We in the modern, secular age aren’t quite sure how to talk about evil.

Over the past of our human history, we’ve thought of those actions and events destructive of the human enterprise and flourishing in many ways.

One of the earliest can be summed up in the word “chaos” — where dark, overwhelming forces consume all we value.  One of the first of God’s Graces is to hem them in.  The sea, the waters above are given their proper place that the dry land might be a haven for human life.

The Flood is the first punishment to be visited upon us for our transgressions and noise according to the biblical writers.  Chaos let loose.  Pestilence, invasion by foreign armies, famine, plague – all forms of chaos which would consume us.

With more sophistication, we would look at evil in more personal terms.  Greed, mental illness, spiritual possession, blindness, disease.  All not good.  Contrary to flourishing.

So, it is in our gospel lesson from Matthew, that Jesus encounters a man possessed by an “unclean spirit.” 

Our family knew this experience.  My grandmother on my father’s side lived with us for several years while I was in my early teens.  Grandma Bertha’s husband, Jonathan Forney, died when my father was around ten years old.

After living alone, with the onset of dementia, it became obvious by her neighbor’s calls from West Virginia, that she could no longer live by herself.  Her home in Bethany was sold and she moved in with us.

Even as a young boy, I knew something was not quite right with Grandma in the head.  She told us that she had a man who lived in her radio and kept bothering her with all sorts of nonsense that he whispered to her at all hours.  Day and night.

My mother, who knew little about mental illness, would tell her, “Mom, just turn the radio off.”  “Just turn it off!” 

Mother thought that Grandma’s radio was actually on.  She seemed to have no idea that the voice was only in Grandma’s head. 

The biblical writer would have described Grandma’s torment as that of an “unclean spirit.”

Such spirits, demonic and canny, knew their opponents.  “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?  Have you come to destroy us?  I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”

In our sophistication, we would poo-poo such simple ignorance as the superstition of an ignorant age.  We, who know so much more now about mental illness and how to destroy the entire planet.  Yes, tell us about mental illness!

And yet, the behaviors arising from such mental disorder can be every bit as destructive to life as floods, enemies, drugs and invading armies.  A negation of all we value.  Evil, in short.

In our house, Grandma lived down the walkway in living quarters Dad had built for her behind the garage.  In the morning we could see her striding up the sloped walkway, jaw set, heading for breakfast.

After she had managed to get a huge family fight started by Mom and Dad, she would strut back to her room whistling a happy tune.  Satisfied with herself.  My family would be in turmoil for the rest of the day.  When everybody was thoroughly miserable, she was happiest.  She and the little man living in her radio.

An unclean spirit, indeed.  Family chaos rampant.

We as a nation are alike possessed by an unclean spirit.  Actually, several.  Perhaps, legion!

Last week my friend, Carolfrances sent me an article on the case filed in the International Court of Justice against Israel for genocide.  By our uncritical and total support of their prime minister Netanyahu, we are enablers of this wanton destruction of the whole people of Gaza.

Many evangelical Christians are complicit in the destruction in their belief that we must support Israel to reconquer all their former lands under the Davidic Dynasty of biblical times.  Utter Rapture nonsense!  This belief is heretical and demonic itself, in that it excuses this genocide.  Spiritual trash!  This belief aids, abets and covers up our role in this wanton carnage of the people of Gaza.  Now going on thirty thousand, mostly women, children and the elderly.  

The Heart of God aches.  Such is the pathos of God.  As Christ wept over Jerusalem and the daughters of Jerusalem, who were only to bear children for calamity, as God was in anguish over the slavery of the Hebrew people in Egypt, in Jim Crow South.  And at Treblinka and Auschwitz, Babi Yar. God now weeps.  As God surely wept along the Trail of Tears and at Wounded knee.   Bitter tears of deep pathos, unremitting sorrow, over what we now do in this land called Holy.

The blood of Gaza is on our hands, President Biden’s hands.  Shame to us all.  An unclean, devouring spirit, roams our land.  The maw of Hell.

What has this demonic spirit have to do with Jesus and the values he taught us, his followers, to live out?  Everything!  Might that this wretched spirit come out American politics, convulsing and with a loud voice!  Might that we join together to exorcise this corruption from our midst.  With power and authority!

This is a demonic spirit born of the idol of nationalism.

The fact is, WE the Church have been given full and plenary authority and power in Christ Jesus to expel, to utterly cast out this spirit of evil.

Authority?  If not us, then who?

Power?  Power as brilliant and as forceful as all the incandescent rays of the sun.  Sunlight is the best disinfectant of this sort of evil.  Sometimes takes a while to work.  Apply often and continuously, like voting in Chicago.  Wash, rinse, repeat.

One nation, a nation formerly complicit in crimes against humanity, South Africa, has now filed charges of genocide against Israel in the International Court.

Here’s what Carolfrances sent me – glorious sunlight.  This is the crux of South Africa’s filing: “So is it Genocide?”

“Over the two days of hearings, South Africa has alleged that Israel has committed genocide by killing Palestinians, subjecting them to serious bodily and mental harm, and inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. It argues that this has been done by the ‘sustained bombardment, forced evacuation without adequate shelter in which they continue to be attacked, killed and harmed’, and by ‘failing to provide or ensure essential food, water, medicine, fuel, shelter and other humanitarian assistance for the besieged and blockaded Palestinian people, which has pushed them to the brink of famine’”.[1]

Through our unconditional support, we are enablers of this wanton destruction and systemic starvation of the entire people of Gaza. 

And how are we affected?  Let me spell out one highly plausible scenario.

Millions of young people who find our actions of support abhorrent are planning to either sit out this election or write in Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or some other choice.  Millions of Arab and Muslim citizens and their families planning to likewise sit out the election in crucial swing states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota.  Places where Biden won only by tens of thousands.

It is quite possible that the Former Guy will be God’s chastisement for our complicity in this crime against humanity.  For God is Truth.  “Say it ain’t so, Joe. Say it ain’t so.”

A far-fetched scenario?  This last Friday in the swing state of Michigan, Arab and Muslim leaders refused to meet with “Genocide Joe.”  Canceled the meet-up.

And how will we prevail?  Through our solidarity with one another.  We will do the little things that preserve humanity and bring some small joy to life.

We will be agents of “necessary trouble,” raising a Holy Ruckus wherever possible.  I write sermons.  My wife writes postcards — for which I admire her.  She in her activism is my pride and joy.

I write letters, I bet some of you do also.  We are all part of God’s most powerful sunlight, as is my friend Carolfrances.  As are the citizens of South Africa.

We are given all authority to raise our cry to the high heavens.  And unbelievable power to do so.   This carnage in Gaza would come to a quick halt if Uncle Sam just turns off the money faucet to Israel.  Raises its righteous voice of indignation in the halls of the United Nations – and Congress.

Chris Hedges reports on the ruling of the International Court of Justice.  “It’s genocide – but they won’t order a stop to it.”

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) “delivered a devastating blow to the foundational myth of Israel. Israel, which paints itself as eternally persecuted, has been credibly accused of committing genocide…A people, once in need of protection from genocide, are now potentially committing it.”[2]

Israel’s aims are crystal clear, the obliteration of the entire people of Gaza.  “Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant on Monday also ordered a ‘complete siege’ of Gaza, and said he would halt the supply of electricity, food, water and fuel to the Palestinian enclave.”[3]

“’I have given an order – Gaza will be under complete siege,’ the minister said. ‘We are fighting barbarians and will respond accordingly.’”[4]  Collective punishment is a war crime.  Every bit as much a what Hamas did on October 6.  Will an-eye-for-an-eye and a tooth-for-a-tooth mentality consume us all?

In the meantime, along with the people of South Africa and folk like Chris Hedges, WE are that Mosaic prophet promised in our reading from Deuteronomy.  If not us, who?

Just as possession by opioids and heroin or gambling is possession, we know the way to freedom from this unclean spirit, from the resultant chaos in the families afflicted.  We know the way to freedom — it is the path of recovery.  Sunlight. 

Stop the enabling.  Stop the lies.  Stop the “stinkin’ thinkin.’”  It was your best thinking that got you a chair in this room.  Now, listen up.  Sunlight!

That first ray is the dawning realization: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, and that our lives have become unmanageable.”[5]  The unclean spirit that possesses America is our addiction to violence.  And we would seem to be just as powerless over it.  We shovel money into our military budget until it’s now half of all our spending.  When is it enough?

As Stokley Carmichael inveighed, “Violence is as American as cherry pie.”

Brilliant sunlight shed on this scourge of our unconditional support of Netanyahu will eventually have its effect.  It will take a lot of post cards, phone calls, letters, emails…and not a few sermons.  We have the full authority in Christ Jesus to say, we compel you — “Be silent, come out of us.”  We, with full authority and power, my friends.  WE!  Amen.

---

[1] Asia News Network, “Why South Africa is leading the legal and moral charge against Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza,” January 16, 2023.

[2] Chris Hedges, “It May Be Genocide But it Won’t be Stopped,” The Chris Hedges Report, January 26, 2024.

[3] CNN News, October 9, 2023.

[4] Ibid.

[5] The first step of the twelve steps to recovery in AA and NA.

January 28, 2024
4 Epiphany

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Deuteronomy 18:15-20; Psalm 111;
1 Corinthians 8:1-13; Mark 1:21-28 “The Pathos of God”

When I was a small child, maybe fourth or fifth grade, our family would gather around our old black-and-white TV to watch our favorite evening fare.  It was still our original TV bought in 1949 or so.  A little round screen and rabbit-ears antenna.  Some of you remember those days.

Among our favorites were: “The Great Gildersleeve,” “Beany and Cecil” puppet show, “Father Knows Best” and a quiz show, “What’s My Line?”

Guests would sign in and the panel participants could ask various questions that could be answered only “yes” or “no.”  Often the line of work was something obscure like wing walking, flaming sword swallower at the circus.  You get the idea.  Every now and then the guest would be so famous that the panelists would need to be blindfolded, but the audience would “ooh” and “aaaahhh” as the person signed in on the blackboard.

It is still the same, most of us are defined by our line of work. 

In theological terms, this is known as vocation or calling.  My wife knew as young as kindergarten that she was called to be an elementary school teacher.  And she has done that faithfully for some forty years before retirement.

I’ve bounced around at several lines of work, always, since my Army discharge, centered around the church.

In our Old Testament story, Jonah’s line of work assigned by God is to go to Nineveh and shape those folks up – a seeming impossibility given their reputation as a bunch of debauched degenerates.  An assignment worse than taking out the garbage.

And those “simple fishermen” were to be transformed into “fishers of men [and women].”  Another new life-assignment.

Frederick Buechner eloquently defines vocation, “Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”

Unfortunately, the church often does little in preparing young people to reflect on the spiritual dimension of that life choice.  Mostly, we stumble into something.

Our first assignment as part of the Jesus Movement is to discern the answer to the question of vocation, I believe.

I had lunch this week with a husband wife couple in their sixties.  His line, which got him in much trouble and caused much grief was Wilmington Gangbanger.

That was the route of most everybody in his family.  Most were still addicts, a good number still in prison.  Michael had spent over a decade in prison as a “lifer” for killing a person while high on PCP.  He has been a consumer of California correctional services in some of the most wretched places imaginable.

Then he came to his senses.  He got sober.  He got with the addiction recovery program in prison and realized God was laying out a new path for him.  All he had to do was walk through that door.

Meeting him and his wife Stephanie made my whole week.  As I snapped a picture, I told the two that “you two are what recovery looks like.”  Michael is now a year and a half into a course leading to a certificate in addiction recovery at Mt. SAC, a local community college.

He met his wife in high school, and they were married while he was still in prison, but then well on the road to recovery.  He now has over fifty years of sobriety.  Stephanie has a Master’s in business administration and oversees payroll for over one thousand employees in a large home building company.  She, also, grew up in a drug-infested family, but managed to get clear of those problems.

Recovery is their line and it is a blessed gift to all they encounter.  And could be for House of Hope.  Michael is interested in doing some work helping to put in our newly donated fruit trees at the church and giving Miguel help with putting in the new drip irrigation system.

Barbara Brown Taylor is absolutely correct in describing how God, the Spirit, works through our intuition.  Dreams, coincidences, a sidewards glance out of our peripheral vision.  Pay attention.

I’ve told the story early on at my arrival at St. Francis of how God got my attention.  And, because our congregation is about three times the size of what it was then, it may bear repeating.

When I was in junior high, we were living in a very upscale neighborhood in Long Beach, California, the Bixby Knowles area where many professionals lived – my father being a dentist who had done very well for the family.

One day, in the summer a moving van arrived at a house, about 6 or 7 lots down the street from us.  I and a few of my playmates rode our bikes down there to see what was going on.

There on the sidewalk, watching furniture being hauled out of the trailer was a mother and two boys.  A Black mother and two Black boys.  As I had always been taught to be respectful, I started a conversation.  The usual, “I’m John, what are your names?”  Where are you from?  What does your dad do?”  I just assumed their mother was a stay-at-home mom like mine.  The mother went back in the house and soon reappeared with glasses of lemonade for us all.

These were the first Black people I had ever seen.  I had led a pretty sheltered, privileged life up to that point.   And the boys just seemed like regular boys who would fit in with our neighborhood gang.  Not at all like how my father would have referred to them.

Shortly after moving in, this family took a long vacation.  While they were away, their fine Christian neighbors put a hose through the second story window and turned on the water which ran for over a week.  Flooded them out completely.

What little talk there was in the neighborhood about the incident was very hush-hush, whispers and innuendo.  My father’s take was that even though the man was a dentist like him, they had no business in buying that house.

What I found to be most spiritually damaging was that my church said nothing.  Absolutely NOTHING about this horrendous evil which had taken place right under their nose.

Deep down, even at that young age, I felt this to be a cowardly betrayal of all we had been taught in Sunday school.  It was about that time I dropped out of going.  They were just a bunch of phonies.  Several years later the conservative pastor came out publically against California’s fair housing law when it was on the ballot.  I wrote the whole place off as a joke.  A sick joke!

It would be a number of years later while attending a college Methodist group with a very progressive leader that he and his wife would convince me to attend a national student gathering over Easter vacation. 

There, in Lincoln, Nebraska, with several thousand other college- aged students I had the good fortune to hear the keynote speaker, one Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I could have stayed home; I was short on funds.  My father was definitely less than enthusiastic about my participation.  But a number of friends were on our three chartered busses, including one girl I struck up a conversation with from Occidental College, Jai Handcock.

Dr. King’s talk that evening was balm to my terrible memory of what had happened to our Black neighbors down the street. 

The Spirit must have been working overtime.  First, after I had heard King, my spirit leapt.  I thought, “If THIS is the church, include me in.” A healing of that searing memory came out of this newly discovered resolve.  I could devote myself to helping Americans better understand each other.  To work for equity and inclusion was a totally new direction from being a drifting, academic screw-up.  In that moment my life found purpose and hope.

Secondly, Jai and I began seeing each other upon our return to Los Angeles.  Before I was discharged from the Army we were married, and I knew I was headed to seminary to prepare for the ministry.

Yes, I’ve done many other things along the way.  I still do.  But I love the church with all its faults.

And what did I discover on this circuitous journey?  The same thing Jonah did.  Through hints and urges, happenstance — small as a mustard seed, God works wonders.  This is “my line” and it has been a blessing beyond measure. 

Just ask Michael and Stephanie.  Just ask any whose lives have been changed through AA or NA.  Ask any person of faith who spends the first part of the morning in prayer – what I refer to as “spiritual daydreaming.”  Ask my wife and all who have found their true life’s calling.  Wonders! I tell you.

As my friend Jim Strathdee’s song says in part, “If you follow and love, you’ll learn the mystery of what you were meant to do and be.”

That we might all find “…the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”  That is the enduring, lifelong Grace of God.  It’s never too late.  “Today really is the first day of your life.”  What are you being meant to do and be?  Amen.

January 21, 2024
3 Epiphany

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Psalm 62:6-14;
1 Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20

“What’s My Line?”

There’s a saying that comes out of the Buddhist tradition about encountering one who claims to be the Buddha.  “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

Because he is not the genuine article, the Real McCoy.  Nothing but a fake and an imposter – demonic.

Likewise, it is no wonder that Nathanael is quite skeptical when Andrew and Peter inform him that they have found the Messiah, the One of whom the prophets and writings testify.

With a feeble half shrug, he responds, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”  A valid question.

Can anything so momentous come out of such an out-of-the-way, nowhere place?  Out of such meager beginnings?

If your answer is “no,” you need a refresher course in the history of God and God’s people.  For this is how it seems to work all the time.  Just so that we don’t think that such wisdom came from our own cleverness or brilliant intuition.  Inch by inch out of nothing.

It’s out of the seemingly trivial things that the biblical writer proclaims God’s mighty acts.

It was out of seemingly nothing that the Big Bang erupted into our known universe.  From an infinitesimally small speck, entire galaxies, stars, planets, dark matter, centipedes and my lovely wife.  And all of you.  The whole shebang!

It was out of a meager group of hominoids in Africa, at one point on the brink of extinction themselves, that the entire human race has covered the planet, bringing most other lifeforms to extinction.

Welcome to the Anthropocene Era.  Yes, indeed — what can come from such seemingly happenstance early genetic mutations on the African Velt?  So long, long ago.

Look at that genealogy of the birth of the Messiah in Matthew.[1]  This lineage traces the birth through the male line.  Except!  Four women are mentioned in all this begetting.  All women considered to be of questionable morals or questionable pregnancies, women seemingly of no account.

Again, look at Matthew’s record of Jesus’ family tree.

Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Mary.  All women associated in gossipy minds as women of questionable character.  Loose morals.  Read of the scandal around Tamar, circulated by wagging tongues.  It’s all there in Genesis 38.  Likewise, with the other three women of this genealogy.  All to show that God does wonders through those who in the eyes of the powerful are considered of little worth, no account.  Out of little, a great blessing to all.

Yes, the men involved get off scot-free.  Nothing is new under the sun here.  Of course, these guys would question, could anything good come of any of this?  Out of this sort of women?

Yet, WE, of little account, would boldly proclaim, “We have found Him.”

Mustafa Suleyman, in his new work, The Coming Wave, lays out how wave upon wave of technological achievement, often from what seems insignificant at the time, tends to mushroom into great promise or threat, often both.[2]

What he terms “proto-general-purpose technologies” – pervasive and engendering new, follow-on technologies, beginning from insignificance — have shaped and continue to shape humanity.  The human animal is an “innately technological species.”[3]  Start with fire, to coal extraction, to the Saturn rocket.  Then, the stone ax.

Suleyman notes that “proliferation is the default.”  One example, computers.

When mathematicians, mostly underpaid, unrecognized women began using a crude version at Bletchley Park in Britain in the 1940s to crack the German Enigma Code, the computer had its first rude use.

By 1945 a new generation called “ENIAC, an eight-foot-tall behemoth of eighteen thousand vacuum tubes capable of three hundred operations per second,” was crunching data.[4]

Then came the transistor, “comprising a paper clip, a scrap of gold foil and a crystal of germanium that could switch electronic signals.”[5]  The birth of the digital age.

Finally, Moore’s law which proclaimed that every twenty-four months, the number of transistors on a chip would double. Now, a 10-million increase on one chip!  Exponential growth beyond imagining — a seventeen-billion-fold improvement.

The then-president of IBM, Thomas J. Watson, was said to have predicted that the entire world would probably have no need for more than five or six computers.  Now there are more computers than there are humans – in your ubiquitous smart phones.  More computing power in your hand than those filling entire warehouses which were used to solve the first atomic equations.  For better, and often worse.

Could anything good have come out of such a niche toy?  Inch by inch, so it goes.

Can anything good come from the inklings of the Spirit that on most mornings awaken my heart?

Each day with the rising of the sun, I find just enough of Him in my heart to dispel the gloomy clouds of night.  Just enough to pull back the covers in Hope that it is worth getting out of bed today.

And usually, this Spirit brings work to my mind before the end of that first cup of coffee.  By late morning, all is rich with blessing beyond my poor imagining.

Barbara Brown Taylor, in her book, Leaving Church,[6] describes listening to one’s primal intuition.  All of which, led her to leave an insanely busy 80-hour-a-week schedule at a large, downtown Atlanta Episcopal parish for a position in a small, rural Georgia parish in the northern hill country of the state. 

Listen to how she describes this leading of the Spirit.

“Intuition may be one way of speaking about how God does that – takes things from here to there, I mean…when I cannot sleep because the rational decision seems all wrong to me, I start paying attention to the gyroscope of my intuition, which operates below the radar of my reason.  I pay attention to recurring dreams and interesting coincidences.  I let my feelings off the leash and follow them around.  When something moves in my peripheral vision.  I leave the path to investigate, since it would be a shame to walk right by a burning bush.  At this point reason is all but useless to me.  All that remains is trust.”[7]

The decision for a move was a life-saver for both her health and sanity and that of her husband.  They had arrived exhausted.  In that move she found herself, her husband, and in new, unexpected ways, found Him whom she would serve as Lord of Life.  New beginnings out of the scrap of a notion, she found.

As the song goes, “See him at the seaside, talking with the fishermen, making them disciples.  Amen. Amen.”  A seemingly insignificant, rather puny start.  Yet, now — spiritual riches let loose for all humanity that would bind us together as one heart.  An ethic of equity and mutual regard that is our Guiding Star.

Yes, we mostly fall short.  A large part of the Jesus Movement has deserted and succumbed to one of the most corrupt men ever to attain to the American presidency.  They gather around the Former Guy as if the leader of a cult.  A total perversion of the Word Incarnate – a corruption doomed to pass away.  We pray!

But the memory of that distant blessing by the Galilean Sea lingers till this day.  It erupts from time to time in unbelievable grace and in incredible sacrifice.  Grace upon Grace.  Mustard seed Grace.  And the hearts who have found Him are filled to overflowing with love and kindnesses for self and stranger.  And for the Author of this Mystery. 

Indeed, “can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

Can anything come out of any of this, out of any of us?  Where might your dreams be leading you?  Let fear and hesitations off the leash.  Taste and see for yourself.  Into Epiphany Light, let God’s Holy Spirit lead you where it will.  What do you find when you push back the covers?  I find God’s whole people as the entire House of Hope, companions on the way.

My Evangelical friends are wont to say, “Name it and claim it!”

My friend Jim Strathdee’s riff on the summons in a Howard Thurman poem beckons:

“I am the Light of the World
You people come and follow me.
If you follow and love, You’ll learn the mystery
Of what you were meant to do and be.”  Amen.

---

[1] Matthew 1:1-17, NRSV.

[2] Mustafa Suleyman, with Michael Bhaskar, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power and the 21^st Century’s Greatest Dilemma (New York: Crown Publishing, 2023).

3 Ibid., 26.

[3] Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2006).

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid. 32

[6] Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: a memoir of faith (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2006).

[7] Ibid., 8.

January 14, 2024
2 Epiphany

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
1 Samuel 3:1-10, [11-20]; Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17;
1 Corinthians 6:12-20; John 1:43-51 “We Have Found Him”

Many of us know that children’s rhyme, “Star light, star bright — First star I see tonight; I wish I may, I wish I might…”  We gazed into the sky while the sun slowly sank below the horizon of trees and housetops.  The clear sky turning from blue to magenta and then dark orange, settling into a rich violet.  “First star I see tonight…”

This weary world yearns for something like a guiding star.  As those three sages are said to have followed the Epiphany Star of revelation, we desperately seek to arrive at some saving grace. 

The Christ Child we seek this year is not to be found in a manger but under the rubble of Gaza.  Covered in ashes and dust, covered in the blood of its parents, brothers, sisters, and neighbors.[1]

As Herod had not clean hands, Israel repaying massacre for massacre has not either.  Nor does the Western Church with its blasphemous and corrupt rapture theology which it uses to justify its unconditional support of destruction Netanyahu wreaks on Gaza.

Yes, what Hamas did was evil, but as my mother would caution, “Two wrongs do not make a right.”  The savage brutality inflicted on our Palestinian brothers and sisters will have consequences for generations.  Their blood will cry out from the ground unto the foreseeable years, unto decades.

Just as the blood of the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp of Lebanon still today cries out — still, from 1982, when on September 16-18, they were surrounded by Israeli forces which blocked all escape while they and their proxy, right-wing Christian militia allies, raped and massacred over 3000, mostly women and children. 

Our only hope is that some rays of that Epiphany Star reach deep down through the rubble of history, down through the rubble of our hearts.  “First star I see tonight…”

Daily, I search the paper, search my own experience, to find what little rays from that Star there are to be found.  And amid the deepest night, I somehow find enough to keep going.  To keep Hope alive.

The other day, in our Claremont Courier the lead article was, “This Church Saved Me.”  That got my curiosity.  We don’t always see churches up for that sort of action.  I wondered, what did they do?[2]

I wasn’t surprised to see this congregation stepping up to the plate on the issue of hunger.  I had heard that these folks believed in a gospel in action, a gospel “with feet,” as my friend, Pastor Kelvin, likes to say.

Before the pandemic the church’s food bank had been serving a couple hundred a week.  That has spiked to upwards of 1,400.  This is the pet project of Associate Pastor Zamar Alkiezar and his wife Anna. On Fridays, lines of cars are stacked up along Foothill Blvd. for blocks and blocks.

Their good work is certainly a ray of Hope from that Gospel Star for the homeless and unemployed who have come to depend on it. 

It is also a ray of Hope for the 35-some volunteers who take satisfaction in putting their faith to work.  Grace incarnate.  Joy all around.

One person interviewed, volunteer Arthur Munoz, allowed that he had been homeless.  As he “took a break from hefting large boxes of donated food into waiting cars,” he offered, “‘This church saved me.’”

One volunteer with Alzheimer’s disease helps keep the food distribution area clean.  “His daughter told [Pastor] Alkiezar that every week her dad looks forward to coming to the church for his job.”[3]  In that job is dignity.

The world at times can be in a most wretched state.  Just read any Cormac McCarthy novel.[4]  Our Advent journey has been through the time of “not yet.”  It has been a descent into the bowels of Hell.  Not a smidgen of any saving grace to the skeptical eye.  Those without rose-colored glasses who dare to have their eyes wide open — they know the wretchedness.

It is precisely such evil into which Christ comes, healing power in his wings.  As the prophet long foretold, “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.  For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you and his glory will appear over you.”

I insist on finding the “Good in the Neighborhood.”  It’s there in dribs and drabs.  If we seek it.  If we work for it.  Arise.  Shine.  That is the Star that brightens my life these days as they begin ever so slowly to lengthen.  Consigned to be part of God’s “nevertheless.”

Even amid the Gaza ruins, countless aid workers risk their lives to bring what comfort they can.  Almost one a day is killed in the bombing, yet they stay. 

Rushing stretcher patients on foot through impassable roads.  Comforting the survivors who have lost entire families.  One family in the south of Gaza, in a supposedly “safe zone,” lost over 90 of its members in one strike. 

With few hospitals left operational, doctors and nurses do what they can with the exhausted supplies of antibiotics and pain killers.  These desperate efforts are precious Gospel Rays for what little Hope there is for that abandoned Christ Child under the rubble.

As we trudge into the new year, the Gospel Ray of Light from the Epiphany Star will be our companion.

When we met at St. Francis with the folks, clergy and lay, of the Interfaith Communities United for Change, I told them that they were one of my best Christmas presents ever.  “You all look like allies,” I said.  We will definitely be blessed by the “street heat” they can bring to counter the NIMBY crowd, to counter weak-kneed politicians who will oppose our addiction recovery center, House of Hope – San Bernardino.  Brilliant rays of the same Light.

Indeed, “Arise, shine; for your Light has come…”

In Christ we hitch our wagon to a guiding star.  Every bit as sure and trustworthy as that Dipping Gourd for those fleeing their slavers, making their journey North.

This season of Epiphany is the season when, in Christ, the whole people of God make manifest through the real stuff of action, inward graces.

Food banks, addiction recovery, speeding ambulances, and in a hundred other ways, in the season of Epiphany faithful people grow into the fullness of the stature of Christ.  That is what our readings will be all about in the months to come – that long Green Season.  It’s for growth.  Not just in numbers but in depth as well.  In Spirit!

Yes, “See Him in the temple, talking with his elders—How they marvel at his wisdom.  See him at the seashore, preaching to the people – healing all the sickness.”

And see us in His image, making all kinds of good stuff happen as well.  Gospel Goodness is what we’re about this Green Season.  Anointed with the same Spirit.  “Arise, shine, your light has come…”  Splinters off that first Epiphany Star.  Amen.

---

[1] This imagery comes from a sermon preached on Christmas Eve, 2023 at Christmas Evangelical Lutheran Church, Bethlehem by the Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac.  It may be found on YouTube.

[2] Steven Felschundneff, “This Church Saved Me,” Claremont Courier, December 22, 2023.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, for starters.  A very, very dark world.  If you’re depressed, DON’T read any of these.  It would only get worse. .

January 7, 2024
Epiphany Sunday

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14;
Ephesians 3:1-12; Matthew 2:1-12

“First Star I See Tonight”

As many of you know, I’m sort of grumpy about the commercialization of the most gracious day that rolls around this time of year.  Christmas is the celebration of God’s inbreaking into our often too pathetic human affairs.  It’s not for commercial “Christmas creep” — buying a bunch of stuff we can’t afford for people we hardly know, don’t like that much, and that they don’t need. 

Despite the “grumpy,” I do allow some early Christmas music to seep into my soul.  One of my favorites is the Gospel song, “Mary, Mary, Whatcha Goina Call That Baby?”  That gets special honor right up there with Handel’s Messiah – wholesome, spiritual preparation for December 25^th!

“Mary, Mary,” a folk hymn with a hundred different versions when it comes to the verses.  So, here’s my take:

“Mary, Mary, Whatcha goina call that pretty little baby?  Think I’ll call him Jesus.  Think I’ll call him Jesus cause he’s gonna save his people.

Think I’ll call him Jesus.  Strong to Save.

That might be his name, but he looks a whole lot like Liz Cheney when it comes to saving this republic.

Yes, we couldn’t handle his message so we nailed him to a cross – and Liz Cheney’s party can’t handle her message of warning.  She has been politically crucified as well.

She and I, as you all know, disagree on virtually all policy issues.  But on one thing, the most important thing, we’re absolutely on the same page – saving this republic.

I’ve been listening to her book on my car stereo system.  Often, I find tears of gratitude rolling down my cheeks, listening to what this woman has had to endure from her tribe for standing tall.  For doing the right thing – country over party.[1]

“Think I’ll call him Savior,” because we all need a little help here.  We need a little help on the democracy front right here.  Actually, a lot of help!

Liz Cheney has sounded the clear, clarion call to her party to reject the lies and wackadoodle conspiracy theories swirling around the January 6^th insurrection.

In one of the most closely contested elections ever, she notes that Vice President Al Gore graciously conceded defeat.  But not Donald Trump!

The Former Guy riled up an enraged, armed mob to storm the House of Democracy.

“But by January 6, 2021, Donald Trump had consumed a good portion of almost every day in a rage:  inventing and spreading lies about election fraud, preying on the patriotism of his supporters, and telling them they had to ‘fight like hell’ if they wanted to save their country…

“Some of my Republican colleagues in the House were preparing to use Trump’s stolen-election lies as the basis for an unconstitutional attempt to overturn the election results.”[2]

Tears, streamed down my face.  It’s this sort of political courage that will save our democracy.

“Think I’ll call him Savior,” ‘cause we all need a little help down here.

And he pops up into history right at the time needed, when all has gone to rot.  In history, for God’s sake.  And for ours.

There he is in the stuff of daily existence.  We know the time.  Emperor Augustus is on the seat of power of the Roman Empire.  We know the place –one of the most out-of-the-way places, Nazareth.

And we know to whom:  to the most unlikely of women, actually, a young girl.  Most likely, barely sixteen or so.

Dropped down out from the birth canal right into the messy stuff of our world.  “Think I’ll name him Jesus, for he will save his people.”  Glory, Hallelujah!  And all the angels, stage left, are readying the refrain: “Glory, Hallelujah.

“Mary, Mary, Whatcha Gonna Call that Pretty Lil Baby?”

Think I’ll call him Emanuel, God with Us.

The present-day hammer of God sounding out danger, sounding out warning.

John, the Baptizer, got it right.  The ax is presently laid at the root tree of our human existence.  The planet heats up.  The planet floods up.  Misery is the menu item of the day.

The name might be “Emanuel” but this heavenly presence looks a lot like Jake Bittle, with his warning, The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration.

Our gracious present under the Yuletide tree is the prescient warning of disaster to come if we don’t Stop. Look. And Listen.  Read and heed, my dear friends.

We know of the Great Migration out of the South, fueled by Jim Crow.  How millions of newly freed African Americans fled the KKK and abject poverty for decent jobs and breathing room in the North.

Jake Bittle writes of a new Great Migration of the same magnitude now in the wings. This time, due to global warming.  The science is clear.  The time is now. The drowning Florida Keys are the canary in this coal mine. 

 A migration every bit as fraught as all the real stuff of history, as perilous as that of Mary and Joseph; forced to travel for a census enrollment in the City of David, Bethlehem.  That’s how this “God-with-us stuff always happens.  In bits and pieces.  Dribs and drabs. Emanuel!

Danger and promise, as Mary and Joseph begin their fateful journey.

A bumpy, donkey ride, as pastor Heidi Neumark characterizes it.  She recalls a donkey ride she and her son took down the Grand Canyon trail to the floorof the canyon.  A ride that caused her to imagine Mary’s ride to Bethlehem.[3]

Time to cue up Ferde Grofé’s “The Grand Canyon Suite” in your mind.

Pastor Neumark and the other travelers were sternly warned, “…the National Parks Service did not guarantee the safety of any participant and was not responsible for any injury, major or minor, brain damage or death, that might result from our journey.”[4]

They had to guarantee that they had no known serious health problems or heart conditions, weren’t afraid of heights and were not recently recovering from open-heart surgery.  And, especially, that NO ONE WAS PREGNANT!

And “if you can’t follow instructions and advice — If any of this scares you, get your refund and get out now!”  That was the park ranger’s parting shot.

Mary, Mary…such a long road to travel.  Watcha gonna call  your baby?

As Heidi and her son and their couple of donkeys plodded down to the floor of the canyon, she thought of Mary’s journey to Bethlehem.  

Once Mary’ had “said yes to the angel, she signed on for a trip with no way out. No chance to get out now and get her money back.”[5]

“Mary’s journey was just as uncomfortable [as mine]. She traveled on the edge, where injury and death are likely eventualities. The knowledge already pierced her heart. Did she turn her fearful gaze from her feet to the larger view—the seismic shifts in her womb, spectacular as a canyon carved with the signature of heaven?”[6]

Mary, Mary, whatcha gonna call your pretty lil’ baby.  Think I’ll call him Jesus ‘cause we all need a little saving down here.  Think I’ll call him Emanuel, ‘cause we definitely need God with us.  Think I’ll call him Prince of Peace, ‘cause our warfare has been long and we’re sick and tired of the hate.  Think I’ll call him Joy, for unto us He will be born a great joy.  Gloria!  Gloria!

“Think I’ll call him Jesus,” but he’s goina look a lot like you and me.

And, as Charles Wesley, quoting Philippians, put it, “Rejoice Again, I Say Rejoice.”   Amen.

---

[1] Liz Cheney, Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2023).

[2] Op. cit., 82.

[3]Heidi Newmark, “Mule Ride,” Christian Century, December 12, 2001.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

December 24, 2023
Christmas Eve

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Isaiah 9:2-4, 6-7; Psalm 96;
Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14

“Hey Mary, Whatcha Gonna Call That Baby?”

On November 18, on a clear, bright morning sky, the Starship, one of SpaceX’s efforts to launch humans towards Mars, hurtled into space from the Texas Boca Chica launchpad.  Within minutes of launch, failure of the main booster to separate led to the termination of the flight.

In the cold, clinical terms of science, the dispassionate control announcer informed us of the explosion – “It was a rapid unscheduled disassembly.”[1]  Talk about jargon!  This was a classic.

Isn’t that what this third Sunday, Mary’s Sunday, is about?  Here comes a most troubling revelation to any girl, an unexpected, unplanned pregnancy.  Her world is shattered, dissembled.  What sort of message might this be?

Through Mary we are now given a message, the Word from On High, of incredible “rapid unscheduled disassembly” – her world, our world,  will be turned upside down.  Grace and Hesed (loving kindness) rent the time continuum — God breaking through!

When told she will be pregnant without her consent, Mary is no shrinking violet.  She takes one step back and says to this intruder messenger, “Hold my beer and watch this.”

Whereupon she cuts loose with one of the most radical statements of Torah righteousness in all of scripture.”  Rapid unscheduled disassembly of the Principalities and Powers.  Total ruination of the haughty.

“He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.  He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek.  He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent empty away.”

“Sent empty away;” and in that wilderness perhaps they might be prepared to receive this message as one of joy and liberation for themselves as well.

The Advent landscape is wilderness.  Astronomical calamity with stars falling from the sky.  Mary’s shock at an uninvited change in her circumstances.  John the Baptist announcing to the surrounding cities both judgement and promise of one to come. 

A Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly of the current order.

It is more often out of the of desperation that we are prepared to perceive the new that is being born.  One who will reign with equity and justice awaits at the manger.  As one line of my favorite spiritual beckons to the weak and wounded, “If you tarry till you’re better, you will never come at all.”

Mary’s revelation is the inbreaking of God into history.  Soon and very soon is the time of the release of those imprisoned.  Addiction, violence, racism, impoverishment, sexism.  These chains are being cast aside.

To replace the ashes of despair, we are given a garland and the oil of gladness to run down our foreheads in rivulets.  This is on the doing of the Spirit of the Lord.  This is Mary’s promise.

Today is Mary’s Sunday.  Let us rejoice and be glad.  Light the pink candle.

As in times of old, God continues to raise up strong women on a mission.  Agents and harbingers of Rapid Unscheduled Dissembly.  Good news to the oppressed and a salve to the brokenhearted.  A couple I wish to celebrate this morning.  All blessings of God.

Yesterday, I saw the clip of two of those women who in the face of lies and defamation have stood up to the powerful.  And did the powerful ever look so pathetic.

Georgia election workers, Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, have had the courage in the national forum of public opinion and in the courtroom to challenge the lies and vituperation of Rudy Giuliani.  And how this powerful man has been cast down from his throne!  How about a $150 MILLION hit to the pocketbook to knock this duplicitous miscreant off his high horse!  That’s what the jury awarded last Friday.

These two courageous women did absolutely nothing to warrant the death threats and harassment at all hours of the night.  Despite all, these two patriotic women stand tall – beacons of democracy.  Ladies, you’re what this republic is all about.

If there is any salvation for our nation it will be due to this sort of lowly election workers who put in long hours for little pay and a lot of grief.  For us all.  They are God’s blessing to America!

I want to lift up a fearless labor organizer, Mother Jones.  She comes directly out of Roman Catholic spirituality.  Her family in Ireland was steeped in the teachings of the church.

Mother Jones grew up in an impoverished family, threatened with the fate of starvation during the time of the Irish Potato Famine in the 1850s.  Death was all about, forcing her father to migrate to America along with several million others.[2] 

One English writer, William Cobbett described the domestic conditions of those living in that Irish rural poverty.

“I went to a sort of hamlet near to the town of Midleton.  It contained 40 or 50 hovels.  I went into several of them…They all consisted of mud-walls, with a covering of rafters and straw…I took particular account of the first that I went into.  It was 21 feet long and 9 feet wide.  The floor, the bare ground…No table, no chair…Some stones for seats.  No goods but a pot, and a shallow tub, for the pig and the family both to eat out of…Some dirty straw and a bundle of rags were all the bedding…Five small children; the mother, about thirty…worn into half-ugliness by hunger and filth…”[3]

This destitution was not far from that which Mother Jones encountered in the hills and hollers of Appalachia.

When congressional stuffed shirts demanded to know her address, she responded, “My address is like my shoes – It’s wherever I am.”

What was that line about the Son of Man?  “The foxes have their holes and the birds of the air their nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”  Because, if born in our time, he would have been out there in the coal fields with Mother Jones causing “Necessary Trouble.”

It was out of this heritage of destitution – virtually nothing – that God raised up Mother Jones to become one of the most fearless labor leaders in West Virginia.  It wasn’t for nothing that she was labeled “The most dangerous woman in America.” 

Her model was the great humility and compassion of the Blessed Virgin.  In her persistence, showing up on most any picket line, speaking words of encouragement, suffering arrest and imprisonment for her activism, she was indeed an instrument of the Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly of the economic power of the coal oligarchs.

We celebrate today God’s gift of strong, prophetic women who persist.  They are our Christmas blessing.  They are redemption incarnate.

With these women of our Christian heritage, let us magnify the Lord that all might rejoice in a Savior to be born.

With these Fearless Ones, we, too, announce, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon US.  To proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Today we celebrate God’s gift of strong women who have looked oppression in the eye, taken one step back and said, “Hold my beer and watch this!  And light that PINK CANDLE!  Amen.

---

[1] “Starship Takes to the Skies Again,” New Scientist, December 1, 2023.  The launch can be watched on UTube.

[2] Elliott J. Gorn, Mother Jones: the Most Dangerous Woman in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 201).

[3] Op cit., 10, 11.

December 17, 2023
Advent 3

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Isaiah 61:1-4; 8-11; Canticle 3, PCP;
1Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8, 19-28 “A Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly”

In matters of the heart, when it comes to what deeply counts for the soul, Advent is mostly a season of Silence.  Oh, there is much background noise, grey noise. 

Like the traffic outside my hotel room in New York City at night – easily tuned out.  A minor distraction.

Sometimes the news breaks through, but only a story which leads us into the deep silence of an unspoken prayer, maybe deep longing, perhaps a regret. This is the holy silence of Advent.  If we truly are attuned to it.

I came home this last Sunday to a story of homelessness among college students.[1]  I wasn’t aware of how many of our impoverished students are living in their cars in order to afford an education.  In order to do better than their parents’ generation.

“Living in their cars, for God’s sake?” I thought.  Is this the best we all can do for these students working sometimes two jobs and at night typing up their assignments at night in a van.

It was a story of a group of students unable to afford campus housing finding community in a campus parking lot, G11, at Cal Poly Humboldt in Northern California.  Finding community until the school ordered them off campus.

The president of the college refused to meet with any of them, closing off any possible discussion of alternative solutions.  “Just be gone – we don’t care where,” was the official message.

With this, my Advent silence was filled with deep shame.   That we, the richest nation in the world, this is how we treat the “least of us?”  Shame and sadness overcame me.   The angel of Annunciation must be weeping.  Our hearts are nowhere prepared to receive the Prince of Peace.  “Love Divine” is far.  With the author of Isaiah in today’s reading, our lives are rent with sorrow and longing.

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence—as when[2] fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil—to make your name know to your adversaries, so that nations might tremble at your presence!”

Silence.  Waiting.

And in the meantime, we have much to answer for.  We’ve made hash of our priorities and a mess of the planet.

The other day at our common meal at Pilgrim Place, our friend Helen Dwyer read for the noon meditation a poem by another of our Pilgrims, Renny Golden, of her hometown Chicago and its river.  It is a tale of the deep stain we humans have left across the land.^[3]

We’ve come with shovels, dynamite, and bulldozers.  We’ve polluted with run-off oil from our streets, plastic bags and who-knows-what-else.  We’ve dammed and drained until the fish are gone, and only a fool would now eat any pulled from the muck.

And from that river, it could be mostly any river in America, silence.  And in our hearts, in our soul of souls, a silent yearning for what might have been.  What once was.  And if we have any humanity left at all – deep silence within.

“I spoke to the Chicago River today the way

I talk to God. Not begging. Grateful

as Potawatomi mothers dipping water gourds

“in dawn light, a nod to thank the river.

Who, what were you, I asked the river,

when you were tribal, pure, a companion?

“Silence, like God’s, not even a whisper.

We came with muskets, then shovels, then dynamite.

I asked forgiveness. The dog we kids let out

“near traffic. Its hind legs crippled.

This mutt river wounded with sewage,

oil, crop poison. Same sorrow.

Advent is of two messages – judgement, the need of repentance and the promise of restoration.  The babe in the manger grows up, and, if we’re fortunate, so do we in our spirituality.

The words of Isaiah, the promise of End Time Reckoning – this is far beyond nasal chipmunks singing happy Winterfest songs.

In this life not every participant gets a gold medal just for showing up.  To the degree we despoil God’s creation, we are all losers.  There may be no do-overs.  In the damage we do to one another, we are all losers.  With tears of repentance and forgiveness, sometimes a do-over.

The ersatz spirituality of shopping mall speakers blaired across aisles stacked with Christmas specials is no substitute for the biblical Advent message folks will hopefully hear in many of our churches.  If they have chosen wisely.

In his book, What is Vital in Religion, Harry Emmerson Fosdick relates the story of one man who has seen it all, one for whom the platitudes of an easy faith are an insult to the conscience and to the integrity of experience.  I fear this fellow speaks for much of modernity:

“I don’t know what I believe, but I don’t believe all this God is love stuff.  I have been in two world wars.  I have been unemployed eighteen months on end.  I have seen the Missus die of cancer.  Now I am waiting for the atom bombs to fall.  All that stuff about Jesus is no help.” [4]

The wanton slaughter of Palestinian civilians – women, children, the elderly — picks up pace again this morning.  An eerie silence from piles of rubble until we hear the shrieks of horror and sirens.

Truly, the dark night of the soul.  Silence shrouds our fears, the misery we nightly witness.  Repentance is the only authentic response possible.  The beginning of any authentic Advent journey.

These past weeks a friend, a former pastor of Downey First Christian Church, asked me to write a review for his recently published book, Acres of Oak.[5]   The title is taken from a quip by the senior pastor of a church he briefly served as an associate, Pilgrim Congregational Church in Pomona, referring to the rows of empty pews in many of our churches.  In his book, Pastor Rich narrates his story of his entering the ordained ministry and the congregations he has served, 

Pilgrim Church is a very large edifice with a good number of Sunday school rooms, all built with the expectation that when the kids left the Sunday school door, they would enter the sanctuary door.  Instead, they just migrated out the door, and shortly after, their parents followed.[6]

In his pilgrimage he has seen the mainline church become a mere vestige of what it once was in its former glory days.  One congregation he served in San Gabriel, Mayflower Congregational, founded by three breakaway splinter groups grew to over 900 in the 1960s.  Then with amazing rapidity the bottom fell out.

By the 1980s the membership had dropped some 600 members.   In 1984 the church had a remnant of only 52 pledging units.  Acres of oak, indeed.  And high maintenance demands. The world seems to presently have little need of what we once offered.

Even seemingly healthy mega evangelical churches are being rent asunder by conflicting loyalties – to the Former Guy, or to our Lord Jesus Christ.  Their youth leaving in droves over this conflict.

These are tough times. Our world, like that of Herrod, is in great anguish.  The birth pangs of what we cannot yet fathom. 

Expectancy mixed with dread fills the silence of our souls as we scan the morning papers over coffee.  No easy answers.  Certainly not from happy Jesus music or holiday extravaganzas.

This Advent, at St. Francis, we will gather once more, read the ancient texts, await fulfillment in the silence of passing days. Or maybe join in plaintive hymn: “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile here…”  And we will work for a better tomorrow for the “least of these.” 

But we sing our hymns together in solidarity; and in that I find hope.  Hope as small and as powerful as in a tiny baby laid in a manger.  Amen.

---

[1] Debbie Truong, “Living in their Cars to Afford College,” Los Angeles Times, November 27, 2023

[2] Isaiah 64:1-2, NRSV.

[3] Renny Golden, The Music of Her Rivers (Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 2019), 77.

[4] Harry Emmerson Fosdick, What is Vital in Religion (New York: Harpers Brothers, 1955), 1.

[5] Richard Kurrasch, Acres of Oak: A Pastor Rethinks Church in the 21^st Century (Chicago: Windy City Publishers, 2023).

[6] Op. cit., 61-62.

December 3, 2023
Advent 1

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Isaiah 64:1-9; Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18;
“What the River Said;” Mark 13:24-37

“Mostly Silence”

If you’re my age, you know where you were.  You know where you were when JFK was shot in that motorcade in Dallas, Texas.  You know where you were when Dr. King was gunned down on that balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.  You know where you were when those planes flew into the World Trade Tower in New York City on September 11th.

Some tragedies indelibly are etched in memory, living with us throughout the rest of our natural lives.  The pictures at times unexpectedly flashing before our eyes, unbeckoned.  Blindsiding us in moments of vulnerability.

Sometimes it’s a private, family tragedy, like the day my mom called to tell me my father had had another heart attack and was now in Long Beach Memorial Hospital.  He had somehow survived that one; it was his fourth. 

“No, don’t fly back here, he’s recovering.  The doctors say he’ll make it.”

“Be sure and call us every day, and if he takes a turn for the worse, “I’ll be there.”

Mom had waited a few days to call.  Like many families, ours did not do well with bad news.

There are times, public and private, when the bottom just drops out.  Hope dies.  With bated breath time stands still.  When just getting out of bed seems an insurmountable obligation of the day.

It is on those days we desperately long for a way forward.  A word of hope.  The message of faith that this is not the end.

This past week, at a preaching conference put on by our Episcopal magazine, the “Living Church,” a group of a little over a hundred of us, clergy and lay, wrestled with our most difficult of assignments – preaching the Word of God. 

We had three bishops at the conference.  One of those, on being introduced from Saskatchewan, gave the following advice: “The best way to accommodate a bishop in ceremonial functions is to assume he’s blind, he can’t hear, he smells, and he doesn’t know what’s going on.”

Now, Jai said that this story doesn’t really fit in here, but it’s too good to pass up – a preacher’s prerogative.

Preaching today — on the face of it, how presumptuous!  To speak for God!?  Especially in a secular age, when such seems most irrelevant.  A task so inconsequential as the world rushes on.  Often, from one catastrophe to another.

And THAT’S exactly why our task is so utterly important – to bring a message of hope and redemption.  To speak to the heart and the mind.  To bring a message that binds up and renews!

Our minds, our hearts, as of late have been transfixed by the calamity unfolding in Gaza and Israel.  Every evening on our TV screens, tragic, sorrowful remnants of families are interviewed, asked to go through their loss one more time.  “How was it in the midst of that music festival, running for your life as all about you your friends were being slaughtered by Hamas gunmen?”  “What do you want to say to those who have kidnapped your three-year old daughter?”  One more day of disaster porn.

Images of total and absolute destruction of Gaza flash on the screen over and over.  Paramedics rushing hopeless cases through piles of rubble, gray with the settling dust of an overnight bombing.  Scenes of distraught survivors picking through mounds of broken concrete, desperately hunting for lost loved ones.

For families on both sides, the End of the World.  Waiting for news that never comes.

And we who watch this unfolding tragedy from across an ocean, from miles away – yes, we’re caught up in the sorrow as well.  If we have any heart at all.  If we haven’t lost our soul.

And we who watch this serial disaster unfold, we wonder, what of our complicity?  Will we find our nation before the World Court, forced to answer for our role in this slaughter of innocents?

Honest contemplation forces us to consider the seeds of this disaster.  It was years in the making.  Since the founding of the State of Israel.  The foundation for some and the nakba, the catastrophe, for others.  As one writer has put it, “The Too-Much Promised Land.”  So many hopes pinned on one small piece of real estate.

How does one preach a word of hope in such a world?  Let alone the Word of God?

A young seminarian is said to have asked the great theologian Karl Barth: what could be preached after the news came of Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany.  What saving word was there to be said?  Barth responded, “Preach as if nothing happened.” 

God’s Word transcends the daily setbacks with a Vision Glorious – the enduring Word of God’s purpose for a restored world, restored relationships.  Take this message to Herr Hitler.

Coming out of Babylonian captivity, the Psalmist could proclaim:

“Come, let us sing to the Lord; let us shout for joy to the Rock of our salvation.  Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving and raise a loud shout to him with psalms.”

Such vision has pulled us through the muck and mire of daily tragedy.  Even decades-long disaster.

Reading of those Conductors on the Underground Railroad, they were guided by such hope.  Cold, wet, terrified.  Leading small bands on the journey from slavery, with the baying of vicious dogs of the trackers on their heels.  Follow the Drinking Gourd.  Following that constellation to a dreamt of future.  No guarantees, only keep one foot going in front of the other.  Breath searing aching lungs.

And what inspired them?  it was the faith of a Risen Christ proclaimed and put into action.  A gospel literally with feet.  It was the belief that human beings are meant for something better than drudgery and degradation.  Recited at church Sunday after Sunday, in prayer meetings, and in the hymns your mother sang while at her daily chores about the house or in the field.

And here’s the secret – we all get there together.  On that Last Day, on that “Great Getting Up Day in the Morning,” gathered into glory, only one question – did you give your sister, your brother a helping hand?  That’s the only question on your Final Exam.  Did you give a care for the very least? 

Today we celebrate the consummation of what this whole Christianity thing is all about – The Reign of Christ.  We celebrate a Vision Glorious where all will be seated at the Table of God’s Plenitude.  A seat for all.  Yes, ALL MEANS ALL!

Each one of us who follows that crucified carpenter from Nazareth is commissioned to be a Conductor on this Railroad of Freedom, this Railroad of Promise.  “Get on board, little chillun.”

It is this vision, this hope, shared with friend, family and stranger that daily sustains.  This is what, on our best days, we would preach.  And in this Vision is Salvation.  Amen.

November 26, 2023
Last Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 29
Christ our Sovereign

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24; Psalm 95:1-7a;
Ephesians 1:15-23; Matthew 25:31-46

“A Vision Glorious”

As I often say, I especially love All Saints Day because with grateful hearts we receive the blessings of God through the lives of so many who have built us up.  These are the ones who’ve helped us to thrive.  Or like my 11^th grade English teacher Mrs. Reiner who did her darnedest on my behalf.

George Regas called these folks his “balcony people” — those living and those who cheer us on from beyond the grave.  They urge us to pull out our best stuff.  They instill confidence and expect that we will strive always to do the honorable thing.  Even when the cost is high.  These are the people who have invested in us.  Because of them we are far better than we might have been, left to our own devices.  These are the Saints of God, a few of whom I want to highlight.

In short, the Saints are those who have brought us along with them that we might thrive.  Their victories are our victories.  They are testimony to the basic truth:  We are all One.

You’ve known them – a parent or other family member who believed in you.  A teacher or maybe a scout leader.  It might have been a neighbor down the street.  Or someone at work.

I want to mention Ruth Jean Simmons.  Ruth, born in 1945, grew up in a Black East Texas sharecropping family.  The last of twelve, the baby of the family.  She not only rose far beyond what life expected of her, but returned that gift to her many students later on.[1]

Her family’s house — actually, “shack,” — in Daly, not much more than a wide spot in the road, had no running water, the only heat being provided by the woodburning stove in the kitchen.

She worked in the cotton fields, beginning at the age of six.  The work was backbreaking and consumed most of her waking days and those of her other family members.  Restricted to purchasing at the company store on the farm, families would sink further and further into debt.

This is what life had laid out for Ruth Jean Simmons.  Her foreseeable future, until she would die.  A life of unending toil, dwelling in a land of ignorance and Jim Crow racism.

Her hope for something better came from her church and the hymns they sang.  They resonated with the promise of something better than endless toil and hardship.

Recitations were one activity young Ruth delighted in.  The passages she memorized for this activity, especially the verses about the Passion and Resurrection embodied hope.

“Come and see the place where he lay,” was an invitation to the imagination to conger up a time of liberation of Blacks from their earthly burdens.

“Even as a child, I understood that these passages gave hope to all of us who sought signs of change from segregation and discrimination.  When churches staged programs and gave us the opportunity to recite stories of deliverance, I understood that these performances were giving sustenance and meaning to many of the famers attending the services.”[2]

It was her Sunday school teachers that opened up the meaning of the Bible to her, and the sermons she heard.  It was the hymns which gave comfort and promise of a better future. 

These comforting hymns her mother often sang through the weekdays of her unremitting toil.  “In the Garden,” “Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah,” and “Jesus, keep me near the Cross,” were among her favorites.

Because she lived on a school-bus line on Highway 19 after the family moved to Latexo and truancy laws were more strictly enforced, Ruth, unlike her siblings, regularly attended school.

There she encountered one teacher who would set her on the path to an unimaginable future: Miss Ida Mae Henderson.

“Accustomed to my family calling me ‘you ole big-eyed girl!’ I found it remarkable that this woman greeted me with ‘Hello, precious!’ or ‘good morning, baby!’  By telling me that I was valued and speaking to me in this way, she invited me into a world of mystery and magic.”[3]

Ruth remembers the classroom as something special, from the brilliant lighting that was unaffordable in her home to the order of all the desks in a neat row.  More importantly, she had her own desk, her own private space just for her.  And laid out on that desk were all the materials to begin her education.  The whole setup indicated that something very important was to happen here.  This room seemed like magic to a child coming from a house where there was not enough furniture for everyone to have a place to sit.

She recounts, “Everything seemed possible with Miss Ida Mae.”  From that teacher Ruth received the first praise she had known as a child. “Her words made me feel like a unique person rather than an appendage to my family.”[4]

Much later in life Ruth Simmons would be invited back to the little community of Grapeland, the home of that first school.  The invitation came from one of the prominent white churches, a church that back in the day allowed no Blacks in Sunday worship.  This for a program held in her honor.

And up came a very frail Miss Ida Mae.  “I was overwhelmed to see this woman who had set me on the path to a career in education.  She had introduced me to the simple premise that the life and exercise of the mind bestowed enormous power and promise.  She provided me a beacon that guided me toward achievement through education.”

“She was the incarnation of all that it means to be a teacher, a mentor, a guide.  Ever hopeful about what human beings can achieve through learning.”[5]

Saints Alive!  If you were fortunate, you also remember a teacher like Miss Ida Mae Henderson.  Or you had a mother like Ruth’s who sacrificed to make sure you had the basic necessities for school.  But more than that, a mother who taught you discernment.  Ruth, as a young girl, would aspire to “be able, like Mama, to be as observant or as discerning.”

Years later at a ceremony at Harvard, where she had earned her PhD in Romance Languages and Literature, Ruth sat on the stage listening to the encomiums lauding her accomplishments as president of Smith College and later Brown University — the first Black woman to have ever reached this pinnacle of academic achievement, wondering how on earth she got there.  “How did I end up here?”

There she sat, musing about the “improbability of the moment.”   It was through a life’s journey graced with saints galore who sped her along the way.  Saints who had paved the way through their own accomplishments and perseverance, and then given back.

As I sat in Decker Auditorium on All Saints Day as we at Pilgrim Place celebrated the lives of those saints in our midst who are now no longer with us in body, gratitude welled up in my soul as candles were processed up the aisle for those who had nurtured us along the way.  My old ethics professor Joe Hough, an iconoclastic hero who taught me community organizing.  Dean Freudenberger, an agricultural missionary in Africa who returned to teach those skills at my seminary.  Saints galore flooded my being as tears flooded my eyes.

We celebrate those family and friends who have been part of our common life here at St. Francis.  Testifying that we all are One, in the benevolent embrace of one Lord.  Amen.

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[1] Ruth J. Simmons, Up Home: One Girl’s Journey (New York: Random House, 2023).

[2] Op.cit., 43.

[3] Op.cit, 68

[4] Op. Cit., 69.

[5] Op.cit. 72.

November 5, 2023
All Saints Sunday

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Revelation 7:9-17; Psalm 34:1-10, 22
1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 22:15-22

“One Lord, One People”

Again, I’m amazed at how uncanny it is that the Holy Spirit seems to continue to be working in overdrive.  This past week I just got our taxes in under the wire – with all that was going on we absolutely had to get an extension.  So, October 18 was the bewitching hour.

I remember back to when I had taken over much of the financial aspects of my parent’s construction and real estate company.  I had opened a letter from the California State Franchise Board.  Mail from these people is never good.

It turned out that Dad owed them around three hundred dollars and some odd change.  This was for his share of the employees overhead for about two years previous.  Dad was absolutely insistent that this was all a mistake.  Their mistake! 

I would spend hours on interminable hold attempting to contact someone so this issue could be resolved.  Dad would not be mollified until every last stone was turned over.

We went down to their regional office in Long Beach and spent, I can’t tell you how many hours, while Dad attempted to convince the woman at the counter that he was right.  He really didn’t owe them anything.

It’s no wonder that the Plexiglas window was one inch thick.  They probably get a lot of irate taxpayers like my father.

Finally, after we got home, he somewhat settled down.  My arguments forecasting impending doom and confiscation made an impression.  I had reminded him of the adage of our high school government teacher, Mr. Marchek, “The power to tax is the power to destroy.”  And how dictatorships have most effectively used this mechanism to eliminate their opponents.  This was one fight he was not going to win.

Grudgingly, though he wasn’t going to pay this “unfair and outrageous” tax bill and penalties, he would acquiesce to my writing the company check to satisfy the “greedy so-and-sos.”

Matthew tells the story of religious authorities coming to Jesus with the question about the obligation to pay taxes off to Rome, the colonizing power of their land.  This was a highly provocative question for two reasons.  First, given the brutality of Roman occupation, any payment or cooperation with their demands would be seen as collaboration with a hated enemy.  Second, the face on the Roman coin to pay the tax was that of an infidel who claimed to be divine, who claimed the titles of divinity proper to a god.  To handle this coin was to become ritually unclean.  Haram!  Definitely not kosher.

So here come these pompous leaders thinking to trap Jesus.  Hypocrisy dripping from their lips like honey:

“’Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality.  Tell us, then, what do you think.  Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?’”

“But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, ‘Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites?  Show me the coin used for the tax.’  And they brought him a denarius.  Then he said to them, ‘Whose head is this, and whose title?’”

And you know the rest. “Give to Caesar the things that are Caeser’s and to God the things that are God’s.”

Just whose face is on that coin?

In a democracy it’s all our faces.  All of us!

My friend at lunch the other day said, “If it’s true that it takes a village, then it’s up to all of us to make sure the streets are swept and in good repair, that the sewage and water systems are functioning and that there are decent schools to educate our children.”

Community is a gift of God.  It is up to us to exercise good stewardship of our common life together – paying the bills.  That, in part, means providing the necessary financial as well as the political support.  It means behaving in a civil manner towards one another and accepting our obligations to participate in the process.  It means constructive criticism – and causing “Necessary Trouble” as a last resort.

When serving on the Planning Commission of our town of Ridgecrest, CA, for a number of meetings we were dealing with the owner of a lumber yard.  He didn’t want to adhere to the zoning regulations or pay the required fees for operating his business.

At the last meeting dealing with this obstreperous fellow and his refusal to pay the required fees, our city councilwoman, Florence Green, in exasperation said, “Listen we’ve got to run the city one way or another; which pocket do you want us to take it out of?”

It’s up to us.  It’s our face on that coin.

And I consider it a blessing to pay taxes – it means I’m making money.  Look at it that way if you don’t accept theological persuasion.

Through our common civic endeavors, sometimes amazing excellence breaks out.

I attended an inner-city high school in Long Beach, California, Poly High.  “The Home of Scholars and Champions.”  It was located in one of the poorest, most racially diverse parts of town.

And while our sports teams took home more than their fair share of CIF state victories, a new principal arrived on the scene who academically made all the difference.

She developed within that high school a magnet school for science and math.  That endeavor allowed, and still allows, Poly to send more students to UCLA than any other school in California.  This, from the poorest section of town!

This degree of academic excellence has been underwritten by our taxes and civic support.  Sometimes, we get what we pay for.

Driving through the roads of Connecticut this past week, I noted that they all looked like they had been freshly paved.  No potholes and the lane markings were fresh.  Even on country roads way out of town.  Not anything like our disastrous roads in California which are one big pothole.  Yes, their taxes are a bit higher.  Again, you get what you pay for.

We are Caesar in a democracy.  It’s not only our face on that coin, but it’s our schools and highways, our government services from fire, police to post offices and senior citizen centers.  After-school programs and decent jails, prisons and reintegration programs for those being released.

Our faces on that coin.  All to be counted a blessing.

Should we pay taxes?

As one businessman has said, “I don’t mind giving fifty percent of what I make back to the American people because they give me one hundred percent of what I earn.”

But of course, we need to monitor as to how our money is spent.  And sometimes we get it flat-out wrong.  Like investing in a possible candidate for Speaker of the House of Representatives who has no accomplishments to his name except vituperation.  A person who authored only four bills in some sixteen years and not a one of them has been enacted into law.  Someone who in that brief trip from an assistant wrestling coach is now worth over $30 million.  And for all that, what we got was election denial and the support of an insurrection against the U.S. government!  This, the would-be leader of the Chaos Caucus.  So, for weeks to come, and for weeks into the foreseeable future NOTHING GETS DONE!

A pretty poor result for his hefty congressional salary and whatever funds he can grift off his campaign coffers.  We’ve got to watch the purse.  It’s our head on that coin, and this man would represent us.

No more million-dollar toilets in Air Force jets, or hammers costing hundreds of dollars.  The fact that the Pentagon budget has not been, and apparently cannot, be audited ought to in itself raise red flags about fiscal responsibility.  As I said several Sundays ago, quoting Reagan, “Trust BUT verify.”  It’s our head on that coin.  It’s our money.  It’s our future at stake.

Yes, there will be mistakes.  I’ve made my share of them.  But God’s gift to us is each other and the common endeavor we share.  Always to perfect and renew.

I close with James Baldwin’s take on our responsibility to one another.  That’s a Torah gift and a Gospel demand.  That we can work it out together is both a Gospel gift and a Gospel obligation.

Listen to Baldwin in his essay, “Nothing Personal.”  He says:

For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; The earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us.  The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.[1]

As St. Paul enjoins those of us in the Jesus Movement, “Rejoice with those who rejoice” …and, to paraphrase Tom Bodet’s Motel 6 commercial, “We’ll keep the lights on for you.”  Amen.

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

October 22, 2023
21 Pentecost, Proper 24 The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Isaiah 45:1-7; Psalm 96:1-9
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10; Matthew 22:15-