past generations had to pay taxes to fill the king’s coffers.  They had to serve in the king’s army.  They had to subjugate themselves any time the king came near.”[3] That good reminder comes from Lutheran pastor Paul Drees.

I am struggling to know how to respond in this time.  Many of us are.  What is our calling right now?   Isn’t it the same as it always was?  Isn’t our calling in this moment to share the good news of Jesus, the one who lifted up the lowly and filled the hungry with good things?  Isn’t our calling to be the community which embodies love of neighbor and love of enemy?

We are not Democrats, Republicans, or Independents, who happen to be Christians. We are Christians who happen to be Independents, Democrats, or Republicans.  I so hope this is true.  The confession of the early church was Jesus is Lord.  Jesus is Sovereign. That is my confession, and yours I hope.  To put our ultimate trust in any political process or form of government is a violation of that allegiance.

In every time and place, under every kind of authority those who followed Jesus lived out the alternatives that Jesus taught. 

They did not just speak about love; they lived lovingly.

They did not just proclaim their faith that Jesus rose from the grave;

they demonstrated it by their willingness to die for what was right.

They did not just say Thou shalt not kill, they refused to kill even in self-defense.

They did not just pray thy kingdom come, thy will be done they lived it, even when choosing God’s sovereignty over Caesar’s reign meant torture and certain death.[4]

 

We might remember Christians who endured faithfully under fascism. After the mainline church in Germany endorsed the Nazis in 1933, a few church leaders broke away to form a resistance movement which came to be called the Confessing Church.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer created a network of underground seminaries to train the next generation of ministers.  It was such a threat that eventually the Gestapo arrested 27 students and shut it down. 

We might remember Koinonia Farms, which has been called a demonstration plot for the kingdom of God. It was founded in 1942 in Georgia when the Klan and Jim Crow segregation defined the political landscape.  It was an interracial Christian farming community where Black and White people worked and lived together. Formerly rich and formerly poor people together owned and worked 400 acres.  When the community and its guests prayed or ate a meal, they all sat together at the table, regardless of color in a time when that could get you killed.  They endured drive-by shootings, bombing of their roadside market and were denied membership in all the churches in town.  But every single day, they lived out Jesus’ alternative vision.

There are so many more stories like these that we could lift up.  I think of black churches that functioned as banks and provided loans when black people could not get them.  I’m aware that white people these days are just beginning to feel some of the rage at the injustice being perpetuated by those in power, the kind of systemic injustice and abuse of power that black people in this country have lived with for generations.

Democracy is not yet dead.  I believe we are still called to resist, to bring all of our power to bear for the good of each other as citizens in this place.  But we are also citizens of another realm, one that requires the courage of Jesus alternate vision.

There are real and valid fears about what may be lost in this administration.   I do not seek to minimize them.  There’s a fear that people may lose the right to marry the one they love.  That is a valid concern and we should resist that with all of our power. But I would gently remind us that we don’t bless marriages because the state tells us we can.  This church and others blessed same sex marriages long before it was legal and we will continue to bless whoever we want to bless.

There are real and valid concerns about the white supremacy, about the dismantling of efforts around diversity, equity and inclusion. We should resist that with all of our power.  But again, I would gently remind us that we have long been about diversity and inclusion. Generations of Christian children have sung about red and yellow, black and white being precious in God’s sight.  We will decide who to shelter, who belongs to us, and we take our orders on that from Jesus, not from the president.

We gather in a moment around the table.  We eat symbolically, but the early Christians consumed a full meal.  They shared a banquet which broke the rules of social hierarchy that defined the banquets of the time.  At the Lord’s Supper, rich free men had to accept as equals women

and enslaved persons and the poor.[5]  Those with social status gave up their privilege and those without status gained it, as they lived out the alternatives Jesus taught, becoming a demonstration plot of the kingdom of God.

May it be so for you and for me.  Amen.


[1] Obery Hendricks, The Politics of Jesus:  Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They have Been Corrupted,  (New York: Doubleday, 2006),  p. 179

[2] Hendricks, p. 181

[3] The Rev Paul Drees, https://www.instagram.com/pastorpauldrees/reel/DCCOWZmK9Lj/

[4] Hendricks, p 183

[5] Joachim Kugler, Politics of Feeding:  Reading John 6 and (I Cor 11) as Documents of Socio-Politcal conflict https://d-nb.info/1153407906/34

 

2/16/25 - Call the Demon by Name - Mark 5:1-10

Call the Demon by Name

Mark 5:1-10

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

February 16, 2025

Image:  Koenig, Peter. Casting Out Evil Spirits, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville,

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHgJn3StDXI

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation about baptism with a friend.  This person was raised as a Christian, but is now active in a non-Christian faith.  They had recently attended the baptism of a friend’s child and were horrified that it still included an exorcism of the Devil.   In many churches, the baptismal service contains these questions:
Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?

Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?

When my friend referred to an exorcism of the Devil, I think they must have been referencing those questions.   

Like the person who is appalled by contemporary people speaking of the Devil as a real thing, we may have difficulty knowing what to do with the notion of the demons in this incident from Mark’s gospel.   We will get to that.

Jesus and the disciples have crossed the sea of Galilee into Gentile territory. The crossing was rough.  A bad storm with strong winds had stirred up the waves, and the disciples, many experienced fishermen among them, had been afraid that their boat would sink.  But Jesus had rebuked the wind and the waves until it was calm. 

As soon as they step on shore, they encounter a storm of a different kind. A man comes out to meet them. He comes out from the tombs, which are in caves, occurring in the hillside.  He is used to being in the shadows, hiding, existing in this place between life and death.  He looks like someone experiencing homelessness, someone who hasn’t bathed or eaten or had a real conversation with another living person very often. 

He shouts Jesus’ name “Son of the Most High God.”  So far, in Mark’s gospel, it is only demons who know Jesus’ real identity.   Jesus had recognized the demon first.  Before the man spoke, Jesus had called the demon to come out.  Now that the demon, or the man, has named him, Jesus asks for his name.

The demons answer for the man.  We don’t know his real name.  All the identity he has left is the very thing that has robbed him of his health and sanity, destroyed his connection with his community, and made him a danger to himself and others. Speaking with the man’s voice, the demons say “My name is Legion, for we are many.”

If we take the story at face value, it seems to mean that there are a lot of demons inside this poor guy.  We don’t think we have much firsthand experience with demons, so we may read this as a crude first-century explanation for mental illness or we put the entire incident in the literary category of fantasy.  But let’s stick with it for a bit longer.

Jesus is just the latest person to confront this uncontrollable force.  The man has a consistent record of attacking again and again. Every effort at control has failed.  The violence erupts again, and the cycle repeats itself.  Again.  Despite best efforts.  When the village restrains him, he breaks their chains, wrenches open their shackles and no one has the strength to subdue him any more. [1]

“My name is Legion, for we are many.” “Legion” is no proper name, it just is a way of saying: “The opponent you face is big beyond counting, and persistent beyond your patience.”[2]  

A legion is the largest unit of Roman soldiers, about 5,000 soldiers.  It is an indication of the quantity of this man’s suffering.  The sources of his brokenness are myriad.  The assault on his mind, soul, and body is multi-pronged; it comes from many sources braided together.[3]

On one level, we can read this as the story of one person’s healing which can set him on a path to address all the other issues in his life.

But we might notice that the unclean spirit does not ask to be sent out of the man, it asks Jesus “not to send them out of the country.”  And then, we might understand that this is not really a story about an individual man, but about a representative character meant to stand for the country or the people of Israel.[4]

The demon identifies itself as Legion, which is to say the Roman army, which was in fact in possession of Israel. 

Obery Hendricks writes, “Mark’s veiled description of his country has having gone wild with self-destruction corresponds to the reality of his situation. . . . Israel was best by an unclean spirit that expressed itself through a number of extreme social pathologies.  The crime rate was so high that Josephus said it looked like the country had been ravaged by a war.  The numerous matter-of-fact refences in the Gospels to insanity, lameness, depression, abject dejection, bands of robbers, disposed farmers, enslaved debt defaulters, diseased beggars, disrupted menstrual cycles (which are often the result of extreme social tensions and anxiety) and revolutionary upheavals depict a society that in many ways appeared to be coming apart at the seams.”[5]

The village has identified the man as the problem.  He howls at all hours.  He lurks in the graveyard, frightening anyone who needs to go there.  He harms himself.  They have done everything they can think of, but they feel powerless to help him or themselves.  He is a menace.

But Jesus demands the demon’s name. The name of the problem is Legion, which immediately implies the army.  The underlying evil is not homelessness or mental illness, but the exploitation and mistreatment by their rulers. The impact of the Empire was so pervasive and so all encompassing that it stripped the man of his humanity and that pattern was repeating itself over and over again across the land.  

Jesus calls the demon by name to free people from self-blame or scapegoating and to help them identify the real source of evil.  It is an uncontrollable force.  It attacks again and again.  Every effort at control has failed.  The violence erupts.  The cycle repeats. No one has the will to combat it any more.

That kind of sounds like gun violence or racism or toxic masculinity, poverty, homophobia, ableism, any of the ‘isms.  They wear us down and we feel powerless against them and may accept the status quo.  

The letter to the Ephesians says “Our struggle is not against the enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (Eph. 6:12)

The Biblical writers understood the dehumanizing systems which run our world.

William Stringfellow was a theologian and civil rights activist who took seriously the Bible’s warnings about principalities and powers.  A White graduate of Harvard Law School, he moved to a tenement house in Harlem in 1956 to live alongside and represent poor Black and Puerto Rican clients. He was also active in the Episcopal Church, fighting for the ordination of women and against the church’s longstanding homophobia.

Perhaps his most influential book was An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land. I tried to read it this week. There’s too much to share, but let me offer just a few of his ideas.

According to the Bible, the principalities are legion in species, number, variety and name...They are designated by such titles as powers, virtues, thrones, authorities, dominions, demons, princes, strongholds, lords, angels, gods, elements, spirits…

Stringfellow says, “And if some of these seem quaint, transposed into contemporary language, they lose quaintness and the principalities become recognizable and all too familiar: they include all institutions, all ideologies, all images, all movements, all causes, all corporations, all bureaucracies, all traditions, all methods and routines, all conglomerates, all races, all nations, all idols. Thus, the Pentagon or the Ford Motor Company or Harvard University or the Diners Club or the Olympics or the Methodist Church or the Teamsters Union are principalities. So are capitalism, astrology, the Puritan work ethic, science and scientism, white supremacy, patriotism, plus many, many more. The principalities and powers are legion.”[6]

He argues that the most powerful people seem most susceptible to the power of death.  “There is unleashed among the principalities in this society,” he writes,

 “a ruthless, self-proliferating, all-consuming institutional process which assaults, dispirits, defeats, and destroys human life even among, and primarily among, those persons in positions of institutional leadership.[7]

Jesus banished the demons and restored the man’s dignity and humanity.  He was clothed and in his right mind. 

Stringfellow says that we resist death by living humanly.  For him, Christian ethics is less about being right than about being a sign of life in the midst of death, to keep on being a human being in the midst of the chaos and evil around us. He calls that spiritual warfare.  It consists of small, even symbolic, daily acts of resistance subversion within systems to protest the dehumanizing effects of living with the principalities and powers.

Elmer Bendiner was a WW2 B-17 navigator. In the thick of the war against the Nazis, one of the most incredible stories unfolded. Bendiner explains: “Our B-17 was barraged by flak from Nazi antiaircraft guns. That was not unusual, but on this particular occasion, our gas tanks were hit. Later, as I reflected on the miracle of a twenty-millimeter shell piercing the fuel tank without touching off an explosion, our pilot, Bohn Fawkes, told me it was not quite that simple. On the morning following the raid, Bohn had gone down to ask our crew chief for that shell as a souvenir of unbelievable luck. The crew chief told Bohn that not just one shell but eleven had been found in the gas tanks–eleven unexploded shells where only one was sufficient to blast us out of the sky. It was as if the sea had been parted for us.

It seemed like a miracle.  After the war, Bendiner learned that when the unexploded shells were opened, there was no explosive charge inside.  They were all empty and harmless.  Except for one. It contained a carefully rolled piece of paper. On it was a scrawl in Czech.  Translated, the note said, “This is all we can do for you now.”   At least one prisoner of war forced to work in a munitions plant in Czechoslovakia was engaged in small acts of resistance.[8]

Living humanly means living within what you know to be true, refusing to accept the lies that the authorities want you to believe.  It means calling the demon by name. 

Friends we know a bigger story than this one incident in Jesus’ life.  Here, he cast out the demon, defeating the power of death that was crushing this man’s life.  We also know that Jesus went on to defeat the power of death forever in resurrection.  If we believe that, we become even more threatening to the powers, because their threat of death loses its hold over us, depriving our adversaries of that system of control.   

Stringfellow says that the threat of death holds no fear for the confessing community and therefore puts us outside the systems of control which threaten us because the worst they can do is kill us.

In the chaos of the world right now, we can call the demon by name.  Jesus offers us the opportunity to name and challenge the madness in the world around us instead of accommodating ourselves to it.  In Jesus, we can claim an identity of resistance which says that we will not be bound by our loyalties or our compulsions or by the status quo or our fears, even our fears of death.  Thanks be to God.

 

 

[1] Richard Swanson, https://provokingthegospel.wordpress.com/2016/06/10/a-provocation-fifth-sunday-after-pentecost-luke-826-39/

[2] Swanson

[3] Debie Thomas, https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2259-legion

[4] Obery Hendricks, The Politics of Jesus:  Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They have Been Corrupted,  (New York: Doubleday, 2006),  p p 145-46.

[5] Hendricks, p 146

[6] William Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land,  chapter 3, excerpted here https://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2014/01/an-ethic-for-christians-and-other_23.html

[7] As quoted by Mac Loftin in The Christian Century, February 5, 2025

https://www.christiancentury.org/print/pdf/node/43877

[8] recounted by Elmir Bendiner in his book The Fall of the Fortresses, retold here https://greglewisinfo.com/2020/04/18/the-b-17-saved-by-a-miracle/

2/2/25 - Joint FOCUS Winter Worship - A Voice to the Voiceless - Jeremiah 7:1-7; Mark 11:15-19

A Voice for the Voiceless

Jeremiah 7:1-7, Mark 11:15-19

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

February 2, 2025 FOCUS Winter Worship

 

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjeqkqpZmhM

Tony Campolo died in November at age 89.  He was one of the prophets of our time and some of us are proud that he was a Baptist.  A very long time ago, when I was a student, he came to my college, and he began his presentation the way he was beginning his speeches on college campuses all over the world at that time.  He said:  

I have three things I’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a [bleep] (Only he actually said the word I’m bleeping because he was braver than me and because there weren’t children in his audience.] Then he would go on to say “What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said [bleep] than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.

The nervous laughter of the audience verified the truth of what he was saying. Tony was good at reminding us that the church often majors on minor things and ignores what is really of major importance.  We have been correctly taught that Jesus calls us to love, but sometimes we have incorrectly internalized that love means being polite or nice or never creating a scene.

Jesus didn’t seem to have that confusion.  He was willing to confront those in power, willing to speak his mind, willing to break social norms at dinner parties as a demonstration of love.  The scene that he created that day in the temple is recorded in all four gospels.  It is so familiar that perhaps it has lost some of its edge.

Several times recently, I’ve been with people who expressed powerlessness.  Some were concerned about the decline of the church.  Despite their hard work of many years, churches continue to struggle for existence and many close.  Others are dismayed by the polarization of our civic life, feeling like there is no way to effect change for the common good. 

I have to think that Jesus of Nazareth shared some of those feelings at least some of the time.  He was working hard, constantly traveling and talking to people, addressing their needs, helping them understand the movement he was leading.

At the beginning of his ministry, in his first skirmish with religious authorities, Jesus said that a house divided against itself cannot stand.  That house is the political system of his time in which a covenant based on justice and mercy was being betrayed by a political economy of exploitation.  In that same skirmish, Jesus also said “no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man”.  Scholar Ched Myers suggests that Jesus’ entire ministry is been about binding the strong man, i.e. Satan or the forces of evil.  This is what Jesus has been about.  He has many apprentices and large crowds come out to learn from him.  The movement is growing, but it probably doesn’t feel like much change is actually happening. 

So Jesus decides to confront evil directly in the center of power. He goes to Jerusalem over the protests of those who love him and fear for his safety. 

He goes to the Temple.  It is probably impossible to overstate how important the Temple was, how sacred it was, to ordinary, faithful Jewish people.  This Temple was built by King Herod to inspire awe and to intimidate. Herod had been Rome’s puppet king.  Under his rule, the Temple had become the center of local collaboration with Rome.  The temple authorities come from Jerusalem’s elite wealthy families. They are the educated scribes and priests.  They are the Temple’s bankers.   They are maintaining their power and privilege by supporting the domination of Rome in the name of religion.  

In the Temple, Jesus drives out the buyers and sellers.  We need to understand that commercial activity was an entirely normal part of any religion in Jesus’ time.   Two thousand years later, we read into the text a concern for the noise and smells that we think are disruptive to prayer and worship.  That is not Jesus’ concern.  He is protesting the ruling-class interests which are in control of this marketplace. [1]

He singles out two stations – the money changers and the dove sellers.  The Temple is a religious institution, but also inherently an economic one. The money taken in by these activities is going to the Temple treasury, to support the ruling class which is colluding with Rome.  The dove sellers are singled out because doves are the sacrifice required of the poor and the ritually unclean.  Jesus attacks the concrete mechanisms of oppression which exploited those on the lowest socioeconomic levels to benefit those at the highest levels.[2]

 Jesus was not against the Temple as such, not against his own religion. He was protesting, from within, a religion that had forgotten its purpose.  He was taking a public stand against a faith system that offered religious cover for political violence.

Did you catch that? He was protesting a faith system that offered religious cover for political violence. 

One of the people Jesus quotes is the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah had also stood in the temple, an earlier version of it, and delivered an ultimatum from God that the temple would be destroyed unless they stopped exploiting the poor.  We should heed that warning – Christianity is being destroyed from within by collusion with the ultra-wealthy, the white supremacists and Christian nationalists. When our faith is publicly aligned with causes antithetical to Jesus, we should not be surprised that the church declines.

Jesus is angry.  This is not a spontaneous temper-tantrum. This is a deliberate, carefully planned action.  We are not always comfortable with the thought that Jesus got mad.  It would be so much easier to follow the Jesus who is always polite to everyone, who never questions economic, political, or religious systems.

We don’t always know what to do with our own anger.  We are angry at economic systems that do not provide living wages to full-time workers.  We are angry at the systematic disenfranchisement of black and brown voters. We are angry at the attempts to erase the existence of trans and queer folk.  We are angry at the lies perpetuated by those in power who benefit when the poor believe them. 

But some of us have become convinced that being angry is not loving. Jesus’ own life demonstrates that is not true.  In her widely influential essay, “The Power of Anger in the Work of Love,” Beverly Harrison wrote: “suppressed anger robs us of the power to love, the power to act.” . . . “Anger is not the opposite of love. It is a sign that we know all is not well in the world around us . . . where anger rises, there the energy to act is present.” [3]

Jesus was angry.  Maybe he felt some of the frustration and powerlessness that you and I do.  Nevertheless, he took action. He dug down to his core understanding of God, to the fundamentals of a covenant that demanded faith-filled care for the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner. And then, as just one person against the Empire, he spoke up as a voice for the voiceless.  He acted up for the cause of justice. 

Was it worth it?  Did anything change as a result of his actions?  Well, Mark says that after that, the authorities kept looking for a way to kill him.  We know that story.  But what else?  Did he make any difference? 

Mark reports that he did not allow anyone to carry anything through the Temple that day.  The Temple covered 33 square acres.  It seems unlikely that one person could have shut down all business in that vast space.

Biblical scholar Obery Hendricks says “How could Jesus have halted commerce on so large a scale, except that other pilgrims and worshippers were empowered and inspired to stand with him?”[4]  He believes  that seeing Jesus do what he did, hearing him speak their own feelings out loud, gave them the courage to do what they would not ever have imagined themselves doing and they joined in the protest.  What Jesus did was to share his anger and power.  The power to love.  The power to act. What Jesus did that day is told by all four evangelists. It changed the lives of Jesus’ followers and still does.

Friends, I recognize that multiple political views and election districts are represented in this room. We don’t all support the same party or vote for the same candidates.  My appeal is not being made on the basis of that.  Nor is it on the basis of our citizenship or immigration status.  I am appealing to our common commitment to follow Jesus, which is our highest allegiance for those of us who share that, and to our common ministry as FOCUS churches.  Just a few minutes ago, we read the FOCUS covenant together.  We promised to provide a ministry of presence, support and advocacy for victims of society’s injustice and neglect and to speak the truth in places of power on behalf of the powerless because it is a demonstration of the gospel.  That covenant is not a partisan reaction to current politics.  It is decades old and reflects our core understanding of who God is and who we are called to be.

St. Augustine was a long-ago follower of Jesus.  He said, "Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are Anger and Courage: Anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.” 

Friends, may we be full of hope – both angry and courageous, following Jesus who channeled his anger for the work of love.  Amen.


[1] Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man, (Maryknoll, New York:  Orbis Books, 2008), p. 300

[2] Myers, p. 301

[3] Beverly W. Harrison (1981), ‘The Power of Anger in the Work of  Love’ in Union Seminary Quarterly Review, vol. xxxvi, pp. 41-57

 [4] Obery Hendricks, The Politics of Jesus:  Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They have Been Corrupted,  (New York: Doubleday, 2006),  p. 124

 

1/26/25 - Treat the People's Needs as Holy - Luke 11:1-4; Matthew 6:9-13

Treat the People’s Needs as Holy

Luke 11:1-4, Matthew 6:9-13

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

January 26, 2024

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGeB7LBnNIk

Dr. Molly Marshall was my theology professor.   I took a lot of notes in her classes, but one thing she said was so troubling to me that I used to turn back to it.  She said that prayer was the purest form of theology, that whether we pray or not and how we pray is the most accurate reflection of what we really believe. 

Jesus’ disciples say “Lord, teach us to pray.”   The faithful Jewish person of that time prayed three times a day and Jesus’ disciples were in that category.  They were quite familiar with prayer already.  What they wanted to know was what to pray for. Just as John the Baptist had taught his disciples a distinctive prayer, Jesus disciples wanted to know what they were asking God to help them accomplish under Jesus’ leadership.  

We have two versions of the prayer that Jesus taught.  The variations between Luke and Matthew may imply he shared different version on different occasions.  It most likely reflects something they heard him pray often, rather than being a one-time delivery.   We should note that the language of the prayer is “our” or “us” or “we” not “me” and “mine”.  This is not a private prayer, but corporate.  An individual might pray in this way, and should, but this is not strictly personal prayer.

The prayer of Jesus has a simple structure.  There are two petitions that focus on God and three petitions about human need.

The English word “hallow” means to make holy, to make sacred, to set someone or something apart.  Roman state religions required that only Casear’s name be hallowed, but this prayer affirms the holiness of God above Casear. When put combination with “your kingdom come, your will be done” the person praying is pleading with God to hallow God’s own status as God.  It is a prayer that God will demonstrate God’s holiness, by revealing himself to be sovereign by manifesting judgment or mercy.

By law, only Casear’s name is to be honored like this.  But Jesus’ only allegiance is to God.  Only God is sovereign.  Keep in mind that the early Christians would have prayed like this in the ruins of the Temple not just during occupation but outright war with Rome. To have been overheard would have been treasonous. Later manuscripts of Matthew’s gospel include the ending “thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.”  This is a very dangerous, political prayer.

Friends, full disclosure, today and for the next few Sundays, I am intentionally looking at Jesus’ words and actions through a political lens.  If you’ve been paying attention for the last 14 years, you know that’s not a new thing for me.  But right now, in the midst of incredible turmoil and division, at a time when our new jerk responses are often framed by which political party we adhere to and who we voted for, it seems most appropriate that we ground ourselves in the politics of Jesus.  It is helpful to me to remember that Jesus did not live in a representative democracy.  Neither did first disciples nor many generations of the first Christians. They did not enjoy freedom of religion or a way to compel their government to act with justice.  But still, they lived faithfully, seeking to be part of God’s kingdom on earth.  Regardless of what is happening around us, to believe that God is sovereign and that we can be a demonstration plot for God’s reign here and now, is still an option available to us.

Back to the prayer. It continues with three petitions for human needs – for bread, for forgiveness, for escape from trial.

Daily bread – Bread was the staple of the diet.  Every meal included bread. Jesus fed people and urged others to do the same.  Daily bread recalls manna in the wilderness, where every person’s need for food was met in the same way regardless of their finances or social standing.  This petition is also a prayer against the injustice of the day where the haves get more without regard for the needs of those who are hungry. For some of us, who are not at any risk of starving, this prayer could mean: Help us to let go of fear about not having enough. Help us to be satisfied with what is sufficient for today. Help us to share out of our abundance and our need.

The second petition is very interesting. Matthew records “forgive us our debts” while Luke seeks forgiveness of sins.  In Aramaic, there is one word which means both debts and sins.  That word does not exist in Greek, so in translating, Matthew chose debts and Luke chose sins. 

The cycle of debt in first century Israel was devastating to the people.  When the Romans conquered the region, they claimed they owned all the land and promptly started charging people rent.  People who had been farming their own land found themselves burdened with debt.  Debt was a way in which the conquerors continued to afflict the conquered. [1] 

Forgiving the debts of others also meant refusing to participate in the ways of the conqueror. It is consistent with Jesus’ declaration of his mission in light of the practices of Jubilee when debts were forgiven and slaves set free and land returned to the original owners.   Both Matthew and Luke use the same word for forgiveness.  It also means release.  It is the same word we heard last week when Jesus read from Isaiah about release to the captives and setting free the oppressed.  Release us from our debts as we release others from what they owe us.  It is a petition for release from the obligation of monetary debt and other kinds of captivity or enslavement, even captivity to sin. 

And do not bring us to the time of trial.  How you interpret this may depend on your theology, whether you believe that

God sets up tests for human beings to pass.  I don’t believe that.  In the original context, it is probably a prayer that the community would be spared trials before various secular authorities in which some Christians were being imprisoned or executed for their faith.  It is a prayer for strength to resist the temptation to serve Caesar out of fear or expediency, and that temptation is just as present in our context as it was then.

I’m using Obery Hendricks’ book, The Politics of Jesus, as a primary resource for this sermon series.  He writes, “Jesus treated the people and their needs as holy by healing their bodies, their souls and their psyches . . . .  He traveled incessantly to raise the people’s consciousness that the present order sinned against the justice of God because it sinned against their well-being.”[2]

Prayer is the purest form of theology, my professor said.  How we pray, what we pray for, reveals what we believe about God.  I have also come to believe that praying in the same ways over time shapes us.  Jesus taught us to pray that everyone has enough to eat every day.  That everyone is free from economic exploitation and violence.  That everyone is delivered from whatever captivity they are in whether from unjust government or addiction or poverty or systemic oppression or their own sin.  If we pray this and mean it, it will shape our actions.  It will form in us the sense of “we” and “us” and “our” until we recognize the holiness of all human need, not just our own.  It will remind us that we serve God best by loving each other. 

Those who live with more awareness of their dependence on G od often understand this in ways that those of us with means do not. There are so many instances of this. Here’s just one example.  There is a slum on the outskirts of Kampala, Uganda. Those fortunate enough to have a job perform the back-breaking work of strip-mining rocks for construction.  The men mine large boulders and rocks, while the women break the rocks into gravel using hand-held tools.  In 2005, these women earned $1.20 per day.  That was the year that Hurricane Katrina wrought such destruction.  These women heard about that.  Two hundred of them broke rocks for weeks and then donated $900 of their wages to help people displaced by Katrina.  One of them said that those who are suffering “belong to us.  They are our people.  Their problems are our problems.  Their children are like our children.”  [3]

This is what it means to treat all the people’s real needs as holy. 

I cannot end this sermon without mentioning what we all bore witness to this week.  At a prayer service for the unity of the nation, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington Marianne Budde lifted up the needs of real people. https://youtu.be/xwwaEuDeqM8?si=PeE32A4fGUI45z7K

She was asking for mercy from the Empire.  The Empire does not hallow the name of God and is not inclined to mercy.  The stark contrast between the ways of Jesus and the ways of Empire are on full display once again.  May we be found faithful to the one God who is sovereign over all. 

This week, I discovered a version of Jesus’ prayer from a Christian community in Central America.  Let me close with it:

Our Father who is in us here on earth.
Holy is your name in the hungry
who share their bread and their song.
Your kingdom come which is a generous land
which flows with milk and honey.
Let us do your will standing up
when all are sitting down
and raising our voice when all are silent.
You’re giving us our daily bread
in the song of the bird and the miracle of the corn.
Forgive us for keeping silent in the face of injustice
and for burying our dreams,
for not sharing bread and wine,
love and the land, among us, now.
Don’t let us fall into the temptation
of shutting the door through fear,
of resigning ourselves to hunger and injustice,
of taking up the same arms as the enemy,
but deliver us from evil.
Give us the perseverance and the solidarity
to look for love,
even if the path has not yet been trodden,
even if we fall.
So we shall have known your kingdom,
which is being built forever and forever.[4]
Amen.

 

 

[1] https://www.progressiveinvolvement.com/progressive_involvement/2010/07/lectionary-blogging-luke-11111.html

 [2] Obery Hendricks, The Politics of Jesus:  Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They have Been Corrupted,  (New York: Doubleday, 2006),  p. 108

[3] https://www.sunnyskyz.com/blog/2494/Women-In-Uganda-Sent-900-To-Katrina-Victims-In-2005-They-Earned-1-20-A-Day

[4] Janet Morley, Bread of Tomorrow: Praying with the World’s Poor, (London: SPCK Publishing, 1992).

1/5/25 – Practices for This New Year – Luke 2:21-38

Making Room

Luke 2:21-38

Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley

January 5, 2025

 

Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEC0a6k31-I

On Christmas Eve, we heard the familiar story of Jesus’ birth which begins “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria.”

Luke places the birth of Jesus in a certain political reality.  Mary and Joseph and Jesus live under Roman occupation.  The empire has a real and profound effect on their lives, even on the circumstances in which Jesus is born.  I think about all the babies born in the Ukraine in the nearly 3 years since the Russian invasion.  I think about all the babies born in Palestine since the Hamas attack in October 2023. Babies and parents in war zones, lands of occupation.  I imagine contemporary Ukranian Annas and Palestinian Simeons who wonder what life will be for the babies they see. I imagine that as the oldest generation welcomes these infants, they may hope that each one will grow up to live in peace or to wage lasting peace. They likely also fear for too many who will suffer because of the powers at work in the worlds into which they have just been born. 

Jesus’ life is shaped by Roman occupation, but not only by that. It is also shaped by his parents’ faith and faithfulness. The cultural struggle evident throughout Jesus’ life is a battle for identity of his people.  On one side is their identity as God’s covenant people, people who are obedient to the practices of justice and mercy and lovingkindness.  On the other side is an identity as a subjugated people who must submit to the ways of Empire, to the practices of power that dominates and oppresses.  It is a real and hard struggle. What the Emperor wants, the Emperor usually gets.  How can an ordinary person be faithful in these circumstances?

What we see in this chapter of Luke is that Mary and Joseph meet the requirements of Empire.  They go to Bethlehem as decreed.  But they are also obedient to God. They go to the Temple on the eighth day of Jesus’ life because they are part of a covenant community. This ritual of naming celebrates Jesus’ birth, introduces him to the covenant community, and recognizes that, in some inscrutable way, God’s promises are being fulfilled.  It honors Mary and Joseph’s deepest awareness and commitments.[1]  The ritual becomes an expression of the identity they are claiming.  It connects them to the past. This is the same ceremony that their parents and grandparents engaged.  And the blessings of Anna and Simeon connect them to the future, their descendants in an ongoing covenant community.  We might understand their ritual as an act of resistance, a small demonstration of faith despite the brutality of occupation.

Even those of us who don’t think of ourselves as traditional probably have a few rituals that we sustain or which sustain us.  Traditions related to family celebrations or milestone events or holidays. My family usually puts up a Christmas Tree as early as we can in the season so that we can enjoy it for a long time. 

Every year, I recognize a number of ornaments with a connection to Emmanuel. I’ll just mention three.  This one was a gift from Liselle last year.  It is a world with the word Peace on it.  This year, it resonates for me with our theme of a weary world rejoicing.  Two others are related to each other.   This heart says “Love wins”.  It was a gift from Ellen in 2018.  That same year, this star came from Michael.  Our Advent/Christmas theme that year was Testify to Love.  If you don’t remember that theme, you might remember it as the year that we carried a burning sparkler across the sanctuary to light the Advent candles while certain trustees looked on with apprehension every week. The ritual of a Christmas tree with ornaments is a way that links memory and meaning and identity and those links are strengthened every year as the ritual is enacted again.

When I was in Northern Ireland this summer, I became aware of the nuances of the English language and its variations across the world.  Something clicked for me with the phrase Do you mind?  In my American world, Do you mind? is most often associated with asking someone’s permission for a small courtesy.  Do you mind if I sit down?  Do you mind if I smoke?  In that context, do you mind? becomes do you care?

In Northern Ireland, do you mind? has a double meaning.  Just like here, it can mean do you care?  But there it also can referring to bringing something to mind, as in do you mind the year of that great blizzard? Or Do you mind the name of those cousins in Belfast? So it means both do you care? and do you remember?

Ritual can evoke that double meaning.  Ritual enables us to remember and to care. 

Jesus grew into adulthood in a culture where Jewish nationalism vied with Roman nationalism and with Jewish identity as God’s covenant people. We live in a similar moment.  Christian nationalism and white supremacy are deeply embedded in our culture, and consciously or unconsciously, part of our own identity struggle.  We are citizens of the global Empire of our time and we must reckon with what it means to be faithful in these circumstances.  We are weary of the fractious politics we have endured in recent decades.  Many of us are seriously concerned about what might be ahead of us this year.

In such times, it happens that weary people are sometimes sustained by rituals and intentional practices.  I want to invite us to be proactive as we launch ourselves into this new year.  Consider the rhythm of your life.  Where are the times and places where you might develop a ritual that reinforces your deepest commitments? What is a new or old practice that you might sustain?

The most meaningful practices will be the ones you create for yourself.  Let me offer a few suggestions to spark your imagination.  Consider a monthly practice – read 5 psalms every day.  There are 150 psalms. In most months, reading 5 per day will bring back to the beginning by the start of the next month. Similarly, there are prayer books designed for 31 days. 

A weekly practice – Sabbath, which is about resting and balance.  Honor the Sabbath with worship, but also by changing the pattern of one day in seven. Consider how to spend that day – perhaps it is a day to fast from media or social media, or a day to light candles and invite some friends over.  Perhaps you might devote time to reading something special only on that day. My intention for this year is to seek more wisdom from people of color, people who have engaged this struggle in ways that my privilege has insulated me from. In the bulletin, there is an excerpt by Howard Thurman as an example.  Work for social justice is necessary, but regular rest is essential to provide physical and spiritual nurture for the long haul.

Tricia Hersey is the founder of The Nap Ministry.  She maintains that rest is anything that connects body and soul.  She writes “My rest as a Black woman in America suffering from generational exhaustion and racial trauma always was a political refusal and social justice uprising within my body.  I took to rest and naps and slowing down as a way to save my life, resist the systems telling me to do more and most importantly, as a remembrance to my Ancestors who had their Dream Space stolen from them.  This is about more than naps.”[2]

Consider a daily practice – if you bathe or shower daily, consider a ritual of re-affirming your baptism.  As the water flows over you, remember your commitment to follow Jesus in all the ways your life requires.  And also remember that you are beloved in God’s sight.  Spend a minute or two every day in the shower or in the mirror saying out loud “I am baptized.  I am beloved.”

I will be very interested in hearing the new and old rituals that you choose to practice across the next weeks and months.    

When the Communists took over Russia in the last century, one ritual of the Orthodox Church took on surprising power. Until that time, you might have thought that the purpose of the Orthodox Church was to underwrite the rule of the Czars. There was very little sense that the church engaged with politics or economics.  When the Communists took power, here was a church that might have seemed peculiarly ill-suited to challenge the status quo.

There was one Russian Orthodox habit, however, that brought the church out of the church. Before the celebration of Communion, the priest was expected to go to the porch of the church and ring a hand-bell. That bell was to tell the people in the village that Communion was beginning. The early Communist regime outlawed the ringing of the hand-bell as part of its anti-religious campaign. Orthodox priests are unfailingly traditionalist by nature, and they just continued to stand on the porch, ringing their little bells, asserting their deepest commitment, finding it impossible to do otherwise.  The state reacted by jailing and slaughtering priests by the thousands. By refusing to give up the ringing of the bell, Orthodox Christians confronted its nation's rulers with a determination that they had not know they had.[3]

Beloved ones, I would like to find a bell to ring.  In the year that stretches ahead of us, I intend to engage in pro-active prayer practices and rituals that honor God and my own deepest commitments.  I hope that you will join me in rhythms that strengthen our faith and witness, that ground us in God’s abiding love and sustain us with joy even though we have considered all the facts.  May we remember and care.  Amen.

 

 

[1] Alan Culpepper, The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IX, (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 1995), p. 75.

[2] https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/

[3] Stanley Hauerwas, Pulpit Resource, January- March, 2003, p. 8