Palm Sunday, Psalm Series, "God's love endures forever," April 5, 2020

A Lent Palm Psalm 118 BFC 2020

Psalm 118

April 5, 2020

           On Good Friday in 1964, just as the sun was softly setting on the horizon of Anchorage, Alaska, an earthquake with the magnitude of 9.2 shook the city for a full four and a half minutes.  Buildings rocked off their foundations, split in half, or fell into themselves.  Street lights swayed and then flew.  Cars were swallowed and then spit back up.  Two entire blocks in the city’s central downtown area just dropped into a jagged chasm.  A theater marquee came to rest even with the street.  It was almost possible for anyone to imagine it.  One witness said of the downtown area, “It looked like the devil ground his heel into it.”[1]  The question hung in the air, “What will Alaskans do now?”—just five years into statehood, their most modern displays of progress in Anchorage now lying in rubble. 

           Sociologists from the newly formed Disaster Research Center at Ohio State, left for Anchorage expecting to find havoc, chaos, and pandemonium.  What they found instead, 28 hours later, was an amazing amount of cooperation, collaboration, and compassion.  Ordinary citizens found their agency and organized mutual aid for one another.  People began immediately looking for others among the debris.  When the local Presbyterian Hospital filled up with gas, Boy Scouts walked the 22 occupants of the hospital down three or four flights of stairs to an armada of taxis and other drivers waiting to take them to another hospital across town.  All over town, neighbors fed and housed the displaced.  When the local fire department failed to offer anything significant, a local psychology professor organized his mountaineering group who had experience saving people off of ledges and caught in avalanches.   Everybody jumped in to do a little bit of everything. 

Genie Chance, the only female newscaster in Alaska, a working mother who had been passed over for lesser male counterparts at local KENI, became the voice of Alaska, as she learned how to curate the necessary details for the general public.  She was the steady hand in the small of Anchorage’s back shepherding her city with the necessary information they needed to remember their humanity—moved the city away from its loneliness and despair.  Once she knew her own family was safe, she headed to the downtown area.

 . . . [s]he began working with the police chief, the fire chief, and various officials. As soon as KENI was back on the air with a generator, she began broadcasting the essentials of survival: where to take shelter, how to purify snow for drinking water. She instructed people to limit the use of candles to the bare minimum of necessity — candles were a fire hazard, the city had just evaded a conflagration by what seemed like a miracle, and the water supply system was too savaged to fight a fire outbreak.[2]

Genie Chance became the hub for the human information that was so important to her city.

“A message to Clyde Wythe at Homer: Your daughter is OK.”

“We have received a call from Joe Fernbeck who said that he’d gotten word on his radio from the oil crews at Beluga and Tyonek. They want their families to know that they are all OK.”

“We have a message reporting that an elderly lady at 216 East Eighth Avenue who lives alone. We have no name on her, but we do have a request for somebody in that neighborhood to please check and see if the sweet lady is all right.”

What happens, Rebecca Solnit writes, is that while the powers and principalities that have been promising salvation are often revealed for their empty promises and lack of resources, in disasters or calamities people become aware of their own possibility for personal agency and collective power.  A spontaneous commons arises in such situations.  A new normal can be established.

So it was in the earthquake of 1906 in San Francisco.  Amelia Hoshouser marched out of her home just after the devastation and set up shop in a central area of San Francisco, a little lean-to called “Mizpah Café.” There she fed thousands of people.  She just went out and did it.  It was in her  Meanwhile, throughout the city soup kitchens, shelters, and relief projects emerged from collective human spirit as if spontaneously from the ruins.  It was in that climate that Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, developed an imagination for what people could do collectively and cooperatively from what she witnessed as a child after that 1906 earthquake. Day asked herself why this cooperation and mutual aid could not be who we were all the time.[3]   

Almost all of the Psalms reference the two great stories of the Jewish faith—Exodus and Exile.  Both of those events are about a bondage, constriction, or a captivity of community life.  Psalm 118 references the Exodus and the political danger and public threat the whole community experiences as governments or nations are like bees ready to attack or a fire of thorns that encircle and trap.   Salvation and deliverance are found in verse 5 where the Psalmnist cries out in distress and God answers to set the whole community in a broad place for community life and conduct.  The bondage, constriction, and captivity fall away.  While that threat and distress and attempt to surround and press and push the Psalmnist on all sides with fear may seem ever-present, there is a deeper narrative that is repeated five times for emphasis in Psalm 118, “God’s steadfast love lasts forever.”  Let all of Israel say, let all the religious officials say, let those who fear the Living God say, God is good, let all the people, say, “God’s steadfast love endures forever.” 

God’s steadfast, loyal love will not quit, will show up, and is on the move.  It does not win.  It doesn’t play that game.  God’s love endures.  So when calamity and disaster come, God’s steadfast, loyal love endures.  When disease and death come, God’s steadfast, loyal love endures.  When governments fail us, press us, surround us on all sides with their cruelty, indifference, and falsehoods, God’s steadfast, loyal love[4] endures.

Do not let others tell you that this is a otherworldly, “spiritual” love.  Spiritual or spirituality, Biblically, was not about “otherworldly” but was about something that was more than at the surface or skin-deep.  Spiritual was about core, about depth, about a transcendence that could not be bottled or contained.  The praise for God in this Psalm is about concrete action in the commons, God acting on behalf of the people in a public, political, continuing way deeper than any disaster or domination.

           “This is the day the Living God has made,” the Psalm says, or, better put, “This is the day our God acted!  Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”[5]  Hear what is being said in this Psalm.  This is a collective voice praising God not for all of the beauty and wonder and bounty they see around them.  On the contrary, the Psalmnist is hemmed in on all sides, feels isolated and constrained, and remembers the deep truth that God is acting and that Creator’s sustained, steadfast, loyal love endures forever. 

And today God is acting.

           Sisters and brothers, siblings and cousins, here is the really good news, that enduring love is in us!  Ready to manifest itself on God’s good earth!  All of creation was woven together on the loom of justice as the fundamental fabric of the universe!  This is the default switch ready to be pulled when all else falls away and calamity and disaster and virus come and we recognize our personal agency and collective power. 

           If there was anything that was central to Jesus’s teaching it was this.  You are not, instinctually, the barbarians the State makes you out to be, recognizing the State’s need for control and domination.  Rather, in the violence and devastation that was First Century Rome, Jesus brought connection and communion to establish a new normal over and against the chaos of his time  You are, collectively, what Jesus told us, you are the Kingdom of God.  And that sustained, loyal, steadfast love is found in your mutual aid and common endeavor!  (pause)

           I know the other side of this too—a system full of practices and policies that is also seeking to maintain an old, dying, death-giving system.  Naomi Klein regularly writes about The Shock Doctrine--how our federal government will use disaster and calamity to push ahead an agenda of violence and war.  Just this week I posted on Facebook a Twitter thread from 350.org co-founder, Jamie Henn, which chronicled the numerous ways the fossil fuel industry and the Trump Administration are seeking to take advantage of the virus to make cuts to funding for environmental protection, push through funding for the fossil fuel industry, undercut the protests of Native leaders defending the environment, and bleed the last bit of money out of a dying industry.  Not only here--another indigenous leader, land protector, Zezico Guajajara, defending the Amazon was assassinated in Brazil this week.[6] 

But this I know.  They will not endure.  This will not endure.  And we must use the knowledge of Creator’s love stirring in us to affirm what will endure going forward toward a more collaborative and cooperative future.

           The week after the 1964 earthquake in Anchorage, Genie Chance’s mother wrote her and encouraged her to fly the children down to Texas for their safety.  Genie Chance wrote back to her mother recognizing that on that Good Friday night, the first, dark cold night, there would be struggles ahead for her community for years to come.  “But,” she wrote, “this was just a fleeting thought in a weary mind.”  Her letter went on:

I would have been ashamed of myself had it not been for the next thought that came so swiftly: We must be together… That night I saw strain, heavy hearts, and fear in people separated from their loved ones by the sudden disaster… As long as we are together, we are confident of the future…

That Good Friday night I knew that we had survived miraculously. And for this reason, there must be a purpose to our lives. Apparently the children must sense this, too. For they have remained calm.  . . . I would not undermine their confidence in the future — in themselves — by sending them away for safety.

What is safety, anyway? How can you predict where or when tragedy will occur? You can only learn to live with it and make the best of it when it happens. These children have learned this — and they are all the better for it. They were in the midst of devastation. And they feel that they are a part of the tremendous task ahead in rebuilding this land we love… The children are not afraid. Their father and I are not afraid. Please, don’t you fear for us.[7]

Jon Mooallem, author of a book about the aftermath of the Anchorage earthquake wrote about what he believed to be the meaning of Genie Chance and her work,

But [Genie Chance] also recognized a way of surviving such a world. It was what Genie had created in Anchorage that weekend by talk- ing on the radio, and what she planned to stay focused on now: not an antidote to that unpredictability, exactly, but at least a strategy for withstanding it, for wringing meaning from a life we know to be unsteady and provisional. The best she and her family could do was to hold on to one another.

Our force for counteracting chaos is connection.[8]

           Calamity, disaster and domination, earthquakes and shock, pestilence and pandemic will come.  There will be imperial rulers that will constrict, push, dominate, lie, and maybe even lead us into captivity.  But God seeks to set a broad space for our community life.  God’s steadfast love endures forever. 

Let that be the message that emanates from Billings First Congregational Church.  That the worst may come to us, but we will counteract chaos with connection to share that God is good and that we are reaching out our arms to our community once again in mutual aid because the steadfast love of God, acting through us, endures.  It endures.  Amen.

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[1] Jon Mooallem, “This is how you live when the world falls apart,” The New York Times, March 12, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-disaster-response.html; Maria Popova, “This Is Chance: The Story of the 1964 Alaska Earthquake and the Remarkable Woman Who Magnetized People into Falling Together as Their World Fell Apart,” Brain Pickings, March 30, 2020, https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/03/30/this-is-chance-genie-chance-jon-mooallem/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+brainpickings%2Frss+%28Brain+Pickings%29/

[2] Popova, “This is Chance.”

[3] Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell:  The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (New York:  Penguin Books, 2009)

[4] In fact, the Greek word for faith in the New Testament, pistis, is a word which literally means political loyalty.

[5] Amanda Benckhuysen, “Commentary on Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24,” Preaching This Week, March 27, 2016.

[6] Democracy Now!  April 3, 2020, https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/3/headlines/indigenous_land_defender_zezico_guajajara_assassinated_in_brazil

[7] Popova, “This is chance.”

[8] Ibid.

Sermon for Pentecost Sunday, May 24, 2015

B Pentecost BFC 2015

Acts 2:1-21

May 24, 2015

          It is the season of commencements and commencement speeches when every high school, college, and graduate school tries to outdo the other with an original speaker.  That speaker helps sum up what it means to have an education and what life lessons the speaker has gleaned that they shall now bestow on the graduates.  The speaker tries to do it all with rapier wit and a sense of humor.

          I remember the former chaplain of Harvard, Rev. Dr. Peter J. Gomes, telling the graduates of Bowdoin College that whether the current graduating class was ready, these graduates had to move on with their lives.  For as every college admission’s office will tell you, Bowdoin had recruited a class of first year students that exceed the standards held when they were first year students.  So the graduating seniors necessarily had to leave because they no longer met the college’s standards. 

          Journalist and intellectual, Maria Popova, referenced a commencement address by poet Adrienne Rich who said that an education is not something that you get but something you claim.  Popova went on to explain. 

            And I think that's very much true of knowledge itself. The reason we're so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — even in that we skip forward — is that we've been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of claiming it. I mean, the true material of knowledge is meaning. And the meaningful is the opposite of the trivial. And the only thing that we should have gleaned by skimming and skipping forward is really trivia. And the only way to glean knowledge is contemplation. And the road to that is time. There's nothing else. It's just time.[1]

This is what we are all about in the church.  Church is about making meaning, and we come together in community with the understanding that meaning is not lodged in one person or even one people.  It will also mean if our young people, teens and young adults, are truly going to learn, they will necessarily have to rely on the hard-won wisdom of elders who have had the time to contemplate and make meaning.  Our young people need our elders to truly make and share meaning. 

Last week I was sitting in the church of my mom, Willow Hills United Methodist Church, a church really built by the former members of the community UCC church who left when the search committee called an authoritarian, unhealthy pastor.  My mom was the only dissenting vote on the search committee.  The red flag for my mom was when this enlightened clergy candidate claimed he could never marry a Christian and a Roman Catholic.  The United Methodists saw an opportunity for a new church start in a neighboring, growing community as people poured out of the UCC church.  Not everybody went to the new United Methodist Church.  Other people just left religion, faith, and Christianity altogether. 

I was in my hometown of Metamora, Illinois, for the graduation of my nephew, Bryson Maddock, from Metamora Township High School, my alma mater.  I visited the gravesite of my dad and my grandmother and grandfather.  We took Sophia to see the high school baseball field named after my dad.  But on Sunday we were sitting in Willow Hills United Methodist Church while my sister, brother-in law, my niece, and my graduating nephew worshipped at Great Oaks church, just a quarter mile down the road.  For years, my sister, an amazing public school teacher, had been the Christian Education Chair and Sunday School Superintendent at the Willow Hills United Methodist Church..  My nephew went through confirmation at Willow Hills and loved the pastor there, but . . .but.

My nephew is an accomplished musician and performer who has starred in all of the high school musicals, plays, and madrigal dinners.  This past year his high school put on the Broadway production of Les Mis, and he absolutely loved the meaning, the message, and the music of a story that is also very dear to my heart.  He had a DVD copy waiting for me, and wow, the voices and talent of my nephew and his classmates.  For his graduation party, he and his band, “Unamused Dave” played an hour long concert.  Much to the chagrin of his mother and father, Bryson is skipping college to save up money and travel with his band to California and make a go of it.  And who can really argue with him?  His band has won a ton of awards at Peoria and Chicago competitions.  This summer Bryson will take classes at Second City, to hone his performance skills.  

He would have loved to be part of the band organized at Willow Hills United Methodist Church but they asked the choir director who is a little older than me to put the band together.  The choir director chose people around his age to form “a praise band.” 

Meanwhile, Great Oaks, the evangelical church just down the road, asked Bryson and his friends not to form a “praise band” at their church but a band of some kind.  It was up to them to figure it out.  So, gradually, my sister and her family gravitated to Great Oaks where my nephew was given a chance to belong and interpret his own faith. 

In much the same manner, the church I just pastored in Byron, Illinois, was the community United Church of Christ church that was either losing its youth to neighboring churches or to just staying at home.  When I first began at the church, every first chair from an award-winning high school band was sitting out in the congregation.  None of them were asked to play.  One of the most amazing young women was playing violin at the Baptist Church every week because they had asked her to be a part of a bluegrass group.  I kept her in the church by having her play, beautifully on Maundy Thursday, the “Theme from Schindler’s List” and one of my favorite pieces from Ken Burns’ documentary on the Civil War, “The Ashokan Farewell.”  I cried each time she played them.

  The Music Committee at that former church, staffed by the daughter of the former long-time organist, the son of a Lutheran pastor, and the former long-time band instructor at the high school, did not see the purpose of enlisting the young people in the music ministry of the church because they did not want to “lower the church’s musical standards.”  Instead, they schemed and plotted to fire the present organist so they could employ the Junior High choral instructor who was known as the best organist in town.   He chose not to apply for the job. 

We brought in one of the recent college graduates, the lead singer for his own band, to sing the Beatles’ “Let It Be” with the choir singing as backup for the 175^th Anniversary of one of the oldest churches in the State of Illinois, a church begun as a pivotal part of the Underground Railroad, providing freedom seekers with safe haven.  The General Minister and President of the UCC, Rev. Geoffrey Black, there to help us celebrate on that great day, shouted a loud “Amen!” when the song finished and the congregation universally loved it.  Only to be never tried again. 

I feel caught.  My daughter regularly runs to me with words from the music of Imagine Dragons or Bastille, two of her favorite musical groups, to show me the theological meaning of their music or videos.  My son does the same with one of his favorite groups, Mumford and Sons.  And my job as their father is to see the wind and fire of God poured out on them so that they can affirm that God is active and moving in their lives.  But both of them recognize they will never have the authority in any local church I pastor to hear the words and music they find meaningful repeated back to them.  So they have kind of checked out.  And I am left realizing that I can keep my job and lose my children in weekly worship.  Or lose my job fighting for my kids’ ability to make meaning and have just a teensy bit of authority. 

While our young people desperately need the knowledge, wisdom, and meaning-making of older generations, our older generations desperately need the energy, curiosity, and idealism of the younger generations.  Without that energy, curiosity, idealism, and vision of the younger generations, our lives together become rote, mundane, and just plain boring.  Through the younger generations, we get challenged to see the world in ways we could not have imagined possible.

In the last days, God says,

I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
    Your sons and daughters will speak truth to power.
    Your young will see visions.
    Your elders will dream dreams.

          The apostle Peter quotes the truth-teller Joel to say that these will be the signs to show that God is active and moving among you.  We know the Spirit is afoot when all ages in the congregation begin to hear God speaking in their own language.  Your young will see visions.  Your elders will dream dreams.  Your elders will dream dreams.  Your elders will dream dreams.  Your elders will dream dreams.  Your elders will dream dreams.  Your elders will dream dreams. 

          The clamor on the religious airwaves this week has been the recent release of the Pew Study which indicates that the mainline churches in the United States are indeed dying while evangelical churches have slipped off just a tad.  To quote from the study:  “While the drop in Christian affiliation is particularly pronounced among young adults, it is occurring among Americans of all ages.”[2]  The group that experienced the most growth over the course of the seven years of the study was the “unaffiliated” group, with a dramatic shift of 8%, particularly among young adults, who do not identify themselves as “Christian” or “religious” but sometimes as atheist or agnostic.  The Pew Research Center referred to this as a significant change in America’s religious landscape.  Interestingly, the mainline Protestant denominations that took the biggest dip were the United Methodists and the Southern Baptist Convention. 

          This sent pastors, seminaries, and religious writers into deep interpretive mode, trying to figure out what these findings mean.  Diana Butler Bass, religious writer extraordinaire, referred to the Pew Research Center findings as the most important thing we would read this week. 

          We are typical of many mainline congregations in that we are strongly populated by older generations and underrepresented by young families, young adults, youth, and children.  I think the reasons for this are varied and complex, but here is some of my read on what is going on. 

          Time was when the young families--young adults, youth, and children we mentored and brought into the life of our church--were our children and grandchildren.  But we are a much more transient society.  The world has changed. 

I have heard many of you talk about what wonderful children and grandchildren you have living not only in some other part of the country but also in other parts of the world.  Many of our children and grandchildren live outside of Billings or have to show they have grown up by not belonging to or attending the same faith community as you do.  So we no longer work out our diversity over kitchen tables.  That means when our different generations do come together within our churches, it can feel more conflicted because our diversity and our conflicts are much more public.  We might be ok with that conflict and diversity showing up over the privacy common kitchen table, but it feels wrong when that conflict and diversity shows up over a public, sacramental communion table.  We leave the communion table thinking, with our overly-romanticized version of the church, that such conflict should never happen in the name of peace, love, and harmony. 

          And we need each other.  We so need each other’s diverse gifts.  

The early Christian Church had to deal with that kind of transience and diversity.  Rome would regularly dump conquered peoples into new geographical locations, force dislocation and displacement, and leave whole populations of people socially rootless.[3]  In turn, Christianity community served a critical function as a response this social rootlessness—where familial and ethnic identification had broken down.  Baptism served as an initiation rite into a wider social network, a community of care, and an adopted family.  What would it mean for a local church to capture that same early Pentecostal spirit, to become the wind and flame for a city that would revel in a community that worked through generational diversity to find the gifts of each age?

What if there was a congregation that became the flame to hold baby showers for young families that did not have traditional family or extended family around to make sure basic needs were met?    What if we regularly focused on adopting and mentoring young people and making our time with them about relationship instead of fundraising?

In a time where we are living longer and dying more slowly, in this era of multigenerational aging[4], what if we were the flame to provide a circle of support for individuals and couples whose far-away families are trying to make decisions about hospice and end-of-life care?  What if young families adopted elderly couples or singles to provide accompaniment for them at the end of their lives?

We need each other. 

One of the more interesting reflections on the report issued by the Pew Research Center was given by Paul Brandeis Raushenbush.

          Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, grandson of the founder of the Social Gospel, Walter Rauschenbusch, delivered the commencement address last week at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School.  He reflected on the Pew Research Center report, recognizing that some evangelical writers are crowing about the report as a validation of the evangelical church.  He believes their chest-pounding to be misplaced.  Rather, Raushenbush believes it to be a great time to be graduating from a mainline progressive Christian divinity school.  He said: 

The most striking news in the report is the confirmation of the extraordinary rise of those who don't identify with any religion, also known as the 'nones', and this is especially true among young people. One in three millennials do not identify with any religion.

In preparing for this day, I asked a younger friend of mine who is not associated with any faith tradition to do a little word association game with me. When I said the word Christian he immediately rattled off: "Closed minded, only out for themselves, wanting to tell others what to do." And I said to him: "But you know that I am a Christian pastor," and he said, "oh, yeah but you are different." Apparently meaning that I didn't represent what "real" Christians are like.

Sociologist Robert Putnam at Harvard and Political Scientist David Campbell at Notre Dame wrote a piece called God and Cesar in America in which they explain: "To (millennials), 'religion' means 'Republican,' 'intolerant,' and 'homophobic, and since those traits do not represent their views, they do not see themselves -- or wish to be seen by their peers -- as religious."

A 2014 study by Public Religion Research Institute showed that fully one out of three young people left their faith because they perceived it to be as hostile to LGBT people.

I want to make clear, most of these young 'nones'  are not atheists, in fact, many of them claim a belief in God. The problem is that they perceive the church to be hostile to them or to those whom they love, unwilling to engage their questions as they seek for meaning, and/or indifferent to the deep and often systemic injustice they are facing in the world in the 21st century.[5]

What we do here in church is make meaning.  If Raushenbush is right, there is a whole generation waiting for a progressive church to become more visible and articulate about a broader and wider love, a church that struggles against systemic injustice.

And in a more diverse, socially rootless world there are young people seeking belonging and acceptance of their gifts, in need of the wisdom and knowledge older generations might give them.  In a more diverse, socially rootless world there are elders seeking the idealism, curiosity, energy, and vision of younger generations, to know that they will still be cared for and honored even as they lose capacity. 

Throw open the windows.  Let the wind blow in so that each may hear the Spirit speaking in their own language.  And may the fire of God’s Spirit, the flame burn brightly so that not only may the elderly dream dreams, women and men alike, but the younger generations may be given the courage to speak truth to power and see visions.  In that moment, in that beautiful, glorious Pentecostal moment, we will know that God’s Spirit is poured out . . . on all people.  Amen.

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[1] “Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age:  Interview with Maria Popova,” OnBeing with Krista Tippett, May 14, 2015,  http://onbeing.org/program/transcript/7584#main_content.

[2] http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/. 

[3] I spoke of this in a February sermon.  See Ray Pickett, “Conflicts at Corinth,” in A People’s History of Christianity, Vol. 1,:  Christian Origins, Ed. by Richard A. Horsley (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, 2005.   See also, James Carroll, Christ Actually:  The Son of God for the Secular Age  (New York:  Viking, 2014), p. 157, "Patterns of ordinary family cohesion were disrupted, with old people badly cared for, the young deprived of hope.  Many people were made destitute and homeless, and there were few, if any, prospects for betterment.

[4] “The Far Shore of Aging, Interview with Jane Gross,” OnBeing with Krista Tippett, May 7, 2015, http://onbeing.org/program/jane-gross-the-far-shore-of-aging/transcript/7564#main_content.
[5] “It's A Great Time To Be Graduating From A Mainline, Progressive, Christian, Divinity School,” Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, HuffPost Religion, May 18, 2015, edited from commencement address delivered to Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School at Third Presbyterian Church, May 16, 2015.