Time is Short

Saugatuck Congregational Church, UCC
©Linda Bruce
January 21, 2018

The Greatest Show

Saugatuck Congregational Church, UCC
©Rev. Alison J. Buttrick Patton
December 24, 2017

It is an unorthodox cast of characters, not nearly what you’d expect if you were writing such an important story from scratch. There are no stars among the performers (except for the one in the sky); no famous people (except the Roman emperor, mentioned only in passing). The role of God-bearer is played by an inexperienced teen named Mary, from a hick town called Nazareth. Mary’s husband, the baby’s adoptive father, is Joseph, an unassuming carpenter with calloused hands, a furrowed brow and remarkably little to say.

Then there are the shepherds – laborers who likely smelled of sheep dung and stale beer. These are the bottom-dwellers, lowest rung on the 1st-century social ladder. One wonders whose idea it was to make them the messengers of God’s Good News, given how few people were likely to let them indoors…  

Even the angels give one pause: Neither Gabriel nor that ‘heavenly host’ are described as what you’d called angelic: light and glowy and feathered, with beatific smiles.  On the contrary, these angels seem to terrify everyone they meet.  “Don’t be afraid!” they have to say, again and again.

So what kind of pageant is this? Smellier than we typically imagine – with all those bodies crammed in around the feeding trough, and a young woman somewhere in the middle, just having given birth.  Smellier, and earthier, more real somehow – not at all like the whitewashed tableau depicted on certain Hallmark cards.  

Imagine Mary without any midwife, no parent or cousin to coach her through those first anxious hours as a new mother. Imagine how she must have struggled to figure out breastfeeding, with Joseph shuffling his feet and averting his gaze.  Imagine a goat butting at her elbow until Mary’s frustration melts into giggles and she pats it on the head. (Goats generally make everything better, when they’re not eating the furniture, that is).

…It’s true, the gospel of Luke doesn’t actually mention any animals.  Still, who can resist adding a goat or two, Joseph’s donkey and a few tag-along sheep.  

All in all, it sounds a bit like a circus, all these oddball characters – not a first-class performance at all.  There are no cameos by local officials; no special appearances by decision-makers of note.  Not one person (or beast) in that barn with the least bit of power, or two nickels to rub together – at least not as recorded in the gospel of Luke.  

Yes: Matthew introduces a few traveling magi  (wise men) who have the means to bring rather extravagant-sounding, if utterly inappropriate, baby gifts, but those guys are just as quirky as the rest: dreamers and stargazers with their heads in the clouds.

So what are we to think? Did the casting director get it wrong? Or is there something about this motley crew that is worthy of note? What if, we are compelled to ask, what if God chose these particular players on purpose? This may not sound so outrageous, at first. If you are used to hearing the story, then teenage mothers and sheep herders and celestial beings may not seem out of place at all.  

But imagine how the scene might be cast if these same events unfolded today. Imagine a brown-skinned immigrant named Jose and his young wife Maria. They have no health insurance and they are afraid to go to the ER (their Visas expired last month), so she gives birth in the tiny apartment they share with another family of eight… plus a dog, a two stray cats and cockatoo.  The entertainer who lives upstairs returns after a late show at one of the seedier nightclubs and hears the woman’s laboring cries, so she comes downstairs with coffee and towels. She also sends a text to the other kitchen staff at the restaurant where Jose works, so they come over bringing cigarettes for him, a homemade rattle for the baby (dried beans in a can), and beer for themselves. They speak an odd mix of Spanish, Mandarin, and English, so they don’t always understand each other.  Still, they all notice the extra-bright star through the cracked window pane and agree that Maria has an extraordinary child… The entertainer, who is wearing too much makeup and has a hole in her stockings, croons a torch song until the baby falls asleep…

And that’s just one possibility. It turns out, there are any number of ways one could cast Luke’s pageant, so long as the roles of honor go to people regarded by society as without power or status: sideliners and outcasts. They are the stars of the show, by design. They are the ones whom God and angels choose – to announce those glad tidings of great joy.

It reminds me of a moment in the film The Greatest Showman, about PT Barnum. Barnum has a vision for an extraordinary show.  He recruits an odd assortment of characters to perform: the bearded lady, the midget, the tattooed man; the pink-haired acrobat. He gives every one of them a place to shine. When things go badly and a broken-hearted Barnum gets ready to throw in the towel, one of those performers looks him in the eye and says,  “The world was ashamed of us, but you put us in the spotlight…We were hidden in the shadows and you gave us our humanity.”

I can think of no more appropriate headline to grace the marquee on Christmas Eve, no greater Good News than this, that God in Christ honors the humanity of those on the very margins.  I can hear the shepherds and their kin proclaim it:   “Christ is born to us this day.  We went to welcome him, and he stretched his little arms wide and welcomed us instead.”  

At the end of the night, when the curtain falls, this is the truth we are left to ponder:  That all those years ago, God chose to be revealed, not through the powerful and the privileged, but through the lives and witness of those seen as powerless (Feasting, Bi, Homiletic, p. 119): the misfits, the outcasts and the odd ones out.  And God speaks through them, still.  

So be on the lookout tonight – for improbable messengers with extraordinary news.  They may just belong to the Greatest Show on Earth: the one that features a flashy star and a huge angel chorus; beasts and a baby and all manner of guests. Listen closely to the stories they have to tell – about Hope-Come-Down, Love-in-the-Flesh, and Peace on Earth; follow their lead, and they may well show you the Way to the Christ Child himself, the very one who welcomes everyone, God’s entire cast of colorful characters – even you, even me – and gives us all a song to sing, a role to play, God’s love to live.

Amen.

Kin-dom Fruits

Saugatuck Congregational Church, UCC
©Rev. Alison J. Buttrick Patton
October 8, 2017

Like so many of Jesus’ parables, this one sets a trap for his listeners.  Jesus is talking, not to his whole crowd of followers, but to the temple officials, the men in charge, religious authorities accustomed to setting the rules and calling the shots. So obviously, they relate to the landowner in the parable. When Jesus asks, “What will the owner do to those tenants when he returns?” They know the answer. “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time!” After all: that’s what you do when someone disrupts production. You’ve got to set an example; replace troublemakers with laborers who will follow the rules. The priority is to bring in the harvest, to protect the bottom line.

But here’s where Jesus turns the tables: “Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produce the fruits of the kingdom.”  Taken away from YOU.  “You are the problem,” says Jesus. “You leaders who are only concerned with upholding the law when it suits you; you who are more concerned with defending the profit margin than with protecting lives. You are the tenants in the story.”

Jesus, it’s fair to say, is royally ticked off, up to his eyeballs with religious leaders who claim to be in charge but repeatedly ignore his message… Sick to death of chief priests and Pharisees who have forgotten what God truly desires – not fruits of a well-run agri-business, but fruits of the kingdom.

I want to unpack this word, “Kingdom.”  It shows up a lot in the gospel of Matthew (53 times, to be exact).  “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven has come near,” announces John the Baptizer in the wilderness.  And, “The Kingdom of God has come to you,” says Jesus (Matthew 12:28). At the time Jesus lived, the word “kingdom” packed a punch, because it challenged the sovereignty of the Roman Emperor:  “Not Caesar’s kingdom.  GOD’S kingdom.”  Caesar’s kingdom is oppressive, militant and obsessed with the accumulation of wealth and power.  GOD’S kingdom?  Well, that’s something else entirely.  GOD’S kingdom (says Jesus) is like a mustard seed, the tiniest of seeds that grows into a giant bush where the birds flourish. (Mat 13:31)  It’s like yeast that leavens the whole dough (Mat 13:33); or like a treasure hidden in a field (Mat 13:44)…”  “The kingdom of heaven belongs to the little children (Mat 19:14).  Prostitutes and tax collectors will enter GOD’S kingdom before any of those temple officials.”  (Mat 21:31)

As he so often does, Jesus takes the status quo and flips it on its head, paints a picture of a community in which the most vulnerable are regarded with honor, prosperity is shared and everyone, everyone, has a seat at the table.  THAT’S the kingdom to which Jesus refers.

The thing is, the word “kingdom” has lost some of its clout. We don’t live in a kingdom. We have no king – and haven’t for generations.  So theologians have looked for other ways to describe this alternative social structure cooked up by God: The Realm of God (we say), or God’s Beloved Community.  I’ve heard it called God’s Commonwealth (which works particularly well if you live in Massachusetts!).  Sometimes, I replace the ‘g’ in ‘kingdom’ with a hyphen in order to speak about God’s kin-dom (see the cover of the bulletin).  Maybe it’s a bit awkward, but I love the wordplay, the reminder,  in the words of the Lakota Nation, that “we are all related” – people and animals, rocks and rivers, mountains and stars.  In God’s kin-dom, there is room for everyone, we are interconnected, all siblings, children of the Most High.

And the fruits of that Kin-dom, God’s Kin-dom?  Justice and loving-kindness; wholeness, harmony, peace, and well-being.  It’s what we call in Hebrew:  Shalom.

And it’s what we’re all called to produce; what God invites us to co-create.  If we are laborers in the vineyard, then we are laboring to cultivate that kind of community, to embody God’s vision for creation – actively, persistently, daily.  There is another Hebrew phrase, Tikkun olam – which means “to repair the world.” to finish what God has begun.  Our Jewish siblings believe that this is our vocation.  In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says, “The Kingdom of God is among you,” (Luke 17:21).  In other words, we’re not talking about some idyllic afterlife, some gold-encrusted, angel-populated heaven up in the clouds; we’re talking about something that’s taking shape right here, right now.  Something we can nurture, in partnership with the Creator of the Universe.

That’s the sort of sacred labor that Jesus was talking about. But apparently,  it’s not what those first-century religious leaders were doing. Then as now, religious leaders were too easily distracted by the pursuit of power, wealth, and status.  Like the tenants in the parable, they forgot that they had been entrusted with something that did not belong to them; they got greedy, possessive, and so they behaved badly.

Maddeningly, some things never change.

This fall, we on the Protestant branch of the Christian tree mark the 500th anniversary of the Great Reformation, launched when Martin Luther famously nailed to the church door his list of 95 complaints against the religious leaders of his day: the Catholic priests.  Among the abuses he enumerated: That priests collected a fee for forgiving sins – indulgences, they were called. Also, those priests had exclusive access to scripture and, by extension, claimed insider access to God.  In short, they called all the shots and reaped all the rewards.

Luther’s call to reform the church started a movement that changed the course of history and the shape of Christianity.  But 500 years later, we religious leaders still forget that the vineyard doesn’t belong to us; rather, that we have been entrusted with its care and keeping.  There are too many shameful and heartbreaking stories of clergy misconduct to list: children systematically abused, money stolen, whole categories of people unjustly ostracized or rejected… There’s a reason young people harbor such distrust of religious authority.  According to a study conducted by the Barna Group, 87% of 16-29-year-olds say the church is too judgemental, 85% say it is hypocritical and 70% say it’s insensitive to those who are different.[1]  Again and again, we have compromised our moral authority.

You may have noticed that I’m saying, ‘we.’  It’s easy to call out clergy who have broken the law, easy to condemn the misdeeds of others; it’s harder to look in the mirror. But that’s what this parable demands.  Jesus has plenty to say to all of us about kin-dom building, but today, it’s the Church, and those of us in positions of leadership, who are in the hot seat.  Today, I am the one compelled to ask: When have I failed to to be a faithful tenant in God’s vineyard?

Here is an admittedly partial list. I fail to fulfill my role:

  1. When my decisions are driven by public approval and not by God’s purpose;
  2. When I focus more on the survival of the institution than on the spread of the gospel;
  3. When I fail to interrupt bigotry, to speak up for or stand with people on the margins; when my fear of criticism keeps me silent;
  4. When worry about profits prevents me from being prophetic (or  urging us all to be prophetic);
  5. When I use my power to avoid risks, rather than to take them;
  6. When I opt for safe topics instead of opening space for us to wrestle with hard questions and controversial issues;
  7. When I neglect to pray (that is, when I forget that this is not my ministry, but God’s ministry);
  8. When I fail to invite all of you to share the joys and the costs of leadership – because if it is God’s ministry, it is also our ministry.

Looking back at that list, two things occur to me.  First: I fall short, all the time. So I need your help.  I need you to hold me accountable to this sacred labor.  If I’m not speaking up, exercising courage, helping us to get real together, reminding myself and you that our sacred purpose is to raise up kin-dom fruits, then I need a nudge!  And second, when I do my job, we may ALL feel a bit less comfortable, myself included.  Kin-dom building is like that; it requires risk, makes us stretch, prevents us from ever getting too settled.  The tenants in Jesus’ parable forgot that they had work to do; they imagined that they could kick back and enjoy the fruits of that vineyard all themselves.  But that’s not what God intended. God wants us all to roll up our sleeves.

Yes, when Jesus told this parable, he was confronting the religious leaders in the temple, but the truth is: we all struggle to keep on task, to live faith-filled lives – clergy and lay members alike.  We all forget that the very ground on which we tread was formed by God, that we are all laborers in a vineyard that does not belong to us, but which surely relies on our faithful care and keeping.

The Pharisees wanted to hire productive workers. But raising kin-dom fruits means exposing any landowner who is more concerned with proceeds than people. The Landowner sent slaves to do his bidding, but raising kin-dom fruits means condemning slavery and racism in all its forms.  The tenants murdered one messenger after another, but raising kin-dom fruits means raging against violence, and lamenting every loss of life, and tenaciously tending communities in which children matter more than weapons.  Raising kin-dom fruits means choosing every day to work for God and not for Caesar – cultivating justice and propagating loving-kindness; planting seeds of wholeness, harmony, peace, and well-being – in our relationships, our church, our community, our world.

Beloved siblings in Christ:  May we find ways to do that every day; until we break a sweat; until our muscles feel that satisfying ache that comes after a hard day’s labor; until the blisters on our hands and our broken-open hearts and the justice-seeking, love-expanding fruits of our labor bear witness to our faithfulness; until Shalom takes root and erupts into breath-taking blossom all around.

May it be so.  Amen.

[1] Liberating Hope: Daring to Renew the Mainline Church,  Michael S. Piazza and Cameron B. Trimble, p. 15.

Emptiness and Void

Saugatuck Congregational Church, UCC
©Michael Hendricks
October 1, 2017

Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Good morning.  This morning Pastor Alison is away.  I want to thank her for offering me this opportunity to share some reflections with you.  I want to thank you as well for your support.

This reflection grew out of conversations, Alison and I have had about hard issues facing young people today.  As many of you know, I have been working as a church school teacher here for more than twenty years.  Wait.  What?  Yikes.  As it turned out, in some ways, this reflection addresses why somebody might do that.

For most of my time teaching, I have been teaching the Story Tent curriculum in which we dramatize stories from the Bible.  Over those years, we have dramatized many, many stories.  And a few of them, we have even turned to more than once.  But the story we have worked with the most – by far – is Creation.  And for some reason, every time I turn to those early stories, I find something in them – something powerful and insightful – that I never noticed before.

A professor of mine, I recall saying once, that any time we try to understand things by talking about how they began, we are really talking about the way those things are.  There is so much in just the first chapter of the Bible that addresses how things are, I will just assume that we will be back there in Story Tent again before too long.  And, if you’ll bear with me, today we will be going there again.  Back to the beginning.  The very beginning.  Before even the garden.  Before even the seven days.  Before God even said “Let there be …”, well, anything.

Today, we will look at what comes before.  At what was first.

Please pray with me.

God the Creator, You took emptiness and chaos and made everything.  We ask you now to look at the emptiness and chaos within us and to fill it with your greatest creation.  Speak to our hearts and say, “Let there be love.”  Then, with your help, may it one day be written of your world, “And there was love.” Amen.

Many of us have the familiar words of the first verse of the Bible, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” committed to memory.  That verse summarizes what the first chapter of Genesis will describe.  Here is what is coming.  Here is how everything that is came into being.  Which is great, but it is not until the third verse that Creation – with God’s powerful words, “Let there be Light.” – that the act of Creation actually gets started.

And the Light is so much like a bright, shiny object designed to capture our attention, perhaps in some ways similarly to the way a magician’s right-hand moves so we don’t see what the left is doing, that maybe we don’t focus enough on what comes before.

But in the second verse of Genesis 1, the Bible describes exactly what came before.  What there was before God ever said, “Let there be Light.” What there would still be now if Creation never happened.

The New International Version says the earth was “formless and void.”  The World English Bible calls it “formless and empty.” The Good News translation calls the world “formless and desolate.”  My favorite of these, the Living Bible, calls it a “shapeless chaotic mess.”

There is a reason for these differences.

The words in Hebrew are actually Tohu and Bohu.  Or in Hebrew, Tohu Webohu.  And nobody knows exactly what they mean because nobody has ever found another instance in all of ancient literature where these words appear – so we have no other context in which to understand them.

What was there before God got started?

Nothingness.  Emptiness.  Chaos.  Tohu Webohu.  And we don’t even know exactly what that means.

And maybe that’s okay because the thing that strikes me as important is that it comes first.  Emptiness and void come before the wonder of Creation.  Emptiness and void come before God’s love comes and makes everything else possible.

And here’s the thing that I can’t help thinking.  What if, as my professor suggested, this observation about how things began is just as much, if not more, an observation about how things are?  What if that truth of the Creation story continues to be true?  Maybe or maybe not so much in a science class way, but just as true nevertheless.  What if the person we were created to be is preceded by a bit of tohu and bohu, a bit of chaos and void, within each of us?

I’m not sure if it’s the same for everyone, but the more I look at the world, the more I hear of violence and hatred and all the horrifying behaviors that fill the news on the television and internet, the more convinced I am that the Tohu Webohu chaos that came before God’s choice to bring Creation into existence is still here living in the human heart.

In my heart and maybe in yours.

And maybe there’s a logic to it.  A beautiful and sacred logic that you would expect from the Creator who designed us.

That hole in our hearts might be that emptiness that God gave us as a gift – that empty place inside us that we are intended to fill – to fill with love.  What if the tohu and bohu void that existed before Creation almost sparked God to respond, responding with everything as an answer to nothing?

In that same way, what if we were given an emptiness at our core so we would know that we were never intended to be complete in and of ourselves?  What if we were given a void within ourselves so we would need connection, so we would need love, to become who we were created to be?  What if the culmination of Creation as it is described in Genesis is not the creation of a human being, but as it clearly seems to be, the creation of two human beings – the creation of relationship, and, by extension, the creation of love?

But that’s the way it’s supposed to work.  What happens though when God’s love doesn’t fill us?

Whether it’s because we turn away or because no one’s convinced us of it, what happens to that emptiness at our core?

As I said, I’m not a scientist, so I don’t know for sure, but I do know there is a saying in science that nature abhors a vacuum.  Somehow, some way, with something, our emptiness will get filled – and that’s what I’m so terribly sad about, so terribly afraid of.

Because if that’s true, what it means is that it puts an awful lot of pressure and responsibility on us to be agents and ambassadors of God’s filling love – knowing that when people’s emptiness and void isn’t filled with God’s love it will surely be filled with something else.

Like what, you ask?

Do you remember that horrible “How did we get here” feeling when you first heard about a young man or woman with their whole lives ahead of them deciding to strap on an improvised bomb and sacrificing their life for the sole purpose of spreading fear and terror?  It’s a big world out there so of course, it’s easy to think there might be one person out there like that.  But that’s not the terribly sad thing about our world today.  The sad thing about our world is that there seems to be an almost endless supply of people whose inner emptiness is being addressed with a binding community of anger and resentment that encourages both self-destruction and an outer violence.

Did you ever wonder why just two generations after their grandparents risked their lives to free the world from the horrors of Nazism, that there are young people in our country who are attracted to the very same or similar ideology?  And now it’s almost worse, because perhaps a case could be made that when young Germans first embraced that evil, it’s at least possible that  they might not have realized where it would lead, but we have no such excuse.  We know exactly where it leads, and yet you still see that there are those in our country today – young people – whose inner emptiness is filled with the community of shared hate.  In fact, that community, if anything seems to be growing.

Did you ever wonder why in this day and age – only a few decades after the Civil Rights movement at great cost finally helped put our nation on a more just path – we still see the KKK marching more openly than ever in cities and towns across America?

Did you ever wonder, why at this time in our country, the rate of suicide in middle aged men has grown so great that it has actually impacted the average life expectancy of our nation?

Did you ever wonder why even in this wonderful community that we are privileged to live in, that I have been fortunate enough to raise my family in for almost 30 years, that we, like so many other communities in our state and our nation, have opioids as an issue facing some of our young people.

Talk about emptiness!

Talk about trying to address your emptiness by embracing the ultimate void of all.

That emptiness we are born with is a sense that something is missing.  And what we believe as members of this community of love and faith is that God’s love that was designed to answer that void is infinitely filling and always within reach.  A great message, but our nation’s children, the world’s children, are telling us, screaming at us actually, that they are empty and God’s love is not reaching them.

We have to do a better job of reaching them.

But, if I’m the means by which God plans to spread God’s love, I must confess, for the sake of the world, I wish God had a better and more consistent and more persistent agent. Because I’m not always on my game.  And I get tired.  And grumpy.  And discouraged.  And frustrated.  And sometimes I still have my own emptiness issues.

But you and I, I believe, are what God chooses to work with.  Maybe because we are not always suited for it, it means more that we keep coming back and trying to live God’s love into this world.

Because, brothers and sisters, if I know one thing in this world to be true it is this: It matters.  Right here in this church.  Right now, with everyone you meet.  With everyone who might have an emptiness inside them just looking for something to fill it.  In other words, with everyone.

That’s what we are here for.

To help point the way to fill in the Tohu and Bohu emptiness in the world, in each other, with God’s love before it is filled by something else, something less, and something potentially and profoundly much, much worse.

I’m pretty sure I don’t believe that as Christians we have any special claim to God’s love.  I’ve seen too many powerful expressions of love arising from other places to really believe that.  And, sadly, I’ve heard too many words spoken in the name of the faith I’ve been called to follow that sound nothing at all like the love I believe we’ve been called to.

In fact, it’s really the opposite.  As Christians, we should not expect, nor do we deserve, any extra share of God’s love.  If anything, as Christians, we’ve taken on a special obligation to extend and put ourselves at the service of that love.  We’ve chosen this, we’ve affirmed it, and we have no excuses.

To help live God’s love into God’s creation.  To do what we can to bring in God’s Kingdom.

To be filled.  Then help fill others.

Take that deep and spirit-filled breath we always talk about.  Know that you are loved.  Be filled with that love.  Then share that love with others.

Amen.