It was most distressing for those communities ravaged by fires in Los Angeles these past months to see the baren hills and flat lands.  Mile after mile of charred skeletons of houses and businesses – what many had spent a lifetime building only to see it go up in flames.  Some of the many landmarks communities grieved over were the loss of many of places of worship.

These hallowed landmarks were places of deep joy and sorrow, places of desperate prayer and joyful song.  Now, all gone.

The first church I served in the upper Mojave Desert had gone through a similar experience, though many years ago.

Soon after I arrived, I began visiting the three small communities, Randsburg, Johannesburg and Red Mountain that were served by this old United Methodist congregations.  Since the former pastor was so shy and introverted, he hardly visited anyone.  With a little effort the place began to grow.  The woman next door who had been a member long ago, wrote one of the former pastors, now living in Ohio.  Mother Carrie, as she was affectionately known by the other Methodist clergy, was the first woman in that conference to pastor a church.

A most amazing thing then transpired.  Mother Carrie wrote me a wonderful letter concerning her time out there in the 30s through the 50s serving that congregation and another close by in Inyokern.

Her husband, John Oval had been the pastor, arriving in the late 20’s.  Shortly before he died his brother had come to visit – his brother with a serious drinking problem.  One night he fell asleep drunk with a cigarette still burning.  A fire began in the parsonage, which was attached to the wooden church.  The whole thing went up in flames.  I still have a picture of that tragedy that someone had taken.  Fortunately, everyone, including the brother, escaped unharmed.  But the church was a total loss.

Not long after that, Pastor John died.  Carrie had been going through the conference course for lay preachers, so she asked to be appointed in her husband’s place.  Mother Carrie was not without her detractors; in fact there were many.  Not at all used to a woman preacher.

Mother Carie soon organized a rebuilding effort while the congregation met in the VFW hall.  This church would not be of wood.  Mother Carrie had managed to get hold of some concrete block making machines.  These were third-world devices operated by hand.

Every evening as the miners came out of the mines she had them organized to begin making concrete blocks.  The women would arrive to cook dinner and they would work late into the night.  After many, many months, through a joint effort of church members and many others not connected to that congregation, a Resurrected church arose.

It wasn’t long after completion that one of the usual fierce desert winds came up and tore a good chunk of the metal roof off the new church.  Some of Mother Carrie’s detractors wrote the superintendant down in Pasadena, “We told you not to send this woman preacher out here.  Now God has taken matters in his own hands.  Soon, we will have nothing again.”

Mother Carie wrote me of that message to the superintendent with the follow up, “And I was reappointed for another year.”  And many more years to follow.

Today we celebrate such mothers, whose fierce love for us has made us who we are.  A blessing to ourselves and many others.  And they didn’t do it all themselves.  They organized the necessary resources to keep going.

When we read the Resurrection story in Acts of Tabitha (known as Dorcas in the Greek), it’s essentially a community effort.  After she died, the attending widows, having washed her for burial, sent two men from Joppa to Lydda, having “heard that Peter was there with the request, ‘Please come to us without delay.’ So Peter got up and went with them; and when he arrived, they took him to the room upstairs.  All the widows stood beside him, weeping and showing him all the tunics and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was with them.  Peter put all of them outside, and then knelt down and prayed.  He turned to the body and said, ‘Tabitha, get up.’”

Peter, with Resurrection Power, awakened the woman. In our hyper individualistic culture, we tend to focus only on Peter – one individual.  But it wasn’t just Peter.  This Resurrection of their lost Dorcas was a community effort — God in them, they in God. The entire community is endowed with Resurrection Power.

The entire community, using all the spiritual resources at their command is empowered.  Facing their tragedy, just like Mother Carrie, this little band of the faithful used all the resources available.  They shed tears; they prayed, they hoped together.  They summoned help.  they waited in expectation.  It took many to summon Resurrection Power.

It will take many to summon the Resurrection of the democracy of our nation.  The call has gone out, in many cases led by strong women, many of whom are mothers who know what’s at stake as programs like Head Start, Women Infants and Children (WIC), Planned Parenthood, and the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services, and Medicaid are all on the chopping block to provide gigantic tax cuts for the richest ten percent.  Mothers know what’s at stake.

Sarah Palin was right about one thing concerning a mother’s fierce love: “What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull – the lipstick.”

At a corner demonstration, widows in their 70s and 80s, even one in her 90s know what’s at stake when the Veteran’s Administration is eviscerated and benefits cut.  Where’s the “Thank you for your service” here?  Yet that small monthly survivor’s check along with SSI is the meager amount that pays the rent, provides heat, cover medical expenses and puts food on the table.

All across the country Resurrection Power is in the hands of us ordinary folk, mass gatherings in the unlikely places as Utah, Alaska – did I mention that I saw a picture of our former hometown of Petersburg – Idaho and Montana, Alabama and Mississippi.  Resurrection Power amplified through our common strength.  Mama pit bull love.

It was a distant relative of our family, Julia Ward Howe – Grandma’s lineage on my mother’s side), who summoned up the strength of our mothers in her first Mother’s Day Proclamation.  She was a feminist, a Suffragist, an activist for the woman’s vote, an abolitionist — I close with that.  Maybe that’s where I get my activist genes – a goodly heritage indeed!

Mother’s Day Proclamation – Boston, 1870

“Arise, then… women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of tears!  Say firmly:  We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies.  Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.  Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.  We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own.  It says:  Disarm, Disarm!  The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.  Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence vindicate possession.  As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of council.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.  Let them then solemnly take council with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his own kind the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask
that a general congress of women, without limit of nationality,
may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient,
and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.“

~ Julia Ward Howe

And I tell you what – This sure beats the hell out of the simpering Hallmark sentimentality found on our supermarket card racks.  Today we celebrate the Resurrection Power inherent in all those pit bull women who have fiercely loved us and passionately cared for this nation.  Yes, these women of the Spirit knew – it always takes a village.  Amen.

May 11, 2025
Easter 4

Acts 9:36-43; Psalm 23;

Revelation 7:9-17; John 10:22-30

“Entrusted with Resurrection Power”

This last week, Resurrection was evident in the labor of love that put in the first of 30 vegetable beds at St. Francis.  Work began early with Barbara opening the gates and unlocking the church.  By 9:00 a.m. we had several members — Joseph, William, and yours truly — laying out the chicken wire to prevent gophers dining on our new plants.  Miguel, our paid farmer, was also on the job.

We had approximately nine beds laid out by the time the first truck arrived from Burrtec with 30 cubic yards of mulch that Christopher had arranged for free.   The aromatic odor wafting across the field of woodchips was definitely the smell of Resurrection.  Wonderful to sniff.

We ended with a break for pizza that Barbara provided with some delicious root beer and Pepsi.  And the satisfaction of having done a righteous deed.

As I previously mentioned.  A great Anglican divine once wrote that if Resurrection was only a one-off historical curiosity, it would have been of minor significance – UNLESS it is lived as a daily reality, Christ raised in our hearts and minds.  And I would add, also in our date books, wallets and credit cards.  And in the voting booths.  Yes, let us pray for the insight and wisdom to notice Resurrection as a daily event in our lives.

Saul, bent on destruction of the incipient Jesus Movement, breathing threats as he heads to Damascus, is struck down.  “Suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him.  He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’”  Saul, raised from the ground, welcomed into the home of some of Jesus’ followers becomes a new man, Paul.  Raised from the deadened life of hatred.  Resurrection to be sure!

Resurrection is vibrantly alive in the daily work of those in recovery.  Arlie Hochschild, in her new book, Stolen Pride, has some marvelous stories of how some in Appalachia have discovered Resurrection in lives ruined by poverty, despair and drugs.[1]

James had just arrived in an emergency room after his fourth heroin overdose.  His sister Ashley, a student at the University of Tennessee, after three calls from a hospital, dreaded that next call would be “the call – James is dead.”[2]

It wasn’t too long before James’ sister’s worst fear came true. One day she received a call from the paramedics.  James had been found without a heartbeat.  After some effort with CPR the paramedics brought him back.

First, Ashley just sobbed.  Then she realized she had to do something. “I took a breath, got online and spoke to James: ‘James, are you ready this time?’”[3]

Yes, he was ready.  Ashley had found the best recovery program in eastern Kentucky, Southgate.  And while they usually only accepted clients referred through the criminal-justice system, they made an exception for James.  Ashley got the costs covered by a special grant.  There, James bonded with one of the counselors over their love of punk rock bands. 

There, James hit rock bottom.  Soon after arrival, he was sitting out in the yard feeling sorry for himself – that his life had gone nowhere, that he had lost everything, that he had messed up his family and had no self-respect left.

As he sat on a bench, he noticed at his feet a line of ants.  They were scurrying along, carrying bits of food, grains of sand.  He noticed one ant carrying a dead ant.  The light went on.  That dead ant being carried was him.

James understood in a flash that his counselor, Tom Ratliff “became the carrier ant willing to carry the dead – or nearly dead – ant, me.  The man saved my life.”[4]  Resurrection!  Fresh from the grave.

Through this program, James became alive to his own emotions, feelings he had stuffed and buried through drugs.  Shame and pride.

He inwardly made the decision to work at his recovery, no matter the pain of realizing what he had lost – because the vision of what he had to gain was so alluring, so life-giving.  That is Resurrection becoming reality.

James, looking at that line of ants had made the decision to be a carrier ant.  He no longer wanted to be carried as a dead, desiccated man.  Resurrection!

Through the stuff of ordinary life, beautiful sunrises, gardens, family, the daily work given to our hearts and minds, lies Resurrection joy and possibility.  Within our very selves we have all the makings of a miracle.

Cassie Chambers – It’s the family name of a most wonderful, extended family throughout Appalachia, one of whose shirt-tail members runs the little market in Bethany, Chambers General Store, just down the road from the Forney Family Farm we now own – and did I mention the most wonderful sandwiches Mr. Chambers makes while you wait.  I even dreamed the other night of standing in front of the refrigerated case of cheeses and meats ordering my favorite bologna sandwich with lettuce, tomato, Swiss cheese, mustard and mayo. And make those slices of bologna extra thick, Bob.  Total delight – a veritable taste of Resurrection.

But I digress.  Cassie Chambers, in her book, Hill Women,[5] tells of one of the influencers in her life.  In the midst of the poverty of Owsley County, Kentucky, in which she grew up, there was always Granny.  And family.

Cassie tells the story of sitting one evening and watching TV in the living room, and the importance of family just being together.

Her father, Orlando, wanted to watch a University of Kentucky basketball game.  Her mother, Wilma, not that interested in sports, tried to get Granny to go watch a movie in another room.

“Granny, a serious look in her eye, scolded her, ‘Orlando has been at work all day.  I’m goin’ to sit right here and spend time with him.  I reckon you best do the same.’   Granny and Wilma joined Orlando to watch the game.  Granny didn’t know anything about basketball, but she cheered enthusiastically.  It was a particularly physical game; at one point she jumped from her seat and shouted with venom, ‘you ain’t nothin’ but a big bully – take your tail end home.’  My parents looked at each other in shock.”[6]

The joy of family – a small moment of Resurrection.  The same delight and pride I took in our son Christopher as he reported on his efforts to repair a drawer at his unit in the triplex my brother had left me in Loma Linda.  A tiny spark of Resurrection joy.

With eyes to see and ears to hear, Resurrection’s all around.  In the Risen Christ I continue to believe that I can make a difference.  I can be a carrier ant.  WE can make a difference – we ARE making a difference – carrier ants.  Resurrection is awakened gratitude for the new life that blooms all about each day.

I opened the paper and noticed an article in the New York Times on the disastrous, chaotic, corrupt first 100 days of this presidency.  More about that in sermons to come, in letters to the editor to come.  But I had an overwhelming sense of joy for the reporters, for their truth-telling.  That truth come to light is Resurrection.

As I look towards my next trip to West Virginia, I drool as I think of my bologna sandwich purchased at the counter of Chambers General Store.  A small bit of Resurrection delight. 

With that sort of nourishment, fueled with coffee, and in the Risen Christ, we go forth with the audacity to believe that today and tomorrow, we can make a difference – carrier ants.  St. Francis folk, how does your garden grow?  Wonderfully well, with peas and carrots, kale and lettuce, plums, tomatoes and peaches  – wonderfully well.  Let it be ever so. The smell of Resurrection.  Amen.

---

[1] Arlie Russell Hochschild, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right (New York: the New Press, 2024).

[2] Op cit., 147.

[3] Op cit., 148.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Cassie Chambers, Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains (New York: Ballantine Books, 2020).

[6] Op Cit., 83.

May 4, 2025
Easter 3

Acts 9:1-20; Psalm 30;

Revelation 5:11-14; John 21:1-19

“Resurrection – Present Day”

An air of gloom and anxiety pervades the room as Jesus’ friends began to situate themselves around the table.  It was the Passover, the feast of liberation from slavery and oppression.  Yet something more was at stake.  They couldn’t quite grasp the backstory, couldn’t put their finger on the cause for dread.

It was not until Jesus said the liberating word when he explained the meaning.  He was their true freedom as he offered up his physical self for the necessary healing.  “This is my body.  This is the cup of my blood poured out for the redemption of the world.  As long as you break the bread and share this cup, remember.  Remember me.”  Remember what we are all about – tikkun olam, the mending of the world.

That sacrifice, that humility, opens the door to true liberation.  In John’s gospel, the story gathers additional significance as Jesus gathers a sponge and kneels at a basin to wash the feet of his disciples.  Of course, Peter will have none of it.  He considers himself unworthy.  Yet, Jesus insists, “Unless I wash you, you will have no share with me.”  Such humility, such love indeed opens the door to eternity.  To true liberation from all that enslaves.  Especially for pompous egos and notions of self-importance, for false humility.  “I am your liberation,” says the Master.  Jesus, in actions proclaims, “My example is your true freedom.” 

And so it is, as difficult, as impossible as it so often seems at the moment.

After the searing events that led to the Black Lives Matter in St. Louis, Missouri, the former rector of All Saints, Pasadena shares this story.

The Rev. Mike Kinman recalls entering the pain of St. Louis and being confronted by the anguish of Black Lives Matter movement.  He relates an experience of five years ago, yet still as vivid in his mind as if it had happened yesterday. 

“I feel you. Do you feel me?”  That was the raised voice of Pastor Traci Blackmon as she grasped the shoulders of VonDerrit Meyers, Sr., the father of a young black youth who had been shot six times in the back on the streets of St. Louis on October 8, 2014.  Mike continues the story:

I can still hear the Rev. Traci Blackmon’s voice ringing in my ears.

I can still see her face against his, hands on his shoulders, eyes piercing into his eyes.

It was near midnight on October 8, 2014, and a few hours before, 18-year old VonDerrit Myers, Jr. had been shot eight times – six in the back – and killed by an off-duty St. Louis City Police Officer.  A crowd gathers at the scene and when they begin to move, the clergy who are there split up. Some go with the crowd. Others – Traci and I – we go with Vonderrit Myers, Sr. to the city morgue to be with him as he identifies the body of his son.

We stand outside for what seems like an eternity until the father emerges, the nightmare he had lived with since the day his son was born slowly becoming real.  Head hanging to the ground, he almost whispers the words we already know:

“It’s him.”

And then… the pain begins to turn to rage.  I could see it happen. He begins to fume … and tremble. What begins as a cry becomes a wail.  What starts as a murmur grows into a shout as he says:

“It’s him.  It’s my son.  Somebody is going to pay for this. I’ve got a gun, and somebody is going to pay for him tonight!”

I am paralyzed.  I cannot imagine his rage and know he has every right to it.  I will not tell him to calm down. And… this is headed nowhere good.  Not only do I not know what to do, I know whatever it is, I’m not the one who can do it.

And then Traci steps up to him. Traci steps up to him and grabs him by his shoulders, and puts her face right up to his face … her eyes to his eyes.
He is trembling.  And she is trembling.  And she holds him.  And he looks at her and she says:

“I feel you. I feel you. I feel you. OK?”

He nods.

“Now I need you to feel me.”

His eyes are glued to hers.

“You have a job right now.  You have to be a husband tonight.  Your wife has lost her son, and she needs her husband.  No one can do that but you.  You have to go be with her.  That’s where you have to be tonight.  She needs you.”

“And tomorrow morning, I’m going to be at your house first thing.  I’m going to be there and I’m going to stay there with you for as long as it takes.”

Tears fill the father’s eyes.
Tears fill Traci’s eyes.
And she says again.

“I feel you.  Do you feel me?”

VonDerrit Myers, Sr. nods his head, and they embrace.  And they cry.  And then VonDerrit Myers, Sr. leaves the body of his son and goes to spend the longest night of his life at home with his wife.

And first thing the next morning, Traci is there. And she stays until they don’t need her to stay any more.[1]

To enter the anguish of St. Louis that night, to enter Gaza, to enter any Jerusalem on this planet is to enter into any of our distressed urban areas, and pray to God, pray, like Pastor Traci, to have the mind of Christ in you. 

Such humility is the true nourishment of the meal we share this day.  The liberating nourishment we share on any given Sunday.  Liberation in the midst of the most excruciating pain and loss.  He in us and we in him.  Présenté.

In city after city, in village and in township, Christ is crucified anew.  Crucified as an eighteen-year-old black kid gunned down on the streets of St. Louis, Missouri.  Crucified in the deadened hopes of the homeless man who used to sleep on the back porch of our office in Claremont – or the lost hopes of those who used to sleep down the block from our church at the Del Rosa and Date Street encampment. Crucified in our hospital emergency rooms as doctors and nurses struggle to save the life of yet another overdose victim.

Yet, in the midst of such crucifying pain, in this simple meal of bread and wine, in the remembrance of a foot-washing, we have the audacity to assert that the world is mended back together.  And in the participation, we also find our healing and true liberation.  We are mended, knitted together in an eternal love.  Amen.

---

[1]Mike Kinman, “The Power of Extravagant Love”, Sermon preached at All Saints, Pasadena, April 7, 2019.

April 17, 2025
Maundy Thursday

Exodus 12:1-4, 11-14; Psalm 116:1, 10-17

1 Corinthians 11:23-26; John 13:1-17, 31b-35

“A Love that Mends the World”

Anyone should know that the verdict was fixed before the trial even began.  Sham trial that it was.  And while the charge was sedition, claiming a kingship over Cesar, the real problem was compassion.  The minute Jesus was hauled before Pilate, he was a “dead man walking.”  The fix was in.

How did we get here?

It might have been that fickle mob that gathered along the dusty road into Jerusalem.  All the hoopla and waving of tree branches.  A notorious rabbi and healer entering the city on a donkey with his followers in tow.  Children running ahead, darting in and out of the procession.  The crowd, hoping he would overthrow the Roman tyranny kept shouting, “Hosanna, Hosanna.”  Treating him as if king.

It was all too much for the Roman authorities and their puppets, Herod and Pilate.  It smacked of insurrection for sure.  Not to be tolerated.

That fickle crowd was easily manipulated, as are folks today.  They didn’t want any trouble.  Go along to get along.  And how quickly they turned.

Don’t ever trust the mob.  With threats, bribes and propaganda they will sell your soul down the river in a New York minute.

It happened in Germany in 1933.  It happened in Russia in 1918.  It happened in Rwanda, in Srebrenica.  It happened in America along the Trail of Tears.  It happened throughout the 20^th century in Jim Crow America.  It’s happening now in Gaza and in Sudan.  History is replete with massacre and genocide.  Don’t trust the mob.  For temporary security, they’ll toss away all their rights.

We in America now stand on the verge of a police state.  And a good number of us would willingly have it so.  People are snatched off the street by unidentified thugs in ski masks, soon to be deported to hell-hole prisons in far away countries.  No due process.  Not even the sham show-trial Jesus got. This is a Stalinesque nightmare beyond belief.

Masha Gessen[1] writes in their New York Times op-ed piece (an aside — being nonbinary, Masha uses the pronouns “they/them”):

“It is the catastrophic interruption of daily life, as when a Tufts University graduate student, Rümeysa Öztürk, was grabbed on a suburban street by half a dozen plainclothes agents, most of the them masked.  The security camera video of that arrest shows Öztürk walking, looking at her phone, perhaps to check the address where she was supposed to meet her friends for dinner that night, when an agent appears in front of her.  She says something – asks something – struggling to control her voice, and within seconds she is handcuffed and placed in an unmarked car.”

Folks are being “imprisoned indefinitely, without due process…It’s the growing irrelevance of the law and the helplessness of judges and lawyers.”[2]  Though courts have issued rulings prohibiting the transfer of those arrested without warrant, without any process – even though a federal judge forbade the government to deport, without notice, Rasha Alawieh, a Brown University medical school professor – even though another judge prohibited moving Rümeysa Öztürk from Massachusetts without notice.   The executive branch has ignored all these rulings.  We now are in an extra-Constitutional order.  There is no rule of law

The same as was justice in Stalinist Russia, the same as in that kangaroo trial in Jerusalem 2000 years ago.  “The secret lists and student arrests are dreadfully familiar.”[3]  Jesus betrayed in the dead of night with a kiss and hauled off to torture.

The psychiatrist-activist, Robert Jay Lifton, documents the pervasive PTSD caused by such calamities.[4]  For days, maybe years, the victims of such catastrophes are stunned into inaction, into silence.  As were the survivors of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Hitler’s death camps and Jim Crow lynchings. 

Stunned, as were those followers who witnessed Jesus’ torture and brutal crucifixion.  Finally cowering in an Upper Room.  As many of us might be, watching the impending death knell of our democracy here in America; witnessing the mass firings and destruction of our government.  We all may be suffering some degree of PTSD – post traumatic stress disorder.

At the moment, we can only huddle in silence, as did those brave women who stayed behind near the cross.  As did that brave doctor who had the courage to listen to the victims of such tragedies – the survivors of the atom bombs, the hibakusha (the explosion-affected persons).  He had the courage to enter their pain and suffering, as did those women who stayed by Jesus.

We, at the moment, gather in silence, before the genocide committed in our name, and with our tax dollars in Gaza – grateful to a courageous Jew, Peter Beinart, having courage of steel to honestly reflect on that tragedy as a Jew.[5]

In solidarity with those who grieve, we, too, will gather.  We will hold on to one another.  And we will trust in God’s Grace to bring new life out of the “imprint of death.”[6]

Do not trust the wisdom of the crowd.  The abiding Grace of God is that we have one another.  And the Spirit of encouragement.  Listen to her.

To quote Paul Tillich – at these moments of crucifixion, gulag and genocide, as we await, stunned to silence — all the while, God abides, obscured in the wings of mysterious darkness with an abounding Grace of New Life and Acceptance.  Hear Tillich’s wisdom:

“You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!”[7]

Let us patiently abide our time.  Take the moments needed for the Holy Spirit to gather us together, to gather our courage into action.

That’s the glorious mystery that awaits after the three fraught days.

In time all shall be redeemed, yes, even if it does take three days to work the transformation from death to Life.

So, in our waiting, might we sing:

“Keep, O keep us, Savior dear, ever constant by thy side; that with thee we may appear at the eternal Eastertide.”[8]  Amen.

---

[1] M. Gessen, “America’s Police State Has Arrived,” New York Times, “Columns & Commentary,” April 6, 2025.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Robert Jay Lifton, Surviving our Catastrophes: Resilience and Renewal from Hiroshima to the Covid-19 Pandemic (New York: The New Press, 2023).

[5] Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 2025).

[6] Lifton, op. cit., 27.

[7] Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948).

[8] George Hunt Smyttan (1822-1870).  The Hymnal (New York, Church Publishing Co. 1985), #150, 5^th verse.

April 13, 2025
Palm Sunday

Luke 19:28-40 (processional reading);

Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 31:9-16;

Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 22:14-23:56

“Dead Man Walking”

A while back there was a news story about how to cook turkeys for Thanksgiving.  This woman had a Butterball Turkey in her freezer and called the Butterball Talk-Line to find out how long to defrost it.

The fellow on the line asked her how long it had been in her freezer and she told him that the date on it was 1987 – it had been in the freezer some 16 years.  There was a long pause on the other end of the line.

“Ahhh, just a minute.  I think I need to consult my supervisor,” the fellow said.  When he came back on the line, he told her that a turkey frozen this long – well, the company didn’t recommend serving it to anyone.

“Oh, that’s okay,” she said.  “It’s just for the church.”  Good enough for God!  No extravagance here.  Devoid of all compassion – just unloading an unwanted turkey (in both senses of the word).

Our lesson this morning is about the extravagance of divine compassion. 

It takes place at a dinner, always symbolic of God’s bounty and also a Last Supper with the disciples.  Among the guests is Lazarus, Mary’s brother whom Jesus raised from the dead, giving us the foreboding of more death to come. 

Remember, that in the gospel of John no detail is by happenstance.  All is freighted with meaning.  The evening overflows with expectation and mystery.

Then, on the most extravagant impulse, pure compassion, Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with the costliest perfume, it’s scent soon filling the entire house.  She ends this generosity by wiping his feet with her hair.  There is a sumptuousness about the act as the scent continues to pervade the corners, nooks and crannies of the abode.

Of the acts to follow in the coming days, climaxing at Golgotha and following through three days later – it’s the culmination and sign of God’s extravagant compassion to all.

We now live in a nation run by a White House where compassion, empathy, are dirty words.  America is suffering through a lack of empathy, devoid of compassion, from the Orange Felon on down.  Empathy is a dirty word for Christian nationalists.

David French, in an opinion piece, reveals the new animus of Christian Nationalists to empathy.[1]

Once, the focus of Christian evangelicals was on the defense of liberty and the prerogatives of the faith community.  Now it’s all about power, imposing their will, their specific ideology and theology on the rest of us.

A part of this is defunding faith organizations of which they disapprove, even if they are of the evangelical community.  Catholic charities have received substantial cuts, especially to programs showing empathy and compassion to immigrants.  Cuts that have been characterized as “catastrophic, ruthless and chaotic.”[2]

Often these unilateral decisions are taken unlawfully against Christian organizations serving the poor and marginalized.

In defunding, actually in destroying USAID, lifesaving aid worldwide has been cut off to the most vulnerable – the starving, the unsheltered, those with HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases.  Not a scintilla of empathy for these.

Sarah McCammon, in her “Weekend Edition” on religion reports on how “empathy” has become a bad word for one group of Christians.[3]  The Ayn Rand crowd I suspect, with a few John Birchers thrown in.

A soundbite from the “Joe Rogan Experience,” podcast features Elon Musk on the danger of empathy, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”  Nice, for a multi-billionaire who has absolutely no idea on how ninety-nine percent of the rest of the world lives.  Nice.

Musk continues, “There’s so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself” – to which Rogan responds, “Yeah.”

Musk: “So that – we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on.”

In a soundbite of the podcast, “Stronger Men Nation,” the Evangelical pastor, John McPherson, asserts, “Empathy almost needs to be struck from the Christian vocabulary.”  Whereupon two other pastors on the program join in, “It does.”  “Yes.”

Pastor McPherson’s conclusion?  “Empathy is dangerous. Empathy is toxic. Empathy will align you with hell.”

In his podcast, “Thinking in Public,” Joe Rigney asserts that empathy is harmful, and because it seems so nice, it is one of the most “destructive tactics” of the devil.

Yet, that is stuff of what God is ever about – compassion, empathy.  Such is a life leading to the door of eternity.  The scripture is full of such stories – the woman with the hemorrhage, the leprous man along a dusty highway, the woman caught in adultery.  Jesus stoops and listens.

Listens even to his blockheaded disciples who often get it wrong. Understanding nothing.  Yeah, stoops also to bless and heal us blockheaded disciples who so often screw up the message.

David Warbrick writes a most tender article in Christian Century about one of the best gifts he ever gave his father.  A gift of pure compassion.

His father with Parkinson’s disease, now living apart from his wife due to being confined to a nursing home, had very few material needs.  That Christmas, David gave his father a small bottle of fragrant bath essence.

The nursing home staff would occasionally “take him to the bathroom, lift his painfully thin frame into the warm water, and leave him and Mum in private so that she can help him bathe.”

Normally, given his illness, his father is mostly surrounded by noisy machines and many interruptions by medical staff.

As his father and mother were forced by Parkinson’s to live separately, bath time is one of the few, precious times they have alone.

David continues, “The bath time is the most intimate time and touch possible for them. After 50 years of marriage my dad’s hands—which once painted stunning pictures and caressed his wife—are so translucent that you can see all their workings. He draws in the air with them sometimes now. He has a tremor. Bath time allows him gentle, distant echoes of the power of his youthful touch. It’s my parents’ least mediated, least frustrating communication. It’s a place where Mum can be wife instead of caregiver.”[4]

It is their precious time together at bath, husband and wife, that is the extravagance of God’s grace.

While the world peddles a transactional economy based on greed, Mary’s economy is pure, unlimited extravagance as she breaks open the jar and lavishes precious ointment over Jesus’ feet.

That’s a sign of Jesus’ extravagant compassion for creation, bending near to touch hearts and minds of all he encounters.  Something, Judas cannot comprehend.  Something the Orange Felon, Musk and their minions seem not to comprehend.

Yet, as Pascal said, “The heart has reasons of its own which reason comprehendeth not.”

If empathy and compassion are sins, then with Luther I say, “Sin boldly.” 

Someone said that Judas, in a way, was 100 percent right, but, without empathy, he ended up 100 percent alone.  Not that Judas ever cared a wit about the poor.

In the end, I suspect, this self-serving administration will also, eventually, end up alone.  Deserted by most all Americans, including many of those in the MAGA crowd.

So, back to Grace — Don’t be a turkey: Break out the ointment of generosity, break out your most precious gifts only you have to offer the world.  Break out an attitude of pure, unmerited extravagance.  Live dangerously in God’s Grace.

I close with Mother Teresa on Grace – Grace as embodied in the extravagance of Mary, Grace as in the extravagance of God:

              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.

Amen.

---

[1] David French, “Behold the Strange Spectacle of Christians Against Empathy,” New York Times, February 13, 2025.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Sarah McCammon, NPR Weekend Edition, March 22, 2025.

[4] Ibid.

April 6, 2025
Lent 5

Isaiah 43:16-21; Psalm 126;

Philippians 3:4b-14; John 12:1-8

“A Divine Extravagance”

Mothering Sunday is an English and Irish tradition that began in the 16^th century.  It was originally to honor and give thanks for the Virgin Mary — Mother Mary.  It was a day for Christians to return to their “mother church,” a day of family celebration and giving thanks for our mothers.

Welcome Home is the spirit.  Yes, “there’s no place like home.” 

I remember a driving trip Jai and I took through Mexico.  We drove down the east coast all the way to the Yucatan Peninsula, arriving in Chetumal shortly after a hurricane had torn most of the city apart.  I wanted to drive to British Honduras, now known as Belize, but we didn’t have a multiple-entry permit for the car. 

The guy at the border crossing said we could mail in our single-entry permit and wait for new papers.  Remembering how it took a postcard four weeks to get to my mom, I decided to forego the offer.

When we finally got back to Mexico City a couple of weeks later, we were exhausted.  We spied a Denny’s as we navigated our way along this huge nerve-wracking thoroughfare with seven or eight lanes in each direction.  No one paying any attention to the lane markings.  We were so homesick for some American food that we pulled right into that Denny’s parking lot.  It was a big disappointment.  Our hamburgers didn’t at all taste like what we got in Los Angeles.  Definitely no place like home.

Jesus tells a parable to answer the objection of the religious authorities concerning his hobnobbing with notorious sinners.  People who should be cast out of their common religious home.

You know it.  About a father with two sons, one who thought life would be better on his own.  So, he took his share of the inheritance and set off for a far country.

Things didn’t work out as he had hoped.  Especially after he had wasted all his money on high living and loose women.  He’s soon wished to be dining with the pigs, sharing their seed pods.

And you know the end of the story.  As the father spies his returning, bedraggled son far down the road, he opens his arms, running to meet him.  “My son was once lost but now is found!”  Joy and merriment broke out that night.  And of course, we remember how the elder, dutiful brother felt about this homecoming reception.  But that’s another sermon.

Home, for most all of us, has special memories and significance.  It’s a place of last refuge.   As Robert Frost said, “Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.”

Unfortunately, many have found themselves far from home.  Not of their own choice.  Not due to their own wandering, but because they had never been fully admitted in the first place.  Our history is replete with those locked out and shut out.

Recently, I stumbled upon a documentary of a group of people whose full personhood had never found a home in the American Dream – stewardesses.  The documentary, Fly With Me, records the history of the first women cabin attendants in aviation.

This is the story of girls coming into full womanhood by dint of their own efforts.  Every step a struggle against male, piggy exploitation.

It was a chronicle of the first ground-breaking women who opened the door for their sisters in aviation.  It all began when Ellen Church convinced Boeing that having nurses aboard flights would put passengers at ease.  As planes were not pressurized, they were limited to 10,000 feet.  This resulted in a lot of turbulence, and most passengers were predisposed to be nervous about flying to begin with.

Soon, airlines began to realize that “sex sells.”  Stewardesses’ uniforms became skimpier and skimpier, demeaning the women as sexpots and Barbie Dolls.  Finally, degrading to “hot pants.”  Really!

Glamor was the ticket.  And a pleasing, compliant personality.  The women must be petite – 100 to 118 pounds, max.  They would be weighed at the bottom of the aircraft stairs every time they disembarked the plane.  One pound over and you’re gone.  You couldn’t have a waistline over 38 inches.  This was just the start of the harsh employment guidelines.

You had to be 22 to 26 years-old to be considered.  Couldn’t be married and must leave or be fired when you reached the age of 32, later 34.  And you must be white.  There were four physical exams required every year.  Pregnancy was instant cause for dismissal.

Did the men have to abide by such standards?  Heck, no.

Fly With Me is the film that records the struggles of a growing cadre of women in a most demanding profession to achieve, and be paid, for their invaluable contribution to the airline industry.  You can see it on YouTube.

Soon, most major airlines were running training schools, lasting in the range of seven or eight weeks, sarcastically known as “Charm Farms” by the women.

Ann Hood, a stewardess – and later a writer, but more about that later – writes a wonderful memoir, Fly Girl: A Memoir[1], revealing all.

Ann notes that on her opening day at the TWA school, Breech Academy in Kansas City, they were tested mathematically, physically, mentally, given drug tests, and divided up into teams to test cooperative and personality skills.

On that first day, their instructor told the seated group, “It’s easier to get into Harvard than to sit in your seat.”  Out of 14,000 applicants only 550 would be hired.  Yes, they were special.

Not special enough to merit a decent salary and humane working conditions, however.  As the country became socially aware in the activist 60s and 70s, these women, and soon a few men, discovered the power of unions.  Through their collective organizing they finally did make a home for themselves in the American dream. 

Many of the sexist standards fell by the wayside, replaced by decent pay, ability to work until retirement age, same as the pilots, and a pension.  They could marry and have a family.  Full womanhood in a profession most of them loved.  They made a home for themselves. 

Fly With Me is a heartwarming story, as is Ann’s book.

Oh yes, I mentioned “more about that later” referring to Ann Hood as a writer.  Some sexist man on the board of one of these airlines expressed the sentiment of many of his colleagues when he opined, “These women have the looks but they have absolutely no brains.”

Au contraire.  Many of these talented women went on to have second careers as authors, teachers, lawyers and highly-placed government workers.  Many went into business or started their own businesses.  No brains?  Give me a break!  Ann has written ten books.  What?  No brains?

No place like home.  And that is our obligation as members of the Jesus Movement, to lay out the welcome mat of full inclusion for all.  And shelter the shunned and those given no chance.

We are now told that ICE is going only after “the worst of the worst.”  Not true.

In the Los Angeles Times there was an article on an Orange County couple who had been living peacefully in the U.S. for decades.  They had three grown daughters, American citizens, living here.

ICE grabbed them up when they reported to their routine check- in as per their agreement to remain in the country.  This happened on February 21, and within hours they were on a deportation flight to Columbia.

Yes, the couple had tried numerous times to gain citizenship, but ultimately the 9^th Circuit Court denied them. 

This couple was law-abiding, hard-working, raising a family and never missed a check-in appointment.

One of their daughters said that “This cruel and unjust situation has shattered our family emotionally and financially.”[2]  Aren’t these exactly the sort of people we should be welcoming?

What happened to welcome the stranger, shelter the foreigner?  All part of Torah Righteousness and Gospel Goodness. 

By the way, how does one know when this administration is lying?  Their lips are moving. 

Like the Loving Father in Jesus’ story, through the prompting of the Spirit, we stretch our arms wide to welcome all home – the foreigner, the disparaged and locked out, the addicted and incarcerated, the shunned. Yes, even the sinner!   And in the doing, there is more joy than in heaven.  “Olly, olly oxen free, free, free.” All home.

Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty nailed it — sentiments straight from this parable.

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” 

Can we all say a big AMEN?

---

[1] Ann Hood, Fly Girl: A Memoir (New York: Norton, 2022).

[2] Ruben Vives, “An O.C. Couple’s Sudden Deportation Sends Shock waves,” Los Angeles Times, March 26, 2025.

March 30, 2025
Lent 4 – Mothering Sunday


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

“Welcome Home”

One of my favorite passages of scripture opens with the words, “In the beginning…”

As a science major, and before that as a small boy, creation always fascinated me.  Later as the astronomy coach for my physics teacher at Cerritos Community, on clear evenings I would roll out our telescope and train it on some cosmic delight, the object of that day’s lesson.

We could view Jupiter with its great red spot and the Galilean moons, the four largest moons being: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.  Later, many more would be discovered.  We could easily see the rings around Saturn.  Mars was a distant, fuzzy orange speck.

On trips out to the Mojave Desert, at night, the sky was spectacular with the Milky Way sparkling overhead with its millions of stars.  We didn’t yet know that it was a monstrous black hole that kept it – and us – all in regular order slowly circling its gravitational pull.

Later, the James Webb Telescope would delight us with the fantastical images of far-off nebulae and pictures of millions of other galaxies in far off reaches of space.  Because the light arriving from some had taken billions of years to reach us, what we were actually seeing was a glimpse into the early creation of everything.  Almost all the way back in time to the Big Bang.

Just as an aside, go treat yourself to a planetarium show at the Griffith Observatory right here in Los Angeles.  It is a spiritual experience.

The Creator is to be found in the splendors of the sky and the natural world.  All around us — as close as that annoying mosquito keeping us awake at night, as bright as the sun and Sister Moon.  It’s all dazzling to behold.

In Abram’s despair over a living inheritance, he complains to God concerning his childless existence.

The Lord God commands Abram to step outside.  “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them…so will your descendants be.”

I can only imagine Abram staring open-mouthed, beholding the cosmic light show.  Stars beyond measure.

And if he had lived in the northern reaches of Alaska and Canada, he would have beheld the Northern Lights dancing across the skies – pink, purple, magenta, dazzling white.

To seal the deal of a new beginning, God’s faithfulness is enshrined in a lasting Covenant.  Abram, on his part, sacrifices a young goat, a turtledove and a young pigeon.  That’s how the Art of the Deal was done back then.

After the sun had gone down and a deep sleep had fallen over Abram a “smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between the pieces.”  God always works God’s wonders in “terrifying darkness.”  The Covenant was sealed.  Such a deal!

All this metaphorical language sounds very primitive and bazaar to us modern folks.  Not unlike a children’s fairy tale or ghost story.

Yet, here is the truth wrapped up in this passage.  However we moderns might understand this Covenant, the fact is that we are here.  We live on a planet uniquely suited to our being present.  The place is not only habitable (or at least it was not too long ago), but is a most delightful place.

I notice the splendor every morning as I go out to my car and see the flower stalk on the agave next to the driveway.  It’s taller each day, now approaching ten feet.  My neighbor Jim tells me the flowers on it should bloom sometime around April or May.

As it shoots towards the sky, I told my wife that actually that plant grew from some magic beans I bought with our life savings from a little boy out in the street.

Delightful, all of it.  That is how I understand this promise from the salvation history of Deuteronomy.  The hallmark of all this is the simple fact that I’m here.  That we’re here.

Think of it – of all the impossible trillion possibilities of a certain egg meeting a certain sperm – well, the odds against it are astronomical.  Replicated over billions of years – and here we are!  Beyond quantum computation.  Incomprehensible!  Sheer grace.  The same for the odds of you being here.

Sheer existence, messy as it is, is the primal seal of this Covenant, birds and goats aside.

In that Big Bang, was all the eventual ingredients for the “wonders of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this earth, our fragile home.”  All released in a nanosecond of a nanosecond after the Big Bang.  From aardvarks to zebras along the little creepy-crawlies we don’t like in our kitchens.

 As hostile as the environment would seem at times – here we are.  Alive, descendants of some Cro-Magnon Adam and Eve. Given an amazing ecosystem favorable to our continuing flourishing.  Unless we totally mess it up.

This is what was, always moving towards what is and what will be.  All the ingredients present.

But we haven’t been left without an instruction book and guidance.  Wisdom and reason have been bequeathed us.  Torah Righteousness instructed us as to our relationships with one another, as to our relationship to this our fragile “island home.” 

Through the prophets, again and again, we have been given promptings on how to flourish and thrive.  Jesus Christ being for us a living example, a spiritual mentor, opening the door to eternity.  A vision bringing each one of us to the full Glory of God – women and men fully alive.  Alive to ourselves, to one another and to the One who left us here.  And, all this, too, out of the Big Bang. 

We are not left adrift.  The Spirit of Christ continues to move through conscience, thorough imagination, through inventiveness, through delight and creativity.

I have been fortunate to have a caregiver from the wonderfully named organization, “Motherly Comfort Care.”  Most of us have been fortunate through part of our lives to have known a mother’s tender care.  It is the first evidence most of us have as newborns of a hospitable universe.

Motherly comfort is a frequently used metaphor for God’s care and love.

Speaking of Jerusalem, the city that kills its prophets, the city doomed to disaster under Roman siege, Jesus laments.  “Jerusalem, Jerusalem…How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings…”

And yet, the universe till now has done just that, given us an out-of-the-way planet just the right distance from its sun – evolved through the eons with an atmosphere that supports life and with faithful rains providing life-giving water.

Barbara Brown Taylor, through a meditation on having an orphaned baby chick, brings flesh to this picture.

Barbara, I think, is sort of like our member Ellen who has a tender heart for all sorts of strays.  The stray in this case was an orphaned guinea chick.  Barbara had heard that one type of chicken tended to be good mothers, the white Silkie.

She shopped around, and through the Market Bulletin, found a person selling them over in Royston.  After a bit bargaining, she had one rooster, two hens and four juveniles.  As she was about to leave, she spotted a gray hen.

“What’s that one?” she asked.  “A Blue Silkie,” the woman responded.  “A cross between a black and a white.” 

“How much for her?”  For another six bucks she concluded her purchase and left for home with all her chickens.

“When the Silkies and I got home, I saved her, [the Blue Silkie], for the orphaned chick. First, I lay on the grass while she and the baby watched each other through the mesh of the cage. Then I placed her inside. Both she and the baby froze. The baby cheeped. The hen did not move a feather. The baby cheeped again. The hen stayed right where she was. The baby took a few steps toward her. I held my breath. The gray hen lifted her wings. The baby scooted right into that open door. When I checked on them an hour later, all I could see was a little guinea chick head poking out from under that gray hen’s wing. Six bucks. What a deal.”[1]

Like that Blue Silkie, you and I are meant to be the Motherly Comfort Care for one another and for this creation.  And for this republic.

Here’s the altar call – a call to each of us as a citizen.  How will you use your God-given “reason and skill” that we have been bequeathed in service of the covenant we share as Americans? Every day we move from what was to the “is” of our present obligation to one another and to the stranger seeking refuge here. 

We are that Blue Silkie for the one another – providing tender shelter under her wing.

To begin…here is the necessary, opening question when arising from slumber, “How can I be part of the solution to the ills daily besetting our nation?”  How can I fulfill my role in this covenant we have with one another?   What one action can I take today?  Will you take?  Now, in your mind’s eye, lay it on God’s altar.

As an American and as a Citizen of our World?  — how can I be God’s Motherly Comfort Care?  For friend and stranger?  For family and neighbor?  I guarantee you this…the Spirit will answer.  And you will be the better for it.  Such a deal!

Every morning is the First Morning of what today is and what tomorrow will be.

“Sweet the rain’s new fall, sunlit from Heaven/Like the first dewfall on the first grass. Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden/sprung in completeness where his feet pass.”[2]  Amen.

---

[1] Op. cit.

[2] Eleanor Farjeon, Songs of Praise, second edition, (published in 1931), to the tune “Bunessan“, composed in the Scottish Islands, 1938. Made popular by Cat Stevens and found in many hymnals.

March 16, 2025
Lent 2


Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27;
Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 13:31-35

“The Journey from Was to Is”

We’ve all been in stores that were understaffed.  Sales clerks are often undertrained, underpaid and overworked.  And what you find is a number of grumpy employees.  And a big dose of attitude.

When I was at the skilled nursing facility recuperating from my hospital stay at Kaiser, most of the certified nurse aides were just fine, some, in fact, outstanding.  But a few – let’s just say they had few people skills.  “Would you like the lights off with some attitude?”  You got it!  Help to the restroom with attitude?  Right!  You got it.

What we got as a nation with the joint session of congress last Tuesday was a lot of attitude.  Attitude in abundance.  The performance by the president was unparalleled in length and in vituperation and grievance. 

No gratitude at all for having been handed an economy in great shape.  Record low unemployment.  One of the largest increases in the number of jobs in the country’s history.  Inflation coming down to normal levels.

Yes, what we got was a grievance-filled tirade vilifying Joe Biden, Democrats and “unelected bureaucrats.”  Packed with lie heaped upon lie.  He blamed the price of eggs on Joe Biden, or was it Hillary’s emails?  Not an ounce of gratitude.

Yes, life is sometimes difficult, precarious.  But we in America have no cause to be down-in-the-mouth.  Even our poorest live far better than many across this globe.

There is much to be grateful for.  That is the sentiment expressed in our lesson from Deuteronomy.  Entering the Promised Land, thankfulness is the order of the day.

“When you have come into that land the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it, you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest…You shall go to the priest…who takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of God…you shall make this response before the Lord your God:”

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

It’s about gratitude for a journey which is always ongoing.  America has been blessed beyond measure:  we are Seminole, Aleut, French, African, Russian, Chinese, Mexican, Cherokee, Tlingit, Korean, German and English.  A rich Heinz 57 variety of cultures and nationalities, all now on a journey together into the Light, if we would but see it.  What’s not to be grateful for?

The temptations of Satan in Luke are about an attitude of presumptiveness, of entitlement.  All of which, Jesus refuses.

This idealized, romanticized version from Deuteronomy omits all the savage brutality that was involved in taking possession of that land.  It justifies the present dispossession of Palestinians from their land – the wanton slaughter and destruction of Gaza.  All with your tax dollars.

Just as is the case with the settlers’ conquest of America.  The genocide of the “Trail of Tears” and the so-called Indian schools in the Southwest, Canada and Alaska.  It omits over 300 years of slavery.  Yet here we are; let’s deal with it.  Despite all, we are blessed with unmeasured riches and opportunities our parents never had. 

The moral arc of the universe has bent a bit more toward justice in the American story.  The panoply of our history is repleat with invention, courage, renewal and correction.

My mother should have gone to college, but instead went to a business school, because that’s what a woman did back then.  Or she went into nursing or teaching.  Or waitressing or sales-clerking. Or caregiving.  All underpaid work.

The other evening, Jai and I watched an episode of NOVA on the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore when struck by a huge container ship the length of three football fields.  I was delighted that the engineer heading up the recovery process was a young woman.  In my mother’s era, never would she have been considered for or promoted to such responsibility.  As she discussed the intricate physics of untangling the mess of twisted steel that had been that bridge, it warmed my heart.  I became choked up.  Gratitude for her success filled me in that moment.

I’ve been reading a book by a Jew who is deeply troubled by his people’s role in Gaza.  Peter Beinart, in costly gratitude for the ethical heritage of his people, dares to tell truth.[1]

He writes, “Over the last year, I’ve struggled with the way many Jews—including people I cherish—have justified the destruction of an entire society.  This book is about the stories Jews tell ourselves that blind us to Palestinian suffering.  It’s about how we came to value a state, Israel, above the lives of all the people who live under its control.”

In his willingness to consider the plight of the Palestinians, Peter has faced ostracism by many of his own tribe.  Yet, out of a generous spirit, he continues to believe in a possible future for both peoples.  This book “is about why I believe that Palestinian liberation means Jewish liberation as well.”  Peter’s book is written in gratitude not only for his people, but for the possibilities for reconciliation for both peoples.  It’s written in his gratitude for a rich Torah and prophetic heritage of truth and justice.

As we enter these 40 days of Lent, would that Christians might have the same humility, the same willingness to dare a larger vision of America.  Gratitude for a shared future is called for.  Not attitude.

Gratitude for the moments of joy that pierce the darkness will get us through these evil days.  We may sing the blues, but that lament carries us through the week to resolution, to possibility.  To a manageable Monday.

The other day, I passed by the strawberry stand in Chino on my way back from our P.O. box there.  On a lark I made a U-turn and swung into the parking area.  When I arrived home, I took one of those strawberries from the basket and indulged.  It was so flavorful, so delightful – it made my whole day.  Self-care is now so essential.

We sometimes sing a soulful song yet find the strength to move on, doing what we can. For as long as we can.  Enjoying the pleasures that unexpectantly come our way.  Like our Friday afternoon gathering of friends at our house I call SUDS ON THE DECK.  More self-care.

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

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

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

---

[1] Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (New York: Knopf, 2925),

March 9, 2025
Lent 1


Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16;
Romans 10:8b-13; Luke 4:1-13
“Gratitude Not Attitude”

Like many of you, I watched the most recent debacle play out in the Oval Office.  It was an ambush of a true and courageous ally under siege by a murderous war criminal.  As more and more in that room piled on President Zelinsky I was nauseated.

Stalin had it right when he referred to such Americans as “useful idiots.”  Our president repeated time and again Kremlin talking points.  One lie heaped upon another.  This Orange Felon must surely be leading the competition with Satan for the designation, “Father of all Lies”.  And J.D. Vance would be a close runner-up.  Disgusting.

We as a nation, taking the side of a murderous dictator, have much to lament.  Many expressed their shame in their nation – an embarrassment to be an American.

It’s not just our allies that are we disparaging, but the least of us.  As of this week orders have come down from the House of Representatives to cut billions from Medicare, Medicaid, nutrition programs for mothers and infants.  Cuts to school lunch programs.  The entire Department of Education fed to the wood chipper along with NOAA, the agency that warns of hurricanes, floods and tornados.  Oh, did I mention FEMA, the agency that cleans up the mess after a national disaster.  That too, sliced to ribbons.

Now you might not have much sympathy for a government worker if your own job history was tenuous, but these are real people with real families.  The helpful response from GOP toadies?  Our “thoughts and prayers.”  And directions to LinkedIn and the unemployment office.

We have much to lament as we watch the social fabric of our nation, of a world order bound by rule, all ripped to shreds by the most unabashed narcissist ever to occupy the White House.

We have our own inaction to lament.  The question that haunts me is, “What did you do when you witnessed the destruction and pillage of our republic?”  We each have our own personal failures and shortcomings to lament – those things done and left undone.

A prayer from the Psalms brings consolation.  “Create in me a clean heart and renew a right spirit within me.”

Today as we receive ashes, the reminder of our frailty and mortality, let us pray for a right spirit.  Let us pray for wisdom and courage to do the little we can do.

As our team that sponsors Agenda for a Prophetic Faith gathered this past Tuesday, the agenda was short and to the point:

What is our national crisis saying to me as an individual?

What is it saying to the Church?

What is it saying to our nation and to us as citizens?

Indeed, what is this season of Lent saying to each of us deep down at soul-depth?  O Lord, create in me a clean heart and renew a right spirit within me.  And give us umption for our gumption – Lord, we pray.  Amen

March 4, 2025
Ash Wednesday


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

We are adrift in perplexing times.  My parents, stalwart Republicans to the core, would be aghast that a president of this nation would be cozying up to a former KGB killer running the Kremlin – especially a Republican!  That we would take his side over that of NATO.  That this president would believe the KGB guy over our own intelligence agencies.  That we would be adrift at sea with a would-be king.

Yes, after the Orange Felon put the kibosh on the Manhattan congestion pricing tolls, he posted a picture of himself sporting a golden crown with the words, “Long Live the King.”[1]

To which the governor responded that New Yorkers were under a king over 250 years ago and had to kill a lot of British soldiers to get rid of him; and we will not be bending the knee to one now.

Yes, in these disturbing times, what is the way forward?  Or are we just too numbed to contemplate anything more that the fetal position under the covers?

But revelation does come.  Maybe not on any mountain.  But if we are listening, there are moments of inspiration, especially in times of extremity – if we but wake up.  When we’re at our wit’s end – revelation.

When I was adrift, an academic disaster at Cal State Long Beach, I was lying out on the grass soaking up some rays, deep in distress.

Coming across the green was an old friend, Dan, who had been a fairly close friend in junior high.  We began catching up on news.  He was now an American history major.  I was a floundering geology major.  As a new transfer I had not made any friends yet.

Out of the blue, he asked me how was my love life.  “Nothing going on,” I responded.  I was lonely and despondent.

He suggested that I might want to attend the Methodist campus group, Wesley Foundation.  To which I replied that I had had it with the church – just a bunch of social climbing hypocrites. 

He said that there were some “mighty fine-looking women” who were part of the group.  “When do they meet?” I asked.

My life in those brief, shining moments was transfigured, exactly as Christ’s.

Revelation!  I was at my wits’ end – then my burning bush moment.  Bright and shining — transfiguration!  And I never looked back.

All true, such Spirit-filled revelation and transfiguration leads to God – transforming life-enhancing Torah values and Gospel goodness.  That’s certainly where mine led.  That’s where Jesus will lead.

The scene on the Mountain of Transfiguration is the culmination of Luke’s Sermon on the Plain – a restatement of the Beatitudes.

This passage from Luke for the last Sunday in Epiphany, Transfiguration Sunday, is a summing up of the teaching of Jesus, placing it in the Torah and prophetic fabric of Israel.  It is Moses and Elijah who join that assemblage on the Mount of Transfiguration and Revelation.

And of course, true to form, the disciples are completely dumbfounded.  Peter wants to enshrine the moment.

“Peter said to Jesus, ‘Master it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah’ – not knowing what he said.”

That’s not the plan, not the point of the moment.  Certainly not Jesus’ plan.  As a cloud envelops them, there is that voice, the same sentiment spoken at Jesus’ baptism, “This is my Son, my Chosen,” with the add-on, “listen to him.”

Yes, Listen!

The mission is to come down off the mountain and enter the messy trials and suffering of those down below — Of us down below.  It is in those struggles — our struggles — that all shall be revealed.  Even on a cross.

I’ve been reading a memoir by a woman who came out of an evangelical expression of the faith.  An expression she now rejects.  After her experience with her diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and her suffering the effect of the condemning theology of that brand of Christianity, she broke free.  It’s a marvelous story of transfiguration as she frees herself from cult-like, destructive religion.[2]

Anna Gazmarian was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2011.  While the diagnosis provided an explanation of the mind-wrenching swings of depression and manic activity, it created real problems in her evangelical community.  The stigma attached by her church, interpreted theologically, condemned her as lacking faith, or worse, demon-possessed.

If she would just pray, read the Bible more, all would be okay.  The condition was her fault; the bromides of her “friends” were no better than those of Job’s “friends.”

“Always look on the bright side of life,” that was the theology of her mother and those in her church community.  If one only had a sufficiently strong faith, one could will cheerfulness.  To do otherwise was sin and rebellion against God.  The nostrum was more Bible reading and prayer.  Little thought that such severe depression was an organic disease of the brain.  Nothing to do with demons or Satan.

Anna writes, “For people living with bipolar disorder, a single thought can turn into obsession.  Racing thoughts become repetitive, sometimes moving from subject to subject, almost out of nowhere.  What stands out for those with bipolar disorder is that these thoughts are unceasing.  Every coping skill imaginable, like breathing[3] exercises or long walks, fails to provide an end.  You become trapped in your own mind.”[4]

It was only later that Anna recognized that her faith rested in the decision to get the real help she needed – a compassionate psychiatrist who understood and could treat her affliction.

After Anna is sufficiently stable, she decides to try college one more time.  She had already suffered through four attempts.  At Hope College, a more permissive Christian environment, she ends up in a poetry class.  Her guidance councilor felt this might be a good fit for Anna. 

This became a moment of transfiguration for Anna.  Sitting in the professor’s office, Anna announced that she wanted to become a poet. The professor, Dr. Glidsan saw through to Anna’s soul, to the true gifts in her writing. 

The professor threw her hands up in the air, exclaiming, “You already are one.  I think you should be a creative writing major.”[5]

Anna is not sure what the professor sees in her. 

“Dr. Glidsan placed her hand on her chin.  ‘You notice the small details,’ she said.  ‘You notice things that a lot of people miss or ignore.  Those details should be like the best whisky we keep on a shelf, only to bring out when people come over.  When you write your poems, you bring out those details.  That’s you.  That’s your vision.  I want you to write what only you can write.’”[6]

Anna sat there transfixed in a moment of pure Grace as she tried to keep the mascara from flowing down her cheeks.  Transfiguration – bright shining as of the Glory of God.  Right there in that professor’s office.

Days later, when Dr. Glidsan introduced the class to Elizabeth Bishop and her poem on loss, “One Art,” Anna came to another epiphany.   Losing as an art, is one that could be mastered.

Memories flooded in as Anna recalled all she had lost.  In her diagnosis she had lost her sense of self.  She’s lost her faith.  She’d lost her home.  She’s lost friends.  She’d lost her boyfriend Hunter.  She’d lost her belief in the world as a safe place.  So many losses.

She gasped as classmates turned to stare.  As one girl handed her a tissue, she knew something about loss.

In retrospect, Anna could see that her time at Hope was a beautiful moment of Grace.  Hope was different than what she had imagined college to be.  It didn’t quite fit the slick promotional brochures she had read.  Anna admits that her experience wasn’t “brochure-worthy, it was still meaningful, even beautiful.”  She continues, “moments of grace can be hard to come by, and even when they do come, the feeling can be fleeting…After years of searching, I was surprised to discover, in the eyes of my teacher and in the words of those poets, that I’d already been found.  That here were things only I could say.  That all the little details, the things that mattered most to me, might also matter to God.’”[7]

“In reading and writing poetry, I no longer needed to think of every bad thing in life, every loss, as being part of God’s plan.  Rather, I started to see my losses as things that could be named, honored, and, through art, brought into the present, transformed.”[8]

In the small poetry workshop groups of threes the professor set up, Anna found the freedom to share her struggles and hopes.  And there found an acceptance she had never felt in her faith communities.  Grace abounding!

She would later meet a young fellow who completely accepted her even with her mental health struggles.  This, all through a madcap adventure involving a garden gnome purchased on a lark at Walmart.  An improbable grace-filled journey leading to marriage and the birth of a son.  Read it.  It is nourishing soul food for Lent.  Such is how Easter arrives.

Transfiguration can be a sudden change or it can creep up on one as if on little cat’s feet.

What we celebrate through this season of Epiphany is the transfiguration of the Church from the timidity of cowering in an upper room into a bold, prophetic expression of God’s will for us all.  A kin-dom that binds us together.  “In Christ there is no north or south, no east or west” – all brothers, sisters we.  And in the Together is God.  We, like Christ on the Mountain of Revelation, like a chance occasion on a college campus green, like an appointment at a professor’s office — Transfiguration!  Amen.

---

[1] Benjamin Oreskes, “‘Long Live the King’: Trump Likens Himself to Royalty on Truth Social,” New York Times, February 20, 2025.

[2] Anna Gazmarian, Devout: A Memoir of Doubt (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2024).

[3] Op cit., 34.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Op cit. 82

[6] Op cit.

[7] Op cit., 83-84.

[8] Op cit., 85.

March 2, 2025
Last Sunday after Epiphany
Transfiguration Sunday


Exodus 24:29-35; Psalm 99;
2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2; Luke 9:28-36

“At Our Wits’ End”