We live in a fearful age.  “Precarious” describes the situation of many folk these days.   Many of us think the country is headed in the wrong direction, with a sociopathological narcisist at the helm.  Heroid incarnate.

Destitution is everywhere.  On the streets you can smell it, the oder of urine and feces wafts from the sidewalk encampments of the dispossed.  This season many families are food insecure.

Pregnant immigrant women are held in detention even though it’s against federal policy.  ICE dosen’t care.  “Screw the courts,” Stephen Miller and his crew retort, or words to that effect which are inappropriate from the pulpit.  The present day Madonna now pregnant in a holding facility, lies shackled to her bed.  Terrified, she remained tied to her bed as she miscarried.[1]  Outrageous! 

Undocumented mothers are separated from their children – the descending gloom of our national disgrace.  A palpable fear seeps in through such misery and torture.  A fear not of one but of many.  The fear of those judged only to have the wrong skin color.  How dark the night in today’s Bethelhem.

And on Christmas Day someone will win a Powerball jackpot of $1.7 billion.  In the midst of so much want, that amount of money for just one person is obscene.  Who needs $1.7 BILLION?  That’s right, folks billion with a capital B.  How dark this night!

Heroid’s raging – his campaign of retribution and vengeance ever presses against this season of expectation and hope.  Yet it is precisely into such a bleak winter that an unexpected Gloria in Excelsis breaks through.  “Be ye not afraid.”

“Unto you.  Unto you.”  That is the ever present joy that yet seeps into this night.  “Be ye not afraid.”

This is the world of those shepherds tending their flocks on that pitch dark and chilly night.  They, like ninetynine percent their fellow inhabitants, lived on the margins.  Cold, malnourished, at the whim of robbers, wolves and greedy taxmen.

As Luke tells the story of that wretched, freezing evening, how a most astounding, disrupting event burst through the skies above.  And for this, we’ve just gotta have the King James version.

“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.  And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.  And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.  For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.  And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,

Glory to God in the highest,

And on earth peace, good will toward all.”[2]

What joyous words – “Fear not.“  Do Not Be Afraid

Calm, soothing words.  The sort of comfort a parent would give a child who has been awakened by a terrifying nightmare.  “It’s okay.  It’s just a bad dream.  Don’t be afraid.  The same comfort our brused world seeks today.

Mary’s child is Good News to a fearful planet.  Do not be afraid.  In the birth of this tiny baby is the Good News of Salvation.  Hope restored, In this message we are gently held.  Yes, in a tiny, squalling baby born in ICE detention is also the promise of ages.  His mother shackled to a bed without pain relief.  Unseen, the multitude of the heavenly host attend that lowly birth.  Gloria in Excelsis Deo the chorus.

On Christmas Day our Luther James will be exactly three months old.  A sign of God’s favor.  Best present ever!  My Christmas prayer is a supplication for the other precious children of this world that they might have the same care, the same promise of our little Luther.  I know this presently is not the case. Yet each newborn is a miraculus blessing, no matter how rude and impoverished the circumstances of their birth.

For this prayer to become sacramental reality — our political action, our open wallets, our ready credit cards, our raised voices, our gumption will be the tangible expression:  In Gaza, in Sudan.  In the Congo and in Ukraine – where wealthy nations make real their concern and care.  Where we make real and visible our concern, our hope — our supplication becomes sacramental reality.  Actual care delivered on the ground.  Follow the money derect to Doctors Without Borders, to UNICEF, to Episcopal Relief and Development.  Follow the money.  Gloria in Excelsis.  Yes, we are cooperators with the Spirit of Christmas for these others.  Santa — if his visage means anything at all in our commercialized day.

As God brought forth Blessing and Salvation by way of an illiterate, impoverished pesant woman in Bethlehem, who knows that miracle lies hidden in any of the millions of children born in these war-torn lands, in impoverished America.  With God, this Christmas, all is possible, for we of the Jesus Movement, God willing — we are the hands and feet of this Christmas promise.  Gloria in Excelsis.

I close with a poem by John Core, “This Night the Music.”

“This night the music of the spheres is somehow disarranged;
with dissonant surprise one star un-tunes the sky, set heaven ajar;
the universe is changed.

…

“The shepherd’s narrow world grows vast as glorias begin;
while God’s own voice, wide as the sky, consricts itself into a cry
behind a crowded inn. Gloria. Gloria. Gloria – Goria in excelsis Deo.  And with Tiny Tim I say, “God bless us everyone.”  And a Merry Christmas to all.   Amen. 

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[1] Karla Gachet, “Pregnant immigrants held for months in detention despite rules against it,” Los Angeles Times, December 3, 2025.

[2] Luke 1:8-14, KJV.

December 24, 2025

Christmas Eve

Isaiah 9:2-7; Psalm 96
Titus 2:11-14; Gospel: Luke 2:1-14

“Do Not be Afraid”

What’s in a name?  As parents about to be at the rather advanced age of 40 and 41 we felt especially blessed that a first child was on the way.  We had been married 17 years when we found out we were expecting.  I’m sure by then our parents had long given up hope of being grandparents.

Of course, the question of names began to surface.  After all the years of waiting, we felt like Abraham and Sarah, startled by that outrageous prophecy at their tent.  So, outraged, Sarah laughed.  They named the boy Yitzhak, laughter in Hebrew.

Feeling especially blessed, like Abraham and Sarah, Jonathan seemed appropriate.  In Hebrew, Gift of God.  Jai also had a favorite student in her class, Jonathan.  That was also the name of my grandfather on my father’s side, though I never knew him because he had died when my father was 12 or so.  He was the last of some 13 children, his first sibling being born during the Civil War.

Christopher came along in a year-and-a-half.  I remember asking Jai if she thought Jonathan should have a brother or sister.  “Oh, I’ve been meaning to tell you,” was her reply.  Christopher in Greek means Christ bearer.  I had suggested Wren as a middle name, after Christopher Wren the architect of St. Paul’s in London.  “I’m not having my child named after a bird,” Jai protested.  So, he became Chrisopher James after some favorite folks bearing that name, including his godfather.  Yes, in him on the day of his arrival was the spark of Christ.  I still remember our pediatrician Clint slapping him on his back as he held him by the heel, shouting, “Breathe, damn it, breathe.”  With relief I heard the first loud squall.

Names in biblical times were considered significant for they indicated a person’s inner disposition.  In Genesis one of the first tasks of Adam is to name the animals -each name reflecting their quality of usefulness to humans.  Names indicated the life trajectory, the quality of one’s contribution to the greater good.  Or a disastrous and bad outcome of one’s end.

And Jesus?  Here is the story from Matthew’s gospel that told of his name.

When Mary was found to be with child, “Her husband joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace (actually she probably would have been stoned to death by the villagers) planned to dismiss her quietly.  But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him to in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.  She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus (Yashua in Aramac) for he will save his people from their sins.’”

He will save his people.  And do we ever need help.  But this word, “salvation,” seems so remote and obscure, so out of date to us moderns.  Yet, there is today a great longing for purpose, for meaning, for connection, for wholeness.  Our kids are experiencing their life crisis in their teen years, not in their forties.  Suicide among our youth is at an all-time high.  It is “blessing” we yearn for, to know that our lives amidst the toil and tedium that they are significant, that we are beloved, that there is a purpose to it all.  And some joy in the mix.

Jesus will go about the countryside; his healing and message are all to pronounce a kin-dom in which all are blessed.  All are loved by Abba, his father.  His parables and stories, his daily actions are an affirmation of blessedness.  A blessedness that includes all.  Includes that women of ill repute at the well in Samaria.  The woman of ill repute who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and hair.  Beloved and blessed.  Includes tax collectors.  You remember the story of the hated tax collector Zacchaeus?  Beloved!  Jesus yearned to include that rich young man with many possessions who cannot bear the cost of discipleship.  As he walks away, sorrowful, and Jesus is also sorrowful for he also loved that young man.  Yes, beloved!  All these exchanges are transforming events, transcendent events of blessing.  All are beloved.

And this Salvation includes all, down through the ages, in whose hearts he has taken up residence – the hearts where he has been born anew in members of the Jesus Movement.  Stalwart members of the Jesus Movement, who, down the ages have been agents of wholeness and blessedness.  Bringing in word and deed the Good News that all are beloved by God.  Sometimes at the cost of their own lives. 

These are the saints of God; yes, the ones you can meet at tea time, on trains or even in committee meetings.  Let me tell you of one of these I have known.  As she could no longer drive, I would come by and pick her up for our endowment committee meetings.  Her name is Phyllis Colclough.  A blessing incarnate.

One evening when I stopped by to pick her up, Phyllis shared this story shortly after the events of 9-11.  She had noticed that for several weeks after those horrific scenes of September that she hadn’t seen her Iranian neighbor who lived a couple of houses down the street.  Finally, under the prompting of the Spirit, Phyllis gathered together her courage and walked down to her neighbor’s house and rang the bell. 

After some period of time the woman finally showed up at the door. It opened just a crack.  About all Phyllis could see was an eye.  Finally, the woman related to Phyllis that she had been afraid to go out after the two planes had destroyed the World Trade Towers.  People might blame her.  Phyllis was the first person she had actually seen for several weeks, as fear of her neighbors had kept her locked in her house.  She was now running our of food but was afraid to go to the market.

Phyllis told the woman, “Honey, let’s go over to my house and let’s have lunch.”  Timidly, her neighbor took her hand and they had lunch. Over lunch, the woman softened and they enjoyed a wonderful afternoon together.  A moment of transcendent companionship.  Blessed neighbor to blessed neighbor.  Salvation!

This simple act of hospitality allowed a terribly frightened woman to understand her Christian neighbor was a friend, not an enemy, or someone indifferent to her plight.  As Phyllis’s neighbor gave voice to her fears over lunch, they began to subside.  This elementary act of kindness was blessedness incarnate.  Release from fear and estrangement.  Blessedness.  Salvation!

Often it is in such small acts of kindness, of service to others that Salvation is manifested.  St. Augustine long ago put it this way about these small deeds of love.  “Faithfulness in the little things is a big thing.”  This was a “big thing.”  As Phyllis related the story, I could see in her retelling of this incident that she had been blessed as well.  I was certainly blessed by Phyllis’s story as a tear welled up in my eye.

Salvation in that brief moment of compassion.  Phylls affirmed the blessedness of her Iranian neighbor.  The Spirit which prompts to such active compassion is the Salvation Jesus sends to his followers in conjunction with his Resurrection in John’s gospel – known as John’s Pentecost.  Active Salvation let loose in creation.

This week at St. Francis, we had our fall pruning workshop led by Tom Spellman, master gardener, who has been at this for years.  Unfortunately, the Aquinas students who work in St. Francis Garden of Hope couldn’t come this week.  Pesky finals and then Christmas vacation.

But we had a fantastic turnout of St. Francis folks.  Yes, many old, somewhat decrepit and tired, but we were there.  With persimmon pudding with lemon sauce as a lure, we had a good showing of our congregation, some 10 of us.

All this to ensure that the pruned trees will in the spring produce an abundant crop of peaches, plumbs, nectarines, apples for the food bank we do with St. John’s. 

Folks, this is what Salvation looks like.  This is what Blessedness looks like.  It’s allowing Christ into our date books plus a bit of hard work on behalf of our neighbors in need.   In need, indeed.  Today, nationally, some fifty percent of us live paycheck to paycheck.  Forty percent of us live in poverty or near poverty.  A $500 unexpected expense could cause family financial disaster.  These, “the least of these,” are precious in God’s sight.  Our Food Bank makes real the Gospel claim of Blessedness.  A sacrament – an outward sign of an inner spiritual reality.

It’s going out of one’s way to be in service to others.  It’s sweat and aching muscles, some thirst in the hot sun.  But this crew of some 13 folks got most of the trees prunned; with the remaining five left for Miguel to finish.  That is a living picture of Salvation.  In his name we bring that Blessedness.

Most of the time it’s hot, boring, grubby work, not glamorous for sure – all to affirm that the people who come on Wednesdays to St. John’s Food Bank truly understand that they are blessed.  Even out in our orchard, loppers in hand – we in turn also experience transcendent moments of Blessedness.  Salvation!

I believe that when anyone new shows up on our doorstep here at church, it is because of a prompting of the Spirit in their life.  Something is missing.  Something is askew.  Something is hurting.   There is an inner longing.  They come to the one place that their heart tells them where there ought to be an understanding, a listening compassionate ear.  And however maimed they are, they come as a blessing to us.  As I’m wont to say, “We do church with whoever shows up.”  Our task is to affirm that in our welcome newcomers know they are beloved, that they are a blessing to us. On any given Sunday morning. 

O Come, O come to Bethlehem and see, see what awaits.  The Mystery of ages.  He shall be called Yashua, Jesus, for he will save his people.  That Blessedness, that Salvation, is passed down through eons by all who have signed up for the Jesus Movement.  It’s in our DNA.  This is the Good News that you and I are beloved and precious in the sight of God and so is all creation.  Treasure in earthen vessels – each of us.  Our lives are grounded in something greater than ourselves – Blessedness.  And this is the gift that awaits in the manger of your heart, in the manger of my heart.  O Come, O Come to Bethlehem and see.  Amen.

December 21, 2025

Fourth Sunday in Advent

Isaiah 7:10-18; Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18
Romans 1:1-7; Gospel: Matthew 1:18-25

“All Changed into Blessing”

It is ever into a world torn asunder that faith is birthed.  Isaiah speaks to a desolate people, brutally slaughtered, hauled off to exile.  Sing us a song of Zion their captors taunted. “How can we sing the Lord’s song in this God-forsaken place,” they sobbed.”  No, they sat down by the waters of Babylon and wept.

We, like them live in a time of exile.  Death and destruction reign.  You know the places:  Gaza and the West Bank, Somalia, Sudan, Ukraine, the Congo, Russia, off the shores of Venezuela.  Gazing upon the ruination of our nation, its laws, its customs, its civility.  It has all been turned to an ash heap – reduced to a garish ballroom that dwarfs the People’s House – reduced to the lawless murder of hapless folks in small boats on the high seas in the Caribbean – reduced to our complicity in settler murder of Palestinians in Gaza and on the West Bank — reduced to a pastiche of our former constitutional order.  All by the most ignorant man to have ever held the office of president, a doddering old fool who can barely stay awake during his own meetings.  Attended by a corrupt, greedy and imbecilic cabal that is the laughing stock of much of the civilized world.  Yes!  Exile from all we have known and revered.  Exile from the America of youthful ideal.  Exile – strangers in our own land.

It Is into such distraught and barren times that Magnificat, the Song of Mary breaks through.  As I’ve mentioned, in Luke’s telling of the episode Mary is not some coddled, mild young thing who meekly accepts this angelic outrageous greeting.  It’s as if she takes one step back and tells that rude interloper, if this is the way it’s gonna be, hold my beer and watch this.  She then cuts loose with one of the most radical prophecies in all of scripture. 

Those on the top will soon find themselves on the bottom.  Those who have grabbed up all the goodies, will walk away with empty hands.  The powerful are confronted and confounded.  No garish, monster ballroom for them.  It will be the lame and the halt who will joyfully do-si-do to fiddle, banjo and mandolin out in the Rose Garden – the People’s Garden.

Yes, “He has showed with his arm;
        he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat,
        and hath exalted the humble and meek.”

I just love the language of the King James version for this canticle.

And finally…
“He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel,
        as he promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed for ever.”

Mary, maybe a 12 or 14-year-old girl, the property of a father with the prerogative to marry her off to whomever and whatever age.  Yet, in Luke’s, telling no shrinking violet she.  No!  Brimful with prophetic righteousness.

And she will persevere through the worst that life can deal out, eventually weeping at the foot of a tree of torture as her son succumbs to a most agonizing death.  Holy Resilience, indeed.

Christmas each year is killed not by those radical liberals who want to banish it, but by saccharine sentimentality.  Its message of Good News is NOT for the timid or the lazy, the willfully ignorant.

It’s about God feeding the people with the nourishment that builds the soul, true manna.  Much more about manna than Macy’s.  Yeah, manna like the veggies of St. Francis Garden of Hope.  The sort of stuff that takes hard work.

It is into the desolate and rough places the actuality of hope breaks through.  That’s the Baptizer’s, that’s Mary’s message.  Hope, perceived through Holy Resilience.  Yes, Lord, we stand ready to be “holpened.”  NOW!

“Remarking on the occasion of Christmas, Thomas Merton once said, ‘Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him, Christ comes uninvited.’  So it is with the true message of Advent. The very life of God takes flesh among us.  It is a scandal, an offense, a disruption to this world.”[1]

Mary is a part of that story of disruption to the very end, from the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Wedding at Cana, the Crucifixion and Resurrection appearances.  It is difficult to imagine a mother bearing more sorrow than Mary, yet she is a most resilient of women.  In the end, the disciple John is entrusted with Mary’s care, Jesus’ last wish from the cross.

Holy Resilience is a gift of the Spirit.  It is what keeps the community of Faith true to it’s calling.  It is our North Star. It’s easy for good intentions to dissipate under the pressures of modern tedium and annoyance.  Let me tell you how.

The other day at Cardenas Market, I completely lost it in the checkout line.  Some woman ahead of me was cashing in vouchers or something.  She must have 20 or 30 or so of them, and for each one the clerk had to go through a big rigmarole with the register.

It was taking forever.  We waited minutes and more minutes.  Customers behind me began moving to the adjacent line.  It seemed so inconsiderate that this woman should be wasting some 20 minutes of everybody’s time – no, change that – of MY time.  I said a few snide things, huffed and puffed.  Finally, we were checked out.  I felt rather sheepish when, afterward, my home health aide Ileen told me that all those receipts and whatever were for a homeless project.

How long, O Lord, must we wait for peace to settle into our hearts, into MY heart?   My resilience had completely evaporated in those few moments behind this woman doing a righteous deed for some destitute homeless folks.

Pastor Heidi Neumark, one of my favorites, tells of a girl’s birthday party around the time of Advent in New York City.[2]

By the time she arrived with her two children the festivities were already under way.  When they entered the house, they were confronted by Tweety Birds, scores of them everywhere.  On the napkins, on balloons, plates, the cake, and center stage, a big Tweety Bird piñata.  Heidi had taken her children because the mother, Marta, was their favorite baby-sitter.  It was the first birthday party for Marta’s baby and it was to be the baby’s baptism.

The children were crowding around the piñata, eager to take a whack at it.  Eager to bash it to pieces and grab as much candy as they could hold in their small hands.

Marta’s one brother was absent, serving time in jail and no one had seen her other brother, 16-year-old Christian.  Va y viene, he comes and goes.

In the middle of the chaos, Christian walks in, baggy red pants and a red sweatshirt.  Hanging out of a back pocket was a red bandana.  Christian had joined the Bloods and he was flashing their colors.

This family had for some time teetered on the edge.  Their mother was strung out on drugs, and the three children had been raised by an elderly grandmother who could barely keep up with them.

When Christian’s own mother died of AIDS, he was 15.  “He sat slouched with his face in his hands, crying uncontrollably through the entire funeral, Heidi recalls.”  It was after that he had joined the Bloods.

Seeing Pastor Heidi, he comes over, gives her a hug and a kiss.  In her arms he, always a slender boy, seemed so frail.  That is why, now, he is most likely armed.  “Young, dangerous and endangered,” she remembers thinking.[3]

It is soon time to leave.  On the way home, Heidi and her children pass two groups of teenagers.  They are walking towards a fight that’s about to explode between the two.  She pulls her children in tighter and quickly walks around the kids.  She doesn’t know the neighborhood and these are not kids she knows.  Heidi and her children hurry to their car.

She notes, once they are safely home and the children in their beds, that tomorrow will be the first Sunday of Advent.  After putting out the Advent decorations – calendars, the wreath of candles, the lion and lamb and a bowl of stars – each one bearing a prayer for the person named on it (Yes, Marta and her family are inscribed on one of those stars) – Heidi takes a few minutes to herself to reflect on the reading for that Sunday from Isaiah 40.

“Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places plain.”

In the stillness of the night, she wonders when this might be.  In the daily grind of violence of her large city, God seems so absent.  For people like Marta and her family, where are the signs of that promise?

Yet, in the resilience of Mary, in the resilience of all mothers like Marta, that the promise finds fulfillment.  The testimony of the Mothers of the Desaparecidos in Chile and Argentine, their resilience each week in the central squares of those nations – their silent resilience is the sacramental sign of this hidden God’s presence.  Their sorrow is the manger in which the Christ Child is born.   Holy Resilience his swaddling. Where is this Christ born?  His birth is in those places where we are weak and vulnerable.  Those places where we are not so full of ourselves — those places, where in the silence of the night, unbidden prayer breaks through:  O Come, O Come Emannuel.  Enter into our brokenness.  Come, O Advent Promise, and shine forth, burning brightly as once did that Epiphany Star, pointing the way. Enlightening our coming days, Marta’s coming days, and the coming days of a world that has sorely lost its way.  Come quickly.  Come, quickly, Lord Jesus.  This we pray.  Amen

---

[1] Jim Wallis, “The Low Estate of His Handmaiden,” Sojourners, December, 1976.

[2] Heidi Neumark, God’s Absence in Advent, Christian Century December 5, 2001.

[3] Ibid.

December 14, 2025

Third Sunday in Advent

Isaiah 35:1-10 Psalm 146:4-9
The Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55); Gospel: Matthew 11:2-11

As a young boy I was immersed in our family’s history.  Both sides.  From my father’s side, it was West Virginia and the Forneys who had been on that land since 1804.  There’s where the family graveyard sits, on a small portion of those180 acres.  Grandpa Jonathan Forney taught at Bethany College there in the Northern Panhandle.  There’s also, until it was recently replaced, a concrete bridge over Buffalo Creek that he built, or engineered.  Dad never told me what he taught, but I’m guessing it wasn’t Shakespeare.

The thing Dad did stress was that Grandpa was a hard-driving man with definite expectations of my dad, an only child.  Not strong on affection but stern on discipline.  That was part of my heritage from my father’s side.

On my mother’s side we were a mix of the Gross and Howe families.  Grandpa and Grandma Gross came from Iowa to California.  I wouldn’t say with nothing as Grandpa had a degree from Julliard School of Music.  He found a job as a letter carrier in Lodi where they’d settled.  Over the years he worked his way up ladder and at the apex of his career was the postmaster of Lodi, California.  His vocal talents were in great demand throughout the area and he sang at weddings, funerals, anniversaries, birthdays.  He had a great sense of civic pride, nurtured by his membership in the Odd Fellows organization.

Grandma’s side gave us two famous Howe relatives, General William Howe, who I told my 8^th grade classes, won the American Revolution by allowing General George Washington slip through his fingers three times.

Most exemplary in that lineage was Julia Ward Howe.  Yes, the author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”  More notably, she authored the first Mother’s Day Proclamation in 1870.  Read it – it’s radical.  She was a suffragist and an abolitionist.  From her we get our activist roots.  It’s in our DNA to raise hell against injustice.

Altogether a marvelous lineage.  And what did I make of it?  Growing up, absolutely nothing.  I was so lost in my teen and early adult years, that all that heritage amounted to nothing.  I was as useless as an old stump.

Isaish, proclaims that even from old stumps can come amazing new growth.

“A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.  The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.”

Out of a useless old stump, fire of new life shall come.  Yes, even the useless old stump my life had become in those early years. 

That fire was the appearance of John the Baptist, a voice crying in the wilderness to rouse up life in the House of Israel.  Breathing fire, he minced no words concerning the corrupt leaders of the people.  “You brood of vipers!  Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?  Bear fruit worthy of repentance.”

What preacher ever began Sunday’s sermon screaming at the congregation, “You brood of vipers…?”  And kept his or her job?

It’s a parallel to John the Revelator chastising some of the do-nothing churches of his day. Yes, right there in chapter 3, he zeroes on the congregation at Laodicea, “I know your works, you are neither cold nor hot…so I will spit you out of my mouth.”  A heritage gone for naught.  An old dried stump of the Jesus Movement.

Truth is, those congregations that have lost their way through numbing complacency, probably won’t be spit out.  They’ll just be ignored as irrelevant.  Irreverent and as useless as a dead old stump. 

And we who might take our ease in Zion, no sense of mission, no little light shining, might dwindle away to nothing.  Much of that pitiful journey is the story of Mainline Protestantism.

But, sometimes, just sometimes we’re jolted out of our lethargy.  A John the Baptizer comes along breathing fire on the dry stubble.  A flame bursts forth and the Church is transformed into the Glory of God. 

That’s the story of our patron saint, Francis of Assisi.  He heard the voice of God calling him forth, “Build my church.” 

That call of the Baptizer echoes down the ages, and fired-up leadership emerges, lay and clergy.  Even a few bishops to boot.

It was a sermon that fired me up.  Paul Tillich’s sermon, “You are Accepted.”  It was a jolt from beyond the blue.  Acceptance, welcome, is the first mission of the church.  Acceptance, welcome, is the sacramental presence of the Grace of God.

Our St. Francis Garden of Hope is the visible sign of that as we are now providing huge amounts of fresh produce for those our economy has shut out.  That produce and the canned goods distributed at St. John’s Food Bank, is the open door of acceptance.  And though we might on the outside look like a withered old stump, the folks there are splendid new shoots.  Sometimes shoots of fire as in the shrub Moses spied in his wilderness.

There’s a story of an old stump in England that is instructive.   Liddy Barlow tells the story of some vandals whose criminal actions were the source of great sorrow and anger in a small English village.

“Nestled into Hadrian’s Wall at the northern edge of England, the elegant Sycamore Gap tree rose from a dip between two hills. Its dramatic setting made it one of the most photographed trees in the country, featured in calendars and guidebooks and postcards. Day hikers posed in front of the tree for selfies; couples said their vows beneath its branches; Kevin Costner and Morgan Freeman strolled around it in Robin Hood Prince of Thieves.”[1]

On a stormy night on September vandals took chainsaws to that tree and sawed it down, leaving only a stump.  In the morning not only were many in that village mourning the tree, but the entire nation was gripped in sorrow and anger at the destruction of that iconic tree.

What had taken a century or so to grow was demolished in only a matter of minutes.  Thousands poured out to mourn the loss.  Such a treasure turned into sawdust and wood for what?  A hobby, furniture, knickknacks?  Only a stump left behind.

That following spring the Northumberland National Park Authority placed an amazing sign at the roped-off stump.  “This tree stump is still alive,” followed by the hope, “If we leave it alone it might sprout new growth.”  Passersby were warned to heed the admonition to respect the barrier.

And wonder of wonders that spring there were seven new shoots that had come forth.

Isaiah speaks to a nation that had a battle axe taken to it as families were split, killed and hauled into captivity.  A nation as dried up and desiccated as an old stump.  But out of the Torah heritage of what had once been a flourishing tree with strong limbs for birds to roost in, would come new life.  Green shoots.  As captivating as a burning bush in the middle of nowhere.

One would be sent and on him would rest the “spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.”

John the Baptizer would proclaim his advent, breathing fire and thunder at those who had led the people of Israel astray.  Offering an opportunity for repentance at the River Jordan.

And that old stump continues to produce wonderous growth, inviting all who would read and heed the summons.  Yes, fire from an old stump – that was John’s summons.

And that fire yet lives on in the hearts of all who have signed up to follow that Prince of Peace, that Mighty Counselor, God with us.

I saw it in a very small way in the grocery checkout line as I waited with Ileen, my home health aide.  We were behind a woman in one of those motorized shopping carts who was having great difficulty in getting her purchases out of the basket.  Without saying a word, Ileen went around in front of her and asked if she might help.  That customer was so grateful, it made my day.

But behind us was an elderly gentleman also in a motorized cart and there was Ileen in a flash helping him.  In just a few minutes of kindness, all of us were chatting together like old friends.  What an Advent delight.  Ileen is the embodiment of her Catholic tradition with a strong social conscience.

A delightful green shoot from that tradition.  A blazing spark of delight in what could have been a dead stump of a mind-numbing wait in a long line, listening to insipid Christmas elevator music.

President Obama was right when he counseled Americans on how to get through the deadness of a nation gone amiss in lies and repression.  Be kind.  Kindness is important, he advised.  It will get us through.  Its pedigree goes right back to the Prince of Peace.  Ileen is most kind – an Advent harbinger.

Amy Frykholm in her interview with a genuine woman of peace brings to her reader the Straight Glory right out of Isaiah’s promise.  Leymah Gbowee shares the amazing tale of an African woman caught up in the terror of Liberia under the dictatorship of the warlord Charles Taylor.  And the price the women of that nation paid.[2]

During that savage reign of horror, Leymah was a terrified 18-year-old girl.  As a result of the fighting between rebel forces led by Charles Taylor and the government, she and many others had taken refuge in a nearby Lutheran church compound, St. Peter’s in Monrovia.

Government forces, looking for food, attacked the church.  After raping and killing the woman who held the keys to the church they proceeded to massacre most of those sheltering there.  With knives, machetes, machine guns, they slaughtered more than 500 men, women and children.

Because Leymah’s uncle had lied to the soldiers, telling them that their family was of the same tribe as the soldiers, they had been released.

Traumatized by that incident, Leymah fell into a desolute life, entering into a relationship with a married man who was abusive.  Giving birth to four children.  She eventually moved back home to her family and reunited with that congregation at St. Peter’s.  There the pastor recognized her unique gifts and her intelligence.  He soon had her reading M.L. King, Gandhi and the Mennonite peace activist, John Howard Yoder.

One night she heard the summons, a call as distinct and clear as any ever heard by a prophet.  In the midst of that turmoil, sleeping in a church office, she heard the ask. “Gather the women to pray for peace.”[3]

Some women overheard her sharing that call but she didn’t see herself as a religious leader. 

“She was a single mother, never married, who had a complicated relationship with her church. ‘It was like hearing the voice of God, yes, but . . . that wasn’t possible,’ she writes in her memoir. ‘I drank too much. I fornicated! I was sleeping with a man who wasn’t my husband, who in fact was still legally married to someone else. If God was going to speak to someone in Liberia, it wouldn’t be me.’”[4] 

A gentle shoot out of desiccated remains of a nation torn by violence, rape and famine.  The few women who had overheard her sharing the vision of that night with a co-worker told her, “We need to pray.”

Some twenty women began to pray once a week, and this small green shoot became a national movement, “Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace.”  It eventually was comprised of thousands, not just Christians, but Muslims, Jews and others – crossing all tribal, religious, educational levels, rural and urban.

Out of this Spiritual fire was born a new Liberia from the dead stump of a ruined nation.  Under the soul force of these woman, warring parties were brought to heel and arms were laid down.

Out of the stump of Jesse, God continues to breathe new life into the People of the Covenant, the people of the Jesus Movement.  And when that roll is called up yonder, I want my name to be there along with the wonderful folks of St. John’s and St. Francis in glorious array assembled. 

This godly heritage, every bit as much as the familial backgrounds of each of us, yet bears the possibility of new life.  If we but attend to and heed the promptings of the Advent Promise.  Amen.

---

[1] Liddy Barlow, “More Life to Come,” Christian Century, December 6, 2025.

[2] Amy Frykholm, “To tell the truth: Nobel winner Leymah Gbowee,” Christian Century, November 16, 2011.

[3] Op cit.

[4] Op cit.

Farmer Miguel with some of Wednesday’s harvest, 12-3-25
A sermon you can see and taste!

December 7, 2025

Second Sunday in Advent

Isaiah 11:1-10; Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19
2^nd Reading: Romans 15:4-13; Gospel: Matthew 3:1-12

“Fire From an Old Stump”

“Johnny, don’t go beyond the curb,” my mother would admonish me when I asked to go outside.  And if the ball goes out into the street, let someone go get it for you.  All instructions to keep me safe.

Later there would be other instructions and advice.  Like that from my father when I slacked on my homework or came home with terrible grades.  I was told that I needed to get an education so I didn’t have to rely on my back to make a living. 

My dad, growing up in West Virginia coal country, had seen the ravages of that industry on the men who moiled for that coal underground.  Men whose bodies were spent before they were forty.  Men with black lung disease slowly wasting away.  Families consumed by poverty and despair as union rights were violated by the owners. 

And some of that instruction sunk in.  Even though my grades and diligence did not substantially improve, his admonition idled at the back of my thoughts.  I knew he was right.  His instruction had imbedded itself in my consciousness.  And after I was married with a family, I finally had my nose to the grindstone.

Does anyone know how many “A”s it takes to redeem a 1.2 GPA.  Yeah, I was a real academic screwup.  I knew my mind was much better than my back.

Isaiah proclaims similar words of wisdom and enlightenment in today’s Advent reading.

“In the days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains and shall be raised above the hills…Many peoples shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord…that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.’   For out of Zion shall go forth instruction and the word of the lord from Jerusalem.”

Instruction and wisdom, indeed!  Torah Righteousness will find a new expression, a new embodiment.  And his name shall be Mighty Counselor, Prince of Peace, Emmanuel, God with us.”

Matthew alerts us, that that day which no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, may happen in a flash.  That day when the roll is called up yonder.  Scientists tell us that that day is certain.  Our sun will massively explode consuming all the neighboring planets.  The universe will slowly expand into lifeless nothingness.  All this apocalypse billions of years away.  Here is one doctrine supported by science.  Trust the science; but more, trust the Lord’s goodness to embrace us all in that end.

Yet in a sense, it is every day.  Opportunities to enter the kin-dom of God present themselves, are revealed through the agency of the Holy Spirit.  Let us each prepare a humble manger of our hearts that it might be born in us.  The Spirit of Christmas Promise never sleeps – 24/7 she’s on duty seeking to rummage through our dreams and imaginations, bearing anew the Christ Child.

And how gentle is often his instruction, his guidance.  Yes, sometimes he has to overturn the tables of our obstinacy and blindness.  All to our own good.  Don’t rush heedlessly into the traffic of evil this guidance compels.

Sometimes, it’s a word I resist.  I’ve been reading Fr. Greg Boyle’s new book, Cherished Belonging,[1] a work revealing the gentleness of Christ on the streets of Los Angeles.

When someone at a retreat of his order was praised as “THAT is a good Jesuit,”[2] inwardly he instinctively rebelled.  If there are “good” Jesuits then it is implied that there are “bad” Jesuits.  It was the Christ within him crying out in that inner moment of protest.  He states that he has never known a “bad” Jesuit.  “I’ve met many broken Jesuits: traumatized, despondent; on the spectrum; wounded; stuck in shame, mental illness and crippling inferiority.  I’ve known Jesuits who are strangers to themselves.  But I’ve never met a bad one.  Please don’t call me a good one.”[3]

The gift that Mary carries in her womb would instruct the world in such gentle, patient understanding.  It’s called Grace.  A sister of the Torah Righteousness that would instruct the life of her child to be born.

Now, I’m often so resistant to that gentle word of admonishment, that gentle word of Love.  Out of the damage of my childhood, I want to nourish my hate for one who has wronged me, wronged our nation.

Perhaps, maybe this president is not evil as I would like to judge, but he is a very damaged person.  And out of that damage he inflicts damage on the rest of us.  Damage that in itself is evil.

Just as Jesus did not see a “loose” woman at the well in Samaria that day, he saw a precious child of God who had become lost in the trauma she had endured as a girl.  Lost in the trauma of assault by similarly damaged men.  Self-absorbed men having no regard for anyone but themselves.

It is the gift of Grace that would await us this Advent season, the gift of allowing us to get beyond ourselves, the gift of self-transcendence that allows us to enter a glorious Kin-dom of God’s full creation.

The Christmas gift for which we prepare is a spiritual reality clothed in flesh and foliage, other people, and yes, Ellen, the animals. Crickets and bees.  Trees and lettuce, baobab trees and seaweed.  St. Francis being a branch of that revelation.

We await further instruction each day to the splendid gift of this wonderful world.  That is the Advent summons to our hearts and minds.

This instruction we would imbibe, would “read, learn, mark and inwardly digest.”  It is the open door to a new way of living that Mary’s child will reveal.

It’s not for sissies, for in our days evil deeds are done by very deranged people.  People whose actions we must resist with all the faith that is within us.  Yes, these times call for “Holy Resistance.”

The pure, unadulterated Grace that awaits to be born in our lives is liberation from all that separates us from our true selves, men and women fully alive in the Glory of God.  God has put a big, shiny bow on that in the work of Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Innocence Project. 

That Christ living in his work is a direct spiritual inheritance, root and branch, from his mother who lived it daily.  The Advent gift we expectantly await in these divided, traumatized times.

Bryan Stevenson’s mother lived the beatitude of reconciliation.  She was an Advent Beatitude, blessed to the core.

Blessedness restores broken relationships and enables life to go on.  Bryan Stevenson tells of a lesson in saying you’re sorry his mother taught him that has stuck with him over the years.  Sometimes the most embarrassing lessons are the ones that stick.

Blessed are those who say they’re sorry.  Blessed are those who go the extra mile, those who seek to understand with the heart. 

Bryan Stevenson’s mother is one tough lady, the sort of disciple Jesus will call. The sort he needs.  You have to be tough sometimes to be a parent these days.  She, and any parent on God’s green earth, knows, parenting is tough stuff – not at all for sissies or the unformed.  There’s a reason sixteen-year-olds shouldn’t be having children.

For those who don’t know Bryan Stevenson, he is the Black lawyer who works on death penalty cases for indigent inmates awaiting execution in Montgomery, Alabama.  As he listened to one inmate about to be led into the execution chamber who was having great difficulty in talking with Brian due to a severe stutter, Bryan had a flashback to an old memory from his childhood. 

Bryan and some of his friends had been making fun of another boy with a speech impediment.  As Bryan and his friends were laughing at this boy, he saw his mother looking at him with an expression he’d never seen before.  Bryan continues his story in his book, Just Mercy:

It was a mix of horror, anger, and shame, all focused on me.  I stopped my laughing instantly.  I’d always felt adored by my mom, so I was unnerved when she called me over.

When I got to her, she was very angry with me.  “What are you doing?”

What? I didn’t do…

Don’t you ever laugh at someone because they can’t get their words out right.  Don’t you ever do that!”

“I’m sorry.”  I was devastated to be reprimanded by my mom so harshly.  “Mom, I didn’t mean to do anything wrong.”

“You should know better, Bryan.”

“I’m sorry. I thought…”

“I don’t want to hear it, Bryan.  There is no excuse, and I’m very disappointed in you.  Now, I want you to go back over there and tell that little boy that you’re sorry.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Then I want you to give that little boy a hug.”

“Huh?”

“Then I want you to tell him that you love him.”  I looked up at her and, to my horror, saw that she was dead serious.  I had reacted as apologetically as I possibly could, but this was way too much.

“Mom, I can’t go over and tell that boy I love him.  People will—”

She gave me that look again.  I somberly turned around and returned to my group of friends.  They had obviously seen my mother’s scolding; I could tell because they were all staring at me.  I went up to the little boy who had struggled to speak.

“Look, man, I’m sorry.”

I was genuinely apologetic for laughing and even more deeply regretful of the situation I had put myself in.  I looked over at my mother who was still staring at me.  I lunged at the boy to give him a very awkward hug.  I think I startled him by grabbing him like that, but when he realized that I was trying to hug him, his body relaxed and he hugged me back.

My friends looked at me oddly as I spoke.

“Uh…also, uh…I love you!”  I tried to say it as insincerely as I could get away with and half-smiled as I spoke.  I was still hugging the boy, so he couldn’t see the disingenuous look on my youthful face.

It made me feel less weird to smile like it was a joke.  But then the boy hugged me tighter and whispered in my ear.  He spoke flawlessly, without a stutter and without hesitation.

“I love you, too.”  There was such tenderness and earnestness in his voice, and just like that, I thought I would start crying.[4]

That day Bryan learned compassion.  Now, that’s a BLESSED moment!

That is the glorious, new way of living that awaits us each under the Christmas tree, or my friend Bob’s Hannukah bush.

“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and ransom us from a world gone awry, from ourselves gone awry.  Reveal a greater Glory that awaits.  With expectant hearts we stand by.  This Advent we await with eagerness to be instructed in such Love.  Amen.

---

[1] Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2024).

[2] Op. cit., 42.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, (New York, NY, Random House, 2000), p. 286,287.

November 30, 2025

First Sunday in Advent

Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalm 122;
2^nd Reading: Romans 13:11-14; Gospel: Matthew 24:36-44

“Instruction Shall Go Forth”

At a student conference at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, I first encountered a mature, muscular understanding of the Christian faith I had received from Sunday school.  The Rev. Joseph Wesley Matthews had been holding forth for several days on an understanding of the faith that led to intentional living, cruciform living for the world.

The energy level of those days was unbelievable.  Methodist students from all over California had assembled for that week.  And the air was electric with possibility, with hope.  I remember on one break, several of us male students and their pastors had gathered around a piano singing “For All the Saints.”  The bond of that male camaraderie was nothing like anything I had experienced in the church.  Yes, “Through gates of pearl streams in the countless host.”  Indeed, a taste of heavenly bliss.

As we broke for lunch, over the PA loudspeaker, boomed an urgent announcement, “Jim Donaldson, this is your eschatological moment!”    Oh oh.

Eschatological — of final things.  A moment of being called to account.  Dealing with final judgement.  Yes, we’d absorbed a lot of theological jargon in those few days.

But in a sense, that conference was an eschatological turning point, days of decision, for many of us.  More than one that week began a journey leading to the ordained ministry.  We were, in a way high on a conversion experience – a decision for a life of intentionality.  I can say I’m here in the church because of that week in Stockton.

The prophet Malachi proclaims such an eschatological moment in the life of the people Israel.  “See the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evil doers will be stubble, the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.”

Out of this moment of crisis shall come a sprig of hope.  “But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.”

One of my favorite hymns, “Once to Every Man and Nation,” speaks to such moments of decision, eschatological moments when our entire life is summoned before us.  “Comes a moment to decide…for the good or evil side.”

While the theology might now be somewhat questionable and the imagery sexist, the truth of this hymn is that in the life of a person and nation, there are critical moments.  Eschatological moments when it’s all on the line.  As the old union song asks, “Which Side Are You On?”

America presently faces such a moment.  As more and more of the Epstein files come to light, we now have three of Jeffrey Epstein emails attesting that Donald Trump knew all about the underaged girls being raped and trafficked by him and Maxwell.  In fact, one avers that Trump had been alone with one of those girls in Epstein’s house for several hours.  What was going on?  I doubt he was helping her with her math homework.  Certainly not a paper on morality!

In this critical moment of decision, who will we be as a people?  Will we join with the MAGA cult to sweep this all under the rug?  Ignore those brave women now coming out to testify to the horrors of their ordeal? 

Amazingly, maybe we will.  The House of Representatives has been away on vacation for seven weeks, in part to avoid seating a new representative who had pledged to sign a discharge petition to force a vote on releasing the entire Epstein files.  Yes, hiding in order to protect child rapists.  And depriving children of their nutritional benefits only to protect these rapists.  Depriving one in eight Americans who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to protect these traffickers of girls?   And a tawdry president attempting to cover it all up.  Yes, what WAS he doing alone in that room for several hours with that underage girl?

Once to this nation can’t come soon enough the moment to decide.  November, 2026 awaits our judgement of it all.  Judgement of this corrupt administration and of all who have by their obfuscation and silence have countenanced this criminal sex trafficking ring.

Oh, and just why might Ghislane Maxwell now be ensconced in a country-club prison with room service?  Of course, it wouldn’t have anything to do with her silence, would it?  Or a presidential pardon? 

This is America’s eschatological moment.  We stand before the bar of history.  Whose side are we on?  The day is coming to decide.

The protectors of the world’s climate are now gathering in Belém, Brazil over these next few weeks for COP30.  COP30 stands for the 30^th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.  That’s a mouthful, but all stands for our collective effort to combat global warming.

Needless to say, the United States is absent, having pulled out of the Paris Accords under this anti-science administration.  Yeah, “Drill, baby, drill” – “Dig, baby, dig.”  What could possibly go wrong?

Well, plenty.  Sarah Palin may have suggested that we don’t need all this “sciency stuff,” but what you don’t know can actually kill you, and the planet.

The Paris Accords, due to the temporizing position of the Obama administration, watered down a critical goal – to keep global warming at or under 1.5 degrees Celsius increase – an increase 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.

Beyond that, we approach or exceed critical “tipping points,” beyond which there is no return.  Climate disaster becomes a run-away freight train barreling through the coming centuries to the planet becoming a crispy critter.

Those pesky climate scientists warn us that we have already exceeded that goal and are on the way to a 2-degree Celsius increase – some even thinking that enough warming has already been stored in our oceans to take us to a 3-degree Celsius increase in warming.

The root cause driving all this, at the very bottom, is a predatory capitalist system demanding, “More, more, more.”   As the economics professor Richard Parker said, “Only a fool or an economist would believe in the possibility of infinite growth in a finite system.”  Our Mother Earth has its limits, and we’re exceeding them.

At a three degrees Celsius increase, what is the future?  The Amazon, due to the shift in the jet stream, looses its rainfall, becoming as arid as the Gobi Desert.  All gone.  The great Amazon River with its piranha and fresh water porpoises.  howler monkeys, spider monkeys and jaguars – all gone.  Statuesque mahogany trees, Brazil nut trees, and the immense Kapok tree.  And did I mention the cacao tree, yes, your Hershey’s chocolate bar gone to extinction.  All the shifting sands of an Oklahoma Dust Bowl.  And what about my coffee?  Huh? – now, this is getting serious.[1]

And worst, all that carbon storage the Amazon provided.  That jungle is truly the lungs of the planet.  Our world is becoming a runaway freight train headed to oblivion as tipping point after tipping point is passed.

In the days of flood, drought, tornado, and wildfire comes the moment to decide.  Our planet’s eschatological moment.  Will we opt for a livable future or an unknown hellscape?  Poor Luther James, we have dropped a very heavy load on his shoulders.

Luke’s gospel warns that those standing for what is right will be hauled before the authorities.  Before ICE and the machinery of government weaponized against our citizens.  We must be ready to give an account for ourselves who believe in Torah Righteousness and Gospel Goodness.   In this contest, “you will gain your souls.”

I believe the evidence is in — that Malachi’s promise, Luke’s promise is worthy of our faith.  “But for you who revere my name the sun of Righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.”  And power our future.  This last November the American people rejected MAGA extremism and the starvation of our children as the cutoff of SNAP benefits was used to punish our most vulnerable.  We will reject sexual predation of the most vulnerable.  And Global Weirding.

This administration may not be present at the COP 30 conference, but our Governor Newsom has led a large delegation to place a marker down, that America will accept its responsibilities.[2]  And, without the Trumpy folks present this time, just maybe this time we will accept a realistic goal for action.  No more aspirational, pie-in-the-sky “hopium.”  The delusional thinking of the past is a narcotic the planet can no longer afford.  It is our eschatological moment to decide.  The day is coming.

Bill McKibben, in his new book, Here Comes the Sun,[3] lays out the realistic possibility of a living future for our Mother Earth.  We have it in our capacity to amend our ways.  Much damage has been done, irreversible damage.  But we can yet adopt to something like a 2-degree Celsius increase.

“In the US, something like 42 percent of the energy we use comes down to how we heat our air and water, cook our food, dry our clothes and drive our cars.  That is to say, almost half of the emissions are the result of decisions we make around the proverbial kitchen table…a big part of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was designed to push those decisions toward the clean and efficient appliances I’ve been describing” – heat pumps, induction stoves, bikes, electric vehicles. 

Just ditching the gas stove can be done for an induction burner at $60.00 to $100.  Of course, a full induction stove will cost around $2000 and you will probably need new cookware.  But all this is possible. 

In that legislation, the IRA, approximately a half trillion dollars was allocated to help America adapt.  Until it was canceled under this administration of anti-science know nothings.  It is up to us to chose the future we want.  The tools are at hand.  Yes, the day is coming – a day when we either burn the place down, as with the fires of last year, or we “cool it,” as the kids would say.  The day is coming.  Our moment to decide.

Momentum is building for solutions.  Time magazine in its November 10th issue, featured a large number of activists, scientists, and others on the front lines working for solutions, and sounding the alarm – yes, that a five-alarm fire is in the making.  Our climate crisis is finally getting front-and-center attention necessary to grab collective attention.[4]

And I believe the American people will choose wisely.  As my friend Vern was wont to say, “Timing is everything.”  The day IS coming.

I close with my favorite quote from James Baldwin on our collective responsibility, our pledge to one another, from his essay, “Nothing Personal.”

Listen to James Baldwin in this essay, he admonishes:

“For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; The earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us.  The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”[5] 

Through the power of the Holy Spirit, might we pray for the strength and wisdom to keep the Christ Light burning brightly now and, in the days to come, that we might not be found wanting of any good grace.  Let us commend the faith that is in us.  All to the “Glory of God and our neighbor’s good.”  Amen.

---

[1] Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Washington, D.C., National Geographic, 2008), 140-143.

[2] Melody Gutierrez, “Climate Gives Newsom a World Stage,” Los Angeles Times, November 13, 2025

[3] Bill McKibben, Here Comes the Sun (New York: Norton, 2025).

[4] “Climate: The 100 Most Influential Leaders Driving Climate Action, Time Magazine, November 10, 2025.

[5] James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 393.

November 9, 2025

Pentecost 23, Proper 28

Malachi 4:1-2a; Psalm 98;
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19

 
“The Day is Coming”

I remember that as my father got older and began to decline, he would sometimes ask me that I thought happened to us after death.  While he was not a church-going person, he had grown up in the cradle of what we now know as the Disciples of Christ denomination.  Originally known as the Christian Church, and before that, named after their founder Thomas Campbell, as the Campbellites. 

This is a rather austere form of the Jesus Movement.  Baptism is valid only by full immersion.  There is little to no use in speculative theology or the creeds.  Their stance?  “Where the Bible speaks, we speak; where the Bible is silent, we are silent.”

Our family farm, outside of Bethany, is just down the street from where Thomas’ son began enlarging the family home to accommodate those coming to study.  The first meeting house still stands, right across the highway from the Forney house in Bethany, West Virginia.

While my father had since rejected his mother’s austere, literal approach to the Bible and their pious keeping of the Sabbath, the roots of that background lurked deep in his soul.  His mother, Grandma Bertha’s version of the religion was very, very strict – though not so much when it came to charity; she hoarded everything.   I remember as a fifth grader, when she was living with us in Long Beach, she offered me a dollar to read the Bible.  It was so boring, all the begats and begats – one generation leading to another, that after a while, I offered to give her back her dollar.  Her version of the faith was all works righteousness.  Her God was a punishing scorekeeper.  One had to earn their way past the pearly gates and St. Peter’s scrutiny.   Grandma Bertha’s personality did not commend the faith either.  She was a complaining, embittered, rigid person with nothing much good to say about anyone.

She was convinced that no woman was good enough for her son, my father.  All the time she lived with us she only referred to my mom as “That Woman.”

Even as a young person, I knew that her version of the faith wouldn’t get me anywhere worth going.  Especially, after death.

Jesus, in our scripture lesson today, is confronted by a group of lawyers who set out to ridicule him, show he’s a fraud.  Some lawyers will do that, you know.  This group does not believe in any afterlife.  So, they pose a most perplexing problem to ridicule Jesus and his after-life ideas about a Kingdom.

I can hear his detractors now – the same scoffers of religion today.

So, how high up is heaven?  The Russian Youri Gegarian went up there in a spaceship, looked around and didn’t see anything, certainly not God.  Yucka yucka, yuck.

And, wise teacher, what are people going to eat up there?  Who’s gonna to be the bracero to pick the veggies?  Who will brew the beer?  You know, Fr. John’s not going if there’s no beer, or rhubarb.

Will there be sex?  Is it the 70 virgins we’re promised?

Is there homework?  No more homework, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks.  Yea!  And what about baseball?  Will St. Peter umpire?

Who’s going to clear the tables after this feast in the sky?  And do the dishes?  Now they’re rolling around the ground in fts of laughter.  Can’t catch their breath.

What will people do?  Just sing Alleluia every day, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday singing Alleluia?  Forever and ever, world without end?  They’ll be bored out of their skulls.

The cynics, who have everything and know the value of nothing will be having a field day at Jesus expense.

For the “cultured despisers,” the skeptical in this modern era, much of religion is considered fluff, of no account.  At worst, a delusion and laughing matter. And face it, some claims of the faith are highly dubious and utterly laughable at worst.  Did the sun really stand still so Joshua could finish a slaughter on the battlefield?[1]  And if same sex relations are an abomination punishable by death, so is eating shellfish.  Should everyone eating clams be also stoned to death?  Oh, yeah, then there was that relationship between David and Jonathan, which might have been problematical.

And when one considers how the Christian faith has been misused to promote toxic masculinity, promote wars, promote the worst sexist, racist and rightwing nationalist ideologies – not only is it risible, it’s downright dangerous.  (As an aside, I say thanks be to God for our first woman Archbishop of Canterbury!).

Just as pernicious, ideas of heaven and hell are used to excuse and make us overlook the injustices of this world.  The political realist would say that all that pious heaven-and-hell talk is a sedative, an opioid answer to the criminal avarice right under our eyes – the grift of do-nothing political hacks raking in billions.

As Dr. King said that all that talk about golden slippers, long white robes and such is fine, but I’m more interested in God’s people having a decent pair of shoes and a shirt on their back down here.  Golden streets are fine, but what folks need down here is some change in their pockets, something to get a square meal and pay the rent.

Dr. King had no use for preachers who just focused on the afterlife and “pie in the sky” in the face of the poverty and misery of Jim Crow brutality.  A lifetime of suffering endured by Black Americans would not be compensated by such rationalizations and pablum.  What God demanded was folks actively working in this world to promote justice, dignity and community.

So here come these religious know-it-alls out to ridicule what they don’t understand, the Torah faith of inclusive community and right relations.

If a man is married and dies without children, according to the law his brother is to take the widow as wife so his brother would have, in a fashion, an inheritance.  And just suppose, just suppose that that man dies, and she has to marry the next brother, and he dies…so on and so forth until at the end she has been married to seven of those brothers?

By this time the crowd is amused and many laughing up their sleeves.

So, then she dies, maybe of exhaustion.  In the afterlife whose wife would she be?  What is she going to do if there’s in fact a resurrection?

People edged closer, eager to hear how he’s going to handle this one.  They winked at one another and shoved an elbow into a neighbor’s ribs.  “This is gonna be good.  What’s he going to say to this?”

Jesus will have none of this foolishness.  God is not to be mocked.

Jesus turns the tables on them.  Whatever the afterlife might be, it won’t be like here on earth.  People won’t be married there.  Whatever happens after death will be nothing at all, absolutely nothing at all like here.  And as no one has returned to tell us about it, anything else is speculation.  A distraction from what we’re to be about down here.

We use metaphor and poetry to express such yearning for eternal fulfillment.  As to such final things, Jesus says, “You know neither the day nor the hour” when you will see your last sunset, dream your last dream.  But, that Kingdom, that Kin-dom of God?  It’s already here among you.  Don’t you catch a smidgen, a brief glimpse of it from time to time?  I do.

Jesus made it clear that the door to eternity is through the life we live in this world.  It’s signs, wonders and markers are all about.  NOW!

I have a cherished memory of a cold, cold night on the balcony of our home in Petersburg, Alaska.  It was clear and frigid as I lay on the chaise lounge outside, bundled up in a heavy duty Kelty sleeping bag, looking up at the flickering of the northern lights. Pink, white, shades of blue and green they began to dance across the velvet black sky.  Just as I was about to head back indoors —  even in a heavy-duty sleeping bag I was freezing my butt off – just then it seemed as if all the lights of heaven gathered themselves over my head.  In one burst of glorious energy, they exploded over my head.  “Take me now, Lord,” I thought.  “It doesn’t get any better than this.”  Moments later I headed back inside suffused with a radiant glow.  A little bit of heaven.

Yes, the wonders of nature, the beauty of the hills inspired more than one Psalm, inspired more than one poem, more than one quiet sigh of contentment.

Yes, in this life we get small glimpses of eternal joy and bliss.  Glimpses of “undaunted courage.” To enter the life of another human being is such a door.  Especially a life filled with unbearable pain.  This week I began reading Elizabeth Guiffre’s book of the torment she endured at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislain Maxwell.  The courage she displays in telling her story with all its horrific and dehumanizing detail – that courage is a smidgen of eternity.  A door that opens the reader to her, his full humanity.[2]  The Glory of God, a woman fully alive despite all the worst life had dished out.

Even her collaborator, Amy Wallace, had to take breaks from this sordid tale, over four years in the making.  Her courage in being willing to immerse herself in the muck that was Epstein and Maxwell lifts my courage to stand for what is right.  Amy’s listening and helping Elizabeth clarify her story is an overwhelming gift to other girls who have been assaulted and abused – you are not alone.  There is help.

After hours of working on her book in Paris, Elizabeth needed some fresh air.  Her lawyers had been grilling her for hours, wanting to maximize, to focus her testimony.  She thought the Louvre might be the distraction she needed.  Wandering through the galleries, looking for the Mona Lisa, she turned a corner and everything fell apart.  Another flashback – fearsome flashbacks of shame that came unannounced at her most vulnerable moments.  Flashbacks she could never banish from her waking days or nightly dreams of terror.

“I climbed a flight of stairs, turned a corner, and froze.  I know this room, screamed a voice inside my head.  I’d been in this precise spot before – two decades ago, when I was just seventeen.”

“The room I am in is painted bloodred and dominated by a large tapestry: a depiction of Louis XIV’s garish bed chamber.  In 2001, when Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell took the teenage me into this room for the first time, they had been sexually abusing and trafficking me for months.  Now I am a thirty-seven-year-old wife and mother…Still I can practically see him standing next to me, admiring the tapestry, whose dark palette he was determined to mimic in the décor of his opulent Manhattan townhouse.  In my mind’s eye, I imagine Maxwell beside him, as always.  A molester with posh manners and an aristocratic pedigree…played den mother to Epstein’s dysfunctional family of underage girls.  I was one of those girls, and I spent more than twenty-five months in their house of shame.”[3]

Though Elizabeth exhibited great courage, resolve in the face of death threats to keep quiet, the devastation finally overwhelmed her, unable to escape the domestic violence in her own marriage, she took her own life at her remote farm in Australia.

In an email sent three weeks before her death, Elizabeth wrote, “In the event of my passing, I would like to ensure that “Nobody’s Girl” is still released.  I believe it has the potential to impact many lives and foster necessary discussions about these grave injustices.” 

Elizabeth’s gift to the numerous and unknown victims of sexual predation is priceless.  Inspired courage.  A priceless moment of eternity.

How do put the whole matter that Jesus was confronted by that day as scoffers ridiculed him?  First, there are some questions that can’t be directly answered by any living person with an absolute, literal answer.  To the scoffers, any answer comes as one lives into the question, picks up their cross and put’s their shoulder to the wheel.  In all finality, what I can say is, “We came as a gift from God and we return to God.  Thanks be to God.”  It’s all Grace – “What a Wonderful World” indeed!  And as my friend John Cobb remarked when nearing death, “I waiting to be surprised.”  Amen

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[1] Joshua 10:12-14.

[2] Elizabeth Roberts Giuffre, Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1925).

[3] Op. cit., xx-xxi.

November 9, 2025

Pentecost 22, Proper 27

Job 19:23-27a; Psalm 17:1-9;
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38

“And My Eyes Shall Behold”

If there’s somethin’ strange in your neighborhood · Who you gon’ call? (Ghostbusters!) If there’s somethin’ weird, and it don’t look good. Who you gon’ call? (Ghostbusters!). 

Well Halloween’s over and the vampires, skeletons and ghosts have put their costumes away for another year.  But we continue to live in frightful times.  A lot of scary stuff is out and about – a lot worse than a fantastical 200-foot-tall Pillsbury Dough Boy phantom roaming the neighborhood.

Tyranny stalks the land.  And we’re led by a low-information president with the impulse control of a two-year-old and twisted heart bent on revenge.

President Zelensky comes calling in search of what he needs to defend his country and halt Russian bombardment.  What he gets is a harangue about “making nice” to Putin.  And how much land he will have to cede to the Bear.
I say, let’s give ‘em Florida and call it even; and their soldiers can just go back home to Russia.  Oh, and they can pay for all the damage they did.

Just a fortnight ago Zelensky was told that “you can win this.” In a Face the Nation interview of September 23 Trump says Ukraine can take all their land back from Russia.  Talk about attention deficit disorder. 

Meanwhile the average Ukrainian is being bombed and frozen.  And yet, through steadfast caring for the bereaved, the wounded and the displaced, burying the dead, these Ukrainians endure.  Steadfast in God’s Grace, caring for one another.  They endure.  They abide.  Saints alive!

In America, as SNAP benefits (food stamps) are being cut off, our poor are being starved.  With health care supplements being cut off and the cost of insurance premiums doubling, families are being denied health care.  Even middle-class families, not to mention those barely scraping by.   And not to mention one source of nutrition for our poorest children being cut, free school lunches and the end of Head Start.

Who’s to blame?  What’s the cause of all this catastrophe?  While I don’t believe that any human is absolute evil, some do the most horrid and inhuman things.  In my blessing at the end of the service, along with blessing those present, those they love, those they serve; I also ask a blessing on “those we must resist.”

In today’s Old Testament lesson Daniel reports a dream.  A vision in the midst of the captivity under the reign of King Belshazzar of Babylon. In the precarity of captivity, most dire straits, Daniel has a dream.  “A vision softly creeping.”

Dreams are voices of our unconscious, sometimes of the Spirit, in the midst of the night when our psychological defenses are down.  Sometimes of warning, often the face of night terrors, or sometimes pondering a situation we are facing, sometimes of fond hope we cherish.

With Daniel’s dream, it’s a vision of terror.

“I Daniel, saw in my vision by night the four winds of heaven stirring up the great sea, and four great beasts came up out of the sea, different from one another.  As for me, Daniel, my spirit was troubled within me.”  Now let’s get this straight, this vision scared the crap out of him.  “…the visions of my head terrified me.”  Daniel approached one of the attendants of this dream asking of those four horrific beasts.  “As for these four great beasts, four kings shall arise out of the earth.  But the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever—forever and ever.”

Yes, among us perfidious, horrid persons will arise and do evil things.  And I suspect, looking at our contemporary political and economic landscape, we all have our candidates for “the worst person in the world,” as Keith Olbermann would label such.

My mother always told me that you will be judged by the company you keep; or in Putin’s case, shelter.

In a recent article on the missing enforcers of Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime in Syria, it turns out that many have found refuge in Russia.  These are the “the worst of the worst.”  Scores of them safely living with impunity for the most barbaric of crimes against humanity.  Just at random, to take a few:  Qahtan Khalil, an officer in the Air Force Intelligence, the murderer of hundreds of peaceful anti-government protesters.[1] The worst of the worst. One we must resist.

Yassin Dahi, Head of Branch 235, a secret arm of the Asaad regime.  He was responsible for the torture and execution and disappearance of civilians.  The worst of the worst.  There are scores more.  Another we must resist.

They have all vanished into nothing thanks to Putin, who continues to hide most of these war criminals.  Putin, a tyrant the entire world must resist.  As my mom would say, you lie down with dogs, you don’t get a chocolate malt!  Or something like that.  Certainly not a Lvivske beer.

Yes, Syria has endured horrific catastrophe under a brutal dictator, but they are surviving.  When in my Arabic classes we were taught about the fellaheen, the people of the soil, the farmers who tend the land.  They endure.  Today they survive the worst atrocities imaginable.  They persist when the harvest is good and when the rain doesn’t come.  They are the people Jesus preached the Good News to. Here today, here for centuries.  They endure.  And so will we.  Their steadfast caring for the land, their families, their communities is God’s Grace Incarnate.  These fellaheen are the Saints of God enduring, abiding.  Because of them Syria will endure.

These next few days many will lose the very food required to say alive.  They will lose medical benefits.  Their children risk losing Head Start and the meals provided there.  Oh, did I mention the kids who had received free lunches in the cafeteria line?  Gone.  No spaghetti or even tasteless meatloaf for them.  Sorry, kids.

I remember the cartoon of one inner-city kid in a cafeteria line eyeing the glop and smelling the horrid odors wafting from the pots, noting a dead cat sticking out of one of one – he remarked to the slovenly, unkempt cafeteria server: “No thanks.  I think I’ll take my chances with the drive-by shootings.”

No, they won’t even be getting those delicacies.

Good bye, Meals on Wheels for many.  This is “Let them eat cake” politics.  Shut down all because Republicans don’t wish to make medical care affordable for our people.  Get this, the House under Speaker Johnson has been on vacation for five weeks, not wanting to face the music.  Our people are enduring hunger and gross uncertainty, and they’re luxuriating at home on vacation!  Absent because avoiding a vote on releasing the Epstein files.  Your tax dollars at work.

That is why it is absolutely essential that in California we pass proposition 50 this November to win back the House of Representatives — to bring a check to this incompetent, cruel, vengeful and lawless administration.

Marjorie Taylor Green is the last person I thought I would be in agreement with – not in all my born days.  Yet, we’re in perfect alignment on the need for affordable health care.  The other day she ripped Johnson to shreds, saying he is a disaster on health.  He shuts the government down over health care subsidies, yet he has ABSOLUTELY NO PLAN OF HIS OWN!  You go, girl!  God raises up the most unlikely allies.

And, somehow…somehow the American people will get through all this.  Like we always have: watching out for one another and opening our hearts and wallets.  Saints steadfast to the end — we will be the tangible Glory of God for these children and their families.

Just like the fellaheen of the Middle East, we will endure by joining together in deeds of Love.  We tend the land in St. Francis Garden of Hope.  This past Tuesday some six students with their teacher from Aquinas High School came across the street to harvest lettuce, kale, bok choy, and cilantro.  Their teacher Chris Burrows helped organize things and our farmer, Miguel Bonila, with over 40 years’ experience in urban farming, supervised the harvesting.  He was great with the students.  I ask you; how many other Episcopal churches hire a farmer?

A great team led by Peggy Dub-Lutz organized the kitchen crew and kept us on track.  Last Tuesday, my caregiver, Ileen, noted, “What a great team you have here.”  Yes, we do.  Saints of God abiding.  Steadfast for sure!

Our garden is a living sermon you can see, touch and taste.  And. as scripture says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”  Good indeed, manifest in the hearts, minds, wallets, hands, and aching backs of all that make all this happen.  Saints alive!  Saints abiding, right here on Sterling Avenue, San Bernardino!

I love All Saints Day for it is dedicated to the best impulses in humanity.  It celebrates the God-spark in common, ordinary folks who tend creation and bring into realty the Beloved Community.  And unlike Christmas, Easter and All Hallows Eve, our vulture capitalist system has not yet figured out how to monetize it.

Jew, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, Jain, non-of-the-above — that God-spark resides in each, though sometimes very deeply hidden.  We are commissioned to bring it forth, that all might Taste and See that the Lord is Good.

I close with a quote from a man who dared to get involved, to be in the arena, Theodore Roosebelt.  Not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but never the less, he gave it all the good he had in him.  Left nothing on the field.

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming.[2]”

Yes, we, imperfect as we are, with soiled faces, aching backs and sometimes tears — you, we, at St. Francis have chosen to be in the arena, making it happen.  Along with our colleagues from Aquinas High.  Steadfast Saints of God abiding, “For the Glory of God and my neighbor’s good,” as Helen’s Church of the Brethren would proclaim it.  Amen.

---

[1] Devon Lum, Neil Coller, Christoph Koetti, Muhsen Al Mustafa, “The Vanishing Act,” New York Times, October 19, 2025.

[2] “Citizenship in a Republic“, delivered by Theodore Roosevelt in Paris on April 23, 1910.

November 2, 2025

All Saints Sunday

Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18; Psalm 149;
Ephesians 1:11-23; Luke 6:20-31

“Saints Steadfast to the End”

It has oft been said that there are no atheists in foxholes.  When shells are bursting all around, the air is rife with prayer every bit as with smoke.  Deafening explosions and smell of cordite bring forth from the human breast desperate sighs and moans of petition to the Almighty.

I still remember, safe as it was, our live-fire drill in the Army.  As Sarge briefed us on what we would endure and warned us not to stand, for the live glowing tracers would be streaking not that far over out heads.  At conclusion of his talk, someone suggested maybe a chorus of “Nearer My God to Thee.” 

Extreme times elicit prayer, spoken and unspoken – the sighs of the inner Spirit.  And as long as there are tests in school there are prayers “without ceasing.”  I remember blankly staring at my physics test, not able to remember a single formula, traumatized, silently praying, hoping, “Just get me out of this with a ‘C.’”  And, of course, desperate prayer is no substitute for diligent preparation.  The results were far worse than a C.

In Luke’s gospel we have the Parable of the Unjust Judge, the teaching that most remember when it comes to prayer and persistence.

“In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people.  In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’”  You know the rest.  Though he would not respond to her urgent pleas, she persisted, knocking on his door at all hours of the night — night after night until she wore him down.  Out of exasperation, or maybe due to too many sleepless nights, he gave in.

We are enjoined to be just as persistent in our prayer.  Now comes the content of her prayer.  She prayed for justice.

This past week at a Chicago ICE raid, a Presbyterian pastor, inspired by the injustice of these raids, stood in prayer at an ICE enforcement action.  Arms outstretched in supplication for justice, he was shot in the head by a pepper ball from a rooftop ICE sentry.  As he crumpled to the ground he was swarmed by well-wishers.

Later that week in an interview on the Rachel Maddow Show, he brushed aside concerns about his health.  He said if folks were moved by what they saw, their concern should be for those harassed and abused by ICE and our unjust immigration policies.  These victims should be the recipients of our care and concern, not he himself.  His prayer was for justice for the victims of ICE mistreatment.  And, yes, many of them are U.S. citizens.

Prayer, urgent, soul-wrenching prayer is a cry from the depths of the God-spark deep within, crying out in supplication for justice, mercy.  It is fervent prayer moving to action.  The kind of urgency that takes one outside of their comfort zone.

Though we are in distress, at a loss for words, “the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”[1]

It is such prayerful concern, spoken and unspoken, maybe only a nudge that has propelled many to sign up for our No Kings Day demonstrations all across the nation.  Millions upon millions, the largest demonstrations we have ever seen on one day.  Those impelling prayers are born out of dire concern for our democracy.  Born of fear of what we are becoming as a nation, a people.

And the answer to those prayers bubbling up from deep within from so many across the nation?  As the poster in my office of folks at voting booths says, “Bring your thoughts and prayers here.”  Prayer, earnest prayer leads to agency – active care for others, for the planet.

Prayer, deep-down prayer from the core of the soul enables us to hear the pain of others.

 JoAnn A. Post in Christian Century tells a story of concern for the pain of her dog as it became quite ill.[2]

Her dog, Ginger, a golden retriever, suddenly began losing weight.  Her coat began to thin and her appetite failed.  She no longer scoured the floor looking for dropped scraps of food.  She had no interest, becoming skinnier and skinnier.

A trip to the vet confirmed the worst fears.  She was slowly dying from untreatable liver cancer.  The most that could be done was to make her as comfortable as possible.

JoAnn vividly remembers those last few days.  She writes:

“Will she be in pain? How will we know if she hurts?”

“You may not,” he admitted. We were to watch for sleeplessness, pacing, a change in temperament—but dogs can’t tell you when they hurt. Or what they need.

A few days before she died, I lay beside her on the floor, stroking her soft fur, whispering in her floppy ear, “Do you hurt, Ginger? Are you sad? What do you need? Please tell me.”

“Ginger was silent. I wept.”[3]

JoAnn takes from this experience an important lesson on pain, the pain of others.  It is possible to be forgiven from recognizing the pain of another who cannot speak, who cannot give voice to their own distress or sadness.

It is unforgivable to turn away and choose not to hear of another’s pain.  Prayer, urgent, sincere prayer attunes our ears to hear and hopefully our hearts to respond.  And maybe our feet, hands, wallets and whatever. 

It is out of such an outpouring of national pain, that so many of us will have been out in the streets this October 18 protesting the pain of so many, many “least of us.”

And, as Elizabeth Warren has discovered, persistence pays off, just as in this parable of a wronged widow in Jesus’ story.

In our church, for centuries and centuries, women have been shut out.  They’ve not had their gifts and contributions recognized.  For many years a woman couldn’t even be on the vestry or serve as a delegate to convention, let alone be a priest, or, heaven forefend a bishop.  How many urgent prayers it took before those first “irregular” ordinations of the first women priests in our church.  Fervent prayers impelling to action these women and a courageous bishop who presided at the ceremony.

Let us remember our own shameful neglect and discounting of the gifts woman yearned to bring to the priesthood.

The General Convention in1973 voted to reject women’s ordination.  That was a signal for many that the time had come to work outside the legislative system. Suzanne Hiatt, who had hoped to be ordained, recalled, “I realized […] that my vocation was not to continue to ask for permission to be a priest, but to be a priest.” Women deacons turned to civil disobedience in their attempts to fulfill their call to the priesthood.[4]

In New York, five qualified female deacons silently presented themselves alongside their male counterparts to Bishop Paul Moore for ordination.  They were not ordained.  

Later in Philadelphia, eleven women were ordained at the Church of the Advocate on July 29, 1974 by bishops Daniel Corrigan, Robert DeWitt, and Edward Welles II.  Let us remember those trail blazers: Merrill Bittner, Alla Bozarth, Alison Cheek, Emily Hewitt, Carter Heyward, Suzanne Hiatt, Marie Moorefield, Jeanette Piccard, Betty Bone Schiess, Katrina Welles Swanson, and Nancy Wittig.  And we never looked back.  These and so many more women to come have deepened and blessed our understanding of the ordained ministry.

I thought we had arrived when we consecrated our first woman bishop here in America.  But these women had greater aspirations.

And this fall, October 3^rd, we chose the first woman as Archbishop of Canterbury, the titular head of the entire Anglican worldwide communion.  And does she have the “right stuff!”  Yes, persistence, persistence, persistence.

Such prayer is dangerous business, you never know where it will get you.

The Rt. Rev. Sarah Mullally, Bishop of London has been chosen as the 106^th Archbishop of Canterbury, the first woman to serve in that office since St. Augustine arrived in Kent in 597 to plant the church in England.  A glorious day for our dear Church.[5]

Bishop Mullally will take office on January 28, 2026, when her ceremonial election by the canons of Canterbury Cathedral will be confirmed at a service at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. She will be formally installed on the Throne of St. Augustine at a service in Canterbury Cathedral next March.

Though brought up in an evangelical congregation, she represents what might be know as the “broad church.”  She has been instrumental in enabling the church to address sexual abuse.  She has been at the forefront of an inclusive church that welcomes the LGBT community.  Though quiet in promoting her own views, she has been a moderating force to move the church to the next steps in changing the rite of the Church of England to full marriage inclusion.

Early on, she implemented a series of changes, including a proposal to allow clergy to bless same-sex unions within the context of regular church services, which was narrowly endorsed by the church’s General Synod in November 2023.  On this issue, we in the Episcopal church in the U.S. have been further ahead in proclaiming that “All Means All.”  And acting on it.

She is a process person, making sure all are heard and included.  One of her fellow bishops, the Rt. Rev. Jonathan Baker, says of her ministry, she “has always shown the greatest respect for the different theological traditions which coexist within the Church of England. In London in particular, she has generously supported my ministry and enabled the flourishing of traditional Catholic parishes and clergy across the Diocese.”[6]

Yes, the fervent prayers of many come to full fruition in her selection.  “Pray without ceasing,” and you never know where that might lead – justice, gratitude, full inclusion, redress of wrongs, solidarity with those in pain, a profound sense of acceptance, of being loved.  And definitely outside our comfort zones.

I heard a speaker once say that if prayer is not leading you outside your comfort zone, you are not doing it right, not listening or perhaps praying for the wrong things.  I’ve found that deep down listening opens me to the pain of others, to injustice.  Prayer of that sort is 90% listening.

As we share the matters that weigh heavily on our hearts and minds, let us always, always pray without ceasing.  The results might astound.  In Christ, we might just astound ourselves.

As my dear departed friend Rabbi Leonard Beerman was wont to say, “My prayers are my marching feet.”

Get those marching shoes on – and see you out on the streets and at the voting booth.   Or maybe in St. Francis Garden of Hope?  Amen.

---

[1] Romans 8:26.

[2] JoAnn A. Post, “Injustice comes with so many alibis and aliases,” Christian Century, October 9, 2019.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Mark Michael, “First Woman Appointed Archbishop of Canterbury,” The Living Church, October 3, 2025.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

October 19, 2025

Pentecost 19, Proper 23

Genesis 32:22-31; Psalm 121;
2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-8

“An Eruption of Prayer”

In 1985 the noted Columbian novelist, Gabriel García Márquez wrote Love in the Time of Cholera.  The story is set in an un-named, steamy South American country at the time beset by multiple outbreaks of cholera.[1]

The main characters are caught up in tempestuous love affairs.  To say their lives are messy is an understatement.  Like cholera which slowly drains the body, these relationships drain the psyche.  The main character, Florentino, is love-sick with the consuming symptoms paralleling those of cholera.  At the end of the novel, the yellow cholera flag on a passing ship plying the river docks at port symbolizing complete surrender – to love and to the disease.[2]

We live in a diseased time, a leprous time.  We denounce our opponents as “unclean,” evil, despicable.  The actions of our government, subtle and not so subtle, are dark and deadly in our diseased society.  We’re waging a running war on science.  We concoct “alternate facts” to sanitize our history.  We pray, in the words of Kierkegaard, that this is not a “sickness unto death.”  A soul sickness of us all.

As ICE raids terrorize our populace, the yellow flag would not be inappropriate. 

This last week, the Illinois governor, J.B. Pritzker, lambasted ICE agents who stormed an apartment in Chicago.  He decried this raid carried out by “jack-booted thugs” in the middle of the night.  An invasion of his state and the city of Chicago. 

Early on October 6th, landing on the roof, agents swarmed the apartments, kicking in doors, discharging flash-bang grenades, rousting people, naked, out of their beds, terrified kids screaming as they’re ripped from their parent’s arms.

Pertissue Fisher is still recovering from being detained by the storm troopers who burst into her South Shore apartment and pulled her out of bed. 

“’An agent put a gun in her face’ she said.  Another placed her in handcuffs tight enough to leave bruises.”[3]  Though Fisher and the other victims are U.S. citizens. they were held for hours.  At 54, she is terrified to think what would have happened to her family if they had shot her.  “I have kids, I have grandkids, and if I would have [gotten] killed, who gonna answer for it?  Nobody.” [4]

U.S. citizens, for God’s sake!  Never in my born days would I have imagined such terror being inflicted upon decent, law-abiding citizens.  And with impunity.  Not what we were taught in 8^th grade U.S. history.

We live in a time of great sickness.  Possibly a sickness unto death as this democracy slides into totalitarianism and its demise?  The vestiges of our civil society are leprous indeed. Unclean.  Stinking to high heaven.

And yet it is in such times – precisely in such times — that the miracle of Jesus healing power is made manifest.  Yes, even amidst broken doors, tear gas, flashbang smoke and terrified, screaming and crying children.  In this chaotic dark night of national despair, we need Christ’s healing word, his healing touch.

You know the story.  “On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee.  As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him.  Keeping their distance, they called out, saying, ‘Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!’  When he saw them, he said to them, ‘Go show yourselves to the priests.’  And as they went, they were made clean.”

Now the story takes a surprising turn.  One of the cleansed lepers turns back.  Praising Jesus, he fell to the ground.  Yes, you guessed it, the hated Samaritan, a despised foreigner.  Out of the ten, only one showed gratitude for his release from that dreaded, disfiguring disease.  The Samaritan!

Incredulous, Jesus asks, “Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?”

Gratitude here is the remedy.  Just as urged in the 12-step movement, what’s needed to get you through life — “An attitude of gratitude.” That and “Brats, Cheese and Beer.”

Yes, my Wisconsin friends have a slogan for their political work; it’s on my coffee cup: “Brats, Cheese and Beer can save Democracy.”  Now, for sure there’s magic in brats, cheese and beer, but the real magic is that other ingredient – ALL of US.  That’s all of us coming together to work for a more just, more humane society through the sharing of those delectables.

Good food and justice work go together like none other.  They are the grease in the machinery of gratitude.  Why do you think Jesus was always feeding people?  All that is the antivenom to this leprous, diseased time.  And in the midst of our disease, we will make love.  And justice is what love looks like in the public square.

It begins with gratitude and goes from there.  No one gives back like our teachers acting out their thankfulness for what had been passed on to them.  Their vocation is an entire life of gratitude. It’s certainly not about the pay. And if it’s only one out of ten, through God’s power working for good, that shall suffice.

In the ACLU magazine for the fall, I came across one teacher preparing his students to live in this diseased world of racism and entitlement.[5]

Starting with the leadership of a principal, Jaime Cook, whose school reflects the values of inclusion.  “We’re constantly striving to keep all of our students free from fear.”  And down into the classroom.

When ICE raids threatened students at Sackets Harbor, (NY) teachers and parents organized public demonstrations.  When one family was ripped from their community in the dead of night, teachers and parents at that school organized larger rallies protesting ICE in their community.  The news of which got Governor Kathy Hochul’s attention.

The New York governor could not think of “any public safety justification for ICE agents to rip an innocent family, including a child in the third grade from their Sackets Harbor home.”  On April 7, the principal, Jaime Cook, learned that the combined pressure of the governor and the local citizenry had ended up in freeing this family.

Teachers and students organized a warm welcome back for the third-grader who had been taken.  Students made cards.  A huge welcome sign to hang in the classroom.  Yes, cookies and punch – no, brats. cheese, and definitely no beer.  

Principal Cook gave her teachers full support in making their school community a place that practices what they teach.

“We’re teaching about what it means to live your morals…You gotta walk the talk, otherwise you’re not a very good teacher.”  Further, “When one of your best friends is taken in the night, that ripples through a classroom…When we look out for one of our students, we’re really looking out for all of them.”

An attitude of gratitude in action!

That caring by a community is the best remedy for what ails us — our leprous politics.  Our leprous polarization shall not have the last word.  At heart, at our best, we Americans are better than our disease.  Yes, in a time of cholera we will make justice, for that indeed is what love looks like in the public square.

In ways big and small, gratitude for what we have finds expression in various ways.  At St. Francis this past week at the meeting of Inland Congregations United for Change, we organized to get “know your rights” cards out to families in our area.  A small thing, but it sends a loud and clear message to our immigrant neighbors, we have your back.  You belong.  This is your America.  “Live long and prosper.”

I’ve found that those immigrant families generally show much more gratitude for their new life in America than most of us who are native-born.  We take so much for granted. 

And while some of us are a little embarrassed by all the flag waving, stop and think what that flag means to those new arrivals – a new life of opportunity, an education for their children, a decent job.  Yes, a whole new life. 

Sure, it’s messy.  We don’t always live up to that promise.  Just like love in real life, in a time of pestilence, is often messy.  Or as one of my married friends says of her marriage, “It’s complicated.”  That’s the given.  And that’s the glory.

This past September 15^th, we noted the anniversary of the 1963 bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Bermingham, Alabama.  By that Sunday night, Dr. Martin Luther King had arrived by air.

Following that outrage, Dr. King urged his hearers in his eulogy for three of those innocent girls killed in that savage bombing – he urged them to hear what those girls had to say to the rest of us in their deaths.  In part, this is what King urged:

“They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution.  They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers.  Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream.”

In gratitude, that is the ongoing work we the living are privileged to continue.  All “to the Glory of God and our neighbor’s good.”  Amen.

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[1] Gabriel García Márquez, Love in a Time of Cholera (New York: Vintage Books, 1988)

[2] Op. cit., 340.

[3] Mary Norkol, “After military-style raid on South Shore, apartments, Congressmembers rally around residents,” Chicago Sun Times, October 6, 2025.

[4] Ibid.

[5] ACLU Magazine, Fall 2025.

October 12, 2025

Pentecost 18, Proper 23 – Jon Braveroff Memorial BBQ
2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c Psalm 111;
2 Timothy 2:8-15; Luke 17:11-19

“Love in A Leprous Time”