New beginnings are afoot for the Forneys.  Our son has become engaged to a most delightful woman with a wedding planned a year or so down the road.  When asked if she or her family came from any faith tradition, he answered that they were African Methodist Episcopal.  That’s when we learned that Alexis was African-American.  Definitely a new beginning. 

She’s shared a couple of Christmas holidays with us, and our original assessment is correct.  She’s most delightful.  This June we go back East to meet her family.  Ours compared to hers is rather tiny.  Even though she was an only child, she has scads of aunts and uncles.  We are definitely looking forward to an expanded and enriched family in the years ahead.

That is the beauty and wonder of new beginnings.  That, and the fact they love each other dearly.  New beginnings are a delight.

Over the years, they will learn what every couple must learn if they are to stay together.  There will be differences of opinion, differences of values, differences of temperament and style.  The bit about “the two shall become one flesh” can work splendidly on the physical level.  At the beginning.  But differences will emerge that need to be worked out.  This is something so close to the heart that it can’t be faked.  It takes work, not excuses.  My parents always urged us to stand tall to the challenge.  No slouching!  My father hated slouching. 

I’ve worked with more than one alcoholic whose refrain was, well, if you were stuck with my wife, it’d drive you to drink also.  If that’s the case, all you end up with is a sad, sad “pity party.”  A party friends and family soon want nothing to do with.  You’ll be left all by your lonesome to count the cracks on the wall and drink yourself into oblivion.  So sad, so sad. Pity Parties are a form of moral and spiritual slouching.  Giving up.

I tell divorced persons, that unless they want to go through the same mess with their next partner, they ought to think about getting some professional counseling.  Otherwise, the same passivity, the same rage, the same excuses will just as surely devour the next go around.

Or you can get a life.  Make a life.  No slouching.

The story is told in the Book of Joshua of when the band of Israelite wanderers camped at Gilgal, they celebrated the Passover.  Instead of manna, for the first time, they “ate the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain.  The manna ceased on the day they ate the produce of the land and the Israelites no longer had manna; they ate the crops of the land of Canaan that year.”

As bountiful as the land is, as freely as it’s blessings flow, at some point the manna ceases and the garden needs tending.  It’s sweat-of-the-brow time If one is going to reap a harvest.  One needs to sow, do the weeding and cultivating.

Jesus tells a story of a young fellow who knows it all.  No one can tell him what to do.  Chores are for the stupid.  “Move out now while you know it all and are the smartest gal or guy in the room.”  No more of their stupid rules.

So, he demands his share of the family fortune and sets off for a promised land of good luck, women and high times.  It all works for a while.  It always does.  But at some point, reality sets in.  Especially when the money’s gone and friends begin to evaporate.

Yes, reality sets in.  Isn’t reality inconvenient?  Not much leeway.  Not much slack.  The hunger pangs become a big ache in the stomach.  Cold, hard sidewalks don’t promote much sleep.  The loneliness becomes unbearable.

It’s reality check time.  How’s it all working out for you?  Eventually the manna runs out.  Good Times Charley is in his cups.

The excuses are legion.  Everybody’s against me.  The system’s rigged.  Everyone’s corrupt, so why not?  Slouching to the max.

As my friend Jim Rhoads says, “How do you know when an addict is lying?  His lips are moving.”  Fact is, there’s either recovery or there’s not.  Excuses are a pretty poor diet.  It is, as Yoda says in Star Wars, “Do or Not Do.  There is no Try.”

Yes, DO or NOT DO.  Excuses, resentment and blame are the putrefying dish served up to too many poor Whites in the South.  “You may not be much.  Your life may be going nowhere, but at least you’re better than… [fill in the blank] …”  Jim Crow might momentarily satisfy, but in the end, it’s a pretty thin diet.  Even for White Supremacists and their neo-Nazi buddies.  Eventually, the politics of resentment do not satisfy.  No slouching!

I love the story of the newly arrived preacher at a small country church.  One day as he is walking down a dirt road, he spies a farmer out in his field — A most productive field.  He hadn’t seen this fellow in church yet, so he ambles over to the wooden rail fence and calls out to the man.

“Hi, there.  That’s a mighty fine farm you have there”.  Indeed, the corn was as “high as an elephant’s eye” and ears were plump and almost ripe for the picking.

The preacher continued, “if I had a farm like that, I’d think I’d want to come to church and let God know how thankful I was.”

“Well,” drawled the farmer.   “I want to tell you; the farm certainly didn’t look like this when God had it all to himself.’

St. Paul calls us to be “cooperators with God.”

The incredible, awful and renewing Grace of God is the moment of awakening.  It’s Reality-Check Time.  If we’re going to eat, the garden needs a whole lot of work.  That’s what vocation is all about.  The beauty of it is that we’re needed.  And in useful work, we grow into the stature of Christ.

Over two hundred years ago our nation set out upon a new venture.  The story is told — it may an apocryphal myth — that as Benjamin Franklin was leaving Independence Hall at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention he was asked by a passing woman, “What sort of government have you gotten us, Mr. Franklin?”  “A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.” 

Within only a short time, trouble as well as opportunity mounted.  The disputations that would eventually tear the nation asunder, culminating in the Civil War, had their inception in what all thought to be the best possible compromise to be had.  The best form of government humans could devise.  We are still bedeviled by the flaws in that original design.  That, and tragic choices early on.  Problematic from the inception — read The 1619 Project.[1]

The remnants of a slave constitution linger, almost guaranteeing a fatal imbalance of power which allows for a minority government. With a Senate that gives disproportionate power to a minority, through gerrymandering, race hatred and voter suppression, this anti-democratic arrangement could likely be our undoing.  Isn’t that what the January 6^th Commission is all about?  The makings of insurrection.  Even during the Civil War, the Stars and Bars did never besmirch and disgrace the halls of the Capitol.

Malevolent forces have seized upon the internal contradictions.

It is time to tend our national garden.  To renew our democracy.  As in the story of the “Prodigal Son,” it’s time to wake up.  To open our eyes.  That is the moment of Awful, Sustaining Grace.  That’s the moment a drunk comes to the realization that he or she is killing themselves — when they’ve hit bottom.

That’s the moment the drug addict realizes that he just might not have survived this last overdose.  Fentanyl could really kill.  It might be the one and same moment that she realizes that there is indeed something to live for.  That someone dear loves them.  With one fellow, it was the enlightenment that he actually could get a job.  There was a purpose to his life.  All that is the Grace of Hard Knocks and Splendid Opportunity.  It’s what that Hebrew band realized at Gilgal.  It’s what a son in a far country realized. 

The voice of the Holy Spirit is urging diligence, productivity.  No slouching.  That’s what reality-check time is all about.  A moment of awful, terrifying Grace.  The moment for repentance and turning around.

In Obery Hendricks we have a prophet who does not sugar-coat the choice now before this nation.  In his book, Christians Against Christianity, he lays out how a segment of the church has aided and abetted America’s descent into our recent moral and political disaster.[2]  Theological slouching to be sure.

Obrey Hendricks, author of numerous books, professor at Columbia University, biblical scholar, and an ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, comes thundering out of our national wilderness like a modern-day Jeremiah.  His voice filled with the judgement and promise of God.

His message to America is God’s wake-up call.  This is his thesis:

“A travesty, that’s how I would characterize Christianity in America today.  A travesty, a brutal sham, tragic charade, a cynical deceit.  Why?  Because the loudest voices in American Christianity today – those of right-wing evangelicals—shamelessly spew a putrid stew of religious ignorance and political venom that is poisoning our society, making a mockery of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Their rhetoric in the name of their Lord and Savior is mean-spirited, divisive, appallingly devoid of the love for their neighbors and outright demonizes those who do not accept their narrow views—even fellow Christians.  Perhaps most shocking is their enthusiastic, almost cultish support for the cruel, hateful policies and pronouncements of President Donald Trump, whose words and deeds more often than not have been the very antithesis of the Christian faith.”

Too many Christians have sold their faith for this rancid mass of potage.  The stench rises to the heavens.

This autocratic mindset and upchuck theology, hostile to the spirit of democracy, has through the perpetrating of a BIG LIE, sucked in all sorts of complicit malefactors. 

Reading this week of Ginny Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas – the expose` of her emails to Trump’s close advisor Mark Meadows, urging the overthrow of the 2020 election, actually, the overthrow of our government — this is nothing short of sedition.  And Thomas was the only justice voting AGAINST allowing the January 6^th Committee’s access to those e-mails.  As Dan Rather asks: “What did he know, and when did he know it?”

Our moment of Grace is this Reality-Check Time for America.  Is this the path we want to go down as a nation?  In nation after nation, this is the path to unfreedom.  The path to tyranny.

That we might rouse from our slumber, that we might tend to the flickering dim light of our democracy – that is Hendricks’ plea.  Wake up, America.   Wake up, Christians.

Obery’s loving Christian parents worked diligently to instill pride and ensure that their children “felt their God-given worth in a society that did not fully value children like us.”[3] 

“No slouching.”  That was his mother’s prescription for self-respect.  “No slouching, they admonished; stand tall and proud and ‘act like somebody.’  Mumbling was unacceptable; we had to speak up and look the other in the eye.”[4]

No slouching.  It’s now up to us.  Will we be what Democracy looks like?

This is as good as any wake-up call we can expect — to the Church, to our nation.  It’s all on the line: “No slouching.”  God has need of each and every one of us.  So does our nation.  No slouching!  This deafening claxon we now hear is the Awful, Liberating Grace of God.  Thanks be to God.   Amen.

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[1] Nikole Hannah-Jones, et al. ed., The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (New York: One World, 2021).

[2] Obery M. Hendricks, Jr., Christians Against Christianity: How Right-Wing Evangelicals are Destroying our Nation and our Faith (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2021).

[3] Hendricks, op.cit., p. xiv.

[4] Ibid.

March 27, 2022, Lent 4

“No Slouching”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney, St. Francis Episcopal Mission

Joshua 5:9-12; Psalm 32; 2 Corinthians 5:16-21;
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

I began as a geology major in college, but in my senior year transferred to the psychology department.  It seemed, more and more that studying rocks and the eons long ago of tree ferns and dinosaurs had little to do with the real-life problems all around me.

It may have been that the impetus was a search for why my own family was so off the rails.  We couldn’t seem to get through a dinner without my parents ending up in a big family fight.  I was too young to have any idea as to what the underlying issues were.  More than once, Dad would just up and thew down his plate, breaking it into smithereens, food flying.  Our dog, Skippy running for cover.  Then in silence, he’d stomp out of the kitchen.  Those of us remaining would quietly finish our dinner and leave the table.  As quickly as possible.

I began to get an inkling that there could be some deep, underlying issues when in high school I took Mr. Stowe’s psychology class in my senior year.  My girlfriend also was taking it and we’d discuss it over lunch.

Mr. Stowe was enamored by the weird behavior one encountered.  A good portion of the semester was devoted to what is called “abnormal psychology.”  From neuroses to psychoses, we went through quite a menu of aberrant behaviors – paranoia, schizophrenia, narcissism, sociopathy, depression, kleptomania, addiction – the entire gamut of the bizarre behaviors.

As Mr. Stowe would introduce the psychosis or neurosis of the week, my girlfriend would become very overwrought, wondering if she might have that problem.  It usually took me several days to talk her down.  “No, you aren’t crazy, we all do that in some small ways.”  So, for another week I had her convinced that she probably wasn’t a homicidal maniac or something. 

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden was a very in-depth exploration into the limitations of what happens on the psychologist’s couch.  It became a best seller as the psychotherapy movement became popular in America in the fifties and sixties. It is the semi-autobiographical novel of a young women who struggles for years through therapy with mental illness.  Her life never becomes perfect.  When she complains that it isn’t, her therapist responds that he “never promised her a rose garden.”

That’s what I discovered in my study of psychology.  I gained some insight into our family dynamics.  No magical reprieve, no rose garden.  Our problems were still there.

As my pastoral psychology professor would later tell us, no matter what behavior people may be exhibiting, they’re doing about as good as they can in the moment.  So do we all.

Our Covenant with God is, in like manner, not a Hollywood promise of roses and fluffy clouds either.  No magical prancing unicorns or instant jackpots.  As my son’s tee shirt says, “The lottery is a tax on people who are stupid at math.”  Ed McMahon will most likely not be at your mailbox in the morning with your million-dollar check – or on any morning.  That’s not the deal.  There’s a reason Harrah’s in Las Vegas is bigger than your house.  It’s calculated greed.  They make their luck.  No magic here at all. 

“Abram.  I am your shield; your reward shall be very great…Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them…I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.”

“As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him.  When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces [of Abram’s sacrificial offering].  On that day the Lord made a Covenant with Abram.”

What happened in the darkness is an unfathomable mystery.  And who can tell about the vision of the smoking pot and flaming sword.  All the hoo-ha with the smoking pot and sword is the biblical writer’s way of assuring us that this is the Real Deal Promise.  “Signed, sealed and delivered.”

However this happened, in a dream, a vision, or otherwise, Abram knew that this sealed the deal.  He, Sarah, and all their descendants were forever bound to this One, to Being Itself, that had freed them from slavery in Egypt. 

Read what follows for Moses and his band of trekkers.  This is no picnic.  Starvation, thirst, poisonous vipers, mass hysteria and superstition over a Golden Calf, total uncertainty, and enemies.   It’s all there in Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus and Deuteronomy.  And it doesn’t stop there.  Read through Joshua, Judges and First and Second Samuel.  Kings and Chronicles — down through Jesus and then the early church.  This Covenant business is no picnic.  BUT you won’t be alone.  There is guidance and comfort.

Part of this Covenant is the continued revelation of God through those who have become part of the journey.  God’s goodness to us has been shared by parents, teachers and total strangers.

There’s a big dose of realism connected with this Covenant business. 

For Abraham, God’s promise of presence is no magic bullet.  Abraham will succumb to the worst sort of behavior.  (And don’t we all from time to time?!) 

Abraham, to save his own skin, tells a foreign king with a big army that, of course, he can have Sarah.  She’s fobbed off as his sister.  “I hardly know her.  Isn’t she just the  ‘coffee girl’ or something?”  And in Genesis he does this, not once, but twice!  What a stand-up guy!  It’s all there in Genesis, chapter 20, verse 1.   Read it yourself.  And he does a repeat in verse 12 — she’s really my sister.  Seriously!  What a schmuck!

This is the sort of imperfection, duplicity and fallibility that God has to rely on.  Both in Abraham and in the likes of us.  That’s all God has to work with.  Imperfection to the max.  No rose garden here.

Our end of the Covenant, our part of the Deal, is not magical theology.  When Satan leads Jesus up to the highest pinnacle of the temple and tells him that if he jumps, God’s angels will protect him, lest he dash his little pinkie against a stone, Jesus rightly responds, “Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test.”  If Jesus is unable to rely on magic, what makes us think we’re any better?  No magical escape in the last reel. 

Just as therapy is not magic, neither is faith.  The gift we do receive is insight, courage and vision.  We get clarity on what is the right thing to do and what enhances life.  And in faith, we step forth.

Definitely, no magic in my college parking lot!  I remember carpooling with a Catholic friend, rushing into Cal. State L.A., running late on most mornings.  Freeway traffic, atrocious, as usual.  By the time we arrived, five or ten minutes late, the parking lots were already full.  Ron would begin his prayer, “Hail Mary full of grace help us find a parking place.”  It hardly ever happened.  My mantra was, “Never discount dumb luck.”  Sometimes we did find a place.  Actually, I don’t ever remember it working.  And when we did find a place, it was way the heck out in the back forty. 

Like Woody Allen, I can’t bring myself to believe in any deity with nothing better to do than go about finding parking places at a mall in Houston.  Or Cal State LA for that matter.  Not when children’s’ hospitals and maternity wards in Ukraine are being reduced to rubble by a psychopathic killer.

As sisters and brothers of God’s Covenant, this is what we can expect.  If we work at it.

We will find companions along the way to share the burden and the sorrows.  Those who will rejoice with us when we rejoice.  This is playing out all over Ukraine these days.  The bloody and broken injured are tenderly aided by total strangers.  This is the impulse fortified by what they learned in catechism classes in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.  It’s the impulse taught by the imam in the mosque or the rabbi of the synagogue they attended.  It’s in the air of the values of Western Civilization. 

Yes, sometimes like Abraham, we will fall short.  We, in a moment of moral amnesia, will lose sight of our duty even to those most beloved.  But that is the standard to which Divine Wisdom calls us to return.  Implanted in hearts and minds of all children of the Covenant. 

The Covenant is about Trust.  It’s like that trust of a young mother in Ukraine who put her young son on a train ride of over one thousand kilometers, all across Ukraine to Slovakia.  Amidst the shelling and bombs in eastern Ukraine, this eleven-year-old boy, Hassan, traveled from Zaporizhzhia and crossed the border into Slovakia.[1]

He left with a mother’s kiss and hug and the trust that she and her husband had given him the character to make this arduous journey on his own.     With a backpack, his passport into which she had slipped a note and with a phone number written in ink on his hand he set out.

The boy’s mother, Julia, sent Hassan to the safety of Slovakia to find relatives there while she remained behind to care for an elderly mother unable to travel and his father remained to fight off the Russian army.  A tough choice made in the faith that they were doing the right thing to get their boy to safety.

That’s how it is with our Covenant with God in Christ.  We are given basic instructions, some innate ability, some friends and strangers who assist along the way – and we set out on our journey of life.  Also, in faith.

I’m sure amidst the doubt, the loneliness and longing for what he left back home – a love of his parents – this trip was no rose garden.  His mother never promised such.  Neither does God.

How many tears did this young boy shed as the kilometers passed by through the deep night?  How severe the longing for the comfort of his mother’s caress?  His father’s reassurance?  All that sustained was a bond of absolute trust between this boy and his parents.  In faith, he ventured into the unknown, into a foreign country.

“After completing a solo journey, the 11-year-old was hailed ‘a hero of the night’ by Slovakian authorities. In a Facebook statement, the Slovak Ministry of Interior said that the boy won over the officials ‘with his smile, fearlessness and determination, worthy of a true hero’”.[2] 

“Volunteers took care of him, took him to a warm place and gave him food and drink,”

“With the piece of folded paper in his passport apart from the phone number on his hand, officials at the border were able to contact his relatives in the capital, Bratislava, and hand him over.”[3]

The mother profusely thanked the Slovak government and police for taking care of her son.  “People with big hearts live in your small country.  Please save our Ukrainian children.” 

This might well be the plea of that nation to the peoples of the world in this moment.

Like Hassan, we in faith, and in God’s trust in us, embark on the journey of life.  We trust, also, at the end, we too will be met with a Big Heart.  No rose garden promised, only a Big Heart.   That’s the Covenant and the Promise.  In Christ’s love it shall be sufficient.  Amen.

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[1] Bhavya Sukheja, “’A true hero’: 11-year-old Ukrainian Boy Travels 1,000 Km Alone To Slovakia To Escape Russian Attack,” Republic on Telegram, March 7, 2022.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

March 13, 2022, Lent 2

“I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27; Philippians 3:17-4:1;
Luke 13:31-1-9

We see the grim faces of mothers pushing strollers waiting in lines that stretch for hours.  Hundreds, mostly women and children, seeking refuge from indiscriminate bombing.  Many have had little sleep and little to eat.  Sanitation facilities are in horrid shape or non-existent.

Husbands, older sons and other male relatives are left behind to defend their beloved homeland of Ukraine.  To stand with their freely-elected president Zelensky – who is, more and more, looking like Churchill.  We will all remember his refusal of the U.S. government’s offer to hustle him out of his battered city of Kiev.  “I don’t need a ride.  I need more ammunition.”

Remember, this is the man Trump attempted to corrupt by withholding aid as their country was being surrounded by hostile forces.  He proved incorruptible, to Trumps shame.  By the way – if you want the backstory on Ukraine, read Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum. 

This should be your required Lenten reading this year.[1]  Lent is our pilgrimage down the Mountain of Transfiguration into the misery and problems of the world.  As the old spiritual says, “If you can’t bear the cross, then you can’t wear the crown.”  By faith, sometimes little faith, we embark upon this pilgrimage.

No this is not a “feel good message.”  It is a Gospel message.  It is a message chock-a-block full of solidarity with all who are refugees, either in strange lands, or in their own strange country.  But I digress.

These are the harried refugees pouring out of Ukraine.  Fortunately, for them, arms are open and spread wide.  Though, it seems, not if your skin is of a darker, African or Indian, hue.  In Poland, Moldovia, Hungary and in most of the rest of Europe. 

These people are leaving with little or nothing.  They grabbed what papers and mementos they could of their past life.  Now they’re on the run with little else and little knowledge of what awaits.

“My father was a wandering Aramean; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous.  When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.  The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders he brought us to this place…”

As I survey our political landscape, I am disjointed, feeling out of place.  I am an alien in the land of my birth.  Our family was solidly Republican, firmly ensconced in the middle class – or maybe a little bit better.  And while I frequently disagreed with my folks on such things as welfare, Watergate, and which party would be best for the economy – we held to the same values and verities.

Communism was bad.  Fascism was bad, especially the Nazi variety.   Knowledge and achieving high grades were good.  Democrats were bad.  A whole bunch of people we shouldn’t associate with were bad or at least questionable.  BUT if someone sued my dad, THEN he wanted a Jewish lawyer!  Our country, while not perfect, was perfectible – and close to perfect under Eisenhower.  We supported United Way and our church.
We still didn’t mention FDR.  He was THAT MAN who “fired your grandfather” – Grandpa had been the postmaster of Lodi, California, appointed by Herbert Hoover.  

I can’t imagine in my wildest dreams my parents’ Republican friends supporting a Russian, former KGB tyrant.  Our family was ready to go to the mat with the Soviets.  Especially, my mom who was the founding president of the Signal Hill Women’s Republican Club.  Dad seriously talked about constructing a bomb shelter in our front yard.  We were definitely of the “Better Dead than Red” opinion

I find it appalling that Mitt Romney is the only party member with the moral compass to denounce the “treasonous” Kremlin mouthpieces in Congress.  They and the entertainment wing of his party over at Fox News.

And it’s high time to cut off all Russian oil purchases.  Yes, gas prices will go up.  Can’t we sacrifice a little bit without whining?  As my friend Debi would say, “Suck it up, buttercup.” 

The Russian people are presently cut off from almost all reliable news.  They have become captive to an unwell leader bent on total destruction.  Not much different from the Trump cult of QAnon Republicans marshaled to storm the halls of Congress.  A cult is a cult.  And Trump’s people brook no more dissent than Putin.  Yet these people continue to fawn over Putin.  My parents must be rolling over in their niches at Forest Lawn. 

Comrade Putin is now rounding up and arresting even children protesting the war – children as young as seven and eleven.  What a mensch!  He must now be very scared.[2] 

Is Tucker Carlson okay with that?  Really – the guy who calls Putin savvy.  Talk about “useful idiot!” – Stalin’s dream child.

George Orwell nailed it.  “War is peace and peace is war.”  We find ourselves as aliens in the strangest of lands as we move into our midterm elections.

I hardly recognize my country at times like this.  Those who side with decency, with truth – yes, we seem as aliens in a rather strange land.  A very strange land.  So, by faith we will travel as sojourners in this unrecognizable landscape. 

Maybe, in standing with Ukrainians, we in some small way, might be able to do penance for all the slaughter we have committed over our own bloody history, beginning with the systemic massacre of the First Nations people and those under the lash of the slave master.  That’s beyond my paygrade.  We are where we are and we do what we can in the moment given us.  It’s truly a leap of faith into this strange new world.

Lent is a period that demands what Otis Moss III, calls “Blue Note Preaching.”  The Rev. Dr. Moss is pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, one of the most influential pulpits in America.  In his book, Blue Note Preaching, Moss brings metaphor and story to its proper place, the imagination.  He is a most apt successor to Pastor Jeremiah Wright – a prophet in our time.

“What is this thing called the Blues?  It is the roux of Black speech, the backbeat of American music…the curve of the Mississippi, the ghost of the South, the hypocrisy of the North.”

Blues addresses both the darkness and the light, the pain and the joy with hope.  No sugar-coating.  Through the moan, the stifled soul is freed[3].  And life goes on.

Blue Note preaching gets through a week of stormy Mondays.  It’s getting it “REAL.”  That is the message of Lent — just happy Sundays don’t do it.  That’s surely not what the flock is getting in Kyiv today.  They crave a message that will get them through this tragedy, and so do we.  So, let’s not sugar coat Calvary.  The cross is real.  Uncertainty nags.

“The world is experiencing the Blues and pulpiteers are dispensing excessive doses on non-prescribed [opioid?] blather with serious “ecclesiastical and theological side effects.”  Lent demands we all “keep it real.” 

Lent demands we enter the suffering and dark places of the world, of ourselves.  That land which is so often strange to us, that land where we find ourselves as alien sojourners.

We must address the woundedness of the world, of our very souls.  Only then will the Spirit be able to debride those wounds, cure our soul-sickness.  It’s singing those songs down by the Waters of Babylon – captives, yet free men and women.

We Christians must have a message that will “help you get out of bed in the morning…get up knowing you ain’t alone,” as the character Ma Rainey in August Wilson’s play insists.[4]  It’s about finding God in the darkness.

Otis tells a wonderful story of being awakened (the Holy Spirit? – just listen on) – awakened in the middle of the night with noises through the house.

Otis remembers, having difficulty getting to sleep, after receiving bomb threats against his church.  He was half awake, half asleep when his wife Monica punched him in the arm, “Get up.  Check that out.

“So, I did. Just like a good preacher, I grabbed my rod and my staff to comfort me.  I went walking through the house with my rod and staff that was made in Louisville with the name ‘Slugger’ on it.”

“I looked downstairs than heard the noise again, and I made my way back upstairs and peeked in my daughter’s room.  There was a six-year-old girl dancing in the darkness…just spinning around, saying, ‘look at me, Daddy.’”

“I said, ‘Makayla, I need you to go to bed.  It is 3:00 a.m.  You need to go to bed.’”

“But she said, ‘No, look at me, Daddy, look at me.’”

“And she was spinning; barrettes going back and forth, pigtails going back and forth.”

“I was getting huffy and puffy wanting her to go to bed, but then God spoke to me at that moment and said, ‘Look at your daughter!  She’s dancing in the dark.  The darkness is all around her but not in her.  But she’s dancing in the dark.’”

This season of both Lenten Ashes and the anticipation of Easter Joy, let’s take to heart a message that will keep us dancing through it all – sorrow and laughter.

We sing a soulful song and find the strength to move on, doing what we can. For as long as we can.

On Thursdays I bike with a group of friends in the morning, even when its only forty degrees out there.   We head out to a small café in downtown La Verne for breakfast.  Oatmeal, if I’m good about my diet.  Corned beef hash and some other stuff, if I’m not. 

In my car, this route looks pretty level.  But once I start pedaling, it’s suddenly uphill – all the way back home.  The last two-block stretch up Mountain Ave. is quite a steep challenge.  I have to rest at the top of it.  Every time I make it, I say to myself, “Well, you’ve made it this week,” knowing that sometime the ride will come when I don’t or can’t.  But, today, I made it.

That is how life is as we approach it’s close.  Lent is preparation for those days.  A Blue Note Gospel will get us there.  A fulsome message that accepts both the heights and depths of the challenges of this new, and strange land.  Getting old is new territory.

In Lent is the assurance that as we complete the journey, it is not as aliens but as beloved sons and daughters of the Most High.  Brothers and sisters of one another.

By the way, a love offering to assist with the Ukrainian refugees would surely be an acceptable gift to lay at the altar of the Almighty – just sayin.’  It might now be widow’s-mite time.

“If thou but trust in God to guide thee through the evil days.  Who trusts in God’s unchanging love builds on a rock that nought can move.”  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.  Amen.

---

[1] Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (New York: Doubleday 2017).

[2] Sebastian Murdock, “Russian Police Reportedly Arrest, Jail Children Protesting War Against Ukraine,” Huffpost, March 2, 2022.

[3] Otis Moss III, Blue Note Preaching (Louisville, KY: John Knox Westminster Press, 2015).

[4] August Wilson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, 1982.  His play named after a popular dance in the 20s, the Black Bottom.

March 6, 2022, Lent 1

“Aliens in a Strange Land”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16; Romans 10:8b-13

A rather unusual experience happened to me one sometime past at the grocery store.  Our local store was in the process of being remodeled, and the location of virtually everything has been changed.  I’m not sure why this was necessary, but I go in there and can’t find anything.  I spend so much time and energy just looking for the items on my list that I can’t even impulse-shop anymore. 

As I was searching up one aisle and then another for a household cleaner, I spied a young woman, a sort of plain looking person in what would seem to be her early twenties with two children hanging on her.  She reminded me of someone from what my mother used to call “the projects.”  Being as young as she was, she looked ill-kempt and tired.  She turned around to see me hurriedly looking down the aisle for the next item on my list, and for some reason she seemed to think I was looking at her, while in reality I was straining to see past her. 

I soon forgot the whole incident until, while standing in the check-out line, I sensed someone sidling up to me on the other side of the chrome bar.  It was that young mother.  She wanted to know if I could help out with some money for her groceries.  As I started to speak, a tall, thin – an older woman in a shabby black dress, with her gray hair done up in a bun, from the next checkout stand over called out, “We’re thirteen dollars short.”

I was soon going home to a hearty meal, and my conscience began to nag, “Well, what would it hurt to help out a little bit?  What did Jesus say? ‘Give to all who ask?’”  Actually, I don’t know if Jesus said that or not.  But I figured it wouldn’t hurt to help out.  I certainly could spare thirteen dollars for Christ’s sake, and for the sake of her family.

I was now approaching the cashier.  Some people nearby were starting to stare at us, this older guy being importuned by this strange young woman.  But I really didn’t mind.  I was determined to help.  One person behind me hissed, sotto voce to a friend, “you’ve gotta watch those kinda people.”

I really didn’t mind helping. I really didn’t.  I was okay with it.  Figure it was my good deed for the day.  But it didn’t seem to end there.

As I paid the cashier and prepared to put my bags of groceries in my cart, there she was again, wondering if I could take her and her family home.  They only lived a short distance away, right behind Home Depot.  Her mother had difficulty walking, and it would be a big help if I would drive them.  Well, I guess I could do a little more.  Oh, and one more thing, could I give her a little money for the week.  I pulled another five-dollar bill from my wallet.  I turned my head just in time to see her step over to the line to buy a pack of cigarettes as her mother was asking where my car might be.  Now, I was getting a little annoyed.  While I didn’t mind paying for the family to have something to eat, I definitely wasn’t interested in helping her purchase a pack of “coffin sticks” so she could smoke herself and her family to death.

Getting into my car is something of an experience.   This was back when I still had my old Buick. I’m really not set up for passengers.  On the floor in the front is my stack of stuff for my construction business.  In the back seat were some lamps for the church in big boxes.  On the back floor on one side is a pile of papers for our youth group.  In the trunk are all the paper goods like cups and napkins and stuff I need for youth group meetings (my mechanic actually wondered one day if I was living out of my car.  Maybe he’d thought my wife had thrown me out.  I suppose some days I wouldn’t blame her – but that’s another story).  Then strewn around are some bottles of antacid, a plastic container of dental floss, an umbrella, some dead straws and a McDonald’s cup, and two very large church posters.  My oldest son had the nerve one day to tell me that my car looked more like a motorized dumpster!  He once asked, “Dad does the landfill company pay you to store their stuff in your trunk?”

Well, somehow, I made room for my newly found entourage with all their baggage, and yes, the cigarettes – that was still grating.

On the way home the grandmother, sitting in the front seat, is telling me about having lost her husband last year and how things have been very difficult.  Her daughter in the back seat with the boy on her lap, next to the boxes of lamps and young woman is saying something about how maybe I could give her my phone number so she could call me sometimes during the week.  We could see each other.  She’d like that.  I averred that that wouldn’t be such a good idea as I had my own life and she had her’s.  By this time the mother was going on about what her daughter really needed was a boyfriend.

Whoa.  Time out!  As I held up my left hand, prominently pointing to my wedding ring, I assured them that I was already happily married.  Moaned the daughter, “See, Mom, the good ones are always taken.” 

We couldn’t have arrived any sooner, to my way of reckoning, to a run-down looking house with a dead lawn and the front door hanging open.  As I helped the grandmother sort out her remaining bags of groceries from all my stuff in the trunk, she spotted my packages of napkins and paper plates.  Maybe I could help out a little more.  They could use some paper towels and things.  “Sure,” I said, handing them to her and trying not to sound too annoyed.  By this time I just wanted to get out of there before her daughter came back again.  And maybe I could help out a little with the electric bill.  “Why not,” I wearily responded.   By this time the twenty–dollar bill I’d gotten for the week had evaporated.

As I drove off, finally glad to be rid of this very needy group of people, a woman suddenly drove up in front of me and abruptly stopped her car.  It seems that she’d seen all that had gone on with us at the grocery store and had just wondered if I had gotten out of it without being mugged or anything.  I thanked her for her solicitousness, assuring her that I really, really hadn’t minded helping.

On my way home, I thanked my lucky stars that I had married someone who was so sensible, and not a complete and utter flake.

But as I got to thinking more and more about this out-of-the-blue mini-adventure, I was forced to acknowledge those times in my life that I have been just as flaky, just as desperate, just as needy – maybe in a different sort of way.   I began to reflect on how it is, ultimately, that we all come before God in not much better shape than this desperate and out-of-control young mother.  Being, more sophisticated, I’m just better at hiding it.  But, ultimately, you and I, we all come before God with very empty hands.  As the song says, we all arrive at the throne of heaven with a “broken alleluia.”

On Ash Wednesday, that is what we at the bottom of it all, are here to acknowledge – our absolute, and utter need for God.  That God-shaped hole in our lives, as Augustine calls it, that nothing, nothing but God can ultimately fill, though we so often attempt to fill it with all kinds of stuff or addictive behaviors.

We come to this rail in our common humanity, remembering that we are but dust, and to dust we do return.  There are no do-overs.  I, that young mother, her two kids and their grandmother, yes, poor and needy, we all come.  Lord, have mercy upon us all.  And we come hoping and trusting in our heart of hearts that there might be some saving mercy indeed, even for the likes of us.  Even for those desperate souls in Ukraine.  So begins our forty days wilderness journey of Lent. Amen.

March 2, 2022
Ash Wednesday

“Ashes, Ashes, All Fall Down”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Psalm 103:8-14; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

This Sunday we wind up the liturgical season of Epiphany.  Most of our readings have been about the revelation of the Holy in Christ and God’s presence as manifest in the Church – the Body of Christ (see the book of Acts).  Our readings reveal Jesus’ presence that turns daily living into the finest wine, and the calling of many to be part of a new faith journey that lives out the Gospel ethic of the Jesus Movement.

I thought I had this sermon well in hand when on Wednesday evening it was abruptly upended.  That’s what sometimes happens when the world’s agenda overtakes what one has written on paper, especially when events are of such enormity. 

On a personal level, as I contemplated all the dazzle and sparkle of the Transfiguration, I had to face it.  In light of the Russian invasion, the detonations and the air raid sirens going off in the background of news reports from Kiev, I’m not feeling much sparkle.  This invasion will be a complete and utter disaster for millions.

Putin has threatened to undo all the Post WW II security arrangements and national borders.  He trashes the international rule of law that has kept the peace in Europe for over seventy-five years. There will be millions of refugees flooding into the rest of Europe.  Hundreds of thousands will perish in Ukraine. 

The Russian invaders are already committing atrocities and war crimes in Odessa.  The invasion itself is a violation of the Geneva Convention, making Putin a war criminal. The economic costs are mounting, and soon will be staggering.  Only “shock and awe.”  No dazzle.  No sparkle.  Just grunge and devastation.

As one of my sons said on the morning of 9/11, “Dad, I don’t think we can let this one slide”.

Consequences for all will be enormous.  What will become of Ukraine?  Will Putin stop there?  Will sanctions make a whit of difference?  Or just amount to a petty annoyance.

We as Americans must gladly bear the costs of sanctions and must be resolute in using all the soft power at our command to bring Putin to the table.  We must bear in mind the alternative – a possible wider war throughout Europe with nukes.  And whatever happens in Europe won’t stay in Europe.

The efforts of peacemakers will be the radiant transfigured face of those who follow the Way.  And if it works, and let’s hope to God it does, my face will be a little brighter.  Meanwhile, our hearts and prayers, and all the aid we can muster, must be with the Ukrainian people and those brave Russians protesting this insanity.  The insanity of one man!

But for now, we’re betwixt and between.  I feel we’re somewhat like Peter in the Transfiguration story – gobsmacked.

In Luke’s telling, Jesus takes his followers Peter, James and John up on the high mountain of God’s revelation to pray.  Pray for what, they probably had no idea.

Jesus’ appearance is suddenly dazzling.  He shimmers and shines like that first star which led the Eastern Sages to Bethlehem.  It is indeed “Christ of the shining mountains, True and transfigured King.”  God speaks almost the same words which began Jesus’ ministry at baptism, “This is my beloved Son, listen to him.”

And in the midst of it all are Elijah and Moses, talking to Jesus.  Elijah and Moses, harbingers of the Messianic Age.  When they appear, a new day is at hand.  Better than the Age of Aquarius.   Freedom and solidarity will reign in the land.

And poor Peter, he has no idea what to make of it all.  He, obviously,     skipped Bible class.  He is consumed by the experience.  He might as well be in paradise.  He doesn’t know what to say.  He’s like a little boy hauled in before the principal, afraid and stammering.”    Finally, he blurts out, “Wow, this is great.  Let’s make three tents, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” Again, he has absolutely no idea what he is saying.

These are strictly Old Testament rumblings:  the mountain, the cloud, the voice, the light show, Moses and Elijah.  The glory of God is fully manifest in Jesus as culmination of deliverance and justice.

Elijah is the sign of God’s solidarity with us, the prophetic tradition of just dealings and God’s preferential option for the poor and defenseless.  When we see Elijah, the time of fulfillment is near and very near.

Moses is the figure of deliverance from all that binds and holds us down from the full stature God intends for men and women. 

It was not coincidence that those escaping the bondage of slavery referred to Harriet Tubman, the most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad, as Moses. 

Time and again, despite the floggings and vicious dogs, she led hundreds to freedom up North.  Following the Drinking Gourd.  It was the North Star of that constellation which would lead them to freedom. She was one of the most successful conductors and best known on the Underground Railroad

Yes, go down Moses and lead us all to Freedom Land where all God’s children can sparkle.  Go down Moses

Jesus in this revelatory episode, is the embodiment of these two traditions.  God’s will that we all sparkle like bright shiny beads – that we and all who follow become the Transfigured Christ.  That’s the divine plan, told down through the ages in both Old and New Testaments.  

It is God’s will that we, the Church, reflect that same radiant face of Christ upon the Mount of Revelation.  God working through us to effect exactly the very same brilliance of Moses as he came down Mount Sinai.  As Jesus upon the mount.

And sometimes Transfiguration takes place in the most unlikely of persons.  Yeah, people like you and me.  People like Fannie Lou Hamer and those of Freedom Summer down in Mississippi in the sixties.

Several Sundays ago I briefly mentioned Fannie Lou Hamer.  She was a poor Mississippi sharecropper who, like Harriet Tubman, was also a conductor on the road to freedom as she led her people to the voting booth.  She stood powerfully in a prophetic tradition where all count.

Let me tell you how this impoverished woman, with no more than a sixth-grade education, showed up the hypocrisy of a president of the United States and the Democratic Party.  I don’t say she brought him low. President Johnson did that all by himself.  As did a cowardly convention.  That convention’s own racist behavior in expelling the Mississippi Freedom delegation was its own abject shame.

As King said, “It is always the right time to do the right thing.”  The power structure of the party failed.

The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) delegates, seeking to unseat the regulars on the floor of convention, maintained that they, an interracial delegation, under the provisions of the Constitution, had the right to those seats.

Johnson, and the Democratic establishment was worried that Fannie Lou and her rump group would alienate their White southern, segregationist voters. 

Party power brokers threatened, they tried to bribe, they promised all sorts of programs for Mississippi — if Fannie Lou and her people would just go back home, or at least accept a compromise. 

Hubert Humphrey, whose spot on the ticket as VP was contingent upon getting the MFDP group to accept a compromise, pleaded for her understanding on the floor of convention.  The compromise would be just two seats out of the sixty-eight allotted Mississippi.  And mind you, neither of those two could be Fannie Lou Hamer.  That was the deal, just two seats and no Fannie Lou Hamer.  Definitely, not THAT woman!

Fannie Lou was aglow with Gospel radiance, Christ-like radiance.  She was delivering her people into a new future.  Johnson and the Democratic Party had no comprehension of the force they faced.

Fannie Lou was proving to be a most righteous sword of justice that God was wielding through our segregationist laws and racist attitudes, both South and North.  Cutting a wide swath of Freedom.

She told Humphry that if this compromise was the price to be paid for getting all his promised benefits for Mississippi, that he, in the end, would get none of it.  The entire MFDP delegation backed her.

When Fannie Lou gave her testimony before the Credentials Committee, her story of what she had endured to be accorded the basic rights of a First-Class American, the right to register and vote – the beatings, the humiliation, the sexual molestation at the hands of deputies and police back home, Johnson realized he was losing the ballgame.

President Johnson called an impromptu press conference in the middle of her testimony.  And while the media attention swung to the White House for Johnson’s presser, which was a big “nothing burger.” Never even mentioned Humphrey, whom most thought would be introduced as his VP choice.

All the while, in Atlantic City, the TV cameras kept rolling.  Recording every bit of what Fannie Lou had to say on behalf of her delegation of sixty-eight.  Every word.  And the ovation which followed.  There wasn’t a dry eye in the room except for the “regulars,” who sat in stony-faced silence during her presentation.  Shaking their heads in disgust.

President Johnson thought he had averted a whole bunch of bad publicity.  He was wrong.  That evening the nightly news programs put out her witness before all of America.

But wait, it gets worse.

Every delegate of the Mississippi regulars, rather than even accepting this minimal compromise, walked out en masse and went home, leaving a block of seats on the floor cordoned off by ropes.

Many delegates, supportive of Fannie Lou and her group, gave floor passes to the Freedom Delegation which, the next morning went under the ropes and occupied that block of seats. 

The following day, the MFDP found that all those seats had been unbolted from the floor and taken away.  So, Fannie Lou and her group just sat on the floor — made Johnson and the party regulars look like the chumps they were.

Fannie Lou may have lost her battle for those seats.  But that evening on the six o’clock news, she overwhelmingly won the hearts of the American public.

Through it all, with her freedom songs, testimony, Bible references, and encouragement, she reflected back divine, Transfiguration.  Her face shone and glittered with Gospel goodness.  As did the faces of her delegation.  True and Transfigured!

Now this was a Glory Attack if ever there was one!

This story of Transfiguration was preserved not as just a weird, one-off miracle.  It is the destiny of God’s people.  Our destiny.  Yes, we, the Church.

Martin Luther King would berate the Church and its leadership for being the taillight of history.  We are meant to be the headlight.  A true and transfigured hundred-thousand-watt headlight.

 Fannie Lou and all who have followed in her footsteps, those murdered volunteers buried in Mississippi’s swamps and lagoons, they are the True and Transfigured image of Christ.  This is the glory God intends for us.  We have but a few days.  How shall we use them?  To what end?

In San Bernardino, West Virginia and Ohio, that is the destiny of the House of Hope.  A transfigured hundred-thousand-watt headlight.

I don’t know exactly what happened up on that mountain with those befuddled disciples.   I wasn’t there.  What sort of miracle or apparition they might have seen — I have no idea.

But I do know about the miracle of some transfigured souls who have come through the tribulation of addiction.  They are the living testimony to “once was blind but now I see.”  I have witnessed their sparkle and shine, eyes wide awake, as they delight in a new rebirth.   I have seen that miracle with my own eyes

They, through their recovery, are splinters of light off that same True and Transfigured Christ.  We, through our faithfulness, are Transfiguration.

This is the vision.  This is the journey’s end.  What we call sanctified. Now, as we prepare to enter our Lenten journey, let us keep our eyes on this Gospel prize.  And may we do all we can to support our sisters and brothers in Ukraine.  And pray for the antiwar marchers in Russia.    Blessed are the feet of those Messengers of Peace.  Amen

February 27, 2022, Epiphany – Last

Transfiguration Sunday

“Bright and Shiny Church”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

Exodus 34:29-35; Psalm 99; 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2
Luke 9:28-36

In the days of another former president, I would some days wake up, and after listening to the morning news think, “I could do better than that.”  With some presidents, that was a more frequent thought than with others. 

Mumbling about idiotic decisions and crony appointments, my wife knew it was safer not to say anything.  Just let him rant and rave.  Even presidents I had voted for often disappointed.  How many times was I fuming over Obama’s boneheaded Middle East wars!  I was probably the best Monday Morning Quarterback any president could have ever had.

As President Biden frequently says, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty.  Compare me to the other guy” (or woman).  My standards were tough – except for myself.  We all disappoint.  I know I have.

Jeremiah offers wise counsel here:

“Thus says the Lord: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord.  They shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when relief comes.  They shall live in parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land.  Blessed are those who trust in the Lord.  They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out roots by the stream.”

“Trust in the Lord” is not some empty phrase.  It means to heed the wisdom given to your heart and mind and soul.  Heed the wisdom that builds community and binds us together and to the earth.  Heed the wisdom that is tested by life experience and community reflection.  You can even find some in the Bible.

We are given this because God has implanted agency within us.  We can choose – for the better, and not the worse.  Choose LIFE.  That’s always the summons.  Choose LIFE. 

This trust is mentioned again in Psalm 1.  The people who trust in the Lord are those wise who do not run with the wrong crowd or sit in the seat of the scoffers.  The righteous, the tzaddikim, are in solidarity with neighbor and stranger, with creation – for solidarity is a better translation than “righteous.”  This is a woman, a man, you can count on.  These are people who know deep down they are loved and that same love just bubbles out of them.  They’re people you want to be around.  For lack of a better word, we call them saints.  But that is the vocation of each who is called to follow the Way.

Take up with those who have followed that path, like Bryan Stevenson and Fannie Lou Hamer.  They have been so tested and purified that they have become windows to God.  As they lived out this wisdom they draw others in.  Spirit just oozes out of them.  They are tokens of God’s solidarity with us.

Luke in the Beatitudes enumerates the qualities of the tzaddikim:

“Blessed are you…”   These blessings are about the so called “little people,” those without pretension. 

Then follow the “woes.”  Woe to you who are satiated with good things.  Woe to you who hoard up more than you know what to do with.  How is it that just three gazillionaires own more than half of all Americans?   When did “enough” become “filthy rich?”  Three people!   Life is not about “whoever dies with the most toys wins.”  Woe to the puffed up and self-important.  You will always be searching if this is where you’re looking.  Take the off-ramp.  Choose LIFE.

When I drove plastic bottles in a big rig at night down to the Coke bottling plant in Los Angeles, several of us would be lined up in the street waiting to be unloaded.  A Black fellow poorly dressed and quite odiferous would often approach our trucks looking for a handout.

After a few encounters, he would engage me in more extended conversation.  I didn’t want to just give him a dollar or two, as if I was some superior, benevolent person – which I wasn’t.  So,it came to be that I would carry some rags and chrome polish with me in the cab.  I’d tell him that If he polished the bumper or the chrome on the wheels, I’d be worth five dollars to me.

When I asked him his name all he’d tell me was that it was “Can Man.”  That’s all I ever got out of him.Obviously — that was what his shopping cart was full of, cans to be recycled for a little extra. 

Several others would offer to help, so each night I’d make sure I had some extra cash with me.  I figured that this small offering was the price of doing business in the big city.         My encounters with Can Man always made my day.  He was a blessing each night.  I prayed I might have been as well.

When my youngest son, living in Cairo, mentioned that he would feel badly, seeing all the beggars in the street or at the entrances to mosques or churches, I told him about my approach to the destitute in Los Angeles.

Just take some extra coins in your pocket, each large enough that a person might use it to get something to eat from a street vendor.  And when they’re gone, they’re gone.  Whatever you can afford to part with.

Just remember, even Jesus didn’t feed everyone, didn’t heal everyone.  And you ain’t in his class.

What counts is that everyone counts.  What counts is that out of the abundance of our lives, we share what we can.  And a bit more.  Without  judgment.  Without expectation.

The Beatitudes are not a new law, not a way of earning divine favor.  Rather, they serve as a direction as to where life is to be found. It’s about “seek and ye shall find” – more abundance than you ever counted on.”   It is more about the sentiment of the heart than any notion of perfection or earning one’s heavenly brownie points.  That’s already been taken care of when the Spirit touched mind and heart.

Blessed is not the same as “happy.”   “Happy” is a transient superficial emotion.  One can get “happy” from a bottle of Jim Beam.

To be BLESSED is to be grounded deep down in God’s goodness.  It’s to be so grounded that goodness spills out of you and overflows into all you do, all that you are.  BLESSED doesn’t depend on the approval of others.  BLESSED just IS.

Bryan Stevenson’s mother lived the beatitude of reconciliation. 

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 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.[1]

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

Out of the tough love of such a Gospel-Soaked mother, Bryan grew to be the man he is today.  She was a living, breathing Beatitude.  Through her persistence of, Jesus would raise up a man who would end up devoting his life to serving the most despised and discarded.  Those of you who are mothers know exactly what I am talking about.

This godly wisdom is the door to all that is holy, all that is true, all that is just.  It is the open door to an abundant life. Trust this, and you will have put your hand in the hand of the Man from Galilee, The Man who stills the rough waters of life.  What a Friend you will have – trust in him.  This, my friends, is BLESSED. Amen.

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

February 13, 2022, Epiphany 6

“Blessed Are…”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

Jeremiah 17:5-10; Psalm 1; 1 Corinthians 15:12-20;
Luke 6:17-26

Every spring our little church in Petersburg would host what was called “Soup and Sandwiches.”  This was an opportunity for cannery workers who lived in what was known as “Tent City” an opportunity for a good meal and fellowship.  Most of the churches in town participated.

And many years there was the discussion around the question, “Why should we always do this?” 

One year I distinctly remember the answer of our junior warden, “Well, isn’t this what Jesus would want us to do?”

The quick rejoinder, “Is he going to pay for it?”

I’m thinking, pay what?  We’re out a bit of electricity and heating oil.  No big deal.  Then the answer came to me. 

“Yes, he’s going to pay for it.  Jesus is going to use my wallet and any other wallet and checkbook here that’s been through the waters of baptism and he’s going to foot the bill.”  And, again that year, he more than paid for it.  In abundance.

That’s because “Abundance” is the hallmark of his ministry.  Not scarcity.  Jesus came to announce God’s Abundance.  This guy EXCEEDS ALL EXPECTATIONS.

Exactly the abundance that issued from the call of Isaiah.  As the temple filled with smoke and supernal visages soared through the chaos, Isaiah trembled in fear.  A cosmic extravaganza worthy of a Superbowl halftime.  He was not up to whatever was going on.  This was time for a 911 call into Ghostbusters.  The space-time continuum was coming unstuck.  Seraphs and whole host of God-knows-what-else materialized out of the noxious cloud.

Throughout it all reverberated the earsplitting, “Holy, holy, holy,” of the phantasmagoric scene.  Mega boom-box sound turned to the max.

“And I said: ‘Woe is me!  I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the king, the Lord of Hosts!”

Actually, that’s probably not what he really said.  It was more like, “HOLY CRAP!”  AM I SCREWED!!!  WE’RE ALL SCREWED.

 Yes, we all are.  Terminally, abysmally ignorant of what makes for any kind of life, any kind of society.  We’re in deep stuff.

“Then I heard a voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’  And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!’”

Now, I don’t know about the physicality of that vision, if this stuff really, really happened, the temple being filled with a Fourth of July fireworks production; or if what had transpired was solely between Isaiah’s two ears.  But whatever it was, God had Isaiah’s complete and undivided attention.

It was either respond or just give up – lie down and die – a do-or-not-do moment. 

In all the smoke and din Isaiah had a choice.  And don’t we all?

Isaiah chose LIFE and ABUNDANCE – a more excellent way.  He chose to be a servant of that Word given him.  His answer to that call would exceed all expectations.  That’s always God’s call to each of us.  And in our acceptance, might we catch a faint echo of that haunting refrain, “Holy, holy, holy.”

In an instant, not only Isaiah’s wallet, but his entire life was baptized in that fire and smoke.  Imagine!   And all this time I thought it was about the car, the chicks and the loudest boom box on the stereo system.  Was I ever out to lunch!  Clueless.

I don’t know about an unclean people, but in the midst of this raging pandemic we’re surely reading about a whole bunch of deluded, thoughtless people.  As our football season draws to a close, several teams are headed for the playoffs and it’s all on the line.   How many fans will be crowded together cheek by jowl without any masks?  We may or may not be a people of unclean lips, but certainly a people of little sense.  It’s into this imbecility God’s call comes.  That’s how it found each of us.  Not always in our brightest moments.

For all who answer, God’s will is to exceed our expectations.  Those who answer are called from the kitchen, from cotton fields, university classrooms.  They are called from long lines of preachers.  They are called from mind-numbing work in Amazon fulfillment centers and post offices.  Called from union halls and corporate executive suites, or off the factory floor.  Called to exceed all expectations. 

I caught the vision at a speech by Dr. King.  We are all here because of some event, some vision, some nudge.  My Methodist friends call this prevenient grace – grace that goes before us, directing us to where Life is to be had.

One of my Pilgrim Place friends posted the story of the fortuitous intersection between one of God’s servants, Martin Luther King, Jr. and a young boy.

This was an eleven-year-old white boy living in the black section of Kentucky, living for the fall of 1969 with his mom, both guests of Dr. Abbie Clement Jackson, his mom’s best friend and a national leader in the AME Zion Church.  Abbie became over that fall his adopted grandma.  David Russell, a relative of one of the Pilgrims here at Pilgrim Place, shares his remembrance of the in-the-flesh Good News of healing and restoration:[1]

“One Saturday morning, Grandma Abbie asked me to wait by the front door to greet her ‘escort’ and let her know he was here to walk her down to the AME church conference where Grandma was the keynote speaker that day. Her ‘escort’ was Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He was already becoming well known and I was excited!

“Later that afternoon, King, Jr. and [the boy’s] parents came back to the house for tea, coffee, treats and conversation with Grandma, Mom and me. At one point, Martin Luther King Jr. turned to me and asked: “David what is it like being the only white boy in an all-Negro school?” I thought for a moment about my friends Cecil and Ellis, my Scout troop, my church and I said… “It’s normal”.

“The ‘Beloved Community’ begins when we can feel comfortable in our own skins and respect the skin of the person next to us. When we look into each other’s eyes and begin to see a Child of God, then being together in community begins to be ‘normal.’”  

This was a journey that summer exceeding all expectations.

The vision of what might be, what ought to be, came to Fanny Lou Hamer, a little girl with no more than a sixth-grade education who toiled in the cotton fields of Mississippi to help support her impoverished family. 

Fannie Lou was raised up to be one of the most powerful women in the civil rights movement of the sixties, a giant for justice.

Kate Larson, in her new biography of Fannie Lou, Walk with Me[2], brings this amazing woman’s story to life.  Fannie’s moment comes as a spokeswoman for the Mississippi Freedom Delegation to the Democratic National Convention in 1964.  They were demanding to be seated in place of the all-white segregationist, official slate of delegates, from that state.

Here’s Fannie’s story as told by her biographer:

“She wore a borrowed dress, one suitable for such an important occasion.  A Mississippi sharecropper, she never had new things.  Used, reused, patched, and patched again—these defined the fabric of her everyday experience.  Someone loaned her white shoes and a white purse, too.  From her seat at the table at the front of a packed hearing room, she scanned the faces of the men and women waiting to hear her testimony.  The din of the conversations and rustling papers and creaking chairs muffled the notice of whirring television cameras.  She folded her hands to steady herself.  A man to her right gave her the cue to start.

“’Mr. Chairman, and to the Credentials Committee, my name is Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, and I live at 626 East Lafayette Street, Ruleville, Mississippi, Sunflower County, the home of Senator James O. Eastland and Senator Stennis.  It was the thirty-first of August in 1962 that eighteen of us traveled twenty-six miles to the county courthouse in Indianola to try to register to become first-class citizens.’  Her white landlord, she said, evicted her when she returned home that night from Indianola because he told her, ‘We are not ready for that in Mississippi.’”

Fannie Lou and more than sixty other Mississippians had gone to Atlantic City, site of the convention, to press their case to unseat the white segregationist delegation.

“It was late in the afternoon and the summer humidity seeped into the crowded room.  Hamer’s brown skin glistened with sweat.  The committee members shifted and settled in their seats, and the chatter in the room subsided into a few whispers.  The white Mississippi delegates shook their heads to disgust while she spoke.  Without notes, from memory, from her heart, Hamer recounted the struggles, terror, and violence she had endured trying to do the most basic thing a citizen of any county can do:  register to vote.

“Her Mississippi drawl ebbed and flowed through her words, giving them a cadence that drew the audience in.  She described the death threats and gunshots that had rewarded her demands for civil rights.  The room grew quiet.  When she recounted how brutally the police had beaten her one day for standing up, eyes welled with tears.

“Her eight-minute plea ended with a question that haunted many for years afterward. ‘Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives are threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings in America?’

President Johnson, fearing he might lose that white segregationist vote, fearing the attention Fannie’s address to the convention was getting, to distract the national attention, called an impromptu press conference.   A conference called on the spot, right in the middle of Fannie’s address, succeeded in capturing the media for three and a half minutes.

“Johnson miscalculated, however.  The television cameras had kept rolling through her speech, capturing her every word, and the evening news programs replayed her testimony and the ovation that followed.  The whole nation watched as a dirt-poor Mississippi sharecropper with a sixth-grade education shamed them into acknowledging how deeply and profoundly broken American democracy had become.  That day, Fannie Lou Hamer called on Americans to walk with her toward equality and justice for all.[3]

Certainly exceeded President Johnson’s expectations.

This, a Gospel Journey that has exceeded all expectations.  And there are still miles to go.  This work is not done.  And so it is with us here at St. Francis.

As with the call of Isaiah, as with the summons of Jesus that morning to those on a fishing excursion.  Fished all night caught nary a minnow.  Jesus instructed them, instructs us, to keep at it.  Lower your nets a little deeper.  That’s what Jesus tells his disciples.  “Lower your nets a bit deeper.” God alone knows what’s in the offing.  Who knows what that effort will surface?  Just might be beyond our puny expectations.

This morning each of us might have been in a dozen other places.  But we’ve chosen to be here.  Let’s hope and pray and see what God might do with us.  The results just might astound.  Exceed all expectations.  So, here we are, O Lord.  Here we are.  Send us.  Amen

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[1] David, Russell, “Little Blessings,” Shared by sister-in-law Marry Russell in the  Pilgrim Place Google Group (with permission) January 17, 2022.

[2] Kate Clifford Larson, Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

[3] Op. cit., 1-2.

February 6, 2022, Epiphany 5

“Exceeds All Expectations”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

Isaiah 6:1-8 (9-13); Psalm 138; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11;
Luke 5:1-11

I was in my office at our little church in Petersburg, Alaska, when I received a call from my friend Fr. Gary, the priest at St. John’s in Ketchikan.  There they had a Seaman’s Center connected to the church, a not-unusual ministry for Episcopal churches in port towns.  There men (and back then, they were all men) could get a warm bed, play cards or watch TV, wash clothes and get a good meal during the few days their ship was in port.

Gary wanted to know if it might be possible that I knew of any place their manager (I’ll call him Bob) could stay while the state ferry was docked in our town for a day or so.  Sure, I told him we had a foldout sofa in my office that made into a bed exactly for such purposes.

So, Bob, a fellow in his late fifties, and I connected by phone and I told him where we were located, but he needed to know that in the early evening  

he’d have to keep to himself because on Thursday nights we hosted an AA meeting.  “Great,” said Bob.  “I can make my meeting.”

Well, Bob came and went.  Made his meeting, I supposed, and was on the ferry the next morning to Juneau.  I’d met him before when I was down at St. John’s, and he seemed like a nice fellow.  I was glad we could help.

The next Sunday, one of the women on our altar guild caught me in the hallway with a question.  “I don’t drink wine, but somehow when I got things setup for communion, what I poured out of the bottle didn’t smell like wine.”  I took a taste.  Charlotte was right – it wasn’t wine.  It was water.

Our overnight guest had turned the wine to water.

I later told Fr. Gary that we’d have to look into his seminary degree.  And maybe look over his ordination exams.  He’d led poor Bob astray.  I wondered if Bob had actually made his meeting that night.

“On the third day” – in scripture the most amazing things always seem to happen on the third day – “On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.  Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding.  When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’”

You know the rest of the story.  Gallons of water are turned into wine so the feasting can continue for the normal seventeen days of a wedding.  Not only were Jesus and his disciples present.  The entire town was present.  This wedding would have been the bash of the year.  Indeed, a good time was had by all.

Eastern Christianity celebrates this miracle as the Epiphany, not the star and the arrival of wisemen.  It is through this occurrence that Jesus’ divinity is perceived.  When Jesus is at the party, there is joy and good times in abundance.   

If this is so, how is it that many too often leave our churches feeling so beat down and worse for the wear?  Or even worse, bored out of their skulls.

The one take-away from this story is, God wants us to thrive, to be joyful.  As Jesus provided such fine wine, he was the Life of the Party.

How is it that we have too often taken the joyous fine wine of the Gospel of Good News and turned it into scolding, or the flat, stale water of irrelevance?

How is it that our country which springs from lofty Promise, has turned the dream of America into the polluted river of Jim Crow?  Turned it into banishment to reservations and impoverishment?  Turned it into insurrection and quack nostrums hawked at the highest level? 

I got the news this Monday that our supervising doctor in West Virginia for House of Hope had died of COVID-19.  He was an anti-vaxer.   He’d fallen for the junk science spread by the former president and Fox News.

Now we have some senators and other politicians comparing a COVID-19 mandate to the Holocaust.  Racial hate seems to be endless with these people.  No fine wine here, only rank pollution. 

“Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) on Wednesday joined that growing number of elected Republicans who have compared COVID-19 vaccine mandates to the horrors imposed on Jewish people by Nazis during the Holocaust.”[1] 

“Numerous 2022 Republican House candidates, Republican members of state legislatures and conservative media personalities have also invoked Nazi Germany in criticizing mask and vaccine rules.”[2]

As no members of that party have called out these people for this racist trope, they must be okay with it.  Have they and their party lost all sensitivity to how this sounds to our Jewish brothers and sisters?  Have they no shame?  The Proud Boys and the Three Percenters would be just fine with such trash.

I can still picture the grimace and wince of Dr. Birx as she sat at a press conference while Dr. Trump expounded on the miracle cures of bleach and ultraviolet lights.  Then, on to horse-dewormer and herd “mentality.”  The fine wine of our best science and medical knowledge turned into putrefying

ignorance.  Yes — the transformation of the fine wine of learning transformed into lies and propaganda.  And for too many, with this raging pandemic, the party’s over.  Over 800,000 Americans dead.  For them the party is permanently over.  No life here.

Here was the offering of the miracle of our best science, and it was squandered – poured down the drain.  Fine wine gone to waste.  And people died.

This coming Monday we celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King.  He was a prophet for the ages who took our sordid history of racism and transformed it into promise.  A foundational promise born from Gospel Joy.  All are welcome.  All flourish.  It’s the content of character that counts.  Not any outward appearance.  Not class, learning, or color.  Nobility IS character.

As the 1619 Project demonstrates, for many this promise was stillborn.  Slaves were part of the story from the inception.  And, within a generation we had banished to starvation some of the same people invited to the mythic first Thanksgiving. 

As my new, favorite poet, Joyce Chisale of Mawali says, “Little by little.”  Little by little does our nation move into this promise.  But we have so far to go.  So far.

 But when one encounters the sewage spewed by ignorant and hateful minds, I grow tired of it all.  When we encounter our inability to deal with voter suppression and election corruption, we all grow tired.  Sick and tired of being sick and tired!

So enough with the garbage already.  Let’s look at the beckoning promise.  Let’s taste a sip of some of the fine wine brought to our democracy party around the Liberty Tree.

My friend, Martha Morales, a pastor at Claremont United Methodist Church, spoke to that promise in a sermon recently on the Methodist tradition of the Watch Night Service, held on New Years eve.  The Watch Night of which she spoke was held on the eve of the day the Emancipation Proclamation was to take effect.[3]

Pastor Martha writes of the Methodist tradition of the Watch Night Service — that she’d “come to know the Watch Night Service from another vantage point, that of the African American Church. This is from the African American lectionary:

“As close as it can be historically pinpointed, the initial observance of the Watch Night Service in the African American church began on December 31, 1862, when the service was referred to as “Freedom’s Eve.” On that cold December evening thousands of enslaved descendants from Africa gathered in churches and private homes to pray and praise God, anxiously awaiting the news that the Emancipation Proclamation had become law. Prior to this evening, rumors had circulated that at the stroke of midnight, January 1, 1863, all slaves in the Confederate States would be declared legally free, as a result of the new laws set in motion by President Abraham Lincoln. When the declaration of their human independence was affirmed, the freed slaves shouted, sang songs of joy, and fell to their knees with thankful hearts for the new era of freedom that had come their way. After this occurrence African Americans continued to gather annually to commemorate their independence and praise God for bringing them safely through another year and the promise of a new era of freedom on the horizon. This was the beginning of a tradition that still remains.”[4]

This tradition is of the finest of wines our nation has produced, enriching the souls of all.  Medicine for healing.  A good remembrance for tomorrow’s celebration of Dr. King.  The work is far from done, but “little by little…”

Having read Martha’s words, Juneteenth will have a richer, deeper meaning this year.  You remember, June 19 – Juneteenth – is the date that former slaves in Texas belatedly learned of their emancipation.

In the midst of sedition, lies and subversion, there is one Republican who gets the Profiles-in-Courage award, and he gets the Last Word, or close to it.

This Last Word today goes to Mitt Romney who had the moral courage to stand up in the well of the senate and say, “Enough!”  Enough of the lies, the grift and corruption.

Here is part of his speech as he cast his vote to convict on the impeachment charges in Trump’s Senate trial:

This is what Senator Romney said: 

“As a Senator juror, I swore an oath before God to exercise impartial justice.  I am profoundly religious.  My faith is part of who I am…I take an oath before God as enormously consequential.”[5]

After pausing to collect himself and reviewing the charges – asking a foreign government to investigate a political rival (make up dirt), Sen. Romney continued:

“The president withheld vital military funds from that government to press it to do so.  The president delayed funds for an American ally at war with Russian invaders.  The president’s purpose was personal and political.  Accordingly, the president is guilty of an appalling abuse of public trust.  What he did was not ‘perfect.’  No, it was a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security, and our fundamental values.  Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office I can imagine.”

“Were he [Romney] to ignore the evidence and what he believed his oath and the Constitution required, it would expose his character ‘to history’s rebuke and the censure of my own conscience.’”[6]

In a stagnant cesspool of pollution, his words were a flowing spring of finest wine for our democracy, genuine refreshment of our liberties.

On Monday, we celebrate one whose words and actions have watered the Tree of Liberty.  As the Senate moves on to consider the John Lewis Voting Rights act, many of my fellow partisans would blame solely two senators if this fails to pass.

But they are wrong. 

In years past, senators on the both sides of the aisle have time and again voted nearly unanimously to renew this legislation.  Where are they now?  Senators, this is your Patrick Henry moment.  Your Dr. King moment.  Your John Lewis moment.

In Atlanta this week Our president put the existential question to America:

“So, I ask every elected official in America: How do you want to be remembered?  The consequential moments in history, they present a choice. Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”[7] For me and my house, I say, let’s pour out the fine wine of equity, opportunity, fair play, unity and solidarity.  Let’s go for a FAIR VOTE.  Let’s raise glasses of the finest vintage of democracy to Dr. King tomorrow.  The fine wine of full inclusion of ALL.   That’s the Life of the only Party that counts.  Amen.

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[1] Josephine Harvey, “Another GOP Lawmaker Compares Vaccine Mandates to the Holocaust,” Huffpost, January 12, 2022.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Martha Morales, “Freedom’s Eve,” a sermon preached at Claremont United Methodist Church, January 2, 2022.

[4] “A Watch Night Celebration: New Year’s Eve.” See Behold a New Thing for “Ideas for Celebrating a Service of Watch Nigh; The Tradition of Watch Night; How to Explore Watch Night.” Online location: http://www.ucc.org/worship/worship-ways/pdfs/2007/07Behold -A-New-hing.pdf. accessed 21 July 2011 See also Kachun, Mitch. Festivals of Freedom: Memory and meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations. 1808-1915. Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003.; Williams, William H. O Freedom! Afro-American Emancipation Celebrations. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1987.; Franklin, John Hope. The Emancipation Proclamation. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1963; reprint edition, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1995. Also see the Cultural Resource unit for Watch Night 2011 in Brandon Thomas Crowley, guest lectionary commentator, The African American Lectionary, http://www.theafricanamericanlectionary.org/PopupLectionaryReading.asp?LRID=246

[5] Adam Schiff, Midnight in Washington (New York: Random House, 2021), 421.

[6] Op.cit., 422.

[7] Joseph R. Biden, quoted in Jackson Richman. “Biden Challenges Republicans in Fiery Speech: ‘Do You Want to be on the Side of Dr. King or George Wallace?’”, ’Mediaite+, Jan 11th, 2022,

January 16, 2022, Epiphany 2

“The Life of the Party”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

Isaiah 62:1-6; Psalm 36:5-10; “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”;
John 2:1-11

Water, the stuff of life or dangerous, and swift the river.  The staff of life or chaos and death.

It is the stuff of our baptism into a new life – a new life offering companionship and also the danger of where that life might lead.

I find it fitting, and intriguing, that the story of Jesus baptism is paired in our lectionary readings with the creation of Israel as it passes through the River Jordan to become a new people.

“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;”

But let me get there with a story from my early childhood.

As a young boy, one of my favorite stories was about a little tug boat, “Little Toot.”  Little Toot was the most rambunctious screw-up in New York harbor.  Up to mischief of one sort or another.  He had no sense of propriety.  Just like boys my age.  His father’s constant refrain, “Won’t you ever grow up?”  Sounds like a parent, doesn’t it?

Well, the little boat finally goes one prank too far and is escorted by stern police boats out of the harbor and banished.  Out there alone at night, out on the high seas as a storm gathers itself.  Soon waves are crashing all around.  Lightening streaks through the skies.  Thunder deafens the ear.

Amidst mountainous waves, completely dwarfing the small tug, Little Toot spies a S.O.S. flare high up in the sky.  The story ends most satisfactorily as Little Toot rescues a distressed ocean liner and, as clouds part to sunshine, brings the ship safely into harbor to his father’s praise.

I had been given a record of this story.  With all the terrifying sound effects of the raging storm and towering waves, that’s where my mind froze.  In my imagination I can still hear the fog horn, the music swelling as Little Toot was lifted on one gigantic wave, only to plummet down the other side.

It may be that I identified our family’s dysfunction with Little Toot’s predicament.  My father’s volatile moods and temper were that storm that crashed around helpless Little Toot.  At most any evening meal, the tension in our family was like waiting for the first thunder clap of that story.

In the second-grade room of our Sunday school, one morning a fellow came in asking for me.  I was to follow him into the church.  My teacher said it was okay and there I met my brother and another adult from his class and we were led up the aisle of this huge sanctuary of the Methodist church our family attended in Compton, California.

I remember the minister in a black robe saying some things, then sprinkling water on my head.  Afterwards, I was led back to my Sunday School room.

That might have been the end of it except our family continued to attend church up until I was in junior high school.

Over the years, I now realize that no matter the storm, my baptism has always pointed my small boat towards a safe harbor where there is welcome.

 After we stopped attending church as a family, I continued because my girlfriend went.  Church was a short walk about six blocks up the main street behind our house.  She lived across the street from me and we’d walk up together holding hands.

Later, I would be invited to the college group on campus by my roommate – Wesley Foundation.  At that point I had pretty much dropped out of church.  Our new pastor was so conservative he opposed fair housing, equal rights for Black people.  Women’s rights hadn’t even appeared on the scene yet, but he would have been against that, too.

It was plain to me that either Jesus loved all people – and we should as well – or he didn’t matter much at all.  I was on the didn’t-matter-much-at-all end of that argument.  Our church affirmed the upper crust, not so much others.  Jesus seemed irrelevant to their plight.  Of course, our family didn’t know any of these in the Willowbrook section of town.

Our college group had chartered, along with other college Wesley Foundations in Southern California, a bus to the quadrennial national conference of Methodist college students to Lincoln, Nebraska.  We had been talking up this event for some time in our group.  It was the in-thing to do. 

The keynote speaker was one Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  I’d never really heard of him, but when I actually heard him speak on the closing night, I said to myself, “If this is what the church is about, sign me up.” 

At which point, that mysterious journey up the central aisle of my church in Compton became real.  I was a part of THAT club, THAT family.  I had found a taste of that Beloved Community where ALL did matter.  This is what Jesus was talking about.

I met Black students from the South there who told me of their lives.  The scales fell from my eyes.  I had known nothing of the KKK and night riders, of segregation and lynching.  Or separate and unequal, or just lack of opportunity.

All this newfound knowledge was dangerous.  My Republican, conservative parents were not ready at all for this Epiphany.  This was dangerous, my father told me.  I should just let these things be.  Fair housing would just run-down property values.  Our only responsibility to Black people was “don’t say the N word” and just be “nice.”  Whatever that meant.  Be “nice.”  Obviously, nothing about being just or finding out what they’ve endured.  Talk about “deep waters.”  My dad was soon convinced that a communist cult had taken me in.  Maybe worse, a cabal of Democrats.  For a number of years, we didn’t talk.

As I began to read the adult church curriculum of Bultmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr, Tillich, Bonhoeffer, and King’s writings, I discovered that my baptism had now led me far beyond simple Sunday school platitudes.  Or maybe it was that these writers had put meat on those basic Sunday school bones.  My new learning and experiences were definitely an Epiphany.   A whole new world of the Spirit opened up.  Joe Wesley Matthews of the Ecumenical Institute presented a muscular vision for my newly developing faith.  Not for the timid.

Later, as a medic in the army, my education in diversity continued, serving alongside folks of all sorts.  Some, their word you could take to the bank, others were best avoided.  People are just people; you take them as they come.  Race, class, background – seemed to make little difference.  I ended up friends with people I never would have imagined encountering.  I met my first Buddhist friend.  Another Epiphany.  God works through all sorts.

I wonder if that’s something of what happened with Jesus as he emerged from the waters, or was it the desert time?  Was he baptized with the Holy Spirit and with fire?  Did all this happen suddenly like a thunder clap, or smolder in him slowly as he lived into his ministry.

I have had Spirit-filled mentors along the way who enlarged the promise of my baptism.  By word and example, they were “Little Christs” to me.  They were seeds of hope.  By their steadfast persistence and belief in what I could become, they kept that hope alive, even when I had lost it.

Later in Los Angeles, I found a church community that did affirm a generosity of welcome – to ALL.  Many a Sunday as we closed worship, me on the string bass, with that raucous song, “Let the Sun Shine In,” from the musical “Hair,” I knew I stood on holy ground.

All the while living amidst the hustle and bustle, sometimes the chaos of life.  I figure my baptism is my general orders for living in chaos.  In the military, general orders enumerated one’s duties should, in the midst of chaos, you become separated from your unit or from command authority.  Or taken prisoner.  Such things as render aid to those around you, secure government property, work with others to restore order.  By our baptism, we all have holy orders, both lay and clergy – the same – live into the Beloved Community and welcome ALL.

Our nation is presently in CHAOS, with forty-some percent believing that Joe
Biden is not a legitimate president, and a good number in denial about the insurrection on January 6^th – just a normal tour group of visitors to the capital.

The mandate of baptism is to continue to work for a nation in which ALL are included, have a say and a chance for sharing in the bounty of America.  In Caesar’s time Christians did not have this privilege, but we do. 

Baptism is entered into as a life process.  Even Jesus was said to have grown in wisdom.  He grew to understand that even a Syrophoenician woman was included in God’s embrace.

We work in an imperfect system with imperfect people.  I trust the Holy Spirit which descended on Jesus at his baptism to continue to mingle amongst us, bringing out our best.  Lincoln referred to this happy outcome as the “better angels of our nature” taking hold.

These days, chaos swirls about us and about our nation as much as it ever did around Little Toot.  What we are promised is that there is a welcoming harbor – a place of refuge.

As we are reminded of the chaotic scenes on the one-year anniversary of January 6^th insurrection, equally distressing scenes flood in from our nation’s hospital emergency entrances.  Images flash across our TV screen of utterly exhausted medical staff as the Omicron variant lays America low.  The camera lens catches nurses scrambling to find one more bed.  Struggling to resuscitate another patient.  Again, gift shops and lunch rooms are repurposed to accommodate the sickest.  Hallways are in utter disorder.  Staff rushing to critical patients with IV lines and bottles as various monitors beep a cacophony of alarms.  Doctors flipping frantically through charts of the newly admitted.  Chaos.  Exhaustion.

When through the deep waters…we will hold on to one another.  We will keep faith.  Our baptismal holy orders.

“Weeping may endure the night, but joy comes in the morning.”  Though a deep darkness has settled over our nation, as Tony Judt put it, though “Ill fares the land,” there remains yet another, a newer chapter, to be written in the history books.  The content of that chapter is up to us.

We continue the work to strengthen and uphold one another.  All working on the House of Hope in both the Ohio Valley and in San Bernardino, we press forward towards the goal.  Funding is now in sight.

WE HAVE SO MUCH MORE WORK awaiting us in the days ahead. The problems we face are legion:  racism, voter suppression, the unleashed forces of sedition, a right-wing disinformation media complex, addiction, apathy, hunger and homelessness in our streets.  AND, not the least, a still-raging pandemic. 

It’s like housework – it’s never done.  But as St. Paul proclaims, “Here we are.  Alive.”

That is the full meaning of our baptism into the Jesus Movement, the Beloved Community.

Yet, in Christ, here we are, ALIVE!   Amen.

January 9, 2022, The Baptism of our Lord

“When Through the Deep Waters”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

Isaiah 43:1-7; Psalm 29; Acts 8:14-17;
Luke 3:15-17; 21-22

There’s a story told of a Hindu speaker invited to give a presentation at an interfaith gathering.  Unfortunately, the host pastor preceding him, who was to give opening remarks, was from a very conservative church.  His agenda was not interfaith understanding.  He was there to prove the supremacy of his Christian faith.  He was solely bent on demeaning the other’s faith, proving the superiority of his own, rather than entering into any interfaith dialogue.  He cared not a wit about the sensitivities of those in the room who were not Christians.

He addressed the crowd reading from one of the most exclusivist passages of the John’s gospel.  “I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father but by me.”

What a jerk, many thought.  Way to make our guest feel welcome!

Most in the audience were embarrassed by this lack of charity, by this lack of basic manners.  Folks sat in their seats in stony silence, glued to their places as interfaith relations were possibly set back hundreds of years.  As the guest speaker approached the podium, all wondered how he would respond.

The speaker stepped up and beneficently smiled at his audience.  After a pause, he proclaimed, “The pastor is absolutely correct.” 

“For, what is the way of Jesus, but the way of peace, humility, truth and respect.  That is the only way one can approach God, enter into the Holy.”

This Hindu man had seen in Jesus that which this pastor failed to register:  the Inner Light of God.  The speaker had seen the same spiritual luminosity that those Wise Sages saw in that baby’s eyes, lying in the poverty of a manger.

Now my wife avers that had those travelers from afar been women, they would have brought more practical gifts:  Pampers, Wet Wipes and a copy of Dr. Benjamin Spock’s book, Baby and Child Care.

I can still vividly see in my mind’s eye a Christmas pageant — read bathrobe drama — of a former church wherein the three Wise Men ended up in a giggling heap at the manger.  I won’t mention who two of those boys were.  Those three, afterwards, were known as the Three Wiseguys.  But we all remembered the story, to be sure.

Epiphany is all about the Inner Light so luminous that it shines forth in the lives of all who take it in.  Shines forth in the lives of all who have been transformed by it.  It is also about two forces.  Some saw the beauty of holiness and blessing in that child’s eyes.  Others wanted to snuff that light out.  Those two forces are still arrayed against each other to this day.

“Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the lord has risen upon you.  For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness will appear over you.”

“In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born to Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?  For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.”

We celebrate the Day of Epiphany this Sunday.  Yes, I know the real date is January 6^th on the Western Calendar.  It is the day we celebration the radical manifestation of the Divine in Jesus.  We celebrate a Way that leads into all that is holy and wholesome – Truth, Peace, Generosity, Equity – in short, Holy Spirit Light.  That is the gleaming those mystic sages saw in his eyes as they knelt in homage. 

Herod and his minions perceived such generosity of spirit as a threat to their power and wanted to extinguish it.  We remember the slaughter of the Holy Innocents on December 29^th – a slaughter that continues yet to this day in the Middle East, in China and Myanmar.  And in the streets of too many American cities.

The Hindu speaker grasped the true reality of Jesus – “Light of Light descending from the realms of endless day,” goes one of my favorite hymns — “As the darkness clears away.”

About the darkness.  Lately, it has seemed overwhelming.

January 6^th is the Day of Epiphany.  In America it is also a day of deep darkness over our land.  A year ago, malignant forces of sedition brought America to one of its darkest hours in recent history.  January 6^th was definitely not the dawning of the Age of Aquarius for our nation.

The alarming tragedy of that day was that the efforts to extinguish a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” continue to this very day.  Snuff out the radiance of Lady Liberty’s torch.

The deep darkness of doubt is cast over our elections.  Cries of “Stop the Steal” and “Rigged” coarse through recent mass rallies, not unlike those heard in Germany in the 30s. 

Over seventy percent of one of our two major political parties do not believe in the results of the 2020 election.  No. Joe Biden is NOT the legitimate president of the United States.  Most of these folks believe that the hearings to investigate the January 6^th insurrection are a sham, or if not – in any case, we should just move on.  Some things are better left alone.

We now know that over one hundred representatives in Congress were prepared to overturn the counting of the election. If only there had been no riot and if only Vice President Pence had gone along with the scheme.

Yes, many would snuff out the torch of Lady Liberty, but her Lamp by the harbor door will not be extinguished.  The call to patriots is still heard and answered.  “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the lord has risen upon you.” 

As Lt. Col. Vindman proclaimed, “Here, Right Matters.”  That was the testimony of Fiona Hill and Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch – all who had the courage to stand up, be counted, and testify to the White House corruption they had witnessed. 

Despite slurs, lies, death threats and character assassination – all speaking Truth at great risk to their careers and to their very lives.  Patriots all.  The very Light as shining forth as from that Epiphany Star.  This is the luminous manifestation of our democratic heritage still shining across the land.

They’re with Tom Bodett in his commercial for Motel 6, “We’ll leave the light on for you.”  In their patriotic service, they’ve “left the light on.”  So must we.

It is still the very Light reflected in the eyes of those three Visitors to a lowly birthplace some two thousand years ago.  It is the very light which has inspired the best of who we are – those who scribbled down the promise of the Declaration of Independence, those Abolitionists who stubbornly stood against slavery, Conductors on the Underground Railroad, those Suffragettes struggling for the women’s vote, those who marched against senseless and endless wars in the sixties.  They are the Light of this nation.  The bipartisan January 6^th Select Committee is the Light of this nation.  Especially the two Republicans, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger; they have paid the highest price.

Epiphany – on January 6^th let us celebrate the manifestation of all that is Holy in our Lord Jesus Christ.   And the light that yet radiates from that vision of those wise sages.  That same force radiates down through the pageant of history.  Col. Vindman summed it up in his testimony before congress and in his book, Here Right Matters.[1]  Our Epiphany journey is through the morass of lies and deceit.  Not for the fainthearted.

Michael Connelly, through his fictional LAPD detective character, Harry Bosch, puts this life value well.  Harry is like a dog with a bone when it comes to pursuing a case.  When he’s sometimes derided by fellow officers for this stubbornness, his come-back is: “Everybody counts or nobody counts.”  Doesn’t make any difference to Harry whether the victim lives on the streets or in a Westwood mansion.[2]  Everybody counts or nobody counts – that’s the truth of the Epiphany star, the Jesus ethic.

This, the message of the inner Light, diffused down through the years in the best of us is still, “Everybody counts.”  That’s the ethic of the Jesus Movement.

Today those same reactions are at war.  Trust the Light of Lady Liberty’s torch and encourage full participation.  On the other hand, fearful voices still seek to stifle such notions.

Senator Rand Paul recently put forth the proposition that an election is stolen just because poor and minority voters are encouraged and organized to go to the polls.  Straight out of Jim Crow 2.0.  That he has not yet been rebuked by his partisan colleagues, is telling.  They must be okay with that perversion of democracy.  Stomp out that dangerous torch of liberty – the “wrong” people are voting.

The Prince of Peace that we behold is the embodiment of God’s Generous Welcome.  And no welcome could be more generous this time of year than Lawrence O’Donnell’s and MSNBC’s K.I.N.D fund project.

That is the spirit behind Lawrence O’Donnell’s efforts to promote education in Malawi through the K.I.N.D. project — Kids in Need of Desks.  Lawrence is imbued with Catholic social teaching.  He and his partners have changed everything in those classrooms where previously children sat on the floor.  Now, many, for the first time, have desks.

Lawrence and his partners on MSNBC and in UNICEF have gone beyond that simple need to also promote girl’s education by providing girls with high school scholarships.[3]  Education is in fact the Christ Light, opening full potential in these young women.  Educate women and you build up a nation.

Each year Lawrence introduces one or two of the girls whose lives have been transformed by this gift of education.  This year, featured has been Joyce Chisale, who is not only an aspiring poet, but is now a first-year student in a medical school.  All because of the K.I.N.D Fund and the hundreds of thousands who have contributed – they are the living radiance of the Epiphany Star.

This year Joyce Chisale read a poem she had penned in 2017, “Little by Little.”  Young as she is, here’s one woman the darkness has not overcome.  In the years to come, we’re going to hear a lot more from her.  Joyce Chisale gets the Last Word

Little by Little

Little by little we’ll go
no matter how far the distance is
we’re not shaken

Little by little we’ll go
and reach our destination

Little by little we’ll go

no matter how bumpy or rocky the road is

we’re not going to turn back
little by little we’ll go
and stay true to our dreams

Little by little we’ll go
no matter how narrow the path is
we are going to force ourselves to pass

and little by little we’ll go
and reach the promised land

Don’t be shaken
don’t turn back
little by little we’ll go
and reach our destination.

Little by little is how those three wise men happened upon Bethlehem.  In this same manor Joyce Chisale arrived at a medical school in Malawi.  Little by little, we’ll preserve our democracy.  Little by little, a light shows the path – and little by little is how we’ll reach our “Star of Wonder, Beauty Bright.”  Amen.

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[1] Alexander S. Vindman, Here, Right Matters: An American Story (New York: Harper, 2021).

[2] Michael Connelly, The Darkest Hour (New Your: Little Brown, 2021).

[3] Andrew Brown, “Little by Little a Malawian Girl Follows Her Dreams”, UNICEF Malawi, 2017

                  St. Francis Episcopal Mission Outreach

                  Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

                The Epiphany
                January 2, 2022

              The Way, the Truth, and the Light

Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14
Ephesians 3:1-12; Matthew 2:1-12