Spokane Friends Meeting

Psalm 42

 1 As the deer longs for the water-brooks,
so longs my soul for you, O God.

2 My soul is athirst for God, athirst for the living God;
when shall I come to appear before the presence of God?

3 My tears have been my food day and night,
while all day long they say to me,
‘Where now is your God?’

4 I pour out my soul when I think on these things:
how I went with the multitude and led them into the house of God,

5 With the voice of praise and thanksgiving,
among those who keep holy-day.

6 Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul?
and why are you so disquieted within me?

7 Put your trust in God;
for I will yet give thanks to him,
who is the help of my countenance, and my God.

Our (Cultural) Relation to the Psalmist’s Despair

The Psalmist has written this poem in a despair that is soul deep. Like a parched deer searching desperately for water in a dry and barren landscape, so does our Psalmist search the depths of his soul for God. If he does not find the holy presence—the living water of the living God, which appears to him now only as a threatened remembrance—he fears that he will die a death not merely of body but of soul.

From a wound created by the pain of loss and absence, we feel his holy longing—a Pentecostal longing we could say, on this second Sunday after Pentecost—that does not seek remedy in the private space of interior experience. The Psalmist’s longing is not just for a personal experience of God which he can enjoy in the private space of his own soul, in other words, but for a sacred place where he can be with God in the presence of others. Without sacred place—sung into existence by faithful friends—the soul fears it will drown in the rising waters of despair and loneliness.

Can you relate to the Psalmist’s holy longing? Do you sense its sacred presence in your friends and family, in the natural world, in our culture?

Coffee Shop Chat: An Incident of Despair and Pentecostal Longing

A few weeks ago, on a Wednesday afternoon, as the sun started to make its presence felt in Spokane, I noticed this holy longing. I did more than notice it, I should say: I felt it. I was at Cedar Coffee on Monroe. From my usual spot by the window, I was working on my dissertation and watching people walk by on the sidewalk.

I confess that I was also eavesdropping. Behind me sat a group of women. At first, I just heard small talk. One woman had just gotten a new kitten. You have to see these pictures, she said. Oh my god, another woman said. So cute.

They also spoke about the weather: how long the winter was and how nice it is to feel the sun again. It changes everything, one woman said. It sure does, said another.

I heard them talk about someone’s new Tarot deck and whether or not astrology signs are phony or for real.

At one pointed, I tried to block their conversation out. I came to write my dissertation, I said to myself, not eavesdrop. That proved hard to do, however, when, a few minutes later, one of the women started to cry.

She’d been telling a story. Recently, she went through a divorce. She said she lost so much: money, mutual friends, her beloved property. Even her cat. Worse yet, she said, I lost my church. Church used to be her sacred place. It was where her soul drank deep, living waters as she suffered various trials and tribulations. No one at church said anything to her face about the divorce, she said. They never told her to leave. But people acted different. Treated her like she had a scarlet letter on. I could feel their judgement on my skin when they looked at me, she said. Gives me chills to think about now. These were people I raised my kids with.

Worst of all, she said, I didn’t know where God went. I’d stay up at night and cry and cry for his peace but I didn’t feel it. I felt abandoned.

Like a parched deer searching desperately for water in a dry and barren landscape, so did she search the depths of her soul for God.

There was a delicate, supportive silence. The women at her table listened. I imagine that they felt deprived of the right thing to say. Eventually, someone broke the silence. That must have been so hard, one woman said. Yes, another said, you are a survivor. That’s why I hate churches, another woman said. I went through something similar when my son came out. You know, she reflected, so many people go through what we did.

Perhaps I imagined it, but I thought I heard an “amen” come from someplace in the coffee shop.

Her soul bare and vulnerable on the coffee table, the woman cried again. I didn’t see her tears, but I felt them. I also felt compassion comfort her like a warm blanket on a cold night. The act of looking can do this to people: leave them cold or warm, alone or supported.

Thank you, ladies, she said. I don’t know what I’d do without you.

After a few minutes, I hear zipping and the rustling of keys. It is clear that they need to leave but are reluctant to do so. How do you put the soul back in its body when it has made itself bare and vulnerable? I wish I didn’t have to go, one woman said. You know what, another woman said, we should do this again. Heck, we could do it every week. It could be like church without all the BS and judgment. The women laughed. And agreed.

On the Religious Wound

“Worst yet, I lost my church.” “Worst of all, I couldn’t feel God’s presence.” “People treated me like I had a scarlet letter on.” “There are so many people who go through that.” “That’s why I hate churches.”

Do words ever feel sticky? Do they ever stick to you? Since I heard these words at Cedar Coffee a few weeks ago, they have stuck to me. Unfortunately, they are terribly familiar words. They are spoken not just in my memory but every day, throughout our culture. Indeed, it seems like these words have stuck to our culture. Last week, as I wrote this sermon, I typed “church wounded” into Amazon’s search engine. The search yielded these book titles:

Hurting in the Church: A Way Forward for Wounded Catholics. Wounded by God’s People: Discovering How God’s Love Heals our Hearts. Sacred Wounds: A Path to Healing from Spiritual Trauma. Church Hurt: The Wounded Trying to Heal.

Clearly, our culture is suffering from a religious wound. A religious wound is created when a person experiences serious pain and suffering from a religious organization. Religious wounds are damaging: they alienate people from communities of care, and they damage a person’s conscious experience of the Living God. Rather than support holy longing, religious wounds undermines it. To be sure, religious woundedness has caused people to flee the church and consider it a lost and delusional cause. Tragically, an increasing number of people believe that religion has become a force of pain and alienation in the world rather than one of healing and liberation. Even more tragically, they are often right.

In 1955, the acclaimed Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote about the decline of religion. His words are truer now than when he penned them almost fifty years ago:

“It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society,” he wrote. “It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion—its message becomes meaningless.[1]

The Last Sermon

Last week, I preached about Pentecost. Together, we thought about the power of the Holy Spirit. We queried what pentecostal events might look like today and what it will take to help make the world quake anew. I suggested that wonder might make the world quake and I asked us to consider concrete ways in which we can create wonder in world and in our city of Spokane in particular.

Real wonder. I do not mean wonder about a new piece of technology. By real wonder I am not referring to what happens to us when we hear that our favorite basketball team won the championship. These things are wonderful but not the kind of wonder I am referring to. The kind of wonder I am referring to is soul deep. It reminds us of where we ultimately are and where we are called to go. Real wonder reminds us, as the beloved Quaker Thomas Kelly wrote, that “deep within [us] all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice” that is our home and that is calling us home.[2]

I want to continue to think about wonder and how that wonder might help make people quake. Quake not for theatrics or to prove that something is right but to replenish our world that has been damaged by pain and suffering. That is longing for love and presence.

Attending to the Religious Wound: Holy Listening as Remedy

Now, I want to make a proposal. It is simply this: one way we can help make the world wonder is by attending compassionately to the religious wounds people have. Not judging them. Not scolding them. Certainly not arguing with them

So here is a second proposal. We can attend compassionately to the religious wound in our culture and in people by the practice of “holy listening.” This, I think, will create wonder. This, I think, can make the world quake.

I think that is what was most compelling about the women’s group I experienced at Monroe Coffee. They were not moved by the power of a pastor. A hymn did not stir their spirits. What moved them was the power of listening to one another. Their listening created a unique kind of presence, a kind of presence I think it is rather easy to discern the presence of the Living God in. By listening compassionately to one another they created healing and compassion rather than confusion and suffering. They attended compassionately to a woman’s religious wound.

Listening is a recipe for wonder. It is one way we can heal the religious wounds people are suffering from.

How often do we—indeed, how often do I—forget such basic and fundamentally sacred things. That nonjudgmental listening is a healing power is hardly novel.

In my view, Simone Weil is one of the most influential theologians in our time. She was a teacher, a writer, and a political activist. She died in 1943 at the young age of 34. In one of her most famous books, Waiting for God, Weil wrote about the relationship between love of neighbor and listening.

“The love of our neighbor,” Weil wrote, “in all its fullness simply means being able to say to someone: ‘What are you going through?’”[3]

One of the great spiritual teachers of our time, Margaret Geunther, wrote that listening is really what the ancient practice of spiritual direction—or, as others call it, spiritual friendship—is all about: rendering a holy, full, loving, and nonjudgmental attention to the Other.[4]

What are we listening to when we listen to another person? I want to conclude by proposing an answer to this question which, at first thought, may seem too simple. Actually, I believe this is one of the most sacred questions the world confronts us with. In fact, we should never be without the query of who the Other is: the Other sitting next to me at church, the Other driving in front of me, the Other behind me at the grocery store, the Other I see beginning for change or camping by the river, the Other I call “daughter,” the Other who I claim to love and who sleeps beside me every night.

How we answer this query of who the Other is will determine more of our lives than we are able to comprehend. We must never forget that the Jews were taken into concentrations camps because of a peculiar kind of looking at them; that slavery was and remains justified in more subtle forms because of a particular kind of looking; that women weren’t given property or voting rights and still earn a fraction of what men do because of a precise kind of looking.

When I look at this person to in order to listen to her religious wound, or any other kind of wound, what am I looking at?

To my mind, the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas answered this better than most. Levinas taught that, when we look at another person, we are looking at something that is ultimately unnamable. A mystery. There is an infinite distance between the person us and other people, Levinas wrote. This infinite distance is the place where ethics begins. Even when the Other is sitting right next to us, they are more than a million miles away. What I am saying is that our thoughts about other people do not actually capture the mystery of who they really are. People are not reducible to how we think and feel about them.[5] Labels like “Quaker,” “Republican,” “Male,” “Atheist,” “Child,” fall short. They may tell us something important, but they do not go soul deep. Even though we are always trying to, no one can go soul deep but God.

The point I am trying to make is that we are always looking at a mystery when we look at another person. Yes, even at ourselves. We are a true wonder. The sight of another human should make the world quake with the power of God. How wild to think that we are made in God’s image and that we are sparks of divinity. That we are not seduced by this wonder is a cultural tragedy we have yet to really discover.

When we listen to the Other, whether she be wounded or exceedingly joyful, we are listening to a wonder. If we fail to wonder at this, then we must ask ourselves what our problem is. More than likely we will discover one problem is how we look at ourselves and see the world seeing us.

Query:

How do I look and listen to myself — and the wounds I have?

This message was given by Paul Blankenship to Spokane Friends on June 16th, 2019

[1] Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983), 3.

[2] Thomas Kelly, A Testament of Devotion (San Francisco: Harper, 1998), 1.

[3] Simone Weil, Waiting for God (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 64.

[4] Margaret Geunther, Holy Listening (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1992).

[5] Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Norwell, MA: Duquesne University Press, 1991).

Acts 2:1-13

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. ² And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. ³ Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. ⁴ All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

⁵ Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. ⁶ And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each.

⁷ Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? ⁸ And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?

⁹ Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, ¹⁰ Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, ¹¹ Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” ¹² 

All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?”

¹³ But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

The (Contemporary) Birth of Pentecostalism

The year is 1905.[1] The setting is Topeka, Kansas. The actual place is a small Holiness school operated by a controversial minister: Charles Fox Parham. Parham is controversial because he is a brother in deep time to George Fox: he regularly upsets religious authority and emphasizes a democratic, personal experience of God. Parham is also controversial because he teaches that Pentecost is not just a line in religious history or a dead passage in an ancient book. Rather, Parham taught, Pentecost is an ongoing reality and, more critically, an integral part of Christian discipleship. The fire, he taught, still falls from heaven in search of human hosts seeking a full Christian life.

William Joseph Seymour is one of Parham’s most promising students. In 1870, Seymour was born in Louisiana to two former slaves. He grew up in abject poverty. One record from 1896 suggests that all Seymour’s family owned was one old bedframe, a torn mattress, and a beat-up chair.

Seymour left Louisiana because he felt called to be a minister. As he traveled and sought his ministerial place in the world, he worked as a waiter. When he heard about Charles Parham’s Holiness school, Seymour felt called to there. He agreed with Parham about the power of the Indwelling Christ and that the spiritual clouds above were impregnated with a (quote) “latter rain” that would soon fall upon a spiritually thirsty world.

Though Seymour begged to be admitted to the Holiness school, Parham was reluctant. In that day, systemic racism was more fiercely visible. There were strict segregation laws. African Americans were being lynched. Parham himself is a KKK sympathizer. He said he could not fully welcome a black student into his classroom. At the same time, Parham wanted to help the aspiring minister. So, he compromised. He told Seymour that he could listen to his lectures as long as he promised to do so from an open window outside of the school. If it rained, Parham said, he could sit outside of the classroom in the hallway.

Seymour listened astutely from the window. Though it didn’t come, he prayed fervently for the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

In a few months’ time, Seymour received a call to pastor a church in Los Angeles. Parham supported him. In fact, he loaned Seymour the money to catch the train there. Distressingly, however, Seymour was not received well by his new Los Angeles church. They didn’t like how central he made the second baptism of the Holy Spirit. Actually, they found the doctrine rather pretentious. Surely, they thought, whatever gift he speaks of we already have.

Perhaps Seymour wasn’t terrible surprised that the church door was dead-bolted shut one afternoon he showed up for work. Seymour interpreted things accurately: he had been locked out. Fired. Strikingly, however, the rejection did not dissuade him. Penniless and without a home, Seymour kept on keeping on. In short order, he found welcome as a preacher in a house meeting comprised mostly of African Americans. The address of this house—where the trajectory of religious history would radically change—was 214 North Bonnie Brae Avenue.

Impassioned and with a more supportive church, Seymour continued to preach about the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I wonder whether he felt doubt and despair when the fire baptism didn’t come—not even on how own tongue. On April 9, 1906, however, that changed. A black janitor said he received a vision about how to claim the second baptism. That night the church prayed with him, and, as Pentecostals often say, the Spirit came. And boy, did it come!

Under the weight of The Good Power, people fell to the floor. They were overcome by the joy of God’s touch. Touched by the Cool Fire, some ran and shouted through the house. They were inspired by the fervor of God’s love. One woman, who had never learned how, played sweet melodies on the piano. Others, including Seymour himself, began praising God in mysterious tongues.

With Seymour as pastor, people continued to meet under the Spirit’s power. Word spread. The meeting became so populated that Seymour had to preach from the porch. When people continued to come, the meeting had to find a new location. They ended up at an abandoned church turned into barn and which reeked of horses and manure.

While some came for the power, others wanted to see a spectacle. It was, after all, Los Angeles. One evening a reporter from the Los Angeles Times came. He was swept not under the power of the Holy Spirit but of doubt and disgust. The day after he attended a service, he published an article which described (quote) “wild scenes” taking place in a (quote) “weird babble of tongues.”

Other papers wrote similarly skeptical—and sometimes denigrating and racist—articles. The Los Angeles Record speculated that (quote) “Holy Kickers” were engaging in (quote) “Mad Orgies.” The Los Angeles Daily Times wrote that “Whites and Blacks [were mixing] in a Religious Frenzy.”

The Pentecostal revival in Los Angeles continued. As it did, people kept coming and news continued to spread. When it reached Seymour’s old mentor, Charles Parham, he came at Seymour’s request to witness the event and preach a message himself.

Parham preached from the pulpit, which was actually just a shoe-box. But he did not like what he saw. In fact, he too was swept under the power of disbelief and disgust—or, to capture the sentiment more accurately, racism.

Parham wrote about what bothered him: “Men and women, whites and blacks, knelt together or fell across one another; frequently a white woman, perhaps of wealth and culture, could be seen thrown back in the arms of a ‘buck nigger,’ and held tightly thus as she shivered and shook in freak imitation of Pentecost.”

What a “horrible shame,” Parham wrote. It was, he said, a “darkie revival.”

Today scholars agree that the revival Seymour led in Los Angeles was a pivotal – if not the pivotal – birthplace of a religious movement that is now one of the largest and fastest growing in the world. It is a great tragedy that the movement split along racial lines in the United States—due in part to Parham’s tenacious effort to discredit what his young student was doing but more critically to the racist world we all still live and breathe and have our being.

To Parham, the interracial nature of the meeting was problematic. It meant that what was happening was not the work of the Holy Spirit. For Seymour, however, things meant precisely the opposite. While Parham taught that the second baptism of the Holy Spirit would be evident primarily when people spoke in tongues, Seymour thought that the more telling sign of the Holy Spirit would be racial reconciliation: that, in other words, the second baptism would be discernable because it would heal the deep and profound wounds of racial injustice. And, in fact, the revival in Azusa Street seemed to be on that path. It was not just that blacks, whites, and Mexican were worshiping with one another—they were also embracing and weeping and kneeling at the altar with one another. One white preacher, who was initially offended but later inspired by the interracial service, wrote that “the color line had been washed away … ” in the power of their meeting.

Historic Parallels  

I want to explore some of the similarities between the Pentecostal story described in the book of Acts and the story I just told about the birth of contemporary Pentecostalism. As I do, let’s set aside for a moment the thorny question of how the Holy Spirit actually moves people. Sadly, I think some people today are understandably quite suspicious of a (quote) “Pentecostal power” in light of how phony and manipulative charismatic preachers have been.

First, both stories describe powerful experiences of God. People prayed for and then received a transformative experience of the holy. The power of God, we might say, made them quake. The power of God became their experience, but, importantly, it exceeded their own power and did not belong to them. Second, their experience of the holy, which they did not force but which God brought upon them, created community. It brought people together—people who may have previously had a difficult time relating to one another. Perhaps this Pentecost recasts the nature of divine action as told in the story of Tower of Babel. God does not confuse and create division; She heals and brings together.

Here is a third parallel. Both Pentecostal events led people to wonder. Personally, I am most fascinating by this parallel.

The power of God astonished. It wooed. It seduced. It created a human experience of amazement and erotic bafflement.

Not everyone wondered in astonished awe, of course. Understandably, there were cynics and people who operated by what we might call a “hermeneutic of suspicion,” which tends to interpret everything on the basis of what may be least flattering and most perverse. Still, though, many were—and remain—astonished. They were wooed and beautifully seduced by the power of God.  How wonderful, I think, to speak of a God who woos us with wonder and seduces us with beauty.

Here is the fourth parallel. Perhaps it is the most important because it reveals what is ultimately at stake. Both pentecosts motivated people to get to work: not just through their own power, but also through God’s. The Holy Spirit came not for pleasure or charismatic theatrics but for purpose: to create inclusive communities that love and through which the human and nonhuman world might experience less suffering and become more fully alive. To help all living and breathing things flourish.

Pentecosts Today (or what might make the world quake).  

I want to conclude by moving us more deeply into our present time and by raising a few queries for us to consider—each in our own beautifully unique way—before God. I want to ask what Pentecostal events might look like today—or how, speaking in a more historically Quaker tongue, we might help the world quake. 

What today, in our own small corner of the globe, might help people experience the power of God? What might help bring people together in Spokane? What in our city might cause people to wonder? What might help people in our Meeting work toward the flourishing of our world?

Power. Reconciliation. Wonder. Flourishing. These words, it seems to me, say a little something about the ultimately unnameable mystery we call God.

I want to say, rather quickly, my imagination hurries to the divisive state of our politics. I would wonder at the power of God if I saw Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi sit down together—without Tweet, stunt, or derision—to improve the common good so that we can all lead freer and fulfilling lives. When I was in Seattle last month a friend told me to imagine Donald Trump on the next presidential ticket with Bernie Sanders (he wanted Sanders at the top of the ticket, he said, as would I). Scandalized by the absurd proposition, I put my fork down in disgust and disbelief. How sad, though, I recollect now, that I did not imagine that The Creator of the World could inspire such a reconciliation.

What a small and jaded conception of God’s power I sometimes think with.

I also wonder at the thought of seeing people who commit crime, whether through malice or desperation, get helped and reintegrated rather than locked up and loaded with burdens that even Wonder Woman couldn’t lift. I wonder when I imagine fundamentalist Christians in the Bible Belt worshiping with liberal Episcopalians in Portland. Or when I think of church wounded people in Spokane bathing with us in the light at our meeting.

I don’t know about you but when I start to wonder like this, I live my life differently. I see things differently. I feel the world differently. Actually, I also see how the things I wonder about are actually happening now and experience a holy invitation to join the work.

Queries (or exercises in wonder):

What do you want to see the world quake before the transformative power of God?

How might God be calling you—today, in this moment, and personally, to participate in a new way in the ongoing

[1] My rendering of Pentecostal history sticks pretty close to Harvey Cox’s in Fire From Heaven (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2001).

This message was given at Spokane Friends Church by Paul Blankenship on June 9, 2019.

Good morning.  A while back, I was asked to help speak at a week long camp for high- schoolers – and the Scripture that the camp asked me to use was this very text in Matthew 22 (Matt. 22:34-40). And so I busily began to prepare each day’s message by reading this passage until it was seared in my memory and digging deep into the context and words and meanings. But the further I got into this preparation, the slower I worked, because I found myself convicted — almost paralyzingly convicted. Scribbling down thoughts that made me pause in prayer and silence for long stretches of time. God was speaking to me. And so I wrote these thoughts down – and they may be a little personal to be sharing with you all, as I don’t know all of you that well. But we are the Church together, and so perhaps we can lean into the ways we are meant to help each other grow with courage and humility. And perhaps you might also hear what God is saying in this passage as convicting to you as well.

So to begin, I want to share a bit about my own life… I grew up as a kid with a passionate love for God. I was baptized when I was seven years old, gave my testimony in front of the whole church. I went on to memorize Bible verses, attend Bible studies, I prayed diligently. I went ot church on Sundays and Wednesdays and retreats on weekends. I loved God as well as I could. But when I was in high school, I stumbled upon a documentary about the AIDS crisis in Africa for the first time – and I was broken hearted. I realized that I had spent so much time and so much of my life loving God and cultivating my own faith life – and I began to question – what does that have to say to these people who were dying of a disease on the other side of the world? How did my faith and love of God help me love the world?

So at that point, in high school, I started a journey of looking outward and not just inward– learning about people. It started by learning about the AIDs crisis and other diseases wreaking havoc on the world’s poor, which led to learning about cities in the US, in our own country, which led to learning about race and racism and how that plays out in our schools, neighborhoods, and our government. And I continue to follow my curiosity on these things today…

I have found, in all of this learning and looking outward, that my soul stirred by these stories. And I live and work and breath in the ministry world—I’ve had this refrain from the Lord’s Prayer beating in my chest, “Let your Kingdom come, let your will be done, on earth, this earth, as it is in heaven,” –I preach and I teach again and again and again that we are called to love our neighbor! To know those whose life is different than ours. To know those for whom life is harder. To love the orphan and the widow and the fatherless and motherless. To walk alongside of and learn from those who have less. To welcome the stranger. To understand our privilege. To listen the race conversation in America and learn how to be part of it. To know the Church in the Global South is an important voice! A leading voice. Love others! I say, Love them well! Stop thinking so individually! See yourself as part of a community! Look outward!

And I believe this is important! In a lot of ways, this is the fuel my ministry mind and heart run on. All I have to do is look at Jesus for half a second in the gospel, and it becomes crystal clear that if we are to follow his example, our life has to be marked by this type of listening and seeing and radically loving others.

But in all of this thinking and teaching and preaching and listening and learning and loving, I fear… I confess to you… that I’ve neglected my own love for God. The pendulum may have swung too far in the other direction since the days of my youth. And so Jesus convicts me in this passage.

Now, I don’t know if you were able to follow the gospel story we just read– it’s pretty straight forward.

A man, a lawyer, a Pharisee, one of those churchy-leader-types, comes up to Jesus with a question. A question to test Jesus, Scripture says. He asks him – Jesus: what is the greatest commandment? What is the one thing we must to do follow God?

Now, every good Jew would know the answer to this question: to love God. So it’s sort of a soft-ball question that the lawyer is using here. The text tells us that he’s trying to test Jesus, right? So why would this soft-ball question be testing Jesus here??

In the background, if I were to read between the lines – and use my sanctified imagination to fill in the gaps of this story – to read this story through the lens of today… I might hear in this question, the lawyer saying something like this — “You’ve spent all your time, Jesus, with these certain types of people. People with diseases–people with sin – people without money – people in trouble. You’ve spent all your time talking with them. Healing them. Helping them. You’ve spent all your time with the poor, the marginalized, the minorities, the outcasts… Your radical social life, this lawyer may have said between the lines, has made me uneasy. Your disregard for all the rules that I follow so carefully has made me uneasy. So let me hear you just say it out loud – what’s the most important commandment? Because by looking at your life, I could guess you think it has to do with these people you spend so much of your time with…

And so, in this climactic moment in which the lawyer tests Jesus – when these two men are nose to nose, the lawyer’s chest puffed out, Jesus brow furrowed, and there’s a drawn out awkward silence between them– Jesus looks at this skeptical lawyer in the eyes. Jesus life is oozing all around them this uncontainable compassion for others. And so with his love for others exuding out of his every pore—that marks his every day—the fuel for his ministry, and the reason for his fame – with this love covering every square inch of Jesus — Jesus looks at the lawyer and says this: The first and most important commandment is this – Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.”

And this is what cuts me to the heart. Jesus, whose every move seems to seek justice and love mercy for the sake of others  – this same Jesus calls us to remember that we must first walk humbly with our God.

Jesus here is quoting an important verse from the book of Deuteronomy, and these verses – this creed really – is so important in the Jewish faith, that it has its own name: the Shema. This is the pledge we’re called to make to God every day: Love the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul and with all your mind. The verse is from Dt 6:4, but the following verses in Deuteronomy 6 help unpack what this means and what this looks like better. So in order to unpack what Jesus means with his answer, let’s look into this passage:

• Deuteronomy goes on to explain that a person who loves God in this way teaches the children about this love of God – raises up the next generation into this love.
• A person who loves God in this way, talks about it – out loud—talk about this love at home.
• Talks about this love while not at home – while out and about: at work, at the store, on vacation, in the city hall, with friends and with family with politicians.
• A person who loves God in this way prays into this love every single morning before their feet hit the floor and every single night before their head hits the pillow. Their life is marked by praying into this verse.
• A person who loves God in this way takes the time to intentionally remember where God’s love has shown up in the past – in their life, in their families life, in the history of the church and God’s people — and uses this memory of God’s love as a source of encouragement, as a source of identity, as a source of strength.
• A person who loves God in this way has woven this pledge of allegiance in their daily routine – has tattooed their life – their body, their house, their rhythms, their relationships, with this love so as to remember it, in all places and at all times.

“Love the Lord your God, Deuteronomy says, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. When the Lord your God brought you into the land that he swore to your ancestors, take care that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of the and of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. Love the Lord your God… This is the first and greatest commandment.”

I can imagine the surprise on the lawyer’s face at this answer as he stared back at this outstandingly social, progressive, people-centered god-man who so often was critical of religious institutions and rules. I can imagine the surprise on the lawyer’s face when Jesus said the most important commandment, in all the Scriptures, is to love the Lord your God with everything you have, because this lawyer wasn’t expecting to have the same answer!

I think Jesus is teaching us here that the best place to begin loving others has to be by first loving God. Knowing this responsibility that we bear as believers should inspire us! Because it continually draws us back to the reason we live and love others in the first place. We love, because God first loved us.

Just when the lawyer beings to turn away from Jesus, perplexed by his answer… Jesus catches the man, I imagine maybe catches him by the arm, and continues … “And the second greatest commandment, Jesus says, is just like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.”

You see the lawyer asked for one answer – and Jesus gave him two answers. The lawyer asked for the one greatest commandment, and Jesus says: there are two. As if to say, one answer is too narrow. We need to love God, yes. That is the first and greatest, and the starting spot. But we also need to love our neighbors. By giving the man two answers, Jesus tells him you cannot have one without the other. The first is the first, and the second is the second, but they are equally important. Different – but inseparable.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

And here, Jesus is quoting again from the Old Testament – an important verse from Leviticus 19, where God’s people are being taught what it looks like to love others.

• Leviticus goes on to explain that the person who loves others works their land, but doesn’t take all the harvest. They leave some for the poor and the hungry, who come to glean the fields after the harvest for food.
• The person who loves others won’t lie or distort the truth to others, but rather their speech will be generous and engaging and uplifting and truth-telling even if it’s hard.
• A person who loves others in this way will demonstrate this love with their lives, but will also demonstrate this love where no one else will see it — within their own hearts. This love permeates their actions and their words, their hands and their heart.
• The person who loves others in this way, loves all people of all abilities – those for whom life is easy who don’t need much help, and those for whom life is difficult, who may need an extra leg up.
• A person who loves others in this way loves even the stranger who comes to live in our land – the refugee, the alien, the outsider. And they treat this outsider well, they don’t oppress the stranger, they don’t make life harder for them – but instead they treat the outsider like an insider. Because the person who loves others in this way remembers that we all were outsiders once, until God made us insiders.

“When you reap the harvest of your land,” Leviticus says, ”you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest…you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger… You shall not steal, you shall not lie, you shall defraud your neighbor…you shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord… When a stranger resides in your land, Leviticus says, you shall not oppress the stranger. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.”

Love God, love others. The whole faith hangs on these two commands.

So where do you feel the most comfortable? Is it talking and thinking and acting on your own interior faith life? Do you love God well? Do you pray often, set aside time carefully for your daily time in the Word? Then Jesus calls out to you, catches you by the arm and says – the second is just like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. Think about loving the world. Let that challenge you to move outside your comfort zone.

Or, like me, do you find yourself in these days most comfortable, as ironic as this sounds, talking about the uncomfortable ways we’re called to love others? Social Justice? Then Jesus calls out to you and says – the first and greatest commandment is to love God with your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Let that challenge you to move outside your comfort zone.

In whatever wing we feel most comfortable, left to our own devices, we’d probably just stay there. But Christ calls us in this passage us to not stay there. To not let the pendulum swing too far one way or another. To realize that the one most important thing is actually two.

This message was given by Rev. Lauren Taylor to Spokane Friends Church on June 2, 2019

When life suddenly takes us in a new direction, we think “this is a new beginning; this is the birth.” However, that is a misconception, because actually this new something began some time ago.  It began when the usual began to seem constricting.  What gave pleasure and meaning no longer feeds you in the same way.  Perhaps there is a death of someone close to you; or something you have relied upon no longer serves you.

However, it happens.  The life you have known has begun its shift.  This is the death that the universe has given you.  Along with this death will come feelings of shock, grief, and loss.  The world as you knew it is no more.  You wake up to find that the reliable is no longer so.

Often, this is the point at which one may go into a decline.  Because what has previously given your life meaning is no longer available to you in the same way.  Life has lost the structure you relied upon.  There may be feelings of depression and despair.

Tune in now and ask what transition may be affecting you now.  Where in your body do you feel this?  In a recent workshop on transitions, when asked this question, what came to me was that I was still processing my brother’s death.  It was affecting me more than I had realized.  It had happened so suddenly that my body was still reeling from the shock.  We had had so many plans together.  He was the rock I had always relied upon and now he was no longer there.  In addition, his death left me as the only surviving member of my immediate family.

Reaching inside, I felt an inner trembling, it felt rocky and sharp.  I was filled with grief and loss and without knowing it, my world picture had changed.  I no longer expected the best but feared the worst possible outcome.  I felt so alone.

As our instructor moved us forward, he showed us how this point asks our soul for courage; the courage to move on, to construct new hopeful realities.  To seek an inner calm that can be present in any circumstance.

I invite you to listen to this poem by David Whyte called Sweet Darkness:

“When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong…

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

Anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

Is too small for you.”

I love this poem for in just a few sentences, he begins to bring me into a new place.  He calls me forth to a vision of my greatness; to the place where I can manage to be alone and begin to revision my life.  This phase of transition is called the middle ground, the unknown.  All we have here is the basic core of our own beliefs.  We learn to be comfortable in not-knowing, and strive to deal with the present by being present.  Rather than thinking, thinking, thinking, we begin to feel our feet hit the ground with each step; we eat without distraction and take joy in each bite.  We count our blessings and let spirit begin to lead us into our new life.

Thich Nhat Hanh calls us to this moment:

Our true home is in the present moment.
To live in the present moment is a miracle.
The miracle is not to walk on water.
The miracle is to walk on the green Earth in the present moment,

To appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now.
Peace is all around us–
in the world and in nature–
and within us–
in our bodies and our spirits.
Once we learn to touch this peace,
we will be healed and transformed.
It is not a matter of faith;
it is a matter of practice

Along with the soul quality of presence, the middle ground calls us to trust.

Here, we can call upon David Whyte once again:

“Watching the geese
go south I find
that
I am part
of a great migration
that will take me to another place.

This morning they have
found me,
full of faith,
like a blind child,
nestled in their feathers,
following the great coast of the wind
to a future I cannot see.”

And so slowly, a new future does unfold and we arrive at the new beginning, the new birth.  We have paid our dues.  We have delved into our psyche and found a new north, the direction that will feed us in a way we have never been fed before.  We taste joy on our lips and feel the wind in our hair.  We are ready for the new adventure.  Here, we call on the soul qualities of Belief, Vision and Intention and we know our new moment has arrived.

Once again, David Whyte names this moment for us:

“I awoke
this morning
in the gold light
turning this way
and that

Thinking for
a moment
it was one
day
like any other.

But
the veil had gone
from my darkened heart
and
I thought

It must have been the quiet
candlelight
that filled my room

It must have been
the first
easy rhythm
with which I breathed
myself to sleep,

It must have been
the prayer I said
speaking to the otherness
of the night.

And
I thought
this is the good day
you could
meet your love,

This is the black day
someone close
to you could die.

This is the day
you realize
how easily the thread
is broken between this world
and the next.

And I found myself
sitting up
in the quiet pathway
of light,

The tawny
close grained cedar
burning round
me like fire
and all the angels of this housely
heaven ascending

through the first
roof of light
the sun has made.

This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.

This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.

There is no house
like the house of belonging.

Emerging through transitions calls on different soul qualities to get us through each chapter of our changing lives.  In the face of endings, we go forward with Courage.  In the middle ground, we call upon Presence and Trust.  As we come through the darkness of the womb of the unknown and enter the birth of something new, we call upon Belief, Vision and Intention.  We now know ourselves in a new way; one that perhaps was not available to us before this journey.

I invite you now to be a friend to silence and come forward, if you are called, to share what transition you are currently in and what qualities you are finding to carry you through, or perhaps what you have learned in previous transitions.  May we be blessed by the ways that spirit comes forth to lead us on.

And so it is.

This message was given to Spokane Friends Meeting by Anya Lawrence on May 19, 2019

Good morning, friends. I thought I would start out with a little bit of context and explanation of my title for this morning. In what may seem like a great irony my title was originally inspired after reading the Game of Thrones books several years ago. If you are not familiar with this cultural phenomenon, you should know that many people think of Sunday as a day for worship, and also for watching Game of Thrones. The HBO series is wildly popular, although I am not one of its fans. Strictly the books for me.

It is a story that takes place in a medieval world, and each of the ruling families has a house sign and house motto. These motto’s are words which are central to each house, as if their identity could be distilled down into 3-5 words. Examples of these mottos include:

– House Stark ”Winter is Coming”: a depressing reminder of the inevitability of hard times.

-House Arryn ”As High as Honor”: This describes the fortress of this house, high in the mountains.

-House Lannister ”Hear Me Roar”: a call to the sign of one of the houses, which is a golden lion.

-House Targaryen ”Fire and Blood”: a cheerful motto, it harkens to this house and that they at one point used dragons in war.

-House Tully “Family, Duty, Honor”: Perhaps the only remotely positive motto among the bunch.

I am a huge fan of these books and some time ago I proposed to Krista that we come up with a motto for our family, for our house. As Friends we immediately thought of something pertaining to light, because looking for the light of Christ is an ever and ongoing task for Quakers. It was an energizing process for us to come up with a few words that could define what we wanted for our family.

Contrary to the bleak and dreary nature of the Game of Thrones house mottos, we wanted a phrase that captured our faith, and our search for good even in the midst of great and challenging evil. Light being the central theme of our faith, we wished to incorporate that as well. Out of that time of dreaming together we came up with the motto which serves as the title of my sermon today: “There is always light.”

I do not pretend to be a voice speaking for all Friends, and not even for the Friends gathered here today. However today I would ask us to consider the value of these words in our day and age. There are always narratives of darkness in culture, and we as a faith community have spoken out against them. Our historical Friends while not adopting a motto officially (for creeds are not really our thing) showed by their actions that “There is Always Light.” They often rejected the popular motto of the day, offering one that was counter to the culture swirling around them.

In the 1600’s when Margaret Fell and George Fox founded our movement, there were many mottoes in British culture. A few of them included “Men are more important than women,” “Prisoners have no rights,” “The nobility is of greater worth” “Always salute the king.” They rejected these notions and said instead “Women and Men are equal” “Nobility is title not virtue” and “Prisoners must be protected,”

Friends, “There is always light”

In the 1700’s after Friends had come to America they encountered a whole new set of mottoes that the culture had adopted:  “Natives have no rights;” “God wills that we should own slaves;” and “Freedom of faith is geographical.” To this they responded “All people have rights;” “God wills that all are free;” and “Find religious freedom here.”

Friends, “There is always light”

In the 1800’s Friends again found themselves battling mottoes new and familiar “It is still right that we own slaves;” “Prisoners still do not have rights;” and “Women cannot be trusted to vote.” Once again they found themselves pushing back: “Freedom will triumph”;  “All can and should vote.”

Friends, I ask us today to consider what are the mottoes in our culture? What mottoes do we encounter in our time?

(congregation responds)

To those we say instead,

(congregation responds)

I am not pretending that we have been a perfect movement, far from it. However, our message to the prevailing culture throughout history has been “There is always light.” We look for it, find it, and remind others of it. May we continue to be that voice in our day and age, in our homes, in our places of work, in our community, and in this upcoming election cycle.

1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.   (John 1:1-4)

To conclude, I wish to share some dialog from one of my favorite film series, the Lord of the Rings. This comes from the second film, not the second movie. In a time of particular darkness. It is an exchange between Frodo and Sam, the most important characters in the story.

Frodo : I can’t do this, Sam.

Sam : I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.

Frodo : What are we holding on to, Sam?

Sam : That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.

Friends, there is always light.

This message was given to Spokane Friends Church by Jon Maroni on Sunday, April 28, 2019.

The Bridge

His lips quiver. “There’s a girl on the bridge,” he says. “She threw a can of beer onto the river. It looks like she’s going to jump.”

Love is inscribed on the bridge. “Pat Loves Erica” is written in pink and purple chalk. In yellow and blue is an imperative: “Love Earth.” A heart is drawn in black sharpie next to the word “more.” Some people have merely written their names: “Jesse,” “Suzanna,” “Jungle Boy.” A small bomb is drawn into the word “revolution.”

She is wearing torn blue jeans, showing her olive knee, and a black jacket. A beanie covers her forehead. Her green eyes appear through clear glasses. There is acne on her chin.

“Excuse me,” she says rudely, “do you have any drugs?” I tell her I don’t. “Well forget it,” she says. I watch as a kind of gravity pulls her back to the ledge. Her hands clutch the concrete railing as she looks down at the river.

I am on my way to Cedar Coffee on Monroe. I planned to work on my dissertation about the spirituality of young adults living on the streets of Seattle. “Call us street kids,” they’d say. Incidentally, I am on the phone with a “street minister” from Seattle. We are having a conversation about an event we are putting on at the University of Washington. The event is about homelessness in Seattle and we are asking what religious organizations can to do help create a world in which people needn’t be homeless.

I tell the street minister I will call him back. “Just have a conversation with her,” he says.

Our eyes lock. I walk this gaze, trepidly, wondering where she is and what to say. Though she is standing in front of me, I don’t know precisely where she is. Though you are standing before me, I don’t know precisely where you are.

“I am going through spiritual warfare,” she says. “It’s real even if you can’t see it.” “I am so sorry,” I say. “What can I do to help?

“If you actually want to help,” she says, “then call my mother.” “Tell her,” she says, convulsing now, crying, “what she is doing to me.”

She leans down, takes frantic breathes from off the ledge. “Don’t misunderstand me,” she says, “if my mom hadn’t kicked me out of the house for using drugs, I wouldn’t have become homeless and learned who I really am.”

She wipes the mucus that’s dripped onto her lips. “Why aren’t you calling her?” “Okay, what’s her number?”

She walks to the ledge of the bridge as I take my phone out. She puts one leg over and then the other. She is sitting down. Her feet hang free. I look past her feet and onto the river, passed the river and onto my neighborhood of Peaceful Valley. “I am so sorry,” she says. “I am so sorry.” I wonder if she is apologizing to me or to God or to every living thing that she has ever wounded.

“If I jump, do you think I will be alright?” She is worried about the fate of her eternal soul. “You will be okay if you say,” I say. “I promise.”

The police came to the bridge and, despite her aggressive resistance, put her in handcuffs and drove her away. “Jesus,” she cried before she left, “please help me.”

I walked away from the scene and called the street minister. I told him what happened. “You saved her life,” he said. “Man,” he went on, “this really confirms the importance of our work.”

Ambivalence

I wasn’t so confident. I did not want to bless her suicide; I wanted her to remain in the world. On the other hand, however, I knew what coming back from the ledge would require: hoping that her mother would stop using, and that she would; hoping that there would be adequate medical care to address her obvious struggles with mental health and addiction; hoping that there’d be someplace safe to go, other than the streets or a dehumanizing shelter; hoping again in the kind of love written all over the bridge. Given that those services are often not available, and the broken state of her heart, was I cruel to offer her that hope? Might the rocks she’d have broken her head open on been kinder to her than the world she came back to?

John 20:19-23

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

Ezekiel 36:1-6

The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry.  He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus, says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.”

What does Easter mean to us? Is it a debate about whether the story is true—whether a man who claimed to be God died as a criminal on a cross and then actually rose from the dead? Is Easter about what we take to be the fundamental nature of reality: that, despite the absurdity of violence and suffering, good will ultimately triumph over evil? Is Easter a banal social demand: something that has lost real meaning for us but that we go through every year because we almost have to? Does Easter signify the death of God and of religion? Or is Easter about candy, bunnies, and eggs?

I am compelled by what I have learned about the Quaker tradition over the past year. Primarily, I am compelled by the Living Light that dwells here. Quakers live by the divine light in and around us and believe that this divine light is radically democratic; that it is communicable and discernable to every person regardless of who has the microphone. I am also drawn to the Quaker tradition because it is a religion not merely of belief but of action. Though it emphasizes the centrality of direct and unmediated experience of the Living Light, it is not individualistic. Friends recognize that attention to the Living Light is best done in community. Strange as it seems to our western sensibilities, we don’t learn much about the Living Light Within unless we sit down and listen to The Silence with one another. I am also compelled to the Quaker world because it recognizes that it is our obligation and our privilege to help other people in the world, and especially the most vulnerable, whose needs are irrefutably greater than ours, experience the deep peace that the Living Light sows into our worried minds.

Evidence of the Living Light

There is evidence of the Living Light all around us. It is discernable in this very church: in our new sink, in the redecorated entrance, in the smell of new paint in the women’s bathroom. It is also discernable outside of the church: in the sunshine we have waited a long winter for, in the slow plant growth in our gardens, and in a new sense of hope emerging in our politics. It touched me when I proposed to Veronika in Hawaii a few weeks ago; I sensed it this week when I heard a faint whisper of truth spoken to power in the Mueller report.

We cannot control the Living Light. It is not like a pill or a diet plan. It is not a seed we can buy from the store and hold in our hands as we place it in soil. Though true, it resists even our best and most lofty theologies. We stand emboldened but dumb before it.

Light-taking Spaces

Though we can discern the Living Light, we remain vulnerable to the Great Darkness that permeates our world. This Great Darkness is in the fabric of our everyday lives. We see it on the news. Every day we learn about a new war, a new famine, a new disease. We sense it in our schools. 2018 was the worst year on record for gun violence in schools. We just learned that, in the coming wave of layoffs that will hit Spokane schools, low-income areas will be hit the hardest. We see the Great Darkness in our homes. Almost 1 in 4 women will experience severe domestic violence by an intimate partner in her lifetime. The Great Darkness is in our minds: roughly 20% of Americans suffer from mental health issues. Alas, it is in our veins. 130 people die every day from opioid-related drug overdoses. The Great Darkness is in the streets and under our bridges: the violence of our economic machine has prioritized profit over people and rendered more and more people residentially insecure and homeless.

The theologian Dorothee Söelle suggests that the crucifixion of Jesus is an ongoing reality: that it is happening wherever the poor and vulnerable suffer from brutalizing abuses of power. How can we celebrate the resurrection while so many people are dying?

Where do you go when The Great darkness surrounds you? Where do you go when the Living Light seems extinguished? Where do we go when the weight of the world has brought us to our knees? Are you breathing under a bridge?

The Church Without a Light

For thousands if not millions of years people have turned to the gods to experience the Living Light in the face of the Great Darkness. Increasing, however, people in the United States are turning away from the gods. They are turning away from the religions that claim to house them. The migration from religion is a complex subject and it is the result of several factors. One thing is clear, though: to many people in our peculiar country, religion is perceived to be a moral failure. It does not seem to bear witness to the Living Light that gives hope to a world that lives in conscious and unconscious despair. When the Cathedral in Notre Dame burnt last week, most were concerned about losing the art in the building, not whether people had lost a house of hope and a place of light amid the darkness.

Actually, the migration from religion is not all that bad. The Holy Spirit is clearly at work, beckoning some people out of the church so that She can be found in new and creative and beautiful ways. What I lament, however, is that people are living life without something we all need: a place to gather together to be dazzled and dared by the Living Light. We humans aren’t as complex as we seem. Our souls need the Living Light like a plant needs the sun. We need places where hope can be experienced as real and lasting—not an absurd fantasy that’s hidden in an afterlife.

The Church As A Light Bearing Place

In the Gospel reading for today, the disciples are gathered together after Jesus died. They are in fear that they themselves may suffer and die. They are in despair. They have lost their love, their teacher, their friend—not just to his death but also to their betrayal of him in his suffering. Despite their fear, betrayal, and disbelief, the risen Jesus comes to them. He offers them peace—not payback. The encounter was absurd—it transcended their human power to understand that Jesus was with them in the flesh though he had died and that he offered them peace when they wounded him. After Jesus shows them that he is real, he breathes the Holy Spirit onto them. This breath was not meant just to comfort them, though that was important. He breathed the Holy Spirit on them so that they would be empowered to continue his work in the world: to bear witness to the Living Light that shines in the darkness and to create communities where people can become more alive. That was—and remains—Jesu’s desires for the world: to dazzle and dare people with the Divine Light so that they can become more alive. The glory of God, St. Irenaeus wrote in the second century, is the human person fully alive.

Building the Infrastructure of Lasting Hope

Almost every day I walk the Monroe Street Bridge. I think about the woman I encountered. I think about how her foundation collapsed and why she became suicidal. Brick by brick, I ask what happened. I think about our culture, too, and how many people walk on a crumbling foundation and are a phone call away from jumping off a bridge. There are more than 1,100 suicides each year in Washington state. That makes it the eight-leading cause of death among people of all ages and the second leading cause of death for people age 15-34. Experts aren’t exactly sure why but, by once measure, suicides have increased 19% across the state and 24% in Spokane.

I asked you what Easter means and how we can celebrate the resurrection when so many people are dying without hope. I struggle to ask these questions because I don’t want to take any of the joy this day offers you and which we all need to go about living our best lives amid the Great Darkness. But I can’t escape the desperate cry that so many people in our world have and which we are obligated to respond to: not just in our minds and our prayers but in our actions and in our politics. Prayer is meant to move the world into the Kin-Dom of God, not merely comfort our troubled minds. Jesus is still breathing the Holy Spirit on us so that we can breathe the dry bones that build our culture to life. So that we can create the conditions in which people can experience the Lasting Hope that Jesus promised. The notion may seem absurd, utopic, and Pollyannaish. It isn’t. Belief in the impossible fact that life can emerge in the face of death is the bone and marrow of our faith. Jesus came so that we may have life and have it abundantly.

As a bridge into this abundance, I have prepared a few queries for us. I will read them both and then sit down to create space for us to respond if God so moves us.

Queries:

How might this meeting help me experience the Living Light more deeply?

How might God be calling our meeting to help the most vulnerable people in our city plant needs the sun.

athered together after Jesus died. They are in fear that they themselves may suffer and die. They are in despair. They have lost their love, their teacher, their friend—not just to his death but also to their betrayal of him in his suffering. Despite their fear, betrayal, and disbelief, the risen Jesus comes to them. He offers them peace—not payback. The encounter was absurd—it transcended their human power to understand that Jesus was with them in the flesh though he had died and that he offered them peace when they wounded him. After Jesus shows them that he is real, he breathes the Holy Spirit onto them. This breath was not meant just to comfort them, though that was important. He breathed the Holy Spirit on them so that they would be empowered to continue his work in the world: to bear witness to the Living Light that shines in the darkness and to create communities where people can become more alive. That was—and remains—Jesu’s desires for the world: to dazzle and dare people with the Divine Light so that they can become more alive. The glory of God, St. Irenaeus wrote in the second century, is the human person fully alive.

Building the Infrastructure of Lasting Hope

Almost every day I walk the Monroe Street Bridge. I think about the woman I encountered. I think about how her foundation collapsed and why she became suicidal. Brick by brick, I ask what happened. I think about our culture, too, and how many people walk on a crumbling foundation and are a phone call away from jumping off a bridge. There are more than 1,100 suicides each year in Washington state. That makes it the eight-leading cause of death among people of all ages and the second leading cause of death for people age 15-34. Experts aren’t exactly sure why but, by once measure, suicides have increased 19% across the state and 24% in Spokane.

I asked you what Easter means and how we can celebrate the resurrection when so many people are dying without hope. I struggle to ask these questions because I don’t want to take any of the joy this day offers you and which we all need to go about living our best lives amid the Great Darkness. But I can’t escape the desperate cry that so many people in our world have and which we are obligated to respond to: not just in our minds and our prayers but in our actions and in our politics. Prayer is meant to move the world into the Kin-Dom of God, not merely comfort our troubled minds. Jesus is still breathing the Holy Spirit on us so that we can breathe the dry bones that build our culture to life. So that we can create the conditions in which people can experience the Lasting Hope that Jesus promised. The notion may seem absurd, utopic, and Pollyannaish. It isn’t. Belief in the impossible fact that life can emerge in the face of death is the bone and marrow of our faith. Jesus came so that we may have life and have it abundantly.

As a bridge into this abundance, I have prepared a few queries for us. I will read them both and then sit down to create space for us to respond if God so moves us.

Queries.

How might this meeting help me experience the Living Light more deeply?

How might God be calling our meeting to help the most vulnerable people in our city live more deeply within the Living Light?

unconscious despair. When the Cathedral in Notre Dame burnt last week, most were concerned about losing the art in the building, not whether people had lost a house of hope and a place of light amid the darkness.

Actually, the migration from religion is not all that bad. The Holy Spirit is clearly at work, beckoning some people out of the church so that She can be found in new and creative and beautiful ways. What I lament, however, is that people are living life without something we all need: a place to gather together to be dazzled and dared by the Living Light. We humans aren’t as complex as we seem. Our souls need the Living Light like a plant needs the sun. We need places where hope can be experienced as real and lasting—not an absurd fantasy that’s hidden in an afterlife.

The Church As A Light Bearing Place

            In the Gospel reading for today, the disciples are gathered together after Jesus died. They are in fear that they themselves may suffer and die. They are in despair. They have lost their love, their teacher, their friend—not just to his death but also to their betrayal of him in his suffering. Despite their fear, betrayal, and disbelief, the risen Jesus comes to them. He offers them peace—not payback. The encounter was absurd—it transcended their human power to understand that Jesus was with them in the flesh though he had died and that he offered them peace when they wounded him. After Jesus shows them that he is real, he breathes the Holy Spirit onto them. This breath was not meant just to comfort them, though that was important. He breathed the Holy Spirit on them so that they would be empowered to continue his work in the world: to bear witness to the Living Light that shines in the darkness and to create communities where people can become more alive. That was—and remains—Jesu’s desires for the world: to dazzle and dare people with the Divine Light so that they can become more alive. The glory of God, St. Irenaeus wrote in the second century, is the human person fully alive.

Building the Infrastructure of Lasting Hope

Almost every day I walk the Monroe Street Bridge. I think about the woman I encountered. I think about how her foundation collapsed and why she became suicidal. Brick by brick, I ask what happened. I think about our culture, too, and how many people walk on a crumbling foundation and are a phone call away from jumping off a bridge. There are more than 1,100 suicides each year in Washington state. That makes it the eight-leading cause of death among people of all ages and the second leading cause of death for people age 15-34. Experts aren’t exactly sure why but, by once measure, suicides have increased 19% across the state and 24% in Spokane.

I asked you what Easter means and how we can celebrate the resurrection when so many people are dying without hope. I struggle to ask these questions because I don’t want to take any of the joy this day offers you and which we all need to go about living our best lives amid the Great Darkness. But I can’t escape the desperate cry that so many people in our world have and which we are obligated to respond to: not just in our minds and our prayers but in our actions and in our politics. Prayer is meant to move the world into the Kin-Dom of God, not merely comfort our troubled minds. Jesus is still breathing the Holy Spirit on us so that we can breathe the dry bones that build our culture to life. So that we can create the conditions in which people can experience the Lasting Hope that Jesus promised. The notion may seem absurd, utopic, and Pollyannaish. It isn’t. Belief in the impossible fact that life can emerge in the face of death is the bone and marrow of our faith. Jesus came so that we may have life and have it abundantly.

As a bridge into this abundance, I have prepared a few queries for us. I will read them both and then sit down to create space for us to respond if God so moves us.

Queries.

How might this meeting help me experience the Living Light more deeply?

How might God be calling our meeting to help the most vulnerable people in our city live more deeply within the Living Light?

This message was given to Spokane Friends Church by Paul Blankenship on Easter Sunday, April 21, 2019

This is an introduction of sorts, one with a wondering eye, given I took inspiration from the Peace, Love, Hope and Joy banners that surround us. The prospects, herein, are tools supporting  what I consider emotional survival; I thought it expedient to dwell on these expectations, as an offering of goodwill.

It may seem a contradiction when I suggest words are not the things people are speaking of, words in the mouth of a fool can be translated into anything, when overused seem compromised.  However, joy to the world, words with substance survive through generations, expressed as values.

Take for example: What is the value of life?  Interest for the credit company? Revenue motivated through purchase? To a minister an opportunity to roller skate through the pearly gates… redemption as the engine?  To a passing drifter the next buck?  To a very old fatalist waking-up in the morning, hoping for another day.

Quaker inspired: life has no value without a peaceful and positive purpose. Why denigrate our very existence?  It’s “a crucifixion of the heart” (Campbell) exploiting words compromised by aberrant* motive, toxic lies, a dark passage, steps endorsing irrational consequence.    (* Deviating from truth.)

Existentially speaking: staying alive is as real as it gets! Based on experience, I understand reality is what happens.  Hope in the face-of-reality is a component supporting our emotional survival; and we seem to measure our value by this standard.

I offer a conclusion that my hope is to keep a good thing going, stay in love, seek positive interaction, creative energy that stimulates the brain –that sensitive engineer of mind and body — giving all consideration to emotional survival, and please add daydreams as whimsy to sharpen focus.

The emotional survival I’m suggesting is important because it buffers our feelings against offence. Accept that life is worth nothing without constructive purpose…a useless rocky road that leads to shallow regret, as we try to distinguish between fact and fiction, as applied to the value of our lives, shaped and  advertised, and woefully created by backroom word-mechanics, marketing the very same banners under discussion.

As to the complexity of this survival: My kind is about emotions; and how we handle critical issues of modern life to help us flourish as human beings?  Understand there is no society of one.

As helpful vehicles I offer: religion, social interaction, inventions, interventions, laws, and our hopes and expectations.  Most important: a moral sense of responsibility as to regulate and support our lives and those we love, through feelings founded on reasoned goals.

I recall Norman Cousins writing on Albert Schweitzer:

“The sense of paralysis comes not so much out of the mammoth size of the project, but out of puniness of purpose.”

Better yet, consider the offering of  Native Americans Adoph & Beverly Hungry Wolf:  “Let our spirits hold hands, our friends become tribes, our minds join in the happy power of life”; add to this… thoughts that embrace our life as a blessing of coincidence.

Consider the thinking of William Saroyan:

In the Time of Your Life 

“When in the time of your life… live,

So that in that wondrous time,

You shall not add misery & sorrow to the world,

But smile on the infinite delight and mystery of it.”

That’s life, a metaphoric smile, hoping for a spiritual reunion, expressed as a prosperous thought, to power the human spirit forward.

Twisting Saroyan’s words, I offer that emotional survival is the bond that supports concrete gestures, a psychological protection in a very complex world. I ask you to consider the banners on the walls as thoughts on how best to survive, no matter the consequence of our fate.

This message was given to Spokane Friends Church by Walter Simon on March 24, 2019

Reading of Mark 16: 1- 8

My sermon this morning begins with one fact – human beings have been gifted by God (and/or by nature) with this wonderful instrument that rests above our two eyes….. the brain.  Specifically we have this large region called the cerebral cortex…. the part of our brain that thinks, analyzes, and imagines.  It is the place where stories are formed.  This gift of the imaginative storytelling is both a blessing and a curse….depending upon what stories we choose to cultivate.  We either create stories that give life, or we gravitate to stories that lead to death.   In fact, my thesis this morning suggests that we live and die by the stories we tell ourselves.

Theologians call these stories “metanarratives”.  Big stories.   Archetypal stories.   Stories that shape and inform us in how we view the world and thus respond within the context of our own unique “small” stories.  These archetypal stories map out how we imagine the world and in return guide us in how we behave and act in this world.

All religious traditions have metanarratives around which they organize. The central metanarrative around which the Christian faith is formed is the narrative of the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.  To clarify, let me say that the term resurrection from a Christian perspective is the idea that Jesus, after being tried, convicted, crucified, and laid to rest in a tomb, was, after three days dead, raised to a new life and appeared physically to his disciples and others before being taken up to heaven.  (A matter of legend, or history – you decide.)   Whatever was made of the event of Jesus life, the story of the resurrection is told in all four gospels … Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  (And when a story is repeated in all four gospel versions, it says something was central about this story that requires our attention.  Something extraordinary occurred.  And the fact that all four gospels tell the story in basically the same way, yet with recollection of differing details is further evidence of the story’s authenticity).

Mark, the oldest of the gospels, in the earliest intact manuscripts ends abruptly with vs. 8 where it says, the women who discovered the empty tomb “were afraid, and told no one.”  I like this earliest version because it leaves the story open-ended, as if to say, “now you (the listener) go and finish the story.”  “You take ownership and run with it.  Continue it on into your world.”

Matthew gives us the post-resurrection marching orders where Jesus’ last words on this earth are, “go out into the world and make disciples throughout the world, teaching them all I have commanded you.”

Luke tells of how the resurrected Jesus opened the minds of his disciples in the breaking of the bread while on the road to Emmaus.  Jesus is seen and known in the coming together of conversation and the breaking of the bread.

John seems to want us to know that the resurrection was physical.  The physicality of post-crucified Jesus is important to John’s telling.  In John’s gospel the disciple Thomas, upon hearing that Jesus is alive must first touch the wounds before he can believe.  Later in John’s gospel Jesus appears on the lake shore and sits down to eat fish with his friends, as if to say to us, “mere ghosts or spiritual concepts do not eat fish and break bread.”

Every Easter Sunday I preach on this central resurrection narrative of the Christian tradition.  And every Easter Sunday I recognize that my audience consists of a broad spectrum of beliefs regarding this story.  To some the story is purely metaphorical.  To others, including the apostle Paul, it makes no sense unless it historically and literally happened.  In saying this I am recognize the fact that people come out in different places in how they relate to the Jesus story.   I am fond of a poem written by the poet Denise Levertov.  The poem is entitled “On Belief in the Physical Resurrection of Jesus”

“It is for all, “literalist of the imagination,” poets or not, that miracle is possible, possible and essential.  Are some intricate minds nourished on concept, as epiphytes flourish high in the canopy?  Can they subsist on the light, on the half of metaphor that’s not grounded in dust, grit, heavy carnal clay?  Do signs contain and utter for them all the reality that they need?  Resurrection, for them, an internal power, but not a matter of flesh?  For others, of whom I am one, miracles (ultimate need, bread of life) are miracles just because people so tuned to the humdrum laws: gravity, mortality – can’t open to symbol’s power unless convinced of its ground, its roots in bone and blood.  We must feel the pulse in the wound to believe that ‘with God all things are possible,’  taste bread at Emmaus that warm hands broke and blessed.”

 For myself I choose (on most days) be in Levertov’s camp.  But whether one believes in Resurrection as metaphor, or as historical reality that points to metaphor, the issue still is always one of meaning.  The Big Cosmic…So What!  Regardless of where one falls on the question of literal historicity, one is still required ask the question “So what?  What does it mean?  How does Jesus rising from death make a difference to me?”

I suppose I state the absurdly obvious when I say that all of us are here this morning because we are alive. That said, many of us have aches and pains and challenges we suffer with.  And I know some of you have had close brushes with death through circumstances of illness and accident.  When I too experienced one of those near death experiences, I had the opportunity to consider in a new way the story of Christ’s resurrection.  At Sacred Heart, a Catholic hospital in Spokane, in every room is an icon of the resurrected Jesus transcendently resurrected upon the cross. (Not crucified… but resurrected).  As a Christian I’ve always valued this image – the ultimate victory of life over death.  The message….Jesus, alive!  Death is powerless before the power of Life.  To me the message is clear …. God is not mocked and life is not defeated by any cruelty we humans may cast upon others.

But none of this translated to me as I lay in the hospital.  The central symbol of my faith did not speak to me when you might think it would speak the loudest.  But then everything else was pretty flat and speechless too.  I had little to no interest in food.  People brought me books to read or would read to me, but I had no interest.  Everything on T.V. was absurd…..every other channel was some story involving a gun, or explosion, or fear, tension and conflict.   Or there would be channels dedicated to some silly “reality” show where people were constantly competing or squabbling, or some family of hillbillies who sell duck calls were discussing the best way to blow up a beaver dam.  All of this seemed so empty and absurd.

But when I couldn’t conceive of the resurrection or when it did not bring me comfort as a theological / metanarrative image – it did come to me.  It came to me in the care and love of my family who were there in the most profound ways.  It came in the form of prayers, and gestures, and mindfulness of many, many friends.  Through them and their good thoughts and prayers God was there in profound and mysterious ways.  Resurrection came in the nurses, doctors, aids, technicians, chaplains, and other caring folks who focused their best skills and energy toward keeping this one privileged, middle aged white guy on this planet for another few decades (at best).

We don’t have to be in a medical or existential crisis to realize that the story of resurrection is a powerful narrative.  This narrative declares to the world that the very force of the cosmos is within, is before, is around, and is much bigger than us.  Yet it is a part of us.  Resurrection calls us out and calls us back again.  Resurrection never lets death and suffering have the last word.  Jesus lived it, Jesus taught it, and Jesus proved it.  Resurrection is a powerful thing, and that is why Jesus didn’t stay on the cross.  That is why the tomb was empty.  That is why the angel says, “Go and find him.  He has risen.”

Most summers I work with Mennonite youth at our Northwest Mennonite camps. (I especially enjoy working with the junior high levels).  At one of the campfire talks I shared how a number of years past at one of the camps, Roger, the camp manager, had a good quality telescope.  And with some help from his phone’s app Roger was able to zero in on two separate spiraling galaxies visible through the one lens.  Galaxies containing billions of stars and planets.  I reminded the kids that the nearest spiral galaxy (the Andromeda Galaxy) is over 3 million light years away.  Furthermore there are reported to be billions of these galaxies within the known universe.  Furthermore some cosmologists believe there are multiple dimensions of realities we cannot perceive.  As if this were not enough to grab our attention and strike our hearts with awe, it is said that only four percent of the matter in the universe is perceivable, leaving ninety-six percent to be labeled as something called “dark matter,” which cannot yet be directly perceived.

In light of these and other observations of science it would seem that the resurrection of Christ might not be so hard to consider.

My point of considering the vast and mysterious universe we live in, to the junior high kids at summer camp (as well as to you this morning), is to get us to believe and celebrate and find courage in the reality that we are part of a very, very, large and mysterious God-ruled, God-centered story.

The story (metanarrative) of the Christian tradition is one of mystery and the victorious power of love and life.  It is one of life over death.  It is one of hope and the embrace of a God who cannot be defeated and will not let go….ever.

And how, you may ask, can one judge whether one’s story / narrative is one of resurrection?  You may consider this…..  Resurrection stories are always about hope and never about fear.  Resurrection stories are about thriving and not just surviving.  They are about sharing as opposed to accumulating and consuming.  Resurrection stories are always about creativity and risk taking.  When you hear stories about cooperation, unity, compassion and tolerance you are hearing stories that point to resurrection.  Resurrection always defies the world’s tired old dysfunctional stories of win/lose; dog-eat-dog; us vs. them; and everyone for themselves.  When you read the Gospels through the lens of resurrection, you begin to see the world through the lens that God sees through..

I recently listened to someone I know and respect relay to me a story from her work.  She was working in a year- long volunteer program (kind of like the Service Adventure program) and was asking of her “employer” (with whom she was a volunteer) for a little flex time for one afternoon a week in order to do some more “hands on” work related to her vocational pursuits.  Her boss, who already had displayed little respect or appreciation in her management style, said in response to this modest request, “That’s not how things work in the real world.”

To that banal reply I say as one who believes in the truth of the resurrection….phooey!  Much of what we call “the real world” is a construct of our own making.  Resurrection says other worlds are possible. Other ways of relating to this world are possible.  Stories of the devil are often the ones that resign us to believe that “That’s just not the way it works in the real world!”

As one who identifies as a pastor, a husband, a father, and most fundamentally as a human being who has the privilege of taking up space on this planet for this momentary period of time, I’ll  tell you about the real world I live in…..  I live in a world of inconsistency, context, nuance, paradox, mystery, and yes, hypocrisy and sin.  And with none of these conditions should we rest easy — especially the sin and hypocrisy.  Nevertheless, this is the real world I live in, and the only effective and honest and humble way I can move through it is by trusting in the victory, power, and grace of the resurrection story.  There is no room for fear and pettiness in this story.  In God’s story, (the only one that ultimately counts) resurrection rules!

A friend of mine was facing a long engagement with cancer.  I’m sure many of you have had similar engagements. And you may have been given this poem (and I apologize if you have and it now seems a bit banal).  But to me it was powerful and it relates to my message.  Instead of using the word “cancer” I will insert the word crucifixion.

Crucifixion is so limited…. It cannot cripple love, It cannot shatter hope, It cannot corrode faith, It cannot destroy peace, It cannot kill friendship, It cannot suppress memories, It cannot invade the soul, It cannot steal eternal life, It cannot conquer the Spirit.  Crucifixion is so limited.

If there is any message to be taken away when we consider this story of the resurrection, may it be a message that informs us that death, be it spiritual death or literal death, is never the last word.  Life is!

This message was delivered by Gary Jewell at Spokane Friends Church on March 10, 2019

Good morning! My name is Lauren Taylor. I’m a campus pastor up at Whitworth – but we just moved here to take that job this summer. I’m originally from Chicago. So I’m a big fan of the Chicago Cubs, of hot dogs with only mustard, and complaining about winters that don’t ever seem to end. I think we share at least one of those things in common.

Derek and I have been married for about 6 years. We bought a dog a short while into our marriage, and when we were able to keep her alive and happy – we added a baby to the mix who is now 2.5 years old. Our little Theo – or Theomonster depending on the day.

Derek and I were both battling a little bit of a cough/cold last weekend. Not enough to keep us home from work or anything, but enough to suck the energy out of us. I was pretty exhausted after working all day and then chasing Theo around trying to convince him to eat, and pee on the toilette, and stay alive and go to bed. So last weekend, I really looking forward to sleeping hard. And I really enjoyed not setting my alarm for Saturday morning when I went to bed Friday night.

Well, the sun had not yet made it’s way through our bedroom window Saturday morning when I heard Theo’s first little squawks. He’s 2, and we haven’t moved into a real bed yet; he’s still in the crib. So when he wakes up, we have to go into his room and pull him up and out of the crib. And when I heard his first little cries, I blearily opened one eye to peek over at Derek. He wasn’t moving yet, but he wasn’t snoring anymore. I bet he’s awake. Theo cried out again. And I closed my eye and tried very hard to lay as still as I could so Derek would think I was still sleeping. The unspoken rule is that whoever moves first has to get up and get Theo. And so we were both laying at still as we possibly could. We were playing toddler-duty chicken.

You see, I love Derek, but I really wanted to sleep a bit longer. And sometimes my desire to sleep trumps my love for Derek, and I think “he should really get him up today.” I think of all the reasons in my head that he should be the one serving me this time, not me serving him this time. You can pray for us.

But I want to talk about this idea this morning. This idea of serving and humility in relationship and in community. And I want to start with Jesus and the twelve disciples.

The first time the disciples all got together, I can imagine there was an electrifying energy in the room. Can you picture that moment? They looked around the group gathered together for first time — at one another, and felt excited…

There was Matthew, who had wealth. There was Peter, who was loud. There was Thomas who was the realist. There was James and John. And they were brothers with a good chemistry. It just seemed, as they looked around, each person had a place. Had a role to play. They were like the first century dream team. And so they set out with Jesus to do ministry together and they were excited. They felt important. I imagine perhaps they even felt unstoppable as the crowds that followed them got larger.

But after living together, and working together and traveling together for three extraordinary years full of ordinary days… some of that magic began to fade in the realities of life. Personalities got in the way. Agendas clashed. Relationships got complicated. Pride swelled. And at the end of the gospels, we see in the disciples an ugly competitive spirit slowly creeping.

James and John pull Jesus aside and whisper to him, “Jesus, let us two be the ones who sit closest to you in glory. Let us be the ones who sit at your right and at your left.” But when the rest of the disciples heard this, Scripture says they were angry with James and John. You are not the most important one.

A few days later, Mary breaks open an expensive bottle of perfume to anoint Jesus. And in front of everyone, Judas shouts, “What are you doing?! That was worth so much money and now its just pooling on the floor! What a terrible idea, Mary.” You are not the smartest one.

 Later, Jesus sitting with his disciples predicts, out loud, that one of them is going to hurt Jesus — is going to betray him. And so each disciple’s first reaction is to turn in on themselves. To protect themselves – “Not me!” They each say. And they cast the blame on the other disciple. You must be it. You must be the unfaithful one.

Fast forward a few days, and the crew was all meeting up for dinner. And when Jesus walked in, the disciples were gathering around the table – The text doesn’t say this, but I can imagine that there was some tension in the room. Jesus looked at each one. He looked at their faces, and then he looked at their feet. Dirty. Still? Their feet were dirty –they had not washed their feet yet. No one had made provisions for the foot washing.

Streets in the ancient Near East were unpaved. They were dirt roads, full of trash and horses and cows and pigs and all the nasty that those animals leave behind. In this age before modern plumbing, they were manure-mixed mud streets with the occasional mystery puddle that’s there even on sunny days. So when people got home, after walking to work in their sandals or walking to the market in their sandals, they always washed their dirty feet. It was sanitary. It was culture. It was normal. And especially when you got together with other people for a meal, it was custom to have your feet washed. To have a servant wash the nasty off your feet. It wasn’t a fun job – it was a menial job, reserved for someone who had a low position in the house. But it was needed.

And so when Jesus came to this dinner, and looked around at his disciples and saw – and probably smelled — that they each still had dirty feet … That no one was willing to wash the feet and to submit themselves to the others in the group in this way… I can imagine Jesus was disappointed.

It was just a few days before that Jesus taught his disciples about greatness. That if they really wanted to be great, they had to become a servant to one another. Whoever wanted to be first had to learn to be last. Not a single one of them seemed to remember those words at this moment. Instead, they all sat passively at the table, maybe stewing in their resentment; maybe feeling paralyzed by the tension; maybe playing foot-washing chicken. Whatever the case, the feet remained unwashed

And so Jesus gets up, drawing the attention of everyone in the room. He takes off his clothes, stands in front of them vulnerable and derobed, and wraps himself with a servants towel. He kneels down and begins to wash their dirty, prideful, arrogant feet himself. The room is caught in a deadening silence as Jesus moves from person to person. The only sound is that of water trickling from the pitcher into the basin. The only movement is that of Jesus bowed head and shoulders as he carefully washes the grime from the street out from under their feet.

The story continues as John’s gospel explains:

¹² After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? ¹³ You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. ¹⁴ So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. ¹⁵ For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.    John

Our passage this morning is from Philippians, Chapter 2. So why am I telling a story about the disciples? I wonder… and this is just my wondering. . . I wonder if when Paul wrote this hymn in the letter to the Philippians, I wonder if he had this gospel story in mind. I wonder if when he wrote that Christ took the form of the servant (vs 7), he pictured Jesus taking up the servant’s towel to wash the feet of the feet of the disciples. Because to me, if this foot washing is the story illustrated in John’s gospel, then this poem in Philippians is the theological commentary to it. It illuminates what Paul is singing about in our passage. The narrative that’s bringing this hymn to life.

This passage in Philippians is pretty famous. We call it the “Christ Hymn,” because it’s not written like a normal part of the letter. Even if you look down at your Bible, you’ll see that verses 6-11 look different than all the other verses, and really most of the other verses in the New Testament. It’s written with indentations and spaces and lines… it’s aesthetic appearance tells us that it’s special. The way the words are on the page tell us that these words are really important!

And so in it Paul says, “Let your mind be like Christ’s mind.”  And he begins to paint in beautiful Greek poetry a picture of what God is like. He gives us the image of God in Christ that we are to reflect with our lives.

Christ, who even though he was God, even though he had power, even though he was privileged, he didn’t exploit it or use it to separate himself from others – quite the opposite. Instead, Christ emptied himself – and became like one of us. Took on our humanness. Washed our dirty feet. Jesus was faithful in this – in his life, but also to the point of death, for the purpose of – saving the world. So that the world might have a way back to God. This, theologians say, is the wonderful exchange – God was humbled that we might be lifted up. God became poor that we might become rich. God came to us that we might come to God.

Oh, how phenomenal and convicting that this is what God is like! One scholar named Jurgen Multmann, in his book The Crucified God, said this:

God is not greater than he is in this humiliation. God is not more glorious than he is in this self-surrender. God is not more powerful than he is in this helplessness. God is not more divine than he is in this humanity. The wonderful exchange.

Three reasons this is important for us:

• First: We should feel loved by God. As always, we are the disciples in this story and we can know that Jesus washes our feet, no matter attitude or what posture or what mindset we bring to the table. Let this sink in: the God of the Universe gets down on hands and knees and in a posture of wanting to love and serve you, washes your feet. Your feet caked in manure and arrogance, covered in dust and shame, Jesus washes your feet. God so loved the world, that no matter how dirty your feet are, God sent his only son to wash your feet and to die for you. In the Words of Charles Wesley, “Amazing Love, how can it be? That you, my Lord, should die for me?” We should feel deeply loved by God as we ponder this Scripture.
• Second: This passage shows us what genuine Christian community should look like. That’s the context for this letter after all, right? Paul writing to a community of Christians, reminding them of the way things are supposed to work. This community’s foundation is Christ, Paul says, and it’s bedrock is real, genuine humility. The world is marked by communities and structures that clamor for power and authority and celebrity and followers. But that is not how Christian community works. Our community is marked by Christ and ought to reflect Christ’s humility in taking on flesh and living among us.
• Last – A Personal Challenge – where do you need to be more of a foot washer? Where are you being called to let go of your pride and humble yourself? Where are you clamoring for power? If we let this passage really challenge us, we can see that this is hard work.
  • It’s easy to be humble with the crowds. It’s hard to wash the feet of your fellow disciple.
  • It’s easy to show humility with your acquaintances. It’s hard to show humility with your family.
  • Its easy to be humble with the people on your side. It’s hard to be humble with people on the other side.
  • It’s easy to fill your time serving others. It’s hard to remember that its not about you.

What we believe about God helps us know how to act. Orthodoxy informs orthopraxis. Meditating on Christ, meditating on this hymn, praying this prayer, reading this gospel should always lead us to transformation.  So how will you let this Christ hymn transform us?

2 If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, ² make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. ³ Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. ⁴ Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. ⁵ Let the same mind be in you that was^[a] in Christ Jesus,

⁶ who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
⁷ but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
⁸     he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.

⁹ Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
¹⁰ so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
¹¹ and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.                                Philippians 2:1-11

I am honored to be here to speak to you in worship.  I am excited about it being today.  You see, I am a church reader board junkie.   I drive by your building multiple times during each week, and I have appreciated seeing your reader board: TWEET OTHERS AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM TWEET YOU.  Every time I read it, I think, “You get this!”

Let me read to you the Gospel passage assigned to today from the Revised Common Lectionary.  Jesus has come down to the plain to teach the multitudes about kingdom living. This “Sermon on the Plain” is Luke’s version of the “Sermon on the Mount” in Matthew: 

Luke 6:27-38 – ²⁷“But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, ²⁸bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. ²⁹If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. ³⁰Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. ³¹Do to others as you would have them do to you. ³²“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. ³³If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. ³⁴If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. ³⁵But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. ³⁶Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

³⁷“Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; ³⁸give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

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Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away….Okay, so it was really only about 16 years ago, but Eastern Kentucky is in its own little galaxy…I was called to do a graveside service for a family that I had not ever met.  The deceased’s last name was Hatfield.  He was a Mason, and this was to be my first Mason funeral service, so I was intrigued.  I was escorted to a rural cemetery that was located next to the Big Sandy River – West Virginia lay within view just across the river.  As we waited for family members to show up, one of the daughters of the deceased showed me around the cemetery.  We were apparently in a family area of this cemetery because there were a lot of relatives…all named Hatfield.  There seemed to be a lot of family pride in her voice. 

Now, you may have a clue as to where I am going with this, but at the time, I was still intrigued with the idea of Mason ritual during the service, and I wasn’t cluing into what I was seeing and hearing at all.  Then suddenly it hit me.  I was in the heart of Appalachian.  I was walking among deceased Hatfields….So I flippantly asked (thinking I was making a joke), “So, I don’t suppose there are any McCoys buried here, are there?” And she firmly responded, “No way.  They wouldn’t be caught dead here.  They are across the river in West Virginia” 

You can probably imagine the look of surprise on the face of this naïve native North Westerner. “You mean…that feud is real?” I asked in shocked surprise.  I had honestly thought it was a made-up dispute.  But she affirmed my question.

“Is it still going on?”  I asked, still in a state of disbelief.  Again, she affirmed the question.

“So, why don’t Hatfields and McCoys like each other? Why did the feud start?”  She didn’t have an answer.  I don’t quite remember if I said this or just thought it, but knowing me, the words were most likely bluntly vocalized, “Then, why don’t they just get over it?”  Again, she had no answer.  At this point, I figured I didn’t want to start another feud so I dropped the subject and did the graveside service, asking questions about Mason ritual and avoiding any other discussion on feuds.  Yet, I left that cemetery dumbfounded thinking that there really must be another way of dealing with differences than hating each other – and possibly hurting each other.

How we treat (and tweet) others matters.  We get this. I believe it safe to say that the majority of us have known this, this Golden Rule as laid out by Jesus, for the majority of our lives.  “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” (Luke 6:31). Every major religion, and even religions you may not even heard of, has their own version of the same.  For example:

Judaism: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.”   — Shabbath folio:31a, Babylonian Talmud

Islam: “Pay, Oh Children of Adam, as you would love to be paid, and be just as you would love to have justice!” and “As you would have people do to you, do to them; and what you dislike to be done to you, don’t do to them.”

Hinduism: “Those acts that you consider good when done to you, do those to others, none else.”

Buddhism: “Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.”  — Udanavarga 5:18

Confucianism: “What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others.”

And many others….

We try to practice this in our lives, and we teach our children to do the same. We teach them to be kind and polite to others, to return your shopping cart, to tip your server, to hold the door open for another, to offer your seat in a crowd, to pick up the piece of trash that is blowing away.  We teach our children that small acts of kindness, like the many and growing rings that form when a small pebble is dropped into a still pool, can have a ripple effect.  

How we treat others matters.  We get this.

But if we get it, and if the majority of humanity has heard this, why is there so much negativity and anger and fear and division in our lives?  In our communities?  In our country?  In our world?

The problem is, what Jesus is asking us to do is downright difficult. It is relatively simple to love a stranger we know nothing about, to donate food to people we haven’t met, to open a door for someone who looks pretty harmless, to have a decent conversation with someone we agree with, to maintain a pleasant relationship with the neighbor whose yard is well-kept and whose dogs don’t bark at 5:30 in the morning. 

But what about the guy on the street who is panhandling at the very same corner for months on end?  What about the parent who has abused and then lost her children because of drug addiction?  What about the neighbor who parties and plays loud music until the wee hours of the morning?  What about that guy who cut you off in traffic and almost caused you to have an accident?  What about the “friend” who has strong differing opinions that you and is not afraid to let you know?  How about the one who belongs to a different religious or political affiliation than you? What about the ones that our culture or our groups of belonging have taught us to hate? What about the white-supremist? The terrorist?  The bigot?  The one who has harmed your family and has wronged you?  The McCoy?  How do we love them?  And why do we even have to?

Why do we have to love our enemies when anger punishment, retaliation, and revenge seem so much safer and so much more satisfying? Well…at least for the present.

The answer to that is two-fold: First of all, Jesus tells us to. Period.  And if that is not enough for you, the second reason is the ripple effect.  How we treat others matters.  Just as a small pebble dropped into a pool causes ripples that reach the furthest shore, what we do to or for others, what we throw into the pool of human relationships, can make an entire world of difference.

There is a lot of anger, hatred, mistrust and division in the world.  There is a lot in our own country.  Angry tweets, disregard for the humanity of others, divisive rhetoric, misleading promises or commitments, and the desire of power and revenge coming from a few at the top have had a negative affect on the dynamic of many of our personal relationships.  Hate crimes have been on the rise.  And many have been moved to a sense of hopelessness.  In this state of hopelessness, what can we who have no fame, no platform, no powerful voice, no twitter account do to change this downward course?

Jesus tells us, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, ²⁸bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. ²⁹If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. ³⁰Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. ³¹Do to others [not as they do to you, but] as you would have them do to you.” 

The Dali Lama says, “Our prime purpose in this life is to help others.  And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.”  

The Rev. Dr. MLK says, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.  Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

How we treat others matters.  What we throw into the pool, ripples to ends of the earth.  And, just imagine: “If we could spread love as quickly as we spread hate and negativity, what an amazing world we would live in.”

This message was given at Spokane Friends Church by Lauri Clark-Strait on February 24, 2019