Advent I, December 2, 2018
First Congregational Church of Cheshire
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell
                                                                        
 
Jeremiah 33:14-16
 
33:14 The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah.
 
33:15 In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.
 
33:16 In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called: "The LORD is our righteousness."
 
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My father didn’t mean to squelch hope.  In fact, he was trying to instill hope in his children, and so he would say things like: “Next year, we’re going to buy a new house and everyone will have his or her own bedroom!”  Or “Let’s all go to the movies tonight, and you can have any kind of candy you want.”  Or “On your next birthday, I am going to buy you a new bicycle.”  My dear dad meant what he said, but the limits of his Baptist preacher’s salary, with three kids to raise, meant that most of the time, despite his best intentions, he was not able to do what he had promised.  For years, every time my dad would speak magnanimously about the future, my heart would fill with expectation.  But after awhile, seeing the same pattern of disappointment repeated again and again, I eventually stopped believing the promises.  Hope deferred is hope denied, and as a teenager I became silent and cynical when he would speak, mumbling under my breath: “Promises, promises…”
 
Inadvertently, my father prepared me on for a lifetime of the disappointments that come when promises are not kept.  As adults we learn the hard way that employers and lovers and churches and governments often promise us the moon, only to keep us earthbound and disappointed by not acting on their word, by not fulfilling their promises.  
 
And so here I am, distrustful of anyone who makes big promises.  Here I am, adorned with my cynicism like a coat of armor.  I tell myself that it’s better to expect nothing than to be disappointed.  And at this time of year in particular, I give my cynical coat of armor an extra shine. I’m a bit of a Grinch.  I cringe at the forced merriment. I bristle at the crass commercialization of this most holy time of year.
 
But then last Wednesday evening, I walked into this space and for the first time ever saw those stars that Alison made suspended above our heads.  And something inside of me began to stir.  My cynicism seemed to soften a little around the edges.  And I let myself wonder if maybe, just maybe, I could afford a little hope.  Maybe I could dare to let my spirit rise to meet the Advent promises of God, despite all evidence to the contrary? 
 
Jeremiah the prophet lived through the reign of three, less-than-stellar Judean kings.  And as a prophet he railed against the political intrigues of Jerusalem. He preached against the cynical use of religion for political gain.  And all the while, he watched as these kings broke promises, made dirty political alliances, and always kept their own best interests at heart.  And because Jeremiah called them out, he was not their favorite person.  They had the power to simply dispatch him permanently.  But there would be a heavy political price to pay.  So instead, the king threw old Jeremiah into a cold, dark prison - his only crime being the courage to speak truth to power.  
 
Eventually, the corruption rotted the foundation of the government and the Judean kingdom fell, hard.  Great calamity followed.  Babylon conquered them, destroyed their cities, desecrated their holy places, and forced the best and the brightest of them into exile in Babylon.  The poor and vulnerable were simply left behind to live in the ruins of their former greatness.  Think Damascus.
 
Such an incredible devastation seemed to leave little room for hope.  But that’s always the moment that hope appears.  And the word of hope was spoken by the same prophet who warned of calamity. In the nuclear winter of their discontent, Jeremiah told the Babylonian exiles the most incredulous thing.  He said that the kingdom would be restored; that the ruined cities would be rebuilt; that the glory of the Lord would once again hover over the land.  It seemed impossible to believe amidst the rubble of their dreams, so far from home. It seemed impossible to believe living, as they did, as desperate refugees. But Jeremiah proclaimed the word of the Lord, which often sounds like a little bit of nonsense.  He said: “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.”  
 
That righteous branch was a baby named Jesus. But here’s the thing: Jeremiah prophesied it.  But he never saw it.  It happened, but he was already dead.  And therein lies the power and the challenge of hope.  The word of the Lord shall surely come to pass, but it may be on some distant horizon.  And there is no guarantee that our eyes will ever behold it. 
 
Another year is coming to a close.  And this year, like all the others past, has been filled with broken promises.  This year, like all the others past, is full of dust and ashes; fear and loathing.  Some of us are tired.  Others are afraid. And yet here we are, under the stars, waiting, longing, dreaming, hoping, praying for the kingdom of God to come upon this earth just as it is in heaven. 
 
And so it is, at this time of year, despite myself, that I feel the nudge of hope.  Something in me stirs as we sing and listen and recite the old, old the story about a God who never gives up on the human race; a God who came to us as one of us, born into poverty and oppression to an unwed teenage mother and a terribly confused father. 
 
Given that I’m a Grinch, I’ve often wondered why hope springs eternal despite all the messes I make.  And this is the only conclusion I can draw: that hope is the gift of God.  It is the image of God shining in each of us.  
 
There are stars in the sky.  There is music in the air.  And there is that promise that simply will not let us go. So let’s begin our Advent journey.  Let’s sing the songs.  Let’s light the candles.  Let’s sit in the silence.  Let’s open ourselves to HOPE. 
 
 

Matthew 6:25-33
Sunday, November 18, 2018
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell
 
 
Matthew 6:25-33
 
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
 
 
I hate airports and it has nothing to do with my fear of flying.  I hate airports because of what happens as you wait to fly.  I’m not referring to being herded like cattle or those people who always refuse to wait for their section to be called or those folks whose cell phones seems to be extensions of their heads.  What really drives me to distraction are the ubiquitous televisions with their speakers embedded in the ceiling so that no matter where you are, you cannot escape the talking heads of cable news.  So there I sit, already nervous about getting on a plane, while plastic-looking people remind me of all that has gone wrong in the world that day – including, one time, an airline disaster!
 
A wise critic once observed that cable news is designed for people addicted to anger and fear.  They sell dread, innuendo, and suspicion.   But TV is a business, and so they wouldn’t peddle those things if we didn’t gobble them up like a Thanksgiving feast.  
 
Of course, there are real reasons for us to be afraid.  We live in a beautiful but broken world.  The murderous violence in houses of worship and nightclubs and concerts is so stark in part because it reminds us of what we all know to be true: that life is fleeting.  Life ends and sometimes not in the way we would hope.  And so we embark upon elaborate journeys of denial. We look for someone, anyone to save us from our fears.  We want to believe that they actually can.  And cynical politicians and giant corporations and power-hungry religious institutions rush into that place of fear and tell us that they can save us. They know we are afraid and they use it against us.
 
A therapist once told me that I was addicted to fear.  I was shocked by that opinion because fear is the one thing I have spent my life trying to avoid at all costs - or so I thought.  But over time I came to see the truth of what he said - that being afraid somehow made me feel more alive.  It was an occupation, an adrenaline buzz, a lover, an addiction. But it was also exhausting and debilitating, like some dread disease. 
 
The Rev. Dr. James Forbes, former senior minister of the Riverside Church in New York City, likes to say that the theme of the entire Bible can be boiled down to these two words: “Fear not!”  And if that is true, and if we are on some level addicted to fear, then the call to “Fear not!” is perhaps the most countercultural command in the Bible. 
 
“Fear not!”  Jesus repeats this mantra in the Gospel lesson today, but with different words. This passage is taken from the so-called Sermon on the Mount, a collection of some of the best-known sayings of Jesus.  Today we heard Pastor Alison read: “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.  Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” 
 
The larger context of this passage is about a proper perspective on money.  And if there is anything that we are truly afraid of, it is the lack of money.  That is an old, old human concern, and the folks who heard Jesus preach that day knew a lot more about that concern than we do.  
 
Assuming that those who heard Jesus speak were a representative sampling of the society at large, then 2-3% of them would have been aristocrats, people of Greek or Roman background, family connections, old money.  For them, Jesus’s instruction not to worry about food and clothing would have been easy enough. They never did.  --Then there were the tax collectors and the major landowners, 12-14 % of the population.  They worked hard, but they always had plenty to eat. --Then there were the priests and the scribes.  They may not have been as rich as the others, but this 4-5% always had full bellies, plus they wore the most beautiful clothes of all.  --But everyone else, a full 78% of the general populace, was really poor.  And of the poor, there were levels of poverty.  The destitute – not the people at the bottom of the barrel but the people under the barrel were the beggars and disabled and prostitutes who were always only a few days away from starvation. 
 
And so there they sat, mostly poor, listening, hoping, longing for words that would relieve their fears of economic insecurity.  They knew Jesus sometimes talked about money, but on this day, there was no zealot’s talk of economic revolution.  Instead, Jesus simply said: “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.  Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?”  
 
Well, yes Jesus, but if you don’t have those things, you can’t live! -- What kind of thing was that to say to poor and frightened people?  Why couldn’t Jesus have said something inspiring about God rescuing us from our fears?  Isn’t that what we all want. But the Gospel doesn’t promise us rescue.  Instead it promises us salvation.  And there is a significant difference between the two.  Salvation is often not about a change of circumstance, but a of perspective – in biblical language, being born again. 
 
Jesus asked the people that day: “Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to the span of your life?” That’s a question we all should answer, every day.  And then to try to help them move away from worry as a default mode, Jesus talked about flowers and birds.  He reminded the people that God loves them more than these.  But that alone is not the truth that saves us.  Our salvation is found in remembering howbirds and flowers experience the world.  These beautiful creations experience the world in the only way they can: in the present moment – not tomorrow or next week or next year, but right here, right now.  Jesus was teaching the supremacy and glory and blessing of the present.
 
And then as if to underscore the supremacy of the present, he concludes with these practical words: “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.  Today’s trouble is enough for today.” In other words, be present now.
 
I wish I were better at that.  How I struggle to even relax into this moment without thinking of what comes next in the service and what I need to do tomorrow and how we will meet our stewardship goal. Worrying about what has not yet happened is my addiction, and the root of most of my fear.  
 
Jesus wasn’t preaching the Gospel according to Bobby McFerrin that day: “Don’t worry, be happy!”  How cruel that would have been to those who first heard it; those who had no idea if there would be food for tomorrow.  How cruel that message would be to those of us living in the forward shadows of terror and racism and hatred and climate upheaval.  Jesus never said: “Don’t worry, be happy.”  Jesus said: “Don’t worry, be present.”
 
Be present.  Consider in this moment how good it is.  We are here together.  We are alive. We know the warmth of human touch. We can ponder beauty and wonder and mystery and awe.  We are able to reach out and help others.  That makes this present moment an incredible gift. And for that gift, may the Lord make us truly thankful. 

Sunday, November 11, 2018
First Congregational Church of Cheshire
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell
 
 
Mark 12:38-44
As he taught, he said, “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”
 
He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. Then he called his disciples and said to them, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”
 
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Sometimes I look at my life, all the places I’ve traveled; the decades spent living in Manhattan; that I’ve landed in such a wonderful congregation in this incredible building, in this charming New England town - and I think: it’s is a long, long way from where you started. For the truth is, I come from pretty humble beginnings.  One doesn’t have to travel very far back in my family’s history before you find extreme poverty and hardship.  My people, on both sides, come from hardscrabble Appalachia.  So I look at my life and I think: it’s a long, long way from where your people started.
 
One of my people was my paternal great-grandmother, whose name was Lennie Igo.  She died when I was 11, but I have clear memories of her smile, of her simple shotgun house, and of her faith.  My great grandmother was illiterate, but she had memorized large portions of Scripture that she could quote at length. She believed in the power of prayer and spent hours a day in that practice on her knees. She was poor and lived on a widow’s pension, but 10% of everything she had, she gave to her church.  My great grandmother staked her life on the Gospel.  I thought of her this week as I began to ponder this passage of Scripture, in which the hero of the story is another poor widow who staked her life on the Gospel.
 
Jesus was in the Temple on the Tuesday before he was executed by the Empire.  For some weeks now, he had been wowing the crowds by taking on the establishment and its systematic abuse of the poor – people just like that widow. Almost all of the folks who listened to Jesus were likewise poor, and so they listened to him with delight.  And they were especially thrilled to hear him take on the clergy, who sometimes abused the poor. “Beware of them,” Jesus said.  “They love to parade around in their holy outfits and pray elaborate prayers while at the same time devouring the poor widows’ houses.”  
 
And this was not hyperbole. The scribes were literally devouring the widows’ houses.  A widow in that patriarchal society was completely dependent upon living male relatives who would decide how much money to give her.  And if she had no relatives, then she was, quite literally, dependent upon the kindness of strangers.  And we all know that not all strangers are kind.  So, it was not unheard of for widows to be forced to choose between prostitution and death by starvation. 
 
Sometimes, if a woman had no male relatives to handle her affairs, then the religious authorities would swoop in to help manage the dead man’s estate.  And of course, they would charge a fee for this service.  Historian Chad Myers notes that this practice was rife with embezzlement and abuse.  Sometimes the scribes literally took the widow’s house as payment for services rendered. 
 
So, on this Tuesday of Holy Week, Jesus and his disciples were in the Temple, sitting in the Court of the Women – a designated place because women were not allowed to go any further.  That’s also where the Treasury was. I guess a woman’s money was holy enough, even if she wasn’t.  At the Treasury, the worshippers would pour their coins into 13 large metal containers.  Imagine the noise – metal against metal, crashing and clanging.  If you gave a lot, you made a lot of noise.  And everyone paid attention to that.  In addition, it was customary for the donors to announce how much they were giving before they dropped the money into the containers. Can you imagine such a practice here, before you dropped your envelope in the plate?
 
A widow appeared, walked up to the Treasury and announced: “Two Leptas!”  It was a measly amount.  It took 4 to 8 Leptas to make one penny.  What she gave was quite literally a drop in the bucket.  But she got Jesus’s attention.  “Truly I tell you,”he said, “this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury.  For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on."
 
I suppose that over my lifetime, I have heard at least two-dozen sermons on this text.  And inevitably they lead to a plea for more generous stewardship. And make no mistake: being faithful and generous with what you have been given is a mark of discipleship.  But there is also another lesson here. And I wonder if it’s a lesson the widow preached without ever knowing it.  
 
So remember the scene: a busy place with plenty of rich folks pouring in their treasures and announcing how generous they were.  And then think of this widow, who with chin raised marched to the Treasury and announced her own participation in the Reign of God. By her boldness to claim her place among the people of God, she preached the vital importance of every act of faithfulness, kindness, and justice. 
 
The widow certainly could have been more penny-wise and simply used that money to buy herself some bread.  But that was not how she understood her role in the world.  She wasn’t just some poor widow.  She was an agent of change, a worker for tikkun olam – a Hebrew phrase translating as “the repair of the world.”  She could not do it all.  She could not repair the world on her own.  Be she could do her best and trust the Almighty to do the rest. And because she was faithful, her singular act of obedience is enshrined in the pages of Holy Scripture, while all those holy men in flowing robes are long forgotten.  
 
Now, you might read this story and think she was foolish.  And maybe she was according to the standards of this materialistic and selfish world. But sometimes foolishness is actually faithfulness. Sometimes it takes a fool to believe the word of God.  There is a Franciscan prayer that ends like this: “May God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in the world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done, to bring justice and kindness to all our children and the poor.”
 
We cannot fix the world all by ourselves.  We cannot lift up the poor all by ourselves.  We cannot even fix ourselves by ourselves.  But that is not now and never will be an excuse for despondency. That is no excuse for inaction. That is no excuse for fear or paralysis or cynicism. 
 
Taped to my office door I have this quote, inspired by the Talmud, that collection of ancient Jewish wisdom and interpretation: “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.” 
 
And that is the Gospel of this powerful woman  - that every act of goodness, no matter how small, moves the whole world in the right direction.  And if you can believe that, or at least pretend to believe that, then that belief and practice will change your life.  It will change your faith.  It will heal your cynicism.  It will melt your bitterness.  It will save your soul - because it’s the Gospel, as proclaimed by this blessed woman who showed us the way. 
 
Thanks be to God.  Amen.      
 

Mark 10:35-45
Sunday, October 21, 2018
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell
 
 
Mark 10:35-45
 
James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” And he said to them, “What is it you want me to do for you?” And they said to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” But Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” They replied, “We are able.” Then Jesus said to them, “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.”
 
When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
 
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When I was a small child, I became convinced that I was adopted.  That’s really not so unusual.  But what was unusual was my suspicion that my so-called parents wore disguises all day long, and that they were, in fact, Chinese spies.  I have no idea where this notion came from.  But I do remember deciding that I had to find out if it was true. So, one night, I crept into their bedroom while they were sound asleep, thinking that, of course, they took their masks off at night.  As my mother tells it, she woke up from a dead sleep to have my five-year-old face about an inch away from hers as I tried desperately to see through the darkness who she really was.  
 
As I said, I don’t know where my crazy idea came from, but I suspect its genesis had to do with my growing realization that I was different. -- I think a lot of us felt or feel that way. The idea that you are somehow different from those who raised you is far more common than most folks acknowledge.  Feeling different is an important early part of self-differentiation; of coming into your sense of being an individual.  And you begin to understand that your dreams and desires and ambitions are not necessarily the same as your parents.  And very often, the dreams of the young are about having more than their parents did.  In fact, that is a building block of the American dream – that each generation will do better than the one before.  And that drive for success seems to be built right into our DNA. 
 
Of course, this desire for more power and more influence has resulted in some remarkable human achievements. We children of God have done some incredible things while striving toward excellence.  But this desire for more power and more influence has also resulted in some remarkable human problems.  Those problems even pop up in the church, because we are forever tempted to measure success by the markers of worldly power and influence. The late, great Catholic theologian Henri Nouwen once said that “the long, painful history of the church is the history of people ever and again tempted to choose power over love, control over the cross, being a leader over being led.”[1]
 
We see this temptation at work in the Gospel lesson today.  Two brothers, James and John, were early disciples of Jesus.  They followed him because they believed he was the Promised Messiah.  And what that meant for them was that Jesus would be a military leader who would drive the Romans out and reestablish the powerful and wealthy Kingdom of David.  And since they had been with Jesus from the beginning, it only made sense that they would share that power and wealth.  They were different and would have more than their parents did.
 
One day, when their anticipation had gotten the best of them, James and John got Jesus into a corner by themselves and whispered excitedly: “Rabbi, we have an idea!  We want you to do for us whatever we ask.” - “What is it you want?” Jesus replied.  And the brothers, exchanging knowing glances, spoke the lines they had been rehearsing for days “Lord, when you come into your glory, we want to share your power, one on your right hand and one on your left.”    
 
Well, you have to admire their chutzpah.  They saw what they wanted and they went after it.  When the other ten disciples heard about this, they were angry because the Zebedee brothers had beaten them to the punch.  These ten others were also poor, uneducated men who saw this “Jesus Adventure” as a shot for a better life. 
 
So how did they get it so wrong? Maybe for the same reason we get it so wrong. The things that Jesus said and taught are hard to understand and accept – enigmatic things like: “the first will be last and the last will be first” and “if you want greatness, you have to be a servant.” 
 
Many years ago, I worked in a large, affluent suburban church just outside of New York City.  Many of the people of that congregation had prestigious jobs.  They were a successful and powerful bunch. And the culture of that church was to wholeheartedly support this drive for success – as if success itself were a Christian virtue. I will never forget the Sunday that the senior minister preached on this story, but as told in the Gospel of Matthew. In Matthew’s version, it’s the mother of James and John who is trying to secure cabinet positions for her sons.  And in his sermon the senior minister vigorously defended the mother and lauded the fact that she was just looking out for her own. And, he said, we should all do the same. And I sat on that chancel dumbstruck. 
 
“Jesus, we want to sit on your right and left hand in your glory.”  And I imagine that Jesus looked at them and understood them and loved them.  And then he asked them: “Are you able to drink the same cup I will and be baptized as I am about to be?”  And imagining that this was their invitation to power and prestige, they answered enthusiastically: “Yes Lord, we are able!” Martin Copenhaver, President of Andover Newton Seminary, commenting on their enthusiasm writes: “It goes without saying that when James and John made their request they did not envision that the ones who would end up on Jesus’ right and left would be hanging on crosses.”
 
Then Jesus turned to the whole group and said: “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.  But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
 
The ways of this world; the power structures; the emphasis on youth and beauty and riches and control - are all very alluring. But we find, again and again, that those vain satisfactions do not last.  The thrill of victory is brief.  And before long we are off again searching for something else to make us happy; something new to conquer; something to fill the emptiness inside.  It’s an endless and exhausting cycle.
 
That rich, suburban church I told you about left a very deep impression on me – and not a good one.  It was from that parish that I left the ministry for ten years – angry and confused and embittered.  I would have written off those four years of ministry at that church as a complete waste of time, except for this: Every Thursday, I would drive a group of Jr. High students from the manicured lawns of our perfect village to the dirty and barren streets of Paterson, NJ where there was an old run-down building called St. Stephen’s Mission.  They had an after-school program and every Thursday we would tutor those desperately poor, sometimes abused, often misunderstood kids with their homework.  In the beginning, I did it because it was my job. In the beginning, the disparity between the two towns only made me more cynical.   But after awhile, after I got over myself, as the children in Paterson started to know and love me, as I began to know and love them, something inside of me began to change. And I found a deep meaning and purpose and salvation in humble service.  At a time when my faith seemed to be crumbling, I saw God in their faces.  And that experience is one of the main reasons I stand in this pulpit today. And all of these years later, I still cannot imagine anything that I have ever done that was more important and life giving than that.    
 
When Christ calls us to serve, he isn’t asking us to give up everything.  He’s asking to give us everything.  He’s calling us to real and eternal life. I know that I said that it’s in our DNA to seek power and influence; but I am also convinced that it is in our DNA to love and serve others.  That’s the image of God in us.  And humble service gives us the kind of treasure that all the money and influence in the world can never buy.  
 
Thanks be to God.  Amen.


[1]Nouwen, Henri.  In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership,1990, p.60
 

Sunday, October 14, 2018
© The Rev. Dr. James Campbell
First Congregational Church of Cheshire
 
 
Mark 10:17-31
 
As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.’” He said to him, “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.” Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.
 
Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” And the disciples were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” They were greatly astounded and said to one another, “Then who can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.”
 
Peter began to say to him, “Look, we have left everything and followed you.” Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.”
 
 
 
I am not naturally a morning person. My body wakes up slowly.  And it’s best, I’ve been told, to just leave me be until that happens.  I once had a college roommate who told me that I scared him to death first thing in the morning. A seminary friend once referred to me as a “box of hate” at an 8 am class.  And then she gave me this ceramic cereal bowl with the words “Good Morning Grumpy” painted in bright red letters around the rim.
 
Most of the folks in my life eventually get the clue and leave me alone until I am fully awake.  There was, however, one recalcitrant person who refused to learn that lesson.  He was my roommate one summer when I worked at a church camp.  And every day at about 6 am he would wake up happy just to be alive and insisting that I be happy too.  He would jump out of bed and start to clean, slamming drawers, and whistling happy little tunes.  It was all I could do not to grab him by the throat.  This all came to a very unpleasant climax one morning when I was jolted awake by the intense smell of bleach and my roommate singing, in full voice, “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down!”  It was 6 o’clock in the morning and he was mopping under mybed, and singing.  Well all the sugar in the world was not going to help me get his medicine down.  I don’t remember exactly what I said to him, but the next day, he moved out.  
 
So, that song is not my favorite. Yet its appeal is that is relays a certain truth. I do like my medicine with some sweetness to it. I do want bad or difficult news somehow couched in sweet, non-offensive language, and delicately delivered.    
 
But apparently Jesus never heard of a spoonful of sugar.  For three weeks now, we have had to endure some of Christ’s most bitter pills.  Two weeks ago, we listened as Jesus warned that those who would harm the little ones in this world are in danger of hell.  Last week, although it was not the topic of my sermon, the lectionary Gospel lesson of the day was about divorce.  And this week, Jesus takes up the subject of money. And if we ever needed anything to be sugarcoated, surely it’s talk of money.
 
Mark says that Jesus and his disciples were setting out on a journey, when suddenly a man ranup to Jesus and knelt before him. “Good Teacher,”he said breathlessly, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”  And Jesus, a faithful Jew responded to this other faithful Jew by saying: “You know the commandments: You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; honor your father and mother.”  To which the man replied: “Teacher, I have done all these things since I was young.” -  “You lack one thing,” Jesus said.  “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”  Mark reports that when the man heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.
 
Then Jesus looked at his disciples and said: “It is so hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of God.  It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God.”--“Who then can be saved?”the disciples wanted to know.  Who indeed?
 
For centuries, pastors and theologians have tried their best to sugarcoat these hard words of Jesus.  One ancient scribe actually rewrote verse 24 to read: “How hard it is for those who trust in riches to enter the Kingdom of God.”  That’s a little more palatable for us.  We know that we shouldn’t trust in our money.  The problem is that’s not what Mark wrote.  Further, a 9thcentury interpreter invented the idea that a camel going through “the eye of the needle” was not a sewing needle at all, but instead a reference to a low gate in the wall that surrounded Jerusalem. And the camels could only get through the Eye of the Needle Gate if stooped and unladen.  So, said this interpreter, Jesus’s real point was that the rich should humble themselves and get rid of any unnecessary baggage in order to get through the gate into the Kingdom.  That, too, is a very nice theory, but archeologists say that no such gate ever existed.  Other parsers of the Bible have suggested that Jesus never really meant this man to give up his money, but simply wanted to expose him to the futility of trying to keep the law.  But that’s an argument from silence, and that’s never a good way to start.
 
So, what’s the point here?  The point here is the same point of every story in this book.  These stories are our stories, humanity’s stories, not because all of the details are the same, but because the path to spiritual transformation is always the same. We have to let go in order to grab hold of that which is eternal. 
 
For thisman, it was his money. And so Jesus asked thisman to relinquish his wealth and to give it to the poor.  But apparently Jesus didn’t ask this of every rich person he met. For example, the Gospel of Luke reports that some rich women helped to fund the ministry of Jesus.  Presumably he did not ask these women to give all of their money away – because for them their wealth was not their spiritual problem. 
 
Our culture places a very high priority on getting ahead.  We love a self-made person.  Our heroes are the rich and famous.  That is a classically American trait.  And I think that a great deal of this cultural obsession with wealth is based in fear. We grabbed hold of things because we are afraid.  Even when we know that this is wrong, even when our possessions own us, we refuse to let go because, we imagine, that the cure will be more painful still. 
 
In an episode of HBO’s morality tale The Sopranos,Carmela, the wife of mob boss Tony Soprano, goes to visit a therapist.  Carmela lives a life of luxury, but she is haunted by the way her husband makes his money.  And so, she seeks out a therapist in the hope that he will give her pity and absolution. The therapist is an old Jewish man who listens patiently as Carmela, with tears, pours out her heart.  She tells him everything.  Finally, he speaks.  “You must leave your husband.  You must renounce this lifestyle supported by blood.  You must take your children and flee.  Only then will you know any real happiness.”  Carmela is thunderstruck; first that he, a therapist, would offer any advice. And second, that he would offer this advice without any sugarcoating.  The viewer sees a range of emotions pass over her face: first disbelief, then anger and then a profound sadness as she decides that this is simply too much to ask, even though it would give her the very thing she seeks. And she walks away sad. 
 
Jesus is like that old Jewish therapist.  He will not sugarcoat those things that will actually set us free.  And his words can be sharp, but they are never cruel. Mark says that when the rich man told Jesus that he had kept the commandments from his birth, Jesus looked at him and loved him.  Jesus loved him enough to tell him the truth. 
 
In the same way, Jesus listens to our stories, to our excuses. He looks at us and loves us and tells us the truth. 
 
We don’t really know how this story ends.  Maybe the rich man went away and never thought of Jesus again.  Or maybe he went home and mulled it over for a while. Maybe his desire for eternal life pushed him to confront those things that stood in his way.  Maybe he remembered the look of love in Jesus’s face, even as Jesus spoke those difficult words. Maybe, after thinking about it for a while, he went out to look for Jesus again.  And maybe, just maybe, after thinking about it for a while, we will too. 

​FLESH OF OUR FLESH
World Communion Sunday, October 7, 2018
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell
 
 
Genesis 2:18-24
 
2:18 Then the LORD God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner."
 
2:19 So out of the ground the LORD God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.
 
2:20 The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner.
 
2:21 So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.
 
2:22 And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.
 
2:23 Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken."
 
2:24 Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.
 
+++
 
This summer I took a trip out to the Midwest, the place I came from all those years ago.  I saw old friends and visited old haunts.  I drove by the houses of people I had loved but who have since died.  I ate some of the old foods and heard the familiar accents.  And it was nurturing in a way I did not expect.
 
I had forgotten the stunning beauty of Indiana farmland that stretches to the horizon on a flat plane.  I had forgotten the charm of the rolling hills of central Ohio.  I had forgotten how good a fried pork tenderloin sandwich really is.  I had forgotten the easy smiles that greeted me almost everywhere.
 
But going back also conjured up some unpleasant ghosts. I was driving across the Ohio Turnpike, getting ready to cross the border into Indiana when I saw an enormous sign looming on the side of the highway.  As I got closer, it proclaimed in giant bold letters: “Thou shalt not kill.”  The next one likewise proclaimed: “Thou shalt not steal.”  In all, there were ten of these signs containing all of the Ten Commandments, those laws I learned as a child, and those laws that were the building block of ancient Israelite society.   There is a lot of goodness in the Ten Commandments, a lot of fairness and justice and even mercy.  But those signs also aggressive to me.  Those giant bolded letters felt like screaming; like a line in the sand; like an ultimatum.  And it gave me pause. But it was the next sign that sort of stopped me in my tracks. It simply read: “One Man.  One Woman.  God’s Way.” And that felt like a declaration of who was in and who was out; acceptable and unacceptable. Signs like that can be painful for any of us whose relationships have ended in acrimony or who love someone of the same gender or who either by choice or circumstance are a family of one.  We don’t fit.  And that is definitely a line in the sand
 
In these horrible so-called culture wars that have ripped our society into pieces, people use the Bible to bolster their points of view, on all sides.  And for those folks who are convinced that there is only one kind of legitimate family relationship, the passage we read today from the book of Genesis is a building block for them.  They see in the story of Adam and Eve the prototype for all human relationships and all human families.  But this wonderful and rich tale cannot be boiled down into a prooftext for the culture wars.  It’s far too rich and far too profound for that.  
 
I once heard a rabbi say that the story of the Garden of Eden is not about how God made the world.  It is not, in any way,  a scientific description of how the universe came to be.  Instead, he said, this story tells us why God made the world.  And why God made the world is so that God would be in relationship with us, and we with one another.  Additionally, this primordial tale seeks to frame the reality that already existed. We call that an etiology.  It seeks to answer basic questions like who are we, how we live together, why life is sometimes painful.  So, with that in mind, try to hear this story again.
 
Once upon a time, when the earth was new, and one solitary human walked upon the face of the earth, the Lord God saw that despite all the beauty of the world, the human was lonely. So, the Lord God decided to make the human some helpers.  And God dipped his finger into the rich soil of the fresh earth and formed from that glorious mud every creature that we know: camels and cows, snakes and seals, butterflies and bees.  And the Lord God took these magnificent creatures to the human and presented them to him as a gift.  And God said to the human: “Whatever you name these creatures that will be their name.” And this naming process was wildly entertaining.  And for awhile, the human seemed happy.  But no matter how magnificent these creatures were, none of them was like him.  None of them could really be his partner, as an equal. None could speak his language.  So the Lord God put the human into a deep sleep. And from this one human, God took a rib and made another human.  And once the first human woke from this divine anesthesia, the Lord God presented him with her, Adam and Eve, man and woman.  And in a moment of wonder that shook the heavens and rejoiced the heart of God, the man exclaimed: “This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” In other words, “I see me in someone else.”  
 
“Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.”  My relationship with my paternal grandmother was one big love affair.  I was her first grandchild and we were mad about each other. I remember the trips to the amusement parks and the lavish gifts and the delicious meals and the summer visits and the tearful goodbyes.  I was lucky enough to have my grandmother in my life until I was 42.  And I still have moments when I miss her so deeply that it hurts.  My dear grandmother was very affectionate.  She should kiss my cheek and rub my head and hold me tight.  And sometimes, when she was overcome with her love for me, she would stroke my cheek, look deeply into my eyes and say these words from Genesis: “You are flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone.” 
 
And in that expression of love and connection, my grandmother was on to something.  She understood, on some level, that this verse need not be so narrowly applied to only one kind of love.  And in remembering her this week, it struck me that maybe that broad application is really the point of this ancient tale; this story of our race.  Maybe what we learn in Genesis is that all humans are intimately connected to one another: bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh; that in you I see me; that we are actually and truly our sisters’ and brothers’ keepers.  
 
But we seem to regularly forget that.  And maybe that is the root of every kind of sin.  And it exacts a punishing price.  The story of our race is littered with the carnage that is the natural result of forgetting Eden and our essential connectedness.  
 
We are at a frightening impasse as a society and as a world.  We are so deeply divided, so dug in, so invested in being right, so angry, so sure of our own truth, that those who don’t see it like we do have become something less than in our eyes.  We do not see ourselves in them.  And by our words and actions and silence and complicity, we act as if they are no longer flesh of our flesh or bone of our bone. 
 
But the call of the church of Jesus Christ has always been the restoration of Eden.  Week after week we pray: “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on EARTH.”  Does that sound like too much?  Then how about “thy will be done in Cheshire”?  Or “thy will be done” in this church?  Or “thy will be done” in our families?  -- For that to happen, we’re going to need to learn to listen again. We’re going to need to look one another in the eye and see something far more precious than our opinions.  And if we as the church of Jesus cannot do that as a model to the rest of society, then we are lost.
 
Today is World Communion Sunday. It’s one day each year that Christians all over the world eat the Lord’s Supper together, despite every difference that separates us.  This table is many things to many people.  But today, perhaps more than anything else, this table is a bold and prophetic act – a living into that which we do not yet see but long for: a table of peace big enough for all the people to sit and dine.  
 
That’s the thing about sitting down at table together.  It puts you at eye level with everyone else.  And in the sharing of food and laughter and conversation, you see the essential humanity of the other.  You see yourself in another’s eyes.  And you likewise suddenly and joyfully proclaim: “This is at last bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.”  
 
Thanks be to God.  Amen.
 
 
 

HELL’S BELLS
Mark 9:38-50
Sunday, September 30, 2019
© The Rev. Dr. James Campbell
 
 
Mark 9:38-50
 
John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” But Jesus said, “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us. For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.
 
“If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.
 
“For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”
 
 
I was raised on a steady diet of meat and potatoes; sunshine and exercise, hell fire and brimstone.  Before I ever understood anything about the boundless love of God, I knew all that I would ever need to know about the anger of God. Hell was the subject of frequent sermons and Sunday School lessons and church camps. 
 
This constant emphasis on hell was used largely to keep us all in lock step with the dictates of the church.  And the dictates of that church had to do with personal morality.  People who drank and smoked and cursed and wore revealing clothing and danced and listened to rock-n-roll were all going to hell.  And the hell they were going to was a literal lake of fire, from which there would be no escape.  And let me tell you: all that hell-talk used to scare the hell out of me!   
 
Where do those kinds of ideas come from?  They come from our holy book. They come from passages like the one we heard today, in which Jesus is purported to describe hell as a place of unquenchable fire.  
 
Well, I threw off the fearful chains of my childhood religion a long time ago now.  I came to understand that most hell-fire talk was abusive and used to manipulate and control, to divide and to conquer and to judge.  And for those reasons, for most of my career, I have steered a very wide path around the topic of hell.    
 
I’m not the only one who avoids talking about hell. I bet most of you do too.  We avoid talking about it for all kinds of reasons.  Some of us don’t believe in it, seeing it as the product of more primitive minds.  Others of us are happily agnostic about it, not knowing or caring if it’s true and sure that if it is, we’re not going there.  And still others of us find talking about it, true or not, a distraction away from the overwhelming message of the Gospel – that God’s essential essence is love.
 
And that’s true: God is love.  But part of love is justice.  We may not like to talk about hell but hell is another way to acknowledge that there is a lack of justice in this world.  Hell is about, on some level, a desire for things to be made right, for the score to be evened.  It’s much easier to dismiss the notion of hell or judgment when you are not the one who suffers at the hands of another.  Maybe we don’t talk about hell too much because our lives are not hellish.  But people who were intimately acquainted with injustice wrote the Bible.  And they longed for a God who would set the world right; a God who would judge in equity; a God who would call human cruelty and selfishness and indifference to account. The oppressed of this world still long for such a God.      
 
At the 50thanniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel offered this prayer invoking the judgment of God: “Those who are here remember the nightly marches [into the gas chambers] of children, and more children, and more children. Frightened, quiet. So quiet and so beautiful. If we could see just one of them our hearts would break. But did it break the hearts of the murderers? O God, O merciful God, do not have pity on those who did not have mercy on Jewish children.”
 
When I read Wiesel’s words this week, their raw anger and sadness shocked me.  But are they really that different from the word’s of Jesus: "If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the depths of the sea.”
 
Harming little ones - how is it that our fellow humans are capable of such cruelty?  Why is it that the history is littered with folks just like us who made this earth a hell for their sisters and brothers?  How does that happen?  The answer to that question is as complicated as we are.  But much of our inhumanity to one another begins very simply.  We separate from people we do not understand or like.  And then we put them into categories.  And then we label them and judge them and finally, as a last step, we dehumanize them.  And when we do that, humans are capable of all sorts of hellish behavior – behavior that God will judge. 
 
It’s interesting to me that the separating and labeling of people is the very behavior that introduces Jesus’ talk about hell in this passage.  The disciple John was complaining that there was someone else, who was not part of the group, who was casting out demons in Jesus’ name.  This guy didn’t look like them or act like them or talk like them. He no doubt did not have his theological ducks in a row.  It is quite likely that he even misunderstood who Jesus was.  But none of that mattered.  What mattered, for Jesus, was that this man was doing good.  This “other” went about setting people free from the demons of fear and oppression.  He was helping some of the so-called “little ones.”  “Don’t stop him,” Jesus said.  “He’s on the right track because he’s doing good.” 
 
It seems to me that this unauthorized exorcist was a test for these followers of Jesus, and a very important one. It’s the same test that is put in front of us on a daily basis.  Will we believe that God works through the lives of those very different from themselves? Will we let go of control?  Will we see goodness in others?  Will we cultivate that goodness? It is so very important that we do these things because it is impossible to judge and mistreat those in whom we have seen the goodness of God. 
 
This is what the Lord Jesus modeled for us.    He was forever seeing human potential and the image of God in unlikely others. Jesus once commended a Roman soldier for his faith even though that soldier was *the* symbol of an oppressive Empire.  Jesus made a despised Samaritan the hero of one of his most memorable stories.  Jesus welcomed a marginalized tax collector and a political extremist into the apostolic band.  Jesus befriended a disreputable woman at the well.  Jesus called Saul, a persecutor of the early church, to become Saint Paul, an evangelist and missionary.  In all of these complicated and imperfect people, Jesus saw beyond the outward appearance. And whenever he went, the walls of separation came tumbling down.
 
Jesus ends this ominous and strange passage with an even stranger sentence: after saying that everyone will be salted with fire, he says: “Have salt in yourself and be at peace with one another.”  Scholars readily admit that no one really knows what this salt refers to, but the talk about peace is plain enough.  Even when Jesus spoke so openly and vividly about judgment; even when he said that those who mistreat the little ones would be better off drowned; even still, he still refused to let hell have the last word.  Even still, he spoke peace.        
 
The Nazis murdered the great German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  For years he had lived the horror that was the Third Reich.  In such a situation most of us would pray that the judgment of God would have the final word.  If anybody deserved hell, surely the Nazis did.  But this great theologian, whose lifework was studying the Scriptures, wrote that while he believed that divine judgment was real - even so, he said, “judgment (is the) word before (God’s) final word.”
 
And that means that there’s hope for a sinner like James Campbell – that even when I refuse to cultivate goodness in others; even when I separate them and judge them and dismiss them; even when my actions are worthy of judgment, God does not give up on me.  God still has one more thing to say to me. And that, dear friends, most assuredly, is the good news of the Gospel: that even judgment heals us and brings us peace. It purifies us and saves us and the world for something far, far better.  
 
Thanks be to God.   Amen.   
​

JESUS IS THE QUESTION
Mark 8:27-38
Sunday, September 16, 2018
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell
 
Mark 8:27-38
 
Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.
 
Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
 
He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
 
 
She looked at me with something approaching disdain: “What, exactly, is a UCC?” the skeptical, dour woman at the Garden Party asked me some years ago.  It wasn’t the first time someone had asked me that question and it won’t be the last.  Has anyone ever asked you? Have you ever seen a blank expression on someone’s face when you told them where you go to church?  Do you skip the UCC part altogether and rely on the New England standard: Congregational?  I can certainly understand why.  UCC sounds more like a community college or a medical diagnosis than a proud and historic denomination.
 
We have an identity problem in the UCC that naturally leads people to make jokes about what those letters stand for. There is the standard quip: UCC stands for “Unitarians Considering Christ.”  I’ve never liked that one very much!  But there are others.  On a website entitled “God Is Still Laughing,” I discovered these: UCC stands for “Utterly Confused Christians.”  UCC stands for “Upper Crust Congregationalists.”  UCC stands for “Uniformly Cultured Centrists” or “Underrepresented Christian Church” or my personal favorite: “Upset Christian Cynics.”  
 
Part of why people make these kinds of jokes is because they are based on the false assumption that those of us in the United Church of Christ don’t really believe in much of anything.  They mistake our emphasis on freedom of conscience for freedom from theology.  They don’t understand that how YOU follow Jesus and how I follow Jesus may look very different – but that we are all still following Jesus.  
 
This kind of religion is not an easy sale in our culture, so sure, as it is, of everything. Americans, by nature, are a confident people.  And so we tend to like confident religion.  Lots of folks are drawn to churches in which the “right” way to believe is laid out very clearly, and all one has to do is sign on the dotted line and you get to go to heaven.  
 
And I know, from experience, how comforting that can be.  I was raised with a great deal of religious certainty, and while it made me very comfortable for a while, it didn’t teach me very much about what it means to really follow Jesus into the deep and sometimes troubling questions of life.  
 
Life is so full of questions.  But surprisingly, so are the Gospels.  In Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Jesus is reported to have asked others 307 questions.  Other people asked Jesus a total of 183 questions.  And of those 183 questions, guess how many Jesus actually answered: exactly three.  Instead of a straight answer, Jesus would often answer a question with another question. And this is completely consistent with Jesus’s Jewish faith – a faith in which the questions as avenues of faith. 
 
 
One day, Jesus and his disciples were walking around Caesarea Philippi, an unusually beautiful place that is alive with a great diversity of religious history.  Long before Jesus, it had been central in the worship of the Canaanite god Baal.  Later, in Greco-Roman times, it was said to be the birthplace of the god Pan, the flute-playing half-man/half goat.  In addition to its rich religious significance, it was a city of the Empire, a Roman outpost in the hinterland, meant to remind regular folks that Rome was always watching.  And so it was in this place, so full of the gods and of political power, that Jesus asked: “Who do people say that I am?”
 
Now there was a good deal of debate about that and so the disciples reported to Jesus what they had heard: “Well, some people think you’re John the Baptist, raised from the dead.  And others think you’re Elijah, reincarnated. And still others think you’re like a prophet of old.”  Jesus listened, and then turned the question on them: “But what about you? Who do you say that I am?’”  We don’t know how long it took for anyone to speak, but eventually Peter answered: “You are the Messiah.”  
 
Well, old Peter got that answer right! And you would think that Jesus would want Peter to spread the word.  But notice that Mark reports that Jesus sternlyordered Peter and the others not to tell a soul.  And isn’t that strange?  If it is the truth that Jesus is the long-awaited One, then why not shout if from the housetops?
 
That’s a good question.  And I think there are a couple of answers that have something profound to say about how we follow Jesus in this early part of the 21stcentury.  
 
First of all, consider this: you can search the Gospels high and low and you will never find Jesus teaching a catechism or laying out a list of rules or delineating a systematic theology. Instead, what you will find over and over again is Jesus telling stories with open-ended interpretations.  You will find Jesus touching and befriending and feeding and healing.  And you will find Jesus asking others to follow him and do what he did.  But somehow it has all gotten boiled down to believing all the right things.  Christianity has been reduced to mental assent.  And if Peter told others what the answer was – that Jesus was the Messiah – then maybe they wouldn’t discover it on their own.  And maybe they would think that thinkingthe right things was the same as doingthe right things.  
 
Second, maybe Jesus told them to keep his identity under wraps because they fundamentally misunderstood the nature of who this Messiah was. 
 
In the time of Jesus, it was commonly believed that the Messiah would be a military leader.  That’s who the people were waiting for – a Messiah who would kick the Romans to the curb and restore the glorious Kingdom of Israel. So when Peter said to Jesus: “You are the Messiah!” that’s probably exactly what he meant.  But that’s not what Jesus meant or what Jesus means.  Remember that Jesus once famously said that his kingdom is not of this world.  But those who followed him didn’t really want to hear that.  And mostly, we don’t either.  The church is still looking for power and influence and dominance.  Like the disciples, we’re not that interested in a life of sacrifice and service.  So when Jesus talked about his suffering and death, it was so offensive to the disciples that Peter pulled Jesus aside and let him have it: “Lighten up, Jesus.  You’re scaring everybody and we will never build a viable political movement that way.”  To which Jesus replied: “You devil!  Get your mind on God’s business in the world.”  
 
And then, just so that there would be no mistake about what Jesus was saying, he  turned to the crowd who had been following them that day and spilled the less-than-appetizing beans of what it means to be a Christian: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”  To which we might say, “Lighten up, Jesus.  You’re scaring everybody.  And we will never build a stronger congregation that way.”
 
In this age of waning participation in the religious life; in this age when churches are shrinking and closing, it’s so tempting to shy away from the strange ways of Jesus. It’s a lot harder to sell a question than an answer.  It’s a lot harder to sell a lifestyle of sacrifice than an easy-to-memorize creed.  So, who wants to buy what we’re selling? 
 
Well, maybe folks who know that life is more often lived in-between; maybe folks who long for meaning more than information; maybe folks who want to be part of saving the world!  Those are the kinds of people who have always been attracted to this strange Rabbi, who questions our assumptions, and call us to find true life by giving ours away.  
​

​BE OPENED!
Mark 7:24-37
Welcome Sunday, September 9, 2018
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell
 
 
 
Mark 7:24-37
 
From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.
 
Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.” And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. They were astounded beyond measure, saying, “He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.”
 
 +++

When exactly did you become you? Was it as soon as the sperm and egg came together?  Was it sometime during the nine long months of watery darkness?  Was it when you learned to speak and express yourself?  Or when you graduated?  Or when you had your first real crisis and survived it?  Or do you think of yourself as still becoming more fully you? 
 
And if you think of yourself as still becoming you, then when did Jesus become Jesus?  There is an often-unspoken assumption in the church that because Jesus was Jesus, he emerged from the womb fully and completely formed, sort of human but really much more divine.  And so, to even ask: “When did Jesus become Jesus” has the ring of heresy to it for some. 
 
I was raised with a thoroughly static view of Jesus. The Jesus of my childhood was the already the perfect Son of God before he was even born. We would say things like “Jesus is fully human and fully divine” but the reality was that we left no room for his humanity.  We sort of ignored the idea that Jesus was the actual son of a woman named Mary, who grew up in a working class home, and played in the streets, and no doubt argued with his siblings, and scraped his knees and had stomach aches and confounded his parents.  We so focused on his divinity that we ignored his humanity. And quite frankly, that also has the ring of heresy to it.  
 
But today’s Gospel lesson seems to show us a very clear picture of Jesus’s complicated humanity.  Jesus had traveled to the region of Tyre and Sidon, in modern day Lebanon.  This was Gentile country.  And it appears that Jesus was traveling alone this time, Mark makes no mention of any of the disciples.  And Mark says that Jesus entered a house but did not want anyone to know he was there.  So maybe he was on vacation – a very human thing to do!  
 
But try as he might to have some downtime, Jesus did not escape notice. Like a celebrity hounded by the paparazzi, word spread that the great healer and teacher from Galilee was holed up in a local house.  Suddenly, there was a pounding on the door of that house.  And when the host opened it, a Syrophoenician woman pushed her way in and immediately fell down at Jesus’s feet.  To say that she was Syrophoenician was to say that she was not one of the chosen people, that she was an outsider, that she was “other.”  And this outsider begged Jesus to cast the demon out of her daughter. 
 
Now when people came to Jesus for help, they were almost always met with compassion.  Social barriers were no barriers for Jesus.  But not this time.  This time, a tired, perhaps close-to-burned-out Savior, looks at this bold and persuasive woman, who has just poured out her heart to him and said: “Lady, let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”  At than point, most of us would have slinked away in humiliation.  But this sassy sister was undeterred and replied: “Yes sir, but even the dogs get table scraps.”
 
So, what are we to make of these strange and harsh words of Jesus?  Well, the church has been trying to answer question that for some time now, usually in an attempt to protect a static view of Jesus and his divinity. 
 
The first explanation is like this: Jesus ignored this woman and then verbally rebuffed her because he was testing her faith.  If she only could exhibit enough faith, the reasoning goes, then her little daughter would be set free.  But that kind of logic sets us humans up for some very cruel tests of faith.  It implies that when bad things happen to us, somehow it’s our fault.  If only we had more faith, then children wouldn’t die and cancer would be cured and lovers would be faithful and we would never lose our jobs.  
 
The second standard explanation is like this: when Jesus calls her a dog, he’s really calling her a puppy, sort of like a term of endearment.  The Greek word here for dog is “kunarios” which actually means little dogs or puppies. This used to be my favorite explanation until the day I realized that no one wants to be called a young female dog, if you know what I mean.  
 
And the third explanation is like this: Jesus rebuffed her because she needed to submit to Jesus.  She needed to kneel at his feet, to beg his mercy, to humble herself.  And it was this humbling that caused Jesus to grant her request.  But I was raised on a steady diet of pious humiliation and frankly it did nothing for me except to confuse me about the nature of God’s love.  
 
But there is another way to read this story.  It’s a little edgy; it might make us a bit uncomfortable.  But I find in it a huge helping of God’s amazing grace.  And it is simply this: maybe Jesus was just having a bad day.  Maybe, when those harsh words were spoken, what we see is a very human Jesus, not some immutable deity. Maybe Jesus was still in the process of change and growth; still, as one blogger has so beautifully phrased it, “on his way to becoming the Savior of the World.”  Maybe, in that exchange with an unlikely messenger, Jesus learned something transformative. And he changed.  As theologian Barbara Brown Taylor has written: In that moment of encounter with the other, “you can almost hear the huge wheel of history turning as Jesus comes to a new understanding of who he is and what he has been called to do.”[1]  And so Jesus, shaken awake by her words, is transformed and sees her not as a foreigner, not as a second-class female, not as a heretic, but as a human sister in need. And of course they only thing to do for a sister is to set her little daughter free of the evil that bound her. 
 
Immediately afterwards, Jesus is off to the Decapolis in Galilee, where the people brought him a deaf man with a speech impediment, and asked Jesus to heal him. And this is an odd story too. Jesus takes this man aside, put his fingers in his ears, and took some of his own saliva and placed it on the man’s tongue.  And then Jesus looked up into heaven, sighed, and said: “Be opened.” And the man was healed.
 
It’s easy to miss that sigh in the reading.  But that sigh seems significant to me.  Was it ironic? Did Jesus sigh with a wry smile?  When he said about the deaf man’s ears: “Be opened!” did he suddenly look up to heaven and think: “Oh.  OK Father, I get it.  Be opened. I get it.” 
 
And if it’s true that in some way our Lord Jesus Christ “got it” in a way he had not before; if it’s true that Jesus became more fully Jesus in that moment, then what does that mean for us as we encounter people who challenge our privilege and assumptions and traditions? 
 
Today we begin another year of ministry and mission in the name of this Jesus.  And so we begin, however tentatively, to draw our circle wider. And as we come face to face with those very different from ourselves, the question before us always is: Will we be content with stasis, which is really death?  Or will we be open to transformation, which is life?  First Congregational Church of Cheshire: I say, let’s imagine that God is not done with us yet; let’s imagine that there is genuine blessing in challenge and change; let’s imagine that the only kind of circle worth having is one that is always expanding, until it embraces the whole world.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.   


Thomas, Debie.  www.journeywithjesus.net, “Be Opened” accessed September 3, 2018
 
 

IT’S PERSONAL
John 6:51-58
Sunday, August 19, 2018
First Congregational Church of Cheshire
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell
 
 
John 6:51-58
​
I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” So Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”
 
At the very first church I served, I was called upon to officiate at the wedding of a church member who was marrying a Catholic.  The Catholic bride had agreed to be married in a Protestant Church, as long as we had some of the trappings of a Catholic wedding.  One of those was that the bride and groom wanted communion.  “That’s fine,” I said, “as long as everyone else in the sanctuary is offered communion too.”  That was one of my Protestant trappings.  
 
The big day arrived and the church was full of people – about half Catholic and half Protestant.  Since it was a wedding, and since I was so young and inexperienced, I didn’t think to ask anyone to assist me with communion.  And I hadn’t really thought about what it would mean, logistically, for me to serve 300 people by intinction, all by myself. 
 
When we got to the Communion portion of the wedding, the Protestants tore off a modest sized piece of bread, dipped it in the cup and discreetly put it in their mouths.  But not the Catholics.  They too tore off a piece of bread, but pooped it directly into their mouths.  And then to my utter shock, they grabbed the cup and drank, and some of them deeply. The Protestants, who were standing in the line behind, witnessed this, got confused, and thinking that they must have been doing it wrong all these years, also began to drink from the cup. And I began to panic as I contemplated what it would mean if the cup ran dry.  
 
Just when I thought all was lost, a woman from my church approached.  She tore off a piece of bread and then tried to grab the cup, but this time I held on firmly and whispered, perhaps a little too loudly considering that I was wearing a microphone: “No Olga!  Dip it! Dip it!”  Well, thank God Olga did.  And then like clockwork, all the other Protestants, copycats that they were, began to do the same.  And the day was saved.  There was enough of Jesus for everybody.  
 
Communion was very complicated that day.  But truth be told, it’s complicated on most days.  It’s one of those things that we Christians do but that we don’t talk about very much.  And maybe the reason we don’t talk about it is that we’re not quite sure what we think about it.  Because it’s complicated.  What began as a simple meal that Jesus shared with his disciples has become a sacrament and, as such, a major point of disagreement between those of us who follow Jesus.  We’ve even fought wars over it!  Some of us believe that there is a mystical element to it all – that somehow Christ is present in the meal in ways that that transcend what our minds can understand. Others see it as a simple memorial – a time to remember the life and saving acts of Jesus.  Some see it as a foretelling of the end of the age, when all God’s children will sit down together at the same table of peace.  And some Protestants, like our Quaker sisters and brothers, believe it solely to be a spiritual event, not requiring bread and wine at all, but rather an inner communion of the spirit.  And in our crazy, wonderful United Church of Christ, we have folks who believe all of those things… and more.
 
So, the Eucharist or Holy Communion or the Lord’s Supper is complicated.  And today’s lesson from John’s gospel makes it even more so.  Jesus speaks very strange words, rather embarrassing to hear.  “Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.  Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”  Pretty shocking, right?  But hold onto your hats because the Greek word here for eat is “trogo” which has the connotation of munching or gnawing, with an implied desperation.  And, for the first hearers anyway, Jesus’ words also would have been heard by some as blasphemy.  The drinking of blood is strictly forbidden in Hebrew Scripture (Gen. 9:4, Lev. 3:17; Deut. 12:23).  In addition, in antiquity the idea of eating someone’s flesh was a metaphor for great hostility.  It was a way to insult someone.  
 
In verse 60, which we did not read today, Jesus’s disciples responded to all this flesh and blood talk by saying: “This teaching is difficult.  Who can accept it?”  Indeed, who can?  And so, to try to make it more acceptable, we have written beautiful and rather vague liturgies, trying to tone down this untamed, hard to understand idea.    
 
But even as we tone it down, if you pause to really think about it, communion remains shocking.  Martin Copenhaver, former pastor of the Wellesley Congregational Church in Massachusetts and currently president of Andover Newton Theological School at Yale, tells this story: “On one occasion when I repeated Jesus' familiar words, "This is my body broken for you. This is my blood shed for you," a small girl suddenly said in a loud voice, "Oh, yuk!" The congregation looked horrified, as if someone had splattered blood all over the altar - which, in effect, is just what the little girl had done with her exclamation.”[1]  And I wonder: did that little girl simply say out loud what some of us are thinking?  
 
So, we have established that Communion is complicated.  And yet, it still draws us.  The invitation to eat and drink with Jesus or of Jesus continues to woo people, even those of us who don’t know what to say or think or believe about it.  And I think it woos us because it’s visceral and earthy and mysterious and intimate.
 
Some of you have met my best friend Jim, the Presbyterian minister who preached my Installation here in April.  In a recent conversation, he said something like this: “It’s interesting.  Presbyterians are not like they used to be.  They’re no longer satisfied with a strictly intellectual approach to the faith.  In the old days, a good sermon was sufficient.  People simply wanted a faith they could understand intellectually.  But that doesn’t seem to be enough anymore.  More and more of the people at my church are looking for mystery and awe, as well as intellectual stimulation.  They want more prayer and more silence.  And they want more Communion.  In other words, they want to engage their bodies and spirits as well as their minds. They’re trying to feed the whole person – and it’s personal.”  
 
And maybe that is, at least in part, what Jesus was trying to communicate when he shocked his friends with his flesh and blood talk.  Maybe it was an invitation to deeper intimacy with him.  Maybe it was an invitation to take something of his own self into our own flesh and blood; to become one with him, to participate on some deep level in the Incarnation.  
 
You know, it’s not unlike what a mother does when she breast-feeds her child.  She gives of her own body, her own substance, in order to transfer her life to her child.  And it’s very personal.  
 
The power of the Eucharist is not, in the end, about bread and wine and words and churches and pastors and ritual. It’s about getting very, very close to Jesus. 
 
So, think whatever you will about communion.  There is probably no right answer about exactly what it is.  But whatever you think, don’t get hung up on it. Jesus’s strange, strong words are not about some kind of doctrine.  His words are about the relationship he longs to have with each one of us.  His strange, strong words are an invitation, as Martin Copenhaver says, to “…receive Jesus, the whole Jesus, (so that) his life clings to (our) bones and courses through (our) veins.” [2]
 
And it doesn’t get any more personal than that.    


[1]Copenhaver, Martin.  http://day1.org/4043-eating_jesus.  Accessed August 14, 2018

[2]Ibid