Luke 12:13-21  (The Message)

I agreed with Debi Thomas who said, when she looked up the Lectionary Gospel reading for this week, that she groaned because she “really, really, really [didn’t] want to write about money. Money is one of those things we’re not supposed to bring up in polite company. We get squirmy when people ask about it. Especially when they ask in ways that challenge our lifestyles or our priorities. For all sorts of reasons, we prefer talking about Christian virtues that are safely abstract—faith, hope, love, joy.  But budgets?  Retirement plans? Shopping habits? Tithes and offerings? Those are so specific,” Thomas said. “So concrete. So private.  But here’s the thing: Jesus doesn’t care one whit about our middle-class sensibilities. So here we go...”  

In reading other reflections on this story in Luke, often called “The Parable of the Rich Fool,” I was taken back in my memory to 1982, when I went—just weeks after graduating from college—with a group of people from my church to Haiti for a mission trip for 12 days.  We went to help paint a church, to conduct a Vacation Bible School, to learn about Haiti, and to learn from the people in that poorest of all countries what it means to live by faith.

This week I re-read my journal from that trip, and remembered how very, very tired I was when I got home!  I also remembered how irritated I became--upon my return—with people who were  talking/complaining about things like the cost of food, and the hot weather, and the slow traffic to work.  People really did not seem to understand just how rich they were, and it made me angry.

Of course, that anger didn’t last too long.  Because, in the end, I like the things that make my life—our lives—easy and comfortable.  And after all, I’m not “rich,” right?  Not “rich” like the fool in the story, right? Then I read this reflection on the rich and the poor, written by Barbara Brown Taylor, and I was stopped in my tracks yet again.

Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “About a dozen years ago, I took a bunch of rich kids from midtown Atlanta on a mission trip to rural Kentucky. To be fair, many of them did not know they were rich. Because they had only each other to compare themselves to, they thought all teenagers received cars for their 16th birthdays and went on cruises to the Bahamas for their senior class parties. Without exception, they were well fed, well educated, and well supplied with everything their hearts desired. The only thing they were missing was an experience of poverty, so we drove to Appalachia to get them one.”

A group of ten headed to Barnes Mountain, where a rural mission had been set up in an abandoned farmhouse in the woods. This group’s job was to finish the log cabin that would serve as a home for the new minister in the fall. They slept in an old chicken house across the clearing.

Although they did not realize it at first, part of the reason for their being there was to draw local people out of the woodwork, and within 24 hours this group from Atlanta had attracted three helpers from the pool of local teenagers, including one particularly sweet boy named Dwayne.

Barbara Brown-Taylor says, “Dwayne was as fascinated by our stories as we were by his. We told him about the dining room at the top of the Marriott Hotel that goes around once every hour. He told us about his uncle, who had fallen into an abandoned coal mine and broken his hip. We told him about the Braves. He told us about the pet barn owl he had raised from a baby.

“Dwayne worked with us, played with us, ate with us--and at the end of the week he prayed with us, as we gathered for a communion service before we got into our van to go home. There was lots of crying that Saturday morning. We had discovered a kind of community with one another that many of us had not known before and no one wanted to let go. When we got to the prayers of the people, they lasted a long time. Everyone had a chance to say something, and quite a few of the prayers had to do with what a privilege it had been to serve the poor people of this area, upon whom we asked God's special blessing.

“Under the circumstances I guess that sort of thing was predictable,” Brown-Taylor wrote, “but later I learned that it was also tragic, at least for Dwayne. When I asked him afterward what was wrong, he said, ‘You all called me poor! I swear, I never thought of myself that way until you said it. I have all these woods to run around in. I have a grandmama and a granddaddy who love me. I got a whole shed full of rabbits I can play with any time I want. Does that sound poor to you? It don't sound poor to me. You all should save your prayers for someone who needs them.’

“No one meant to hurt him, but our language gave us away. We thought of "the poor" as people other than ourselves. We separated ourselves from Dwayne in our prayers, and our partiality stung him to the quick. By setting him apart like that, we withheld the one thing he really wanted from us, which was simply to belong--not one up or one down but just one of us--a member of the community, not a mission project.

“Our prayers also exposed our narrow definition of poverty as not having enough money… It was not entirely our fault, either. Most of us learned to pray in church, where the general consensus seems to be that the poor and the oppressed are in much greater need of prayer than the prosperous and the privileged. …It is difficult for me to remember ever hearing a petition for the rich who have received their consolation.

“Ever since Dwayne raised my consciousness, I have wondered what it would do to the Christian community to hear ourselves praying for the rich as earnestly as we pray for the poor.

For those in bondage to their assets, let us pray to the Lord.
For those whose success does not satisfy, let us pray to the Lord.
For the entitled and the comfortable, for the isolated and the elite, let us pray to the Lord.

She ends her meaningful reflection this way: “All I know for certain is that prayers like that would confront me in ways that prayers for the poor never do. If I heard them over and over again, they might even lead me into another reality where categories such as first and last, rich and poor, lost and found, began to change places in my mind. At the very least, I am pretty sure Dwayne and I could pray those prayers together, and both say "Amen" at the end.”

Was Dwayne poor? Go back to the scripture reading in Luke, and you decide. 

Rev. Lisa Drysdale

Luke 10:25-37 (NRSVUE)

Just one week ago today, on July 17, a mass shooting occurred at the Greenwood Park Mall in Greenwood, Indiana. A FOX news report said, “The alleged gunman, 20, opened fire with an AR-15-style rifle around 6 p.m. Sunday at the Greenwood Park Mall, located just south of Indianapolis, firing 24 rounds within two minutes before a Good Samaritan stepped in and killed the shooter.”

I was disturbed on so many levels when I heard about this. I was deeply disturbed that the incident happened at all, and I found myself feeling disturbed that the young man who shot and killed the attacker was hailed as a “Good Samaritan.”  A good Samaritan.

So, I went to this story we are thinking about this morning from the gospel of Luke, the story many of us know as “The Good Samaritan.”  This story was the prescribed Lectionary reading for worship a couple of weeks ago.  At the time, I chose not to focus on this reading because, I thought, what can I say about this story that hasn’t already been said?  Many of us learned about the Good Samaritan when we were young children in Sunday School. 

And then God, in the way that God so often does, nudged me into thinking more about the Good Samaritan when I finally paused long enough to read a reflection on the familiar story, written by Diana Butler Bass in her blog, “The Cottage.”  Bass, an American historian of Christianity whose most recent book, Freeing Jesus, I’ve been working my way through this summer, is close to my age and she writes about learning about the story of the Good Samaritan in Sunday School.

“The flannel graph board was blank except for three colors — soft blue fabric for sky, green for the ground, and a thin brown stripe for a road. Miss Jean, my Sunday School teacher, called us to gather in a circle. She reached into a box and drew out a man cut from felt. “A traveler was walking down the road,” she moved him back and forth to imitate a stroll, “when some robbers attacked him, took his clothes and money, and threw him in a ditch.”

“She pressed the felt victim onto the board in a prone position. She pulled more figures from the box. A priest, then a Levite (what’s a “Levite,” I wondered?) passed by without helping the man. Then, a fabric Samaritan with a cut-out donkey came down the road. He stopped and picked the injured man up, gave him a drink and bandaged his wounds. Miss Jean peeled the prone felt character from the board and placed him on the donkey. She continued, saying that the Good Samaritan “took the man to an inn and cared for him.”

“Who would you like to be?” she asked. She held up the felt priest; then the Levite. No takers. And then, she removed the Samaritan from the board and showed him to us. “Him?” We all raised our hands.

It may well have been one of the easiest questions I’ve ever been asked. Everybody wanted to be the Good Samaritan. Of course.”

Bass goes on in her reflection to share a story about a time when she was riding a steep escalator from the Dupont Metro stop in Washington.  Several steps ahead of her on the escalator was an elderly man who suddenly cried out and crumpled, tumbling down the moving stairs until he reached the step above her.  He was bleeding, so she yelled for help.  Immediately, a young man was at her side and he was able to lift the injured man off the escalator.  Soon, others rushed in to help tend to him and “the impromptu band of Good Samaritans waited for the professionals to arrive.”

“About three weeks later,” she writes, “I was crossing a street in Alexandria, the town where I live outside of Washington. It is a much less hectic and friendlier place than downtown DC. I tripped, landing spread eagle in the crosswalk. My purse flew one direction, my glasses another. My hands were scuffed and bleeding from my feeble attempt to break the fall. And my knee was hurt. Dazed, I looked up, and saw that the crosswalk signal was about to change. I couldn’t pull myself together in time to get out of the road before the light turned green. I started to cry, searched for my glasses, and hoped for help.

“A car stopped, and a woman opened the driver’s side door. I felt relieved — someone was going to assist me. Instead of helping, however, she began to yell at me: “What’s wrong with you? Get up! You’re blocking traffic!” When I didn’t answer, she shouted, “Are you deaf?” and she leaned on her car horn. I crawled across the street to the far corner. “Idiot,” she shouted as she drove away. I sat on the curb sobbing. No one asked me how I was; no one helped. Several people walked by without comment, turning their gaze away from the rattled woman on sidewalk.

“And that’s the thing about this parable. Occasionally, you get to be the Samaritan. But sometimes you’re in the ditch.”

When she thought back to the flannel graph days of learning the story of the Good Samaritan, she said Sunday School never alerted her to the possibility that she might one day be the one in the ditch.  She believed she was always going to be the Good Samaritan, and it felt virtuous to be the Good Samaritan. Helping the man who fell on the escalator made her feel useful. 

“But it felt terrible to be the victim,” she said. “Not only did the fall hurt, but I was shocked by the response of all those around me. That woman yelling. People ignoring my pain. Wondering if some inattentive driver would run me over while I struggled in the road. Reaching for my glasses, unable to see clearly. My sense of helplessness quickly turned to fear and then, unexpectedly, anger. After all, I’d recently been a good Samaritan. When I needed someone, however, no one was there. I had to help myself.

“Some people will always pass by — even if they don’t want to admit it to their Sunday school teachers. Many people will help. But, sooner or later, we’ll all be in the ditch. And there, in that utterly dependent position, we see everything differently.”

Splayed on the road, Diana Butler Bass didn’t care who helped her. She just needed help. And that’s the real point of the parable. Amy-Jill Levine insists that Jesus’ first audience — Jewish hearers — would have identified more with the victim in the ditch than the Samaritan:

“For the perspective of the man in the ditch, Jewish listeners might balk at the idea of receiving Samaritan aid. They might have thought, “I’d rather die than acknowledge that one from that group saved me”; “I do not want to acknowledge that a rapist has a human face”; or “I do not recognize that a murderer will be the one to rescue me.” That’s what the Jews in Jesus’ day thought of the Samaritans — that they were descendent from rapists and murderers, collaborators with rulers who oppressed God’s people and who worshiped at a corrupt Temple. That’s who showed up as the hero in the story, the person who administered mercy — their enemy.

“Who is my neighbor?” asked the lawyer.

The answer? The very worst person you can imagine, Jesus responds. Your enemy.  That’s the real story of the Good Samaritan.  Whoever shows up—even your enemy—especially your enemy—is your neighbor.

So, what about the so-called “Good Samaritan” at the Greenwood mall in Indiana?  The young man who shot and killed the gunman with the AR-15 style rifle?  I honestly don’t know.

What I do know is that God continues to nudge me into thinking in bigger, more radical ways, about my neighbor.  By grace alone, God isn’t finished with me, yet.  I suspect God isn’t finished with you, either.   

Rev. Lisa Drysdale

Psalm 105:1-6 (The Message)

Abraham Heschel, a Polish-born American rabbi, once said, “Awareness of the divine begins with wonder.”  That made sense to me when I saw the photos this week from the James Webb Space Telescope.  Have you seen these photos?  I encourage you to see them. When NASA released the first pictures from its new telescope on Tuesday, the world seemed to stop for a moment to gaze — and gasp — at that which has been hidden from us.

“Today, we present humanity with a groundbreaking new view of the cosmos from the James Webb Space Telescope – a view the world has never seen before,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “These images, including the deepest infrared view of our universe that has ever been taken, show us how Webb will help to uncover the answers to questions we don’t even yet know to ask; questions that will help us better understand our universe and humanity’s place within it.”

The photographs are beautiful — gas cliffs sheltering newborn stars, a four-billion-year-old star cluster appearing to dance across a dark sky, a star shedding its dust toward all corners of the universe, and five galaxies of such luminosity that they seem to be angelic beings.

Diana Butler Bass, an American historian and religion scholar said this about seeing the photos: “I cried.”

Then she said, “Wonder. Jubilation. Such things bring us human beings to our knees. As the Psalmist once cried out, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?”

Awe is the first response to seeing the expanse of the heavens. And, as a scholar of religion, I’m fairly certain that’s the origin of religion itself. Some ancient ancestor of ours looked up at the night sky and said, “Wow.”  Wow…

I’m not surprised by how easy it is for us to be speechless by the big wonders of the universe.  I admit I had a bit of trouble keeping my eyes on the road on Wednesday night when I saw the most spectacular sunset that I can remember seeing in quite some time.  It’s easy for us to be left in awe by the amazing wonders of the universe, where we remember we are part of something much larger than ourselves. 

But what about the little wonders?  They’re equally amazing, I say.  And the little wonders point us to the divine in exactly the same way the big wonders do.  Remember what Heschel said: “Awareness of the divine begins with wonder.”  Just wonder.  And wonder—in all forms—seems to be hard for us to notice these days, in our troubled world.  So I want to share with you this very short story about an experience of wonder, written by Brian Doyle:

“A high school kid asks me this morning, What’s the greatest sports moment you ever saw?  Before my brain can rumble into gear and produce the 1986 Boston Celtics (the best basketball team I ever saw), or the 2004 Boston Red Sox (the greatest comeback in the history of baseball), or the 1969 New York Mets (for sheer shocking unbelievability, not to mention that I got to watch that whole World Series on a television in our grade school classroom—how cool was that), or the 1980 Miracle on Ice USA Olympic hockey team, or Doug Flutie’s preposterous last-second touchdown pass for Boston College against Miami, or autistic teenager Jason McElwain drilling seven long shots in four minutes when his Athena High coach put the diligent cheerful team manager into uniform for the first time at the very end of the last home game of his senior season and he went bonkers and the whole student body went bonkers and they carried him off the floor and every time I see the film again I am elevated to tears…Before I can recall any of this, I say this instead:

“One time when my twin sons were little, maybe six years old, and they were playing soccer, in the town league in which every single kid I think proudly donned his or her blue uniform with blue socks every Saturday so that anywhere and everywhere you went in our town on Saturdays you would be surrounded by small blue grinning chirping people, not just on the fields and in parking lots but in burger joints and pizza places and the farmers market and the library and the grocery store, and it was a crisp beautiful October afternoon, and I was standing with the other parents along the sideline, half paying attention and half keeping an eye out for hawks, suddenly the tiny intent players on the field all formed a loose circle on the field, and play stopped.

“I remember seeing the ball roll slowly by itself into a corner of the field. I remember that the coach, one of those dads who was really into victory even though the boys and girls were three feet tall and could hardly tie their laces, was yelping and expostulating.  I remember that two of the moms ran out onto the field, worried that a child was hurt.  I remember that a referee, a lean long teenager who had been the most desultory and unengaged of referees up to that point, sprinted toward the circle, worried that a child was hurt.

“And then the circle devolved into a sort of procession, with all the players on both teams following a girl in front, and cupped in this girl’s hands was a praying mantis, which she and all the other players on both teams were escorting reverently off the field, because, as a child helpfully explained to me afterward, the praying mantis was on the field first, and maybe even lived there, while we were all visitors, and you’re supposed to be polite when you visit someone’s house.

“I have seen many extraordinary moments in sports—” Doyle said, “stunning achievements, stunning reversals, terrific teams, teams that, at the exact moment when their absolute best and most meshed play mattered most, played even better than they ever imagined they could. But I don’t think I ever saw a more genuine moment than the praying mantis moment. All of it was there for us to see—teamwork, decisive collective action, a leader rising to the occasion, humor, generosity, respect, surprise, narrative, drama, tension, release, grace, satisfaction, laughter, and the subtle virtue of being something you see only once in a lifetime.”

My friends, there are examples of wonder all around us…all the time.  Sometimes they’re huge, like the images of the very beginning of the universe. And sometimes they’re small, like the young children playing soccer stopping to protect and pay attention to a praying mantis of all things. 

Remember what the Psalmist tells us: “Keep your eyes open for God, watch for his works; be alert for signs of his presence.”  The signs of God are all around us. Thanks be to God!

Rev. Lisa Drysdale

2 Kings 5:1-14

By all accounts, Seoul, Korea, is a great place to live, and one of the most visited cities on the planet. It is a modernized metropolis with many amenities. There is a wonderful public transportation system, easy access to great parks, wonderful food and great weather in the spring and fall.

The weather in the summer, however, is less than desirable. It rains nearly as many days as it doesn't. Then there is monsoon season. Weeks of clouds and rain cover the vibrant and colorful city of Seoul and its people with drab, dreary grays that weigh heavily upon one's spirit. Although it hasn’t happened this summer, we certainly that know days without the sun can cast darkness over our general disposition. We know what it is like to feel down, or depressed, when the sun does not shine.

But what if there was a way to bring color and joy into our lives in the midst of the gray pall of clouds and rain?

Designers from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) wondered the same thing. They traveled to Seoul, Korea, with a novel idea to bring some color to monsoon season. On sidewalks, streets, crosswalks and alleyways the designers and artists painted colorful murals. On one busy sidewalk, they painted a giant pink whale surrounded by fish of many shapes, sizes and brilliant colors. They all appear to be swimming down the street together with the pedestrians. On an alley walkway, the artists painted a team of colorful tortoises swimming alongside some smaller creatures. Elsewhere, a colorful group of fish look like they are feeding near a curb. All the brilliant blues, pinks, yellows, reds, purples and greens are in stark contrast to a gray sky.

But here's the amazing part! Most of the time the murals are invisible. They were painted with hydrochromic paint, a special design that only becomes visible when activated by water. In other words, these beautiful works of art are only visible when it rains! So, when the sun shines down on the people of Seoul, and there is plenty of color in their lives, the murals are invisible. The painted streets and alleys look like every other walkway.

When it rains, though, the water activates the hydrochromic paint and the colors burst through the gray. Those walking with their heads and hearts down are greeted not with more gloom, but with wonder and playfulness. A dreary walk to work or the market becomes a fun-filled adventure of discovery.

This happens not in spite of the rain, but because of it. The water from the dreaded storm causes the murals to appear and brings a semblance of healing to the brokenness caused by the dreary weather.

Our weather around here can affect us dramatically, and sometimes we find ourselves in the midst of a dreary season of the soul. Ailing bodies, broken relationships, tight finances, boring jobs and general feelings of dissatisfaction with our day-to-day existence can feel like darkness and clouds that will not break apart. In fact, things just seem to go from bad to worse. As the saying goes, "When it rains, it pours."

Naaman's storm begins with an illness. Naaman is a man who appears to have everything going for him. He is a high-ranking general in the army of Aram, a powerful nation. The Bible describes him as a great man, a mighty warrior, well-regarded by his king and the people. But there's a problem. Naaman has a skin disease. All of his power, reputation and skill in battle are useless against the illness, and he's desperate for healing.

On the advice of an unnamed servant girl, one who has none of his power, reputation or freedom, Naaman journeys from Aram to Israel to see the prophet Elisha for healing. He travels with an entourage and plenty of cash. He is ready to pay. Maybe this is the one way he still feels like he has some power, some control over his illness. He can pay for the best medical treatment of his day, whether in or out of network.
When he arrives in Israel, though, Naaman isn't treated with the respect he feels he deserves. He first stops at the royal palace to meet with Israel's king. There he is met with fear and confusion before being given the address of someone who can help him. When his motorcade pulls up to the curb in front of Elisha's house, you can imagine Naaman rechecking the address. This cannot be the right place. It is not a state-of-the-art dermatology clinic, but the simple house of a prophet. His heart sinks.

Then, even here, he is not greeted and treated in a way that is worthy of the magnitude of his position and wealth. He doesn't see the doctor. There is no examination, no tests, no sympathy or bedside manner.
Instead, a messenger of the prophet meets him at the curb with instructions to go wash in the Jordan River seven times. Can you imagine arriving at your physician's office with a serious illness and being told by the receptionist that the doctor wants you to take a couple of Tylenol to see if that would do the trick?

Naaman is irritated, to put it politely, and insulted. He's been treated disrespectfully, and his hope for a cure is dashed. But his servants—who, like the girl in Aram, are also unnamed in the story—eventually convince him to give it a shot. Reluctantly, Naaman agrees. He and his entourage arrive at the Jordan and Naaman wades in before following Elisha's prescription and immersing himself seven times. To everyone's surprise, he's healed. In the verses following today's reading, we learn that not only is his skin restored to that of a much younger man, his heart and life are also changed. Naaman confesses that there is a God in Israel!

In the climactic scene of the story, when Naaman is at the height of his frustration, he talks about the water. He angrily questions what Elisha thinks is so special about the Jordan River, and in some sense, he's right. Water is water. The water he has been bathing in at home every day is exactly the same as the water in the Jordan.

What Naaman doesn't know is that the healing powers are not in the water, but in God who is already alive in the life of Naaman. Naaman's healing is, in a sense, hydrochromic. Like the rain on the streets of Seoul activating the paint, the water of the Jordan makes visible what had previously gone unnoticed, but had been there all along. Colors burst through the gray. Joy peeks through the sadness. Wonder and awe break through feelings of brokenness and weakness. The power of God was made visible by Naaman's bathing in the Jordan River.
 
We’ve heard stories about all this before: The beauty of the diamond is exposed by the cutting, chipping and polishing of the stone. The brilliance of the pearl is revealed after prying apart the shell of the oyster. The block of marble becomes David only after bearing the brunt of Michelangelo's chisel and hammer.

"That is why," the Apostle Paul exclaims, "I delight in weakness, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong" (2 Corinthians 12:10, NIV). I know this is a difficult paradox: your weakest moment is also the moment of your greatest strength! But it is very often the story we read in scripture.

The rain that fell on Paul and Naaman -- the dirty waters of the Jordan River -- revealed the power of the God of Israel. That's basically God's message to the apostle. And Paul responds, "Ah, I did not know that. Okay, then, instead of complaining about the rain, I will welcome it. I will 'boast' about it. Because in the rain, I will see the glory of God."

In the dark seasons of your soul may the waters of adversity reveal to you the presence of Christ alive in you. And may you find joy. Amen.

Rev. Lisa L. Drysdale

Isaiah 51:1 (The Message)

If you have a dog, you probably know how challenging this holiday weekend can be. I can almost guarantee there is going to be a lot of noise throughout the weekend. I live in Niagara County, and over the last two weeks I’ve noticed some tents popping up in parking lots, where fireworks are being sold to celebrate the 4th of July. I don’t remember these tents popping up before, but they’re popping up this year.

A lot of dogs and a lot of humans struggle with the noise of fireworks.

Thankfully, I’m not traumatized by the noise of fireworks, but I do think I’m particularly sensitive to noise, in general. I remember one morning this past winter when I got out of bed and walked past the open door to another bedroom. Still a little foggy with sleep, I could clearly hear the noise: drip! Water from icicles hanging outside the window was making its way through the window frame and dripping inside the window and down the wall. Drip! I definitely heard that noise.

The scripture we’re thinking about this morning is just one sentence long: “Listen to me,” God says. “Listen to me, all you who are serious about right living and committed to seeking God.” It’s one short verse, but it leaves us with a lot to think about.

“Listen,” God commands.

“God already knows that this will be a struggle for us. Because there’s a long list of voices that cause a cacophony in our heads, asking so much of us before our days even begin. And somewhere, inside of us—again, whether we realize it or not—we are answering to them.” This is what the Rev. Kaji Dousa, Senior Pastor of the Park Avenue Christian Church in New York City, wrote in a recent UCC Daily Devotion about this one sentence in the 51st chapter of Isaiah.

I think she’s right. We are answering the voices, and we are paying attention to, the noise in our heads.

“This requires energy,” she goes on to say. “Brainwaves. Attention. The asks from the voices take from us without necessarily putting anything back. And when this is our steady state, how do we have the capacity to even begin to listen to what God has to say?”

How can God get through? Listening to God means we have to change our steady state. We have to find a way to tune into God’s frequency while tuning out some others.

Have you ever turned a radio dial to tune in to a station? I have only one radio where I still have to turn a dial to receive the particular station I want. It’s the alarm clock radio that sits next to my bed. I actually set two alarms for the morning. The first to go off is the alarm on my phone, and because my phone does not sit right next to my bed at night, I actually have to get out of bed and take one step to turn that alarm off. Then, to ensure that I don’t just take one step backward to get back into bed, I set the clock radio alarm for five minutes later.

But the dial on the clock radio that allows me to tune into the particular station I want to wake up to is very finicky. If it’s not perfectly tuned to the station, the station will make no sound at all five minutes after the first alarm. It can be a long time before I wake up again and figure out what has happened!

“Getting a radio dial to the right station frequency takes some fine tuning,” Rev. Dousa writes. “You’d start with static, but you’d keep turning the knob. More static. But keep turning, and as you do, you start to hear some sound come through. And as you get closer and closer, the sound becomes clearer. Words become discernible. And you keep turning. You keep turning and you might still get some noise, some interference, from another station—not the one you’re looking for. But keep turning. And you turn, and you turn, and, in time, you will tune in to that which was casting out to you all along.”

I completely agree with her suggestion in her Daily Devotion that “if listening to God is our objective, then we need to turn the dial. And tune in. This works. It is powerful, and it works.”

But you know what doesn’t work? Trying to tune into countless stations, all at once. That’s just a jumbled mess. And while we would never try to do that with the radio, for some reason we try to do that with God.

“To hear God loud and clear—to faithfully listen, as God calls us to do—we really need to shut some things down. Turn off the stations—or at least, turn them down. Limit the asks.”

I was in my car not long after reading Rev. Dousa’s Daily Devotion, and I was using the GPS on my phone to guide me to my destination. As I often do, I had the radio on while I was driving. I really didn’t need the GPS directions until the last few turns, so the competing voices from the radio and the GPS voice didn’t really bother me. Until I got close to my destination. Then I had to turn off the radio! I simply cannot listen to the directions with the noise of the radio competing for my attention.

“To hear God loud and clear, we really need to shut some things down. Turn off the stations—or at least, turn them down…”

“Listen to me,” God says. “Listen to me, all you who are serious about right living and committed to seeking God.”

This summer, I want to encourage you—and encourage myself, as well—to take a deep breath and turn. Keep listening. Turn the dial. Tune in. Shut out the noise that is not helpful or life-giving to you.

Keep listening. Turn the dial. Tune in. Amen.

Rev. Lisa Drysdale

Luke 9:51-62 (The Message)

We are not very good at predicting the future. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit the United States in March 2020, many of us assumed we’d be home for a few weeks. The virus would pass through the country, and then we’d all be back to school, work and church. I clearly remember assuming we’d be able to gather for Easter Sunday in April! It’s Easter, after all. Of course, it didn’t exactly turn out that way.

We carried a lot of assumptions and made a lot of predictions in those early days of the pandemic. But all through history, people have made questionable assessments of what a good next step would be, based on assumptions and predictions.

In The Washington Post, columnist John Kelly lists a number of the most questionable. In the year 1486, a royal committee was gathered in Spain. They said it would be wrong for the king and the queen to provide funding for an Italian explorer named Christopher Columbus. The committee members insisted that sailing west to Asia would take a ridiculously long three years. And why would anyone want to spend so much time at sea? They believed that there was nothing between Europe and Asia but a vast and featureless ocean. “Don’t do it!” they advised. We know how that turned out.

In the gospel of Luke, Jesus knows exactly where he needs to go — “he set his face to go to Jerusalem”. The importance of that city to his ministry and mission is very clear to Jesus. But confusion arises on his way to Jerusalem, causing his disciples and a number of potential followers to make some problematic predictions based on their assumptions.

First, two disciples enter a village of the Samaritans and attempt to arrange some hospitality. But the Samaritans do not receive Jesus, because they are not supportive of his plans to go to Jerusalem. James and John are incensed. Assuming Jesus’ reaction, they say to him, “Master, do you want us to call a bolt of lightning down out of the sky and incinerate them?” They are convinced that Jesus would want the complete destruction of this rude and unwelcoming town.

But the assumption held by James and John is wrong. Jesus is not interested in the destruction of the Samaritans, so he turns to James and John and rebukes them for their destructive impulses. Then the disciples and Jesus move on to another village.

More assumptions are coming! Next, as Jesus and the disciples are going along the road to Jerusalem, a person says to Jesus, “I’ll go with you, wherever.” Jesus says to him, “Are you ready to rough it? We’re not staying in the best inns, you know.”

The man probably thinks to himself, “Gee, I really like to sleep in my own bed at night.” Don’t we all? At this point, it seems that he slips away and heads home.

Then, Jesus says to another potential disciple, “Follow me.” The man says, “Certainly,” which is a good start to his response. Then there’s a “but.” “But first excuse me for a couple of days, please. I have to make arrangements for my gather’s funeral.” That seems like a reasonable request, doesn’t it? A good next step. After all, the Ten Commandments say, “Honor your father and your mother”.

But Jesus says, “First things first. Your business is life, not death.” The grieving man doesn’t know how to respond, so he drops out of the crowd — probably to take care of the funeral arrangements.

Finally, another potential follower says, “I’m ready to follow you, Master; BUT (there’s that word, again) first excuse me while I ge things straightened out at home.” Again, a reasonable and respectful request: A quick good-bye to the family, so they won’t think that their loved one has just disappeared.

What does Jesus say? “No procrastination. No backward looks. You can’t put God’s kingdom off till tomorrow. Seize the day.” The request of the final follower is immediately denied.

The first man envisions a place to rest. The second assumes he will be able to bury his father. The third is anticipating a chance to say good-bye to his family. They seem like reasonable expectations. So why does Jesus consider these assumptions to be problematic?

All three of these potential disciples fail to see and understand that a future with Jesus is very different from the past. They cannot imagine a time in which they don’t have a bed to sleep in, or the opportunity to go to a funeral, or the chance to visit with their family.

They are like the man who wrote about airplanes in the March 1904 issue of Popular Science Monthly. He said, “The machines will eventually be fast, they will be used in sport, but they are not to be thought of as commercial carriers.”

Jesus is calling his followers to look towards a new way of life, one that is hard to predict with any accuracy. When Jesus looks into the future, he sees the kingdom of God coming near. He doesn’t see comfortable beds, respectful funeral services or satisfying family visits. Jesus envisions a future that is very difficult for us to imagine, because it is a future being created by God.

But this does not mean there is nothing for the followers of Jesus to do. “We can’t build the kingdom by our own efforts,” writes biblical scholar N.T Wright. “But we can build for the kingdom. Every act of justice, every word of truth, every creation of genuine beauty, every act of self-sacrificial love, will be reaffirmed [in the kingdom of God].” All are solid steps forward.

These acts do not have to be shocking in order to be significant. The cup of coffee given with gentleness to a homeless person at a day shelter, “the piece of work done honestly and thoroughly; the prayer that comes from heart and mind together; all of these and many more,” says Wright, “are building blocks for the kingdom.”

Looking to the future, we followers of Jesus often misunderstand and fail to see what he desires for us. Like James and John, we assume that Jesus wants to destroy the people who disrespect us. Like the three potential followers on the road, we cannot envision that discipleship will disrupt our normal routines.

The truth is that our assumptions and predictions will cause problems for us, unless they are in line with the coming of the kingdom. But if we act in ways that are in response to the words of Jesus, we will be adding important building blocks to the kingdom of God. Let’s commit to building the kingdom of God.

Rev. Lisa Drysdale,

1 Kings 19:1-15a (NRSVUE)

The famous Simon and Garfunkel song “The Sound of Silence” explores the difficulty of communicating truth in a way that will be heard. While it may be easier to believe that truth is told in the booming shouts of the powerful, or in the loud shouts of those with the biggest megaphones, truth is often uttered in the whispers of the vulnerable: “The words of the prophets / Are written on the subway walls/ And tenement halls / And whispered in the sound of silence.”

Simon and Garfunkel were not the first to make this claim.

Elijah’s whole job as a prophet was to call out the idol worship that was rampant in the kingdom of Israel and that was perpetuated by those in power—those with the megaphones at the time—namely Ahab and his wife, Jezebel. But the prophet we encounter in today’s reading seems to be the complete opposite of the prophet spoken of in the previous chapter, where Elijah’s zeal and swagger on behalf of God clinches victory over the prophets of Baal, even though the odds were clearly in Baal’s favor.

If you look back to chapter 18 in 1 Kings, you’ll find the story of Elijah saying to the people, “How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.” Elijah was the only prophet standing before the people representing Yahweh, while there were 450 prophets representing Baal. Elijah is ridiculously outnumbered.

Then Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal to cut up a bull, put it on wood, and then call on Baal to set fire to the wood. The 450 prophets take the challenge, and after cutting up a bull and putting it on the wood, they call upon their god, Baal, to answer their cries for fire. “But there was no voice, no answer, and no response.”

So, Elijah does the same; cuts up a bull, puts it on wood, even drenches the wood with water again and again until it fills a trench around the wood, and then calls upon Yahweh and says, “O Lord…let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your bidding. Answer me, O Lord, answer me so that this people may know that you are God…” Immediately, fire from God falls and consumes the burnt offering, the wood, the stones, and the dust, “and even licked up the water that was in the trench.”

With God on his side, Elijah triumphed over the prophets of Baal, “and when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces and said, ‘The Lord indeed is God; the Lord indeed is God.” Elijah had to have been thrilled at this victory!

Then, surprisingly, when Elijah hears of the death warrant Jezebel has placed on his head because of his triumph over the prophets of Baal, his whole demeanor flips from empowered and confident to helpless and miserable. As readers, we are left to guess why.

The change in Elijah’s behavior may strike us as irrational, but human emotions often are. In his depressed state, he falsely believes that he has been left alone to complete the work of God, and so he declares that he is done with his ministry and even with his life.

But an amazing thing happens when Elijah tries to get out of being a prophet: God does not shame Elijah for his feelings and for his wanting to flee, but God validates his feelings. Before asking more of him, God

addresses Elijah’s basic physiological needs, providing him with food, water, and 40 days of retreat. Elijah calls on God to take his life, and instead, God feeds him!

Then pay attention to what happens next: this compassionate God coaxes Elijah out of his cave in an unexpected way, and Elijah finds God not in the powerful wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire (of all things!) but in the “sound of sheer silence.”

Commentators debate the theological meaning of this phrase. I take the view that the text implies God’s presence is also in silence as opposed to only in the standard pomp and circumstance of, say, fire raining down from heaven. That Elijah encounters God in silence and receives direction through this encounter reminds all of us that powerful leaders like Ahab and Jezebel ignore the prophetic voice of political dissenters and the vulnerable…the ones Simon and Garfunkel sing about in “Sounds of Silence.” God’s presence in the sound of sheer silence serves as a foil to the way Baal worshipers like King Ahab and Jezebel rule, a foil to how they understand divine power.

On the mountain, God then tells Elijah to return to the work of his calling and to mentor a new prophet, Elisha. Elijah must complete his portion of the task at hand, but God assures him there are others called to the work as well. It turns out God never intended for Elijah to be alone in his ministry and mission as a prophet of God. But we do need to heed God’s call to step out of our caves and face the challenges of the day.

In the story from 1 Kings, Elijah is devastated and afraid: he retreats into the wilderness, and calls on God to take his life. Instead, God feeds him. And in his encounter with God on the mountain, he witnesses God’s power in the wind, earthquake, and fire.

But don’t forget: Elijah actually encounters God in what comes next—the sheer silence—as if to say, God is in the silence. Or more pointedly: Elijah, even when you feel that I am absent, when you feel most isolated and alone—even there I am with you. I am with you in the absence, in the silence, in the struggle. Now go—we have work to do!

So do we. Amen.

Rev. Lisa Drysdale,

John 16:12-15 (NRSVUE)

Four times now. Four times I have been treated for the same persistent, unrelenting infection. I have to say I’ve learned a lot over these last three months. I’ve learned that after I’ve been on an antibiotic for a couple of days, I feel good. Really good. All is well!

I’ve also learned that that good feeling can be a tricky illusion, for when the antibiotic is complete, the infection has continued to lurk. Or come back. Whatever. I don’t really know. I just know that it’s taken me a full three months to learn how this cycle moves along.

I’m a little less fearful of it now than I was during my first encounter with the infection, when I had NO idea what was happening. I still don’t like dealing with an infection…at all. I would NEVER wish this on anyone. But I am learning…albeit slowly.

I was thinking about how long it’s taken me to get my mind even partially wrapped around what’s been happening to my body while I was also thinking about this lectionary reading from John for today’s worship.

“I still have many things to say to you,” Jesus tells his disciples before his eventual arrest and crucifixion. Or, ““There is so much more I want to tell you,” according to the New Living Translation. It seems there’s more for us to know. More for us to learn. More for us to understand.

At the right time.

Elizabeth Evans, an ordained deacon in the United Methodist Church and an advocate for victim-survivors of sexual assault in Lawrence, Kansas wrote about this reading from John and said, “I am not the type to learn as I go. Even when others around me believe in my abilities, I prefer to train and prepare in excess, hoping to achieve some internal standard of readiness that provides the illusion of preventing mistakes and embarrassment.

“When I started in my role as an advocate for victim-survivors of sexual assault, I dreaded the first time I would have to answer a hotline call. Despite nearly a decade of experience in ministry, plus the month of training my agency offered me related to advocate counseling in particular, I still felt unprepared.

“Then two advocates were occupied and unavailable to answer the hotline, so my director asked if I was ready to turn on my phone. Turning to a colleague who had worked for weeks with me on role-play scenarios, I asked, “Do you think I’m ready?”

“I can’t answer that,” she said. “Only you know. But at some point, you’re just going to have to learn by doing it.” So, I did.

“There comes a time when we have exhausted all the available training and must act. What I’ve learned as an advocate is that not every situation can be anticipated enough to train for or plan ahead. Sometimes we cannot take in any more information until we face the crisis at hand. It is in responding to crises in real time that fresh understanding and wisdom reveal themselves to us.”

Responding to crises in real time.

Perhaps this is what Jesus means when he tells his disciples they cannot bear what he still has to tell them. It’s not that he is finished teaching them or that there is nothing left to reveal to them. Nor is it that he considers them too weak to handle what’s to come. It’s that the things Jesus has left to share will only make sense in the future, when they face new challenges in real time.

In anticipation of Jesus’ death, the disciples face a crisis themselves—losing not only their friend and teacher but also the ultimate, in-the-flesh revelation of God’s loving presence among them. How will they continue to know God after Jesus’ death? How can they continue to live out Jesus’ teachings as they endure unanticipated challenges without his physical presence?

Not only that, what implications will Jesus’ death have on the first readers of this text, huddled together in their house churches as they live through their own crisis, trying to remain faithful to the teachings of a man they never met while facing persecution from the authorities of the day?

For the Gospel of John, the Holy Spirit is the answer to such a crisis. John conceives of the Holy Spirit as a divine advocate who persists in guiding communities of faith in the way of Jesus after Jesus’ physical life on earth has ended. The Holy Spirit is the unending promise to communities of faith of God’s loving presence with humankind, continuing to reveal God’s nature and God’s hope for creation in new ways—ways particular to who, where, and when we are. The Spirit of Christ empowers communities to face the challenges that arise in their context with new understandings of Jesus’ life and teachings.

The Holy Spirit is the one who makes tangible the life and teachings of Jesus for contemporary faith communities like ours, as we face our own crises particular to our time and place.

Communities of faith the world over have grappled with crises that feel like a signal of the end. We are not the first to face multiple, complex global crises and wonder, “How can we possibly come back from this?” Yet it is unlikely that if Jesus had unloaded onto the disciples the truths of how to respond faithfully to every crisis that would ever befall the world, they would have been able to conceive of global climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, the unrelenting scourge of assault weapons.

At the same time, there are undoubtedly more crises bubbling up that we cannot anticipate, fathom, or prepare for. There is evidence to suggest that many feel unprepared to respond to the crises already at hand. Perhaps, like the disciples, we are waiting—just waiting with bated breath—for Jesus to reveal the many things he still has to say to us.

The Holy Spirit reminds us that we already have all we need to respond to the current needs of the world. We have already learned all we can learn before it’s time to act, and we are not acting alone. While our particular crises were foreign to the disciples in Jesus’ time, feelings of fear, anxiety, grief, burnout, and pain are universal. The disciples also knew injustice, violence, and suffering, and as they were equipped to face those challenges in their day, so are we in ours.

The Holy Spirit, the continued embodied presence of God’s love through Jesus, makes possible the collective memory of how God has worked with communities of faith of every generation to respond to such challenges. As long as the Holy Spirit keeps reminding us who Jesus is and nudging us toward fresher understandings of Jesus’ way in light of our own circumstances, we will have what we need to respond. For now, there is nothing left to prepare.

May we pledge to be open to the Spirit’s presence and guidance. Amen.

Rev. Lisa Drysdale

John 17:20-26                                                                

​

All in the Family was an iconic sit-com that ran from 1971 to 1979.  Archie and Edith Bunker became household names all across the U.S.  Their family, which included Gloria and her husband Michael (aka, “Meathead”), came to be embraced in humorous and serious ways, by a wide audience.  As the series title implied, they were all in the family.  Archie with his ultra conservative opinions and Michael with his ultra liberal view of things, honed in the crucible of the late ‘60's.  Edith with her restrained values and mores and Gloria with her Flower Child sense of personal freedoms.  They were all there in one family: spitting and fuming, laughing and loving one another.

Where are Archie and Edith and Gloria and Michael when we need them?  How would they deal with red states and blue states?  What do you think they’d say about restroom wars being waged over gay, lesbian, transgender, and transsexual access to those facilities?  What about immigration and border walls?  How about critical race theory or the banning of books in a school’s curriculum?

All in the Family wasn’t the first attempt to address unity in diversity in our lives.  No, there’s an older project that’s still running.  Originally, it gathered and held together quite a diverse group of folks.  They were educated and uneducated.  Some worked with their hands for a living – blue collar, you could say.  Other’s handled money – white collar, you could say.  And their political views ranged all the way from a populist uprising to maintaining the status quo.  I’m referring, of course, to the followers of the Way, a movement that would eventually become Christianity.  Norman Mailer did well to keep his show on TV for eight years in a tough, demanding market.  The unity in diversity movement that Jesus started is still running today, far eclipsing, in numbers, its original 12 subscribers. 

The Church was formed as a multicultural, diverse body of people.  That’s its strength and its gift to the world.  Unity in diversity.  The Body of Christ is not homogenized.  It’s not a melting pot.  The Body of Christ is more of a tossed salad where all the different ingredients lend their own unique tastes to the whole dish.  Green leaf lettuce, peppers, cucumbers, feta cheese, Buffalo Wing chicken – they all taste great on their own.  But put them together in a salad, and suddenly you have something really special – a riot of flavor for the palate.

That they may all be one all in the family.  That is Christ’s prayer for us, and, fittingly, it is the motto of the United Church of Christ.  Brown, black, red, yellow, white, male, female, liberal, conservative, gay, straight.  On their own, each can leave his or her mark on the world.  Put them together in the Church, and suddenly you have something really special.  You have a miracle from God, the instrument through which God is saving the world by mixing it all in the family.

Rev. Stephen Hall

John 14:23-29                                             

Ubiquitous Ubiquity.  In the field of English grammar, that’s what’s known as gilding the lily.  It’s worse than using a double superlative to describe something.  I can just see my 10th Grade English teacher, Mrs. Brath, shaking her head vigorously from side to side, while wearing a furrowed brow and a down-turned mouth. 

But this exercise in gilding the lily does make a point when it comes to today’s text.  First there’s the word, ubiquitous.  It isn’t exactly common fare in most people’s conversations, but I like it for the way it sounds: ubiquitous ubiquity.  It just trips off your tongue, doesn’t it?  Well, maybe it’s more of an acquired taste.  Now, let me try to define it by sharing some ancient history.  Back when I was in high school in the late 1960's, I liked to listen to a crazy radio program that had the tag line, “He’s everywhere; he’s everywhere.”  Who was everywhere?  Chickenman – “Chickenman, he’s everywhere; he’s everywhere.”  Chickenman was the antihero who bumbled and geeked around but always managed to save the day by being there for people in need.  He was ubiquitous, because he was everywhere, all the time.

I like ubiquitous as a description of God’s Holy Spirit – one of the subjects in these verses that we heard from the Gospel of John.  Christ promises us the presence, or you could even say “the present – as in gift”, of God’s Holy Spirit in our lives.  The Spirit will be with us everywhere, all the time.

I also like ubiquitous as a description of our relationship to God and one another.  It’s a relationship that’s everywhere, all the time.  Just like the word ubiquitous, this relationship starts with the sound, “u”.  Now that can be the letter, but it can also be the word, you.  You is a very important word, because without at least one you in this world, there would never be a me.  The Seventeenth Century French philosopher Renée Descartes is famous for having said, “I think, therefore, I am.”  In my own life, I’ve developed a variation on his observation:  “You are, therefore, I am.”

My point is this: God made us to be a gregarious bunch of people.  We’re folks who find our existence in God and in each other.  We haven’t been put in this world to fend for ourselves, sometimes at the expense of others.  God put us here to guide us and care for us so that we might guide and care for each other.  And how does God manage this?  Through the most amazing ubiquitous ubiquity in the universe.  Through the Holy Spirit.

Five verses before this passage, Jesus is quoted as saying, “I will not leave you orphaned.”  This means that he will not leave us alone to fend for ourselves.  He will come to us.  Until then, God gives us the Holy Spirit to keep our memory of Christ’s promises sharp and to continue our instruction in the gospel.  We are not alone; we are not orphans.  We have company everywhere, all the time.  We have the wonderful, ubiquitous gift of God’s Holy Spirit. 

The Holy Spirit.  It’s everywhere.   It’s everywhere.  All the time.  All the time.

​

Rev. Stephen Hall

John 13:31-35

How much time have you spent with young children? Enough to know that they
can turn into little tyrants in the blink of an eye? Yes, without the proper
guidance, they easily come to believe that the entire world revolves around them.
Their wants become their needs, and there is absolutely no distinction between
those two things. Never mind the fact that the children right next to them may
have their sights fixed on the very same thing. It doesn’t matter. In that moment,
that child has become a world of one. Unless we direct them – unless we
command them – they will never grow into the adults whom they need to become.
“Little children.” It’s a way that I have chosen to speak to and about the twelve
who follow me. It isn’t always a term of endearment. Often, it’s a clear-eyed
term of discernment. So many times they have acted like little children –
bickering, backbiting, badmouthing children. There was the time, on the road,
when they got into a heated argument over who among them was the greatest.
And then there was the time when James and John tried to cut a private deal with
me that would assure their prominence in the group as my right and left hand men.
James and John, the Thunder twins are always quick to explode in anger. But
they aren’t the only ones to suffer from that affliction. Nearly all of my Galilean
followers are like that. Three of them have not even tried to hide their passions
for the Zealot insurrectionist cause. Simon has been the clearest on this score, but
Judas the brother of James also has harbored violent Zealot passions. Judas
Iscariot, as well. I sense that Iscariot, in particular, hopes that I will draw the
insurrectionists to me and ignite a nationwide war against the Romans. Zealots
aren’t the only personalities among my 12 followers. There is also a tax collector,
Matthew and a Greek, Philip. Outside of my small circle, these twelve men
would have reason enough to avoid, if not despise, each other. But I have worked
to bind them to me and to one another in love. It hasn’t been an easy thing to
accomplish. Indeed, after two years of constant company – preaching, teaching,
healing, casting out demons – they are still resistant, still blind to who I am and
what I have tried to do among them.
Love one another. Sometimes, with children, you just have to give them an order,
especially when their well-being and that of others depend on it. Love one
another as I have loved you. James and John: did I give them the glory that they
craved at someone else’s expense? No. Love one another as I have loved you.
Peter: did I forsake or turn away from him when he tried to turn me away from the
path that God has set before me? No. Love one another as I have loved you.
Matthew and Philip: have I denied them a place at my table because one has
collected money for the Romans and the other is a Greek? No. Love one another
as I have loved you. Iscariot: have I denied him a place in my heart, even now, as
he goes to betray me? No. Love one another as I have loved you.
There is only one way that the world will know that these twelve are my
followers: if they love one another as I have loved them. It will serve them no
purpose at all to quote scripture or my teachings, not if they can’t stand to be with
and for each other. The world will see only what it has always seen – little
children bickering, backbiting, and badmouthing each other.
Little children, God is doing a new thing in the world. Can you not see it? Can
you not hear it? Can you not feel it? Too much rides on you being able to see,
hear, and feel what God is doing in this world. So I command you as I
commanded the Twelve. Love one another as I have loved you. It’s an order.

​

Rev. Stephen Hall

Acts 9:36-4

To be a widow is to know the pain of loss. First, comes the loss of one whom you have loved with the fullness of your heart. That kind of pain is nearly unbearable. You move through your days, fending off an emptiness that is voracious. It’s insatiable, pressing on until it utterly consumes you.

But that isn’t all the loss that you face. Next, comes the loss of standing. You become invisible to those around you. You have no means of support. Some of us are fortunate to own our own dwellings, but they are precious few in number. No, most of us have no means in our lives. We rely totally on the charity of others. And, as you might expect, that charity can be thin and uneven at times.

That’s why Tabitha has been such a blessing to us widows in Joppa. Her name actually comes from an Aramaic word. Aramaic is our native tongue – the language that we speak every day. Tabitha means, “gazelle.” It’s such a fitting name. If you have ever watched a gazelle, you will see right away that this is an animal endowed with great grace. That is Tabitha – a woman endowed with great grace. She literally flowed into our lives with such compassionate care. Without her, we would all be living in rags. But she has sewn us clothing – the kind of clothing that protects us against the elements and makes us presentable. Her gifts make us feel like women again. She always makes them with an excess of love. And she’s constant. Where others offer momentary grace and disappear, Tabitha has been the consistent thread in our lives. She is dependable, committed, solid. Tabitha is the bond of God’s love that keeps us from being devoured by death.

When she died, our world collapsed. Every one of us felt ravaged by her death. She was the embodiment of life to us. In many ways she was life to us. Death had its way with us once when it took our husbands from us. Then, against all hope, this woman, this graceful gazelle, flowed into our hearts and restored us to life. Now, death would rob us of the constancy of her love.

Ah, but God is great. The leader of those who followed Jesus of Nazareth – Peter is his name – derived from another good Aramaic word, Cephas, which means “rock.” Anyway, Peter intervened with the full power of his master – the full power of God. He restored our beloved Tabitha to life and to us. I had heard the stories about God raising Jesus from the dead. We all have. It seemed to me a wonderful, yet, incredible tale. I thought to myself that God probably reserved this miracle for his Son. It was a miracle for him and him alone. How wrong I was! How joyfully and stupendously wrong!

I see God’s life-giving power everywhere. It’s so clear now. I find it in moments large and small. It’s there when bread is broken at table. It’s present in the healing touch of those who work with the sick. I find it entwined in the teachings that are passed to young and old alike. Especially now, wherever I encounter death, I discover God drawing forth life. Everywhere that I turn, I see God’s life, unrestrained, running free with the grace of a gazelle. It all began with the amazing resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and has continued with the restoration of our beloved Tabitha’s life. Life out of death. It will not stop until God has overwhelmed death with life. That’s what God wants. And God always gets what God wants.

John 20:19-29 (NRSV)

I wonder what it was like in that room when Jesus showed up. Can you even imagine? Imagine that you saw him die on the cross. Imagine that you saw his bloodied, mangled body laid in the tomb, and, by the way, this massive boulder rolled in front of the opening to the tomb. Imagine what it must have been like, a couple of days later, to get the news that Jesus’ body isn’t in the tomb anymore…that the boulder had been rolled away, the body was gone, and, by the way, Mary Magdalene says she saw him and talked with him. Risen from the dead! Not mangled. Not bloody. She is positive it was him.

Now try to imagine that you are among the disciples who have gathered in this room. You’ve locked the doors because you are afraid of what’s going to happen when people find out that Jesus’ body isn’t in the tomb. It’s not a big room, so you’re kind of huddled together.

Then, Jesus shows up! John says Jesus “entered” the room. He says Jesus “stood among them.” Are you kidding me?!

John also says that when the disciples saw Jesus, they were “exuberant.” Maybe they were. But I wonder what the lag time was between seeing Jesus among them, hearing his voice as he greeted them, and being “exuberant.”

Most often, I think, when something tragic—or even something exciting—happens, when something happens that is just too overwhelming for the logical part of our brains to absorb, our brains freeze. Your logical self cannot make sense of what you’re seeing and it is as if time stops—or maybe for you time speeds up—perception and memory get thrown out of whack.

For any of you that have been through an experience like this: the death of a loved one, getting fired from a job, being in an accident, seeing a crime committed, maybe you’ve found it hard to recall exactly what happened in those first moments after the incident, after you first heard the news, after you first took in the trauma.

The day after Easter this year, I found myself quite fascinated by the running of the Boston Marathon, after I heard and followed the story, and then contributed to the efforts of Team Beans. Team Beans was running to honor Francesca, daughter of CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski and Wall Street Journal journalist Rachel Ensign. Francesca died on December 24, 2020 from a rare brain tumor, at nine months old. Team Beans was working very hard to raise $500,000 for infant cancer research.

Whenever the Boston Marathon reaches my consciousness around the middle of April every year, I can’t help but think of the deadly bombing attack at the finish line of the event in 2013. I picked up a book written by one of the many injured in the bombing, Jeff Bauman, and once I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down.

You might remember Jeff…there is an iconic photograph of him shortly after the bombing, in a wheel chair, being pushed by a woman, with a big man in a cowboy hat running next to him, and an EMT also running alongside him, pulling his wheelchair. His right leg is gone from just above his knee, and he’s holding onto the thigh of his left leg, though he ends up losing that leg from the knee down as well.

Jeff wasn’t a runner that day. He was at the finish line to cheer on his girlfriend. When he woke up on Tuesday, the day after the bombing, he was in the Boston Medical Center, groggy from a series of life-saving surgeries, and the first thing he did was try to rip out his breathing tube so he could speak. When he realized he couldn’t, he asked for a pad and paper and wrote down seven words: “Saw the guy. Looked right at me,” setting off one of the biggest manhunts in the country’s history.

In the book, Jeff tells about a moment that he recalls with his mother, after the early days of trauma, and when I read it, it reminded me of what it must have been like in that locked hideaway when Jesus entered and joined the disciples.

This is what Jeff wrote: “I knew there were two ways you could go,” Mom tells me now, her hands still shaking. “You could be…” She stops. Mom doesn’t say depressed, because she doesn’t like that word, but that’s what she means. … “I don’t know if you remember…” “I don’t, Mom,” I tell her, knowing what’s coming. “…we were all standing over you.” “I know. It’s creepy.” “And you opened your eyes. This was early, maybe Tuesday, so we weren’t expecting it. We didn’t know what to say. Your eyes went from one person to the next, and nobody was sure whether you recognized them or not. Finally, you tried to speak. But you couldn’t. So it must have been Tuesday, right? Anyway, I bent down so you could whisper in my ear. ‘What is this,’ you whispered, ‘a funeral viewing? Everybody sit down.’”

“I’m not sure about Mom’s story. There are certain parts of it that don’t quite work. I was in the emergency intensive care unit, for one thing, so only two people were allowed in my room at a time…how could the whole family have been there? And when I woke up, I was on a breathing tube. How could I have whispered even those two sentences to her? But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe her. In fact, I know it’s true, that the moment must have happened, because it means so much to her.”

“And besides, my brother Tim tells a similar story. In his version, everyone was there, and he was squeezing my hand, asking if I knew who he was, when I made the joke.” So maybe it happened on Wednesday, after my third surgery. Or maybe it happened on Monday night, before my second surgery. Maybe they had me off the breathing tube for a while, before slicing open my stomach and poking around inside me.

“It doesn’t matter to me. It doesn’t matter if it never quite happened like that. Everybody has a story about those days, which they swear is true, even though none of the stories are the same.”

Those moments, hours, days of confusion when something overwhelming has happened…of course it’s hard to remember the details.

So I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that’s exactly what Thomas experienced when the news of Jesus’ appearance in the room reached him. Remember, he wasn’t there at the time, so the word has to travel to him. And when he hears this part of Jesus’ incredible story, he’s the one who says, “Oh yeah? That’s amazing. But you know what? I’m not going to believe what you say until I see him for myself…until I can actually touch the nail holes in his hands.”

And who can blame him? But we all do at some point…we’ve given Thomas this bad reputation for being a doubter when what I suspect he was doing was what any of us would do….he asked for more information because the logical part of his brain could not catch up to what he was being told. It just didn’t make sense.

And I bet nobody was telling the story the same way! One disciple might have said, “Jesus knocked on the door!” Another would say, “No, he didn’t knock, he just opened the door and came in.” Another would say, “No, he couldn’t have just walked in through the door. Remember how we locked—and double-locked—the doors?”

Like Jeff Bauman letting his family and friends tell him over and over again the story about his first words after losing his legs in the bombing, can’t you understand why Thomas needed that “proof” to help soothe his confusion and calm his racing brain? He simply wanted to touch the wounds on Jesus’ hands and side. Then he would know for sure that what he was being told was true.

Some biblical scholars say that Thomas’ refusal to believe without seeing for himself puts him into a new category. He is not merely a frightened, hiding disciple. He is faithless. Thomas was the first person approached by the Spirit-endowed disciples, and he was the first person to refuse to take the Spirit-empowered authority of their witness to heart. I can see that. I can appreciate that point of view.

I can also see how much like us Thomas was. And I can see that while he wasn’t just going to take the disciples’ word for it, he came on his own…in his own time…to a place of deep, deep faith and action. And for me, that is as significant a part of his story as are his moments of doubt.

God has come to us in Jesus Christ, who continues his mission through doubters and misfits like Thomas and like us. Faith is a willingness to follow him, even when we’re not sure where it will lead us.

Whoever you are, and wherever you are on life’s journey, God is ready and waiting to use us. My hope is that we will at some point respond by saying that we are ready, as well. Amen.

Rev. Lisa Drysdale

Matthew 28:1-15 (NRSV)

A friend of mine readily admits to having a bad memory. She was telling her congregation recently about the time—when she was a seminary student—that she scheduled a meeting with a committee of students, and then forgot to go to her own meeting. The day after the meeting was supposed to take place, when she realized she had missed it altogether, she called to apologize to her co-chair for forgetting to go to the meeting, and then, the day after that, she called the co-chair again to apologize…because she forgot she already called the day before!

I am sure every one of us can tell a story like this. One thing I’ve learned about myself over the years is that I can be the ideal “confidential listener.” I tend to remember the content of what I’m told, but can’t recall who told me. It’s an interesting “gift” I apparently have to ensure everyone’s privacy.

If you are like me, and like many other people, then you can understand why it is that we can be thankful that Holy Week—the week I was crushed to miss out on this year as I was recovering from illness at home—we can be thankful Holy Week comes around every year to remind us what it is this whole faith experience we celebrate on Easter is about.

As a colleague described it, “If I didn’t sit at the Table every year on Maundy Thursday to take the bread and cup, or watch the [Christ candle being extinguished at the end of the service on Good Friday], or get up at the break of dawn every Easter to greet the news of resurrection, I’d be apt to forget why I worship and that there is hope for me even in the darkest of nights.”

If we don’t deliberately walk our way through the events of Holy Week, from the joy of Palm Sunday, into the depths of darkness and death on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, and back out to joy again on Easter Sunday, I think we are apt to forget what happened.

“Christianity is described by religion scholars as a ‘linear’ religion. Unlike the eastern religions which see time as cyclical, these scholars say, Christianity views time and the world as moving in a forward progression, starting with a moment of creation and moving toward a final fulfillment of God’s purpose […someday…out there in the future.]

“That may be true theologically, but [in our actual day-to-day experience] Christianity is just as cyclical as Buddhism or Hinduism because Christianity, like all religion, is grounded in real life experience, and our real-life experience never moves in an orderly progression forward.

“Instead, our lives are filled with ups, and downs, and reversals, and discovery, and forgetting, and reminding ourselves again of those lessons we once learned but have to re-learn all over again.”

That’s why the Jewish tradition of Passover begins with the question: “What makes this night different from all other nights?” It’s a way to open up the memories of those at the table, to hear the story again of the deep connection between God and the Hebrew people. It’s like asking someone, “Tell me about when you were a kid…”

“Even those with steel-trap memories [for some things, like, trigonometry formulas] learned in high school, even these people can forget the simplest things like, ‘It’s better to count to ten and wait until I’m calmer than it is to let my tongue loose and then have to pick up the pieces from the damage I

caused.’ Or, ‘If I eat the whole gallon of ice cream in one sitting, I will regret it.’ Or, ‘Helping someone else can [bring joy to my own] downcast heart.’”

“During Holy Week, we rehearse the last week of Jesus’ life, so that we will be reminded again that Christ’s love for us was so great that he was willing to take on for us the worst the world could do to him, and on Easter—and for 50 days after—we re-enact the resurrection to remind one another that even the world’s worst was not powerful enough to overcome that love. With God, life will always triumph; love will always win.

“It’s strange that we need to go through Holy Week every year—you’d think with such an incredible piece of good news [at the end of the story we’d be able to remember it for all time]—but we’re human. And when the darkness presses around us and our hearts are heavy within us, we forget.

“We forget that God promises the bare branches will grow full with lush leaves again.

“We forget that the frozen fields will ring forth with the songs of birds one day.

“We forget that God can lift the burdens that lie so heavily on our hearts.

“We forget that no matter what death we face right now, God will raise us to new life, and one day the tomb will be empty.”

“I wish I didn’t need to be reminded of this every year—I wish that I could just remember it at every moment of my life, good or bad, up or down, but my memory is just not that great and I need reminding…a lot.

I suspect maybe you do, too.” Maybe that’s why you’re here today. Just as we need to remember the events of Holy Week every year, we need to hear the great story of the resurrection…over and over again.

That’s one of the things I am really drawn to in Matthew’s version of Jesus’ resurrection. Over and over again, people are told to “get on your way quickly and tell the disciples” what you saw. Or, “Don’t be frightened…Go tell my brothers that they are to go to Galilee and I’ll meet them there.” Even the guards quickly go to the city and tell the high priests everything that happened, though they clearly don’t hear the account of Jesus’ resurrection as good news. In fact, they come up with a way to make sure that their own version of events at the tomb—an incorrect version of events, by the way—gets told around town so that people will begin to doubt that Jesus is raised from the dead. The Scripture says, “That story, cooked up in the Jewish High Council, is still going around.”

All throughout Matthew’s story, people are told to tell others about this amazing event. It is through the verbal sharing of this story—over thousands of years—that we come here to today to celebrate.

Please…notice that we are not told to simply remember. We are commanded to tell others. We are urged to share the good news. We are compelled to tell the story, not just so we can remember, but so that others can hear it. We have got to find ways to do this.

Diana Butler Bass, whose writings got me thinking about the importance of Holy Week, tells of an experience she had, and I want to leave you with this both as a reminder and as an encouragement to

you who have heard the awful story of Jesus’ death and the good news of his resurrection. She says: “After a long day flying, I went to the hotel lounge for a glass of local red wine. There, I got in a conversation with a woman, who is about my age, who never heard of Holy Week and asked me to explain Palm Sunday and Easter to her. I told her the story of Jesus’ triumphal entry to Jerusalem, of his betrayal, death and resurrection. About how human it is; how our betrayals turn into our rebirths. She got tears in her eyes. ‘That’s so beautiful,’ she said. ‘How come no one has ever told me this before?’”

Tell someone the story of what we celebrate today.

Amen.

Rev. Lisa Drysdale, April 24, 2022

[Based on essays by Diana Butler Bass]

 John 20:1-18

 Easter Sunday, 4/17/22

I remember a discussion at one of the many bible studies that I led over the years.  We were talking about the resurrection and one of the group’s members asked, “Do you have to believe in the resurrection to be a Christian?”  I sensed that there was another question behind that one: “Is the resurrection essential to the Christian faith?”  So I responded, “The short answer is “yes;” the long answer is “yes.”  This woman was steeped in the scientific method.  She had an empirical approach to life.  For her, believing in the resurrection was a heavy lift.  If it couldn’t be observed, quantified, or proven, then it wasn’t real.

All of us approach life in the same way, at least some of the time.  We see our lives and the world in which we live as flat, two-dimensional.  I know that’s true with my life on most days.  I see my life as moving forward, moving backward, or sometimes simply sliding sideways.  But is there more to it?  Is there a third dimension to life?  Let’s try a little show and tell.  What do you see; what is this? (hold up a two liter bottle)  A two liter Coke bottle?  Does anyone see a clown?  If not, then I’m right with you.  I look at a two liter bottle and that’s all I see.  A two liter bottle.  But Marion Henning would look at that same two liter bottle and she would see a clown.  Marion was a member at St. Peter’s United Church of Christ, the congregation that I came to Lockport to serve 40 years ago.  She was one of the most gifted crafters whom I have ever known.  Her gift was deeply rooted in the third dimension of life.  This is the place where creativity exists and thrives.  Marion turned Coke bottles, Pepsi bottles, Sprite bottles into clowns of all shapes and colors.  Those clowns brought people a sense of joy – a slice of life. One of Marion’s clowns sat for year at the nurses’ station in the intensive care unit of  Lockport Memorial Hospital.

More times than I care to admit I, like a lot of people, see the world and my life in it as flat –as two dimensional.  And because I see the world as flat, I can offer no clowns, no slice of life, no joy.  Death wins every battle and every debate in a flat world.  Fortunately, for all of us, God did not create a flat world and hand it over to death.  God created a multifaceted world where life reigns supreme.  God created a world where the dead are resurrected to new life.

A life lived completely in two dimensions is a dangerous thing.  In a flat world, I know just enough to get myself into trouble.  For me, that applies to all things medical.  I don’t have a degree to practice medicine, but too often I talk like I do.  That doesn’t mean that any of you are going to want me to perform brain surgery on you.  Knowing just enough to get myself into trouble also applies to electricity and plumbing.  Now I have the Reader’s Digest Complete Guide to Home Repairs, and I’ve even read it.  I was shocked (shameless, intended pun!) when it didn’t turn me into a master electrician.  And maybe it was just one of my pipe dreams (another shameless, intended pun!), but it also didn’t turn me into a master plumber.  Just ask Jerry Schultze; he’s cleaned up several of my self-inflicted messes.  Jerry, I only ask that you leave the more entertaining details out of your after-church conversations.  I could go on, but I don’t think I need to; you get the point.

When it comes to the resurrection, we tend to know just enough to get ourselves into trouble.  Suddenly, we turn into Mr. Spock from Star Trek.  Reality gets defined solely by the laws of nature.  But that’s only half of the knowledge that’s available to us.  The other half is just as powerful, indeed, sometimes more powerful, than the rational half.  This is the half that gives our lives depth – that third dimension.  It’s the half that’s driven by mystery and passion and love. It’s the reason why we have significant others.  For my money, love is the anchor occupant of the deep dimension in our lives.  Love cannot be separated from life, nor can life be separated from love.  Love is to life as oxygen is to fire.  You can’t have one without the other.  That’s the reason why my biologist daughter plays violin and piano and my physicist son plays cello.  I’m not embarrassed to tell you that my daughter brought me to tears this past Tuesday with her performance of Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances, and my son did the same thing when he performed Shastokovitch’s Cello Concerto with the Colgate University Orchestra.

People don’t have difficulty with the resurrection because they know too much.  They have difficulty with the resurrection because they know too little.  Today’s Gospel lesson covers the complete gamut of responses.  Peter doesn’t yet have the framework in his life that can embrace the resurrection, so he reaches the only conclusion that he can – someone must have taken Jesus’ body from the tomb.  The beloved disciple, whom church tradition identifies as John, looks at the evidence and believes.  I resonate the most, though, with Mary Magdalene in this story.  She goes to the tomb expecting to find Jesus’s dead body.  She’s confined by the same limiting trap as Peter.  Mary discovers an open, empty tomb, and that’s just too much for her to bear.  It’s bad enough that her master was arrested, tortured, and crucified.  Now this!  The enemies of Jesus didn’t even have the common decency to allow his body to rest in peace.  But unlike Peter and the other disciple, Mary doesn’t go home; she stays.  She grieves but she also seeks.  Mary has an encounter with God, a totally unexpected conversation with two angels.  Then she sees Jesus, but she doesn’t recognize him.  Thinking that he’s the gardener, she asks him where he has taken the body. Jesus speaks her name, and that’s when the mystery of the resurrection opens itself to Mary and draws her in. 

That’s what the resurrection is – mystery.  There’s no narrative describing how it happened, just a declaration that it has.  The New Testament and the Church exist because of this mystery.  We are here today because of this mystery.

                                       So, let’s try this again.  What is this? If you still                                               don’t see a  clown, don’t despair.  Let me show                                             you what a Coke bottle became.   This little clown                                         was  sitting on my office desk at Lockport United                                           Church of Christ one morning.  An anonymous                                               note simply read, “Hi, my name is Stevie.”  A slice                                         of life.  A splash of joy.

​

The empty tomb is more than an empty tomb.  If you don’t yet see that, don’t despair.  God is relentlessly patient and will give you the eyes of faith to see that it is the resurrection.  And the resurrection, dear sisters and brothers, is life everlasting for us all.

​

Rev. Stephen Hall

Mark 11:1-11

I want you to know this morning that I am sharing someone else’s story with you. I’m sharing it, not because the details describe anything I’ve actually experienced, but because the point of the story stopped me in my tracks…and made me think about you, and us and how important this fellowship of Christ is to me, especially as we stand together on the threshold of this most holy week in the life of Christians.

The story comes from Lillian Daniel, a pastor in a UCC church. This pastor, like many, loved Palm Sunday and Holy Week, though she knew Easter would end in exhaustion.

But shortly before Palm Sunday one year, her eight-year-old son was under the weather, and she and her husband soon learned that Calvin, had type 1 diabetes. Unlike the more common type 2 diabetes, the much rarer juvenile diabetes, or type 1, cannot be reversed by diet or lifestyle. With type 1 diabetes, the body’s own immune system attacks the pancreas for no apparent reason. The pancreas then shuts down—slowly over a few months—and there is absolutely nothing that can be done about it. Suddenly, out of nowhere, her son was dependent on insulin, and would be for the rest of his life.

“It is ironic,” Daniels says, “that all this happened just days before Holy Week—ironic, because Holy Week begins with the cheerful procession of people waving their palms before Jesus, shouting Hosanna. His followers are ecstatic. They are having a party in the street. But in a matter of days, the disciples will be eating their last meal with Jesus. He’ll be betrayed. They’ll be afraid. The cheering and partying will seem like a distant memory from a time when they thought life was easy.

“Those days spent in the hospital, I later realized, were more about us as parents than about our son. His health stabilized quickly once he received the insulin his body had stopped making. But we, his parents, needed a lot more treatment. The doctors would not release Calvin from the hospital and into our care until they were convinced that we could manage his treatment, that we had adjusted to this change. We learned about what he should eat to avoid high blood sugar levels. We learned that he would have to monitor his carbohydrates so the right dosage of insulin could be supplied. This would keep his blood sugar at the right level and allow him to live a “perfectly normal life.”

“Just when we got that straight, we learned that when Calvin’s blood sugar was too low he should eat the very things that otherwise he shouldn’t eat. Treating this disease is frustratingly counterintuitive. “I thought diabetics couldn’t eat sweets,” I said. “Actually,” the doctor said, “in a case of low blood sugar, when he’s had too much insulin, he has to have sweets in order to avoid a diabetic coma.” This was not sounding to me like a “perfectly normal life.”

“What is a perfectly normal life? Have you noticed that the only time that phrase is invoked is at times when life is neither perfect nor normal? But is life ever perfect or normal? We had been at the hospital for days, taking turns there and with our five-year-old daughter at

home. We had friends but no family nearby. My mother had died a year before, and I don’t think I ever grieved for her as much as I did in those days at the hospital.

“By now it was the Saturday before Holy Week. Because I love Palm Sunday, I had planned a lot for that day. There was to be the usual grand procession with the palms, the special music, the triumphant entry into Jerusalem. But because I had assumed that this would be a celebratory day, I had decided that it would also be the day that new members would join the church. Early that Sunday morning, I sat at the desk in the church’s front office, not feeling celebratory at all. I wondered if it would be easier to simply lead the congregation through the service and then tell them the news, or whether I should tell them first. It seemed like a different person had planned this festive Palm Sunday worship service.

“One of the new members who was to join the church that day, a young man in the medical field, had arrived bright and early. “How are you this morning?” he asked, not realizing that he was the first person I had seen at church that morning and that he was about to really find out how I was. “You know what, I’m not doing too great. My son is in the hospital, diagnosed with diabetes, out of nowhere, and he may or may not get to come to church today. No, diabetes doesn’t run in my family, unless you count my great uncle, who I am just now remembering. He lost his leg to it in his thirties and his life to it in his forties, leaving behind a widow and a little daughter. They say he never took care of himself, but how do you make someone take care of himself? So how am I doing? To be honest, I’m a little shaky.”

“I realized that I had said more than I had wanted to say, and more than he, a new member, had asked. I think I remember saying, “Sorry,” as we careful people do when we are accidentally honest with one another.

“Juvenile diabetes or type 2?” he asked, evidently knowing a distinction that most people do not. “Type 1?” I nodded. “Well, I have type 1 diabetes too,” he said. “In fact, it’s what drove me to go into medicine. I’m passionate about helping people to live healthy lives with this condition.”

“I looked at this young man who seemed to have it all together—he was the picture of health, a person who had talked about climbing mountains and kayaking and who traveled the world. Suddenly my image of this disease had a new face, and I liked it a lot better than my late great uncle’s. “I think that’s why I am joining the church today,” he said, and we both stopped to take that in. “I’m going to be a friend to your son, and help you deal with this.”

“And that is exactly what happened. That young man’s friendship changed our lives in the years that followed, and none of that would have happened were we not joined together in the body of Christ, not just when our news is good but also when it’s bad.

“On Palm Sunday, things change so quickly. The followers of Jesus move from triumph to tragedy in a matter of days. That’s how quickly life moves too. But as surely as the arc goes down as we begin the solemn services of Holy Week, we know that the arc will go up again at Easter Sunday.

“Some resurrections are enormous and get recorded in scripture to be read about year after year. Other resurrections are smaller. They happen in the midst of ordinary lives. And we witness one another’s resurrections in church all the time. For me that Palm Sunday morning, what was resurrected was hope. And when my son ran into church that morning, finally out of the hospital and being his energetic self, I knew that as quickly as things change, they can change in all directions, as much as they do in Holy Week. The lesson of Holy Week is that pain and sorrow do not have the last word.

In the midst of all that went wrong right before that Holy Week, God was working on the bigger picture, and my Holy Week story now has yet another hero, an eight-year-old boy whose courage I admire every Palm Sunday when I think about how quickly things can change. And I also think of that new member. He probably thought that he was joining the church that day because he needed it. But sometimes the reason you join the church is because somebody there needs you.”

(Story by Lillian Daniel, April 21, 2009, Christian Century)

For the joy we know this day, we give you thanks, O God.

For the sorrow and the darkness to come, we ask for your mercy, O God.

For the hope that is before us, we praise you, O God. Amen.

Rev. Lisa Drysdale

I Peter 2:4-5, 9-10

“Come on, David!” “C’mon, c’mon!” “Come on, Dave, yeah!”

“With shouts of encouragement and steady applause from his teammates, David Gorczynski crossed the finish line at Orchard Park High School late Tuesday afternoon, long after most of the other runners in one more race that he almost was not allowed to run. But David Gorczynski is still running, and because of his fight, all young athletes with disabilities in New York will have one less obstacle to overcome in the seasons ahead.”

I loved reading this story that appeared in the Buffalo News nearly ten year ago, now. The article said, “Gorczynski, 20, has autism and loves to run. This summer, his family’s court case against a state education regulation that banned him from competing because of his age attracted wide attention. Hundreds of people – including his Orchard Park teammates and runners from other schools – signed an online petition objecting to the law, and State Supreme Court Justice John L. Michalski issued an injunction that would allow David to run.”

Like any long-distance runner, David benefited from The Bislett Effect. I may have talked with you about this interesting phenomenon before, but it seems to me, as we gather for worship and to celebrate new members in this congregation of God’s people, that the Bislett Effect is a perfect reminder of what has been our strength in years gone by and what needs to be our passion going forward. The Bislett Effect is a phenomenon that has implications for us all, whether we are practicing our running or practicing our faith.

The name comes from the Bislett Stadium in Oslo, Norway, a place where 65 track-and-field and speed skating records have been broken since the start of the annual Bislett Games over 50 years ago. We’re not talking about one broken record. Or two. Or 10. Or even 20. But a full 65 records. No other track can boast such a record for record-breaking achievements. According to an article in Runner’s World (November 2003), the British runner Sebastian Coe set several records at Bislett, including a series of stunning miles. Another fine British miler, Steve Cram, who shattered Coe’s record for the mile, said, “If you can’t run well at Bislett, you can’t run well any bloody where.”

But what’s the secret of Bislett?

In a word, it’s the crowd. The original track was narrow, with only six lanes, and the grandstand is so steep that the fans are practically on top of you. “The sound of 21,000 screaming maniacs rakes your reflexes,” writes Kenny Moore, “forcing you to keep your rhythm, the crowd’s rhythm, for one more stretch, one more turn. The frenzied fans keep you going.”

That’s why 65 records have been broken at Bislett. We run faster in front of great crowds because we are inspired by community — we run not only for ourselves but for the team, the family, the congregation, the tribe, the party, the nation. “Our deepest nature,” concludes Moore, “is that we are at our most majestic when we do for others.” Just ask David Gorczynski…he kept running as the crowd cheered him on.

The apostle Peter knew all about The Bislett Effect although, unlike his colleague, Paul, he never used the racetrack, race-running metaphor. Instead, Peter uses a construction metaphor in these words to the Christians who were scattered across five provinces in Asia Minor: “Present yourselves as living stones for the construction of a sanctuary vibrant with life, in which you’ll serve as holy priests offering Christ-approved lives up to God” (1 Peter 2:5). The point is the same. There’s nothing individualistic about the Christian faith, according to Peter — nothing that gives credence to an isolated, one-on-one relationship with Jesus Christ.

Peter knows that inspiration comes from the crowd. The Bislett Effect. The Living Stone Syndrome. Whatever. It’s critical to the health of the Christ Body, as well as to our mission in the world, to see ourselves as a community that empowers and enables each other, thereby allowing us to set all sorts of records. Enabling us to do much more than we had ever dreamed possible.

This is not to say, however, that the church is merely a gathering of frenzied fans. Remember that as living stones we are cemented to the cornerstone that is “chosen and precious,” according to Peter (2:6). Without a good cornerstone in Jesus Christ, we cannot remain standing as a solid spiritual house. So, we need to stay connected to Jesus. That’s what this whole church—any church--is about at its very core.

Even so, the crowd is crucial. We’re living stones in the building, or fans in the stands. Sometimes we’re the runners, the contestants, but in the “stands” we’re cheering on, helping, assisting, empowering, those who are on some particular track, some particular course, who are facing some particular challenge, obstacle, trial or test, and having been on the course, having run the track, having flown over those hurdles ourselves, we’re in a position to yell and scream and cheer and urge our sisters and brothers onward.

We know what it’s all about. We have to stay close to one another. If we’re going to have any chance of proclaiming the mighty acts of God to a hurting and hope-starved world, then we’re going to have to hang together as “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people” (2:9). We are at our most majestic when we work for the good of the body, and when we do for others instead of ourselves.

All of which should lead us to reflect on the times in our lives when we have been inspired to greatness by the support of the Christian community, maybe by this Christian community that gathers today.

And, more importantly, we really should be thinking about what we can do today to be a source of encouragement to the people around us, especially those who are running tough races. Who is it out there that needs to hear words of encouragement and hope from us? Who is it out there that needs to feel energy from us…God’s people in this place?

I’ve heard it said that there’s an understanding in the marathon world that you only have to run 20 miles in a practice run in order to run 26.2 miles in the marathon itself. The fact of the matter is that the extra 6.2 miles are given to the runner as a gift of the crowd. The cheers and support of the spectators are enough to push the marathoners beyond any distance they have ever run before.

We have benefitted from the unwavering faith and support of those who came before us. And as we welcome our new members—sisters in Christ—let us commit to sharing our faith and support with someone else, someone we don’t yet know. That’s how we become building stones for the construction of a sanctuary vibrant with life. That’s what will keep us alive and thriving years to come.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Rev. Lisa Drysdale

John 15:1-12 (NIV)

Someone told me recently in a text that I have the patience of a saint. I laughed! Then I began to think about it a little bit, and I guess this person is right, to some degree. I can be a patient person. Maybe I learned to be a patient person because my father was NOT a patient person, and he paid the price for his impatience early in his adult life—before I was born—with debilitating ulcers. So, he wasn’t particularly patient, AND he didn’t really know how to deal with his impatience. I know I don’t want to go down that path.

But while I may generally be a patient person, that doesn’t mean that I couldn’t relate when I read this in a Lenten devotion written by pastor and author, John Pavlovitz. He said, “I don’t like waiting: for takeout food, online orders, doctor visits—anything. As I move through the world, things almost never function as expediently as I’d like, and a smoldering restlessness is always rumbling just beneath the surface. Traffic tends to amplify this ever-latent frustration, and I can easily lose my religion in a good gaper delay or unexpected construction area. My continual impatience is compounded by a terrible affliction I suffer (one doctors have yet to properly identify), which causes me to always choose the wrong lane in a backup. Always. The very instant I complete my transition to what is clearly the faster option, its as if the lane I’d just vacated suddenly glides briskly along and my new one now ceases to move.

“That is, of course, until I veer back to where I’d been originally seconds ago, upon which that lane once again screeches to a standstill. I soon look ahead into the distance and lament the place farther down the road that I would have occupied had I only stayed put. I watch another driver claim the smooth travel I missed out on, and in a fit of rampant lane envy I pray a pox upon their house—or at least a nice pothole to mess with their alignment.”

I love how down-to-earth Pastor Pavolvitz can be!

In this particular day’s devotion, Pavlovitz reflects on the scripture from John we are thinking about today. “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. You are already clean,” Jesus says, “because of the word I have spoken to you. REMAIN in me, and I also REMAIN in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must REMAIN in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you REMAIN in me.”

Can you hear it? In this extended sermon in the fifteenth chapter of John’s gospel, Jesus uses the word REMAIN nearly a dozen times—“…which makes me think,” Pavlovitz muses, “that it’s both important and also probably something that isn’t easy, or else saying it once or twice would have been enough.”

Since I read this devotion this past week, I’ve found myself thinking about “remaining,” or staying, or waiting. I usually think about waiting, in particular, during the season of Advent, where we encounter the images of Mary and Joseph waiting for their baby to be born. When I’m practicing yoga, I hear the teacher talk frequently about “staying”; staying in the pose, paying attention to what it feels like to “stay with it.” Ugh, is usually my unspoken response! It can be so challenging to stay in a pose when I think my legs are going to give out under me and/or my arms are simply going to fall off.

Then, since the lifting of the state of emergency in Erie County, I’ve been reflecting on where we’ve been these last two years. Much to our distress, we have lived through long periods of time when we’ve been forced to “remain,”…indoors, away from each other, out of school, away from work, away from restaurants, away from yoga, away from those we love who were hospitalized. It has been hard to stick with it. Some people managed to “remain” better than others.

Then we encounter these words from Jesus today, this message about how critical it is to remain in constant contact with him. “If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.”

But staying put is a profound challenge for many of us, especially if our present is uncomfortable, or confusing, or turbulent. In seasons of struggle—and we all have them—it’s counterintuitive to not want to get some distance from whatever it is that is causing us pain, heartbreak, sadness, grief. But Jesus reminds us that growth is sometimes painful and slow. (Ugh!) It cannot be rushed even when it is both of those things.

Last week, we heard the story of Jesus being driven into the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights, right after his baptism. It’s the very next thing that happens to him. No baptism parties. No rest. No special meal. He immediately finds himself in the wilderness. I feel confident that Jesus, at some point, during those 40 days and 40 nights felt like time was moving painfully slow. And I started thinking about this: in that story of Jesus in the wilderness, we hear nothing about him trying to find his way out. Could he have prayed for guidance in finding a way out? Could he have started walking, maybe?

Jesus doesn’t do any of that. He REMAINS in the wilderness for the whole 40 days and 40 nights.

Pavolvitz says, “There is something sacred and rare about staying: about enduring the waiting and trying to stay grounded in love while we face the frustration of what we want to be through with right now. The words of Jesus offer the wise path forward for those of us who don’t wait very well:

Stay. Love. Repeat.

Amen.

Rev. Lisa Drysdale

Luke 4:1-12 (NIV)

“God hates nothing God has made. Remember you are dust, and to dust you will return.” These are the words many people heard on Ash Wednesday as we began our Lenten journeys. Church leaders put ashes on our foreheads, said these challenging words, and invited us to face a mind-numbing paradox: we are loved by God. And we will die. The first truth does not prevent the second. The second truth does not negate the first.

After two years of a global pandemic that has taken nearly six million lives worldwide, we’ve had plenty of opportunities to witness life in all its goodness crumbling to dust and ashes. Just over a week ago, as our brothers and sisters in Ukraine and Russia began to face the terror and losses of war, we were once again asked to consider what it means that we—all of us, regardless of where we live or what political views we hold—are small, mortal, vulnerable and defenseless.

On top of all this, we get some biblical whiplash this Sunday. Last Sunday we observed Jesus on the mountaintop—"a wonderful, Broadway-style production with costume changes, offstage voices, and guest stars brought in from previous productions of God’s glory,” as Jennifer Moland-Kovash describes it. Today we flash back to the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, encountering him immediately after his baptism, still dripping wet, and headed into the wilderness.

Thankfully, there’s comfort in familiarity, isn’t there? We know when we start reading it how it will end. We know that Jesus overcomes the temptations that the devil sets before him. It’s great to start Lent with a win, especially because I can almost guarantee that lots of people have already given up on whatever Lenten discipline they set for themselves.

What do you picture in your mind when you hear the word “wilderness?” Some people have a particular landscape they picture. Pastor Moland-Kovash says she grew up about 100 miles from the Canadian border in an area of northern Minnesota dubbed the Edge of the Wilderness. It is known far more for lakes and trees than for high population density. That’s what she pictures. Maybe you associate a similar landscape with the idea of wilderness, or perhaps you envision the Badlands of the Dakotas, the Sand Flats of Utah, or the deserts of Arabia or Africa. Whatever the landscape, the wilderness rarely features a lot of other people.

But even in this early moment for Jesus, he’s remembering—in some of the same ways he does with Moses and Elijah on the mountaintop. He quotes Deuteronomy to respond to the tempter’s offers; he stands on the faith of his ancestors and finds their words to be rock solid in the face of temptation. Jesus might not have anyone with him in the wilderness, but he is not alone.

One of the biggest temptations we face during times of struggle and wilderness wandering is the temptation to believe that we’re all alone. Part of it is the myth of self-sufficiency, a myth often upheld and perpetuated by our society. We, like the toddlers in our lives, want to proclaim with a foot stomp and a fist clenched, “I do it myself!”

The other side of this temptation is a heartbreaking sense that in this big world we are all alone. In Hebrew, one of the words for wilderness is more literally translated as “the wordless place.” While maybe at times in our lives we might crave for some peace and quiet, this wordless wilderness has a frightening landscape that whispers from the shadows, “You’re all alone.”

Today’s scripture tell us that Jesus is hungry. This isn’t that bored, “I’m hungry but there’s nothing that looks good” hunger. After 40 days, his hunger is a body clamoring for sustenance, a haze-inducing kind of hunger. It’s no wonder that the devil first pulls from the backpack of temptation the offer of a loaf of

bread. But I wonder about this: I wonder if Jesus is also hungering for connection. Hungering for God’s voice that called him the beloved at his baptism to ring out again across the landscape and from the mountaintop. To know that he isn’t alone.

Wilderness time can feel really long, whether it’s 40 days or 40 years or 40 minutes. Most of the time when we encounter the wilderness of the outdoors, we do so intentionally with enough supplies, a plan, and an emergency contact if we don’t come out after a certain amount of time. But when we are in the woods of anxiety or the deserts of despair, the temptation is to believe that we are alone. We’re so close to two years since we learned new, heightened meanings for words like quarantine, pandemic, and pivot. I know I’m not the only one desperately wanting to keep others safe, but there have been moments during these years when I think we have all felt alone and isolated with our thoughts.

Maybe the true comfort of this passage isn’t that Jesus can stand firm against temptation while we help ourselves to the chocolate we swore we were giving up, but rather that we’re not alone in the wilderness. Not only do we have a community of faith, we have the promises of God. We, like Jesus, do not head into the wild without feeling the waters of baptism still dripping down our foreheads. Without hearing that we’re God’s beloved.

We do not embark on this journey to live and trust and have faith without the assurance that the Spirit leads us: we do not go alone. We remember and acknowledge the wilderness of our journey—a wild place of questions and fears and doubts and temptations. This wilderness is part of our story but not the end. We have the voice that speaks in the wilderness, Christ shouting down the tempter and assuring us we are not alone. We have the promises that respond to our wilderness wanderings—the assurance of God’s grace, the gift of worship and living bread from Christ, the communion of saints and the forgiveness of sins, the celebration of all the good things God has given us.

We are not alone on this Lenten journey in the wilderness. Thanks be to God.

Rev. Lisa Drysdale

Luke 9:28-36 (NRSV)

Transfiguration Sunday is an odd church festival. The mountaintop experience of the Transfiguration is the last stop before we begin the journey of Lent, which leads to another mountaintop, Jesus’ face transfigured again—not in glory, like on this mountain—but in suffering and death.

Transfiguration Sunday is the highlight of the liturgical season we call Epiphany. For weeks now, we’ve caught hints and glimpses of the holy in Jesus’s early ministry. A dove descending from the heavens. Water becoming fine wine. A fishing net nearly bursting from a miraculous catch. But today, we see Jesus in his unveiled glory. Today, we see the view from the mountaintop.

Matthew, Mark and Luke all tell the story of the Transfiguration and just as Peter, James and John are coming down the mountain, these three gospels all tell the story of the healing of a “demon-possessed” boy down in the valley. It’s an important story, because it reminds us that what happens in the ordinary trials and tribulations of human life is just as God-infused as the experiences that occur on faith’s mountaintops.

Unfortunately, we don’t always believe this. We fall into the habit of measuring the depth and success of our faith by the number of spectacular epiphanies we can claim. Have we “felt the Spirit” in Sunday worship? Has Jesus “spoken” to us? Have we seen visions? Encountered God’s living presence in our dreams? Has God answered our prayers in the specific and concrete ways we desire?

Most of the time, my answer to these questions is “no.” Or at best, “I'm not sure.” From there, it’s a short distance to feeling like a spiritual failure. Mature Christians, (we assume), probably have lots of experiences like Peter’s on the mountaintop. They see visions and dream dreams. Jesus reveals himself to them in spectacular ways they can’t describe or deny.

It's not true, of course. And yet it lingers in us — this yearning for a particular kind of emotional experience to come along on a regular basis, and validate our faith. After all, if Peter could see Jesus in his unfiltered glory, why can't I? Why can’t we?

The danger of “God on the mountaintop” Christianity is that it prompts us to compartmentalize our lives. As if God is somehow more present during a rousing choral anthem, a stirring sermon, or a silent retreat in a seaside monastery, than God is when we’re doing the laundry, buying groceries, or sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

At its worst, mountaintop Christianity is addictive, leading us to spend our days pursuing a “high” we confuse with spiritual success. Then, when we don’t experience that high, we feel empty, unloved, angry, or bored. Meanwhile, we don't notice the ever-present God in whom we actually live and move and have our being. Desperate for the mountain, we miss the God of the valley, the conference room, the pharmacy, the school yard. “Worshiping the extraordinary,” one pastor said, “doesn’t make for a healthy faith.”

The problem in the Transfiguration story is that as soon as Peter experiences a spiritual high, he tries to hoard it. I suspect we’d do the same thing! What I hear in his plan to “make dwellings” is an understandable but misguided attempt to contain, domesticate, protect, and possess this fleeting thing. To harness the holy. To make the fleeting permanent. To keep Jesus shiny, beautiful, and safe up on a mountain. After all, everything is so good up there. So clear. So bright. So unmistakably spiritual. Why not stay forever?

Well, because God is just as present, active, engaged, and glorious down in the valley as God is in the visions of saints, clouds, and shadows Peter experiences in the high places. In fact, what Peter eventually learns is that the compassionate heart of God is most powerfully revealed amidst the broken, the sinful, the suffering, and the despairing. The kingdom of God shines most brightly against the backdrop of the parent who grieves, the child who cries, the “demons” who oppress, and the disciples who try but fail to manufacture the holy. God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness. God’s beauty is best contained in broken vessels. We might not like this aspect of faith, but it's an aspect that has a lot to teach us.

It’s interesting, I think, so I want you to notice that the amazing experience with Jesus on the mountain doesn’t give Jesus’s disciples the faith or the strength to heal the suffering boy, or comfort his heartbroken father. What they experience during their spiritual high doesn’t magically translate into vibrant, transformative faith down below. “Which is to say,” another preacher has said, “if we’re sitting around waiting for more mountaintop experiences to mature and deepen our faith before we love and serve God’s children in the valley, then we need to rethink our strategy immediately.” Finding God in the ordinary requires dwelling in the ordinary.

I suspect we all still yearn for mountaintop experiences, and that’s okay. They’ll come and go according to God’s timing. We can’t control them. What’s really hard to do—and what I hope we are committing to do today—is to follow Jesus back down the mountain. Committing ourselves to finding Jesus on the long road. In the deep sorrow. At the heart of the unanswered prayer.

With Transfiguration Sunday, we come to the end of another liturgical season. Having seen the brightness of Epiphany, we prepare now for the holy darkness of Lent. We can’t know ahead of time what mountains and valleys lie ahead. We can’t predict how God will speak, and in what way Jesus might appear. But we can trust in this: whether on the brightest mountain, or in the darkest valley, Jesus abides.

So, don’t be afraid to come down from the mountain. Keep looking and listening for the sacred, no matter where the journey takes you in this season of Lent. Because Jesus is present everywhere. Both the mountain and the valley belong to him. He is Lord of all. Amen.

Rev. Lisa Drysdale

Genesis 45:4-11, 15 (MSG)

The topic would be perfect for a Jerry Springer show: Siblings who sell each other into slavery. Picture the sons of Jacob on stage, a line-up of rough and questionable characters who openly admit to selling their teenage brother Joseph down the river. No doubt they'd bluster about why they did it: "I hated him." "Dad loved him best." "He had the fancy robe, and wouldn't get his hands dirty." "The kid drove me crazy with his dreams" "Thought he was the king of us!" And then they'd explain just how they pulled it off: "We thought about killing him." "Wanted to throw dream-boy into a pit." "Say that the wild animals ate him." "But Reuben said no - said we shouldn't kill him." "So we stripped him and we sold him." "Got 20 pieces of silver for him. Pretty good money." Finally, Jerry Spinger would bring out the surprise guest: Their long-lost brother Joseph, who ended up as chief minister in Egypt. "I am your brother," he'd reveal. "But don’t feel badly, don’t blame yourselves for selling me. God was behind it. God sent me here ahead of you to save lives.” Joseph would promise to feed the brothers in their time of famine, and all would be amazed at his generosity. But what about the scars? You know there would have to be scars. All those years of hatred and jealousy, abuse and violence ... there would HAVE to be scars. Liana Gedz knows all about scars. She went into the hospital for the birth of a child which was delivered C-section. Later, she noticed that the physician who had performed the surgery had carved his initials - "AZ" - into her belly. Bizarre Jerry Springer stuff. But how do you get rid of a scar like that? The answer for Liana was a tummy tuck. Both the AZ and the C-scar disappeared with one additional surgical procedure, while the surgeon was hauled into court and thrown into jail. Unfortunately, there are times when you can't hide your scar with a tummy tuck. If a large area of skin has been lost - as with burn victims - a surgeon will have to remove the entire scar and shift a piece of healthy skin to the injured site. Even better, scientists have come up with recipes for advanced bandages that jump-start the repair of injured skin, but then break down - leaving behind only healed tissue. These bandages are "biodegradable scaffolds" that improve the odds of scarless healing.

But injuries are everywhere, and not every scar can be treated. Think of the deep and numerous scars in the life of Joseph and his brothers. The constant taunting when he was a child. The plot to murder him. The heartless sale into slavery. How do you heal these wounds? A tummy tuck's not going to do it. The text tells us that Joseph and his brothers reconcile, and they kiss and weep and talk. But the scars that this family bear are not easily sanded away through dermabrasion - in fact, their story illustrates well the medical axiom "once scarred, always scarred." As one doctor has observed, "You can't airbrush

out a scar, but you can create great camouflage." Joseph's scar won't go away. He knows it won't, and he doesn't pretend it will. In fact, he points to his scar and reminds his brothers that they sold him into slavery. He makes no attempt to airbrush the fact that something terrible was done to him, but in spite of this history, Joseph is somehow able to heal and move toward reconciliation with his brothers. How does he do it? Joseph discovers that a divine scaffold has been built over his wound - a scaffold that will prove to be much more healing than any modern biodegradable scaffold. Looking back over his life, he sees that God has managed in a truly mysterious way to bring good out of evil, using even the dastardly act of his jealous brothers to put him in an important position in the land of Egypt. "God sent me before you to pave the way," Joseph explains to them all. "God sent me to make sure there was a remnant in the land, to save your lives in an amazing act of deliverance". The spiritual scaffold doesn't remove the scar, but changes its appearance. You might say that it "camouflages" it, and makes it look like something else. But it does more than simply provide cosmetic reassurance. What first looked like a cruel, heartless and hateful act on the part of Joseph's brothers now looks like a graceful, heartfelt and loving act on the part of a God who wanted Joseph to prosper and save his family from famine. God brings healing. "Even though you intended to do harm to me," Joseph tells his brothers, "God intended it for good" (Genesis 50:20). The scar is still there. But now it looks beautiful, instead of ugly. God's spiritual scaffold has changed its appearance forever. Does this mean that every tragedy we experience has a silver lining? That all evil is really good, and that all our suffering is somehow being orchestrated by God? Not at all. The world is full of senseless violence, horrifying hatred and a whole range of actions and attitudes that attempt to block the will of God. It would be absurd to assert that God is orchestrating all this evil.

But one thing that both the Old and the New Testaments teach us is that God has the power to transform human evil into divine good. He used the slavery of Joseph to save a family, and he transformed the death of Jesus into the salvation of the world.

Joseph didn't ask for his scars to be removed. Neither did Jesus. God can create a life in which our wounds are transformed into something good. He does not remove our wounds, but builds a spiritual scaffold over them - one that shows us that healing is always a possibility, even when it comes in surprising ways. Thanks be to God!

Rev. Lisa Drysdale,

Luke 6:17-26 (NRSV)

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Blessed are you who are poor, hungry, sad, and expendable. Woe to you who are rich, full, happy, and popular. This week’s Gospel in a nutshell.

In Luke’s version of the famous Beatitudes story, Jesus has just spent the night on a mountainside, praying before he chooses his twelve apostles. As morning dawns, he and the newly called twelve descend from the mountain to find a crowd waiting. People in need of help have come from everywhere, and Jesus — in his element, with power literally pouring off his garments — heals them all.

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Then, standing “on a level place” with the crowd, he tells his would-be followers what life in God’s upside-down kingdom looks like. Those who are destitute, unfed, grieving, and marginalized can “leap for joy,” because they have God’s ear and God’s blessing. But those who are wealthy, full-bellied, carefree, and well-liked should watch out, because their condition is precarious, not enviable. The material “blessings” they cherish most, the very possessions and attributes they consider signs of God’s favor, are in fact liabilities that might do them spiritual harm.

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What should we do with this scripture reading? What should we specifically — those of us who are comfortable and privileged — do with this?

What most of us probably want to do is edit Jesus’s words until we can tolerate them. As in, he didn’t really mean we have to be poor, hungry and weeping in order to be blessed by God, right? Obviously, Jesus was exaggerating, wasn’t he? Speaking figuratively? There must be some way we can wiggle out of the “woes” column and sneak into the “blessed” column, right? Right?

Unlike Matthew, who softens the Beatitudes with phrases like “poor in spirit,” instead of “poor,” and “those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” instead of plain old “hungry,” Luke keeps Jesus’s “Sermon on the Plain” raw, to the point, and close to the bone. There’s no way around it; as far as Luke’s Jesus is concerned, God’s preference for the poor is crystal clear. God’s blessing rests on those who have absolutely nothing to fall back on in this world. No credit line, no nest egg, no fan base, no immunity. If we want to know where God’s heart is, we must look to the world’s most reviled, wretched, shamed, and desperate people. They are the fortunate ones.

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So, again. What should we do with this Gospel? Wallow in guilt? Romanticize poverty? Avoid happiness? I doubt it. Debie Thomas, in her essay on this text, reminded me in my thinking about this that right before Jesus shares this hard teaching, he alleviated suffering in every way possible. That suggests, she says, that Jesus doesn’t in any way validate misery for its own sake. Pain in and of itself is neither holy nor redemptive in the Christian story, and in fact, Jesus’s ministry is all about healing, abundance, liberation, and joy.

And pay attention to this: nowhere in his litany of blessings and woes does Jesus tell his listeners how to behave. As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, the sermon “is not advice at all. It is not even judgment. It is simply the truth about the way things work.”

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In his sermon, Jesus isn’t sorting out the good folks from the bad folks; he simply says: this is the human pattern. This is where all of us live. We move from blessing to woe over and over again in the course of our lives. We invite blessing every time we find ourselves empty and yearning for God, and we invite woe every time we retreat into smug and thoughtless self-satisfaction. “When I am ‘full’ of anything but God, God ‘empties’ me,” Thomas says. “Not as punishment, but as grace. Not as condemnation, but as loving reorientation. When I am bereft, vulnerable, and empty in the world’s eyes, God blesses me with the fullness of divine mercy and kindness.

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“In other words, our God is a God of both comfort and challenge, and in the divine economy, we are, all of us, on one level. Blessed and woeful. Saint and sinner. We occupy ‘the plain’ of this beautiful and broken world together.”

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Maybe, then, our calling in this gospel reading is to accept the tensions of living in this place of both-and. Maybe our task is to admit that most of the time, we are not desperate for God. We are not keenly aware of God’s active, daily intervention in our lives. We are not on our knees with need, ache, sorrow, longing, gratitude, or love. After all, why would we be? We have plenty to eat. We live in comfortable homes. Our families are safe. We’re not in dire need of anything. Wow. This is hard stuff to hear and think about.

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Maybe what Jesus is saying in this Gospel is that we all have something to learn about discipleship that our life circumstances will not teach us. Something to gain from the humility that says, "Those people I think I'm superior to? They have everything to teach me. Maybe it's time to shut up and pay attention."

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Is it comfortable to sit in the “woes” column? No. Might a willingness to do so save our lives? Debie Thomas says yes. I think this is what each of us has to decide.

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In a beautiful reflection on Jesus’s upside-down kingdom, Frederick Buechner writes this: “The world says, ‘Mind your own business,’ and Jesus says, ‘There is no such thing as your own business.’ The world says, ‘Follow the wisest course and be a success,’ and Jesus says, ‘Follow me and be crucified.’ The world says, ‘Drive carefully — the life you save may be your own’ — and Jesus says, ‘Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.’ The world says, ‘Law and order,’ and Jesus says, ‘Love.’ The world says, ‘Get’ and Jesus says, ‘Give.’ In terms of the world's sanity, Jesus is crazy as a coot, and anybody who thinks he can follow him without being a little crazy too is laboring less under a cross than under a delusion."

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May the God who gives and takes away, offers comfort and challenge, grant us the grace to sit with woe, and learn the meaning of blessing. Amen.

Luke 5:1-11 (The Message)

“Master, we’ve been fishing hard all night and haven’t caught even a minnow. But if you say so, I’ll let out the nets.” As Luke describes the scene in this week’s Gospel story, it’s early morning, and Simon Peter is cleaning his fishing nets after a miserable night out on the lake. He and his partners have worn themselves out, casting nets from dusk until dawn into the dark water. As the sun rises, they have nothing to show for their efforts but sore muscles and weary hearts; their nets are empty.

Just then, Jesus shows up, steps into Simon’s boat, and tells his would-be disciple to “put out into the deep water.” In other words, to do the same old same old one more time, with no guarantee that he’ll see better results. Simon protests: “Master, we’ve been fishing hard all night...” But then he obeys: “But if you say so, I’ll let out the nets.” As soon as Simon’s net hits the water, his emptiness gives way to epiphany.

Let me say up front that I don’t fish. Never have, and I don’t picture it anywhere in my future. I know nothing about fish. Even so, I can see there is a lot for us to think about, as we figure out how this gospel story intersects with our lives. Let’s look at a couple of things:

First, it’s amazing that the story describes failure so honestly. As I so clearly stated, I’m no fisherperson, but I know what it’s like to work really hard at something that matters, and have nothing to show for my efforts when I'm done. I imagine we all do. I imagine we all know what’s it’s like to pour ourselves into a job, a relationship, a ministry, a dream — and come away exhausted, frustrated, thwarted, and just done. But if Simon's experience is representative, maybe Jesus has a way of showing up at precisely these moments of loss and defeat. Maybe he has good reasons for asking us to return to old places of pain and failure. In any case, when he encounters us, he doesn’t stand at the shore and wave us forward saying, “Try fishing over there!” He steps into the boat and ventures into the deep water with us. Is his timing maddening sometimes? Yes. But maybe his timing is also perfect. Maybe we’re most open to epiphanies when we’ve exhausted our own resources, and know that we’ve got nothing much to lose in saying “yes” to one more attempt -- this time with Jesus at our side.

Second, the story honors the “same old same olds” of our individual lives. Jesus’s call in this story is specific and particular, rooted in the language, culture, and vocation his hearers know best. Simon and his partners understand the nuances of the “fishing for men and women” metaphor in ways I never will. They know from years of experience what depths of patience, resilience, intuition, and artistry professional fishing requires. Simon knows the tools of the trade, the limitations of his body, and the life-and-death importance of timing, humility, and discretion. Most of all, he knows the water. He knows how to respect it, how to listen to it, and how to bring forth its best. When Jesus shows up and commissions the seasoned fisherman, Simon understands the call not as a command to leave his experience and intelligence behind, but to bring the best of his knowledge and expertise forward — to become even more fully and freely himself.

Think about that for you, for us. Maybe a point of this story is to remind us that we don’t follow Jesus in the abstract. We don’t heed his call “in general,” as if Christianity comes down to nothing more than attending church or being a nice person. If we’re going to follow him at all, we’ll have to do it in the particulars of the lives, communities, cultures, families, and vocations we find ourselves in. We’ll have to trust that God prizes our intellects, our backgrounds, our educations, and our skills, and that he will bless and multiply the daily stuff of our lives for his purposes.

Debie Thomas says in her essay on this reading, “This is a promise to cultivate us, not to sever us from what we love. It's a promise rooted in gentleness and respect — not violence and coercion. It's a

promise that when we dare to “go deep,” to do what we know and love with Jesus at our side, God will enliven our efforts in ways we couldn't have imagined on our own.”

Third, think about the abundance at the heart of this story. In Jesus’s day, the fishing industry in Palestine was fully under the control of the Roman Empire. Caesar owned every body of water, and all fishing was state-regulated for the benefit of the urban elite. Fishermen couldn’t obtain licenses to fish without joining a syndicate, most of what they caught was exported — leaving local communities impoverished and hungry — and the Romans collected exorbitant taxes, levies, and tolls each time fish were sold. To catch even one fish outside of this deeply unfair system was considered illegal.

How amazing then, is an image of boats so laden with fish that even a weathered fisherman like Simon Peter finds the catch overwhelming. This is extravagant, excessive, bountiful generosity. Food for all, food security for all, justice for all, nurture for all. In this extravagant food for everyone, Jesus shows Simon what God’s kingdom will look like when it’s fully established. God’s kingdom will suffer no empty nets, no empty tables, and no economic exploitation of any kind. God’s kingdom will mean good news for all. Meaning that if whatever we profess as Christians is not good news for all — it’s not God.

Lastly, think about how this story tells the truth about our—at least, my--fraught journey with God and with faith: “Master, we’ve been fishing hard all night and haven’t caught even a minnow. But if you say so, I’ll let out the nets.” Sometimes it feels like we’re stuck in the gap between those two sentences. Maybe we all live in the gap between weariness and hope, defeat and faith, resignation and obedience. Though we’re often reluctant to admit it (for fear of sounding ungrateful or irreverent) life can be a grind. A same old same old of monotony and failure. Even the most earnest and hardworking of us can land up on shore some mornings with empty, stinking fishing nets tangled in our fingers, wondering what the heck went wrong.

“The hardest thing for any of us to do at these moments is to make the leap of trust that Simon makes. “If you say so, I will.” If you say so, I will try again. If you say so, I will be faithful to my vocation. If you say so, I will go deep rather than remain in the shallows. If you say so, I will trust that your presence in the boat is more precious than any guarantee of success. If you say so, I will cast my empty net into the water, and look with hope for your kingdom to come.” (Debie Thomas)

May it be so.

Rev. Lisa Drysdale

Luke 4:21-30  (NRSV)

Katie Hines-Shah—a Lutheran pastor in Hinsdale, IL—tells about asking her six-year-old daughter what she learned in Sunday school that day. The six-year-old put down her fork, turned to her mother the pastor, and in a very serious tone said, “We learned that Jesus was not a Lutheran!”

So, Katie Hines-Shah did what any modern parent does with this kind of stark theological realization: she posted it on Facebook. And then came the comments: “Of course not, Jesus was a Presbyterian,” typed a Presbyterian friend. “Next they will be telling her he wasn’t even a Christian,” quipped another.

We know that Jesus was a Middle Eastern Jew; the joke is that somehow, we imagine that Jesus was like us, and because he was like us, he liked us. That’s how Jesus can become, say, a light-skinned, blue-eyed Christian American, Hines-Shah contends, who votes the way we do, or at least roots for our favorite football team. And we aren’t alone. This idea that Jesus is our guy goes all the way back to the first Christians, to the first disciples, to the people who knew Jesus before anyone did—the people of Nazareth.

Today’s gospel reading is a continuation of last week’s—two diametrically opposed scenes in one narrative. The first one is nothing but good news: Jesus reads the Isaiah scroll at the Nazareth synagogue. He preaches his first sermon, just one short verse: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

This is good news, at least as far as the people of Nazareth are concerned. They know this Jesus—he’s the son of Joseph, the guy they grew up with. And now they assume salvation is coming their way. The Jews of Nazareth aren’t xenophobes. They don’t wish ill on their neighbors. They simply believe what we all believe: these promises, this good news, these mira­cles are primarily and maybe even exclusively for us.

And then in today’s gospel reading, Jesus upends everything.

It’s helpful to remember that Jesus doesn’t just go around doing nice things. It’s useful to know that the point of scripture isn’t always to make us feel good. Communities of faith and their leaders aren’t always going to meet our expectations, partially because they are human but also because sometimes we have to hear things that we would rather not. Which may be why Jesus says in Nazareth that day, “No prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.” And then he goes on to prove it.

“Remember Elijah?” Jesus says. Of course, they do. Elijah was the greatest of Hebrew prophets. But whom did Elijah feed in a time of great famine? Not anyone from Nazareth or Jerusalem or even Capernaum, but instead a widow in Zarephath—a small town in Lebanon.

And Jesus doesn’t stop. “Remember Elisha?” he continues. Of course, they do. Elisha’s everyone’s favorite wonder-worker. But did Elisha heal anyone in the Northern Kingdom? No. Jesus reminds the congregation that the only leper Elisha heals is Naaman, the Syrian. The people of Nazareth probably haven’t forgotten: Naaman was also an enemy army commander. It hurts. No wonder the people of Nazareth want to throw him off a cliff.

There isn’t really a cliff in Nazareth. When you go to the Holy Land and ask to see the place where this happened, they will take you to a gentle hill. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t want to get thrown off the gentle hill, but still—doesn’t it kind of seem like Jesus deserves it? If he’s with the other guy, how can he be with us?

Jesus escapes—if not certain death, then at least certain bruising—but how? Luke includes a tantalizing detail: Jesus goes through “the middle.” He refuses to be caught in the binary trap. He is not pro-Jew and anti-Samaritan. He’s not pro-Capernaum and anti-Nazareth. He won’t be pinned down as supporter of any political party or football team. Jesus will not be a Presbyterian or, as much as it pains Katie Hines-Shah to say it, a Lutheran. He won’t be contained.

She goes on to reflect: “Jesus came to be with us, whoever we are. This is so important because at some time or another, we will find ourselves on the wrong side of a dividing line. Our gender, our age, our race or color, who we love, how much money we make, our physical abilities or challenges, our nationality, where we went to school, how we pray—these will make us unworthy in the eyes of some. Someone once said whenever the world draws a line, Jesus steps across to the other side. His love is just that big.”

Another lectionary reading for this Sunday maps out a great promise of faith. It’s the well-known love chapter from the first letter to the people of Corinth. In this 13th chapter, Paul writes that our love should be too big for envy or boasting or rudeness to gain a foothold. Our love should be big enough to bear with one another, to see the good in our neighbor, to rejoice in truth over convenient lies. In an era when so many would pit us against one another, when bearing with one another is not the norm, Jesus calls us to remember: we are beloved siblings, and a beloved sibling cannot be our enemy. Our enemy is sin, death, and the devil—and Jesus has defeated them all.

The world we live in is full of division. Even a six-year-old can see it. And yet, we live with a diametrically opposed sure and certain hope. As the people of Nazareth once rejoiced to hear, we still believe: the scriptures are being fulfilled. The work Jesus began in Jerusalem broke through boundaries to reach people in every space and time. Jesus walks in the midst of all people: widows, lepers, folks who root for the opposing team, and even the unlikeliest: Christians like us.  Thanks be to God!

Rev. Lisa Drysdale,

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10 (NRSV)

If someone told you to feast, celebrate, and rejoice right now, because today is a day “holy to the Lord,” how would you respond? If someone insisted that this year — 2022 — is “the year of the Lord’s favor,” what would you say?

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I think a lot of us would say, “You’ve got to be kidding. This year? This one? Today? Right now? How can that possibly be?” We’d probably be skeptical.

I don’t have to tell you why we’d be skeptical: Omicron is overwhelming the planet. Hospitals are reaching capacity, physicians and nurses are exhausted, national and local economies are struggling, and Covid’s death toll continues to rise. And this is before we mention any of the other challenges facing us. Wars and threats of wars. Violence of all stripes. The catastrophic effects of climate change. The long shadow of racial injustice. Alarming breakdowns in civility and basic kindness. Rising epidemics of anxiety, depression, addiction, and despair.

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Who on earth would reasonably call our current moment holy, or favored of God?

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We need to think about this, because our lectionary this week does exactly this. Today we hear a story about people gathering to read, hear, and inwardly digest the word of God, we hear a call to attend to now. The story ends with an invitation to recognize the sacredness of the present moment. The story insists that when we seek the divine, today shimmers with the presence, the blessing, and the favor of God.

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This is true regardless of circumstances. Regardless of the trials we face, the sorrows we carry, and the pain we bear. Not because God’s joyous “today” is dismissive of our hardships, but because God’s presence infuses all things. God’s joy — the joy which is our strength — has within it the capacity to hold and honor our tears.

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This story from the book of Nehemiah describes a tender and hard-won moment in Israel’s history. Nehemiah is a minor figure in the court of Artaxerxes, the king of Persia. When Nehemiah hears that Jerusalem is a broken, fire-razed wreck, he begs the king to let him return to his homeland and rebuild the city of his ancestors. The obstacles to rebuilding are significant, but Nehemiah persists, and finally succeeds in restoring Jerusalem’s wall and gates. He then invites his people back from exile and asks them to gather in the square before the Water Gate for an assembly.

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Our lectionary picks up there, at the moment when the prophet Ezra “opens the book in the sight of all people,” and reads from the law of Moses. He reads until the assembly of men, women, and children gathered in the square open their ears, stand up, raise their hands, worship “with their faces to the ground,” say, “Amen, Amen,” and weep. The story ends with Nehemiah and Ezra telling the people to dry their tears, return to their homes to “eat the fat and drink sweet wine,” and share the feast with those who are poor. Following an intense divine encounter, the people embrace the day and time they live in as “holy to the Lord.”

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What a great story for us today! I think it offers us a beautiful reminder of what can happen when we seek the presence of God together, and allow that presence to touch every part of our lives. Remember, the Israelites who gather at the Water Gate to hear the reading of the Torah are not people living in a “happily ever after,” all their trials and travails behind them. They are people newly returned from exile to a homeland that’s still in ruins. Their traumas are fresh, and their future is unclear. Their most recent memories are memories of loss, dislocation, oppression, and chaos.

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And yet, something powerful happens among them when Ezra opens the book and reminds them of who they are in the long arc of God’s story. What happens is not magic. And it’s not manipulation. What

happens is transformation. As the people work to listen to God’s word with their whole hearts, to receive what’s read in a spirit of openness and vulnerability, and to express their comprehension as honestly as they can, everything changes.

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There’s no doubt, the honesty they express includes sorrow, lament, and repentance. Ezra reads for hours—from early morning until midday—and in that time, the people enter into a period of deep reflection and remembrance. And they weep. We aren’t told why they weep, but I imagine that when the Israelites hear the sacred stories of their tradition—the stories of the Exodus, the stories of God’s provision in the desert, the stories of their ancestors’ failures and rebellions—they feel everything from nostalgia to elation to horror to happiness. They weep in gratitude over God’s goodness. They weep in bewilderment over God’s silence. They weep in regret over their own sins. They weep in mourning for all they’ve surrendered or lost. And they weep in relief that the exile is over, and Jerusalem—a mess though it is—is once again their home.

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God’s word—living and active among them—holds all of this. It allows all of this and blesses all of this. When the time is right, God transforms the entire encounter into an experience of joy.

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Joy feels hard to come by these today, doesn’t it? For nearly two years now, we’ve been living as if the days we live in right now don’t count as “real life.” “Real life will resume after the pandemic,” we say. Real life will resume when church services go back to being in-person only. When we can celebrate communion without trying to get that plastic cover off the elements. When we put away our masks for good. When we get some sort of handle on climate change, police brutality, teen depression, and violence everywhere.

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Are we, like Ezra’s listeners, full of pent-up grief, longing, regret, and lament that has nowhere to go? Do we assume we can’t lean into God’s joy until all our sorrows are spent? Or that worship can only be an articulation of happiness—not grief or anger or confusion or doubt? If that’s what we assume, can we possibly remind ourselves that God’s embrace is wide enough to hold all of human experience? Can we trust that God’s abundance is possible now, even in the midst of uncertainty and pain? Can we say “Amen” to God’s word in the complicated circumstances we live in right now? Today?

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Can we accept the possibility of “holy discomfort,” as Rev. Debie Thomas describes it in her Journey with Jesus blog? Perhaps the “now” of God, she says, means we have to stand up, shake the dust off, and move. It’s one thing to scan the horizon of someday for the “year of the Lord’s favor.” It’s quite another to live boldly into that favor now. Today.

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“This day is holy to our Lord.” May it be so for us.

Rev. Lisa Drysdale

John 2:1-11 (NRSV)

This week’s scripture reading celebrates Jesus turning water into wine during the Wedding at Cana — one of three traditional focal points for Epiphany through which Jesus’ identity “shows forth”; the other two being the visit of the Magi and Jesus’ baptism, the Gospel readings for Epiphany and last Sunday, if you’ve been following along. Next week, we’ll look at Luke’s story of how Jesus begins his public ministry — and so this week and next make for an intriguing comparison and contrast between two accounts of how Jesus “goes public.”

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John organizes his Gospel around seven astounding “signs” that reveal Jesus’ identity and mission. The turning of water into wine is the first of these signs. John’s name for these events — “signs” — is a clue to their purpose: they’re supposed to catch our attention (even catch our breath!), drawing us toward what for John is the whole point: life with and in God. But amazement doesn’t always work that way. It’s only too easy to get caught up in the miraculous and miss the larger purpose, pulling the car over, as one commentary suggested, to ooh and ahh at a road sign pointing us toward our destination, instead of moving on to the destination itself! And as it turns out, this tension is a running theme throughout John’s Gospel. Jesus repeatedly scolds the crowds (and his disciples) for focusing too much on signs, urging them to move on to higher, more important matters.

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But let’s look at this sign, in particular. Still a largely unknown rabbi, Jesus is invited to a wedding along with his disciples and his mother. Mary appears exactly twice in John’s Gospel: in this scene at the outset of Jesus’ public ministry, and at the foot of the cross at the end of it. On both occasions, Jesus addresses her as “woman” — an ancient form of address roughly equivalent to “madam,” a relatively formal gesture of respect.

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The fact that Mary is concerned about the wine running low may mean the bride or groom is a close relative; in any case, in the ancient world, this kind of shortage was far more than mere inconvenience. Wedding celebrations would often last a week, and running out of wine would be a major embarrassment for the host family. The shortage may also indicate that both the family and the attendees lacked resources, since wedding guests often brought wine as a contribution to the party. In other words, as John tells it, this is a relatively modest, humble gathering of ordinary folk.

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Rev. Debie Thomas is a great writer of essays based on the lectionary readings, and this is what she said about the heart of this story in John: “I doubt it’s the line I’m supposed to fixate on in this week’s Gospel reading, but I can’t help it. I can’t help wondering exactly how Mary says it. Quietly, urgently, after pulling her distracted son away from his friends, away from the music and the dancing, away from the servants working hard to hide their growing panic as countless wedding guests swirl obliviously around them. I imagine Mary takes Jesus into an inner room, fixes his attention with a stern stare, and whispers the shameful news into his ear: “They have no wine.”

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Debie Thomas says what strikes her—in part—about this story, is the struggle to reconcile a Bible story about abundance with her own contemporary reality—both personal and global—of scorching scarcity. Mary’s line, ‘They have no wine,’ is a line Thomas says she can get behind. “They have no money.” “There is no cure.” “He has no friends.” “I have no strength.” Mary’s line is a line Thomas says she repeats daily, for herself and for others. It’s the line she clings to when she feels helpless, when she has nothing concrete to offer, when Christianity seems futile, when God feels like he’s a million miles away.

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Unless one of you is keeping some amazing super power to yourself, none of us knows how to turn gallons—as much as 180 gallons!—of water into gallons of wine. But we do know how to say what Jesus’ mother says. Sometimes, it’s the only thing we know how to say. “There is need here.” “Everything is not okay.” “We’re in trouble.” “They have no wine.”

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In an amazing twist in the story, Jesus initially dismisses his mother’s suggestion (How is this our problem?) — but Mary dismisses his dismissal. The moment goes by in an instant, but it’s nonetheless striking (and funny!): Mary sees something Jesus doesn’t, and rather than argue with him, she simply presumes victory and turns to the servants: “Do whatever he tells you.” What is it that Mary sees? Is she concerned about the host family’s reputation? Or does she see in this dilemma a golden opportunity for Jesus to start his ministry? Jesus says, in effect, The time isn’t right. His mother knows better: The time is perfect — seize the day!

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Of course, Jesus is no fool; he knows that his countdown to crucifixion will begin as soon as he makes his true identity known. Maybe he’s reluctant to start that ominous clock ticking. Maybe he thinks wine-making shouldn’t be his first miracle. Maybe he’s having fun with his friends, and doesn’t want to be interrupted. Maybe there’s a mysterious timeline he prefers to follow — a timeline known only to him and to God. Whatever the case, Mary doesn’t cave in the face of his reluctance; she continues to press the urgency of the need into Jesus’s presence. As if to say, “I don’t care about your ‘hour’ — there’s a desperate problem, right here, right now. Change your plans. Hasten the hour. Empathy first. Help!”

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So what about us? How can we fit into this story?

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Maybe we can be like Mary. Maybe we can notice, name, persist, and trust. No matter how profound the scarcity, no matter how impossible the situation, we can elbow our way in, pull Jesus aside, ask earnestly for help, and ready ourselves for action. We can tell God hard truths, even when we’re supposed to be celebrating. We can keep human need squarely before our eyes, even and especially when denial, apathy, or distraction are easier options. And finally, we can invite others to obey the miraculous wine-maker we have come to know and trust.

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"They have no wine." “Do whatever he tells you.” We live in the tension between these two lines. Let's live there well, confident of the one whose help we seek. Because he is good. He is generous. He is Love. Amen.

Rev. Lisa Drysdale

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22 (NRSV)

I know a lot of people who are profoundly grateful for their chiropractors. They talk glowingly about what it feels like to have their spine correctly realigned after having it be out of alignment. They talk about the relief they feel—often throughout their entire body—when all things are in the proper position in relation to each other. The correct alignment of our bodies is important to our overall health and well-being.

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I thought about these people I know who are grateful for their chiropractors when I started reading some commentaries on today’s scripture from the gospel of Luke, where we hear of Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan River. You may think that chiropractors and baptism cannot be connected in any way, but let’s think about this for a minute. My own thinking was piqued when I read something Rev. Debie Thomas wrote on the blog, Journey with Jesus.

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She wrote about how hard it can be to go through the season of Christmas and Epiphany and then, all of a sudden, find ourselves—as we are, today—“standing in a long line of people by the banks of the Jordan River. Ahead of us, waist-deep in the water, John the Baptist bellows a no-nonsense call to repentance. Behind us, at the very end of the long line, stands that once-upon-a-time baby — all grown up. Thirty years have gone by, and the promised child is about to come into his promise.” Thirty years have gone by. That, all by itself, is kind of hard to get our heads wrapped around after just celebrating Jesus’ birth!

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Rev. Thomas wrote, “On the other hand, even though the ‘fast forward’ between seasons feels abrupt, I’m grateful that the first glimpse we get of Jesus’s adult life is during his baptism. I’m especially grateful this year, because the baptism story recorded in the Gospels speaks to a question we all need to be asking in these difficult and divisive times: how can we live well together? How can we belong well together? What must we do to embrace a truly common life as human beings coexisting on this struggling planet?” That’s what piqued my interest and stirred my soul; the question about how can we live well together today.

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“Whatever else Jesus’s baptism story is,” she wrote, “it is first and foremost a story of the sacred ordinary. That is, it’s a story of profound humility. The holy child conceived of the Holy Spirit, celebrated by angels, worshiped by shepherds, and feared by Herod, stands in the same muddy water we stand in. The Messiah’s first public act is a declaration of solidarity. God is one of us.”

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In case we’re tempted to skip over this aspect of the story too quickly, it’s worth noting that the Baptism of the Lord has raised awkward questions ever since it happened thousands of years ago. According to Christian historian John Dominic Crossan, Jesus’s baptism was an "acute embarrassment" for the early Church, because it didn’t fit the triumphalist Messianic image the Church hoped to portray. Why would the Son of God place himself under the guiding influence of someone like John the Baptist? Why would a supposedly sinless Messiah need to be baptized? Did Jesus really want to be lumped in with the people who streamed into the wilderness to listen to John? Weren’t those the same people John the Baptist called “a brood of vipers” just a few verses before our scripture reading today? Weren’t those people desperate, broken, tainted, and sinful? Why would God choose such an odd moment in the Messiah’s life — such a mundane and perhaps even sordid moment — to part the clouds and call Jesus “the Beloved?

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“Unbelievable as it seems,” Rev. Thomas wrote, “Jesus’s first public act is an act of alignment. Of radical and humble joining. His first step is a step towards us.”

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In other words, in this one moment, in this one act, Jesus steps into the common and, frankly, inescapable experience of living in a broken, sin-soaked world, and hungering for righteousness, redemption, and restoration within that world. “The question at stake is not about Jesus’s personal “sinfulness.” The question is about what it means to declare genuine and costly solidarity with our neighbors in a world that is structurally, wholly, and jointly “living in sin.” We can’t belong well to each other if we’re busy erecting walls between “our” piety and “their” sinfulness. We are in this together. We are in all of this together.”

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Our ancestors in the faith couldn’t understand Jesus’s willingness to risk defilement by aligning himself with our messiness, our chaos, and our weakness. They — like us — wanted to keep God separate, safe, and squeaky clean.

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But Rev. Thomas reminded me that to embrace Christ’s baptism story is to embrace the core truth that we are all united, interdependent, connected, one. Our personal “goodness” notwithstanding, our baptisms bind us to all of humanity — not in theory, but in the flesh — such that you and I are family, responsible for each other in ways we fail so often to honor.

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“Baptism is all about stepping in, all about finding the holy in the course of my ordinary, mundane life within the family of God. The challenge is always before me and before all of us, so look again. Look harder. See freshly. Stand in the place that looks utterly ordinary, and regardless of how scared or jaded you feel, cling to the possibility of a surprise that is God. Stand in the dirty water with the people you'd rather not stand next to, skin to skin, fates knitted together — because holiness is in the spaces you'll create together. There is one baptism, one common hope for all of us. You can't dip your toes in. You must take a deep breath and plunge. Yes, baptism promises new life, but it always drowns before it resurrects.”

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Where can we find hope, then? “Simply in this: Jesus is the one who stands in line with us at the water's edge, willing to immerse himself in shame, scandal, repentance, and pain — all so that we might hear the only Voice that will tell us who we are and whose we are in this sacred season. Listen. We are God's chosen. God's children. God's own. Even in the deepest, darkest water, we are the Beloved.” Amen.

Rev. Lisa Drysdale

Matthew 2.1-12 (The Message)

Lent is coming! This, I confess, is what runs through the minds of church leaders as we come to a new year. Yep…Ash Wednesday is a mere 8 weeks away from today, on March 2nd. With Lent, Holy Week and Easter beginning to push and shove for space in my brain, it shouldn’t be surprising that I sometimes have a hard time thinking about this story from the gospel of Matthew, the familiar and well-loved story of the Magi traveling from the East to find the baby Jesus.

Years ago, now—and yet, I remember it like it was yesterday—I had an experience of looking for the baby Jesus. It’s not a story as familiar as the one from the gospel of Matthew, but maybe you’ve had something like this happen to you.

I brought my beloved dog, Maggie Mae, to the church I was serving. It was the Wednesday after Christmas. Maggie was a beautiful rescue dog a friend found for me, a black and white English Springer Spaniel with soulful eyes and really big, long ears. Every time she entered the church, she was a ball of energy, running from one end of the building to the other. On that Wednesday, she tore off toward the Christian Education wing, and nearly tumbled head-over-heels as she came upon the children’s Christmas tree, and the nativity scene set so beautifully beneath it. I watched Maggie for a second, and then opened up my office and settled in to get some things done.

A little later, as I walked toward the Christian Education wing to see where Maggie had gone, I glanced at the nativity scene set so beautifully beneath the Christmas tree…and saw the chaos.

There on the floor, about eight inches away from the stable, lay Joseph, face down on the carpet. A few inches from him, lay some sheep, plowed down, I quickly assumed, by the galloping Maggie who liked to get in close to sniff things, forgetting just how long her ears were. A little further away, almost hidden under the tree, was a young shepherd boy carrying a sheep on his shoulders, flat on his back, gasping for air, it seemed. The only survivors in the nativity scene set so beautifully beneath the Christmas tree were Mary, and way off to the East, the wise men. And a cow.

As I surveyed the scene a moment longer, something caught my attention. Something was missing. What was missing? Oh yeah, the baby Jesus! Where’s the baby Jesus? No manger. No Jesus. Just the young mother Mary, kneeling quietly next to empty hay as Joseph struggled to get up off the floor outside the stable.

Oh no, I thought to myself…Maggie ate the baby Jesus! Now, Maggie wasn’t stupid; she didn’t typically eat things that really weren’t edible. Food left on the counter, or on the table, or in a bag on the floor? Yeah, she would eat that. But the baby Jesus? Would Maggie really eat the baby Jesus? If she did, well, I knew what that meant. If she didn’t, where was the baby?

Our Scripture today tells the story of the journey the magi took to find the baby Jesus. I suspect that many times along the way, they asked the same question. Where’s the baby Jesus? In a couple of days, on January 6th, the Church celebrates Epiphany—the day we stop to consider the story of the magi—so I think it’s good for us to remember that these people went on an amazing journey to find Jesus. And the scripture tells us they were full of joy when they found him because, looking at Jesus, they knew they had arrived at their long-awaited destination. Presumably, most of their fellow magi stayed home, took

no journeys toward the east, refused to go off on some wild camel ride to see a baby on the basis of nothing more than a star.

These magi—we don’t know if there were three or 13 of them, Matthew only says they offered the baby three gifts—these magi were the sort of people who were looking for something, willing to risk a journey, brave enough to venture forth on the search. And when they got to the right place, they felt joy.

I know people who would rather get a root canal than take a trip. They love home and its comforts. They love being in control of their surroundings, and the one thing that makes a journey difficult is that it places us at the mercy of the trip. Every trip involves risk. The magi were willing to take the risk.

Matthew introduces us to another character in this Epiphany story—King Herod. We thought about him last week, as well. Having heard about “the one born king of the Jews,” he got very nervous. The star the magi followed struck him with fear. And he wasn’t the only one who was terrified. Matthew says, “Herod was terrified, and all Jerusalem with him.” They were terrified, I imagine because they knew that when Herod was terrified, all hell would break loose. And they were right.

So there is fear in this story, and there is great joy.

At any church on any Sunday morning, in the light of this Epiphany story, you have mainly two kinds of Christians. First, you have those who have arrived. They may have been on a journey, but now, having found what they were looking for, they experience joy at having reached their destination. A second group consists of those who are at the beginning of—or, in the middle of—a journey toward Christ. Often, the most difficult part of a journey can be the middle part. There is anxiety about when and how you will reach the destination. “Are we ever going to get there?” someone asks. Will the final destination be worth all of the perils and difficulties along the way? So, we feel fear.

Joy and fear. These are two conflicting, sometimes complementary emotions to be found in any church on any Sunday morning. They are the emotions of travelers. And according to scripture, all of us who walk with Jesus are travelers. And soon—very soon—we will begin another journey. This time it will be a journey toward a cross.

But for now, we give thanks for the magi who were willing to risk taking a long journey to follow a star, and to believe that God would lead them to the place where the baby lay.

As for the baby Jesus in the nativity scene set so beautifully beneath the tree? I didn’t find him until after the first of the year. May that be what we find this new year, as well. Amen!

Rev. Lisa Drysdale

Matthew 2:13-23 (The Message)

You know about the shepherds and the angels and the wise men from the East.

You’re familiar with Joseph and Mary and the “little Lord Jesus, asleep on the hay.”

These characters are known to us all, and our visions of them can leave us with a warm and fuzzy feeling.

But scratch the surface of any Christmas card image, and you’re going to uncover greed and passion, danger and death.

How does Christmas really work?

One place to begin to answer this question is the Internet, which conveniently enough includes a site called “How Christmas Works.” It’s a one-stop shop for all your questions about the holiday.

Questions like, “Why do people give each other presents on Christmas Day?” Or, “Is December 25 really the day Jesus was born?”

Then there’s the mistletoe mystery. What does it have to do with the Christmas story? Absolutely nothing.

And how about the 12 days of Christmas? What’s that about? Aren’t there like about 30 days of Christmas, from Thanksgiving until Christmas Day?

Of course, there are answers to these questions for those who are truly interested. The point is, a cultural and religious tradition like Christmas takes years, even centuries, of formation until it becomes the event it is today, enshrined in the global consciousness in one way or another. Christmas works through all these traditions and legends and customs that have evolved over time.

In reality though, Christmas almost didn’t happen. Dig beneath the peaceful picture of Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus, and you are going to find surprises. Take a close look at the gospel of Matthew, and you’ll be stunned by the danger and death that flow through the original Christmas story. You want to talk about catastrophe theory, you can start right here. Christmas should never have happened.

You don’t, for example, take your pregnant wife — nine months pregnant with God— put her on a mule, and pack her off on a 120-mile road trip.

Second, if you do, you arrange for lodging, and don’t just hope there will be a room in the inn.

Third, the child is born in a manger. Think about it. We often wonder how children survive these days? Back then, a lot of them didn’t. Jesus did, but where he was born certainly wasn’t your typical birthing center.

And then there are the wise men who hit a roadblock as they attempt to gain access to Jesus. Sure, the star in the sky is a big help as they make their way to Jerusalem, but once they arrive in the capitol they

run smack into King Herod, who’s already working on an exit strategy in case this new “king” isn’t found — and killed. To make sure, scores of male children are killed in what today is known as the “Slaughter of the Innocents.”

So, Christmas almost didn’t come off then — and it often doesn’t come off at all for us now. Of course, we go through the motions. The presents, the Christmas cards, the shopping, the food, the parties, and so on. But that’s not Christmas. That’s the holidays. So how does Christmas work?

It works when we remember that Christmas now, as then, is a dangerous business. Christmas is not easy, and in fact it can be costly, because it demands that we put “the hopes and fears of all the years” to work. It calls on us to give muscle to our aspirations and dreams. And that’s not easy. But if we do it, Christmas works.

Christmas works when we shatter the false gods of materialism, and the idols of ambition, and the demons of self-importance, and set up the Christ child as the promise and priority of our lives. When Christ is the center of our daily living, then the other demons will fade away.

When we honor Christ, and not the culture of Christmas, as it were, then Christmas, ironically, really works. The demons, while there, have no control.

Finally, we honor Christmas when we allow it to take us to a foreign land. The text today tells us about the flight of the holy family into Egypt. Jesus often leads us into unknown territory. We find ourselves in uncharted waters. But that’s what Christmas is about, letting Jesus take our hand and lead us along our journey.

The late Mike Yaconelli, told the story about a deacon in his church who wasn’t doing what he was supposed to do as a deacon. One day he said to the deacon, “I have a group of young people who go to the old folks home and put on a worship service once a month. Would you drive them to the old folk’s home? Could you at least do that?” The deacon agreed.

The first Sunday the deacon was at the old folk’s home, he was in the back with his arms folded as the kids were doing their thing up front. All of a sudden, someone was tugging at his arm. He looked down, and here was this old man in a wheelchair. He took hold of the old man’s hand and the old man held his hand all during the service. The next month that was repeated. The man in the wheelchair came and held the hand of the deacon.

The next month, the next month, and the next month.

Then the old man wasn’t there. The deacon inquired and he was told, “Oh, he’s down the hall, right hand side, third door. He’s dying. He’s unconscious, but if you want to go down and pray over him, that’s all right.”

The deacon went and there were tubes and wires hanging out all over the place. The deacon took the man’s hand and prayed that God would receive the man, that God would bring this man from this life into the next and give him eternal blessings.

As soon as he finished the prayer, the old man squeezed the deacon’s hand, and the deacon knew that he had been heard. He was so moved by this that tears began to run down his cheeks.

He stumbled out of the room and as he did, he bumped into a woman. She said, “He’s been waiting for you. He said that he didn’t want to die until he had the chance to hold the hand of Jesus one more time.”

The deacon was amazed at this. He said, “What do you mean?”

She said, “Well, my father would say that once a month Jesus came to this place. ‘He would take my hand and he would hold my hand for a whole hour. I don’t want to die until I have the chance to hold the hand of Jesus one more time.’”

Christmas works when we let Jesus take us into unfamiliar territory — a nursing home, a neighbor’s home, or into something even more bizarre, like an attitude adjustment, a generous spirit, a helping hand. Whatever.

The point is that whenever and wherever we go, we are the hand of Jesus to others, and when that happens — Christmas happens.

Christmas works!

Amen.

Rev. Lisa Drysdale

Luke 1:39-45 (The Message)

This morning, I’ve asked Diane to play a couple of lines from a piece of music that may be familiar to you. (Diane plays from The Skater’s Waltz.)

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Even those who may not be gifted with an ear for music can probably recognize the signature sounds of a waltz. What gives a waltz its characteristic lilt and lift is the number of musical beats it contains in each measure of music. That easily identifiable waltz beat is called "3/4 time" -- it has three beats to a measure. Listen again to this waltz, and I think you'll hear it. (Diane plays again.)

The first of the three beats is usually the accented beat, the second two beats softer and unaccented: "Dum-de-de, Dum-de-de." The waltz, popularized in the later 19th century by Richard Strauss in the lavish social circles of Vienna, became enormously successful. Everybody who was anybody was dancing the waltz to Strauss' hypnotic 3/4 beat. If you were waltzing, you were with it.

But what makes a waltz a waltz is also, as some have said, what makes a waltz a pretty boring piece of music. Its slavish devotion to that 3/4 beat limits the variety, the drama and the joy that a waltz can communicate to listeners. Like the waltz dance step that accompanied it -- step, two, three; step, two, three -- a piece of waltz music seemed to go on and on as if it were some perpetual motion machine -- always beautiful, always in harmony, always predictable, always dull.

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Have you ever noticed that despite our human tendency to blame God for everything bad and hard that happens in our lives, we rarely find a reason to accuse God of being boring? Earthquakes, famine, flood, disease, death -- or more regularly the everyday tragedies that mar our lives -- bounced checks, bad relationships, difficult coworkers, broken promises and brawling kids -- are all somehow blamed on God. When people and problems in our lives get too difficult, too big, too messy, too overwhelming, that is when we feel God has abandoned us to the forces of fate, or evil or despair.

What these frantic few days before Christmas can recall for us, however, is that it is exactly during these most hectic, harried, hardest moments in life that God's presence hovers nearest to us. What appear to us to be our most chaotic, congested, convoluted times are actually our "stable times" (with thanks to Dr. Virginia Hoch for originating this phrase).

For people of faith, "stable" moments aren't those few days when calm briefly descends on our world. Our true "stable times" are when we look around and see that however unpredictable, unmanageable and unimaginable our mess, the message is there even more.

In today's gospel text, both Elizabeth and Mary find they are in the midst of their own "stable times." Elizabeth is far beyond child-bearing age, yet she finds herself pregnant with her first child. Imagine her overwhelming feelings of joy and anxiety. At last, a child to love and care for!

Care for?! That’s putting it mildly, isn’t it? Suddenly, in her old age, Elizabeth was going to be expected to take on all the exhilarating but exhausting duties of motherhood. Could she do it? How would she manage? Was she up to it? Her anxiety must have been running high. But the mental state of her young relative Mary must have been even more disheveled.

Like Elizabeth, she, too, was unexpectedly pregnant. Her betrothed, but not quite yet husband Joseph was understandably confused and upset. Mary was young and poor and had been utterly average in the expectations she had for her life. She had been anticipating setting up a household with Joseph, establishing herself in her new role as wife, and then, hopefully, becoming a mother.

Instead, Mary recently had to cope with the astounding visit of an angelic messenger, the shocking realization that she was indeed pregnant, and the stunning news about the identity of this baby she carried. Has anyone ever been faced with such an outrageously "stable time" in his or her life as Mary?

Yet both Elizabeth and Mary respond to the revelations and situations these "stable times" present in their lives by fully opening themselves to this unexpected divine presence. When these two most unstable-appearing women come together in today's gospel text, the result is an outpouring of joy and praise for God's startling stable presence in their lives. Elizabeth feels the vigorous movement of her baby, the "quickening," and is overwhelmed with an insight into Mary's condition that is revealed to her.

Mary responds to Elizabeth's greeting by delivering one of the most beautiful prayers of praise we have in all of Scripture. The "Magnificat," as Mary's hymn is usually termed, is an astonishing example of what kind of unexpected beauty and inspiration emerges when the unpredictable rhythm of "stable time" washes over us. God takes a simple, humble, young woman and looks "with favor on the lowliness of his servant," transforming and exalting her. Mary becomes "blessed ... among women" -- because she refuses to panic and instead responds to this most "stable" moment in her life with faith and trust.

Jesus was born in a stable -- a small, cramped, congested, messy place. A new-born baby was out-of-place, out-of-sync, amid the dusty animals, the mucky straw, the sneaking vermin, the spilled grain, all the usual smells and sounds and sights found in a stable. But the mess is the message of Christmas: There is no stable, no place in our world or in our lives that is too poor, too remote, too outcast, too "other," too messy, that God cannot be found and formed in us there.

As Christmas fast approaches, we may find ourselves at wits' end, running out of time, out of patience, out of money, out of ideas. The demands of work and the responsibilities we bear refuse to "take a holiday" and keep the pressure on, despite our longing for some simple Christmas cheer.

Don't be fooled into thinking that God cannot draw close to your life, to your heart, just because your schedule seems "too busy" for Christmas. If your circuitry is all hovering near overload, you could be on the very cusp of experiencing genuine "stable time" in your life. Open up to it, exalt in it, and be willing to let the Spirit of God "do great things for you." May it be so!

Rev. Lisa Drysdale

Philippians 4:4-7 (NRSV)

I have a small group of clergy colleagues I meet with on Zoom roughly once a month. We’ve known each other for a long, long time, and we’ve worked together in group settings for decades—often with a mentor/teacher/spiritual guide of some sort, in an attempt to maximize our effectiveness as church leaders and people of faith. Some in the group are now retired, but when the pandemic hit, we quickly reached out to each other and re-started our commitment to work together and be supportive of each other in these really, really weird times.

We had a Zoom meeting this past week. I’d missed the meetings for the previous two months, I think, so it was good to join the group again. This is a group that loves to laugh, and our meeting started with some very satisfying, robust laughter. It felt so good to laugh like that. By the end of our meeting, usually about an hour or so later, I noticed that our conversation became very dark. Covid issues. Political issues. Challenging church issues. Sadness about the state of the world, in general. It just got dark.

Then I also became aware, as we neared the one hour mark, that the group typically looks to Mike (who couldn’t be with us) for an ending joke (which are usually really, really bad!), or they look to me to offer some word of hope. In the midst of this meeting’s dark ending, someone asked me, “So, Lisa, what’s the word?” I replied, “The word is this: Jesus still comes and there is light in the darkness.” Joy to the world! I don’t know if it helped the group feel better, but I felt it needed to be said!

Today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Philippians is filled with reminders to be joyful, to rejoice, even in the midst of darkness. But, as one pastor said, “Paul sounds so like Pollyanna!”

This pastor, Debie Thomas, who is the Minister of Lifelong Formation at St Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, California, went on to say, “Like most people, I don't like being told what to feel. Nothing brings out the curmudgeon in me like a catchy slogan about positivity: "Don't worry, be happy!" "Start your day with a smile!" "Happiness is a choice!"

“So, this week's epistle reading, chock-full of such cheery imperatives, is tough for me to take in. "Rejoice in the Lord always," Paul tells his friends in Philippi. "Again, I will say, 'Rejoice.'" "Do not worry about anything. "Let your gentleness be known to everyone." I don't know about you, but when I read these verses, my inner teenager rises up in rebellion. Snarky and superior, she frowns, rolls her eyes, and heads for the door.”

She continues, and says something that captured my attention. “On a more serious note, I know from growing up in the church that the exhortation to "rejoice always" can do serious harm when we elevate it over and above the insights of psychology. Telling someone who struggles with clinical depression to rejoice always is cruel. So is telling someone in the throes of a panic attack to just stop feeling anxious. Too often, Christians demand of each other a Pollyanna-ish cheerfulness that refuses to look the complexities of real life in the face. As if our faith—and, by extension, our God—is too fragile to handle life's dark side without a generous side serving of grinning emojis.”

Debie Thomas reflected that what was helping her to contemplate Paul's advice was to remember that he wrote this letter from prison—while awaiting trial and anticipating a likely outcome of death. It also helps, she said, to remember that Paul was a man who was threatened, rejected, beaten, and shipwrecked. A man with a "thorn in the flesh" that God apparently did not heal. A man whose haunted past included contempt, rage, and even violence. A man who knew firsthand the irony of Pax Romana—a peace that existed in the Roman Empire—that left most people cringing under state-sponsored oppression.

“Paul was no Pollyanna;” she said. “He was a tried and tested realist.”

So, maybe these famous verses from Philippians are not about feeling good so much as they are about cultivating the inner life of the soul. In Paul's view, peace and joy are not emotions we can conjure up within ourselves. They come from God, and the only way we can receive them is through consistent spiritual practice: prayer, supplication, gentleness, and contemplation.

In other words, “…joy requires us to sidestep sentimentality and cynicism alike. It requires that we hold onto two realities at once: the reality of the world's brokenness in one hand, and the reality of God's love in the other. Joy is what happens when we daily live into the belief that God can and will bridge the gap between the world we long for and the world we see before our eyes. It is a posture, an orientation, a practice. A willingness to sit gently but persistently in the tension of the "not yet," trusting that God's peace will guard our hearts and minds in that in-between place for as long as it takes.”

This is joy at its most robust, its most powerful. There's no emoji in the world that can contain it.

We’re going to sing, now, a hymn that I love to sing, “Joy to the World!” For all the years of my ministry, I have insisted the churches I served wait to sing this until as late on Christmas Eve as possible. But then I read somewhere this week…this week!...that this hymn wasn’t originally meant to be a hymn for the stroke of midnight on Christmas Day, but it is, in fact, an Advent hymn. I never knew this!

This is the day to sing Joy to the World! This third Sunday in Advent, when we realize we still have a couple weeks to go in this darkness before the baby is born. This Third Sunday in Advent, that we celebrate as the Sunday of Joy in our Advent wreath. Let’s sing this together, believing, trusting that joy is coming! Amen.

Rev. Lisa Drysdale

Luke 1:26-38 (The Message)

I cannot say I’d ever really thought about this, until my friend, Steve, included me in an email he sent out to his church members and friends, asking the question. He asked: What if Mary said no? What if, when the angel Gabriel came to her and told her the good news that she would give birth to the Son of God, she had said, “No. Thank you, though. I appreciate that you were thinking about me. It’s always good to hear from you, Almighty God. But, no. Just no.”

Here are some of the responses Steve received to this interesting question:

· Wait…that would mean we’d never have Peter, Paul, and Mary. Peter, Paul, and Esther? It just doesn’t sound right.

· If not Mary, then it would be someone else. Catholics could be saying “Hail, Thelma” instead of “Hail, Mary.”

· Do women ever say no????

· But Mary wouldn’t get to hang out in bathtubs in people’s yards all across America!

What if Mary said no? It’s interesting to think about, isn’t it? I have—maybe we all have—this image from Scripture that she was pleased as punched to be asked to participate in this enormous thing God was about to do, and there’s no doubt that God’s request of Mary simply could not be any more important.

But the bible doesn’t tell us what would have happened—what God would have done—if Mary said no. Instead, all we know is that God focused on Mary; God chose Mary. God knew she’d say yes. This is what Liz Curtis Higgs writes in her book, The Women of Christmas. “God didn’t have a Plan A, Plan B, Plan C. Mary was The Plan.”

I want us to think some more about this, but let’s go back for a moment to remember the conversation between Mary and the angel, Gabriel, as imagined in the book, Cloth For the Cradle. This is the story of what happened in the days before Jesus was born, in the town of Nazareth, where there was a young woman whose name was Mary.

Mary: I was washing the dishes at the time. I was bending over the sink, with my back turned away from the kitchen door—not that he necessarily opened it. I just remember hearing my name being called.

Gabriel: Mary.

Mary: That’s me…but who are you? And what are you doing here in my kitchen?

Gabriel: It’s all right. I’m called Gabriel.

Mary: But I don’t know any men called Gabriel.

Gabriel: I’m not a man. I’m an angel.

Mary: You don’t look much like an angel to me.

Gabriel: Have you seen an angel before?

Mary: No. But they always have wings. Where are your wings?

Gabriel: I don’t need them when I’m not flying.

Mary: So, what are you doing in my kitchen?

Gabriel: I’ve come to bring you a message.

Mary: You’re putting me on!

Gabriel: No. I’m not. I’ve come to tell you that God has chosen you to enable the Incarnation to take place.

Mary: To enable the what?

Gabriel: The Incarnation…the word becoming flesh.

Mary: Gabriel, what are you talking about?

Gabriel: You’re going to become pregnant.

Mary: Not with you, I’m not! And not in here. What do you think I am?

Gabriel: Mary, it’s all right. God has chosen you to become the mother of his son.

Mary: Me? I’m not even married.

Gabriel: (speaking calmly) The Holy Spirit will descend on you, and you will conceive a child, and you will call him Jesus. That means “savior.” Out of all the women in history, God has chosen you. Out of all the minutes in history, this is the one in which God needs a woman, not to give him her body, but to give him her Yes.

Mary: (almost speechless) But what will my parents say?

Gabriel: They’ll be all right.

Mary: What will Joseph say?

Gabriel: Don’t worry. I’ll have a word with him.

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Lynn Cowell read the book, The Women of Christmas, and found herself thinking about Mary, as well.

She wrote, “The authors’ words about Mary take me back to my own direction changing story. The season was coming to an end. I was done with school and had no idea what God had for me next. I had tried to open a door, only to have it quickly slammed shut. Now what? Sharing my dilemma with my counselor, she asked me if I had prayed about it. Why, of course I had prayed about it! The problem wasn’t me , God simply wasn’t talking.

“Then she said these wise words, redirecting my focus: ‘When you reach the point, that no matter what God says, the answer is “yes”, you’ll hear Him.’”

That’s what God knew about Mary. God knew her answer would be “yes”.

So, stop and think about how willing you are—and I’ll think about how willing I am—to follow what God asks us to do. Do I always respond like Mary? Do you always respond like Mary? No. Are there things we’ve been aske to do that we haven’t followed through with yet? Oh, yes. Absolutely.

What does God need from us now, if our hearts and minds are open, and willing?

Mary accepted God’s goodness in her life, and God changed the world through her. God chooses to change the world through us only when we are willing to say “Yes!” That’s living life to its fullest in the kingdom of God. That’s why we celebrate Mary.

Today we give thanks that Mary said, “Yes!” to God. Amen!

Rev. Lisa Drysdale

Isaiah 60:1-3 (The Message)

“Put your face in the sunlight!”

God created our bodies to thrive when they are exposed to a healthy amount of sunlight. The light of day is the very first thing God creates in the book of Genesis, so we know it is critical to all life forms. We need the sun to shine on our faces!

Do you have, or do you know someone who suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder? It’s a type of depression that affects a person during the same season every year. For those of us who live in the Northeast, this is a relatively common ailment during the winter season we are getting ready to fully enter in a few short weeks.

Anyone can get SAD, but it is more common in:

People who live in areas where winter days are very short.

Women.

People between the ages of 15 and 55.

People who have a close relative with SAD.

Experts are not sure what causes SAD, but they think it may be caused by a lack of sunlight. Lack of light may upset the sleep-wake cycle and other circadian rhythms, and it may cause problems with a brain chemical called serotonin that affects mood.

If you have SAD, you may:

Feel sad, grumpy, moody, or anxious.

Lose interest in your usual activities.

Eat more and crave carbohydrates, such as bread and pasta.

Gain weight.

Sleep more and feel drowsy during the daytime.

The symptoms of SAD come and go at about the same time each year, and for most people with SAD, symptoms start in September or October and end in April or May.

One of the recommendations for people who suffer from SAD is light therapy, of which there are two types:

Bright light treatment, where you sit in front of a "light box" for half an hour or longer, usually in the morning.

Dawn simulation. For this treatment, a dim light goes on in the morning while you sleep, and it gets brighter over time, like a sunrise.

Like some of you, I bet, I find I have a hard time getting up when it is dark in the morning, so I found myself really interested in this idea of a dawn simulator. Turns out, you can get one in an alarm clock! The Sunrise Clock is a slow light alarm clock designed to simulate an actual sunrise. Just like God intended (!), this clock lets you wake gently to a progressive, simulated sunrise. The light will begin to shine slowly either 15, 20, 30, 45, 60 or 90 minutes (you choose) before your scheduled wake time, gradually filling the room with light until your alarm sounds. Doesn’t that sound beautiful?!

The other product I was fascinated by was something called a Feel Bright Full Spectrum Light Visor. This thing is completely portable and works just as well as a 10,000 lux desktop lamp. It connects to a baseball cap and shines some light on your face through a rechargeable LED device. You have the freedom to go anywhere you want and still get the light therapy you desire! Very clever…

We are created to thrive in the light of the sun.

I remember the time during a very gloomy winter in WNY when I came out of the grocery store and felt like I was HIT by sunlight! For a moment, I had to stop walking with my grocery cart, because I couldn’t see where I was going. Other people in the parking lot were laughing and talking to each other…pointing to the sun and saying, “What is that thing in the sky?”

We are created to thrive in the light of the sun.

But so many of us truly know what it feels like to live in darkness.

Years ago on PBS there was a Ken Burns’ documentary, “The Dust Bowl”. I don’t remember watching the whole thing, but the image I was so struck by—the image I can still remember clearly—was the image of a black blizzard approaching from the distance. Approaching fast.

The people in the path of that black blizzard knew what they were about to endure on Palm Sunday in 1935 because they had endured it before. They knew that very soon a complete darkness would envelop their world. "The impact is like a shovelful of fine sand flung against the face," Avis D. Carlson wrote in a New Republic article. "People caught in their own yards grope for the doorstep. Cars come to a standstill, for no light in the world can penetrate that swirling murk... We live with the dust, eat it, sleep with it, watch it strip us of possessions and the hope of possessions. It is becoming Real."

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There are all kinds of darkness each of us experiences. I don’t have to tell you about the darkness because in one way or another, you have lived in it. Maybe you are living in it right now.

But the prophet Isaiah tells us this is what God says: “Get out of bed, Jerusalem! Wake up. Put your face in the sunlight. God’s bright glory has risen for you.”

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This is the message of Advent: the gift of God is coming and the gift will be like light shining in the deepest darkness.

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“God rises on you, his sunrise glory breaks over you.”

On you. Over you.

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Our challenge today, on this first Sunday in Advent, is to focus on this light we are promised, to trust that Christ is always present—even in, especially in, times of darkness.

When we practice focusing our eyes on light, there is always some light to be found. In fact, none of the shadows we encounter in day-to-day life are totally dark and depressing. They all contain some small amount of light.

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Shadow expert David Lynch, co-author of a book called Color and Light in Nature, points out that a shadow is filled with light reflected from the sky—otherwise, it would be completely black. If you want to see a completely black shadow, one that has no brightness at all, you have to go to the moon. Black is the way that shadows on the moon look to astronauts, because the moon has no atmosphere to bounce light into the dark corners of the lunar surface.

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Even in our shadow times—our times of disappointment, failure, temptation and tension—God is going to bounce some light into our darkness. I know…I know this is really hard to believe, sometimes, but I believe if we are willing to search for the light of God in times of deep darkness, we will find it. If we look hard for Jesus Christ in situations of chaos and confusion, we will discover him.

If we train our eyes on the small glimmers of light that appear in our shadow times, we will emerge from the blackness that threatens to overwhelm us.

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Although “the whole earth is wrapped in darkness, all people sunk in darkness,” promises Isaiah, “God rises on you. God’s sunrise glory breaks over you.”

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As I was meditating on this scripture reading for today’s worship, I wrote this prayer in my journal…and I invite you to be in prayer with me as I share it: “I am drawn to your Light, O God, and yet there are days (sometimes more!) when I feel like I am in a dust cloud, living in a profoundly gloomy WNY day, and my heart and my spirit are sad. The darkness is all around…it is all some people see, it is all some people experience.

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“But I know the beauty of the Light, O God! I know how the Light makes me feel….how it gives me energy….how it gives me hope!

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“Let all your people see the Light of Christ this Advent. And let that same light shine through me, in Christ’s name.”

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Amen!

Rev. Lisa Drysdale

I am a huge fan of paper. Stationery. Notebooks. Journals. Especially journals. Particularly Moleskine journals. Moleskine is an Italian papermaker and product designer founded in 1997 and based in Milan, Italy. It produces and designs luxury notebooks, as well as planners, sketchbooks, leather journals, and stationery. Be still, my heart.

I was looking at the Moleskine journals that I don’t really need at Barnes and Noble recently, and found an adorable small sized one that would fit nicely in my purse. I could happily have a piece of paper with me pretty much wherever I go. My life would be complete.

As I was looking at the selection of journals and notebooks, my mind flashed back to being given a small notebook to use as a Food Log. I was, out of the blue, remembering attending a nutrition class my trainer at the time was leading, and she was a HUGE proponent of the Food Log. I remember not loving the concept. I did also remember the 10-week class was helpful; I learned how to avoid additives and chemicals in my food, and how to replace them with whole foods, or foods, I’ve been told, “That come from the ground or had a mother.” Can’t really say either of those things for the Wegmans chocolate chip muffins I love to eat…

One thing that used to always be a staple of any reputable weight loss effort—through Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, a doctor, a nutritionist—is the Food Log. At the beginning of that long ago nutrition class, my trainer said, “None of what I share with you is going to make any difference if you don’t have a sense of what you are currently eating. You have to understand what you are currently putting into your body.”

And so, the Food Log. As much as I like making lists—and I DO like to make lists—I was never fond of Food Logs. They seem to demand so much work and attention. “Ok, this morning, I drank a glass of water, ate a piece of whole wheat toast…dry…with a side of Lucky Charms.” Not only do I not particularly want anyone else to know what I’m actually eating, I don’t derive a whole lot of pleasure from looking at the labels on foods I have loved for years and finding that there is not ONE thing in them that is natural, that comes from the ground or had a mother.

But Mary said, “The Food Log is the key to success.”

And you know, I’m not sure I can argue with her. Not only did that Food Log help me see what I was actually eating, it showed me what I was NOT eating. It helped me look back at the end of the day and say, “Wow. I didn’t realize that all I had to eat today was bread. No vegetables. No fruit. No protein. Just bread.” A Food Log helped me see if I was covering all the food groups in a day AND (this is what I really want you to hear this morning!) AND it conditioned me to pay attention!

There is no doubt we are, today, on the cusp of a very busy season. We celebrate Thanksgiving in a couple of days and then we immediately step into (if the stepping into hasn’t already begun!) the season of Advent. This is where I find we (you and me) tend to have a harder time paying attention to God in our lives, as we get caught up in the whirlwind we often create around the Christmas holiday. I find we end up forgetting, or maybe losing track of, what we’re trying to do…receive and give thanks for God’s gift to us of his only Son, Jesus Christ. In the flesh. In the flesh of a baby. Just like us, but connected to God in a way we haven’t seen since.

I assume you’ve heard the “news” that because of the “supply chain problem” many of the things we love to have to help us celebrate the season will be tough to get this year. That’s why, in part, we started hearing anxious reports early in October that we “better get going on our Christmas shopping!” As if we need anything more to make us anxious about that part of the season. You want a Christmas tree this year? You better have it in hand by the end of October! And that “hot” item for children? I don’t even know, yet, what the hot item is this year, but I suspect you can’t get it anywhere.

It all adds to the anxiety we’re already feeling about our lives and our world. And so we forget what the season of Thanksgiving and Christmas we are now entering is all about. With all the noise clamoring for our attention and telling us that we have to have this or that to have a proper holiday, we lose track of what we’re really hungering for.

I believe our faith—when we pay attention—guides us toward what we hunger for: Meaning. Grounded-ness. Hearts of gratitude. The desire to be in service to others. A deep connection to the God who created us. The Psalmist reminds us of a great ritual that connects us with God at the start of every day.

“If you wake me each morning with the sound of your loving voice,” the Psalmist says to God, “I’ll go to sleep each night trusting in you. Point out the road I must travel, I’m all ears, all eyes before you.”

What if we really paid attention to God throughout the day? What if we kept a God Log of sorts—like the Food Logs of weight management programs—and made the effort to record in it each day where we have seen God show up in us, around us, especially in these busy days to come? What if we used this God Log to help us pay attention to the road God may be pointing us to travel. if we daily record what our ears and our eyes, what our hearts and minds experience of God?

What you might write in your God Log does not need to be deep. It does not need to be intense. It does not need to be long. It is simply a commitment to recording these things that helps each one of us pay attention to God this season.

I followed this practice for a season years ago, and I remember that I kept my God Log in the drawer of my nightstand. In hindsight, that may have been a mistake on my part. When I get into bed, I am much more conditioned to read than I am to write in a Log. It is the same way, for me, with the Food Log. I found myself to be much more successful in paying attention to the food I ate if I carried the Food Log around with me during the day. If I tried to fill in the Food Log at the end of each day, I found myself “forgetting” that I ate 6 chocolate kisses before dinner…without thinking…because I was “hungry.” You will know what works best for you.

So here’s what I’m inviting you to do, any of you who are interested and feel challenged this morning. I have some actual God Logs available for you to take with you today, or you can use any notebook or notepad you already have handy, or even commit to jotting down some notes on your phone.

When you get up in the morning, read verse 8 from Psalm 143, and then during the day, pay attention to your glimpses of God…some of us call them God flirts…and record them in your log. Do you notice a swell of gratitude for someone or something? Write that down. Have you felt God’s presence in some way during the day? Write THAT down. Has something you seen along the way made you think, “Nice job, God!” If so, write it down.

Above all, my prayer is that we will take this opportunity to re-condition ourselves to really pay attention—morning, noon and night—to God moving in our lives. In addition to the thankfulness that swells up in us this week, let’s practice being mindful of God every day this Advent and Christmas. Amen.

Rev. Lisa Drysdal

Revelation 7:13-17

It was about ten years ago when I had a conversation with a friend of mine who is a funeral director in Lockport. He told me that a young man had called him to make arrangements to bring his father’s ashes from Chicago to Lockport. My friend made those arrangements, and when the ashes arrived, he called the son. He asked him what he wanted him to do with the ashes. Now, my friend expected to hear one of several responses. “Let’s inter my dad’s ashes in the ground.” Or, “Let’s put them in an urn and place them in a vault.” Or, “Give me my dad’s ashes, and I’ll take them home with me.” My friend wasn’t prepared to hear what this young man actually told him. “I don’t care. Put them out at the curb.”