The Rev. Jake Miles Joseph
Plymouth Congregational UCC of Fort Collins, Colorado Mark 1:29-39 Fifth Sunday After Epiphany Will you pray with me this morning, Plymouth? May the words of my mouth (as fully inadequate as they will be) and the meditations and prayers of all of our hearts (as speechless as we are) be good in your sight, O God, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. “In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there prayed.” Mark Chapter 1, Verse 35 is a moment of absolute stillness, silence, and deep loneliness in the middle of a chapter (a passage of Scripture) filled to the brim with over-activity: healings, expelling of demons, travel, and crowds of endless pressing need. This morning, friends, we are really living in a still very dark morning at the deserted place—and it is exactly where we need to be. It is okay. Today was scheduled to be Jane Anne’s monthly Sunday to preach. I know that, like myself, Jane Anne treasures the opportunities she has to come before you in this pulpit and share a Word of Gospel and grace. All of the words this week of common prayer: The Call to Worship, our hymn selections, the Unison Prayers, and even the sermon title, “Ripples of Healing,” come from my colleague, The Rev. Jane Anne Ferguson. She finalized this worship bulletin only hours before indescribable tragedy would touch the Ferguson-Chorpenning household. The loss of a child at any age and for any reason is a source of grief and pain that stays with a parent in some form or another for a lifetime—with a brother, with a stepfather, with stepbrothers. Our work, brothers and sisters/ siblings in Christ, here in this congregation in the days, weeks, years to come is to allow the work of the Holy Spirit through grief and bereavement to flow through us—to be ripples rather than waves of healing. Ripples rather than waves because it requires patience, boundaries, awareness, and finesse. Jane Anne’s original sermon title, which I retained, could not be a more accurate depiction of the way grief and loss process works. I know this from my time as both a hospice and hospital chaplain. Starting from a sudden and unexpected impact on the surface of the waters of life, the process of recovering equilibrium does not come in waves but rather ripples of healing. Continuing with the image of the ripple, we should also remember that ripples continue to exist in the system of the water well after they are no longer visible to the human eye. This will be a long process for both Jane Anne and Hal—one that they will both define in their own way. We will need to wait for them to define their needs. So far, as a congregation, I want to commend you all for understanding the boundaries of space needed. You all have responded with so much love and care, and I know that they feel the ripples of healing your prayers are sending. Likewise, I want to thank the Leadership Council for providing meals for the family. We will let the congregation know if more are needed. I also understand and need to name that for many of you, some have spoken with me and some haven’t and maybe won’t, the ripples of your own healing processes intersect and overlap (magnified) with the ripples of this event. Hal shared with us by email, vulnerably and authentically, that Colin probably took his own life. While brave and hard to say, it helps remove stigma and bring this conversation to the light. I know that for many of you, this has brought up your own grief, fears, loss, guilt, and feelings of helplessness even decades old. The ripples of this event in our church family system have brought up a lot of things for many of you from your own families and histories. I want you to know that even as busy as I will be perceived to be “holding down the fort” in the coming weeks, your pastoral care, the conversations you need to have, the questions this might raise about God always come first for me, for Mark, for Mandy, and our team of pastorally-trained lay people. I want to be as explicit as I possible can be (no vagaries today): do not hesitate to reach out if you need to talk, or process, or grieve. This is true even if the triggering event is 50 or 75 years ago or even happened in your family system a 100 years or more ago. The ripples of healing are a promise from God, we see God’s great power of healing in this passage, but that doesn’t mean that you have to do it alone or that it is easy. This brings me back to our Scripture (good news) even this dark morning: “In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.” The word translated from Greek here in our translation as “a deserted place” is hotly contested in different Christian translations. Other words frequently used in lieu of deserted include: secluded place, solitary place, desolate place, uninhabited, or most interestingly it can be translated as a vulnerable place… a place that is deprived of the protection of others—the rawness, realness, and pain of the human experience. In the early hours of a new day, when it was still very dark and dangerous, Jesus got up and went out alone to a place of vulnerability and there he prayed.” One of my favorite theology books is called Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality. In this book, the author and father of son living with disability, Dr. Thomas Reynolds, argues that good theology starts with looking for the places in the Bible and in Systematic Theologies where strength comes from brokenness, wholeness comes from authenticity, where community/ church/ all of this Christianity business really is rooted in one word: Vulnerability. This is entirely counter-cultural and is essential for understanding what a grief process, ripples of healing, means for us now. Christianity is not a normal religion or normal way of living where safety and comfort are the arguable norms. Normal life is life where we suppress pain. In normal life we ignore healing. In normal life we rush bereavement. In normal life, strength is the ultimate virtue, right? In fact, in this book, and I love this and reference it frequently because it is at the core of my belief in Christ, is that normal is a cult. The Cult of Normalcy dictates that we always need to be strong, always need to be progressing, always need to have it all figured out, always need to “get over it fast,” always look happy, healthy, and wise. This normal business isn’t Christian…heck it isn’t even possible. It is a false idol. The Cult of Normalcy. Vulnerability, deserted places, lonely and hard are the source of our faith in a God who accompanied and accompanies all of humanity in the hard parts of life and death. God and Jesus Christ don’t end when things get hard, when we need to be vulnerable with each other, when healing doesn’t even seem remotely possible, but that is where faith starts. In the early hours of a new day, when it was still very dark and dangerous, Jesus got up and went out alone to a place of vulnerability and there prayed.” A couple of closing remarks: I want us to look to the last three words of this fascinating verse: “And There Prayed.” What Hal and Jane Anne shared in vulnerability with you by email, what many of you have since shared with me, what we do by worshiping God (mystery, universe, creator) together, sharing in admitting our own brokenness, admitting that none of us looks anything like normal (AMEN!) is dangerous, risky, and vulnerable. It is, yes, all of these things, but it is never hopeless. In denying the power of normal and embracing the rawness and realness of vulnerability and finally turning to the source of life in prayer (even in the midst of the darkest morning in the scariest places of our souls)—we find hope eternal in a God who will not let us go, a God who accompanied humanity even unto worst. This is the importance of the cross even for progressive churches to understand. God accompanies humanity in even the worst circumstances. While vulnerable in a deserted and lonely place, Jesus was far from alone. And there he prayed. Sometimes, like now, that is all we can do. Grounded in a calling to vulnerable places and spaces of life and death, we together come before God in prayer. There is no normal way to grieve a loss like the loss of a child, but we can come alongside in prayer, in knowing our own vulnerability is a gift that starts the ripples of healing from a core of hope. Deserted (vulnerable) places have no map, no normal, no yelp, no timeline, no Google to tell you how to find them or exactly how long you will need to be there. They just are and need to be. Amen AuthorThe Rev. Jake Miles Joseph ("just Jake"), Associate Minister, came to Plymouth in 2014 having served in the national setting of the UCC on the board of Justice & Witness Ministries, the Coalition for LGBT Concerns, and the Chairperson of the Council for Youth and Young Adult Ministries (CYYAM). Jake has a passion for ecumenical work and has worked in a wide variety of churches and traditions. Read more about him on our staff page.
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The Rev. Jake Miles Joseph
Plymouth Congregational UCC, Fort Collins, Colorado 1 Samuel 3: 1-10 Will you pray with me? May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be good and pleasing to you, O God, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. On this Sunday of Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, it is important for us to take time to reflect on the life and impact of a great leader and visionary. Of course, we remember that MLK was a community organizing, a grassroots coordinator, and a national hero. What we often overlook, however, is that he was The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. The Bible and its stories, especially the Old Testament in his tradition, would have been the inspiration for his life and work. Today, we have a story that I am sure MLK knew and lived. The story of Samuel is one of miracles and God in unexpected places and direct communication. Before he was conceived, Samuel’s mother Hannah was found by Eli (the older priest in this story) crying on the steps of the temple begging God for a son. Eli, I am now convinced, must have failed Pastoral Care 101 in seminary because he assumes that Hannah is drunk and tried to send her away rather than help her. Hannah then proves to Eli that she isn’t drunk, and so Eli promises her that she will have a son… so Hannah dedicates her son to God’s service. Soon she gives birth to Samuel, and the minute he is weaned she brings him to the temple and gives him to Eli and the priests to take care of and bring-up. It is paradoxical because she prayed for a son then when she is given a son she gives him away. Let this be a lesson for us that nothing in the Bible is exactly as it seems. This is a reminder that the story we are dealing with today is not from our context or culture or our time. Now, we catch up with Samuel when he is a young boy serving and living in the temple (he only sees his parents when they come for high holidays), and he receives a very usual alarm wake-up call! Some of us have odd alarm clock sounds (mine sounds like a cricket—I am now terrified of the sound of crickets), but this is especially weird. How many of you are woken up at night by God calling your name? Not many of us, right? This is not normal for us, but it is a common theme in Biblical call story narratives of the Old Testament. Our passage today falls into a whole subgenre of Biblical literature called the “Call Story.” This is a genre of Biblical stories that is important to look at when we are talking about how God communicates or doesn’t communicate. While call stories in the Bible often have themes in common, no two are the same. This shows us, even today that each and every individual hears from God differently. Last week, I was in Arizona at an educational intensive for the Next Generation Leadership Initiative (NGLI) of the UCC for “promising young clergy” (don’t ask me why I was invited…I have no idea). The focus for my class this year was on family systems theory, so there was a lot of sharing. All of us had some great stories to tell, and you know what? None of the 16 in my class and 64 total young ministers there had the same story or the same way God communicates with us. Likewise, none of the Biblical call stories is like any other. So today, our job is to see what is unique about Samuel’s story, and then I want us to think about how it applies to our world today. Okay, are you ready? Ready to put our Sherlock Holmes hats on and start the investigation? Because there are three big things about Samuel that we need to pay attention to that are unique to this story and offer us clues to our own lives with the Divine. 1. Notice that God demands a dialogue. The first two times God calls his name, Samuel doesn’t respond to God, and Samuel rather runs to Eli. We can imagine Eli is getting tired of being woken up. Finally, Eli is probably so tired of being woken-up by Samuel that he says, “Go lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’ So Samuel went and lay down in his place. Now the Lord came and stood there, calling as before, ‘Samuel, Samuel!’ And Samuel said, ‘Speak, for your servant is listening.” This is fascinating. God won’t do all of the work when you are called to something. God may still be speaking, as we say in the UCC, but our God does not monologue. God is looking for a conversation, a response, and an action on Samuel’s part. So long as Samuel doesn’t tell God that he is listening, God won’t continue the conversation. God needs dialogue. Question 1: What is God calling you to in your life right now? What is your response to God in your life? Is something keeping you up at night that you are too scared or don’t know how to reply to? What is holding you back? Remember, God is not a God of monologue. You need to say yes or no and engage with these questions rather than sleep through the alarm of God’s voice. 2. Alright, so this brings me to the second thing about Samuel’s call story that is particular to this account. Samuel needs help from an elder and a mentor. Unfortunately for Eli, if you keep reading the account later on, what Samuel has to say once he has listened to God has to do with Eli’s family’s sins. Sometimes the mentor is the one who has something to learn from the student, but I digress. The main point is that Samuel has to have help discerning how to respond to God’s call on his life. Samuel has no shame in waking Eli up not once, not twice, but many times. “Here I am, for you have called me.” The Bible doesn’t say, but maybe this is something Samuel does often! Unlike other call stories in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament, Samuel goes to a mentor and an elder for assistance. This is something NGLI clergy are likewise encourages to do: develop mentoring relationships outside of our home church or home conferences to retain perspective. Question #2: Who are some mentors or people outside of your own internal knowledge system, household, or person who you can ask for guidance in the calls or decision making processes ahead? Here is a hint: sometimes mentors are not older than you. In a multigenerational church, advice flows both ways. The second thing we learn from Samuel’s call story is that sometimes we need to ask others for advice, guidance, or insights to learn how to answer God’s call on our hearts that is keeping you up at night? Who do you need to ask for advice from? On the flip side, pay attention to when in life you are called to be Eli—do not be annoyed by the questions, by being woken up at night by the discernment of a friend of mentee. In life in community, we are both Samuel and Eli. 3. Okay now for the strangest and coolest part of this particular story! So first, God is a God who wants or requires a yes from us—a dialogue. Then we see how in the story, the community, the mentors, the wisdom of others is essential to the discernment, and now we come to the best part that makes Samuel’s call unique and relevant for our lives. Verse 10: “Now the Lord came and stood there, calling as before, “Samuel, Samuel!” Now the Lord came and stood there. God meets us where we are. God doesn’t give up on your purpose. You are valuable, loved, and followed by God. When Samuel doesn’t respond to simply being called, God tries a new tactic, a different approach for a different call: God comes and stands right by Samuel’s bedside and yells in his ears. “SAMUEL! Wake up!” Question #3: Do you know that God won’t give up on you? Did you know that? I know that. Additionally, each of you is being called, no matter how old or how young (Elis and Samuels alike) to new adventures with the Spirit. I know that. I feel it in my bones, friends. Let me ask it again: Do you know that God won’t give up on you? Let’s pull all of this together. On this Martin Luther King Jr. weekend when we remember one in our own time who was called to something extraordinary, we need to all think about what God is calling us to do in this world. What is our greater purpose for a time such as this? What the call story of Samuel reveals is that God is a God who is looking for a dialogue, a conversation, a two way street and requires your response. God doesn’t want to talk at you. God wants to talk with you. Secondly, mentors, community, elders, and getting advice from other people are good ways to figure out how to respond to God. Don’t be afraid to wake someone else up and alert him or her to your problem even multiple times. You are not in this, this current dilemma, and this Meshuggeneh life alone. Thirdly, and most exciting and unique to this story, know that God doesn’t give up on you and you have a purpose that God is moving through your being and your life. Are you all with me? Let me now in closing take this one step further. A common theme in my preaching is what I see as disconnect between our lives as Mainline Christians (an imagined life that looks a lot like 19th Century Victorian Vermont) and the real life we struggle through on the other hand. The disconnect I see possibly arising here is that you all, like me, might think that God is going to only speak to you when you are on a meditation retreat or sitting in silence, or staring into the actual physical face of a stranger. Here is the reality: What actually is most likely to wake you up at 2 AM? For me, it is a text message from one of you with an emergency or a call. A text from my mom… who wakes up at 5 in the morning and sends inspirational quotes to her adult children. While we like to idealize how God communicates with us, just like we idealize God as having stopped speaking a longtime ago (that would be convenient), I have to tell you that the Divine Deity is more tech savvy than your computer programming grandchildren. While the divine can and does speak to us in voice and in spirit on those yoga retreats or palates pilgrimages, we also find God sightings and marking on text messages from a friend in need, in a Facebook post from a wise friend, or in the emails from a stranger reaching out for help. Look for God in the text messages, in the emails, in the online materials. Our God sightings are no longer limited to face to face. Treat the texts and emails you write with the same care as in-person interactions, for it matters just as much now. It is a brave new world. It is a world in need of new call stories to be told, and I think I know of just the congregation to tell their stories and to bring something new to a time such as this. Now the Lord came and stood there, calling as before, Plymouth, Plymouth! And Plymouth said, “Speak for your servants are listening, reading, following.” We are ready for what God has to say. Amen. AuthorThe Rev. Jake Miles Joseph ("just Jake"), Associate Minister, came to Plymouth in 2014 having served in the national setting of the UCC on the board of Justice & Witness Ministries, the Coalition for LGBT Concerns, and the Chairperson of the Council for Youth and Young Adult Ministries (CYYAM). Jake has a passion for ecumenical work and has worked in a wide variety of churches and traditions. Read more about him on our staff page.
Mark 1: 1-8
Second Sunday in Advent 12/10/17 The Rev. Jake Miles Joseph Plymouth Congregational UCC, Fort Collins, Colorado Will you pray with me? May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be good and pleasing to you, O God, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. Merry Christmas, Plymouth... at least according to the Gospel of Mark! In today’s Scripture passage, we find the opening remarks of the Gospel According to Mark foretelling the birth of Jesus through the mixing of the story of John the Baptist and verses cited from Isaiah. This lectionary reading brings us Mark’s Christmas even though we are in Advent. What is particularly interesting is that, while it doesn’t sound like it on first reading, Mark 1: 1-8 is in fact this Gospel’s entire Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany Story combined in shorthand. Some like to simply ignore this Gospel by saying, “Oh Mark doesn’t have a Christmas story,” but that is simply because we don’t like what we find. Yes, I know that sounds impossible, but it is true: Merry Christmas, and I bet many of you haven’t even finished your Christmas shopping. From this point where our reading left off in this Gospel, we jump right into the baptism of Jesus and the start of his ministry! Mark does Christmas a little differently: no angels, no manger, no magi, no star, no Mary, no Joseph, no shepherds, no Santa Claus, no presents, no cookies, no tinsel, no mother-in-laws visiting, no nothing! Nada! Right about now, my guess is that might sound good to many of you. This season is stressful and lonely for many. Mark is sort of the Grinch of the Gospel writers. Merry Christmas (early) today from the Gospel of Mark! Sort of feels like we all just got coal in our Christmas stockings, right? Where did the glamor go? Mark is the oldest of the Canonical (or narrative) Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Matthew and Luke were written later and were based, in part, on the outline and organization of Mark. This is uniformly accepted in Biblical Studies academic circles. Studying these distinctions is an entire field of Biblical study called “Gospel Parallels.” This is the study of the slight and significant differences between the four Gospels and the three canonical ones in particular! It is also the best topic to bring-up if you want to be the most awkward person at a cocktail party! The Gospel of Mark allows us the opportunity to rethink Christmas because Mark offers us a stripped down version—A back to basics lesson. There are several important things that, if we take Mark seriously, we learn about the Christmas Season that we might forget once we read Matthew and Luke’s elaborate versions of the start of Jesus’ life. Mark grounds the entire story of Jesus in Prophesy of Isaiah. Unlike Matthew and Luke, Mark’s entire Jesus narrative remains rooted squarely with the ancients as an outgrowth of older tradition. Verse 2: “As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, ‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of the one crying out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his path straight.’” Then in verses 4-8, Mark elaborates and says that John the Baptist was the one whose job, whose sacred mission it was to create a world that is ready for Jesus Christ—the Prince of Peace—to enter. “John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness [wham, voila, poof], proclaiming [screaming, yelling, preaching, extolling] a baptism of repentance and a forgiveness of sins [renewal, peace, restart, hope… hope]… He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming* [hey y’all… even as awesome as I am … just wait]; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals [which by the way is the most lowly, dirty, and stinky thing you could do for someone in the ancient world]. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” *This is interesting because why would God need any help from people, from humans, especially this mountain-man John who would fit in better with us rock climbers and backpackers of Colorado than the city dwellers of New York or Jerusalem? Why would God need to wait for the world to be ready for Jesus, and then why would God want someone who is verily an outcast from the places of power and culture to do it? This raises the question: Who are we in this story? I think we are John the Baptist crying out in the wilderness—for crying out loud in a world that can’t seem to get it! Crying out loud—doesn’t that seem to be most of our work as Christians these days? We are John the Baptist in this Christmas Story as we enter Advent in 2017. Plymouth, are you ready to get real with me? Let’s talk about our “crying out loud.” Because Mark’s Gospel offers us one heck of a Christmas Story in only a couple of verses that calls us to the mat—us powerful, comfortable, mainline old school Christians. Church, Christianity, congregation is all about journeying through Scripture, tradition, and faith exploration together. Every single year in our liturgical context, we take a slow tour through the Bible, and that tour always begins with this weird thing called Advent. Advent is the first stop on a tour of wonders. Have you ever been on a tour of the Avery House here in Fort Collins? It is a really cool place for weddings and part of the Poudre Landmarks Foundation. Where is the first place you go? You start in the lobby of the house, and what is the first thing they tell you in the Advent of your old house tour? First they will ask you nicely to please not touch anything… please do not break the Avery House collection and keep your kids close as you do the walk. “Fort Collins has Franklin Avery to thank for the wide streets in Fort Collins; he took advantage of the open spaces when he surveyed the town in 1873. Avery later founded First National Bank and was instrumental in developing water projects that enabled agriculture to flourish in northern Colorado. In 1879, he and his wife Sara built a family home on the corner of Mountain Avenue and Meldrum Street and raised their children, Edgar, Ethel, and Louise, there. The original two-story home consisted of two rooms on the first floor, now the entry area and dining room; three bedrooms upstairs; and a basement. Constructed of sandstone from local quarries, the house cost $3,000 when it was built. During the ensuing years, the Averys added to the house several times; the final addition included the distinctive Queen Anne tower…” [PLF website] That is all well and good and exactly what a tour of an old house should be, but is this also how we experience our annual church tour through Scripture? “Hi I’m Jake and I will be your tour guide this year through Scripture. First Jesus was born in a manger to really cool young parents Mary and Joseph (you would have liked them), then he did a lot of miracles, made friends, told great stories, and had a tough death because of some political misunderstandings…but its all good, you see, cause there is Easter, resurrection, and ascension and potlucks… and endowments now in his honor.” Is this also how we read the Bible…as a casual walk about tour through quaint old facts and anecdotes of ancient times: Queen Anne towers and dust collectors? If the lectionary cycle lulls us into an old house walking tour where we are scared to break things, something is wrong. I love the Avery House, but I think we mistake our annual tour through the Bible for an antique house tour. It is time to shake the dust off. Since Advent is like our lobby talk where we set our values for the coming year Bible tour, lay-out the rules, it is my job as your tour guide to inform you that this year… please PLEASE break some sh… stuff this year! For crying out loud! Adventing is weird and highly dangerous walking tour of history where we are called to be the John the Baptists crying out in the wilderness for a new time declaring: Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love to a world that doesn’t remember how to do these things and frankly is threatened by them for good reason! Being John the Baptists in Advent is more about being like Indiana Jones in a dangerous adventure of caves and mystery than being Hyacinth Bucket (Bouquet) keeping up appearances in an old British Castle. If you got that second reference, then there is a prize waiting for you in the gift shop. Think about it—how dangerous are the Gospel truths of Advent: Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love! Love would mean giving-up hatred that maintains political order. Hate and fear is how the world works politically speaking. Do we really want love? Wouldn’t it be anarchy? Peace would mean that weapons manufactures would lose countless sums of money and contracts and people might even lose their jobs. What about security firms and lawyers? Violence is how our economy works. Do we really want peace? Wouldn’t it be bad for the economy? Joy would mean that the pharmaceutical companies would need to rethink their business models and the all the people who spend their days (some of you my friends) writing to the comments section in the Coloradoan about how mad they are at CSU would have to find something more productive to do with their time. A lack of joy and perspective on the miracle of life is how we know how to use our time. Do we really want joy? Wouldn’t we be bored? Oh, and hope would mean that we might support affordable education or real healthcare, housing, and food for our world! Do we really want hope? Wouldn’t that be unfair for the nations and individuals who inherited so much blessing from a benevolent prosperity God? Wouldn’t the world be unjust or ungovernable with too much hope? See how truly dangerous Advent is for the status quo! But then we say… again… with confidence and true belief—“World, hey you, you haven’t seen NOTHING yet! Just you wait until the love and the peace and joy and hope of God gets ahold of you through the Christ Child. Just you wait!” How hard is that for us to do? Maybe the reason it hasn’t happened yet, is we (Christians) don’t really believe it anymore ourselves… it is just something we repeat because we were brought-up to come here on Sundays and pay ministers salaries. Do we believe what we proclaim in Advent on this Gospel of Mark Christmas? Maybe that is the only way to start inviting God back to this planet—if the Christians themselves learn to believe in these again: Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. If we are honest with ourselves, can we overcome our despair and liberal pessimism long enough to even believe these things are possible for a split second? It is only by believing that they were possible that voting rights came for all, slavery was abolished, that apartheid was no more. If you don’t really believe we can do it together, humanity, then don’t take the Gospel in vain for crying out loud. Adventing is not just the lobby (opening intro) for an old house museum tour stroll through the Bible anymore. Advent isn’t the lobby introduction to your grandmother’s old house museum tour. We are called to be the John the Baptists proclaiming that something new is coming—something bigger than ourselves or our imaginations. We are, as Mark implies in his Christmas story, called to be prophets. Now, while I am your tour guide, I am not your John the Baptist. I don’t even own a Subaru. You are John the Baptist in this Advent time of preparation. There is this myth, and I see it play out with the prayer tree that because you have paid professional clergy, we are the ones called to proclaim and you are the ones to follow. Plymouth, however, is a Calvinist-rooted Congregational Church, so you don’t get off that easy. :) Today, Mark drops a lump of coal in our Christmas plans. He is the Grinch to Luke and Matthew’s idealist Santa Claus. Mark calls all us to the mat to advent with him. Advent in Mark consists solely of us crying out loud…wailing in the desert. In Mark our role is to reveal God’s reign, for maybe… I propose, the reason these things are not realized or realizable, the reason the world doesn’t change, the reason Jesus has yet to repeat radical transformation and return in our midst is because we think we are on an old house tour of the Bible (admiring knick knacks covered in dust) rather than a religion (that word has power) of belief and action! This year, for the sake of peace, it is time for us to break some stuff… and believe something again. This year, we need to be religious, and believe something ancient, brooding, and dangerous for a change. No more safe Christianity for 2018. We tried that already in 2017, and how did that work out for us? Merry Christmas, for crying out loud, from the Gospel According to Mark! AuthorThe Rev. Jake Miles Joseph ("just Jake"), Associate Minister, came to Plymouth in 2014 having served in the national setting of the UCC on the board of Justice & Witness Ministries, the Coalition for LGBT Concerns, and the Chairperson of the Council for Youth and Young Adult Ministries (CYYAM). Jake has a passion for ecumenical work and has worked in a wide variety of churches and traditions. Read more about him on our staff page.
The Rev. Jake Miles Joseph
Plymouth Congregational Church UCC of Fort Collins, CO Psalm 100 Noise, Gladness, Singing OR EveryDay Miracles (EDM) Will you pray with me? May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be good and pleasing to you, O God, our rock, sometimes our rock band soundtrack, and our redeemer. Amen. One of my favorite parts of attending a Methodist divinity program was the weekly chapel service: the noise, the singing, and the gladness of it all! Now, I was lucky because when I was at Emory it was a high point for that seminary as a place of music and noise. At that time, one of the heads of liturgy and music was Professor Don Saliers. Some of you may know of his daughter Emily, principle member of the Indigo Girls, who would sometimes appear in chapel as a surprise soloist! What made Emory’s chapel services great wasn’t only Rev. Dr. Saliers, Emily Saliers, or even the fact that every other seminarian (except for me) actually could sing really well, but that everyone sang with reckless abandon, conviction, and NOISE! This might have had more to do with Emory being a southern seminary more than a UMC seminary. It was at my first chapel service that I discovered perhaps some of the theological rationale for this robust singing when I opened to the first pages of the red UMC hymnal and discovered John Wesley’s “Directions for Singing,” (which would be my reading during many a sermon for the next three years), and I have never been quite the same again. How many of you know what I am talking about? There are seven rules in total, and they vary from rules about singing in tune to keeping time and rhythm (basically… pay attention) to others about not turning yourself into a soloist in the midst of a congregational song, but by far my favorite two rules are numbers 3 and 4, which are as follows: 3. Sing All – see that you join the congregation as frequently as you can. Let not a slight degree of weakness or weariness hinder you. If it is a cross to you, take it up and you will find a blessing. 4. Sing Lustily – and with good courage. Beware of singing as if you were half-dead or half-asleep; but lift up your voice with strength. Be no more afraid of your voice now, nor more ashamed of its being heard, than when you sang the songs of Satan.[1] Setting aside that last part about the songs of Satan, John Wesley has a point! What are we so scared of? Is it the judgment of the person next to us? Is it the judgment of the music director? I promise Mark is nice guy. Is it the judgment of the choir? No, it is usually a lack of confidence in ourselves. Sing with good courage, Plymouth! What I love about what the Methodists have in the front of every hymnal is the reminder of what worship is all about. It is about not being dead (amen/praise God)! It is about being fully alive, embodied, and awake to what God is doing moving in our midst. As Hal said last week in his sermon, quoting Irenaeus, “The glory of God is in a human being fully alive,” or as Wesley would say… please don’t sing as if you were half dead! Live life abundantly in each moment, especially when we are gathered in worship to praise God. Today’s Psalm is a classic and archetypical “Psalm of Praise!” This is the type of song, I see through reading the national news, that is most difficult for the UCC these days, and it is why we need to talk about it. We cannot because the denomination that only knows lament. Nobody want to join into that. That is exactly what is happening today with Psalm 100, friends. This is a Psalm, a hymn, and a concert of praise at its very best: noise, gladness, and singing. Scholars often describe the Psalms as ancient “hymns.” This gives us the unfortunate and false parallel to conveniently and comfortably think that the Psalms were used in a context that looked much like Plymouth. When we quietly sing Psalms or hymns, we feel like we are engaging the ancient. For my generation, and I bemoan this fact because I love hymns, the word hymn is often associated instinctively with something quiet, mumbled, spoken at memorial services and staid and quiet and sad. [Sing slowly while stomping foot in slow rhythm in the pulpit] “I went to the garden alone… while the dew was still on the roses”, and by the time the dew is on the roses you are asleep. There is no passion, no noise, certainly no praise… and no heart in the word hymn anymore. Now before you jump to conclusions or stop listening, this doesn’t mean we should stop singing hymns (I love them), but we need to reclaim the passion of the Psalmist and bring back the fractured parts of our lives. The Sacred (on Sunday) and the Embodied (the rest of the week) should not be mutually exclusive. 100:1 Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth. 100:2 Worship the LORD with gladness; come into his presence with singing. 100:3 Know that the LORD is God. It is he that made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. 100:4 Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise. Give thanks to him, bless his name. 100:5 For the LORD is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations. [even the millennial] Do we believe this radical statement about the universe and its meaning, church? Or is it just something we say at funerals and in bereavement seminars, church? Verse 1: The word in Hebrew translated as, “Make a joyful noise,” is used 42 times in the Hebrew Bible. It is translated often as “shout, cry, scream, vocalize, raise a sound, give a blast…have a blast!” We are talking about embodied experience of being Christian not just acting like it on Sunday… and praising a God, a creator, beloved, giver, lover, essence, breath, sustainer, redeemer, healer. It is completely in line with our Mission Statement here at Plymouth: “It is our mission to worship God [praise God] and help make God’s realm visible in the lives of people, individually and collectively, especially as it is set forth in the life, teachings, death, and living presence of Jesus Christ.” The Psalms, in their ancient context, would have been used in the cultic, ritual, communal ceremonies and parties of the time that looked very little like our Sunday morning worship. In fact, they would have felt more like Red Rocks Concerts complete with the smoke effects coming from the offerings. Unlike today where we have created an artificial boundary between “high, church, sacred culture” on one hand and “low/ popular/ worldly culture” (a 19th Century Victorian distinction and construct we are still enduring today)—our lives lived on Sunday mornings on one hand and our lives lived singing at the top of our lungs in our cars on the highway on the other hand is false. It makes praise from the gut difficult or awkward. It is this artificial line and compartmentalization (in French Cartesian) that is killing the mainline churches. The worship settings where the Psalms were used were the concerts, the center, the pilgrimage, and the collective hope and aspiration settings—not ethical historical lectures. Not only do we keep our church to ourselves proudly as Fort Collins’ “best kept secret,” but we also sometimes keep our passion for life and living and thereby our overwhelming praise for a God who makes all things possible a secret from ourselves…on Sundays. This being the Sunday when Thanksgiving is now past, I want to ask a question. How many of you married, partnered, or have dated people whose families have different Thanksgiving traditions from your own? A ham instead of a turkey or perhaps lasagna? Vegetarian? Pickled watermelon? Stuffing vs. dressing in or outside of the turkey? Should Thanksgiving “dinner” be at lunchtime, midafternoon, or during the normal supper hour at night? Compromise and learning is a big part of being married. Amen? Aside from thanksgiving, this can also happen with music taste. While I am sort of a bluegrass guy, my husband is very much a fan of something called Electronic Dance Music or EDM. This is not a kind of music I have ever had a lot of tolerance for, but it matters a lot to him, so he will come with me to bluegrass concerts and folk music events… and I will go with him to his concerts. I do have a secret weapon though—these are earplugs [show congregation bag of earplugs used for concerts], because I need to hear you for my profession…even if I don’t always want to. Aside from learning to appreciate a genre outside of my comfort zone, I have also learned something else. My generation has a lot of heart but not a lot of patience for BS! We are good, naturally connected to one another in some obstinate quiet hope. I have witnessed at Red Rocks 1000’s of young adults my age, many your doctors and lawyers and ministers (or soon will be), singing together. The lyrics are often about life, love, meaning, and even heaven. “Don’t forget about a thing called love.” “In your love I’ve built a home.” “We are all we need.” "On my way to heaven.”[2] Like a spy in enemy territory who learns to love, I have witnessed that we in the church are trying to ignore what has happened for too long—cultural surgery of heart and soul, soul and mind, body and essence. We have forgotten, especially in the UCC, the language of praise in the midst of our lament for a world and a realm that we can’t control with even the best intellect. There is so much need for crying out together in joy and passion in this universe. Radiohead, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, Daft Punk, The Colorado Symphony Orchestra, The Grateful Dead, John Denver, U2, Metallica, Rodrigo y Gabriella, Above and Beyond, Pretty Lights, Brandi Carlile, X Ambassadors can be messengers of good and have all played Red Rocks over the years. I think that Red Rocks might be the cultic center of Colorado that Psalm 100 refers to—it binds this place together in ways the churches haven’t managed to do yet. But there is hope for the church yet to reclaim praise. I see evidence of it still: When you are at Presbyterian gathering (General Assembly, etc.) and someone comes marching in with bagpipes—the frozen chosen… melt… and are suddenly transformed into embodied praises of God’s goodness over the hills and valleys of Scottish embodied, collective memory. When you are at Plymouth on Easter morning and we get to the Halleluiah Chorus, we are all moved in the same way, choked-up, spirit-overcome that George the II of England was during its first performance when he was called to stand! At Worship 3.0 [Sunday evenings] at Plymouth when we sing with passion the songs of Iona or Taizé, releasing our worry and looking up to heaven and singing the Celtic and ancient repetitions. On this Christmas Eve, when we will sing in darkness… “Silent Night…[PAUSE] Holy Night [PAUSE]”—you know the feeling, right? We don’t need to imitate the Evangelicals (some of the best and most embodied worship praise I have ever experienced have been Episcopal services) and change anything about our worship service to get there—we just need to remember our mission statement and the intent of the hymns and the Psalms and the call to sing as if we are indeed alive. We should bring our car singing, poetry reading, improve workshop, beer garden, rock concerts, conversations selves… whole selves to worship. [Minister leaves pulpit and goes to the middle of the congregation asking everyone to please rise, as they are able and willing. Everyone stand looking to the middle, close eyes, singing together at full voice Amazing Grace verses 1, 2, and 3.] Now, that was Thanksgiving! Amen! [1] https://exploringchurchhistory.com/john-wesley-hymns-directions-singing/ [2] All of these are part of the Above and Beyond (http://www.aboveandbeyond.nu/about) label. Above and Beyond is a radio show and a collection of DJ’s in the EDM genre. All of this is new to me, and it is like learning a whole different language. AuthorThe Rev. Jake Miles Joseph ("just Jake"), Associate Minister, came to Plymouth in 2014 having served in the national setting of the UCC on the board of Justice & Witness Ministries, the Coalition for LGBT Concerns, and the Chairperson of the Council for Youth and Young Adult Ministries (CYYAM). Jake has a passion for ecumenical work and has worked in a wide variety of churches and traditions. Read more about him on our staff page.
On Thanksgiving Day, Jake preaches on John 6:25-35.
AuthorThe Rev. Jake Miles Joseph ("just Jake"), Associate Minister, came to Plymouth in 2014 having served in the national setting of the UCC on the board of Justice & Witness Ministries, the Coalition for LGBT Concerns, and the Chairperson of the Council for Youth and Young Adult Ministries (CYYAM). Jake has a passion for ecumenical work and has worked in a wide variety of churches and traditions. Read more about him on our staff page.
Revelation 7:9-17
All Saints Sunday Plymouth Congregational UCC, Fort Collins, CO The Rev. Jake Miles Joseph Will you pray with me? O God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations, the artwork, the expressionism of all of our hearts in response to your Word, this Totenfest morning, be good and pleasing to you and healing for your people. Amen. Last Sunday was Reformation Sunday when we celebrated the 500 years of the Reformation in the Church, so today it is proper and right for me to begin my sermon by quoting Martin Luther from his preface to a 1522 translation of the New Testament. In it he says of the Book of Revelation, “My spirit cannot accommodate itself to this book. For me this is reason enough not to think highly of it: Christ is neither taught nor known in it.”1 Martin Luther’s reaction to Revelation was not unique. Zwingli, another parent of the Reformation, also sternly rejected The Book of Revelation, although neither succeeded in removing it from the cannon. There is a reason for that. This is one of those complex texts, not a comforting or easy narrative, not a story or a letter, but a volatile and even dangerous one when misunderstood or misused, which it often is in our time. This is because it emerged from the School or Community of John, but many years after the death of the Apostles and Gospel writers. Rather, it is attributed to a later John—John the Divine. Isn’t that an awesome name! We can surmise from the context, language, and historical references that in response to persecution, death, and even hunger. It is, by every definition, an apocalypse. As such, it bears the weight, the burden, the pain, the anguish, and the torture in the face of oppression, fear, and loss. It was written as a tableau of grief in search of hope for a community and a people in pain. An apocalypse in Biblical literature is always a response to a Totenfest of sorts. Rather than reading the Revelation literally, for that is always a grave mistake with Biblical apocalyptic literature, we must hold it up to the light of paradigm, metaphor, and human experience… painted in words and story fragments. The Book of Revelation is the raw, pure, and complex experience of being human and facing death transformed into a non-linear story. Again, this book is a painting of grief and loss. Speaking of paintings, how many of you have ever been to a modern art museum? If you haven’t, Denver has one of the best with the Clyfford Still Museum—which I recommend. Still was an abstract expressionist artist rooted in philosophy that kept most of his work as one ensemble and offered it in its entirety to any city, upon his death, willing to build him an art museum. Guess what? Denver did it. This museum inspired my sermon. Today, in Biblical terms we are journeying into Scripture’s Museum of Modern Art. We are entering together into the literary space shared by John the Divine (author of The Book of Revelation) and the Bauhaus movement, abstract expressionism, modernism, surrealism, pointillism, and post-modern artwork. Saint John the Divine was the original abstract expressionist. When we encounter modern art, like encountering the apocalyptic literature, we must assume a couple of things: 1. Feelings and our responses matter 2. Pay attention to the metaphors, the colors, and the big picture rather than getting lost in the details—it is the composition that counts 3. It is in response to a world that is no longer explainable, relatable, and understandable with simple story. Abstract Expressionism emerged in the speechlessness and horror of a post World War II world, much like the communities who wrote Biblical apocalypse. Pictures of flowers and stories will no longer do. We again live in such a world where words and images have reached their limit of rational expression. I love this—I feel like I am teaching an art history class. Put simply in artistic terms: When encountering The Book of Revelation, think Jackson Pollock rather than Rembrandt. While the Gospels and the letters of Paul are images we easily can relate to with story and personalities we understand (love 'em or hate 'em), learning to love the Book of Revelation is much like learning to understand modern or abstract expressionist artwork. It is not to be taken literally but symbolically and artistically. Again, think of Jackson Pollock rather than Rembrandt. Think of Salvador Dali rather than Monet. Think of Clyfford Still or Mondrian rather than Michael Angelo. One of my professors, Dr. Carl Holladay, writes, “Counterbalancing [the] negative reactions [to it] is Revelation’s influence on the church through music and art. Some of the most memorable choruses from Handel’s Messiah are drawn from Revelation, even as it has inspired some of the most memorable works of visual art through the centuries…Its ‘Splendiferous [a great word… splendiferous] imagery’ captured the imagination of poets, artists, writers in every age and from every quarter. Any assessment of Revelation must account for this aesthetic dimension of the work and its lasting legacy.”2 When we read Revelation, we are called to respond with the creative side of our souls, which I know can push our limits as Congregationalists. When we read Revelation, we are allowed [given permission] to be artists dealing in the delicate space of grief, bereavement, loss, death, and finally the light of hope. So I am going to read the passage for today again [while emphasizing the colors and imagery that emerge for me in my reading], and I want you to pay attention to color, to metaphor, and to what makes your heart jump: words, colors, phrases, etc. I also invite you to close your eyes and visualize the painting of emotions that John the Divine is painting with words. Let us be artists: After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation [rainbow], from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches [green] in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” And all the angels stood around the throne [gold] and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, singing, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.” Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” I said to him, “Sir, you are the one that knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood [red] of the Lamb. For this reason they are before the throne [gold] of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun [yellow] will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water [clear blue] of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. What do you see? How do you feel? We have had the beauty of The Book of Revelation, its powerful imagery, and ability to bring peace taken away from us by those in the Christian faith who want to interpret it as a literal apocalypse of the future and use it to draw fear into their followers. Rather, I believe for today’s reader it is painting an abstract picture of what it means to face loss and death for each of us in our lives. It is a picture of all our daily deaths and mini apocalypses. Since there isn’t enough time to dig into all of the images, although I will point out the use of color in this passage for today, I want to draw you attention to just one image, one that I will point out is unique to the Book of Revelation, which might surprise us. So many of us, like Luther, say we dislike this book, but in it are some of the images we hold most dear in our faith and in healing ministry. This is an image that we know and see in popular Christianity, we have heard, but maybe we have not thought much about or located before in Scripture. Verse 17: “For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd and he will guide them to springs of the water of life and God will wipe away every tear from their eye.” And God will wipe away every tear from their eye. This imagery is unique to Revelation, and it is so important that it is repeated again in Revelation 21: 4, “‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” The word in Greek translated as “wipe away” is moreover only used to mean specifically “wipe away” in this way only two times in the whole Bible, and they are these two instances in Revelation. The Book of Revelation is unique in this motif and the intimate, kind, and lovingly familiar image of God here. This is gut-wrenchingly intimate. Have you ever wiped away someone’s tears while he or she is crying, weeping, or morning? [Gesture to face to imitate the wiping of tears.] I mean have you ever reached over with a tissue and actually wiped away a tear? Or have you ever had someone else wiping away a tear for you? This is something that maybe some of us have never experienced. This is God at God’s most intimate, familiar, gentle in a time of great mourning. Here, at the conclusion of the Bible, we have journeyed from the Book of Genesis with a God or collection of gods (depending on how you read Genesis) who punish and don’t want names known or said, to here… here… a God who wipes away tears from a multitude too large to count. What a journey it has been. Here at the conclusion of the cannon, while often misinterpreted as a book of violence and misread by Evangelicals as an instruction manual for the end of the world, really it is an abstraction on the theme of loss and hope: contrasts and colors. A God who wipes away tears is a God who is familiar with us. A God who reaches out with the comfort of touch is a God who knows and feels our pain. The tableau presented here in this abstract expressionist apocalypse is a complex image of life, death, pain and yes a glimmer of hope. We find ourselves on this Totenfest or Death Sunday at the end of the Biblical cannon, in the midst of a confusing and complex artistic interpretation of the pain and the fear of an ancient people in a time that could not be explained with a story or a narrative or a letter or a poem. Only one genre will do: abstract apocalypse. We are offered something unfamiliar: colors, imagery—raw emotions of a community in free-fall. Yet, despite all of that, God comes through the dizzying array of colors, themes, metaphors and similes… and smiles, reaches out for our faces and again wipes away our tears. I revel in being able to say this: Martin Luther was wrong, at least in this case. Today, only a week after Reformation Sunday, Martin Luther misses the point and the mark entirely. Revelation doesn’t point necessarily directly to Christ, but rather it paints pictures of the deepest struggles, fears, isolation, loss, mini apocalypses, and ongoing deaths and struggles we all face. Revelation paints a picture of grace and hope with color, with art, and with God’s hand reaching through the storms of the centuries past and yet to come to wipe a tear from the faces of God’s beloved one: you. We remember those we have lost (our saints) friends and beloved. We also today remember the little deaths we all face every day when we know we aren’t living the lives we thought we were promised. When work is unfulfilling or political. When a child you helped raise and love, perhaps a son or daughter, turns and says something hateful. When we face loneliness and isolation. What parts of you/ yourself are you mourning the death of? Whatever the answer to these questions, God emerges in a revelation of hope in the midst of darkness to wipe away every every every every tear. This is what I see for God’s people, for you, in the abstract expressionism of our reading for today from The Book of Revelation. 1 Carl R. Holladay, A Critical Introduction to the New Testament: Interpreting the Message and Meaning 2 Carl R. Holladay, A Critical Introduction to the New Testament: Interpreting the Message and Meaning AuthorThe Rev. Jake Miles Joseph ("just Jake"), Associate Minister, came to Plymouth in 2014 having served in the national setting of the UCC on the board of Justice & Witness Ministries, the Coalition for LGBT Concerns, and the Chairperson of the Council for Youth and Young Adult Ministries (CYYAM). Jake has a passion for ecumenical work and has worked in a wide variety of churches and traditions. Read more about him on our staff page.
The Rev. Jake Miles Joseph
Exodus 20: 1-4, 7-9, 12-20 October 8, 2017 at Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ Fort Collins, CO. Good morning Plymouth! Thank you this morning to our many volunteers who make worship possible: Sound, Deacons, Choir/Music, and our wonderful liturgists. While the minister preaches, these volunteers have the job of invoking the Holy Spirit through their work. Now, would you pray with me? O God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be good and pleasing to you, our guide, our teacher, and the ultimate mouse-catcher! Amen. Plymouth, I have something to confess to you as my employer this morning. Since I started working for this church as one of your ministers (three years ago November 1st), I have been hearing voices. Now, I know that sounds really bad coming from your minister. So, don’t get the wrong idea. I am not hearing God (at least not audibly), angels, or ghosts—this is the month leading into Halloween so one must be very careful about invoking such things. No, no…I am hearing voices because the way the minister office area over here is insulated, and the way the hallways are shaped and surfaced. Because of the architecture of this church, I can hear voices emanating from the conference room if the door is open, as far away as the front door and even the back of the sanctuary from sitting at my desk answering emails (which as Ron and Jane Anne will tell you is a significant part of working here—you all LOVE emails). Yes, Plymouth, if you are in this building, it is likely that your ministers can and do hear you. We hear all voices emanating from the walls and corridors. So I hear lots of voices from my office, and usually I politely ignore them unless addressed to me. A week ago, however, though I heard a voice down the hallway asking a rather odd question: Do you often have mice here at Plymouth? Never having seen a mouse at Plymouth, although the previous associate minister Sharon Benton did warn me about their existence, I ran out of my office to find both the mouse in question and my interim boss, The Rev. Ron Patterson, in a staring contest in a corner down the hallway. The mouse looked at Ron. Ron looked at the mouse. I looked at the mouse. Ron and the mouse looked back at me. What should we do? I have never had to catch a mouse before. Now mind you, this was a very small and incredibly adorable and reasonably terrified little baby mouse. It was about the size of your thumb from its head to end of its tale. Cowering in the corner, not running fast, Ron suggested it was probably dehydrated and lost. Friends, let me say the other time I have seen that look of fear and confusion on someone’s face is almost every Sunday when a new visitor arrives and doesn’t know anyone. So from now on when I do trainings about how to welcome people to church— just remember how scary a new church can be for human and mouse visitors alike. By the time I had finished zoning out and turning that last metaphor about first time visitors over in my head, Ron had created an actual plan. “Get a cup and a piece of paper,” Ron said, so I went running for a small clear glass cup and a piece of sturdy paper. I also grabbed a small manila folder for me to use as a temporary wall to assist the effort from the corralling side of things. Then we were off! As Barb and Daisy barricaded themselves in the front office, Ron chased the mouse with the cup as it took off down the hallway. I herded the mouse with the folder into another corner where Ron promptly dropped a glass over the mouse. [Produce an actual glass cup like the one we used and drop it down on the pulpit.] We had caught it! He then gently slid a piece of paper under the mouse to create a floor. Voila--we now had a mouse airplane! Imagine that mouse’s surprise as Ron lifted the mouse in the cup off the ground went swiftly out the door into the rain and safely deposited it by the far fence across the parking lot. The mouse had reached freedom and a state of liberation! And that, my friends, is how you catch a real, live, church mouse with a lot of care and teamwork. Today’s lectionary reading from Exodus, Chapter 20 is one of the passages in the Bible (and there are several) that deal with the Ten Commandments or what academics call the Decalogue. No, there isn’t a commandment telling us step-by-step how to catch a mouse (I wish there were), but often we feel like a lost mouse when we encounter these ancient texts and rules and try to navigate the complex passages of Scripture and our lives in community. The Ten Commandments are, in their basic form, the outline of community covenant that ideally would help us to navigate lives in which we often feel like lost mice. A lot of life is, after all, feeling like a lost mouse in God’s universe. This part of Exodus is a very ancient part of the Hebrew Bible. It is also a complex part (the scholarship surrounding Exodus from historians and accredited Biblical scholars is often rejected by our Evangelical sisters and brothers) because at closer look we can see the complexities of the text. The story of Moses bringing them down off of the mountains is important but so is the historical-critical scholarship. In the UCC, we take both the history and the narrative seriously. Exodus, and this version of the 10 Commandments in particular, incorporates and directly quotes very VERY ancient portions of a pre-Biblical fragments called the Code of Hammurapi from the Ancient Near Eastern Babylonian context that predates the rest of Exodus by several hundred to a thousand years and also a 1,000 years after the original version it incorporated later edits and revisions from the later Priestly period. The Ten Commandments, contrary to an anachronistic literal interpretation of the story, represent around 2,000 years of human history, covenant, legal code, and the necessary changes there within. [The Bible is most powerful when understood as communities wrestling with God.] In non-academic talk, Exodus is an ancient narrative that draws upon much earlier legal codes (pre-dating the Bible) and like all relevant and good law was revised and edited much later to meet the needs of the Priestly era communities. This shows that the Ten Commandments were like all good and practical laws and good understanding of cultural covenants meant to be contextual, updated, and relevant for the society they governed. The Ten Commandments were written based on older laws and the version we know today, scholarship shows comes from a redacted version from a later period. So what happened to this ancient understanding of law and Bible as something that needs to be reinterpreted anew in the contexts it meets? Where did that go? When did we get stuck in that mousetrap of interpretive death? When did we, as a country, then start using bad interpretation of Biblical law (seeing it as frozen in time) to interpret our Constitutional Law? Which is the cat and which is the mouse here in this interpretive choice? Vs. 4, “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the sea…” For the word of God in Scripture, for the word of God among us… for the word of God within us… friends… what have we done with the Ten Commandments in modern America? Politicians have turned them into an impractical, meaningless idol—a totem replacement for God’s good and dynamic presence. “If only we keep the old sculpture of the Ten Commandments in courtrooms,” says many rightwing politicians, “then we will surly have favor with God.” Even better, as long as we defend stone monuments to God, we don’t have to think about love of neighbor or what the monuments actually say or funding programs that support God’s people! Ironically, this is the definition of an idol (written on the very stone monuments they are defending to avoid)… a static representation of the will of God that ignores the realities of the needs and issues of the time. It denies a living God whose presence we experience and know and replaces God with stone scriptures of laws that were always meant to be reinterpreted for every new generation since they were taken from the Babylonians for the early drafts of the Talmud and revised by the Priestly governors. As a country, we have done the same thing, applied the same flawed written in stone logic with the Second Amendment—BUT we need to understand it for a new time and new issues and new technologies that were not here at the writing. The weapons and violence we saw this week means that we need to re-understand again the meaning of both Biblical and Constitutional law. This modern, anachronistic worship of the Ten Commandment—changing the commandments from living/ dynamic/ covenant relationship into a sculpture to be fought over is idolatrous. It is “Conservative” Blasphemy. Currying favor with political base, stoking hatred against minorities, ignoring starvation and housing issues, missing the point of God’s love but…BUT coming to the defense of a statue with old laws written on it instead of the defense of those in need, the poor, the abused, the LGBTQ minorities around the world, the desperate… is blasphemy and misses the point of the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments were created from a process of meeting the covenant needs of the communities that wrote and reexamined them and made them a useful covenant in society. I believe the mouse’s journey represents the different ways that we get stuck in our faith journeys and our relationship to church, to Scripture, and to law in general. Here are the three stages of catching a mouse as shorthand for how we move from fear and entrapment to freedom and Grace through covenants both with God and society:
Fear, Entrapment, Freedom—the different ways to relate to life, community, covenant, and the difficult parts of Scripture and relationships are all choices we make as people and society. We can run away from community, we can become too comfortable in clearly defined houses and rules, or we can join the world and learn to be free. The arc of the Biblical Narrative and the Life of Christ shows the way towards liberation, but first we have to let go of stone carvings of ancient laws and learn how to love freedom once again. And that, my friends, is how you catch… and release... a mouse. Amen. AuthorThe Rev. Jake Miles Joseph ("just Jake"), Associate Minister, came to Plymouth in 2014 having served in the national setting of the UCC on the board of Justice & Witness Ministries, the Coalition for LGBT Concerns, and the Chairperson of the Council for Youth and Young Adult Ministries (CYYAM). Jake has a passion for ecumenical work and has worked in a wide variety of churches and traditions. Read more about him on our staff page.
The Rev. Jake Miles Joseph
Plymouth Congregational Church, United Church of Christ Fort Collins, Colorado September 7, 2017 (Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost) Romans 13:8-13 [Silence from Pulpit looking out at the congregation.] Have you ever had the feeling [PAUSE] that there was so much (so much 2x) you MUST say to someone that you couldn’t even start to speak? Today is one of those days for me as a young pastor. There is so much to say this morning and so much need for sacred, indignant Christianity in the face of Empire. But there is also a need for comfort and God’s assurance that All Shall be Well again… eventually in God’s Realm of Love and God’s Providence/ God’s dream for us as co-inhabitants of this finite planet and finite, mortal lives. It appears to me, and many scholars, that the Apostle Paul, the author of this letter to the Christian community in Rome from the lectionary for today, was in a similar situation as a preacher. He had so many concerns and so little time to try to say it all to the communities he was leading. This means that Paul, in the midst of so much to say, sometimes contradicts himself, but today’s reading from Romans 13 seems to be Paul breaking free from systemic gridlock, confusion, logistics, and institutional minutia into a moment of absolute ethical clarity. We imagine Paul saying to himself, “Yes, this must be said to Rome, forget about disagreements about laws, antiquated and complicated and contradictory as they are. Rather, refocus on Love (agape).” Like Paul, today, let’s get back to the basics: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” All of the commandments, “are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to neighbor; therefore, love is fulfilling of the law.” As I humbly attempt to channel a bit of Paul’s predicament and also clarity from Romans this morning, I covet you for your prayers. Pray with me? May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be good and pleasing to you, O God, our Rock, Our Sustainer, and Our Dreamer. Amen. Hurricanes (plural) made of wind and rain and hurricanes of bad policy that puts old law before young people, protectionism before those who most need protection, a political base before the basic ethics of Christian faith. Bombs tested this week both in the arena of diplomacy and international relations with North Korea and in the middle of the living rooms, educations, and the personal lives of DACA/ Dreamer residents of this country— our neighbors. Where is God? Is God also on a golfing vacation somewhere in New Jersey? This is a question that the Romans and the other early Christian communities also probably ask themselves—well, except without the New Jersey part. Where is God? Verse 12 says, “the night is far gone, the day is near.” Paul is writing to a community of Christians he has never visited in person, and he is trying to share with them the dream of Christian hope, a law of love, and a sense of where God is in the midst of persecutions, hiding, and life threatening potential conflict. Because the letter to the Romans is written without much specific familiarity, it is Paul’s most comprehensive letter with the biggest vision for what Christianity is all about. Paul, like his contemporaries, saw his time, as some of us see our own here and now with conflict, persecutions, and global climate change, as apocalyptic in one form or another—a time of great change and crisis. Scholars agree that this chapter from Romans, while filled with a deep sense of love for neighbor (which means the whole world… all people... and not just a literal neighbor) is rooted in the genre of apocalyptic literature and a feeling of urgency, fear, and a sense of God’s Realm being the dawning of a new day...like tomorrow or now. So next time you hear this Romans passage being used in a wedding, I want you to chuckle to yourself and remember it is an apocalyptic text being used for that wedding! While the immediate reality around them was grim, the call of Christianity from this letter onward has been to be the Dreamers for a better world that goes beyond borders, nationalities, and politics. Christians are called to be dreamers for a world beyond violence, deportations, and cold hard expediency or literal law. This is what Augustine wrote in The City of God. Christ calls us to post-borders, citizens of God’s realm of Love, to be Dreamers and enactors of a world of Holy Love for all. “The night is far gone, the day is near.” “The night is far gone, the day is near.” We are, in many ways, on this Sunday of setbacks and contradictions, wars and rumors of wars, weapons of unimaginable destruction, and deportations (separating of families and friends in the name of law and order)…kindred Christians with Paul’s community in Rome. We feel the need for a new day. We are on the brink of something new. Paul is writing to and for us. Additionally, like Paul’s Christians, we know that after us Christianity will never be the same. What will be left of our legacy? Today, therefore, is the day to ask this question: What is the core, fundamental, back-to- basics dream of Christian faith? Let’s get back to basics. For Paul, the law doesn’t go away and still has value, but it is summarized first and foremost by a focus on striving to love and take care of one another. The dreamers we are called to be for God’s world of love are threatened by unholy temptations to turn inward! Vestiges of Theological Education, remnants of denominational infrastructure, and catastrophic shifts in institutional function and arrangements threaten to take all of our attention as Christians to save what was and has been rather than dream of what could be. Some want us to dream of yesterday of before everything went wrong; but that is nostalgia, not a dream. Nostalgia in national politics and in church culture doesn’t lead to love-in-action. Christianity is the faith of the dreamers for God’s realm of now and tomorrow not the faith of nostalgia for a past that never really was. To dream is what God does and it is something that comes for the future. When we release ourselves from the bonds of conflict and false prophets of nostalgia, and open ourselves up to love, then we are Christian Dreamers with God. Does being dreamers for a world of love mean that we are inactive or passive observers? Verse 11 and following: “Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep…the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us live honorably as in the day…not reveling and drunkenness, debauchery and licentiousness… NOT in quarreling and jealousy.” This week, veiled in confusing tweets and promises, those who were brought to the United States as children, raised as friends and patriots here, educated, invested, loved here as their home and country were told that they are no longer safe, no longer neighbors, no longer able to dream. You have heard of "un-friending," like on Facebook? [Ask for a show of hands.] This action is un-neighboring of 800,000 beloved and their families. DACA or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients, also known as dreamers, are the subject of Romans 13 today! You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep! As Christians, we also claim full solidarity with the dreamers being un-neighbored by policies of false nostalgia and false promises. As Christians, borders and political excuses don’t limit our ancient faith and ancestral calling. God’s dream is too big for that. You know what time it is! I am not going to leave you guessing today. God is a DACA recipient. God is a dreamer. Where is God? That is where God is—sleeping in a cold deportation center cell in Aurora. God doesn’t need more lawyers debating God’s intent. Love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no wrong to neighbor. God is the one in our midst who looks like a neighbor or a childhood arrival immigrant working for a better future in education, community, and hope. This is how we live honorably as in the day of love rather than in the night of quarreling and jealousy—we work for justice and hope for DACA recipients. Only by showing love of neighbor in real ways can we wake from sleep and live-into the dreamer status we are called to embrace… to become Christian Dreamers (ALL) as God intends for us. You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep! In responding to the needs of DACA recipients, supporting them in following their dreams, recognizing their contribution, and standing in solidarity in these days of uncertainty… we love our neighbor as ourselves. You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep! In giving to the victims of Harvey and Irma and by advocating for policies that will protect God’s beloved planet and people from further climate change and devastation… we love our neighbors as ourselves. You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep! In our prayers and voices advocating for diplomacy and de-escalation rather than war and destructions, bomb tests, and global anxiety. By advocating for peace for the planet, we love our neighbors as ourselves. You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep! It is time for love. It is time to be dreamers with the DACA Dreamers for a better world and a better tomorrow. It is time to dream a new world into bring. Yes, we are dreamers called by God as Christians to imagine a better world, but that doesn’t mean that we are asleep to the needs in our midst. We are dreamers— visionaries for a world rooted in love. Like Paul, we live in a changing and dangerous world that often seems apocalyptic. Often we get bogged down in politics and church nostalgia, but today we go back to basics… to love and to dream a dream for a new world. You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep! The dreaming has only just begun. Amen. AuthorThe Rev. Jake Miles Joseph ("just Jake"), Associate Minister, came to Plymouth in 2014 having served in the national setting of the UCC on the board of Justice & Witness Ministries, the Coalition for LGBT Concerns, and the Chairperson of the Council for Youth and Young Adult Ministries (CYYAM). Jake has a passion for ecumenical work and has worked in a wide variety of churches and traditions. Read more about him on our staff page.
The Rev. Jake Miles Joseph
Genesis 32: 22-31 Plymouth Congregational UCC, Fort Collins, Colorado August 6, 2017 Would you pray with me? Wrestling God, as we wrestle with your Word this morning, I pray that the humble words of my mouth and the inspired reflections of all of our collective hearts may be good to your sight… our Rock, our Wrestler, and our Redeemer. Amen. DING DING DING And now Plymouth Congregational Church and the many communities, authors, redactors and editors of the Book of Genesis present in association with the financial sponsorship of your ongoing pledging support and sanctioned by the Society of Biblical Literature and the United Church of Christ and supervised by the night skies of ancient times and the three judges marking the scoring for today’s contest: Biblical hermeneutics, form criticism, and ancient literature, and the referee and time keeper for this event is the moon and the sun. And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the main event of this morning! Let’s get ready to rumble with God!!! In the far corner, wearing the long robe and his brother Esau’s cloak of hair is the undisputed champion of crafty, sly, and creative human infighting. From the ancient land of the nomads comes this many time world sheep hearing champion. In previous fights he has come out on top through the use of manipulation and sneaky moves. Weighing 150 pounds. Ladies and Gentleman… the undisputed human champion of the world, please welcome the son of Isaac and Rebecca, grandson of Abraham himself … Jacob (Yacob)!! [Congregation cheers] In the other corner and really all corners…clothed in light and mystery… nobody has ever seen the face and lived to tell about it… creator of the planets, the earth, all living beings, undefeated, eternal, and all powerful… from the land of Heaven and the stars, the undisputed immortal, invisible champion of the universe and the cosmos and the space beyond imagination…the one… the only…please welcome… Elohim (The Name) God. [Congregation cheers] Now, we want a good, clean fight today… and we wish the best of luck to both contestants. Let’s get ready to rumble with God. And with that, the rumble, the ambush, the wresting or the greatest boxing match of all time and history began (and I don’t mean the famous fight between Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson, but the fight on a riverbank between God and Jacob from our lectionary today). This is the story of the greatest wrestling match or boxing contest of all time—one that continues within many of us to this very day. Let us hear the story of this epic fight/ wrestling match/ boxing contest again: 22 The same night he got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children (ufdah), and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. [Whenever you see a river crossing in the Bible it is an important literary trope (big neon sign) meaning narrative change… something brand new is on the other side of the river.] 23 He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. [So Jacob intentionally makes himself vulnerable. As the leader of his tribe, he has many companions to protect him and belongings to defend himself with, but he purposefully enters the night alone, on the side of the river, cut off from all that is safe. Students of theology learn that good church community and relationship with God comes from places of vulnerability/ authenticity NOT safety. Author Belden Lane calls this the solace of fierce landscapes where you are on the edge and forced to wrestle with God and with yourself. Likewise, Church and community is only real and meaningful when true and full venerability are present. So… Jacob makes himself utterly vulnerable…at risk]. 24 Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. [I think Genesis 32: 24 is the ultimate example of Biblical understatement. This leaves several key questions—1. Who threw the first punch? Who is the aggressor or initiator? Many scholars like to call this passage, “Ambush by God,” but I think that Jacob threw the first punch. When we fight with God, friends, sometimes it feels like God throws the first punch in the ring and other times… we pick a fight with God, don’t we? 25 When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. 26 Then he said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” 27 So he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” 28 Then the man[a] said, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel,[b] GOD FIGHTER for you have striven with God and with humans,[c] and have prevailed.” 29 Then Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your name.” [The reason that Jacob wants to know the adversaries’ name is because a name was thought to provide power over the individual. Knowing a name of a God could invoke its power. Jacob, ever crafty tries to obtain the name of God.] But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And there he blessed him. 30 So Jacob called the place Peniel,[d] saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.” [This is important because in the Ancient Near Eastern tradition of these early Hebrew texts, it was thought that you could not see the face of God and survive to tell the story.] 31 The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. God wrestlings on the rivers’ edge of change never leave us unscathed. Rather, we can come away from these boxing matches with the divine quite wounded but also deepened in faith, renamed, recreated, and blessed. Religion is no easy or safe sport. Now, that is what I call a boxing match of Biblical proportions—literally! Mike Tyson and Muhammad Ali have nothing on God and Jacob. This boxing match in our lectionary today raises no fewer than four essential theological revelations for us all to remember in our current time of many different river crossings:
So… Plymouth… friends… look at God, feel God’s wrestling tension with you (this religion thing is a tactile, contact sport)! It is not meant to be passive or calm. See God’s face shining with love and desire… and say, even in the hard times, the complex times, the times when you feel ambushed by politics, by spousal conflict, by relationships at work gone wrong, when your kids aren’t doing well, when your parents are ailing or dying… grab hold of God and cry out… “What is your name? What should I call myself now? What is my name, God, now that I am no longer a teacher or a professor or a daughter or a son or whatever other title or identity is passed? Say to God, “I will not let go unless you bless me on the bank of this river I KNOW I need to cross” I will not let go unless you bless me. I will not let go. I will not let go. I will not let go… This account of Jacob wresting with God on the riverbank is one of the most studied portions of the Hebrew Bible and someone with the name Jake coming from Jacob, although my legal name is really just Jake (thanks mom), this means a lot to me today on this one year anniversary of my ordination and installation as your associate minister, on my final Sunday leading worship with Jieun, as Hal leaves on Sabbatical, and as I start a new NGLI young minister program this week that will last for the next ten years. I have spent the last year wrestling with God around this new name I have been given “The Reverend” (reverendus)—a title that carries with it so much responsibility to you and to history meaning “a person to be revered/ and or feared.” That idea alone is a lot to own. A year ago today, you changed my name from Jake to The Reverend Jake Joseph. It was a river crossing, but it is a title I struggle with because how many people with this name that I now carry abused, injured, killed, or supervised/ passively observed the destruction of my LGBTQ ancestors, of women, of minorities, throughout the past 2,000 years? How many? The answer is countless. How many people with this name injured the planet, subjugated nations, killed or are killing gay people to this day in the name of Christ? I told a close friend early after my ordination that when people called me reverend… it was like being called the crypt keeper. Wrestling with God, I have found a way to claim this new name and to use the power and position it affords to flip the expectations and understanding of the meaning and the burden of “The Reverend” on its head. I have found my calling to be redefining, reclaiming, and renaming what The Reverend can mean for authenticity, vulnerability and God Wrestling. Plymouth, this reverend doesn’t have all of the answers, but I believe we are called to all wrestle with the names we are given, to not run from a fight with God, to make Christianity the contact sport with the Divine power in our lives once again… and for all of us to collectively wrestle…not run… but wrestle with Christianity in all of its messiness. Yes, as we stand with a light foothold on the shore of a new river, let us open-up to vulnerability, call God to a good wrestling match, and cry out: “I will not let go unless you bless me, God.” Plymouth, Fort Collins, Christians—LETS GET READY TO RUMBLE!!! Otherwise, why bother… Amen! AuthorThe Rev. Jake Miles Joseph ("just Jake"), Associate Minister, came to Plymouth in 2014 having served in the national setting of the UCC on the board of Justice & Witness Ministries, the Coalition for LGBT Concerns, and the Chairperson of the Council for Youth and Young Adult Ministries (CYYAM). Jake has a passion for ecumenical work and has worked in a wide variety of churches and traditions. Read more about him on our staff page.
All three ministers answer questions submitted the previous week, but which they have not seen in advance.
AuthorsRead about Sr. Minister Hal Chorpenning, and Associate Ministers Jane Anne Ferguson and Jake Miles Joseph here. |
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