A few days ago, I was speaking to a friend about the previous Sunday’s sermon.  When he had heard that I was still serving a parish — yes, at my advanced years, somehow funked retirement, I did – he had requested that I send him one of my efforts.

You know me.  It was chock-a-block full of the straight.  The social gospel, because the movement of God’s people and all the rest is a group effort.  I had spoken to our responsibility to live sustainably.  I had spoken to our political indifference to the misuse of our wealth, and voter suppression.

After listening for a while, he said, “You’re almost there, but it didn’t speak to me personally.”  As if he were the only one who mattered.

These days there’s an awful lot that has hit the fan.  And as a corollary to Murphy’s Law states, “Everything that hits the fan is not equally distributed.”

And when things don’t go according to our liking, our first response is often to moan and groan.  Dissemble.  Shift the blame, or like the FBI director testifying before Congress this week about their dereliction of duty on January 6^th, refuse to answer the question. 

We become so consumed by grievance, we think the whole universe revolves around our pity party.  As Jesus said somewhere, “Get over yourself.”  Consider the lilies of the field.

I recently read of a new program to compensate black farmers for the discrimination by the Department of Agriculture in various loan and crop subsidy programs.  Inequities, often stemming from the inception of some of these programs, disadvantaged Black farmers.  This systemic racism led to the loss of farms and the impoverishment of share croppers for generations.  This, from the so called enlightened New Deal of Roosevelt.

The point being, the descendants of these farmers should have been compensated for way they were cheated.  It’s the only moral and patriotic thing to do.  I salute President Biden and his administration for righting this historical wrong – too many years in the waiting.

The next days, white farmers are up in arms about this redress.  Where’s our handout?  Huh?  What about us?  The program’s now on hold.  My salute was aspirational, I guess.

“Who is this that darkens counsel without knowledge?”  God must be demanding from the heavens.  Gird up your loins like honest men and women.  I will question you, and you shall declare to me.  Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?  Tell me, if you have understanding.”[1]

Where were you at the inception of these agricultural programs when it was decided that some were worthy and some were not?  All based on skin color?  Tell me if you know.   Declare it to me, God demands.  Let’s have a little honesty about your feigned grievance, your pity party.

‘

Let me switch the metaphor to Mark’s passage of Jesus disciples in their frail bark tossed about in a vast sea.  Surely another apt metaphor for our time.

As I told my friend, the personal touch is good.  I’ve been noted to recount such stories:  the recovery story of Bo Cox, the transformation story from prison to upstanding community member of Albert Woodfox.  That is what I so appreciate in the novels of Louise Erdrich, stories out of the native reservation lives from the Dakotas and Montana.

But the mission of Jesus is not just about “me.”  It’s about “us.”  The whole of humanity.  I’m sorry my friend couldn’t see beyond his own situation to the broader whole.  Not one will be saved if not the entire company takes hold of the promise of hope and fellowship with our Creator. 

Throughout our history there have been individual actors, but those who were successful were always grounded in larger movements, in institutions.

The Ship of State we know as America presently is floundering on high seas.  Monstrous populist waves threaten to capsize us all.  We share the same terror as those disciples tossed about in pitch dark.  We are truly all in one boat.  The pandemic wave of COVID-19 threatens to flood our storm-tossed boat.  Climate catastrophe, homelessness, families barely making it paycheck to paycheck.

And while many have done their duty, have gotten their vaccinations, worn their masks and kept their distance from the other passengers, there are those who wantonly put the entire passage at risk by refusing even the simplest communal obligations.

This last week a grocery store clerk was gunned down and a police officer shot, simply because some customer took umbrage at being asked to wear a mask. Imagine, wear a mask, for God’s sake.[2]  Who is this who darkens counsel without knowledge and shoots up the rest of us in the boat?  Such presumption!

My friend Susan Russell’s response to such assertion of individual rights.  “If we’re all in the same boat, yes, you have your rights, but you don’t have the right to shoot holes in the bottom of the boat.”

To my friend who desires the personal, I will insist on the communal.  We’re all in the same boat.

Election laws that disenfranchise voters in Georgia and Alabama rob us all of our democracy.  Even in California.  The crazy autocracy of Number 45 to toss out the results of the 2020 election is a virus infecting the entire ship of state.

The other night, A.B. Stoddard of Real Clear Politics sounded the alarm, loud as a claxon going off.  The 2020 election could well be the last free and fair election of this republic.  It’s bad enough to suppress the votes.  It’s a completely different order of magnitude to rig how they are counted.

Joseph Stalin got it right, “It doesn’t matter who votes.  What matters is who counts the votes.”  And he would win reelection time and again with over 98 percent of the vote.  Autocracy works quite well, thank you.

By Trump’s party passing suppression laws in state after state, many giving local legislators the ability to overturn vote tallies after the votes have been cast, we become no more than one of those S…hole countries The Donald derides. 

More holes in the Ship of State while rowers and bailers frantically struggle to keep it afloat and moving towards safe harbor.

Our boat is now storm-tossed as never before since the Civil War and the end of Reconstruction.  Crazies have been let loose with entire arsenals, automatic weapons at the ready.  We, like those twelve rowers whom Jesus approached on the high seas, fear for our lives, for our nation.

He comes to us with the same word he gave to those men:  Shalom.  Peace. Better translated as, “Get a grip!”

Your caterwauling will get you nothing.  Come to your senses. Take a deep breath, and think on the things I have taught you.  The Holy One, at your birth, has given you everything necessary.  Put it to work. 

Where there is disorder, chaos and insurrection, we have laws and norms.  Put them to work.  It’s about solidarity and respect.

Put Gospel instruction to work.  That’s precisely what one organizer, Opal Lee, did. 

When she was ten her family moved into Sycamore Park, a suburb of Fort Worth, Texas.  Two years later, when twelve, an angry white mob of over five hundred terrorized her family for days.  They threw rocks through the windows and threatened to kill the family. 

Meanwhile law enforcement officers stood across the street and did nothing.  Finally, the mob drove them out of their home and torched the house.  

That was June 19, 1939.  No one was arrested.  That was a Juneteenth she and her family would never forget.

She could have grown up as a bitter old woman.  Many of us would have.  I understand that temptation completely.

Opal, known as the “Grandmother of Juneteenth,” put that experience to work for good.  She began organizing.  Racism may have shot a lot of holes in the frail bark that is our democracy, but she was going to be plugging those she could.

“Experiencing that hate crime pushed Mrs. Lee into a life of teaching, activism and, eventually campaigning.  In 2016, at the age of 89, she decided to walk from her home in Fort Worth to Washington, D.C. in an effort to get Juneteenth named a national holiday.  She traveled two and a half miles each day to symbolize the two and a half years that Black Texans waited between when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, on January 1, 1863, abolishing slavery, and the day that message arrived in Galveston, where Black people were still enslaved on June 19, 1865.”[3]

This became a march of Black and White together, as Mrs. Opal says, “None of us are free until all of us are free.”

There are still millions more of us who believe in this glorious experiment in self-rule.  Millions more working for a greater freedom for all. 

We presently stand at an all-hands-on-deck moment.  Write that letter, make that call.  Summon your elected representatives to Democracy’s Altar.  We need voting rights to be secured by national legislation, given that over 400 laws have now been enacted, or are presently proposed, in over 40 states to suppress voting.

Be instruments of blessed trouble, as John Lewis, the patron saint of Necessary Trouble, summons us in this hour of peril.  Be disruptors for justice.  As Opal still is at 95.

“Why are your afraid?  Have you still no faith?”  Jesus asks today of us.  We have so much to celebrate.  It’s Juneteenth this weekend.  Let Opal Lee be our drum major.

We have a national anthem, but Rep. James Clyburn will be introducing legislation next week to give America a national hymn.  “Lift Every Voice and Sing” would be a most fitting step towards bringing America through our dark night of racial bitterness. 

Known as the Black National Anthem, written by James Weldon Johnson, this poem certainly captures the soul of Juneteenth, and the unfulfilled promise of America.  As Rep. Clyburn said, it “would be an act of bringing the country together”. 

“Lift every voice and sing till earth and heaven ring,

Ring with the harmonies of liberty.

Let our rejoicing rise high as the listening skies;

let it resound loud as the rolling sea.

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us;

Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;

Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,

Let us march on, till victory is won.”

America has trod a shameful path, but redemption is at hand.

In the words of the second verse, we have come,

“over a way that with tears has been watered;

We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,

Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last

where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

Keep marching on, Opal Lee at our side. The work is not done.  Happy Juneteenth!  Amen.

---

[1] Job 1:1 ff.  New Revised Version.

[2] Associated Press, “Sheriff: Cashier fatally shot after argument over face masks,” June 14, 2021.

[3] Julia Carmel, “Opal Lee’s Juneteenth Vision Is Becoming Reality,” New York Times, June 18, 2021.

“Who is This That Darkens Counsel?”

Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

Fourth Sunday of Pentecost, June 20, 2021
Proper 7

Job 38:1-11; Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32;
2 Corinthians 6:1-13; Mark 4:35-41

That bright morning the sun pleasantly warmed the awakening world.   Another light in the sky, however, caught the attention of a stegosaurus nonchalantly munching in a grove of ferns.  The quickly moving light, flaming bright — or was it the thunderous sonic boom as it raced through the upper atmosphere that caused it to cock its head and stop its chewing. 

This cataclysmic event was the rude beginning of what would turn out to be a “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day” for our gentle stegosaurus and a whole lot of other creatures on Planet Earth.  And for a bunch of plants and fishes, too.

In a flash, a mountainous wave rose up, carrying the now-deceased dinosaur and a mish mash of mud, boulders, fish, trees and animals from the usual temperate climes near the Great Gulf Water.  Inland it all rushed, petering out near what we now call Arkansas.  And in the next moment, it all went sloshing back again to the Gulf.  Reptiles, spiders, plants and all.  Along with not a few ichthyosaurs and fishes.

In the days and years to come, thick darkness hung over the planet.  Much of the vegetation died and they that dined on it were soon gone, along with those that dined on the diners.  All around the world.  Welcome to the new world of the cockroaches, opossums and a few birds.  And a spider or two.  Much of the ocean life had also died as well.  But not everything.

Whether coincidence or not, volcanic activity in the newly disturbed planet soon belched enormous clouds of toxic gasses into the darkened skies over the ensuing eons, making the survival of most anything at all highly problematic.  The greatly acidified ocean was hell on clams and oysters.  Brachiopods, crabs and lobsters. 

The greatest natural disaster to befall Planet Earth?  No, this had happened before in various configurations.  Five or so times previously.

Out of this latest cosmic disaster arose an entirely new fauna and a land teeming with a multitude of mammals and creepy crawlies.  And Humankind.

And Humankind, that wonderful humanoid, Alley Oop – or whatever his name was.  Next door neighbor to Fred and Wilma Flintstone.  There he sat, atop the heap, with a mind to comprehend it all and will to take charge.  Planted in this renewed Garden.

The earth slowly settled down.  It must have been a wonderful garden.  Up sprouted everything these new humans needed for food, clothing and shelter.  Seas bountiful with fish.   So many fish in the Massachusetts Bay it was claimed that one could walk across that body of water stepping from one codfish to the next.

It must have been a wonderful Garden, indeed.  Until men and women began to mess with it.  Soon the imperial mammoth and giant sloth were gone.  Extinct, never to be seen again.  Until dug up millions of years later by us moderns and put in a museum.

How did all this take place?  How did the destruction begin?  Our story from Genesis says it was the fault of the cleverest of inhabitants lurking in the underbrush – that damned snake.

“Who told you that you were naked?  Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”  The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit from the tree, and I ate.”

That’s right, shift the blame.  Throw her under the bus.  Of course, you had absolutely no responsibility?  Right!

However the Fall happened, we presumed to plunder the Garden until much of it was gone – the beginning of another great extinction.  We gave no thought for tomorrow.  No thought for that delicate web of life of which we are a part.

As my theology professor was wont to note, “Sin is the one theological doctrine for which we have empirical proof.”

We may chuckle at this primitive story.  We may dismiss it out of hand as a simplistic myth of our early prehistory.  But the truth remains – the God’s honest truth — we’ve really screwed up the garden.  Just about stomped it to death and paved it over. 

We humans have ushered as many of our fellow critters into extinction as did that meteor and all the attendant volcanos so many eons ago.  The “Sixth Extinction,” scientists label this present ecological disaster.[1]  

Someone once asked the great theologian Karl Barth if he believed in “original sin.”  “Isn’t that how it usually works out?” he responded.

How often it is, we let the snake have the last word.  Nothing to see here, folks.  Just keep moving.

We now stand on the brink of the next great extinction.  Our age is now being labeled the “Anthropocene.”  Earth’s destiny, now influenced by humans as the greatest geological factor, will succumb to global warming.  Caused by – us.   We humans.

“More, more, more,” hisses the snake.  In the halls of Congress, in board rooms and in shopping cart lines.

To the extent we remain in its thrall, that cunning, mesmerizing serpent gets the Last Word.  BUT NOT QUITE. 

There’s another Word, a saving Word – a Word that echoes down the ancient halls of time, through the dusty roads of Palestine.

In the midst of a convoluted theological debate with religious authorities, Jesus has become an embarrassment to his family.   In fact, they’ve come to take him away.  He’s clearly out of his mind.  Maybe demon possessed.  When told that some members of his family are outside to take him home, he cuts to the chase.

“Who are my mother and brothers?”  And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers!  Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”

We have agency.  We can heed that Word which life and abundance.  Yes, we are NOT God.  We are but one of the creatures, though a very clever one – often too smart for our own good.  And we can choose an alternative to that of the snake…a blessed alternative.  We will do just fine living in harmony with the flora and fauna of the Garden.  Snake needn’t have the Last Word. 

We can choose the life intended by God for ourselves, our neighbors and our planet.  Everybody and everything doesn’t have to die.  Stop listening to that hissing in the background.

Here what our brother Paul has to tell us.  He get’s it

 “Yes, everything is for your sake, so that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.  So we do not lose heart.”

We do not lose heart.  We will come to our senses, our authentic selves, as a part of the great living web of life.  We do not lose heart.  There’s still time – but not much.

There’s still time for those who cherish this, our Mother Earth.  It’s time for our primitive selves to grow up.  Time for Alley Oop to put down the club and put on a suit and tie.  Time to grow into his full humanity.  And listen to God’s restorative Word.

That happened this past week.

In several board rooms some “Mean Greens” took back a little bit of control from Exxon/Mobile and Chevron oil giants this last week

Bill McKibben and others have been warning us for over a decade about the disastrous course on which we have set our planet – that we need to clean up our act, literally, if we are not to shove the planet into climate catastrophe.

Two environmental activists were elected to the Exxon/Mobile board of directors, maybe even four.  They’re still counting the votes.  Time for Alley Oop to take his seat at the board.  Time for Wilma Flintstone to join him.

Chevron also was the target of climate activists who forced management to cut their customers’ carbon footprint.  And in the Netherlands, the court ordered Royal Dutch Shell to slash emissions harder and faster than they had been planning for. 

Maybe a few of our Alley Oop fellows, Barney and Betty Rubble, are growing into becoming world citizens.  Maybe there’s some hope for us all yet.  The snake doesn’t get the Last Word.

As my friend George always said, “Keep your eyes on the prize and celebrate the incremental victories along the way.”  So, grab a slice of cake.

This doesn’t mean our work is done.  President Biden has appointed enough folks from the fossil fuel industries to shut out the Sunrise Movement agenda.  We still look to miss by a wide margin the goal of keeping global temperatures under a 1.5 degrees Celsius rise.  We still are on the brink of going over the cliff of more irreversible tipping points.  Kiss your polar bears goodbye.

Follow the science.  Time is running out like the grains of sand in an hourglass.

Whoever does the will of God that we might all thrive, she, he, is our authentic sister and brother.  And a true companion on our brief journey through creation.

The saving Word is that in Christ we have the power and the vision.  Oh, sure, there will still be some weeds in the garden, some loathsome creatures.

That poor stegosaurus and all the rest?  I love visiting them in museums but am thankful they are not out in the front yard munching my nasturtiums and periwinkles.

I am very thankful that more and more of us are learning to live respectfully in the Garden in which we’ve been placed.  Who are our true relatives?  Brother, Sister Lizard, among others.

On the way to lunch am delighted in seeing my lizard friends out on the walkway sunning themselves, and am happy to greet them.  I like it a lot that they are a considerably smaller and much cuter than their dinosaur relatives.

For all things bright and beautiful…for activists willing to raise heaven on the Exxon/Mobile board of directors…for Alley Oop, the Flintstones, and our paleolithic forbearers who survived the dire wolf and saber-toothed tiger to stick around to have offspring…for those willing to head back to the White House and risk arrest again in support of Planet Earth and Bill McKibben’s 350.org movement…for those doing the Will of God – It’s like weeding.  The job’s never done.  THANKS BE TO GOD for all who lend a hand (and a dollar or two).  “It’s a Wonderful Life.”  AMEN.

---

[1] Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York, NY: Henry Holt, 2014).

“On Not Giving the Snake the Last Word”

Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

Second Sunday of Pentecost, June 6, 2021
Proper 5

Genesis 3:8-15; Psalm 130;
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1; Mark 3:20-35

When I took a church in Petersburg, Alaska, I had to head up there before my wife was able to leave California.  She taught at a year-round school and her contract didn’t end until September.  So, I and our preschool boys boarded Alaska Airlines and headed on up.

As I had already enrolled them in the day care center, I thought, “How hard can this be?  Single parents do this all the time.”  Was I in for a rude awakening — and I even had child care covered!

I still remember that fateful Sunday morning when I was sitting at the breakfast table going over my sermon when I heard the rumble of feet coming up the hallway.  Giggling and shouting, “Daddy, we made a chemical.  We made a chemical!”

That I could see.  It was all over their Sunday best.  Did I ever pay for those brief moments of peace and quiet!  They ushered me back to the bathroom – their laboratory – to see their creation. 

The novel chemical was part red and green food coloring.  Part toilet paper, part oregano, part tooth paste.  At least, those were the identifiable components.

After I got them cleaned up, picked up my prayerbook and the pages of my sermon I bundled them up in their jackets and off to church we went.  I then understood in the most real way why it was that so many harried parents came bursting through the church doors, a kid or two in tow – late.  Sometimes very late.

Up until then, my judgmental self had thought as I saw these latecomers, “Why can’t they get themselves to church on time?”  Always the same several families.  Every Sunday.

Now, after having tried single parenting, I’ll forever banish that thought.  I knew from experience that these families were lucky to have made it at all.  Experience has a way of “keepin’ it real,” as we’d say in the hood.

In the age of pandemic, congresswomen, Republicans and Democrats alike, are totally insistent on including child care as part of Biden’s proposed infrastructure package.  Read Elizabeth Warren’s new book, Persist.   When she would meet with exhausted nurses and ask them what they needed to do their jobs in the midst of COVID-19, it wasn’t more PPP or shorter hours.  Nothing like that.  It was dependable, quality childcare.

Mitch McConnell, I suspect, never had to wrap up his morning’s work and rush off to the floor of congress, only to be confronted by two boys with goop all over themselves.  Chemical, I mean.  No wonder most men just don’t get it.

Today, we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete – the One who keeps it real.  Those who insist we keep it real are her agents.

“When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, that one will testify on my behalf…”

“The Spirit of truth…will guide you into all truth…” 

There is our grounding.  There is our power.  There is our guidance.  Keepin’ it Real.

Those nurses, speaking at that impromptu conference spoke the truth of their hearts.  Elizabeth mentions that virtually every modern, industrial nation has state-supported childcare for women who want to, or need to, work outside the home.  Listen to them, guys.  The lion’s share of childcare falls to women.  Their stories help us keep it real – if we have the guts to hear them out.  They are anointed agents of the Spirit of Truth.  Especially in this era of a pandemic.

“When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth …The Spirit of truth…will guide you into all truth…” 

This very same Spirt spoke loudly through my own experience of those months of being a single parent.  This Spirit spoke loudly through the voices of those exhausted nurses.  And the truth of the matter is, we’ve simply got to do better for all when it comes to child care.

Let the Spirit of Truth speak with a firm, insistent voice – Keepin’ It Real.

There are a number of folks I absolutely depend on to “Keep it Real.”  One I’ve come to rely on concerning the preservation of our democracy, is Liz Chaney and that group of Republicans who know that Joe Biden really, really, really is the President of these United States.

Though, on policy issues, I would most likely disagree with her on virtually everything, we do agree on one central core issue.  Our democracy is at stake.  It is being undermined by a pernicious lie that the election was stolen.

Liz Chaney is an agent of the Holy Spirit, insisting that this nation keep it real.  The Spirit will lead us into all truth.  Listen to her agent!

Yes, for some people, for some true believers in QAnon, this will not be easy.  But our democracy, if we care about it all, depends on rational Republicans taking control of their party. 

It’s said that the truth will set you free, but, as my friend Ed Bacon, would add: “First it will hurt like hell.”  Cognitive dissonance can be very disconcerting.  AND…it’s the work of the Holy Spirt.  It’s Keepin’-It-Real territory.  And Keepin’ it real can be painful.

The other day on the floor of Congress, Representative Tim Ryan, full of the Spirit of Truth, full of fury, spoke for Reality, the last and only hope for saving this republic — the only hope for saving our own souls as citizens:

“Benghazi!” he shouted.

“You guys chase the former Secretary of State all over the country, spent millions of dollars, we have people scaling the Capitol, hitting the Capitol Police with lead pipes across the head, and we can’t get bipartisanship!” Ryan screamed.

“What else has to happen in this country?”

“Cops. This is a slap in the face to every rank-and-file cop in the United States, if we’re going to take on China, if we’re going to rebuild the country, if we’re going to reverse climate change, we need two political parties in this country that are both living in reality, and you ain’t one of them.”[1]

You go, Spirit of Truth.  Preach it!  Our democracy urgently needs you.

At the end of May we come to the hundredth anniversary of the Greenwood Massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  Sometimes referred to as the Greenwood Race Riot.  The Greenwood District has been known as the “Black Wall Street” of Tulsa.

On May 31, 2021 one of the few living survivors of this slaughter, at 107 years old, gave her testimony before Congress.  If ever there was the incarnation of the Spirit of Truth, it was Viola Fletcher. 

“On May 31, of ‘21, I went to bed in my family’s home in Greenwood,” she said. “The neighborhood I fell asleep in that night was rich, not just in terms of wealth, but in culture … and heritage. My family had a beautiful home. We had great neighbors. I had friends to play with. I felt safe. I had everything a child could need. I had a bright future.”

“Within a few hours,” Fletcher said, “all of that was gone.”

“The night of the massacre, I was awakened by my family. My parents and five siblings were there. I was told we had to leave and that was it. I will never forget the violence of the White mob when we left our home,” she said, “I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street. I still smell smoke and see fire. I still see Black businesses being burned. I still hear airplanes flying overhead. I hear the screams.”

“I have lived through the massacre every day. Our country may forget this history, but I cannot. I will not. And other survivors do not. And our descendants do not.”[2]

This Black community was burnt to the ground, some forty blocks of businesses, homes, churches.  Hundreds were killed, slaughtered in their homes, shot down in the streets.  Only one of the several mass graves has so far been discovered. 

The State National Guard joined the White mob in the killing and looting.  “The city, sheriff, chamber, and county targeted Black community leaders and victims of the massacre—despite knowing who were truly responsible.”[3]

There are times that the Spirit of Truth morphs into the hysterically funny, comical, if the consequences weren’t so dire.  But maybe a bit of humor is the only thing that will carry us through the farce.  Trust the wisdom of the Spirit.

In Arizona the Republican senate has insisted on yet another recount.  Amidst charges that part or all of the Maricopa County digital data base has been erased or gone missing, they have hired a Florida outfit to conduct one more recount.  This time without Democratic participation.  Florida?  Election recount?  What could possibly go wrong?

You’d better be sitting for what comes next—are you sitting?  I don’t want you to hurt yourself laughing.  The group hired – a group that has absolutely no, zero, none, experience in conducting a recount of anything – are you ready? – It’s called “Cyber Ninjas.” 

No, I’m not making this up!  They’ve never even done a recount of a piggy bank, let alone an entire cache of a couple million ballots from Maricopa County.

I keep looking for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  Where’s Donatello?  Michelangelo?  Has anyone here seen any terrapins with nunchucks?

This wackadoodle outfit – the Cyber Ninjas – has caused the entire state to be the laughing stock of several news cycles.  So much so that, now, a lot of state Republicans have banded together to object.  To shout, “STOP!”

Holy Moly!  Does the Spirit of Truth ever have a raucous sense of humor!  Descend upon us this Day of Pentecost.  We’re in desperate need down here.

Elliot Hannon of Slate writes:

“No election fraud theory is too insane for the Cyber Ninjas, such that every cockamamie conspiracy is treated credulously. The team of voter fraud sleuths say they are using UV lights to investigate a far-right conspiracy theory that ballots—cast in the state of Arizona—were actually smuggled in from Asia ahead of the election and that these ballots are detectable by traces of bamboo in their composition. This is real stuff.” [4]

Laughable if not so tragic.

Descend, O please, descend now – were hurting here – Make haste, O Spirt of Truth.  Make haste before we bust a gut rolling around on the floor with a terminal case of the giggles.

The county board that oversees elections, four of the five of whom are Republicans, is accusing the Arizona Republican senate of conducting a “sham recount” by a bunch of “grifters” who are just bilking the party faithful out of millions of dollars for this farcical exercise.  These county commissioners are the few Keepin’ It Real in Arizona.  Bonafide agents of the Spirit of Truth.

This is personal.  It is up to each one of us to renew our allegiance to the common good.  I say “good,” not “perfect.”  “Perfect” may be beyond us, but “Better” surely is not.”  Do it for George Floyd.  Do it for t Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott and all those women who gathered at Seneica Falls in 1848.  Do it for every decent officeholder who daily strives for “better,” strives to Keep It Real.

Come, Holy Spirit, Come.  Anoint us with persistence.  Anoint us with healing and reconciliation.  Anoint us with a passionate concern for neighbor.  Anoint us with Truth that burns white hot within our breasts until we get off the couch and do something.

Happy Pentecost.  Amen.

---

[1] https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/tim-ryan-speech

[2]DeNeen L. Brown, “One of the Last Survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre – 107 Years Old – Wants Justice, Washington
 Post, May 19, 2021.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Elliott Hannon, Slate, “Arizona Republican Officials Call State GOP Election Audit a “Sham” and a “Con,” May 18, 2021.

“Keepin’ It Real”

Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

Day of Pentecost, May 23, 2021

Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 104:25-35, 37;
Acts 2:1-21; John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15

Nikki King grew up in a hardscrabble hamlet in one of the hollows of Appalachia.  Like many rural communities, it was awash in drug and alcohol addiction.  She reports, “At 14 I could’ve pointed out everybody who would be dead.”

At the urging of her grandmother, who, with her grandfather had raised her, she left home with a few meager belongings at the age of seventeen and headed for the University of Kentucky. 

She remembered one day in a high school class, the teacher asking the students what they wanted to be upon graduation.  One boy said, “A drawer.”

“You mean an artist?”

“’No, a draw-er’ – someone who draws disability checks and doctor-shops for OxyContin prescriptions.”  Reselling those pills could bring in substantial cash.  This was to be his career.[1]

After her grandmother, Sue, had died, Nikki received little support or understanding from her grandfather concerning her potential.  She had a 4.0 grade point average and a high ACT score.  He thought that the AP courses on her report cards meant that she was slow, in remedial classes.  He judged that a community college would be just fine for her.  So, in the middle of the night Nikki packed some stuff and headed off to the University of Kentucky.  She had been planning the get-away in her senior year, saving up money by working in a comic book store.[2]

After a friend’s mom had relapsed while on probation, she was deathly afraid that the state would take her children.  Her drug dealer had told the woman that she could clear the drugs from her system by drinking Clorox.  It killed her.  At that point, her grandmother urged her, “Just go, and don’t come back.”[3]

Nikki had internalized her grandmother’s hope, however, that she would one day come back to help people.  And she would.

By 2017 Nikki had graduated and was making a difference.  She was the lead data cruncher on a hospital-wide task force at Margaret Mary Health, a community hospital in Batesville.  Indiana.

She had been unable to do this work in Kentucky.  Too young.  Too female.  No one would listen to her.  Now, a decade after leaving home, after 800,000 opioid deaths nationally – Nikki is now a National Rural Health Association fellow. 

Though one head of a local Kiwanis Club objected to giving addicts rides to treatment facilities, “I think when they relapse, we should let them die and take their organs” — Nikki has “figured out a way to get treatment to people in remote, underfunded areas.”[4]  With their organs intact.

Many politicians say we should do something about drug overdose.  It’s “absolutely terrible,” they say.  But most have done nothing to learn about the problem, beyond catch phrases and slogans.  They’ve brought no funding to bear on the problem.  It, for far too many is all talk.  As illusory as a phantom.

The passage from Luke’s gospel presents the risen Christ as flesh and blood reality.  The Real Deal.  He eats fish with the disciples.  He shows them his wounded hands and feet.  What ghost does that? Whatever this mystery is, and how Luke explains it, I haven’t the foggiest.  Beyond my pay grade.

So, here’s my take on this.  One way to understand what Luke might be saying, especially in the second half of his witness, the Book of Acts, is that the Church is Spirit-empowered to be the Real Deal flesh and blood Risen Christ.  The physical, actual body, blood and bones – wounds and all.  Remember, Luke and Acts are actually volumes one and two of the same work.

This is, in fact, what people seek still today.  Flesh and blood difference-making.  This is what hungry hearts seek to be a part of.  Real Deal difference-making.

How all this happens?   It’s a holy mystery.  I can’t explain it and neither can you.  All we can say is that the Resurrected Christ becomes real, as testified in the book of Acts, as the living Resurrection Community bears the wounds of the wounds of one another, the wounds of its neighbors. 

Its all there in Matthew 25.  The heartaches, the sufferings.  To paraphrase Albert Schweitzer, the Risen Christ will reveal himself in the heartaches, the despair, the doubts. They shall pass through in his fellowship.

A faithful, obedient Church surely bears the same wounds, the same ministry.  For that is what it is to let the suffering of others into your soul.  Every bit as much as Nikki bears the wounds of her friends who have died of addiction.  Every bit as much as she has borne the wounds of families rent asunder by addiction.

The same can be said for Beth Macy.  Her ongoing journalist project to being to America the full story of opioid addiction with all its ugliness and despair, She has also borne the wounds of Christ.

And as both the lives of these women testify to the hope and redemption taking place through their work, they give witness to the most profound Easter Joy.  Sobriety is a flesh and blood possibility for many.  One-day-at-a-time recovery works.  Thanks to the Nikki Kings of this world, addiction treatment is more than political promise.  Where there’s no way, Nikki King makes a way.  Even if her rant goes, what her boss calls, “going all holler.”

The other day, a friend despairing of the emptying out of the traditional, mainline churches, said that traditional Protestantism had pretty much died in Pomona.  No surprise.  Most of those churches, when they slowly emptied out, barely left a mark.  A number of congregations chose to flee that city.  The Resurrection Community finds a way to stay.

This week at our diocesan Zoom meeting of clergy and our bishops and Canon to the Ordinary, Melissa, the featured speakers were from Habitat for Humanity.  You all know this program.  They build houses for those who, by normal market standards would not be able to get into permanent housing.

Habitat grew out of Koinonia Farm, an interracial intentional community of Christians in Americus, Georgia.  The founder, Clarence Jordan, was a biblical scholar, inspired by that early community portrayed in the Book of Acts.  It was begun back in the dark days of the KKK and the night riders, lynchings and cross burnings.  This was in 1942.  Despite the intimidation, this small band was determined to live out of the model in Acts, where all was shared, goods, mission, and the sufferings.

Out of this beginning, Jordan and Habitat’s eventual founders Millard and Linda Fuller developed the concept of “partnership housing.” “The concept centered on those in need of adequate shelter working side by side with volunteers to build decent, affordable houses. The houses would be built at no profit. New homeowners’ house payments would be combined with no-interest loans provided by supporters and money earned by fundraising to create “The Fund for Humanity,” which would then be used to build more homes.”[5]

This is flesh and blood Resurrection.  Gospel reality that could only come from authentic community, gospel committed.  Just like our small band putting together House of Hope.

The purpose of Bishop John in bringing this program to the clergy was to inspire “outside-the-box thinking on ways the Real Deal Resurrected Christ through us might meet current need, today’s task.  The Real Deal.

Habitat now does much more than its original mission, though permanent housing for low-income families in need remains its central “wheel house.”  They’re into housing condominiums, tiny houses, housing rehabilitation, even sober living homes. 

Just across the street from our diocesan center, in Echo Park, have been the tents and tarps of some fifty or sixty homeless in Los Angeles.  All up and down Wilshire Blvd. are scattered encampments of the homeless.  The pandemic has only made this situation far worse.  Some would say intolerable.  About thirty to forty percent of these suffer from mental illness and addiction.  About twenty-five percent are veterans.  Right – support the troops!  Until they get shot up, become mentally ill or have PTSD.

You guessed it, I’ll be calling two of these Habitat presenters next week. 

The Risen Christ is Real Deal, housing for the dispossessed.  Flesh and blood reality.  That’s what folks want to see, to be part of.

Maybe it’s endless meetings, assuaging fearful neighbors and mountains of paperwork that are today’s Resurrection Wounds the community of faith bears today in America.

I came across an article in Sojourners Magazine this month on Fr. Daniel Berrigan.  Most know of his work as a peace activist during the Vietnam War.  Many know of his writing.  All a piece of the Real Deal Resurrected Christ.

But this article brought to light an entirely different side of Daniel Berrigan, the pastoral side.  He had an active ministry to the ill and dying during the AIDS crisis.[6]

Father Berrigan’s time with the AIDS patients at St. Rose’s Home in Manhattan, where most of the patients were Catholic, was to be among the terminally ill and dying.

St. Rose’s was simply ‘a laboratory in dying,’ a ‘ship of fools’ sailing on heroically while Berrigan and the other orderlies ‘bail, row, weep, swab the decks, change beds, ferry in the newly arrived near dead, and try to keep sane’”[7]

Surely these servants of mercy were the Real Deal Risen Christ.  This is what the gospel looks like.  Here was the true church “enveloped by the ever-present stench of cancer,” the gospel incarnate. 

The staff was dedicated to “making people’s lives bearable, comfortable, and lively for as long as they lasted.”  “No one is forced-fed…whether on religion, psycho-semantics, antics…and there are no state snoops because there is no state money.”[8]

This is the Real Deal, flesh and blood Risen Christ.  Fish and all.

Grant, O Lord, that where there is injury, we may pardon be.  Grant, O Lord, that where there is abuse of authority under the cover of a badge, that we might justice be.  Grant, O Lord, that where there is loneliness, we might companionship be.  Grant, us O Lord, where gospel is lacking, we might gospel be.  Amen

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[1] Beth Macy, “At 14 I Could Have Pointed out Everybody Who Would be Dead,” The Atlantic, May 2020. 56.

2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.

 

 

[5] https://www.habitat.org/about/history

[6] Patrick Henry, “The Bread of Life in the Breach of Death,” Sojourners, May, 2021.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.

 

 

“The Full, Real Deal, Body of Christ”

Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

April 18, 2021, Easter 3

Acts 3:12-19; Psalm 4;
1 John 3:1-7; Luke 24:36b-48

I remember when I had come to my first parish out in the desert, a little town called Inyokern.  It was so small I remember driving through the main section of town and across the railroad tracks.  My wife with a quaver in her voice and tears in her eyes asked, “Is this all there is?”

Centrally located.  Two hundred fifty miles from anywhere!

There didn’t seem much for young people out there.  When I asked some of the youth what there was to do, one girl said, “You go to desert parties, get drunk, get pregnant, and then get married.”  “Wonderful,” I thought.  I was sure glad we didn’t have any children at the time.

Within a month I had the first young couple show up on my doorstep to be married.  Judging from the condition of the young lady, it seemed likely that she had attended one of those notorious desert parties.  I followed the schedule of pre-marital counseling classes that I had learned in seminary.

I stressed that what we were doing would require work on their part.  “You gotta work the program.”  That is what the community of faith is for – to provide support and encouragement, help and wise counsel.  But you gotta work the program.

One of the questions I usually asked to set the couple at ease concerned what originally had attracted them to each other.  The young, the far too young, young lady got all moony eyed and sighed, “His car.”  I knew then we were in trouble.  I could see that the “program” was in deep doo-doo.

Well, we went through the counseling sessions, and I figured that maybe they had a 50-50 chance of making it.  Of course, had I declined to marry them, I’m sure they would have found someone who would have had less compunction about it.  I also rationalized that if they were able to work things out, the child would certainly be better off in a stable home. 

At the conclusion of our sessions together I admonished the young couple to come back to me if there were any problems that I could help them work out.  Especially before they became insurmountable.  Be part of a community of faith that would nurture and support them.

After the wedding, the couple never returned; and later, I heard that they had split up.  No surprise. He was too busy with his car and friends and partying.  He couldn’t understand why he should change. She became too angry and shrill at being ignored and taken for granted.  He withdrew into a shell.  The wall of anger between the two of them became an insurmountable barrier.

The Church is Spirit-powered to help couples work the program.  But it’s not magic.

I’m not sure what they were expecting when they came to the church.  A marriage, especially when folks are this young, needs an awful lot of support.  It needs the daily spiritual discipline of forgiveness, sacrifice and active concern for the other.  These are bedrock requirements if there is to be joy and peace at home.  They seemed to have believed that having the church, or God, present through my officiating would magically make everything okay and happiness would rule ever after.

Unfortunately, the Hollywood fantasy did not come through for this ill-fated couple.  It hardly ever does. 

It would seem that none of what we had gone through for several weeks stuck.  Indeed, to make it work, you’ve gotta work the program. 

That’s also the core truth about recovery as well.  And that’s the core truth about faith.

“Peace be with you” were the first words they heard.  Frightened and guilty, huddled together in the darkness, the last person they ever thought they would lay eyes on was Jesus.   “Peace be with you.”  But this is a Jesus not bound anymore by time or place.

“Peace be with you.  He breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’”   Here’s the power to work the program.  You’ve got the power.

Proclaim Good News – BE the Good News.  You have the Power.  But you’ve gotta work the program.  Put that power to good purpose.

Christians, we’ve gotta work the program – every bit as much as that couple of young people needed to.

When I came to one church, an older couple greeted our family – we were a three-generation family at that point.  This middle-aged couple – a white man and a Vietnamese wife.  I found out Kim had been a war bride. 

I soon found a lot other things about Kim.  That first Sunday after church, she didn’t ask.  She told.  Told me to set aside Tuesday because I was going to be with her behind the community hall serving lunch for the homeless.  And I did.  Kim and her husband definitely worked the program.  She had seem so much privation and hunger in Vietnam, she was determined that no one should be going hungry in her new home, America, if she could help it.

And America would likewise be good to Kim.  Several years ago their daughter graduated with a PhD in psychology.

It was one of the great things about that congregation — Kim and her outreach to the homeless.  This was the program, and with Christ by her side, she was going to make sure we got with the program.  And worked it.

At one point she asked if we could invite these folks to our evening service, which we called Alternative Service.  Of course, why not?  Our music for that service was provided by a small group, piano, drums, string bass, fiddle, trumpet and a saxophone.  When the group did “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” it was pure Dixieland.  We did folk, gospel and Taizé music.  We’d take a standard hymn and set it to a beat. 

As we always began with a dinner at 6:00 o’clock, of course the homeless had a reason to be there.  Beside Kim’s prodding.  As we had a shower, they could also clean up.  And Kim would make sure folks did.

One day a fellow named Freddy asked if he could bring his mouth harp.  Of course.  The following week, I couldn’t believe the music I was hearing.  Freddy could have played that blues harmonica as a sideman in any recording studio.

I told him that from now on, he would be the prelude.  “What’s that?” he asked.  “That’s the music that gets us all started after dinner.”  That evening service was the program, Spirit propelled with JOY.  Easter Joy!  And more and more homeless and others showed up each week.  They worked the program.

Somewhere Teilhard de Chardin said that Joy is the most profound evidence of the presence of the Holy Spirit.  Working the program with unadulterated JOY.  Working the program with Easter Joy is never a drudge.

As one of my church secretaries, Kay, once told a boy who thought her parity was boring, that he could go call his mother right now to pick him up.  “We certainly wouldn’t want anyone here who’s being bored.”  His response?  “Oh… Ah…Er…Ah, I was talking about another party.” (Gulp.)

Get with the program.  Work it.  The Spirit doesn’t like boredom any better than did our church secretary Kay.

“Peace be with you.”  This was not any ordinary turn of phrase to pass the day.  Not a perfunctory “Good morning, how are you?” 

This was a profound expression of reconciliation.  It was an act of complete and utter forgiveness.  They had all fled in terror.  They were faithless friends.  Peter had denied him three times.  The Risen Lord had every reason to abandon them to their fate, whatever that might be – to have washed his hands of them.

Love doesn’t give up.  Even the Risen Christ continues to work God’s program.  He knew that his followers were better than their worst moments.  As are we – and with Spirit-assist, we often improve with age.

Anyone who has been married ten, fifteen, twenty or more years knows the need for forgiveness.  The same for long-term friendships.

The only way you make it through the years is to make an awful lot of allowances for each other.  You need a lot of forgiveness.   Marriage is sacramental, in that the selfless giving that takes place in such a relationship is exactly the power that Christ brought to those disciples huddled in that upper room of fear –the power of life made visible.  One pastor said that marriage is our one opportunity to grow up.

A long-term friendship is sacramental in the same way.  It is also an outward and visible sign of Christ’s continuing forgiveness and reconciliation.  It is godly companionship.  And as such, it is also an outward and visible sign of the joy of Christ’s presence – the blessing of Absolute Joy.

How often I am saddened by couples who so yearned for the magic of having their new, story-book beginning blessed by the Christian community, but who couldn’t quite bring themselves to be a part of Christ’s ongoing community of reconciliation, of sustenance – a community where they might just possibly have found the same reconciling Spirit-power when their marriage began to become precarious. 

It’s not magic.  Spirit-tools are available, but YOU, you’ve gotta work the program.

There’s the story a rabbi told of a father and his wastrel son.  He comes to temple every Sabbath and pours out his anguish before God about this kid whose life is going nowhere.

The story’s of the old Jewish man in New York City who enters the synagogue one morning, and in the silence of the moment pours out his heart to the Almighty.  “O God who made heaven and earth, you know that I have never asked for anything for myself.  Never!  But I’m asking you now, for my son.  He’s never done well and I’m not sure what will happen to him when I’m gone.  All I’m asking you now is to just let him win the lottery.  Not a huge amount, just enough to get by when I’m no longer here to watch over him.”  In the deep shadows of the place no answer is heard.  Dejected, the man leaves.

The next week he enters the synagogue and again fervently prays the same prayer.  Silence.  No answer.

But this fellow is one to persevere.  And so, a week later he enters and in the dim recesses of the synagogue, again he pours out his heart before God on behalf of his son.  “Just this once, O Lord.  It’s the only thing I ask.”  As he turns to leave, a brilliant shaft of light floods through a window, right on the spot on which the he is standing, with a resounding voice, “Could you help me out here and have him buy a ticket?”

The price of the ticket?  Listen to the Spirit.  She’s nearer than you’d ever think – right there in your own imagining.  With Power.  With Joy.  With Challenge.  With your Holy Assignment.  The task given for our time.  Your PROGRAM.

And sometimes when the presence is so profound, like Thomas, we can only stammer, “My Lord and my God.”  Amen.

“You’ve Gotta Work the Program”

Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

April 11, 2021, Easter 2

Acts 4:32-35; Psalm 133;
1 John1:1-2:2; John 20:19-31

When we last gathered, the sun had been obscured in deep darkness.  Subterranean tremors shook the land.  All that was stuck became unstuck.  And the ghastliest spirits were let loose to roam the land.  The veil separating holy and profane was rent in two.  It was a day of terror and dereliction.

Lent concludes with the most bitter journey.  Yet, in community, we were provisioned to take the final steps.  And to receive, as did Mary, his mutilated body from the cross.  As Christ is crucified in a thousand venues, in a thousand times. Pray we be prepared to receive his crucified body — the starved, the homeless, the disrespected, the isolated, the tortured.  And let us remember that this is not the end of the story.

Crucifixion is every day.  Likewise, Resurrection.

In the simple act of receiving Christ’s mutilated body is the seed of Life Abundant – Resurrection – Living Water.  For Matthew 25 people, Easter is every day (look it up).

How this transformation takes place…who can say?  In deepest darkness are mysteries beyond comprehending.  Yet, the deathly cold tomb is empty.   And we hear our name called out, “Diane, Jim, Barbara, Pam, Faith…”  Whom do you seek?   Life renewed floods back into the void.  Like those women overflowing with         both terror and astonished hope.  We announce to the world, “We have seen him.”

In Resurrection Faith, the Church kneels down to receive Christ’s broken body – yes, the homeless, the addicted, the destitute.  And life springs forth.  HOPE and PROMISE breathe.  He comes to us, taking up residence in mind and heart in many guises.

LIVING WATER –, he is among us.  Easter refreshment quenches our thirst.  Living Water, Bread, Good Shepherd, Teacher, the Way, the Vine, the Door – The gospel of John uses many images to portray the risen Christ in all fullness.  But give me LIVING WATER.

Let me tell you about water.

I remember my first church out in the desert.  It was not the most promising place.  Only four members of the congregation remained.  My charge was to wrap up a bequest to the church and close the doors.  Forever.

This was not the most promising of assignments, not a great career move.  Only a congregation of four!  Everything was hot and dusty.  On my first visit, there was not even a glass of water to be had.  The water had been turned off months ago.  What can be more depressing than the hot desert without any water.  Not a drop.

As the few faithful. in the coming weeks, were joined by several others, the first decision made was to get the water turned back on.  It took a couple of weeks, but when the spigot was opened up and water gushed forth, Living Water, we knew we stood at the possibility of Resurrection.  The Church was living again.

From there numbers grew.  Mission grew.  A daily senior lunch program was begun at the regional community hall in the adjoining town of Johannesburg.  A breakfast program was begun on Sunday mornings before church.  We even ended up with a small youth program.   Resurrection is Living Water.  As you have given the “least of these” a cup of water, you have done so to me, Jesus tells us.  Matthew 25.

That church was no longer a desiccated tomb.  That church became a gusher of Living Water.

I was so saddened by the testimony this week of George Floyd’s girlfriend on the stand.  She spoke of their mutual addiction flowing from prescribed opioids.  She testified to the pain and difficulty in overcoming addiction, which George never did.

In her words, she touched many Americans touched by addiction – of a family member, a friend, a work colleague – or maybe they, themselves.

If ever we needed the refreshment of effective treatment, if ever these families needed help, it is now.  Those working in the field of addiction:  clinicians, doctors and nurses, administrators and funders – all are a fount of LIVING WATER.  The Risen Christ personified.  Right here in San Bernardino!

In John’s gospel the story is told of Jesus encountering a foreign woman at the village well.  Jesus asks her for some water, for a cold drink.  She upbraids him for asking.  It is unseeing for a man, especially a Jew, to speak to a foreign woman about anything.  Much less make a request.  Such are the dank tombs of convention which confine us in death.

Jesus tells her that if she knew who was asking, if she knew of the water he could draw up, she would be asking of him — for he would produce a gusher of Living Water.  Tombs, water – yes, I’m mixing the metaphors.

The Living Christ we welcome this morning can’t be contained in just one story.  This is about the power of a Great Love let loose in the world.  Just like that gusher which flowed from a little desert congregation so long ago.

Water is HOPE.  Water is LIFE brim-full with possibility.  A faithful Church is Living Water, the risen Body of Christ.  Water is life and HE and his followers are the true LIVING WATER.

That’s why those who would suppress us in voter lines have outlawed water.  No handing out of water on pain of criminal charges!  No LIVING WATER to be dispensed here.  Do not encourage the voters, especially the wrong kind of voter.  No Living Water for this democracy.  No, sir.  Let it die in the dustbin of white supremacy. 

Rest assured, there will be a joyous band of the Spirit-anointed, water bottles in hand, ready to be hauled off to jail.  With joyful hearts, singing hymns and freedom songs.  Trust me – this is what will happen all across Georgia, sweltering in heat of white supremacy. 

LIVING WATER can be dangerous to your reputation if you hand it out to the wrong voters.  But that’s precisely what Resurrection People will be doing.

I told Jai, upon hearing this news, she’d better be getting bail bond money ready.  For a whole lot of us.  Hundreds and thousands arriving in Georgia with gallons and gallons of water.  LIVING WATER flowing straight from God Almighty.

Living Water is the eternal gift – Resurrection.  In our Lenten study book, there’s the most marvelous story of a couple, Victoria and Frank, hiking the Appalachian Trail, all 2,190 miles of it.  As a result of their professional careers as writer and photographer, they had become exhausted and spiritually depleted.  So, for renewal, they hit the trail.

As they neared the end of their months-long journey, on a scorching day in Massachusetts, they became desperate to find some water to fill their canteens and quench their thirst.  Their throats were parched. 

They left the trail and headed off on a back road in their search.  Coming upon a house they spied, by the garage, a hose bib.  They, being raised to be polite, thought they should ask permission.

What they found in the guise of an elderly couple was Living Water.  Here’s what happened when they rang her doorbell:

“A woman answered, looking a little puzzled to find two sweaty, smelly backpackers on her doorstep.  Her husband joined her at the door as we explained our parched predicament.  They escorted us into their kitchen—where the plied us with cold lemonade from the refrigerator and, quite unbelievably, warm cookies.  We found ourselves in a most luxurious oasis.  Before we left, the lady and her husband topped off our canteens with fresh water and added ice cubes to keep the water cold.”[1]

“Thirteen years after we stumbled to their door, I phoned the woman that other hikers have come to know as the ‘Cookie Lady.”  She and her husband never forgot the couple who came to their doorstep in need of water.  She told me, ‘You enjoyed the cookies so much that I try to keep fresh cookies around for other hikers.’  This couple was changed by our encounter with them, and they never took the comforts of their home for granted.  By the time I phoned years later to say thank you, we too had been transformed by their hospitality.”

Living Water this couple was.  The Easter Christ present in their simple hospitality.  Resurrection is Living Water.  We are Living Water.  No dried-out Christians here. 

Resurrection eternally remains a mystery in hearts of all who are drawn to him.  I give the Last Word to Albert Schweitzer, who concluded his monumental and exhaustive search for the historical Jesus with this final paragraph – set to music by Jim Strathdee:

“He comes to us as one unknown without a name,
Without a name, without a name as of old by the lakeside he came to those men who knew him not.

He speaks to us, he speaks to us the same word: Follow me, Follow me!
And sets us to the task which he has to fulfill for our time. 

He commands and to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple,
He will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts and the sufferings. 

They shall pass through in his fellowship,
As an ineffable mystery they shall learn in their own experience who He is.”[2]

We too, shall learn in the experience of our journey through the years who he is.  For me, nothing dead and dusty.  He will be revealed as an Easter font of refreshing, LIVING WATER.  Especially in every voter-suppression state of this Union.  Amen.

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[1] Frank and Victoria Logue, “The Journey,” Are We There Yet? (Cincinnati, Ohio: Forward Movement Press, 2017), 143-144.

[2] Jim Strathdee, Albert Schweitzer, “He Comes to Us,” There’s Still Time, Desert Flower Music, 1977.

“Resurrection is Living Water”

Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

                                           April 4, 2021, Easter Day

 Isaiah 25:6-9; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24;
Acts10:34-43; Mark 16:1-8

The crowd which welcomed Jesus and his merry band into the streets of Jerusalem is the very same crowd that, at the end of the week, would scream, “Crucify.  Crucify.  Crucify.  Giddy and bursting with excitement over a possible comeuppance for their Roman occupiers, they ran and pranced along with Jesus, waving palm branches, shouting, “Hosanna.”    The air was electric with the possibility of miracle.

Cruel irony, how the crowd can turn so fast.  Cruel irony, how we can turn so fast on our highest ideals.  Through our lofty proclamations, runs a bitter streak of violence.  Lord, have mercy.  We crucify him time and again.

In her book, Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson narrates a litany of betrayals of our American ideals.  All in defense of the caste status of those on the top rung.  This is a history of our nation you didn’t, and our kids still don’t, learn in their eighth grade or high school history classes.  You probably didn’t learn it in a college course.  Yet, it’s an indispensable part, for we are again on the verge of its repetition.  This book is required Lenten reading for Americans.

In 1951, Youngstown, Ohio, the city championship was won by a team that had one black kid on it.  The coach, unthinkingly, took the team to celebrate at the city swimming pool.  When the lifeguard saw Al Bright, the only black player, he forbade the boy to enter the enclosure with the other boys.  Al was forced to sit outside the fence and watch the others eat their picnic lunches and frolic in the water.  From time to time someone would join him out there and bring him something to eat.

Even though several parents and coaches attempted to persuade the pool staff to change their minds, there Al sat on a blanket outside the fence enclosing the pool that one of the lifeguards had laid out for him. 

Finally, the supervisor of the pool was persuaded that Al could get in the pool.  Only if everyone else, who was white, got out.  Al was led to a little rubber raft.  As he got in it, the lifeguard repeated over and over, “don’t touch the water.”  The lifeguard entered the pool and towed the raft with Al around the pool for a single turn as parents and coaches watched from the edge.  All the time the lifeguard kept repeating, “Don’t touch the water.  Don’t touch the water.”

Al was then escorted to his assigned spot on the other side of the fence.

“The lifeguard managed to keep the water pure that day, but a part of that little boy died that afternoon.  When one of the coaches offered him a ride home, he declined.  ‘With championship trophy in hand,’” Watkins, a boyhood friend, would later write, ‘Al walked the mile or so back home by himself.  He was never the same after that.’”[1]

Imagine the pain of that crown of thorns pressed down upon the brow of that little boy.  Christ crucified again.  In our own day.

This week we call Holy, for it contains both the bitter pain and sublime hope of the Gospel.  We behold the sorrow of the world, sorrow like none other. In the poignant moment of fellowship Jesus and his companions gather for a last meal.  This Holy Week is every week, as will Easter arrive every week.  The bitter mixed with the sweet.  But this week we face betrayal, torture and abject forsakenness.  Can you not keep awake?

As the old hymn puts it, “If you can’t bear the cross, then you can’t wear the crown.” 

Communists, in rejecting religion, called Christianity the opiate of the masses.  As if faith was some sort of blinders that might enable us to ignore and skirt the ugliness of hate and tragedy — the ugliness of what we do to our fellow human beings. 

Not so.

Faith is what allows us to look death and tragedy straight in the eye and carry on, find a way, make a way when there is no way..  And when we’re called to our Maker, it is faith that enables us to hear that clarion sound, “Well done, my beloved.  Well done.”

Through our community in Christ we are surrounded and upheld by that glorious company of the faithful.  It is only through their strength, through their encouragement and support, that we complete the race we’ve been assigned.   Even Jesus needed a few others.  And we’re just not in his class.

Yes, many were willing to watch a little black boy slowly diminish, to shrink and to spiritually die on the edge of a municipal plunge one warm day.  But not all.  Some knew this wasn’t right.  Some knew this was diametrically opposed to everything they had been taught in their churches.  They may not have had the tools resistance champions of justice now have.  They may not have understood the power of civil disobedience, but some, that afternoon had their hearts ripped from their breasts.

That is the first step – a willingness to let the pain of rejection and tragedy enter one’s soul.  To feel at one’s root core Al’s rejection.  But that is only the first step.  Imagine if the entire team and bystanders had, instead of yielding to passivity, marched outside the pool enclosure and joined Al.  Imagine the power of that NO.

Today, as Christ is dismissed and scorned through Jim Crow voter suppression laws, we are being confronted with the same choice as those onlookers at a Youngstown municipal pool in 1951.

The question always is, which side are you on?  The side of complicity through silence?  Will you, too, avert your gaze and refuse to see?  Not act?  Or, will you be on the side of “necessary trouble?”  Will you be on Al’s side?

Mother Teresa puts our Palm Sunday choices this way in a simple poem, “Forgive Them Anyway.”

People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered.  Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives.  Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies.  Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and sincere people may deceive you.  Be honest and sincere anyway.

What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight.  Create anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous.  Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, will often be forgotten.  Do good anyway.

Give the best you have, and it will never be enough.  Give your best anyway.

In the final analysis, it is between you and God.  It was never between you and them anyway.

Do not forget — It is God who brings Resurrection Joy even through the most bitter tears.  Amen

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[1] Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (New York: Random House, 2020), 120-121.

“Lord, Have Mercy”

Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

March 28, Palm/Passion Sunday

Mark 11:1-11; Isaiah 50:4-9a; 31:9-16;
Philippians 2:5-11; Mark 14:1—15:47

As a young woman, Diana Harvey Johnson, now seventy-four, marched up the steps of the courthouse to register to vote.  There she was confronted by a white woman who pointed to a Mason jar on the counter.  “How many butterbeans are in that jar.”  The inference was that if she was able to correctly guess the number, she would be allowed to register.[1]

“’I had a better chance of winning the Georgia lottery than guess how many butterbeans,’ Ms. Harvey Johnson continued.  ‘But the fact that those kinds of disrespects and demoralizing and dehumanizing practices – poll taxes, lynchings, burning crosses and burning down houses and firing people and putting people in jail, just to keep them from voting – that is not far away in history.  But it looks like some people want to revisit that.  And that is absolutely unacceptable.’”[2]

“You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient.”[3]   Through our nation’s original sin, the notion that some count more than others, America’s ideals have often been a dead letter.

The spirt of “this world” is the evil that overtook much of this nation after the Civil War, after Reconstruction, and now, after the Civil Rights struggles of the 60s.  It is presently “Jim Crow in a suit and a tie, drafting new voter suppression laws in states across the land.

The sin, the evil, is exclusion.  It’s, “You don’t count in this country.” 

“But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.”[4] 

In the midst of the hypocrisy, the land theft, the lynchings, God has been silently at work perfecting.  In every age, reaching some righteous hearts and minds.

As Christ rises, we all rise together.  That’s the bottom line of “For God so loved the world…”

The bottom line of Paul’s proclamation is – brothers, sisters you count.  We all count as God’s own.  No one is left out, left behind.  In the gospel of Jesus Christ, we are all raised up.  Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert.  We all rise together. 

“But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead…”  Loved us even when we’ve given up on ourselves.

Those who take this promise to heart, they are God’s own.  We all rise together.  In our rising is proof positive that God “so loved the world…”

You count at the voting registration table!  You count at the school house door!  You count at the college admissions selection committee and on the high school track team.  You count!

We now have a whole bunch of folks who must have gotten a defective Bible.  The part about God’s inclusive love for all must have been left out.  Wasn’t in Sheriff Jim Clark’s Bible.  Must have not been included in Governor Faubus’s Bible.  Sure wasn’t in Bull Connor’s Bible.  Nope.  No evidence of any love on Bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettis Bridge that day.

Must not be in the Voting Suppression Bible — definitely wasn’t in the spirit of those brand-new laws stifling the right to vote – like the elimination of Sunday voting, the restriction of same-day registration, the elimination of convenient drop-off boxes.   Except that one lone box, out in the middle of the Arctic tundra.

“For God so loved the world…”   That may well be.  But not you if you’re the wrong kind of voter.

But St. Paul continues, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God…”  The Easter story we so desperately await in this Age of Pandemic is that in Christ we all rise.  Together.

You are okay, just right.  The way you were created – simply by virtue of your being here.  “God does not make junk.”  So, stay in that voter line.  Make your voice count.  Stay in school and don’t let anyone turn you around.  Finish that novel.

Opportunity for all is the foundation of our country.  The idea “of the people, by the people, for the people,” – that’s a straight line from Paul’s proclamation that all are precious in God’s estimation.  Derivative from the Honest-to-God Gospel of Jesus Christ.  No watering down.

The God of Jesus is not about perishing.  This God is about raising us all up to the full stature of who we are meant to be.  We all rise together.

The people who remind us of this truth are our “balcony people,” as George Regas called them.  They cheer us on.  Though they be saints long gone on before, or they be current mentors and champions, they cheer us on as we approach that bright finish line.

This last week, March 8^th, we celebrated International Women’s Day.  It is a day to celebrate one half of humanity that too often is ignored, patronized, dismissed.  These are the ones we’ve been waiting for if we but see them.  Strong, competent, talented, assertive women.

And they’re bustin’ out all over the place.  Not just at the voting booth, though I believe Stacy Abrams is a role model for all of us, men and women alike.

In celebration of Women, I picked up a book of the noted science fiction writer, Octavia Butler.  Very few successful writers in this genre are women, especially Black women.  In the Library of America, one can obtain the first collection of her stories and two of her novels.

Octavia grew up as a introspective girl, later subject to bouts of loneliness and depression.  But her mother was a fierce advocate for her daughter.  When a sixth-grade teacher told Octavia that she could not learn very well because she was “colored,” her mother, angry at this teacher, urged Octavia, you “be somebody.”  And gave her a typewriter for Christmas – that she would later write her first five novels on.[5]

Even her well-meaning aunt urged her to take up something practical: nursing, teaching, something what would return a decent salary.  “Black people can not grow up to work as writers.”  Butler worried that this might be the case. “In all my thirteen years, I had never read a printed word that I knew to have been written by a Black person.”  Yet, at this age she had already submitted a number of stories to science fiction magazines, encouraged by her science teacher.[6]

One night, as a seventh grader, watching a B-movie, Devil Girl from Mars, on late night TV, she came to four revelations.  “The first was that ‘Geez, I can write a better story than that.’ And then I thought, ‘Geez, anybody can write a better story than that.’  And my third thought was the clincher: ‘Somebody got paid for writing that awful story.’  So, I was off and writing.”[7]  This in the seventh grade!

Octavia, grew up in our own backyard, Pasadena and Altadena, attended Pasadena City College and my alma mater, Cal. State Los Angeles.  She would rise, and rise indeed, publishing scores of novels and short stories.  In 1984 her short story, “Speech Sounds,” is published in Isaac Asimov’s magazine and it wins her first Hugo Award for Best Short Story.  Hugo Awards are among the most prestigious in the SciFi trade.  In 1995 Octavia would be awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship – the “genius award,” so called.  Her novel, Parable of the Talents, wins a Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1999.  The top award for science fiction writers.

As Octavia rises, we all rise together.  All, in the full humanity that God intends for each one.  Her work has enchanted and challenged her many readers.

Another story, another incredible woman, from a recent episode of “60 Minutes.”  As a young college graduate, Charlie Blackwell-Thompson remembers standing in the NASA control center for many space launches.  Having, upon graduation, applied for a job at NASA, she stood in that fabled room and thought to herself, “I want a seat in that room.”  As a woman, this was not likely.  Virtually everyone in that room was a man.[8]

Charlie now has THE SEAT in that room as NASA’s first female launch director. 

A year from now she will give the launch command for a journey that will return humans to the moon.  The same room that witnessed the Apollo Missions leave earth.  The same room she had visited thirty years ago as a young college graduate.

If you look at those old black-and-white NASA photos, all you see is men.  White men.  Now, over thirty percent of the launch crew is women.  This room is presently diverse enough to almost look like America.

This achievement in inclusion is the realization of Paul’s proclamation — We all count.  The ethic of Jesus, running down the century and across cultures, through America’s foundational documents, has brought us to the richness of his promise for all.  We all count.

Title 9 has done this for women sports.  Title 9 was the seminal change in the U.S. education code that mandated equity in sports for both male and female.  Both funding and opportunity had to be on a parr for both. 

 

Now, a little home-town bragging.  Title 9 in high school, basketball opened the door for women like Diana Taurasi, a home-grown star from Chino’s Don Lugo High School.  She went on to headline University of Connecticut (UConn) Women’s Basketball. 

On July 8, 2018, Taurasi became the league’s all-time leader in field goals. Taurasi would also earn her ninth career all-star appearance after being voted into the 2018 WNBA All-Star Game.  This opportunity came all because of Title 9.

When I was in high school, during gym time I would see the girls in their area playing just half-court.  When I asked a friend why this was so, she told me that girls were too delicate to run up and down a full court.  Tell that to Diana Taurasi.

After college, she was a top draft pick by the Phoenix Mercury and that year was selected WNBA Rookie of the Year.  In 2017 she became the all-time top woman scorer, and is now considered one of the best female basketball players ever.

As Diana rises, we all rise together. The Glory of God is a woman fully alive.  A wonder to behold, on or off court.

We have our own Hayden, an up-an-coming pitcher in girls’ softball, burning them in at over 60 miles an hour.  I can’t wait for COVID to be over so I can see her show her stuff.

A couple of all-stars have combined to coach Hayden develop her talent.  Crystl Bustos is an all-time home run hitter in the late ‘90’s.  She was on the Olympic team in 2000, ’04 and ’08.  A two-time gold medal winner, known as “The Big Bruiser.”

Another, Rhonda Wheatley, from Cal Poly, Pomona was the number one pitcher on Team USA for1980 through ’88.  She was the fifth most winning pitcher ever in NCAA, Division 1.  With a record 198 wins and only 60 loses, she was one of the starting pitchers in the 1987 Pan American Games.  That is the sort of help Hayden is attracting.

Thank you, Title 9, that Hayden’s magnificent talent can blossom.  If she keeps at it with her studies and pitching practice, I hope to see Hayden in the record books.  This talent we also acknowledge on International Women’s Day.

This is what St. Paul celebrated in his glorious epiphany, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”.[9]

Hayden, you and your teammates totally count, and are precious in God’s sight.  Your talents will be honored as far as they will take you.  You go, girl!

This week wherein we lift up the gifts and accomplishments of our sisters, it’s good to wear a pink stole.

Why a pink stole?  I’m told by our most English of Episcopalians at St. Francis that this Sunday is “Mothering Sunday” — No, nothing to do with the American holiday, Mother’s Day.  Think, “Rule Britannia.”  Yes, do remember the woman who gave you birth, but ALSO remember your Mother Church.  Especially the one in which you were baptized.  Leave a special offering.  So, we put on the pink – for a number of reasons.

Title 9 and other opportunities opened across the board access for our sisters to excel.  As they do, they lift us all.  In the Spirit of Christ, we all rise together.  This is not your grandfather’s church or country anymore.  All really does mean all. 

Octavia is interred in Altadena at Mountain View Cemetery, near her mother.  Inscribed on her marker are words from Parable of the Sower: “All that you touch, you change.  All that you change, Changes you.  The only lasting truth is Change.  God is Change.”[10]   

Amen.

---

[1] Nick CoraaNIRI ns Jim Rutenberg, “Georgia Bills Target Black Church Voting Drives, New York Times, March 7, 2021

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ephesians 2:1-2, New Revised Standard Version.

[4] Ephesians 2:4-5, NRSV.

[5] Octavia: E. Butler: Kindred, Fledgling, Collected Stories, Gerry Canavan & Nisi Shawl, editors (New York: The Library of America, 2020), 744.

[6] Op. cit., 745.

[7] Op. Cit., 744.

[8] Bill Whitaker, correspondent, “60 Minutes,” March 7, 2021.

[9] Galatians 3:28, New International Version.

[10] Octavia, 755.

 
“We all Rise, Together”

Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

March 14, Lent 4

Numbers 21:4-9; Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21

Helen and Henry Howard, an elderly couple, ran the little Union 76 station and café attached to it.  It was just a wide spot in on the highway through Johannesburg, one of the three former mining towns served by the Randsburg United Methodist Church, my first appointment. Inyokern was the second of this two-point charge.                              I still remember my friend Alan announcing to the congregation we were attending on a Sunday before we were about to depart that I had received my appointment: “The bishop is sending John to Unicorn and Rancid.”

Anyway, I digress – on to the point of this story.  Helen was a faithful member of the Foursquare Church in Johannesburg – the other towns being Randsburg and Red Mountain. If you’ve been up Hwy. 385 you know the place.

For several weeks Helen had been after me to teach the “Released Time” Bible study that churches in California were allowed to make provision for during the regular school day.  It would he held at her church because that was just a short walk from the elementary school which served students in the three towns, all about a mile apart.  Jai was the teacher for this one-room school house.

The curriculum provided by the Council of Churches for the program was mostly non-doctrinal. The purpose was mainly to teach kids their Bible stories.

I hemmed and hawed.  Helen was Foursquare, right? I once want to one of their churches with a high school girlfriend because her friend Glenna had pestered her into going. To say that their worship was exuberant would be an understatement. Certainly nothing for the “Frozen Chosen” from the Presbyterian tribe, which is where my girlfriend attended. I was the drag-along.

So Helen was a nice person, but I wasn’t sure about this.  Well, soon Helen had an ally. The Spirit spoke. She said, “C’mon. You don’t need to be so stuck up. They’re Christians, too.”  So, I acquiesced and said, “Yes.”

Other than there being no A/C and the room being dimly lit – sleep inducing – I got through the first few weeks or so until…

There we were in Exodus with the Ten Commandments. The first few were no sweat.  We could all understand that you should go to church and thank God for everything.  We knew that murder is bad. Helps nobody.  Nor does stealing all

their stuff.  God certainly wouldn’t like that any better than we if it was our stuff that got boosted.

Then we came to adultery. I really hadn’t thought much about how I would approach this with the kids. There was the giggle factor, and I didn’t want to get into a Peyton Place scenario. So, I punted. I asked the group if they knew what “adultery” meant.

At once a very angry boy jumped up and pointed to another kid. Rage in his voice, “That’s like when your grandfather ran away with my mom.”

Silence. After what seemed like an hour I stammered, “Well, I guess we all know that adultery is.” This was the most recent scandal of those three little towns.  The story, with embellishments, was everywhere. The town jaws were flapping big time.

The final retort of the young boy of the accused grandfather, “Well, when my grandpa runs off with someone, he doesn’t just take her to California City!” A planned community out in the middle of nowhere that never really got built. Except for a scattering of houses, a couple of dives, a gas station and a motel. The No-

We have from the Mount of Revelation Ten Commandments, not Ten Suggestions as my Unitarian friend calls them.

The purpose of the Law, those Ten Suggestions, are to keep us focused and attentive to what gives life, not what sucks it up. They’re about what is necessary for freedom in community. And our frail community was in shambles for quite a while as everyone chose up sides.

The Law exists not for itself, but enable us to keep the freedom God won for us when we were brought out of bondage in Egypt. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me.” It’s Gospel THEN Law.  Friends, there’s as much Gospel in the Old Testament as in the New.

There is no freedom if all is up for grabs. If one has to be on continually on guard to protect life and limb. And the part about idols – they may seem to work for a while.  Like a great set of wheels that would turn the girls’ heads. Because we sure thought that we were so dorky that we, all by ourselves, wouldn’t attract any notice. Talk about lusting after something like a ’57 Chevy. The fins, the chrome, they were to die for.  What was that about covet? And idolatry?

They may seem to work for a while, but what then.  What about when you’re forty- five and the chick who you lured into the seat next to you, now has nothing in common with you. And he with the fancy car? Now an ignorant blowhard.  Maybe, you’re no catch either. A couch potato every night watching WrestleMania or old reruns of Kojak or the Wheel of Fortune? And who knows where the kids got off

to? They never call.

The ethic of “do your own thing – nobody will get hurt” doesn’t really work. The problem is, somebody always gets hurt.

This is the struggle within Paul. “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the vey thing I hate.” We, just being human, are “born for trouble as the sparks fly upward.” The Law is to preserve Gospel Freedom.  It is the adult guardrail that counsels against such as, “It seemed like a good idea at

That is why a key question in the baptismal pledge asks, “Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, when you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?” It doesn’t ask, “if you fall into sin,” but “WHEN you fall into sin.”

I know my weaknesses. As a political pugilist, I’m not so charitable to those on the other side of the aisle.  My Lenten discipline this year is to regard those of other persuasion not as enemies but, at best good Americans with other ways of seeing things. Though I admit I still have difficulty with those who have gone over the QAnon edge. I’m not too hot about the Antifa folks either. But I’m making a good attempt to understand what took some of my opponents to such extreme. To regard them as opponents, not enemies. Pray for me.

This discipline is good for my soul. And also good for House of Hope. Addiction knows no party.  It’s neither Red nor Blue. All sorts, from bankers to brick layers, from professors to students.

I really have to believe in the possibility of redemption, but that’s no quick fix.  You may have taken half of your life to get hooked, and it’s going to take the other half to amend your ways, to find a life of sobriety, of community.

I think it begins with empathy, understanding. That is surely one of the gifts of the Spirit, for most of the time we have compassion not within us. Too often, it’s not my first thought – to think about walking in someone else’s shoes.

“Thou shall not, Thou shall not.” This is the law.  It is a guardrail for safety of the soul. The purpose is to preserve the freedom and bountiful life won for us already.

“God spoke all these words to Moses on Mount Sinai: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery…” That’s it in a nutshell.  Do not fritter this gift away.  Do not forget who opened the door to the wonder of this life.

A passion for this priceless inheritance is at the root of Jesus’ anger at the folks outside the temple with their money changing tables and animals.

“‘Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.’ His disciples remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’”

The entire purpose of Moses, Jesus and the prophets – all of it down to the present day – is to bring humanity into community with each other and the animating Spirit behind it all. It’s not about yard sales.

Yes, there is behavior that destroys the fragile bonds of community. Behavior that is completely off limits.  We should abstain from such. There are also sideshow distractions from the core teachings of our Judeo/Christian heritage.  Mercy, Justice and forgiveness go much farther than raffles and rummage sales, bingo night and beautiful liturgy.

Instead of just the “do-nots,” lets also consider the “dos” this Lent — while we’re considering an amendment of our ways.

I came across a piece by a writer, Simone Ellin, who in school had been unmercifully bullied by some of the “mean girls.” You know who they were in your high school. Dressed tough. Sullen. Smoked and used foul language. These talked back to teachers, and sooner or later often were expelled.

In high school this woman had been bullied and ridiculed by some of these girls. As a result, her self-esteem had been in the dumps for much of her adult life.

She writes: “For decades, I’ve struggled with low-grade depression, anxiety and feelings of inadequacy and underachievement that have persisted despite years of therapy. I won’t argue that my mental health issues stem only from the bullying I encountered in school, but those experiences ― and my lifelong shyness, hypersensitivity and self-consciousness, made me a perfect target for bullying and exclusion”1

Suddenly, she had an idea. She decided to contact her former classmates, not

1 Simone Ellin, “I Tracked Down The Girls Who Bullied Me As A Kid. Here’s What They Had To Say,”  Jmore magazine, 2-19-2021.

only those who had bullied her but the other girls as well. What happened after that was astounding and life-giving.

The response of one girl was typical of comments she received from others who had bullied her. “I’m so sorry,” she said repeatedly during our call. “I swear I’m not a bad person. I think about what I did to you all the time. I don’t know why I chose you. I had a miserable home life.” She revealed some of the trauma she’d been through and, though I might have guessed that my classmate came from a troubled background, hearing it from her own lips made all the difference. I was finally able to forgive her, and (I hope) to help her to forgive herself.”2

Not one girl was nasty or bitter. Many calls ended in tears of relief and reconciliation. Being stuck in that high school nightmare was slavery for both women. Not what God

intended. For how many has the bondage of junior high, high school, been another

Egypt? For me, junior high was an utter social disaster.

Against the sort of heartfelt charity of Simone there is no law.  Always, such abundant Grace in season. If I can practice just a half an ounce of such kindness and understanding to my Republican colleagues — that would be some reconciliation which God could put to good work.

In this life, the blessings of Beloved Community are rare indeed. More valuable than much fine gold. They must be nurtured to be sustained. And as Simone Ellin has demonstrated, it is never too late to put into practice their nurture.

“Truth and Reconciliation” do in fact work. Ask Archbishop Tutu. Ask the South Africans. Nothing is fixed forever – ask the people of Northern Ireland.  Ask whites and blacks of the New South. Forever and forever, hate is not fixed.

Rebirth is a never-ending journey, beginning with one step.  One phone call.  It requires charitable leadership and the willingness to risk.  As Christians, we are the people of “The Second Chance.” Remember who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. Remember the One who still is your Liberation.

Here, at hand.  Now. Amen.

“The Ten Suggestions?”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

March 7, 2021, Lent 3

Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22

Isabel Wilkerson, author of Caste, opens her book with the recollection of a old black and white photo of Germany in the 1930s, a rather famous photo taken at a Hamburg shipyard in 1936.

The photo is of some hundred shipyard workers lined up facing the sun, and offering the heil Hitler salute with rigid right arms held outstretched in honor to Der Fuhrer.

However, if one looks carefully at this picture, in the upper right, one sees a man who does not salute.  His arms are folded.  It is one lone man standing against the tide, the onslaught about to engulf all of Europe in abject terror.  He had a premonition of a horror the others missed or refused to acknowledge.

Though he had joined the Nazi party early on, he had come to know that they would bring disaster and heartache.  He, an Aryan, was in love with a Jewish woman.  He had come to see the Nazi propaganda machine as a fount of lies and slander against the Jewish people.  She and her friends were nothing like what Hitler and their ilk portrayed. So, there he stood, alone, grim-faced, refusing to bow to the lie.[1]

A flood was about to engulf his nation, and among the many, only he saw the disaster.  He was among the few in that boatyard who saw the Nazi tsunami approach the shore before it struck with the full force of the Nuremberg Laws – laws modeled on the US Jim Crow laws, stripping away the last vestiges of a proud and vibrant civil society.  One lone shipwright knew that his nation would come to no good end under Hitler, when this Nazi stuff happened.

One lone man, not unlike those patriotic Republicans, who voted for conviction of the former president.  Yes, insurrection and sedition – treason is definitely bad “stuff” happening. 

It is said that Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.  Try a Trump scorned.  He has declared war on every single member of Congress who had not supported him in his second impeachment trial.  If you backed McConnell, you’d better be looking over your shoulder.  That is the message.

Our nation is now awash in a flood of hate and vengeance unlike any since the Civil War.  QAnon lies drench great masses of Americans submerging us in a conspiracy of lies and fantasies beyond all bounds of logic.

Republicans are presently drowning in the frightening political flood waters of Trumpism.  Old values and verities are swept away in the chaos engulfing that tribe.  What about deficits?  What about “law and order?”   What about truth?  What about decency and humility?  What about small but effective government?  All sacrificed on the altar of expediency and in base subservience to one man.

The Grand Old Party of my parents has become a shark feeding frenzy.  My mother, who was the founding president of the Women’s Republican Club of Signal Hill, would have been aghast to see her party be submerged under an obsequious tidal wave of a cult owing fealty to one broken man. 

Mom, stuff happens, even in your Grand Old Party of Lincoln.

“We did not send him there to vote his conscience, we did not send him there to do the right thing, whatever he said he was doing,” Dave Ball, the chairman of the Washington County Republican Party in Pennsylvania, said of Toomey’s vote to convict Trump”[2]

No room for dissent, any more than in the old Soviet Politburo under Stalin.  Censure and expulsion are now threatened against any Republican siding with Mitch McConnell following his speech in the well of the Senate following the vote on the possible conviction of Trump.  To stand up, it will take a woman, a man, of the same courage as that of a lone worker in a Hamburg shipyard in 1936.  Ask yourself: would you have had the courage of that solitary man?

Any standing against this idolatrous cult, this base worship of one man will be swept away.  My parents and their friends would not have, did not, survive such a political onslaught washing over their conservative values and loyalties, their years of working in precinct politics.  My mom would have been heartsick had she lived to see this unsightly end.

In our lesson from Genesis, the reader comes out the other side of this biblical Flood.  Noah and his family and all the critters scamper down the gangplank and the sun is shining.  And bright in the sky is that rainbow.  Sign of God’s covenant, God’s promise never to do that again – no matter how badly we behave.  Yes, it’s all bright flowers, butterflies and rainbows.

Not so fast, I protest.  As one young girl asked her mother about Noah and the ark, “What about all the animals?  They didn’t do anything.”   As Jesus asks, concerning those piously excusing God for a terrible tragedy, “Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them – do you think they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem?  No, I tell you…”[3]  Sin and repentance are a different discussion. 

Personally, I find this narrative highly problematic.   Like Job arguing against God about unfairness, I protest.  I want an accounting. “What about all the animals?  They didn’t do anything.”  Jesus refuses to blame all disaster, natural or otherwise, on human sin.  Sorry, Pat Robertson – gays and lesbians did not cause 9/11.  (Now, the Sixth Great Extinction is entirely another matter – we have culpability, and that’s a different sermon.) 

Scholars now know that this Flood story was a Hebrew adaption of a much older Babylonian story of another flood, centuries earlier.  In fact, those looking for a historical antecedent think this narrative might have had its origins in the immense catastrophe when ocean rise caused the Mediterranean Sea to surge past the Bosporus straights to flood into the area we now know as the Black Sea.  This, some ten thousand years prior to the telling of our story. 

Within a just a few, brief, horrendous days raging waters swept away hundreds of thousands.  Livestock and all.  This is the sort of catastrophe that would have been sealed in memory passed down for generations upon generations by the descendants of those who survived.  Yes, and what about the animals?  They didn’t do anything bad to God.

Whatever the origin, however we attempt to tidy up this calamity, sometimes bad stuff happens.  Stuff happens.  It’s that simple.  Stuff happens.  Actually, some order it.

Paired in our readings with Noah’s disembarkion from the ark is Mark’s narrative of Jesus’ baptism.  Jesus is drawn from the waters to receive God’s blessing, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased.’ And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.  He was in the wilderness forty days…’The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’”

You are my son.  You are my daughter.  Those words that every Christian should hear as they emerge from the baptismal waters, sprinkled or submerged therein.  You are my beloved.  With you, I am well pleased.

Repent – put on a new mind.  Time to wrap your mind around a new fact – in the deepest sense, the real alternative fact – God is doing a new thing.  Time to think outside the box and recalculate where your life’s going.  Lent is a time of recalculation.  Stuff happens, and the choices you make, make all the difference.  They tell us, they tell you, who you are and whom you serve. 

One writer surmised that, in fact, we ought to think of Lent as being without end.  Repentance and renewal are always in order.  We are consigned to walk in a wilderness lasting not forty days, but for the duration.  Surviving this journey has nothing to do with giving up chocolate or coffee or T-bone steaks or whatever.  Actually, God can’t do much with the little bit of chocolate you might abstain from this Lent.

But God can do A WHOLE LOT with a renewed and refocused heart, an amendment of foolish ways.  That is material God can definitely work with.  If you traverse this wilderness with lasting values and purpose, you are not a wanderer but a pilgrim.  You know the destination – the Beloved Community. 

In Texas this week, we had two hearts which God might have put to good use.  A heart of compassion and a me-first heart, a heart of après moi le dèluge – after me the flood – attributed to King Luis the XV of France.  This, the ultimate nihilistic expression of indifference to “stuff’ happening.

^‑We saw the heart of heartless indifference in full display in Texas this week as Ted Cruz and his family hightailed it out of the frozen clines of that state for the warmth of tropical Mexico, at a first-class resort.  With heat and electricity.

Meanwhile, another former politician of a different heart chose an alternate path.  He remained in that baren wasteland of death, frozen waterlines and no heat.  Beto O’Rourke stayed behind to host a virtual event for seniors, helping them locate aid and assisting others suffering in their deep-freeze state.

‘Yes, the “Eyes of Texas are Upon You,” Ted.  And, also those of the Houston police authorities who, in the worst emergency in a century, were summoned to make sure your departure went smoothly at the airport.  Not that they might have other things to do,  Well, at least almost smoothly, except for those pesky photographers who caught you skedaddling out of Dodge after the frigid “stuff” had hit the fan.  No forty days in the wilderness, frozen or otherwise, for our boy.

“On Wednesday, many first responders, civic leaders and concerned citizens from all over the country struggled to aid the people of Texas during their ongoing crisis, caused in part by an imperfect and isolationist electrical grid and in part by a storm that many scientists have identified as yet another example of fatal extreme weather caused by climate change.  Meanwhile the Lone Star State’s most famous senator – that climate-change denying, isolationism-preaching, self-proclaimed true patriot —tweeted his concerns” [4]

“You know the guy, that guy of many disaster films…”that guy.  The weaselly, duplicitous tough-talking middle management type villain who sets bad things (stuff) in motion, or completely denies they are happening until it is far too late.  The guy who likes to be front and center when all is going well, but as soon as the going gets tough does everything he can to take care of himself.”[5]  As one billboard put it, “Texas froze. Ted fled.”  Leadership, for sure.

Our baptism is to initiate us into a community where the ethic is a heart renewed, a heart attuned to the needs of “the least of these.”  A heart immersed in the notion of solidarity.  A heart so prepared, that when the flood does come, as surely as it will, she is ready with a raft and life preserver, food and clean drinking water.  For others.  She will not be the first hot-footing it out of town.  And if flight becomes necessary, she will take as many as possible with her.

Yes, two things the writer of the Flood story did get right.  First, the flood will come — or in this case, ice – a frozen flood.  Second, it requires of us our duty.  Is that duty only to ourselves?  Or is it, in solidarity – God’s solidarity – to be with our companions amidst the raging waters? 

Ted made one answer.  Beto, another.  Beto’s answer is the sort that will get us through forty days in a winter wilderness, in any wilderness. 

“What about the animals?”  Enlightened hearts will realize a duty to the entire natural world.  As St. Francis has taught us, everything is connected.

I remember bringing to Jonathan’s room late one night some supplies needed for a project due the next day.  I still can’t figure how it was that his teachers always seemed to wait until the very last minute to assign these projects – late at night when almost all the stores were closed – but that’s an educational problem to be solved at another time.  Anyway, as he sat on the floor with poster board and pictures, glue and scissors scattered about, a very large wolf spider scurried away from it all, towards the door.

Jonathan immediately went into freak-out mode, hopping around, all the while shouting, “SPIDER.  SPIDER.”

When I told him that this spider was just one of God’s little, beloved creatures, he responded, “Yeah, the kind that will kill you.”

Actually, fact is, these might be deadly to a cricket, but not to a young boy late with his homework.

What about the animals?  They didn’t do anything.  Even to the tardy and the procrastinators. 

In our church, before baptism, the congregation, joins together in remembering their baptismal covenant, which in part affirms:

“Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?…Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?…Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?…”  The hoped-for pledge being, “Yes.”

An informed and repentant heart would also include a healthy respect and gratitude for the natural order, even wolf spiders.  (Yes, I confess, I do squash the spiders in the shower for my wife when she freaks out about them.  Lord, have mercy). I know, they didn’t do anything.

Yes, the story does end with butterflies, blue skies and rainbows.  That’s God’s doing in the “time that shall surely be, when the earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.”[6]  In the meantime.  In the meantime, it’s up to us to pilot the life rafts, throw out the preservers.  Warm and nourish the survivors.  Feed the animals in a stinking ark, and pray for bluer skies and some rainbows for all of God’s children – in “the time that shall surely be.”  What did you think you were baptized for, anyway?  Amen.

---

[1] Isabel Wilkerson, Caste (New York: Random House, 2021), p. xv.

[2] Travis Wilkerson, “Republicans Have Emerged From The Capitol Insurrection United Against Democracy,” HuffPost, February 17, 2021.

[3] Luke 13:4,5.  New RSV.

[4] Mary McNamara, “Cruz flies right into villain mode,” Los Angeles Times, February 19, 2020, p. E-1, 4.

[5] Op. cit.

[6] The Hymnal 1982, No. 534, The Church Pension Fund (Episcopal Church), 1982.

“Stuff Happens”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

February 21, 2021, Lent 1

Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25; 1 Peter 3:18-22;
Mark 1:9-13