Sermon for Sunday, February 23, 2025: "No Time Like the Present"

Sermon for January 5, 2025: Follow Me!

Three Wise Men, from the East, some say Persia. Some say Persia (now Iran), India, and Arabia. Some say they represent the 3 ages of man. Some say it was their gifts that were important: gold (Christ’s kingship), frankincense (Christ’s divinity), and myrrh (Christ’s death). All interesting stories and symbols. But, that’s not the point of this sermon. They saw the star, they had an idea, a vision, and they followed it. And that light brought them to Jesus, the Light of the World. And I think that series of events is what’s important about the 3 Wise Men. I mean there must be a reason besides a Partridge in a Pear Tree that we count the days until the arrival of the Three Wise Men. And I’m proposing that the Three Wise Men at the Manger is the original Come-to-Jesus Moment in Christianity. And for those of you who have heard the phrase, “Come-to-Jesus Moment,” but can’t remember the context, a Come-to-Jesus Moment is a moment of sudden realization, comprehension, or recognition that often precipitates a major change in someone’s life. Or, you know, an Epiphany. So, thank you, Three Wise Men, you did your part, now get out of here.

Luke: Until I had to write a sermon about it, I perceived Luke’s gospel verses where Joseph and Mary left Jerusalem without Jesus (“Joseph, where’s Jesus?” “I thought he was with you!” “I thought he was with you!!!” Meanwhile, Jesus is back in Jerusalem like McAuley Culkin in “Home Alone” “AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!) Not really. Jesus didn’t do that. Yeah. Jesus wasn’t doing that at all; he was in the Synagogue, wowing the rabbis with his knowledge and interpretation of scripture. Why? It was his calling. "Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?" Jesus was ready to start. He was about the age when a Jewish boy gets bar mitzvahed and he was ready to go. He was prepared, he heard the order, and he obeyed.

Jennifer Ruth Lynn Garrison writes about Jesus calling his disciples later in life, “The calling of the disciples varies somewhat from gospel to Gospel but basically Jesus shows up and says, ‘Follow me.’ Without hesitation, they do! They drop whatever their work was before and take up the only work that suddenly seems to matter: the work of following this shiny new messiah.” You might say that Jesus came at the right time to call his disciples to him to continue his work. So, this leads me to ask, when is it our time to continue Jesus’s work? And one could respond to that question with “when wasn’t it our time to continue Jesus’s work?”

John Edgerton writes something a little more timely about this question. He writes, “The presents have all been given out, the stockings distributed, the feast feasted upon. Now there remains a great mess. Leftovers hastily stuffed into the fridge, blocking me from grabbing the milk. Toys gleefully scattered across the floor, unerringly finding their way beneath my bare feet. It’s not just physical detritus, either. The carols have been sung, the old words read aloud, the holy silences lingered over. Now there remains a great mess. Words spoken that I wish I hadn’t said aloud. To-do list items I had really intended to finish, now scattered across next Monday morning.

After the day after Christmas dawns, I feel like I’ve got a big mountain to climb before I’ve finished everything required by the law of the Lord. Where to begin? Will I really believe that God’s blessing will be enough for me? Will I really, actually, let my heart be transformed by the birth of one child? Will I really, actually, for realsies see God in the midst of the mess of the world today?” 

These are questions that I ask myself a lot: will I let my heart be transformed by the birth of one child? Will I / Can I see God in the midst of the mess of the world today? I want to. These definitely have been goals of mine. And, I have to say that over the past year, being in front of you almost every Sunday has helped me a lot. This work has laid the groundwork, it has prepared my heart, it has changed my mind. It has transformed me just a bit. It has helped me see God in the midst of the mess of the world today. Just a bit. And I thank God, and I thank you.

So, the question I have for you is: are you doing anything to prepare your heart to be transformed? To see God in the midst of the worldliness of it all? Honestly, if someone asked me that question out of the blue I’d probably say, “I have no idea how to do that.” Well, after giving it some thought, I have some ideas how to prepare oneself to hear God’s voice. I can’t guarantee that they’ll work, but I know they won’t hurt. Here they are: 

• Pray: from a devotional, from a website, from your memory, from your imagination. Just take a moment to pray. To give thanks. To praise. To petition. Whatever is on your mind that you want to take to the altar. And along that same line, 

• Meditate: just sit quietly for 5 minutes and become aware of your breath. Just let thoughts enter your brain, and notice them without judgement. Quietly, for five minutes.

• Read books of a spiritual nature: They’re everywhere, including in the library. Go look in the Spirituality section of a bookstore or your local library. Or ask me.
  
  In fact, I mentioned this before, I’d love to meet again on a weekday morning with any of you who are interested and we can do all of these 3 things together, when we gather to discuss a book that I just finished reading and quoted from in a couple of my sermons, Henri Nouwen’s “Finding My Way Home.” Let me know if you’re interested and we’ll find a time to meet. 

So, let us listen for God’s still, small voice. And hear what it has to say. And let that be our star to guide us. To our Father’s house. To our Come-to-Jesus Moment. To our Epiphany. Amen.

Sermon for December 10, 2024: The Path of Peace

Every moment in today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Philippians is beautiful. These are words that anyone would want to receive from anyone. Words like:

“I thank my God for every remembrance of you, always in every one of my prayers for all of you, praying with joy for your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now.”

And

“It is right for me to think this way about all of you, because I hold you in my heart, for all of you are my partners in God's grace.”

And, finally,

“And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight.”

It sounds like Paul was having a good day when he wrote this. Such affectionate, tender parenting to this gathering of Christians in Philippi. But, in reality, Paul was imprisoned when he wrote this letter. Other parts of Paul’s letter describe his suffering in prison. Andy Rau, from Bible Gateway, explains that Paul “writes to the Philippians to show them that his imprisonment had not impeded the spread of the gospel, but had actually hastened its expansion. Paul draws attention to the significance of suffering in the growth of God’s kingdom, and offers the Philippians that same joy-in-spite-of-suffering if they will embrace that gospel message.”

Joy-in-spite-of-suffering: Henri Nouwen, who I quoted a couple weeks ago, from his book Finding My Way Home describes “The Path of Peace” through a man named Adam, with whom he lived, along with 8 other men in a community named Daybreak, where people with a mental handicap and their assistants try to live together in the spirit of the Beatitudes.

I’m going to quote from this book for the rest of the sermon, but don’t worry: I wrote out everything I wanted to quote and won’t spend time searching the book.

Adam “is 25 years old, and he cannot speak, cannot dress or undress himself, cannot walk alone or eat without much help. He does not cry or laugh and only occasionally makes eye contact. His back isn’t very straight and sometimes his movements seem distorted. He suffers from severe epilepsy and, notwithstanding heavy medication, there are few days without “grand mal” seizures. Sometimes, as he grows suddenly rigid, he utters a painful groan, and on a few occasions I have seen a big tear coming down his cheek. It takes me about an hour and a half to waken Adam, give him his medication, walk him into his bath, undress him, wash him, shave him, brush his teeth, dress him, walk him to the kitchen, give him his breakfast, put him in his wheelchair, and bring him to his Day Program.”

This sounds like a lot, right? Day in and day out spending your life with this man, helping him to live his life. But Nouwen discovers, as he spends more and more time with Adam that a kind of peace comes over him in this work.

“Adam’s peace is first of all a peace rooted in his being. Adam can do nothing. He is completely dependent on others every moment of his life. His gift is his pure being with us. Every evening when I run home to “do” Adam’s routine, to help him with his supper and put him to bed, I realize that the best thing I can do for Adam is to simply “be” with him. … I am simply here, present with my friend. How simple the truth that Adam teaches me, but how hard to live! Being is more important than doing.”

Henri Nouwen looks back at his life before joining Daybreak, up to and including his tenure at Harvard University. He left on a sabbatical from Harvard to explore the Daybreak community experience, and literally spent the rest of his life there.

Nouwen says, “As I sit beside the slow and heavily breathing Adam, I start seeing how violent my journey has been. This upward passage has been so filled with desires to be better than others, so marked by rivalry and competition, so pervaded with compulsions and obsessions, and so spotted with moments of suspicion, jealousy, resentment, and revenge. What I believed I was doing was called ‘ministry.’”

Henri Nouwen ends each day with Adam in prayer, not really sure that Adam understands what’s happening. So, Nouwen simplifies the moment and sits in his presence. “Since I began to pray with Adam I have also come to know better what prayer is about. Prayer is being with Jesus and simply spending time with him. Adam is teaching me that.”

As he moves through his life with Adam, Henri Nouwen experiences the simplicity of the work of Adam and the effect he has on the house. How simply his presence inspires peace in the community. Perhaps like long periods of time that Paul spent in the solitude of prison. “Adam is the weakest of us all, but without any doubt the strongest bond between us all. Because of Adam there is always someone home; because of Adam there is a quiet rhythm in the house; because of Adam there are moments of silence and quiet; because of Adam there are always words of affection, gentleness, and tenderness; because of Adam there is a patience and endurance; because of Adam there are smiles and tears visible to all; because of Adam there is always space for mutual forgiveness and healing… yes, because of Adam there is peace among us.

“Let me conclude with an old Hasidic tale that summarizes much of what I have tried to say,” Henri Nouwen writes as he concludes this chapter. And this sermon!

The rabbi asked his students: “How can we determine the hour of dawn, when the night ends and the day begins?” One of the rabbi’s students suggested: “When from a distance you can distinguish between a dog and a sheep?”
“No,” was the answer of the rabbi.
“Is it when one can distinguish between a fig tree and a grapevine?” asked a second student.
“No,” the rabbi said.
“Please tell us the answer, then,” said the students.
“It is, then,” said the wise teacher, “when you can look into the face of another human being and you have enough light in you to recognize your brother or your sister. Until then it is night, and darkness is still with us.”

“Let us pray for the light. It is the peace the world cannot give.” 

And may that light “shine upon those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace." Amen.

Sermon for November 10, 2024: It Ain't WHAT It's HOW

Jim Wallis, who wrote the book, “America’s Original Sin,” of which we have 3 copies available to you for free in the chapel, said the following: “Regardless of what the New Testament says, most Christians are materialists with no real experience of the Spirit, or individualists with no real commitment to community. An American Indian once challenged an audience of Christians in which I was sitting. He asked us to pretend we were all Christians who didn't want to accumulate material possessions but who actually loved one another and put everything in common and treated each other as family. Then he asked what kept us from doing that. And the question remains: What is it that prevents Christians from living like Christians?”

He continues, “I am increasingly convinced that it has less to do with ill will or bad intentions; it has more to do with how small our communion with God and with one another really is. Most of us in the churches have yet to find the spiritual strength and resources that would enable us to live out our faith.”

This isn’t a sermon about tithing (though it is that time of year); it’s about what all my sermons are about: God and Us and where we meet, and the results of that interaction.

Psalm 146 says, “Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help. When their breath departs, they return to the earth; on that very day their plans perish. Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God.” I get it: princes are out for themselves. To gather more “princeocity” in order to make themselves even more princely. At whatever cost. And then they die, and with them everything they’ve gathered. God, on the other hand, is everlasting and needs nothing more to make them more Godly. It’s all there. 

Psalm 146 goes on to say that the God of Jacob, “executes justice for the oppressed; gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets the prisoners free; the Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down; the Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the strangers; he upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.” Yeah. Thank you, God. But how? How does God do all these things? Because I haven’t seen any blinding light in the sky, or giant hands coming out of a cloud to lift up the orphan and the widow. Probably because I have DTS: “Doubting Thomas Syndrome.”

As Jesus says in Mark, chapter 12, "Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows' houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation." This is Jesus. This has always been Jesus: turning over the tables and not just against money changers and merchants in the synagogue during Holy Week. But everyone, everywhere. Which, in Jesus’s world, is the Roman government and the Israelites who work for them. From the day we’re born we’re taught to show respect for those in charge. Those who seek power. What has Jesus said about those in power? That they are the servants of the people they rule. They are the servants. Not us. But, alas, our society dictates that with power comes privilege. Would that that weren’t the case. Who would be the people running for office then? My guess is those who set the prisoners free; who open the eyes of the blind. Who lift up those who are bowed down; who love the righteous. Who watch over the strangers; who uphold the orphan and the widow. But, I digress…

Back to Jesus, and the widow: “Then he called his disciples and said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.’” According to Walter Burghardt, "this widow had been taught and encouraged by religious leaders to donate as she does and Jesus condemns the value system that motivates her action ... In a word, Jesus is condemning a structure of sin, a social injustice." In a world where too many leaders, religious and secular, gain and wield power at the expense of the weak, Jesus exposes such systems for what they are—an affront to God—and what they do: destroy relationship, dignity, and even bring death. “This poor widow" gives not out of her excess, like the privileged, but "out of her poverty." Jesus reminds us that what we give, of ourselves and our possessions, is of little importance; instead, how we give to others is what will show the world that we are followers of Jesus Christ. 

And that is how God works in our world: through us. Through those who work to follow in the path of Jesus. Through those of us who find the spiritual strength and resources that enable us to live out our faith and do the work of God, for God, here on Earth. Amen.

Sermon for October 27, 2024: Walking with Jesus

These past 3 Sundays, we’ve listened to stories of 3 people who Jesus beckons to follow him, each with his own response and result. Let’s do a quick review:

Sunday, October 13, we looked at the rich dude, the wealthy young man who followed all the commandments and had everything he wanted except one thing: the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus said, give up everything and follow me. His response was to walk away, dejected. No Kingdom of Heaven for you, rich guy! Next time, why don’t you try to pass a camel through the eye of a needle!

Then, Sunday, October 20, we meet up with the Apostle Brothers, James and John: they give up everything they owned, and apparently, they have a hidden agenda. Jesus and the gang are all walking to Jerusalem and James and John want Jesus to promise that they get to sit to the left and right of him when they go to heaven. Can you imagine what the Kingdom of Heaven would’ve been like for Jesus if he said okay? James and John would be forever squabbling about who gets to sit on the right side! “I’m older! I get to sit on the right!” “Well, I’m more handsome; I feel entitled to the better side!” Etc. If Jesus had any control over that and promised them, it would’ve been the Kingdom of James and John and it wouldn’t be heavenly!

And today, we meet Bartimaeus, the blind guy who sits on the side of the road in Jericho. No money. Only the clothes on his back. His eyes don’t function, and yet, he sees more than any of these other guys. He calls out to Jesus, for his mercy (one of Jesus’s specialties), and the followers tell him to leave Jesus alone. However, Jesus has other ideas and heals him and, without being asked, Bartimaeus follows him. He doesn’t need anything else from Jesus. He doesn’t even require an invitation. He simply ups and follows him after receiving the healing touch of Jesus. 

As Michaela Bruzzese notes, “With nothing to lose and everything to gain, Bartimaeus is free to be free, while the rich young man and the disciples are still possessed by their own ideas of who Jesus is and what kind of liberation he brings.”

Bartimaeus magnifies Jesus. He lifts Jesus up. He follows him faithfully. Quietly and with love. This is another way to be a Christian. An excellent way to magnify Jesus’s word. To serve God faithfully, and with humility. Not requiring fortune. Not requiring power or fame. Dedicating our lives to God. How? How do we dedicate our lives to God? Well, we could all become monks. Or travel into the hilltowns with Bibles in our hands professing the word at the top of our lungs. We could do that.

Or we could walk humbly with Jesus by quietly taking his commandment of loving our neighbor as we love ourselves seriously. How do we do that? 

Let’s make this a Q&A. How do we live the love of Jesus in our everyday lives?

• Feeding the hungry

• Clothing the naked

• Seeking justice

• Lifting up the downtrodden

• Praying

• Practicing contemplation

These are all examples of living the way of Jesus. We’re all such creatures of habit. Let’s commit to creating a new habit in our lives. Take one of the actions that we came up with and commit to practicing it at least 1, 2, 3, 4 times a day or a week or a month. Let’s get up from the side of the road and walk humbly with Jesus. Amen.

Sermon for September 10, 2023: "Let the Girding Begin!"

So, today’s Hebrew testament reading begins right before the final plague that was brought upon the Egyptians: the killing of the firstborn. God instructs Moses and Aaron (Moses’s brother) on how God will kill the firstborn whose families aren’t displaying the blood of the slaughtered lamb, how they should eat the lamb, and how they shall mark the month – even before Pharaoh tells them to leave Egypt. He tells them that, “This month shall mark for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you,” which is interesting to me that this is the Hebrew bible reading that shows up for this Sunday, because it’s the springtime holiday, Passover, which commemorates the exodus from Egypt BUT, this passage about the “beginning of months” more or less coincides with the Jewish holiday, Rosh Hashanah (which begins next Friday), the holiday that we sometimes call the Jewish New Year.

Rosh Hashanah is translated as “head of the year.” This is a time (ideally) of serious introspection, personal growth, and spiritual rebirth. The Season of Repentance, beginning with Rosh Hashanah, encourages Jews to seek forgiveness from those they have wronged over the past year and reflect on what the new year might bring. Rosh Hashanah actually commemorates the creation of the world. So, it’s interesting that there are two new years, in a way: the creation of the world and the exodus from Egypt that resulted in a home for the Hebrews to live and create their own lifestyle and religion. 

There are a few other thoughts that I’ve drawn from today’s Hebrew bible reading:

1.   First, and most importantly, this is a “beginning of months” for North Hadley Congregational Church, as well, as we embark on our transition to a new spiritual leader for our community. We’ll come back to this point very soon.

2.   Second, I would not use this recipe to cook lamb. Ever. No matter who told me to cook it that way. Well, maybe if I were leaving Egypt and God gave me the recipe personally. But, really, leaving the head, legs and all the inner organs intact? Yech. Eeew.

3.   Third, that whole girding your loins thing. Has anyone else wondered exactly what it meant? Well, I’m going to tell you. Don’t worry, it’s G-rated. Girding your loins refers to pulling up your tunic and, essentially, turning it into a pair of shorts. This allows the man or woman to become more productive in manual labor (or war) (or exiting from your land of enslavement). In reference to this passage, you are eating on the run. Out of Egypt. So, all those shots in the movie “The Ten Commandments” that you see of the Hebrews exiting Egypt are incorrect. Everyone’s loins should be girded; they should’ve been wearing makeshift shorts.

So, back to my first point: while we are carrying on the everyday activities of this church – worshiping God, upkeeping the premises, fulfilling mission – we are also working toward a shift in our community as we search for, find, and eventually work with a new pastor. 

Just as it is for Jews honoring Rosh Hashanah, for us, it is also a time of serious introspection, personal growth and spiritual rebirth, as we grow as individuals within our community. It’s a time to look at our beliefs, to consider why we hold these beliefs, and deciding if these beliefs are helping or hindering us. For instance, what was your thought or feeling when you heard me say that last sentence about re-examining our beliefs and why we hold them? Did you have one? What was the thought behind that thought or feeling?

I hope that we can have time to discuss this process as a congregation, either one on one, or as a group, formally or informally.

The reading from Matthew also discusses these ideas in regard to sinning against each other. It talks about going back to the one who sinned against you, or you sinned against and explaining how you feel about what was said or done and making amends. Making amends is a major theme in the gospels and it has all sorts of applications to many different situations. This is an important time in our church community: Matthew says, “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” 

Whatever thoughts or beliefs we hold right now, we may still have when we choose a new pastor. It’s up to each of us individually and as a community to decide whether or not our thoughts and beliefs support the decision of the Pastor Search Committee. And if necessary, can we replace those old thoughts with new thoughts.

I know I talk a lot about my Brooklyn church. It was the church that I chose as an adult and one that I was most involved with until now. At the First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn, I was the co-chair of the Pastor Search Committee for the replacement of the pastor who was retiring after 25 years of service to the church. He was beloved. And black, as was 40% of our congregation. It was important to the entire congregation that our new pastor be black and hold many of the customs of the black church. Our committee met weekly, read dossiers daily, and began and ended each committee meeting in prayer for a year-and-a-half. We felt led by the Holy Spirit. When we finally presented a candidate, he wasn’t black. We made special efforts to find a new, black pastor, but those we interviewed we didn’t feel were good fits for the church. Well, when the time came to vote for our candidate, based on his experience, conversations with the congregants, and his sermon, there wasn’t a large enough percentage of the vote to support bringing him on as our pastor. Did I mention that there was a behind-the-curtain movement led by leaders of the church to vote against him? Yeah, that happened. It took a lot of conversations with individuals for me to forgive them, and for them to forgive me. 

My point: church activities like finding a new pastor that everyone will like and learn from take on a whole life of their own, and it can become difficult to keep God in the process. Even in church. For instance, we as a search committee were so anxious to present a candidate that we ultimately ignored the fact that the congregation overwhelmingly wanted a black pastor. And our not presenting a black candidate could be interpreted as racist, not taking seriously enough this foremost request of the congregation. And the church’s leadership’s actions as a result of their disappointment in our candidate also failed to include the fact that if there’s any place where we can practice openness, trust, active listening, empathy, and compassion it’s within our church community. It’s kind of why we're here. 

So, if you have a thought, share it. If you disagree with someone, start a conversation with someone who can help you understand. If you feel disheartened, gather with community. This is the work. This is when we have to “gird our loins” and work towards a transition built on love and fellowship. We are a church at the crossroads of Service, Worship, Fellowship, and Prayer. These are the four tools that we can use to continue this community by staying open to each other, to God’s will, and to change. In this new period of growth, let’s explore what growth means to us as individuals and as a community. 

Sermon for October 11th, 2020: "The hard, right thing"

About a decade ago, someone published an article in my field of music theory arguing that the composer Igor Stravinsky’s early-period music was not, in fact, organized primarily around the octatonic scale, but rather on a smattering of other more traditional scales, including rotations of the harmonic minor scale. While this may seem innocuous and esoteric, this claim was a swipe at the work of a more-established author who had spent much of his career arguing the exact opposite. What followed was a series of somewhat vicious back-and-forths in the pages of that journal arguing both sides of the case, attacking each other’s methods and knowledge of Igor Stravinsky’s music.

            Academic debates are so juicy because they are so personal and so petty. The great debate of the 90s as to whether key is better determined by a passage’s intervallic content or its pitch content. The vicious conflagration a few years earlier as to whether prolongation was an essential aspect of the concept of “tonality.” These are the stuffs of academic soap operas. Of course, for most of the world, none of this matters. But for a few people, the legitimacy of years of work – a lifetime of work – is at stake. Even if the opposing side has a point, giving up ground means giving up some of the validity and authority you’ve been working so long to acquire.

            The story of the golden calf is one of the most iconic of the Old Testament. It was one of the first Bible stories I remember learning when I was a child. And even then it seemed so perplexing. The Hebrews have been led out of Egypt following a series of miraculous plagues that had been called forth by Moses. They had not only witnessed Moses parting the Red Sea, but had walked through that sea on dry land. Then they watched the water swallow up Pharaoh’s army. Their leader, Moses, literally has conversations with God. And then Moses goes away for a few days and the tribes and their leaders quickly forsake the practices preached by Moses. They build a golden calf as an idol to worship.

Now, a little research reveals that calves and bulls were common deities and idols in the Eastern Mediterranean at the time and could even have been a manifestation of an earlier form of Judaism, in which the God of Israel was associated with the image of a calf or bull. What’s going on here is that the people are sliding back into an older practice at the absence of their leader.

We read this story and find it nearly impossible to empathize with. In the story as told by the scriptures: for the last days, weeks, and months, these people witnessed a steady stream of miracles. Moses was preaching adherence to the one true God, and these people were witnessing the power and actions of that God first hand. The things Moses is teaching are obviously correct. Even if these are new and progressive ideas, they can see their benefits with their own eyes. The evidence is right in front of them. And yet, at the first moment of Moses’s absence, they shrug off those ideas and return to an older practice of idol worship.

            But then I think about academic disputes. I think of how much self-worth people can have tied into concepts that seem so petty and how tenaciously people hold onto ideas that are part of their identity. I then imagine throngs of people who grew up with ideas of gods-as-idols or God as needing to be manifested in an object in order to be worshiped. It would have been obvious to them that when they wanted to worship, they needed an object, and that object should be gold, and it should be a bull… and sure, they’ve heard from Moses that this isn’t what they should be doing, but Moses isn’t here and who is he, after all, to tell us that the ways we’ve been worshiping all our lives are wrong, it’s the way I worshiped as a kid, and it’s how my parents worshiped, and it’s always worked before so LET’S MAKE THAT COW.

            There was a recent flare up in my field that was unlike most academic disputes. A music theorist named Phil Ewell – he works at Hunter College in New York – pointed out music theory’s connections to white supremacy in a lecture at our national conference last year, and then in a subsequent article he published. His logic was that the music we study and the methods and thought-systems we use are infused with the outlooks held by thinkers in 19th and early-20th century Western Europe. That thinking includes notions like a male dominated society, and white supremacy. And it’s not hard to find symptoms of this within my field– greater than 90% of full-time music theorists are white. If you could the musical examples that appear in the most-used music-theory textbooks, only 1.67% of examples are by non-white composers.

            And of course there has been pushback. We can put this pushback into two categories. The first is the “arguing against” camp. Here, you say things like: “Just because a composer or theorist we study held racist beliefs, doesn’t mean their music or scholarship was racist. We are teaching our inherited culture – it’s of course wrong that women and people of color were excluded from Western European classical music, but that’s simply a historical fact – that tradition is our tradition, and it’s a tradition of white men. We can’t take away time from studying the great works of this tradition – the Beethovens and Brahmses (“The Music I Love and I Grew Up With”) – it’s great music, and we’d be doing a disservice by studying it less in order to make room for whatever “diverse” music you might be trying to push into my classroom.”

            The second camp is the inertia camp. And I have to confess, I realize that I find myself in this encampment far too often. Here, you say things like: “I’ve taught this class using these pieces for 20 years, and it just sounds exhausting to have to learn new music let alone learn a new style. I can’t go out and find new music, I’ll just rely on what the textbooks provide me. I don’t have time, I have other priorities, other people will do it, it’s always worked this way… why change.”

            But it’s just so obvious that classical music has a race problem. If we’re only white folks – and mostly white men – only studying music by white men, and only teaching music by white men to our students… that’s a problem. It’s the kind of problem that we need to solve NOW. And it’s the kind of problem that people will look back at 20 years from now and wonder why people were arguing about it. Why were people defending the status quo? Why wasn’t everyone doing something?

            I’m using an example from my corner of academia, but it’s an example in a sea of so many. We can look back at almost all progresses causes with this kind of incredulity. It just seems so impossibly wrong that people were arguing against or lazily indifferent to women’s suffrage a hundred years ago. That enslavement was up for debate and compromise 150 years ago. That the ability of same sex couples to have a family was on ballots 15 years ago. Believing women two years ago. Black Lives Matter seven months ago. Soon it will be climate change, or essential worker’s rights. And at each of these junctures, there exist a plethora of reasons why these causes should be supported, reasons that in retrospect seem so obvious. But people argued against these reasons, often letting their want to keep things the same shield them from seeing rational evidence in front of their faces. And people ignored it. It wasn’t there problem. And the status quo has worked forever, so why change it.

            This is how I make sense of the Israelites desire to make the golden calf. A bunch of folks were falling back into how they had always done it. Some thought the new, progressive teachings of Moses were going too far, even in the face of plenty of evidence that Moses was teaching the literal word of God. And some just didn’t want to think about it. The easy thing to do was to fall back into old habits.

            Adopting progressive causes – causes like curtailing white supremacy – means taking risks. It means doing hard things. It means being willing to work harder than you would under the status quo. It means looking at the evidence you see around you rather than just relying on inherited assumptions. It means discarding arguments like: “because it’s always been this way,” “this is just the way things naturally should be,” or “doing that would take too much time and too many resources.” It’s taking the long view. It’s wondering what people in 20 or 100 years will think.

            Now stories of progressive ideas can have their ups and downs, and just because something is progressive, it doesn’t mean it’s right. The story in Exodus takes a very Old Testament turn in the next several verses, where Moses orders those who were not worshiping the calf to murder those who were. It’s a dark story. Progressive ideas can go too far, and they can become warped.

But I hope this story challenges us to check ourselves when our intuition tells us to stick with the status quo instead of building a better future. To not do the easy wrong thing, but to do the hard, right thing. If you’ve been meaning to donate to a charity but have been putting it off, do that this week. If you’ve been putting off calling a friend who might be going through a hard time, but you’re worried about how awkward it might be, do the hard thing and call them. Try to break yourself of some unhealthy habit. Think twice when a politician tells you that right now everything’s fine, and that people who are advocating for change are just whiney and weak complainers. And when some Moses challenges us to follow a new, better way, don’t ignore the miracles, logic, and beauty of that new way. Walk the hard road.

Amen.

COVID-19 Update

Please listen to all of our sermons for the duration of the COVID-19 Pandemic on our Sunday Service Podcast page here.

Mud Between My Toes

Sermon Delivered January 19th, Gordon Pullan

Refections on Baptism

Sermon Delivered January 12th, 2020, Rob Powell

Sharers in the Promise

Sermon Delivered January 5th, 2020, Gordon Pullan

Things Do Not Change, We Change

Sermon Delivered December 29th, 2019, Gordon Pullan

Christmas Eve Message

Sermons Delivered December 24th, 2019, Rob Powell

Singing Christ Into Birth

Sermon Delivered December 22nd, 2019, Gordon Pullan

Waiting

Sermon Delivered December 15th, 2019, Rob Powell

Guide my Feet

Sermon Delivered December 8th, 2019, Gordon Pullan

Living in the Days of Noah

Sermon Delivered December 1st, 2019, Gordon Pullan

Living Boldly

Sermon Delivered November 17th, 2019: Rob Powell

What Matters

Sermon Delivered November 10th, 2019: Gordon Pullan

Sycamore or Sick of More

Sermon Delivered November 3rd, 2019: Gordon Pullan

Fall Back Into the Spirit Stream

Sermon Delivered October 27th, 2019: Gordon Pullan

The Gift of Wisdom

Sermon Delivered October 20th, 2019: Robert Powell

Audio Block

Double-click here to upload or link to a .mp3. Learn more

Bare, Bear Bare

Sermon Delivered October 13th, 2019: Gordon Pullan

Impossible Dreams

Sermon Delivered October 6th, 2019: Chris White

---

On Nannies, Pigs, The Beatitudes, and the Opportunity Mars Rover

The following sermon was delivered by Chris White at the North Hadley Congregational Church on February 16, 2019.

It’s 1910, London. Two children, Jane and Michael have been cycling through Nannies. Their father thinks it’s because he hasn’t found the right Nanny, but as viewers we’re pretty sure it’s because the children are constantly acting out in an attempt to draw their father’s attention. These attempts are in vain, since the father is a low-level executive at an Edwardian bank who works long and scrupulous hours to keep his family in their comfortable upper-middle class lifestyle on the fashionable Cherry Tree lane. Through some combination of happenstance and magic, they hire a nanny who instills several moral foundations into the children, including to use your money to ease the suffering of the less fortunate, to spend time with those you love, and to embrace the delight and whimsy embedded in the details of the surrounding world. These tenants run headlong into the father’s values in such a way that gets him fired from his job at the bank. However, the father has a change of perspective, embracing the teachings of the nanny; and, through a combination of happenstance and magic, not only gets his job back but secures a promotion.

On first blush, the moral is obvious. Don’t let the quest for wealth and prestige get in the way of what really matters: time with loved ones and stopping to smell the proverbial roses. But, thinking about the story for one moment more blurs its moral. The father’s actually not a workaholic at all. As explicitly stated in the first song, his schedule allows him to spend time with his children every day after the bank closes. Are we supposed to conclude that he should leave his bank before it closes? Or work at a job with fewer hours? Are we all supposed to work at jobs with fewer hours? Certainly, the moral can’t be that we’re all supposed to work minimal hours to spend maximal time with our children, thus crippling the economy? How would we afford comfortable lives for our children, let alone magical nannies?

One spring morning, a little girl named Fern Arable pleads to her father for the life of the runt of a litter of piglets. Her father relents, and Fern names the pig Wilbur. Once Wilbur becomes an adult pig, he’s sold to the girl’s uncle, but Fern still visits her pig-ward quite frequently. In his new locale, Wilbur struggles to adapt, but befriends a spider named Charlotte. As he increasingly becomes a full-grown pig, it becomes increasingly apparent that Wilbur is going to be slaughtered for sale to the butcher. The spider, however, connives a plot to save Wilbur from the slaughterhouse. The next morning, Charlotte’s web reads “Some Pig,” praising Wilbur’s graces. Over the next days and weeks, the spider’s loomed phrases encourage Wilbur’s new owner to enter him into a competition, at which Wilbur wins a prize. The spider –being an insect– dies in the fall, but Wilbur makes sure her eggs are cared for, and looks over them as they hatch and depart the barnyard.

On first blush, the moral is obvious. Have compassion for the less fortunate. Use your talents to help others. But, when you think about it for a couple for moments, it’s not clear what we want our children to take from this story. Is everyone who reads this story to their toddlers trying to foster future vegetarians? Are we trying to say that sacrifice for the greater good is wrong? Surely, farmers –and our whole agrarian economy– would suffer if we saved every malnourished runt, and would suffer worse yet if we lavished every plant, animal, and fungus that caught our affection with years of affection and resources. Our food supply would collapse, all because of some pig. 

Jesus approaches the mountaintop. He tells his the gathered crowd: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets. But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your reward. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”

On first blush, the moral is obvious. Help the poor, don’t flaunt your wealth, speak what you know to be true, and Christianity has rewards for those who don’t find them on earth. But, when you think about it for another couple of moments, it’s just not clear what the moral truly is. What Jesus does not say is that you should actually help the poor. What Jesus does not say is that you should not be wealthy. He does not say that those in power should stick up for the oppressed; he does not advocate giving away your wealth, he does not say that you should feed the hungry. Instead, he says the hungry, poor, and oppressed will have a happy ending. No more detail. Now, of course at other parts of the gospels he says more specific things. Luke 3:11– And he answered them, “Whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none, and whoever has food is to do likewise.” But this is also the Jesus who, when his disciples suggest that instead of him using an expensive perfume, it might be better sold to help them feed the poor (They say: “Why this waste?  This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor” [that’s  Matthew 26:8-9]). To this, Jesus chides them, and encourages the lavish use of this expensive perfume. He says in the following verse, “The poor you will always have with you.”

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” But, “the poor you will always have with you.” The poor are blessed, but –followers of Christ– do not always immediately worry about alleviating their suffering…. After all, there will always be poor people. The moral is just not obvious.

Now, I want to recognize that there are many contradictions in the Bible. But, what’s simply true is that when Jesus is given perhaps the biggest platform of his career he doesn’t advocate for social change. He doesn’t advocate for redistribution of wealth. He doesn’t suggest political reform. He doesn’t even say that we should care about people less happy, less fortunate, or more oppressed than we are. All he says is that it’ll turn out all right in the end for them. 

And it’s not trivial that this is one of the biggest platforms we give Jesus. What’s Jesus’s most famous sermon? The sermon on the mount. When we think of takeaways from the New Testament, we think about John 3:16, and we think about the passages about loving God above all else, and we think about the Beatitudes. One of the most highlighted parts of Jesus’s message doesn’t tell us how to help the poor, meek, and oppressed. It doesn’t advocate for regime change, it doesn’t tell us to redistribute wealth, it doesn’t even explicitly tell us that we should help those in need. It just tells us that the poor, meek, and oppressed will…. eventually, somehow, be fine.

Now, I –as much as anyone– want to believe that Jesus would be pro-Universal health care. I want to believe that he would be pro-immigrants’ rights. I want to believe that he would advocate for a higher minimum wage if not a guaranteed base income. I want to believe that cruel and oppressive governments are anathema to Christianity. I also want Mary Poppins to be an anti-capitalist parable. I want Charlotte’s Web to be about human and animal rights. 

But here’s the thing: they’re not. They’re just stories. They don’t need to tell you what to do. That’s not their job. Their job is to help mold kids into empathetic, sensitive, and idealistic adults– adults who stop and give a dollar to a homeless person in the park and who think critically about the politics of eating meat. Who wonder if guaranteed universal income is the right and proper things to do. Who wonder about how their vote affects their fellow humans. And this is a beautiful and valuable thing. The world is a complicated place, full of situations where it’s actually quite ambiguous what the right thing to do is. This is why ambiguous morals are so important, because they help us approach ambiguous situations– these stories don’t tell us exactly what to do, but they tell us how to think about what to do. 

Don’t we want our children to approach the complex problems of this world with abstract –impractical, contradictory– but idealistic, good, and kind precepts? Don’t we want our children to grow up with “Feed the Birds,” “Some Pig,” and “Blessed are the poor” tugging at their hearts as they make tough, practical, and necessary decisions? 

And as adults we not only benefit from these impractical and contradictory ideals, but we continue to crave them. 15 years ago, the Opportunity Mars Rover began its 90-day mission to gather information about Martian geology. To scientists’ surprise it kept working on day 91, day 92, day 93, and continued to analyze Mars’s surface and beam back its information. And it did so for the last 15 years, lasting more than 5,000 days longer than it had been projected to. This week it finally died, beaming back its last message, “My battery is getting low, and it is getting dark,” thus ending its remarkable mission and its life span. The Internet immediately made this a parable whose moral was about gumption, selfless service, and jobs well done. Of course, if you think about it a moment longer, it doesn’t make sense: Opportunity is just a machine that lasted better in space than its engineers estimated. But I (like, apparently about half the internet)… I cried when I read, “My battery is getting low, and it is getting dark.” I, like so many of us, crave these incongruous and illogical beacons of hope, morality, and goodness.

This is why the Beatitudes are so special. They give us these idealistic gems that become embedded in our conscience and morality. The poor are more blessed than the wealthy. If you experience hardship, you’ll get through it. If you are ridiculed for your beliefs, you’ll be justified one day. Now, practically, we as individuals might use these moral gems to decide upon certain actions, or to support certain social programs, or to vote a particular way on a particular topic. And as Christians, there likely are indeed certain social and political programs that we should probably support– but that’s a topic for another day– and it’s not what the Beatitudes are about. They, like the best children’s stories, lodge the impractical concepts of kindness, charity, mercy, and hope into our hearts and minds, so that we can walk through our messy, practical, adult society with these ideals tugging at our decisions and pulling us toward Christ’s message.

Amen

Singing Christ Into Birth

Sermon Delivered December 22nd, 2019, Gordon Pullan

Waiting

Sermon Delivered December 15th, 2019, Rob Powell

Guide my Feet

Sermon Delivered December 8th, 2019, Gordon Pullan

Living in the Days of Noah

Sermon Delivered December 1st, 2019, Gordon Pullan

Living Boldly

Sermon Delivered November 17th, 2019: Rob Powell

What Matters

Sermon Delivered November 10th, 2019: Gordon Pullan

Sycamore or Sick of More

Sermon Delivered November 3rd, 2019: Gordon Pullan

Fall Back Into the Spirit Stream

Sermon Delivered October 27th, 2019: Gordon Pullan

The Gift of Wisdom

Sermon Delivered October 20th, 2019: Robert Powell

Audio Block

Double-click here to upload or link to a .mp3. Learn more

Bare, Bear Bare

Sermon Delivered October 13th, 2019: Gordon Pullan

Impossible Dreams

Sermon Delivered October 6th, 2019: Chris White

---

On Nannies, Pigs, The Beatitudes, and the Opportunity Mars Rover

The following sermon was delivered by Chris White at the North Hadley Congregational Church on February 16, 2019.

It’s 1910, London. Two children, Jane and Michael have been cycling through Nannies. Their father thinks it’s because he hasn’t found the right Nanny, but as viewers we’re pretty sure it’s because the children are constantly acting out in an attempt to draw their father’s attention. These attempts are in vain, since the father is a low-level executive at an Edwardian bank who works long and scrupulous hours to keep his family in their comfortable upper-middle class lifestyle on the fashionable Cherry Tree lane. Through some combination of happenstance and magic, they hire a nanny who instills several moral foundations into the children, including to use your money to ease the suffering of the less fortunate, to spend time with those you love, and to embrace the delight and whimsy embedded in the details of the surrounding world. These tenants run headlong into the father’s values in such a way that gets him fired from his job at the bank. However, the father has a change of perspective, embracing the teachings of the nanny; and, through a combination of happenstance and magic, not only gets his job back but secures a promotion.

On first blush, the moral is obvious. Don’t let the quest for wealth and prestige get in the way of what really matters: time with loved ones and stopping to smell the proverbial roses. But, thinking about the story for one moment more blurs its moral. The father’s actually not a workaholic at all. As explicitly stated in the first song, his schedule allows him to spend time with his children every day after the bank closes. Are we supposed to conclude that he should leave his bank before it closes? Or work at a job with fewer hours? Are we all supposed to work at jobs with fewer hours? Certainly, the moral can’t be that we’re all supposed to work minimal hours to spend maximal time with our children, thus crippling the economy? How would we afford comfortable lives for our children, let alone magical nannies?

One spring morning, a little girl named Fern Arable pleads to her father for the life of the runt of a litter of piglets. Her father relents, and Fern names the pig Wilbur. Once Wilbur becomes an adult pig, he’s sold to the girl’s uncle, but Fern still visits her pig-ward quite frequently. In his new locale, Wilbur struggles to adapt, but befriends a spider named Charlotte. As he increasingly becomes a full-grown pig, it becomes increasingly apparent that Wilbur is going to be slaughtered for sale to the butcher. The spider, however, connives a plot to save Wilbur from the slaughterhouse. The next morning, Charlotte’s web reads “Some Pig,” praising Wilbur’s graces. Over the next days and weeks, the spider’s loomed phrases encourage Wilbur’s new owner to enter him into a competition, at which Wilbur wins a prize. The spider –being an insect– dies in the fall, but Wilbur makes sure her eggs are cared for, and looks over them as they hatch and depart the barnyard.

On first blush, the moral is obvious. Have compassion for the less fortunate. Use your talents to help others. But, when you think about it for a couple for moments, it’s not clear what we want our children to take from this story. Is everyone who reads this story to their toddlers trying to foster future vegetarians? Are we trying to say that sacrifice for the greater good is wrong? Surely, farmers –and our whole agrarian economy– would suffer if we saved every malnourished runt, and would suffer worse yet if we lavished every plant, animal, and fungus that caught our affection with years of affection and resources. Our food supply would collapse, all because of some pig. 

Jesus approaches the mountaintop. He tells his the gathered crowd: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets. But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your reward. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”

On first blush, the moral is obvious. Help the poor, don’t flaunt your wealth, speak what you know to be true, and Christianity has rewards for those who don’t find them on earth. But, when you think about it for another couple of moments, it’s just not clear what the moral truly is. What Jesus does not say is that you should actually help the poor. What Jesus does not say is that you should not be wealthy. He does not say that those in power should stick up for the oppressed; he does not advocate giving away your wealth, he does not say that you should feed the hungry. Instead, he says the hungry, poor, and oppressed will have a happy ending. No more detail. Now, of course at other parts of the gospels he says more specific things. Luke 3:11– And he answered them, “Whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none, and whoever has food is to do likewise.” But this is also the Jesus who, when his disciples suggest that instead of him using an expensive perfume, it might be better sold to help them feed the poor (They say: “Why this waste?  This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor” [that’s  Matthew 26:8-9]). To this, Jesus chides them, and encourages the lavish use of this expensive perfume. He says in the following verse, “The poor you will always have with you.”

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” But, “the poor you will always have with you.” The poor are blessed, but –followers of Christ– do not always immediately worry about alleviating their suffering…. After all, there will always be poor people. The moral is just not obvious.

Now, I want to recognize that there are many contradictions in the Bible. But, what’s simply true is that when Jesus is given perhaps the biggest platform of his career he doesn’t advocate for social change. He doesn’t advocate for redistribution of wealth. He doesn’t suggest political reform. He doesn’t even say that we should care about people less happy, less fortunate, or more oppressed than we are. All he says is that it’ll turn out all right in the end for them. 

And it’s not trivial that this is one of the biggest platforms we give Jesus. What’s Jesus’s most famous sermon? The sermon on the mount. When we think of takeaways from the New Testament, we think about John 3:16, and we think about the passages about loving God above all else, and we think about the Beatitudes. One of the most highlighted parts of Jesus’s message doesn’t tell us how to help the poor, meek, and oppressed. It doesn’t advocate for regime change, it doesn’t tell us to redistribute wealth, it doesn’t even explicitly tell us that we should help those in need. It just tells us that the poor, meek, and oppressed will…. eventually, somehow, be fine.

Now, I –as much as anyone– want to believe that Jesus would be pro-Universal health care. I want to believe that he would be pro-immigrants’ rights. I want to believe that he would advocate for a higher minimum wage if not a guaranteed base income. I want to believe that cruel and oppressive governments are anathema to Christianity. I also want Mary Poppins to be an anti-capitalist parable. I want Charlotte’s Web to be about human and animal rights. 

But here’s the thing: they’re not. They’re just stories. They don’t need to tell you what to do. That’s not their job. Their job is to help mold kids into empathetic, sensitive, and idealistic adults– adults who stop and give a dollar to a homeless person in the park and who think critically about the politics of eating meat. Who wonder if guaranteed universal income is the right and proper things to do. Who wonder about how their vote affects their fellow humans. And this is a beautiful and valuable thing. The world is a complicated place, full of situations where it’s actually quite ambiguous what the right thing to do is. This is why ambiguous morals are so important, because they help us approach ambiguous situations– these stories don’t tell us exactly what to do, but they tell us how to think about what to do. 

Don’t we want our children to approach the complex problems of this world with abstract –impractical, contradictory– but idealistic, good, and kind precepts? Don’t we want our children to grow up with “Feed the Birds,” “Some Pig,” and “Blessed are the poor” tugging at their hearts as they make tough, practical, and necessary decisions? 

And as adults we not only benefit from these impractical and contradictory ideals, but we continue to crave them. 15 years ago, the Opportunity Mars Rover began its 90-day mission to gather information about Martian geology. To scientists’ surprise it kept working on day 91, day 92, day 93, and continued to analyze Mars’s surface and beam back its information. And it did so for the last 15 years, lasting more than 5,000 days longer than it had been projected to. This week it finally died, beaming back its last message, “My battery is getting low, and it is getting dark,” thus ending its remarkable mission and its life span. The Internet immediately made this a parable whose moral was about gumption, selfless service, and jobs well done. Of course, if you think about it a moment longer, it doesn’t make sense: Opportunity is just a machine that lasted better in space than its engineers estimated. But I (like, apparently about half the internet)… I cried when I read, “My battery is getting low, and it is getting dark.” I, like so many of us, crave these incongruous and illogical beacons of hope, morality, and goodness.

This is why the Beatitudes are so special. They give us these idealistic gems that become embedded in our conscience and morality. The poor are more blessed than the wealthy. If you experience hardship, you’ll get through it. If you are ridiculed for your beliefs, you’ll be justified one day. Now, practically, we as individuals might use these moral gems to decide upon certain actions, or to support certain social programs, or to vote a particular way on a particular topic. And as Christians, there likely are indeed certain social and political programs that we should probably support– but that’s a topic for another day– and it’s not what the Beatitudes are about. They, like the best children’s stories, lodge the impractical concepts of kindness, charity, mercy, and hope into our hearts and minds, so that we can walk through our messy, practical, adult society with these ideals tugging at our decisions and pulling us toward Christ’s message.

Amen

The Gleaners' Union

Sermon delivered by Gordon Pullan at the North Hadley Congregational, United Church of Christ, July 21, 2019

Sermon text Amos 8:1-12 and Leviticus 19:9-10

You just heard a couple of interesting scriptures. In Amos 8:1-12 God shows Amos a basket of summer fruit and asks him to tell him what it is. When Amos speaks the obvious—it’s a basket of summer fruit--God then rails against those who trample on the needy, and bring ruin to the poor of the land, The LORD has sworn surely, I will never forget any of their deeds.

In Leviticus 19:9-10 we’ve got that same God telling his people not to harvest all the way to the edge of their fields, but rather to leave those rows of produce for the poor and the foreigner, the stranger.

I don’t believe that you can understand the first scripture—the one where god is so angry, angry about abundance and inequity—written somewhere around 750 BC--without understanding the second. Primarily because the second one from Leviticus was written some years earlier, In the era sometime shortly after Moses—1400 BC or thereabouts.

By the way, there is also something you should know about the older of the books--Leviticus. It is more aptly described by its early rabbinic name, “the Priest’s manual” and like any good and well established Priest’s manual it has rules that just won’t stop—rules about what is clean and what is unclean, and rules about ritual purification that raises the common to the holy, but more importantly, rules of ethical behavior that inform those rituals and creates a cultural definition for moral behavior.

What I really find interesting about this charge from the Priest’s Manual is not just the fact that it instructs the children of Israel to build their personal boarders with edible plants, rather than brick walls, but that the command--to leave the harvest at the edges of the field and the fallen fruit on the ground—for the poor and the foreigner—is a refrain to the Holy word, not just a stanza. It is to be repeated, to be memorized, to be held up as a moral imperative to the entire nation. Hear the word of God;

Deuteronomy 24:19-21

"When you reap your harvest in your field and have forgotten a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be for the alien, for the orphan, and for the widow, in order that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. "When you beat your olive tree, you shall not go over the boughs again; it shall be for the alien, for the orphan, and for the widow. "When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, you shall not go over it again; it shall be for the alien, for the orphan, and for the widow.

Leviticus 23:22

Verse Concepts

'When you reap the harvest of your land, moreover, you shall not reap to the very corners of your field nor gather the gleaning of your harvest; you are to leave them for the needy and the alien. I am the LORD your God.'"

In total there are at least 19 scriptural references to gleaning with the majority of those in the Hebrew bible, including the story of Ruth being sent out into the gleaning fields to find her second husband, Boaz.

The whole concept of gleaning is about abundance and sharing. There is enough for the foreigner and the poor and the widow and the orphan. We are blessed, our baskets overflow, and why would we not want to share this abundance? The laws of the universe, Karma, God, will all bless us.

Remember what I was saying, how these earlier scriptures inform how we read that passage from Amos. When God shows Amos—and by proxy shows us-- a basket of summer fruit that is ripe and overflowing and asks Amos/us what it is, God knows full-well that we know the shared moral obligation, the obligation that raises us from the unclean to the clean. He is pointing to the fact that what we have is not our own, but it is a gift from God.

Like the children of Israel in the year 750 BC, we too are brought to task simply by that vision of a basket full of summer fruit. In this valley we know what that basket of fruit means. So, if we trample on the needy, if we bring ruin to the poor—whether intentionally or unintentionally, whether directly or indirectly, then Karma is going to get us. Our summer baskets will be replaced by famine—spiritual or physical. We will have lost our moral authority. It happens. It is happening today.

~~~

A few interesting facts:

American’s waste about 150,000 tons of food a day—nearly a pound per person—about 40% of the food that we produce is actually thrown away—grocery produce that isn’t perfect, leftovers and overstocks from your fridge, food from processing plants that get dumped in order to keep prices higher, food thrown out because of date labels that are unrelated to food safety.

~~~

There is a film entitled, Just Eat it that I am planning to bring to the church this fall. It is a movie about a couple who decides that they will live and eat for six months strictly by gleaning—in modern culture, we can translate that as dumpster diving. Can you imagine. –checking out the Stop and Shop dumpster, after hours, lurking around “Real Pickles” in greenfield after a day of food packing. The movie chronicles the absolute abundance and wastefulness that is ours. But rather than making the abundance available to those in need, we simply throw it away—like someone given ten talents who throws away four of them.

One of the most prized finds for the couple over the course of their six months, was a dumpster—you know, the giant kind they use outside of construction sites—full of perfectly good humus, still sealed in their plastic tubs, nowhere near the stamped expiration date. They ate humus for weeks until they were sick of humus. When they dug deeper to find out why it had been thrown away, they discovered that it was discarded because of a glut in the market, it was more profitable for the company to throw this batch away in order to keep prices higher. We will make the ephah small and the shekel great.

~~~

It makes you question, what happens to the food at the salad bar at the end of the day. What happens to week-old bread when they take it off the shelf, and apples that aren’t perfectly round. What happens to the pies at the local bakery that aren’t sold? What happens to the buffet at the local restaurant at the end of the day or the pizza slices at the pizza parlor, or the three heads of lettuce you bought on sale for buy one, get two free only to have two rot in your crisper? What happens to the 13 million kids in this country who are considered to live in food insecure homes? That is 18 percent of all children. What happens to our neighbors in poverty, in Guatemala, in El Salvador, in Honduras?

I don’t have all the answers to this conundrum of our abundance. I’m not standing up here saying you should give money to anything. My message is much simpler than that—cheaper-- involves less packaging, is amazingly old school Yankee at its core. The answer begins with creating a conscience around this so that it becomes a moral imperative, one that breaks down barriers and finds ways that all may share in the abundance, a union of Gleaners.

The answer comes in these simple words.

When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord, your God.

Translate that into our language. Join the union of gleaners. Do the will of God.

A Mother's Day Sermon

Sermon delivered by Rob Powell at the North Hadley Congregational, United Church of Christ, September 2, 2019

Mother’s day offers the opportunity to celebrate and honor the mothers and motherly people in our lives, a time to reflect with gratitude on the ways that we have been mothered by our mothers and by others in our lives. And, a time to honor the ways that we mother ourselves and others. For some, Mother’s day brings with it sadness, the sadness of a mother lost or the sadness of a fraught relationship and history of hurt with a mother.

When I think about my mom and think about how to hone in on the essence of her mothering, I tend to gravitate towards a single topic- my curfew. Now, before I tell you all about this, let me be clear- I have a great mom. But, a certain truth about great moms is that to be a great mom you also, sometimes, have to be a pretty annoying mom. Boundaries and rules and expectations aren’t much fun in the short term, and so mothering and parenting, can at times not make a child very happy.

When I was in high school and driving, I had a curfew. It wasn’t a hard and fast time, but rather something that was negotiated based on the activity. But usually, it landed somewhere around 11:00. This is pretty standard for kids, but what always made my mom stand apart from the parent’s of my friends was her refusal to go to bed until I got home. So, if I was running late or intentionally trying to pull one over on my parents, I wouldn’t just get in trouble for missing my curfew but I’d also be saddled with the burden of making my weary mother stay awake until I returned. Now, this was really pretty effective. One or two times of looking my mom in her sleepy eyes after returning home late, left me committed to getting home on time.

Now this is all well and good when you’re a teenager, but imagine that you are a 28 year old, home for the holidays, and there’s not so much a curfew anymore, but your mom will still wait up for you to get home- it is essentially a curfew. As an adult, when I’d go home to visit I would know that my mom would stay awake until I returned and so I was always inclined to get home sooner than my friends. It’s in these later years that my mom’s commitment to waiting up really started driving me mad. I’d say “mom, go to bed! I’m fine” and she’d stay up each night that I was out, waiting for me to return.

It really drove me crazy.

But, there’s a thing that happens as you grow older and reflect on the quirks and annoyances of your parents. For the fortunate, those quirks and annoyances start to look more like building blocks of the person you became. For me, I think about what it meant to know someone was always waiting up for me. In what ways did that truth get woven into the person that I became? What would my life and myself look like if that wasn’t true? That I don’t really know- because it was true for me. If I was away, there was someone waiting on me. I was expected somewhere.

I can remember asking my mom- “mom, why do you do this? None of my friends have to deal with this.” And her response, a response heard by so many children so many times, was “well, they aren’t my kids”. How many of us have heard that at some point or another? At the root of it, that I was meant to adhere to the expectations of my parents, and it didn’t much matter what other people were doing.

In looking to our Psalm today, I’m struck in a new way by the language. Particularly the language of “he makes me lie down in green pastures”. I suppose it is reflecting today on mothers and mothering, but I got a little bit of a chuckle out of that language because it sounds a lot like what we do with our little one and what was done with me when I was a little one. You see, our son doesn’t always totally understand that he is tired. He feels something- frantic, upset, irritable- but he’s not really aware of the solution. But, Chris and I are, oh boy are we. We know that that little baby needs a nap and so...we make him lie down. We make him rest. He doesn’t always like it, but we know that he needs it. We know when he is thirsty and so we make sure he drinks his milk. We know when he is scared so we make sure he feels comfort. I think this looks a lot like the way I was mothered, the way many of us were, and the way many want to be. A firm hand leading us and even making us rest, eat, and feel peace. Maybe sometimes when we don’t necessarily know that’s what we need or what we want.

And as a Christian people, we are called to listen to God in the same way that a child is called to listen to their parent. We are given guidance, some wanted some not, and asked to heed it with the belief that it is in our best interest. We see this play out a bit in our reading from John.

I have to be honest, I struggled with this reading. In this world we live in, full or polarization and us vs them mentalities, I cringed when I read it, wanting little do with anything that creates a who’s in and who’s out kind of framework. But, in the light of mother’s day and with my own reflections, I started to think about this in a different way.

I think about that common refrain of parenting, when I would do something I wasn’t supposed to and then I’d say “but so-and-so did it!” and my mom or dad would says “but i told YOU not to do it”. It’s not often a judgement on the other kid, it’s a judgement on me for not listening.

It seems like when we started talking about us and them a lot of the focus ends up on the “them”. What are they doing? How are they wrong? But in reading this scripture today something new stands out, not the question of who doesn’t hear but rather a call to those who do hear. We are the people God is talking to, we needn’t waste time figuring out who God isn’t talking to, but rather think about what it means that God is talking to us, God is calling us, God is promising us. What do we do with that. My mom never much cared what the other kids were doing, she cared about what I was doing. I think it is similar for the church.

I think a perfect place to start on this Mother’s day is to consider how we are mothered as children of God and how we mother a hurting world. As we are made to lay down to rest, how do we offer rest to a weary people? As we are made to eat, how do we offer food to the hungry? As we are given peace and comfort, how do we extend peace and comfort in moments of fear and sorrow?

For God is talking to us, it is us who are expected to do the work of God here and now, may we be so bold as to heed that call.

In thinking about my mom waiting up for me all those nights for all those years, I’m now touched by it. Let’s be clear, if I was visiting right now and she was waiting up for me to come home, I’d also be annoyed. But, in the big scheme of life, I’m grateful to have lived a life where there was always a light on for me. Sometimes, I look at our child and I feel such deep gratitude that he too will always have a light left on for him (in his case, it might be a metaphorical light because Chris and both like to sleep- but a light nonetheless).

Every Sunday we are all here and in that I believe that we are answering that call- we are coming home to a place where the light has been left on for us, but also in being here, week after week, year after year, we are leaving a light on for all the people ready to come home. As God keeps a light on for us, we respond by keeping a light on for a hurting and weary world. In that way we are mothered and mothering as the children of God. May it always be so. Amen.