Gender Pronouns And The Challenges of These Days

      My congregation worshiped this last Sunday with three other congregations.  During this pandemic time my congregation has done our worship through YouTube, while many others have been worshipping through Zoom.  So this Sunday, in what was a great change for my congregation, we joined the others through a Zoom worship time.  Several of my parishioners noticed that many of the members and pastors of the other churches had their pronouns listed after their names, "Joe Smith, (he/him)"  "Jane Doe (they/them)" for example.  So at our regular Zoom coffee hour the question came up.  "Why were they doing this?"  "What does it mean?"  "How can an individual be 'they/them' which I've always understood to be plural?"

    Oh, boy.  Good, light, fun coffee hour conversation for the day.

    So I did my best to explain. After all, one of my own children now chooses "they/them" pronouns to self-identify.  If the church cannot get behind them and support them in their self-understanding and self-identification, the church will lose a really good, committed, wise human being.  And probably their siblings as well.  It was past time to have the conversation.  

    So we talked.  I shared about what it meant to be transgender, non-conforming, non-binary, fluid, etc.: that some people simply don't fit into the categories of male and female as we understand them.  Some of this is genetic: folk with XXY or XYY genders aren't going to be "female" or "male" as we understand them.  But as I'm learning from my child, this goes far beyond that.  For my child, there is a problem with being identified primarily by gender before any other identification occurs.  They are not first seen as "person", they are first seen as "female" and they no longer want that.  They want to be freed from gender ideas and gender categories to just simply be who they want to be, who they are, as a unique individual, a person, a human.

    I will be honest and name that this one has been a challenge for me.  At first, I worried that we were taking a step backwards.  The first wave of feminists fought hard for women to get the vote.  The second wave fought hard to allow women to work and to be in roles that previously had been restricted to men alone.  My generation wanted women to be accepted as being whoever and whatever we wanted to be, still as women.  And I was afraid that when my child said they no longer wanted to be identified as female because it felt restrictive, that we were reverting and going back to a time when "female" was so specific and so regulated that women could no longer be whatever and whoever they wanted except to declare themselves NOT female.  My child and I went around and around on this.  Was all our work in trying to say we could be women and still be and do anything we wanted  - was all of that for nothing?  

    I also struggled because this, my eldest child, is so very feminine in so many ways.  They usually wear long, flowy dresses. Their hair is very long and they like to put it in new and artistic styles.  They wear necklaces always, and love pretty things.  They are so much more classically female than I ever was, and yet they no longer want to be identified primarily as female.  I struggled to understand this.

    But I have done the work.  I have had the conversations.  My child is articulate, and smart.  They are wise and clear.  And I have finally heard them and come to understand that this is the next step.  This is the next frontier in allowing people to be who they are, in seeing them in their individuality and uniqueness.  

    Still, it was because of my own struggle that I understood the struggles my congregants were having with this.  I found myself remembering that as a young person, when Lesbian/Gay rights first came into focus, that some of my own grandparents said, "This is too much.  I cannot make this change.  I am being pushed too far this time."  They'd struggled to accept racial equalities, the movement towards more gender equality.  They'd struggled but had understood.  But this next one, pushing to accept that people had different sexual orientations, and that this was okay - this felt too hard.  For me and my peers, acceptance of same-gender relationships had not been an issue.  It was a no-brainer to see that who a person loved didn't matter, as long as the relationship was mutual and consensual.  Why should a person be limited on who they love by gender?  I frankly didn't begin to understand why people were having issues with this at all.  In what way does it negatively impact anyone for someone to love someone else?  In what ways am I affected at all by the choices people make in their partners except that I am blessed by seeing another happy, in-love couple?  Of course we need to push for acceptance of their rights to love whomever they are called and invited to love!

    But I also had enough wisdom to wonder what the next frontier, then, would be.  Where will I be challenged?  Where would be the edges that would confront me?  At what point will I say, "I am too old to change on this one."  And "I can't take this next step."  

    I've written before that I believe life is about challenge, is about growing, is about becoming the most whole we can be, and that includes being able to see others as the unique individuals they are.  It means learning to support and love one another across our differences, across the "walls" that we have put up.  We put things in categories to make sense of the world.  But the work of being an adult, a person on-the-way, a person called to love all of our neighbors as ourselves, is the work of then breaking down the very categories we have created so that we can see each other as the unique children of God that each of us is.  

    And so, while I heard my grandparents say "I am too old to change on this," that is a phrase I never, ever want to utter for myself.  I know challenges will continue to come.  That is the nature of being a human being in the 21st century.  But those challenges are what life is about: they give us the chance to grow, to deepen, to become more fully and wholly the people we are called to be.

    I also heard my grandparents say, "This may divide us even further."  "This may break us apart as a country."  Well, we are already broken apart as a country.  We are.  And it will only divide us further as we choose to let it do so.  To deny people rights because we are afraid it will upset some people is not a good justification to me.  It never has been.  It never will be.  In this case, to not listen, to not move on this, to refuse to allow people to choose their own identities is to deny people the right to self-identify, to figure out who they are and to claim it for themselves.  

    My child, along with all of those who do not choose to self-identify in terms of gender (or anything else for that matter) as we would first have them do, is still a beautiful, deeply loved child of God.  And we are called to love them as we love ourselves.  That's the bottom line.  Always.  That's our call from God at every step of the way.  To love them as I love myself means to allow them their own journey, to support them in their own walk, and to take on myself the burden of seeing them for who they are claiming they are, not as I would want to see them for my own comfort.  

    I found myself reminded of the Kahlil Gibran writing "On Children" (The Prophet. New York: Alfred A Knopf. 1995, p 17)

    "Your children are not your children.

    They are the sons and daughter’s of Life’s longing for itself.

    They come through you but not from you,

    And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

    You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

    For they have their own thoughts.

    You may house their bodies but not their souls,

    For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

    You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

    For life goes not backward nor tarries from yesterday.

    You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

    The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

    Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;

    For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable."

    This is not about me.  This is about them and their ability to walk their own path towards wholeness.  The only question I have to ask myself is will I support this person in their journey or will I choose judgment and rejection instead?  And once again, this is a no-brainer.  I love my child more than my own life.  And I will do whatever is necessary to support them in being whole, being full, being themself.  I know that I will benefit from that choice as well, as I learn to let go of judgment, pre-conceptions, and the needs to categorize, box and label others.  As I let go of judgment of others, I also release more self-judgment and that can only be a good thing.  

    I know this isn't an easy step for folk.  And people will find ways to justify their resistance.  Some will claim it is against God's will (which is not at all biblical, by the way.  That's for another conversation, however).  Some will claim it is against nature.  People usually do try to find justifications for their own inability to be open, to change.  But again, I cannot choose that for myself.  I have to choose love.  It is what God calls us to do.  And in this case, that starts very much at home.

Jesus Came For the Lost

 

John 12:20-33

Luke 18:31-19:10 

 

               Today we have three very packed stories back to back.  In the first, we hear Jesus’ final prediction about his death and resurrection, stating he will be rejected by the religious leadership, given over to human hands, and finally given to the political powers of the time who would kill him.  In the second section we hear about the healing of the blind man, and in the third we have the story of Zacchaeus.  And once again, while the stories are separate, are different, they are also related to one another and all center around the question of seeing, of blindness, and of the salvation that comes just from being open in our sight. 

               The religious authorities, as we know, were completely blind to the good that Jesus was bringing.  They feared him, they feared his sway over the people, they feared his radical ideas about inclusion and love of even those others despised.  They would reject him because he threatened the life that they were comfortable with, he threatened their way of doing things.  And because of all of this, they were blind.  The disciples, too, were blind.  Jesus talked to them again and again about what was going to happen and the fact that he would be killed.  But, as we are told throughout the gospels and here, once more, “But the Twelve understood none of these words. The meaning of this message was hidden from them and they didn’t grasp what he was saying.”  The people in the crowd were blind as Jesus passed through.  When the blind man was calling out for his help, the people in the crowd just kept trying to shush the blind man, failing to see that his care was Jesus’ concern, his well-being was Jesus’ well-being, and, indeed, theirs as well. 

               In the gospel reading from John we see a similar situation.  A voice from heaven calls down “I have glorified my name and I will do it again.”  And the people not only can’t see, they also don’t hear.  “it’s thunder.”  “An angel spoke to him.”  As Jesus said, the invitation to see, the invitation to hear, this is not for Jesus’ sake.  It is not for God’s sake.  It is for ours.  But seeing, hearing is difficult, especially if we don’t WANT to see or hear.  If we don’t like what is being said, seeing and hearing can just feel too hard. 

               In great irony and in great contrast to all of this we have the blind man, who, though he cannot see physically, understands who Jesus is and what he is capable of.  In his vision, then, and in his humility, he cries out to Jesus for help.  Jesus asks him what he wants done for him, and in this, too, the man has clear sight.  He wants to see.  He knows who Jesus is and he knows what he wants and needs.  In response to that sight, then, Jesus gives him what he asks for.

               Then we come to the story of Zacchaeus.  Zacchaeus was a chief tax collector, meaning he worked for the Roman system: an agent of the state, a Jew turned oppressor of his own people. People hated him, but probably would take his job if they could.  He had income, a job, was “rich”.   All tax collectors, by definition, at that time, were wealthy; they purchased the right to collect taxes and profit from what they charged above what people owed the empire. When some tax collectors asked John the Baptist, "Teacher, what should we do?" he said, "Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you" (3:12-13), which effectively put them out of business.  But somehow Zacchaeus had sight.  He knew that making a living wasn’t the same as making a life.  He had sight into that.  The story said he was of short stature.  It’s possible that this is literally true.  But some commentators suggest that the “short stature” was actually a metaphor, a way of saying that he was blocked from equal participation in the community because of his career. 

Either way, he was an outcast, he was not encouraged to have access to Jesus.  He was blocked, either because of his height or because of his career.  And yet, he, saw Jesus.  He climbed the tree to get sight, he made his own access to seeing Jesus.  Still, I’m certain he did not expect Jesus to call to him, did not expect Jesus to respond.  And then, here, is a very interesting part of the story.  The Common English Bible translates Zacchaeus’ words this way, ““Look, Lord, I give half of my possessions to the poor. And if I have cheated anyone, I repay them four times as much.”  Do you hear something different in this than you might have heard before?  This is not a future tense thing.  This is not a declaration about how he will change his behavior.  This is a statement about what he is doing now, what he HAS been doing.  In the face of this, those being confronted and asked to change their behavior are not the Zacchaeuses of the world.  It is those around him. 

As the Commentary Feasting on the Word said it, “If one takes seriously this reading of the text, …the issue is not Zacchaeus's conversion at all, but the unfair and harsh judgment of the observers, who see Zacchaeus as a sinner. In this light, then, Jesus' statement that Zacchaeus too is a "son of Abraham," that he is a good Jew, is a defense of Zacchaeus against those who judge him to be a sinner and therefore outside the faith. … Zacchaeus, … is outcast by reason of his occupation. Although he apparently has considerable wealth and, presumably, considerable power as chief tax collector, he too is treated as an outcast, a sinner, by the same religious leaders who condemn Jesus for healing a woman on the Sabbath and going home with a notorious tax collector.” – (Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary - Feasting on the Word – Year C, Volume 4: Season After Pentecost 2 (Propers 17-Reign of Christ).)

               Remember what we talked about last week: that Jesus actually talks more about money and possessions than anything else.  And here it is in a practical way.  This story shows us it is not enough to believe: a genuine encounter with the Christ we meet in scripture is life-changing.  It will change you.  It does change you.  Zacchaeus understands that.  Again, to quote from Feasting on the Word, “Luke's concern for the proper use of wealth is no mere indictment of rich people or an ascetic preference for poverty. It is a matter of distributive justice.  Before Jesus is born, his mother praises God for filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty-handed (1:53). Jesus' blessing of the poor with the promise that they will be rich has a corresponding woe to those who are wealthy, because they have already received their consolation (6:24). The parables of the Rich Fool (12:13-21), the Dishonest Manager (16:1-13), and the Rich Man and Lazarus (16:19-31) all highlight the danger that personal wealth both easily becomes an idol and also can deprive others of what they need.  The story of the Sabbath banquet ends with Jesus' saying, "When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed" (14:12-14). God has designed wealth to be shared, something the ruler in 18:18-23 learned to his great sorrow. This is why Jesus says, "Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God" (18:25).

Again, Zacchaeus understands this.  And he is acting differently.  He is acting in a way that saves many people.  He is working for the empire, collecting taxes, in a way that does NOT harm the people.  But still they can’t see him accurately, they can’t see Jesus accurately, and so both Jesus and Zacchaeus are condemned by the people, by the legal experts, by the pharisees, because of their blindness.

               What helps us to see?  In today’s stories, people come to Jesus in different ways.  The blind man calls out to him.  Zacchaeus climbs a tree to see him and Jesus calls to him.  The ways in which people come to Christ differ: they are person dependent: they rely on God’s knowledge of each of us as the individuals we are.  But they all do have something in common.  On the part of those saved, what they have in common is humility.  In contrast to the religious experts and pharisees who think they got it all right, think they understand it all, think they have it all figured out, the blind man knows he needs help beyond himself.  And Zacchaeus, too, knows he needs to see Jesus: again that having a living and having a life are not the same things.

               Do we have this same humility?  Do we have trouble calling out to ask for what we need, what we want?  Do we even have trouble recognizing what it is that we truly need or want?  Do we have the humility to ask for help when it is there to be given? I think about Jesus asking the blind man what he wanted.  Jesus needed to know that the blind man could see what he needed in order for Jesus to be able to truly help him.  Can we see what we need?

               I found myself remembering the wonderful movie “Family Man”.  In this movie, Jack Campbell thinks he has it all.  He is the CEO of an exclusive company, he lives in a beautiful penthouse and is wealthy beyond imagining.  He is single but because he is good looking and wealthy, he can have any woman he wants and he does, on a regular basis.  When he goes out on Christmas Eve to pick up egg nog, though, he encounters a racist shopkeeper who will not honor a lottery ticket win because the person with the ticket is African American.  The African American man pulls out a gun and in anger tells the shop keeper to actually look at the ticket he’s rejecting before refusing to pay it.  Jack tries to step in to help and the African American man turns the gun on him, asking him if he wants to die.  Jack says “no”, offers to pay the man for the ticket, and helps everyone calm down and become centered.  As they leave the shop, Jack says to the black man, “What do you want to carry a gun around for anyway?  You’re just going to wind up doing something you’ll regret.  There must be programs out there and opportunities.”  The man responds, “You’re talking to the wrong person about regrets, Jack.” 

Jack goes on, “I’m not saying it wouldn’t take some hard work.  A lot of hard work, and maybe some medication…” But then the other man starts to laugh.  He says, “Wait a minute.  This is bananas.”  He turns his face to the sky and shouts, “This man thinks I need to be saved, yo!” 

Jack says, “Well, everybody needs something.” To which the man says, “And what do you need, Jack?”  Jack says, “Well, me?  I got everything I need!”  The man, laughing, says, “Wow, it must be great being you.”  And then he continues, “You know I’m going to really enjoy this.  You just remember that you did this, Jack.  You brought this on yourself.  Merry Christmas.”  And he walks away.

As the movie progresses, we learn that the African American man was actually an angel, and he gives Jack the gift of a “glimpse” – a sight into a life he might have had, had he made different choices.  The glimpse takes up most of the movie, but in the end, Jack realizes that what he thought he needed, what he thought he wanted, what he thought mattered to him, what he thought he valued, was not what would make him happy, whole, complete.  He came to see,  but not without a great deal of pain, struggle, and deep self-reflection.

               Jesus states that he came to save the lost.  But this is not a future tense saving.  This is a saving NOW: he saves the blind man from loss of sight.  He saves Zacchaeus and indeed many of the outcasts from their isolation, their condemnation, their exclusion.  He does this now.  And he lets his disciples know ahead of time so that they will understand that they are called to continue the work.  In the revised common lectionary for this week, we hear from the gospel of John that unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it can only be a single seed.  But if it dies, it bears much fruit…. Whoever serves me must follow me.”  It is in the growing of his community, in the spreading of the seed of truth, of love, that salvation comes to all of us.  But again, that is for NOW.  We are not called to wait to end suffering for people.  We are called to follow Jesus and end it now. 

And that starts with our own humility.  Our own ability to cry out,  “Have mercy on us!”  To remember that, on our own, we rarely see the grace of God.  But then we also have to remember that when we really see Jesus, we will be changed.  Jesus was in Jericho when all of these stories occurred.  He was in every way, tumbling down the walls of Jericho once again: breaking the barriers that put the tax collector on the outside, breaking the walls that said the blind man would always be stuck in his blindness, tearing down the beliefs that the religious experts and pharisees were the ones who understood while these outcasts didn’t; flipping that on its head so all would see it was the outcasts who got it, and those humble enough to learn from them.  Choosing to see Jesus, choosing to SEE, will not be easy, it will not be painless, and it will mean that we have to change, something that is not comfortable for any of us. 

Still, the gifts are amazing.  Zacchaeus walked away with incredible joy, a man maybe less rich in money, but filled with the elation of his faith and love of Christ.  The Gospels are about serious commitment to God, but also about joy.  Reminder that “Eucharist” means thanksgiving, the meal that we take is a meal of deep joy, deep connection, deep gratitude.  May we have that same ability to put aside our “sure knowing” and be open to actually seeing, hearing and meeting the risen Christ anew.  For in doing so, we will be “saved”, we will be found.  We will be healed.  And we will find joy.

Lord Have Mercy

 Luke 16:19-31, Psalm 41:1-3

               Starting in chapter 15 of the gospel of Luke, all of Jesus parables are about wealth.  Commentators I read said that Jesus spoke more about money and possessions than about anything else in his parables.  And unfortunately for us, his words on money and possessions are condemning of all of us who are comfortable, all of us who have so much more than enough.  And bottom line of his condemnation is this: we have failed to remember that we belong to God and to one another.

               In this story we see the rich man hiding behind his gated estate, his gated community, behind his walls from anything outside that would be displeasing to him.  He, as most people at that time, and indeed as most people in our time, mistakenly assumes that his wealth is due to his own actions and/or to God’s blessing him because he DESERVED it.  As a result, he doesn’t see any need to give a second thought to this poor man outside his gates.  He doesn’t see him, doesn’t think to give him even his left-overs, or anything from his own table.  Just as he assumes his own wealth is because he deserves it, he assumes that Lazarus is poor because that’s what he deserved.  Perhaps he saw him as lazy, perhaps he saw him as just “less than”.  Whatever it was, he gave him no thought at all.  He never saw it as his job to care for this brother of his, he probably never even considered helping him.  We are told that when Lazarus the beggar died, the angels carried him to Abraham’s side.  He was a beggar in life, someone many of us, too, might see as “lazy” or “unworthy”.  But this does not change the fact that he is a valued child of God, and so, in place of a decent burial, he is instead carried away by the angels.  In contrast, the rich man who died was given a proper burial, and then he found himself in Hades in torment.  But even from this place, from THIS place, he still cannot see.  He begs Abraham to have Lazarus, whom he is still seeing as his inferior, come to cool him down.  And when the answer is “no”, he begs to have Lazarus go to his family to warn them.  He still sees Lazarus in the servant role, still sees him as the inferior who should do this for him.  This is especially emphasized by the fact that he never talks directly to Lazarus, but only to Abraham, someone he sees as “on par” with him in terms of level.  The rich man sees himself as one of the elite, able to talk to those who are the fathers and founders of the faith.  The rich man also wants help for his family.  The rich man never asks for forgiveness for his actions, he is still not thinking of the poor people whom he shunned or whom his family still shuns.  He considers that maybe they should change their behavior, but it is still for their own personal gain.  “Send Lazarus to my family so that they will not also come to this place of torment,” he says.  After everything that he has lived through, and everything he now suffers, he remains unable to see beyond himself, beyond his family, beyond his own personal cares.  He has failed to remember that we belong to God and to one another.

               In what ways is this familiar to us? Materialism makes people very selfish.  We become owned by our stuff, and it causes us to be more and more self-focused, and focused on only gaining for self.   A friend posted this on Facebook:

            John Bogle, the Vanguard founder who passed away in 2019 told a story: “at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informed his pal, Joseph Heller that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day that Heller had earned from this wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history.  Heller responded, “Yes, but I have something he will never have… enough.” 

         Those who are just accumulating more and more for themselves never feel they have enough.  They are always focused on gaining more for themselves and their close family.  They fail to remember that we belong to God and to one another.

      When we think about the growing discrepancy between the rich and poor in this country, we see the reality of this story.  Did you know that during this COVID pandemic, while people are losing their jobs, losing their livelihoods, losing everything, that the wealth of the billionaires in this country alone increased just during the pandemic by $1.9 trillion!!  And yet, many of these are the same people who declare that we should not have a minimum wage of $15/hour, which, by the way, is nowhere near a living wage in the Bay Area.  The rich have so much more than they can ever, ever use.  The poor don’t have enough to feed their families, but the rich still cling to the idea that they somehow deserve it, somehow need to cling to it for themselves, while the poor do not deserve to eat, and should be okay with the “dogs licking their sores,” as we are told that Lazarus experienced.  We think that God blesses us so that we might have wealth.  But the truth is that God blesses us so that we might bless others.  And we forget this.  God doesn’t bless us to hoard our wealth.  What we have is not ours, it is lent to us to use for the good of all by the God who loves all of God’s children.  But we have forgotten that we belong to God and to one another. 

               The rich man did not see Lazarus as part of his family.  But we are called to “Love our neighbors as ourselves”.  I want to point out that this is not “we should love those people that we like”.  And it is also not “we should give a little of what we have to those other people.”  What does it truly mean to love our neighbors as ourselves?  How would you treat yourselves?  We know how we would treat ourselves.  We pay for our houses, we buy nice things for our children.  We pay for our cars.  Do we treat our neighbors this way?   No, we throw a ten at a homeless person, but loving them as ourselves would mean inviting them in, sharing our home with them, including them in the same abundance that we have.  Is this hard?  For all of us.  For ALL of us it is hard.  I had a conversation with someone this week who said that she invited a good friend who had lost a job to live with her.  It was hard for her to even invite this very good friend into her home, but she did.  And it didn’t end well, for any of them.  It ended with the friend stomping out of the house in a rage, the friendship broken.  She said, “well, so what are we supposed to do?  Just keep taking those risks?  When do we get rewarded for caring for those who don’t even appreciate it?”   The answer is that we don’t.  Not in this lifetime, or at least not in the way that we expect.  We probably won’t be paid back in terms of money.  We might lose friendships, we might lose sleep.  But we are not in charge of “what happens out there”.  All that we are in charge of is what we will do with the time that is given to us.  All we are called to do is to remember that we belong to God and to one another.  The reward for that?  Again, it won’t come in the way we think of rewards.

               The reward for doing what God expects of us is wholeness.  It is not material gain.  It is not comfort.  But it is a memory that we belong to God and to one another.  It is the reminder that we are all God’s children, all family to one another, all deeply loved beyond our imaginings.  It is the vision of what it truly means to love our neighbors AS OURSELVES and to live into that. 

               Admittedly, it is the rare saint who can do that.  But that is what we are called to try to do.  There is a wonderful phrase, “If you’ve come to ‘help’ me you are wasting my time.  If you’ve come because your freedom is bound up in mine, let us work together.”  This is not top-down.  This is not parochial.  This is not “charity” in the common sense of the word.  This is about serving one another because we remember that we need one another, that our wholeness is bound together.

               The rich man in this parable got it wrong in so many ways.  He got it wrong because he never helped Lazarus.  He got it wrong because he thought Lazarus was beneath him.  He got it wrong because he assumed that people have what they have because they’ve earned it and God has blessed them to use it for their own good.  He got it wrong because his attitude about it never changed from one of superior hoarding, to one of repentant giving.  He got it wrong because instead of living a life of gratitude, he lived a life of greedy accumulation.

               As you know a group of us continue to study racism in the United States.  We are looking at history in new ways, searching for deeper truths about how we came to be as we are, and what needs to change.  This last week I listened to a podcast about Affirmative Action.  It started by asking when Affirmative action began in this country.  Most people said sometime in the 70s.  And then we started looking at the facts.  Back in 1618 the Headright system gave 50 acres of land, or to some 100 acres of land, only to white people, to anyone willing to migrate here.  In 1705, statute in Virigina required masters to give WHITE indentured servants 50 acres of land, 30 shillings, 10 bushels of corn and a musket.  160 years later there was a ruling to give freed slaves 40 acres and a mule.  But that ruling was then overturned, unlike the ones for white folk.  1785, for every 36 square acre units, one was set aside for the education of white children.  But not African Americans or Native Americans.  And it went on and on.  We have a history of taking for “our own” whatever that means, of not allowing others the same opportunities, and then blaming THEM for not having as much as we do.  We have failed to remember  that we belong to God and to one another.

               In the parable for today, Abraham talks about the growing chasm between heaven and hell which prevents any kind of interaction across the divide.  We are creating that here, and a lot of how we do that is our failure to remember that we belong to God and to each other.  Crossing divides is not easy, but I believe that Lazarus will not be whole without the rich man, just as the rich man will not be whole without Lazarus.  Just as Lazarus needed saving from his extreme poverty, the rich man needed liberation from his wealth, his greed, his tunnel vision of only caring for his own needs.  We need God, and we need one another and that means working hard to cross those divides.

               So my question for all of us is who is just beyond our gates that we fail to notice?  Who are we failing to treat as we treat ourselves?  Who is it that we divide ourselves from, and how can we start to remember that we belong to them, too.  And then, what do we do with what we have?  Do we give thanks?  Do we use it to care for others? 

          We don’t know what is the greater problem in this parable: the rich man’s wealth or his attitude.  But both call us to look in a different way at what we have and our attitude as well. 

       Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy, said in his speech on how to change the world that the first thing we need to do to change the world is to get closer to those we would serve.  To spend time with the poor, the hungry, the homeless.  There is power in proximity and the solutions will come in that dynamic of closeness.  He tells the story of his grandmother who would hug him so hard and then ask, “Do you still feel me hugging you?” Amd of he said “no” she would hug her again.  But as she died, she said to him, “Bryan, I will always be hugging you.”  And he realized we can all hug someone, embrace and hug the people you are called to serve.  He got close to prisoners and in doing that found his own power to change the world through his actions, his writings, his speaking, his remembering that we belong to God and to one another.. 

         As always, we come here to hear the good news.  And the Good News is this: we will keep being given those opportunities for wholeness, those chances to serve and love one another as the brothers and sisters that we really are.  We will continue to find those chances to remember that we belong to one another.  And when we finally learn that we belong to God, and to one another, we will also, in fullness, remember what it is to be children of God, loved into being, loved into “enough”, loved beyond measure.  Amen.

God Celebrated

                                Luke 15:1-32

       Once again here we have an extended passage of verses we don’t usually hear together.  And yet, these verses all go together very well.  They are all stories of the lost being found, and the found being celebrated.  The sheep that was lost was sought after, found, and celebrated as it was returned to the flock.  The coin that was lost was sought, was found and was celebrated after being found.  And the son who was lost, came to his senses, returned and was celebrated. 

            Can you think of things that you’ve lost that have really mattered to you?  A small thing, perhaps like a necklace or letter that meant something to you, or a big thing, perhaps, like a house that you had to move away from or a car that was in an accident.  Maybe it’s not a thing that you’ve lost but a situation: maybe a job, or a relationship.  Maybe what you’ve lost is a cultural thing: days when children could play outside and visit their neighborhood friends without their parents helicoptering over them, the times when only one adult in a family had to have a job.  Some of the hardest loses I think are the losses we experience when a deeply held belief is overturned: a belief that the world was a certain way, or the belief that God was a certain way.  When those kinds of things are confronted and overturned, it can be incredibly painful, incredibly hard.  Sometimes, we feel grief, or nostalgia for the past, and can’t identify what it is that is lost.  We feel this nebulous, “I want things to be the way they were before!” without being able to really name what it is we feel we’ve lost.  Sometimes those memories of the past are also incomplete or missing things.  For example, that yearning for a time when only one adult per family had to work is also missing the fact that when women wanted to work or had goals or aspirations, they weren’t allowed to fulfill them.  Those times when kids could play freely with neighborhood kids were not actually safer times, just times when we were less aware of the dangers that kids were exposed to and the traumas that our children experienced.  I think for myself, there finally came a realization that my nostalgia for the past was often more about knowing how that past turned out… it turned into today, after all.  Whereas I don’t know how today will turn out – I don’t know if I’ll survive this day, or if my children will, or if there will even be a survivable world left for any potential grandchildren.  And so, I crave what seems like a simpler time, when in fact it was only “simpler” because I didn’t know as much, wasn’t aware of the problems to the same extent, and again, they ended in today, so I know that I survived it.  But regardless, there is a sense of loss, a depth of grief, even when I can look at it in the face and challenge it for what it was, that grief is there.  And sometimes it is unbearable.

            In the face of that, what would you do to search for that which you’ve lost?  What would you sacrifice to fill that space of grief, to find that which you valued once more?  I think about Carol Weir, who would not let go of Ben when he was kidnapped in Lebanon, but who did everything in her power, talking to our government, raising awareness, fighting for the release of her husband.  She gave up her comfort, her solitude, her anonymity, to stand up, to fight, to get her husband home.  I think of the mother’s who began MADD.  They found a world that was unsafe for children when a drunk driver killed their sons, their loved ones.  And while they could not get their sons back, they could fight with everything in them to make sure other mothers did not suffer that same loss.

            Did others always approve of what these women that I’ve named did?  No.  Carol got a lot of pushback and even hatred coming her way.  But she would not give up fighting for her lost sheep, her lost coin of great value.  MADD mothers also had pushback, but they, too kept fighting for what they had lost: their sons, those they loved.

            All three of the gospel parables for today are a response Jesus tells us as he confronts a situation in which the pharisees and legal experts were grumbling against Jesus for spending his time with “sinners and tax collectors”.  They were questioning why Jesus was spending time with people everyone had designated as “bad.”  He was welcoming and eating with these “bad” people.  In contrast to many people’s belief that some people are “bad” and some people are “good”, Jesus does not see it that way.  Instead, he describes some people as found, and some people as lost.  The lost people, those he is choosing to spend time with, are valuable to God, as he describes in these stories.  They are a lost sheep of the flock, they are a lost coin of great value, they are a child of God.  And Jesus is not content to just discount them as “bad”.  He wants them saved, he wants them healed, he wants them FOUND. 

            And I would say this is a challenge for all of us.  It is a challenge for us to remember that there aren’t “bad” people, there are only lost people.  And how are we to interact with lost people, the same way that Jesus did – we are to try to find them, to seek them, to help them.

           Who are those people for you?  Who are the people you don’t want to be around, individuals or groups of people you don’t want to be associated with?  Who are those for you?  Do you struggle then, when you see people you want to respect hanging out with those “bad” people that you don’t approve of, that you’ve written off?  And to take it a step further, when you see your friends hanging out with people you don’t approve of, what do you think?  How do you feel?  If it’s someone you admire and respect and then you see them eating with and spending time with people you really detest, how do you feel?  Do you discount them?  Do you lose respect for them when you see them with “undesirables”?  Maybe it’s easier to think about this in terms of our kids.  What do we do and how do we feel when we think our kids or grandkids are hanging out with a “bad crowd.”  When it’s my kids, I have, historically, worried about them being corrupted.  I’ll own that.  I remember the time when I was really concerned about a friend Jasmyn had made.  I was concerned because I saw this friend making really bad choices: lying to her parents, hiding inappropriate “hookups”, trying drugs and other questionable substances.  She was running wild.  And I was concerned.  But in talking with Jasmyn about my concern with honesty and openness, Jasmyn said to me, “My friend needs someone to be here for her when her world crashes, as it will with all that she is doing.  She needs someone solid to be here and show her there is another way.  She needs me.  And I will stay friends with her through this, offering another model for how to be, even offering advice, if she asks for it, until she, too, has finally found her way home.”   Okay.  I still worried, but at the same time, I was also impressed.  She was doing exactly what Jesus said God would do in the stories of the lost sheep and the lost coin: she was searching deep into the heart of her friend for that lost soul, seeking her out, and helping her to come “home.”

       I want to point out that there is a big difference between the stories of the coin and sheep, on one hand, with the story of the prodigal son on the other.  In the stories of the sheep and the coin, both of these could not be found on their own.  Both were sought after, with intention, with commitment until they were found.  How do we expect to find the sheep if we don’t seek after it?  Do we just let those we feel we’ve lost “go”?  Do we give up on the one family member we can’t reach, can’t connect with, can’t “find” because we don’t agree, or don’t understand, or have “lost”? 

        I think that maybe the Pharisees and Legal Experts judged Jesus because they were, in fact, convicted by Jesus.  We are told by all scripture that we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, that we are to love even those whom we don’t like, even those we hate.  And by love that means we are to care for them, to want their highest good, to be kind to them, even when that is not reciprocated.  They knew this.  But they weren’t living it out.  In contrast, Jesus was.  He did not see people as beyond redemption, beyond saving, beyond help.  He reached out to them, was kind to them and loved them.  He was doing what the Pharisees knew they should, just as Jasmyn was doing with her friend what I knew I should.  And that became judgement on their lips.  Jesus’ actions convicted them.  And instead of owning, they judged and condemned him.  

        The story of the prodigal son is a little different.  That son had a lot more agency.  That son had to return on his own.  The father in the story saw him coming back and ran out to usher him home, to bring him back completely into the fold, but the son had to make some steps first, some intention towards turning home.  And my guess is that the elder son in the prodigal story is the Pharisees and legal experts themselves.  They have became so bound by the written law that they have forgotten the spirit behind it: the call to care for and love one another.  They have become so lost, that when Jesus welcomes in the “lost” younger son, they just resent it, they want the father all to themselves, and all that is his, they have forgotten how to celebrate the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son returning.  They have forgotten that those Jesus is spending time with are also children of God.  They have forgotten that that lost younger brother is “this brother of YOURS”, not just “this son of the Father’s”.  Jesus never finishes the parable of the prodigal son.  We never know if the older son in fact does come into the house to celebrate with the son who has returned.  We don’t know because we are still waiting to see.   In the end, it will be up to them to decide to celebrate with the Father and the son the return home of the younger son, if they ever do.  In the meantime, he is missing a great party, as are they! 

         And that is the final point that I want to make through another story.  There is a wonderful video based on a children’s book.  The book and video are entitled Lost and Found by Oliver Jeffers.  I would love to be able to share them with you, but because of copyright issues I can’t do that through YouTube.  However, if you are interested, I have bought copies of both and would gladly share them another time.  In a rare exception, the video of this story is better than the book.      

        In the story, Lost and Found, a penguin walks into a little boy’s house.  The little boy is not thrilled about this.  And the penguin doesn’t seem to be leaving on his own, so he decides the penguin is lost and needs to get home.  He takes the penguin to the lost and found, but no one says they are missing a penguin.  Then he takes the penguin to the pet store, but then feels bad and doesn’t leave him.  He goes to the library to find out about where penguins come from and discovers they come from the South Pole, so he tries to put the penguin on a boat, but the boy's voice is small and the ship leaves without the penguin.  So, the boy builds a boat to take the penguin there himself.  As he is getting ready to go the narrator said, “And so the boy worked out an ambitious plan to get the visitor back to where he belonged.  But he never stopped for a moment to considered just what his visitor was doing there in the first place.”  They each “pack” a little bag, and they travel down to the South Pole, having adventures on the way, and in the end he finds a place with many, many penguins just like the one that has been with the boy.  He leaves him there and gets back in the boat to travel home.  But in the boat he finds that the penguin had left his suitcase.  When he opens it, he finds the only thing in this “box of treasures” was a picture the penguin had taken of himself and the boy: that this was what he valued.  The boy thought the penguin valued “home”, but what he found was that the penguin valued him, the boy.  And so he found, “that perhaps someone wasn’t lost… just lonely.  And maybe they weren’t the only one.”  After another little adventure, the boy and the penguin finally reconnect and go “home” together.  But the film ends with these words, “So, all began with someone lost and someone found.  Who is to say which was which? There was a boy and there was a penguin, strangers from opposite sides of the ocean.  And like the beginning of any friendship, theirs is a remarkable story indeed.”

            Perhaps, then, like the boy in the story, we will find, when we choose to spend time with those we consider “lost” , those from the opposite side of the ocean, that we too will ask, “who is to say who was lost and who was found”.  If it turns out that it was we, then, who were lost, and if we let ourselves be found, we can be guaranteed that God will celebrate with all the angels and heaven.  Amen.

Mistakes, growing, learning, forgiving.

     As this New Year begins, I find myself reflecting on events in my own life from years ago.  I've been taking a webinar on forgiveness and I think that it, too, is prompting this reflection.  My biggest challenge in terms of forgiveness, as I think is the case for many people, is learning to forgive myself.  I think that these arising memories of things that happened as far back as my childhood are opportunities to step more fully into self-forgiveness as well.

   Today I found myself reflecting on my first call.  When I was in seminary, and frankly my years as a young adult before going to seminary, I felt pretty clear that my primary call into ministry was primarily "prophetic".  What I mean by that is that I knew that while ministers are called to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" that my call was very much on the "afflict the comfortable" end of things.  I regularly stood up against injustices, taking concrete actions to confront oppressive government behaviors, to organize rallies and non-violent protests, to preach and speak and organize on behalf of the "least of these" - those who are often overseen, neglected, abused, oppressed and worse.  I didn't care who I angered by these actions - seeing their anger, if anything, as a sign that I was on the right track.  After all, we know that Jesus angered people enough with his standing up against the legalists and the hypocrites that they killed him.  I felt if people were angry that I was standing up for the poor and oppressed, then I must be doing something right.  At my ordination, the friend I had invited to preach spoke about this.  He said that I rattled cages, but that this was the gift, this was the call that I clearly had been given: to confront the oppressor, to challenge the apathetic into truly learning to love those others would disregard.

    But then I went to my first church call.  I went in roaring and pushing for the church to take strong stands on justice issues.  And instead of being able to make those changes, I found that I got the ire and suspicions up from those who saw me as an inexperienced upstart who didn't really understand my position or my place.  Instead of making the changes I knew I was called to make, I was disregarded and discounted more and more.  My voice, which had carried weight and value in college, at seminary, and even during my internship, was pushed aside.  I was effectively limited in voice as well as in action.  I was an associate pastor, so people weren't leaving the church, but they were closing off the work I could do, tightening the reigns on my options, and closing doors to relationships.  I left that position after only a year.  And while much of my leaving had to do with a difficult senior pastor who simply did not "play well with women," I'm certain that my decision to leave was exacerbated by my own sense of not doing well in that call.

    Fortunately, I didn't leave without learning and growing.  I learned that relationships must be built, trust must be gained, people must know that you love them, and not just because you've said it but because you've shown it, before they will be able to hear things that challenge their thinking, that encourage them to look at things differently, that then call them to different actions.  I learned that pushing too hard leads only to anger and separation, not growth in others.  I learned that listening first is extremely important.  I also learned that first impressions are sometimes the only impressions you will be allowed to give.  And that once we have alienated someone, rebuilding those relationships can be extremely hard to do.  While apologies are important, the "other" may not always accept them, so being thoughtful from the start is important.

    When we talk about "repentance" in the church, we are talking about taking another path, choosing a different way to go, to walk; turning from one direction to another.  And we take this seriously.  But my experience tells me that most of the time while we can see our own growth, and we can celebrate the steps we've made to become different people, more loving people, more faithful people, people who are more whole, we don't always trust or see that others are also growing.  Part of our failure to forgive other people is an inability to see or accept that the other may have genuinely changed, grown and moved from wherever it was that caused them to do damage to us or to someone else that we care about.  When it comes to self-forgiveness, I think that I struggle with actions that may have hurt or upset others in part because I believe that THEY don't understand that I, too, have changed, moved, grown, "repented", chosen a different path, seen where I've erred and strived to do better.  My fear that they can't see that in me, and that they can't forgive me in part encourages me to not forgive myself.  It shouldn't be that way.  I can't control what others see, feel or think.  And I should not allow what others judge in me to determine my own behaviors or the ways in which I view myself.  But this is easier said than done...

    I'm still learning.  I'm still growing.  I'm still making mistakes.  And there are people who cannot or will not forgive me.  There are people who will not accept that I change and grow, too.  There are people who will choose judgment and rejection over an open-heart when it comes to relationships with me.  When you are in a leadership position, it sometimes is easier for people to simply write you off then work through the hard and painful process of reconciliation.  I understand this.  I don't like it, but I understand it.  So today my goals are two fold: first, I will work more on self-forgiveness.  I find that self-forgiveness leads more deeply into a change in behavior than any intense self-judgment can possibly do, anyway.  So I do this for the "others" in my life as well, so that I may have the grace and compassion to truly grow in my actions, to be more loving, to be more aware, to listen more deeply.  My second goal is to remember how it feels when others box me into "that's just the way she is" kind of thinking and to be more open about the possibilities that others are growing too. These are my goals for this day.  I invite you into deeper self-forgiveness as well. And I encourage you to remember that just as you are growing and changing, others are too.  Perhaps we can be better at giving all people the benefit of the doubt: both ourselves and others.