Plymouth Congregational Church
Fort Collins, Colorado Lection: Psalm 46, "Easter, 1916" (Yeats) Trying to make sense of something that is senseless is not easy. You already know that I think. When someone we love dies, when our lives are turned upside down by something the doctor tells us, when the phone rings in the middle of the night or when a relationship breaks apart, we are left stunned and at a loss for words. That’s how I feel when I think about 9/11 and about much that has happened in our world and in this country since 9/11. It’s been twenty years, but for me it seems like yesterday. As a few of you know, Charnley and I were living in New York City on September 11, 2001. She was working for Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Research Hospital in Human Resources, and I was on the staff of Marble Collegiate Church on 5th Avenue. That day was election day and we voted at P.S. 116 on our block and left one another on the corner of 33rd Street and 3rd Avenue at around 9:00 a.m. She headed north to her office, and I headed cross town to the church at 5th Avenue and 29th Street. What neither of us knew at that moment, was that an airplane had struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. and that another plane had flown into the South Tower at 9:03 a.m. When I reached Park Avenue South and 32nd Street, people were looking downtown at a large cloud of smoke. A man with a cell phone said that he thought a small sightseeing plane had hit the World Trade Center. By the time I reached my office, traffic was beginning to stop, and the street was full of people pointing and crying. We hooked up a T.V in the lobby of our office building and for a time just wandered around in shock. I walked over to Sixth Avenue where you could look downtown directly at the Twin Towers. I was there when the South Tower fell, but it was hard to tell what was happening because of the smoke. When word rippled through the crowd, people reacted with shock and anger and tears. People hugged total strangers. Meanwhile, Charnley’s office closed, and she went back to our apartment with a consultant who had just arrived in the city by train and a young girl from her staff who lived outside of the city and was terrified and had nowhere to go. They turned on the T.V. and heard that blood was needed at the hospital two blocks from our apartment, so they headed over there to give blood. After a short time standing on line, they were turned away because the hospital had figured out by that point that they were probably not going to need blood. Outside of the Emergency room on the street, dozens of doctors and nurses stood waiting with wheelchairs and stretchers for the injured who never came. One of the saddest truths of that day was that almost no one made it to the hospital. People either escaped or they died. By the time the north tower collapsed, we had organized ourselves at the church to do what we could. We began to list the people we knew might be working in the Twin Towers. We opened the Fifth Avenue doors, we set up land-line phones that people could use, we put together a prayer service for noon and set up a table to give people water. We put on our robes and stood outside in the crowd milling around on the street just talking to people. The next eight hours are a blur and the next few days are a bigger blur, but by noon, people covered with dust from the building’s collapse began straggling up Fifth Avenue walking home. Many of them stopped to talk. Many of them went into the church just to rest and pray or use the facilities or to make a phone call since nobody’s cell phone was working at that point. And that’s what we did for the next several days, we listened, we tried to give comfort, we worshipped—we rang the bell and the sanctuary would fill beyond capacity with people anxious to sing together and pray, and we stood on the street just talking to people who needed to talk. Looking back from the perspective of twenty years I want to share a few observations. In the limited time I have, I can only scratch the surface, so these remarks come with an invitation for further conversation with any of you. Observation one: the human spirit is amazing and when evil runs into the human spirit—which is exactly what the people who hijacked those planes were up to, the human spirit may flounder for a time, but the human spirit comes through because the human spirit is really one with the Divine Spirit. That’s how I understand the fire fighters and other first responders who ran into those buildings. That’s how I make some sense of what happened that day and that’s how I understand and deeply appreciate the scientists and the first responders and all the medical people attempting to help during this time of Pandemic. When we trust one another and the facts, we are all capable of a lot more than we think. Observation two, when something bad happens, the worst part is the fear. I spent the first few hours after the attack working in the shadow of the Empire State Building. I found myself glancing up afraid that I might catch sight of another plane. Rumors abounded. A mosque in our neighborhood was excavating a basement, were they really planting bombs? Don’t ride the subways, there is an attack scheduled for Friday on the trains. Some of the same conspiracy theories born then are still festering in the dank ignorance that empowers the science deniers and fear mongers today. One of the biggest challenges in this life is to live by faith and not by fear and that is a decision we are called to make every single day of our lives. Fear is real and worry is fear’s best friend but living by fear is not living—living by faith is living. So many angel messengers appeared that day and in the following days with that message, that I became convinced that the Holy One was speaking. Observation three, it's OK to be angry—in fact when something like that happens, it is downright healthy to react with anger. There was plenty of anger, but since anger is what flew those planes and killed all those people to begin with, the anger we were feeling in response to the attack needed to become a pathway to healing and not an excuse to join the people who live their lives angry. Whole groups of people in this nation are living that way and that is tragic. Anger is either a dead end with the emphasis on the word ‘dead’ or a passage to the positive. Dare I suggest that being angry enough to do something loving is the way of Jesus? Observation four, and this relates to the one about anger: there is no future in revenge. I suggested a few days after 9/11 that we offer to send every young person in the Arab world to Harvard rather than seek revenge for what happened. That sounds crazy I know, but it’s hard for me to see what we as a nation achieved with our twenty-year wars that thank God might be ending. One recent study (Watson Institute, Brown University) revealed that these wars have cost $6.4 trillion dollars—a number beyond comprehension, but in simple terms around $20,000 for each person in this nation. And that is not counting the 800,000 human beings lost in the process, including so many of our beloved young people whose service and sacrifice is beyond measuring. I am not a foreign policy expert, and I am not a politician, but I do follow the Jesus who talked about the futility of revenge. Observation five, bad religion leads to bad politics and crazies are crazies no matter which religion they practice. When human beings confuse their ideas about God and what they believe God might want them to do, with God or when human beings justify what they want to do anyway by appealing to their understanding of religion, you can almost guarantee that the religion being practiced has very little to do with the transcendent reality that is glimpsed from time to time on the far side of our human experience. God is not what is in the book whether that book is the Bible or the Quran or Vedic scripture. God is love and where love abides God resides, God is forgiveness, and when we forgive and find a way to give, God is hovering near. God is present when humans embrace one another across borders and find ways to break down walls that separate or differentiate based on race, ethnicity, or orientation. If pride or patriotism drives love out the door and creates enemies to enhance identity or to preserve privilege, then the amazing ability of the human ego to justify its behavior takes over and people are bound to get hurt and God will once again be found weeping on a pile of smoking rubble left behind by the next act of human idiocy or idolatry. Observation six, when you find yourself caught up in something overwhelming, do something human and whatever you do it will multiply. Two stories. Shortly after we got started talking to people on the street, a member of the congregation in her late eighties showed up to help. She just showed up. The water table was her idea. We did that every year in June for the Fifth Avenue Pride Parade, because that’s what Jesus said to do with thirsty people. And so following her lead we began offering ice water on that hot day and pretty soon, people trudging up Fifth Avenue covered with ash from the falling buildings and many people who needed to be with others joined in to help. Total strangers were helping her hand out water. It wasn’t heroic, it was tiny compared to what others were doing at Ground Zero, but it was the love of Jesus. That’s one story and here’s another. Most of us on the staff of the church and many of our members were customers at a tiny drug store on 29th Street just off Madison. The pharmacist was a devout Moslem. At our first staff meeting after the disaster, one of the administrative assistants brought up our pharmacist and ask for prayers of understanding in our community. She then decided that it would be her mission to stop by his store everyday to assure him of her friendship. Many of us joined her. It wasn’t dramatic, it wasn’t heroic—it was just the love of Jesus. In the next few days, leading up to the 20th Anniversary of 9/11 on Saturday, I hope you will take some time to remember the people who lost their lives on 9/11 and the people who have died since because of the hate that burned on that day. May our mourning and our remembering bring meaning to our living and to our loving. That’s the way of Jesus. Amen.
0 Comments
Rev. Dr. Ronald Patterson
Plymouth Congregational UCC Fort Collins, CO I Kings 8:1,6,10-11, 22-30, 41-43 Several weeks ago, on my first Sunday with you, I had one of those moments. I had the sense that I was suddenly in what the saints call a thin place. That Sunday was the first time I had been in a meeting house for worship in over a year. It moved me to tears because I had not realized how desperately needed and deeply missed communal worship had been. To sing my faith with others, to listen to a group of people who are happy to see one another, to hear the words of the Bible in a community on a shared journey had been absent from my life since a year ago March. It was understandable and necessary, and zoom and live stream were soul savers, but it just was not the same. Zoom is sort of like eating an ear of sweet corn or a half-ripe tomato shipped up from Florida in January. And I have heard similar thoughts expressed by others around the country as congregations bolstered by the vaccinated; gather, as those who understand that loving Jesus, means loving your neighbor enough to be vaccinated, or to wear a mask, as they too begin taking baby steps toward gradual reopening. We aren’t there yet. We are still taking precautions, listening to experts, and attempting to use the best information available. Given the Delta variant, this whole business is not easy. We are not out of the woods yet. But as people of faith, we know that we are on a journey and as St. John Lennon said, “Everything will be okay in the end, and if it’s not okay it’s not the end." This congregation has wisely prepared for this gradual reopening, and I am really impressed that your leaders have embraced possibility with the new lighting on the way and the new cameras so that what we do here can be multiplied through media to enlarge our faith family and leave no one behind. We don’t know what might come next, but what you have done makes what might be less challenging. So let me say: “Thank you!” Let’s start with a question: Do any of you collect things? Stamps? Beer cans? Barbie dolls? I collect church buildings and other places of worship. When we travel, I visit churches. I visit old churches, unusual churches, historic churches, and new churches. I visit great cathedrals or adobe mission buildings or churches with the simple colonial lines of a New England meeting house. And for some reason, I usually remember any church I visit or even pass by and often, when I am driving, I navigate by churches—once I’ve seen a particular church building, I just don’t forget it. Over the years, a few of the people I have traveled with, including my beloved, have grown tired of this fixation. I tour an old city from steeple to steeple. Years ago, traveling with four college friends touring Rome from church to church to church, they figured out what I was up to and the whole group rebelled and took my map away. They had had enough while I was just getting started. On another trip I learned that the great gothic cathedral in Cologne, Germany is surrounded by a dozen large Romanesque Churches, and I became obsessed with visiting all twelve. If I had a bumper sticker on my backside it might say: “Edifice Obsessed” or “This Vehicle Stops at All Houses of Worship.” Now before you think that this is a sermon about my personal neurosis, let’s engage the text. Today we heard another piece written by the anonymous Hebrew storyteller who’s book we name I Kings. We heard the story of the dedication of the first fixed non-movable worship space in our religious tradition—the Temple in Jerusalem built by King Solomon. And it is an interesting story, full of things to consider. Let me point out a few. According to this story, the priests cook up a grand celebration for the dedication of the temple. They bring the Ark of the Covenant into the Holy of Holies in the new Temple—and according to their tradition God is present in the Ark of the Covenant. But at the very moment in this big celebration when they manage to localize God, just when they imagine that they have tamed God so that they will know where to find God and where to come to seek the presence of God, God makes a U-turn. God fills the temple with a cloud and drives the priests right out of the temple. In other words, God says: look, I don’t care how wonderful your building is, I don’t care how much time it took you to build it, I don’t care how magnificent it is, I am more wonderful still and I am not contained within any shrine you might build for me no matter how beautiful that shrine might be. Lesson one: like Solomon’s temple, this place is a house dedicated to God, but God does not live here. God is here when we are here. And God travels from this place to wherever our journey might lead us. God is the one who walks the lonesome valley and takes us by the hand when the shadow of death comes calling. God is here when we are here, because you and I bear the image of God and Jesus said that when ever two or three of us gather in one place (whether on zoom or through the live stream which some of you are watching), God is there with us and we are not alone. This place is holy not because it is beautiful, it is holy because you and I are holy—the very children of God’s love and holy is as holy does—and being holy as God is holy is about loving others and making sure all God’s children have enough to eat and a warm, safe place to live. I think that most people would agree that this space is pleasing to the eye—the first time I visited here many years ago, I found this place beautiful in its simplicity—but its true beauty is the beauty of a community of people seeking to follow the way of Jesus who just happen to meet here. For example, God showed up here a week ago Saturday to meet some of you in the form of kitchen towels and kitchen gadgets and volunteers and students from around the world and that’s a fact—that was a genuine God sighting! I sometimes come into this space during the week alone and I love to do that—but I must remind myself that the thing which makes this a sanctuary—a holy place—is the gathered presence of the people of God whether they are physically here or present on the other side of that camera. It is beautiful because here we find the strength to go out into this community and into the wider world and find ways to let the Christ light shine. It is beautiful because we discover ways while we’re connected here to be neighbor to one another and to hold one another’s hands when the going gets rough. It is beautiful because in our gathering in person (or virtually), we are reminded that the true holy places are wherever we lift up our eyes to see the goodness and the beauty all around us in this world and beyond this world in the mystery of a universe still unfolding. Beauty is as beauty does, goodness is as goodness does. Lesson two, when God filled the temple with a cloud, it was a warning about idols—don’t worship idols—you know that, don’t localize God and whatever you do, don’t make some image of God and bow down before it. This is just basic Christianity 101, Judaism 101, and Islam 101. Moses said it, Jesus said it, Mohamed said it! Don’t ever get caught creating God in your own image or hemming God in with ideas that are too small or too local or that look too much like the backside of your own fears about the future. Don’t be seduced by conspiracy theories that are idols dressed up in ego-driven pseudoscientific costume. In my mind, that’s just the latest manifestation of the same old sin and there’s lots of it going around. I have noticed that some people seem to believe that God is a conservative Republican. Others imagine that God is a liberal Democrat. I have noticed as well that some folks confuse their politics or their way of life or their contrary attitude with the will of God and call it freedom and that others are convinced that “God Bless America,” means that the rest of the rest of the nation and world with other ideas can just take a long walk off a short pier. That’s idolatry. This text is a cautionary tale about religion or attitudes that create God in your image or mine because that is much more comfortable and comforting than the awesome deity who will not be built into a box or contained in my feeble brain or yours. This temple text teaches that opinions and behavior that are too small, too narrow, too certain, are the dirty dishwater approximation of the Holy that filled the Temple and taught through the voice of Jesus. This story is a reminder that when we are certain about where God is located, when we’re ready to confine God to one type of building or hang the deity as a graven image above one altar dedicated to a particular way of life or thought system, God moves. God moves inviting us to expand our understanding of the mystery of God’s love. Simply stated wherever love abides, God resides, and love knows no borders and God’s love is bigger than anybody’s politics or palaver. Lesson three, when it comes to God—when it comes to knowing God and following the way of Jesus, it is never about a place, it is about a relationship—our relationship with God, God’s relationship with us and our relationship with our neighbors and a place that makes relationships happen is a holy place. That is why we do what we do as a congregation. Do you remember what Jesus said when he was asked what we needed to do to become the inheritors of eternal life? He said that we are to love God with our whole heart, with our entire soul and with the totality of our mind and find a way to love one another with the same depth with which we have been loved. Solomon calls it steadfast love: the love that will never let us go; the love that will never abandon either us or this beautiful world. The apostle Paul calls it grace: the unconditional acceptance of each of us no matter how unacceptable we might believe ourselves to be. And so, here we are in this place, this place of beauty. And it is good, it is very good, but like that temple long ago—this beautiful place is not a destination. This place is a way station on the path that leads to life. Here we find renewal; here we are reminded of God’s love and mercy, here we can be recharged for the life journey, here we can meet a neighbor we need to love. Here we can work together, to accomplish great things, but here is not the destination. The journey is whatever comes next. Amen. AuthorFrom July 12 to October 3, 2021, the Rev. Ron Patterson is with us again, having served as a sabbatical interim four years ago, and then serving as our interim conference minister during The Rev. Sue Artt’s sabbatical. Ron retired as Senior Minister of Naples United Church of Christ in Florida. Ron and his wife have family here in Fort Collins: their daughter is a member of Plymouth, and their grandchildren are active in Sunday school. Pronouns: he/him. Rev. Dr. Ron Patterson Plymouth Congregational, UCC Fort Collins, CO I Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14 This morning I want to talk about dreams. I am not an interpreter of dreams, and I am not a psychologist or a mystic, but I am a dreamer and I believe with my whole heart that when I trust my dreams and listen to them, I am healthier and that when I ignore them and don’t pay attention to my dreams I am in a bad place. I believe that dreams are important for our emotional health and for our spiritual vitality and for our physical health as well. Several years ago, I began to fall asleep in meetings. Now I know that church meetings can be sleep inducing and that there is no end to jokes about people falling asleep in church, but I was really sleepy until one afternoon I actually fell asleep at a traffic light. I finally went to my doctor and I expected him to poke around and do some tests, and instead he asked me a simple question: “How are you sleeping?” and when I said to him, I get eight hours of sleep every night, he asked me: “Are you dreaming?” and it suddenly occurred to me that I had stopped dreaming, that instead of waking up and remembering for a short time sometimes complex and convoluted dreams, I hadn’t dreamt for months. He sent me for a sleep study that revealed severe sleep apnea and when that problem was solved, the dreams came back and I recovered my energy and my vitality and the sleepy’s went away. The Bible is full of dreams and dreamers. The lives of the patriarchs and matriarchs are driven by dreams. Dreams get Joseph of the coat of many colors in trouble, and dreams ultimately save him. The Wise Ones dream sends them home from Bethlehem by another route. Joseph the father of Jesus saves the savior by listening to his dreams. Herod, the wicked king is a man without dreams and he dies a terrible death because power without a dream or a vision is deadly. Haven’t we learned that the hard way in this country? Pharaoh, Job, Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar, Jacob, and many more are warned, guided and sustained by dreams. And then there’s those words spoken by Peter on the Day of Pentecost quoting the prophet Joel about the promise of the “kingdom” of God, about the time when justice and truth and peace will prevail on this good earth, the time when the old will dream dreams and the young ones will see visions. So today I want to talk about dreams and dreaming and my text is from the book of I Kings, the story of God coming to a very young King Solomon in a dream. Now in this this dream, God asks King Solomon what he wants. Well, what do kings or for that matter, most politicians normally want? They want long life or at least perpetual re-election and lots of power and lots of money. But this young King is not ordinary. He doesn’t ask for wealth or power or money—he asks instead for an understanding mind, he asks instead to know the difference between right and wrong, he asks instead for the presence of God to guild him in his life. And he gets his wish. Solomon receives from God an understanding mind. He receives from God the knowledge of good and evil. He receives from God a full measure of wisdom. And as a bonus, because from God’s point of view he asked for the right things, all the rest: long life, wealth and power were given as well. Now this is a great story and one I hope you will remember the next time you mark a ballot or listen to the yammering of a politician or a talking head. Now, let me talk just a bit about power of dreams. To begin with not everyone believes that dreams have any meaning. I do. As I said, I’m not a psychologist and I am certainly no psychiatrist. But those I’ve read disagree about dreams. Some of them say dreams are important and some of them say they aren’t. Some of them say that dreams are just random encounters with bits and fragments of the unconscious mind, totally without meaning. Others believe that dreams are much more meaningful. One of them, whose work I really admire has said that we do not sleep to rest, rather, we sleep to dream—that dreaming is the purpose of sleep and that emotional and spiritual health are not possible without a dream life. (C. G. Jung) That’s pretty close to my own belief about dreams—except that I would add one more layer to the idea that we sleep to dream. I not only believe that we sleep to dream, but that dreams are the gift of a loving God for the purpose of healing and wholeness and wellness. And that sometimes, in fact many times, God speaks to us in our dreams. And that listening to our dreams is one way you and I can listen to the voice of God. Did you ever have a dream that repeats over and over again? Let me tell you about a dream I have many Saturday nights. I dream that you are all here and that I arrive late at the church building just as you are singing the first hymn, sometimes I’ve had a flat tire or sometimes I get lost but when I finally get here, the doors are locked and I go all around the building trying to find a way to get into the church. But I can’t find the door or because you are singing, you can’t hear me knocking on the locked door once I do find it. Or sometimes I get locked in the bathroom and can’t get out as the service starts or sometimes I dream that I get up in the pulpit only to discover that I have forgotten to bring my sermon with me and I’m suddenly standing up here with nothing to say. I’ve even dreamed that I show up at the wrong time or in the wrong place. Now that is a preacher’s nightmare and dreams of that type are what are referred to as classic anxiety dreams. Do you remember a dream like that? Do you remember that dream from when you were in college and it was the last week in the semester and you suddenly discovered that you had forgotten to go to a particular class and that you were confronted with a final exam for which you had not prepared? Do you recall how relieved of stress you were when you woke up and found out that it wasn’t true? Or how about a dream when you are embarrassed in public—that you arrive someplace with no clothes on or the wrong clothes? Anxiety dreams like these are healing dreams. They heal us because they gather up whatever it is that worries us or troubles our hearts or makes us afraid and the dream maker—our own spirit under the inspiration of God’s love, I believe, lays out the very worst possibilities in life, reviews those possibilities, and causes us to live through them in our dreams. And while sometimes they are full of the most graphic detail and sometimes, they are terribly painful, we wake up relieved of the burden. I believe that when we lay down to sleep the one who keeps your soul and mine sends us dreams to deal with those things in our lives which trouble us and worry us most. The way I picture it, our anxiety dreams are like someone working the night shift on our behalf, first with a push broom and shovel, cleaning up the clutter of our harder days and dealing with the day’s worries, while helping us reduce our anxiety and our fears. And then when the mess is cleaned up that same still small voice of God the giver of dreams, can become a wise teacher and guild helping our unconscious mind to heal and to think new thoughts and consider new possibilities. Did you ever have a dream which helped you make a decision? Did you ever have a dream which gave you a new idea or a way forward in your life journey? Part of my nighttime routine is a ritual I call “giving it to God”. When I lay down at night, I gather up my worries and the things that might be keeping me awake, or the things I am working on and all my prayer concerns and mentally put them in a little bundle and lay them up on the head board. Then I say to God—would you work on these things tonight so I can get some rest? And the blessing for me is that so many times, some of those concerns or some of the things I am working on get taken up in my dreams and new ideas and ways of looking at my present reality emerge. And that is a gift from God the giver of dreams. Am I allowed to talk about Christmas at an outdoor service in the middle of August? My favorite Christmas story—aside from the Christmas story with Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus is the one written by Charles Dickens. Dreams moved the action of the first Christmas story, but do you remember the role that dreams played in the Dickens classic? In each of Ebenezer Scrooge’s dreams his uneasy conscience took his personal pain, his smallness of mind, his greed and his secret regret over his shriveled heart, and held those broken places up to the searching light of God’s love in ways that would have been a daytime impossibility. Dreams converted Scrooge. Dreams converted him from death to life, from darkness to light, from despair to hope, from misery to love. He was saved in the night kitchen of his dreams. Now, I’ve only touched the surface of this whole subject of dreams, but one last thing: There is no record that Jesus ever dreamed. The gospel writers and Paul are completely silent about his dream life. But let me suggest that dreams heal our past and open the way to the future. Dreams take our pain and open the path of possibility. Dreams clean up what is old about yesterday and enable us to face tomorrow. That’s exactly who Jesus was. That defines exactly what Jesus does. He looks at this world as it is and invites you and me to embrace what might be. He looks at hate and invites us to love. He stares fear in the face and invites you and me to hope and confidence. He confronts our fear of death with the power and the promise of abundant life. He was and is quite simply a dreamer inviting all of us to embrace his dream. In our waking, in our dreaming, Lord may that become the truth about our lives! Amen. This service was held outdoors at Rolland Moore Park, so there is no recording.
Rev. Dr. Ron Patterson
Plymouth Congregational Church Fort Collins, CO Psalm 23 Charnley and I are happy to be back with you again! This congregation and this community have become our second home. Hal, Jane Anne and Mark along with your leaders have extended a wonderful welcome in the last few days. I would be less than honest though if I did not confess, that while I have come to love this congregation and its ministry to the Fort Collins community, my deeper motivation for accepting this three-month bridge assignment has lots to do with our two grandchildren, Heath and Quinn, and the opportunity to spend some extra time with them. Besides, accepting this job enabled me to score one of those coveted Plymouth parking stickers for the back of our car. We left home in Tacoma last Friday the 9th and arrived here last Sunday. I spent Monday learning about your computer system and something called Slack, which is a fascinating name for a system that enables continuous communication between your staff and maybe continuous work? As a recovering workaholic struggling with retirement, Slack is such an enticing temptation! Just think of the possibilities---something that sounds like rest—slacking off, gifting me with the possibility of continuous engagement! I had been in the office about an hour, being tutored by your amazing Communications Coordinator, Anna Broskie, when Hal and Jane Anne invited me out to lunch. Of course, I accepted and learned over lunch that they wanted me to preach today; and since it was my first day on the job, I really couldn’t refuse. After lunch, I went back to my study and read the lectionary passages for this Sunday and one of them was the Shepherd Psalm. Chances are about 80% of you could recite these words from memory and even people who have never cracked open a Bible find them familiar. They are words of comfort and hope. They are words of promise and what they promise is the eternal presence of the loving God watching with us on the journey of life. One of the things this life journey has taught me is that we don’t get to choose the valleys through which we may have to journey—that it’s “valley now or valley later,” valley of the shadow of death or despair or depression or fear, or tragedy, but that the promise of the presence of the shepherd does not fail. This morning I want to share a few thoughts with you that came to me as we were driving through rural Oregon, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. Thoughts I found myself pondering as I saw signs of political discontent and anger about last year’s election as we traveled from one blue island in Washington to another in Colorado through a sea of hot red. I want to think with you about tolerance and take as my text the shepherd Psalm. As I looked at the Psalm this time, I noticed something that I had not noticed before. I knew that it is full of spiritual truth. I knew that it is a compact comforter ready to read or remember when life’s bumps and bruises challenge or threaten to overwhelm. I’ve read it beside hospital beds, at gravesides and remembered its words when I couldn’t seem to remember anything else. I’ve never met a person who failed to understand its power, but this time I noticed something more. Woven into the fabric of this little poem, are gentleness and kindness and acceptance. Lovingly, these simple words about the Good Shepherd invite us to a different way of living with the people around us. They invite us to travel the way of tolerance in what often these days seems to be a journey surrounded by growing intolerance. What I hear in these words is something that seems to be sadly lacking in the screaming voices standing on street corners or packing guns in public places or writing political commentary or expressing religious ideas here and around the world. You don’t have to go very far to meet people who figure that you and I are going to hell because we welcome everybody. You don’t have to travel too far to meet others who reckon that because we speak up for reproductive freedom or say that black lives matter we are not really Christians or that because we try to take the Bible seriously and not literally, we are not true followers of the way of Jesus. It fills me with fear that some people believe that there is only one way to understand what God wants us to understand about life and love and who to love and the future. And worst of all, is dressing hate up as a cross between patriotism and ignorance and calling it Christianity and then deluding people by suggesting that one set of political ideas is the only set which bears the stamp of divine approval and that any preacher or any politician can tell you exactly what that is. What I see when I read the shepherd Psalm is nothing like any of that, but what I hear when I listen to so many people and even sometimes when I listen to myself when I am overtaken by fear or frustration at others’ ideas or actions… is something a whole lot different. What I see and what I hear is regrettably the idea that if I am right you must be wrong and that if you are correct, then I must be wrong and that the rightness or the wrongness of my perception or your perception throws up a wall between us that cannot be breached and that if it is, then you are a winner and I am loser or the other way round. Some time ago, I ran across an article that talked about silo thinking. Silo thinking. That right now in this nation and in the world, many people only listen to the people with whom they agree—that like those hard concrete silos where farmers store things—too many of us are living in intellectual, spiritual and political isolation, separated from one another. I spent time on a farm as a child and we had a silo—you know what that is—it’s one of those beautiful big round, tall structures that dot the rural landscape. Each summer, we filled the silo with either chopped hay or chopped corn and then it fermented and the cows loved it—I think it was sort of like herd keg party—but the silo was dangerous, and sometimes farmers died—because sometimes those hard concrete walls held not only the crops, but dangerous gas that could kill. Well, that is the danger of silo thinking, because it clouds the mind and the heart with the deadly temptation to deny the image of God in another person or to see another one of God’s children as an enemy to be vilified and defeated. To get ahead of myself for a second, let me just say that the image of God setting a table in the presence of our enemies turns that idea upside down, and that’s about tolerance and acceptance and having an open heart and an open mind. Hold that thought, please for a moment. A few years ago, I attempted to rewrite the Shepherd Psalm to fit some of the intolerance and silo thinking I heard floating around in my own head and heart and in the community where I was and around this nation and around the world. And please forgive me, I am not a poet and I am not a Psalmist, but I am someone who is troubled by the creeping intolerance that seems to be festering in all sorts of places. Particularly in places where according to the love of Jesus it does not belong. Listen now to words which stuff the shepherd Psalm into a silo of intolerance: God is the ruler who gives me what I want. I own the pasture because I obey God’s rules. I drown out the water’s gentle sound with the self-righteous roar of my ideas. God is on my side, I have the exact words to prove it. You better watch out since you’re in the dark and I’m not. So I will beat you on the head with the rod of my belief. And if you come to the table at all, it will be on my terms. But if you don’t agree with me, you’re the enemy. You don’t belong. My cup is full because I earned it, and God’s with me right where I am, but surely not where you are. Now that’s somewhat silly and somewhat overstated and those words are negative and those words are not hopeful and those are not the words I want you to leave here this morning remembering. I want you to remember instead that when you and I say that God is our shepherd that does not mean that God loves any of God’s other children one little bit less. I want you to leave here with the idea that there is no fence around the green pasture and that the still water of a heart at peace with itself and God’s unconditional love, flows for every single person who seeks it. If you or I limit the love of God, then we have denied the essential nature of God as the ground of unlimited possibility. The God who spoke through Jesus, will not be enclosed in any silo of the mind or political reality human beings can design to fool themselves into feeling secure in its bounds. And when a politician or a religious leader plays with the fear we have about the future or about our security, by building silos that separate us from God’s other children, then they have denied the essential truth the Good Shepherd calls us to live. A church or a nation built on a foundation of fear and intolerance might succeed for a time, but the arc of history and eternal truth always tends toward love. I want us to live our lives understanding that when the Psalmist talks about restoring our souls, that soul restoration is a lifelong process and that judging where any other child of God is in that process, just delays our own journey. I want us all to remember that just because we think we’re right about something others do not by definition, by politics or by theology have to be wrong. I want us to remember that even a stopped clock is correct twice-a-day. I want us to hold to the center of our hearts the memory that even if we are wrong or others are wrong, we are still called to love ourselves and love them too. I want us to remember that life is a journey and that God is still speaking and acting on that journey and calling us to work for justice. I want us to know with every once of our being that we are loved by God but that God’s love for us does not mean others who worship in different languages or in ways that seem odd to us are worshiping a different God. If it’s just my dark valley that is covered and if the staff and the rod of God’s love just heal the problems of people who look like me or act like me or think like me—then I must have the Holy One mixed up in my mind with a cheap little god who is a whole lot smaller than the whole universe and who is created in my image rather than the other way round. That’s not the God revealed by the person who sang this Psalm the first time and that is not what Jesus was trying to say either. The table at which we are invited to sit and be welcomed, is larger than my idea of just how big it is. The goodness is better and the mercy is fuller and there are more days there than I have to worry about, because the house of God’s love is infinitely large and extravagantly welcoming to all. Now, that’s how I read the shepherd psalm and that’s why I know the Shepherd is good! Amen. AuthorFrom July 12 to October 3, 2021, the Rev. Ron Patterson is with us again, having served as a sabbatical interim four years ago, and then serving as our interim conference minister during The Rev. Sue Artt’s sabbatical. Ron retired as Senior Minister of Naples United Church of Christ in Florida. Ron and his wife have family here in Fort Collins: their daughter is a member of Plymouth, and their grandchildren are active in Sunday school. Pronouns: he/him.
Reformation Sunday
October 29, 2017 Rev. Dr. Ron Patterson Matthew 22:34-46 Let me begin with a true story. Several years ago I arrived late to the annual Christmas Bazaar at my church in Naples, Florida. Most years, as the Senior Minister, I was there at the opening of the Bazaar and would spend the entire day wandering the various rooms welcoming our guests and encouraging our volunteers. In that congregation the Christmas Bazaar was a big deal because the proceeds benefited the homeless and the hungry and our neighbors. Their goal was to raise over $30,000 and with creative crafts, baked goods, art, food and a lot more, they usually managed that much or more. Well that year, I arrived about an hour before closing time because of an out of town meeting. I managed to greet and thank most of the volunteers before ending up in the hall where a few of the men in the congregation set up their Trash and Treasure booth. When I walked in, the men who had spent the day on their feet were sitting in the corner of a room with mostly empty tables of the picked over remnants of mainly trash with few noticeable treasures on offer, but I browsed anyway. On one table I noticed a few pair of old binoculars, one clearly broken and another in a worn leather case. I opened the case and took out a small but surprisingly heavy pair of binoculars. I looked at the label and noted that they were Leitz binoculars made in Germany. I called back to the men and wondered if they minded if I took the binoculars outside for a look. They didn’t care so I did, and as I focused them on a palm tree across the parking lot, I squealed with delight. I took them back inside and asked how much they were. Without leaving his seat, the man in charge said: “Five bucks,” and went back to his conversation. I took my new birding glasses home that night and discovered that the same binoculars list on EBay for over a thousand dollars and are described as ‘probably the finest small binoculars ever made.” I treasure them and use them all the time. These are my $5 miracle binoculars. (Hold them up) Now, I tell that story today, because I think it’s a parable about my personal faith and our faith tradition. Today we commemorate the 500th anniversary of the beginning of one part of the Protestant Reformation. We remember that in Wittenberg, Germany, in 1517, an obscure monk nailed 95 debating points to a church door. It was an invitation to a theological conversation from the learned to the learned. It was written in Latin. Most of the 95 thesis would mystify and confuse us today because they mainly concern who forgives whom for what, when, and how. But Luther opened a door and surprised himself by starting a revolution. When translated and multiplied by the new at the time printing press, his ideas mushroomed and upset the careful religious consensus that had dominated Western Europe for 500 years. His words helped people see a new relationship with God. Like my wonderful German binoculars discovered in the trash, binoculars that help me see the wonder around, Luther found treasure in what was old and tired in the medieval world view and began a Reformation of faith and practice that has defined and shaped everything that has happened to Christianity in the last five hundred years. Within his lifetime, other Reformers like Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin and dozens more, redefined the Christian faith in ways that still touch our lives today. Let me add a footnote here: The United Church of Christ is I believe, the single Protestant denomination that carries in its DNA all of the major strands of the Protestant Reformation, we are a bit Lutheran, we are a bit Calvinist, we are a little Zwinglian as well. We carry a strain of the English Reformation in our history and we are also a little bit Anabaptist in our Christian Church heritage. I tell you that as an invitation to learn more of this interesting history in your own reading, but this is a sermon and not a lecture, so I have some other ideas to share. Back to the binoculars! They are old, they were rescued from the trash, but they are only worth what they permit me to see and understand about my world and my life journey now and in the future. So here goes. One of the ideas born in the Protestant reformation, an idea that our UCC tradition holds close and cherishes, is the idea that part of being a reformed Christian is to be continually reforming. That’s where all that UCC talk about “God is still speaking” and “there is yet more light and truth to break forth from God’s holy word’ comes from. (Pilgrim Pastor, John Robinson) We cherish the Bible and lots of traditional ideas, but for us, the Bible is a guide and not a dictator and tradition is a touch point, not a tether. A few years ago, a writer named Phyllis Tickle suggested the notion that every five hundred years or so, Christians need to hold a great garage sale and dump their worn out theological trash and embrace new ways of thinking about the treasure God gives in an attempt to see and experience what new things the Holy Spirit is doing in the world. And I love that idea because I know that God is a moving target calling us into the future. And while some people questioned Tickle’s theory of how history operates, I want to take her basic idea and offer a few suggestions for you to consider. What should we keep and what should we dump? What religious ideas should we cherish and what should we abandon? Luther and the other reformers, especially Calvin talked about the sovereignty of God. I think that’s a keeper because it prevents the rest of us from confusing our thoughts and our opinions and time bound cultural notions that often appear as racism, sexism, classism, and a dozen other isms with God and the image of God we bear. When a church tells people who to love or limits love with a litmus test that separates me from the rest of humanity by dogma or doctrine that mimics the prejudices of a particular leader; that’s surrendering the sovereignty of God to some inferior reality: preacher, priest or the bigot down the street. That is thinking that belongs on history’s trash heap! The reformers stressed the importance of faith over works. Luther’s life was transformed by the idea that you could not work your way into heaven, but that the promise of abundant life was a free gift of God’s love in Jesus Christ. That’s an idea worth living for because there is plenty of conditional love on offer in the religious world and when somebody talks about love with strings attached, that’s not love and that’s not what Jesus had to say. Unless grace is amazing, it’s not grace. Look at what Jesus said and look at how he lived and get rid of the barnacles the church has encrusted itself with over the last twenty centuries to protect its authority, often male authority. Live like Jesus, love like Jesus and jettison the rest. Distill the essence of tradition into the essential oil of a lived faith. That essence is covered quite beautifully in our scripture lesson for today—love God, love your neighbor and respect yourself enough to keep learning and growing. Don’t trust me, trust a community praying and talking and caring for one another. Luther called it the ‘priesthood of all believers’ and that’s an idea worth living. Five hundred years ago Protestants and Roman Catholics forced uniformity and conformity of thought in the territories they controlled. And in the process fought long wars and caused amazing suffering. Freedom of conscience was stifled by the fear of change. Fling out the fear and bring on the freedom. I don’t think it matters how you worship or what type of music that you happen to like. I’m a fan of simple but there’s nothing wrong with worship that isn’t simple, if it renews and nurtures our lives toward engagement on behalf of Jesus in a world that is hurting. Style is time bound, substance is timeless. Cherish the substance that empowers active love. In my mind there is no such thing as an individual Christian. People who talk about having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ are too often the same people who look the other way when it comes to loving others without condition. The whole notion of getting saved as some sort of test of Christian credibility is an American invention. Being born again may be a way to get elected in this country, but being born again daily with a humility that trusts God in all things and struggles to be a bit more loving day by day is an idea worth keeping. About a thousand years ago, St. Anselm of Canterbury, an Italian monk who later became the Archbishop of Canterbury put forth the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. This doctrine says in essence, that you and I crucified Christ by our willful sinfulness and that to satisfy an angry God for our sins, an innocent Jesus had to die as a substitute for the punishment we deserved. And on that one doctrine, I think, rests all the gloom and doom and guilt that have enveloped most of the western Christian tradition for the past 1,000 years. It is this doctrine, sometimes wrapped in contemporary music or marketed in prosperity gospel pulpits, that lurks just below the surface in conservative churches all over. You can hide it with seeker friendly music or upbeat preaching but it is still about guilt and shame and getting right with Jesus or God will get you! Now, you can force this idea out of the New Testament if you fish for it and many of us, first found one form of Jesus through guilt based preaching that scared us into a conversion experience—that happened to me, but I have changed my mind. I have come to believe that fear killed Jesus, that hate killed Jesus, that small- mindedness and greed and political power trying to hold on to privilege, killed Jesus. An empire killed Jesus and empires of political and religious power when they work together still try to kill Jesus today. Look at some of the so-called religious arguments that are made against health care or freedom of choice or human rights and look at how people of color and the poor and the oppressed are victimized. But Jesus will not stay dead despite the effort of lots of Christians attempt to keep him dead and safe in the past like grandma’s old Bible sitting unread on the coffee table. Jesus is alive and there is this universal life force called love, as in “God is love”, that was in Jesus and is in you and me and in the essence of the universe beyond all that we can understand and know, that moves through us to bring change and hope and the promise of abundant life. And when we sort that out and get thoughts like that going in our minds and souls, seeking in this faith family the presence of the God who’s still speaking, we will discover that like it or not, we become part of what the Holy Spirit is up to for the next 500 years. Happy 500th Reformed and Reforming Anniversary! Amen. AuthorThe Rev. Ron Patterson came to Plymouth as our interim for the fall of 2017 during the Rev. Hal Chorpenning’s 2017 sabbatical. Ron has served many churches from Ohio to New York City and Naples UCC in Florida, where he was the Senior Minister for many years before retiring. Ron’s daughter-in-law and grandchildren attend Plymouth.
October 15, 2017
Rev. Ron Patterson Philippians 4:1-9 This morning I think most of you know that I am supposed to talk about money. I think most of you know that we have this wonderful Board of Stewardship that does a great deal of planning and thinking and then sends out a letter and makes some phone calls and then asks the preacher on this Sunday to talk about money. And if you are a visitor this morning, you have wandered in here on the very day when this annual ritual of talking about money is supposed to happen. And I would be tempted to apologize to you visitors because I am tempted to believe that my talking about money might make you uncomfortable, but I know that you know that this beautiful building and this wonderful congregation and these preachers and this music program and what you may have heard about the mission of this congregation did not just happen here on Prospect Avenue by accident--that we were not just hatched from some cosmic egg or that somehow we all fell from the sky fully formed, we are here because for the last 100 years or so, someone talked about money and a lot of great people listened and God blessed and multiplied. For many years in other congregations, despite being asked to talk about money I have often made a game of explaining that I really don’t like to talk about money because I grew up in a family that even used a different tone of voice when they referred to money—they whispered the word in a rather shameful raspy voice. We had an aunt who had “money” and neighbors who had “money” and there were people in our church who had “money,” but we never talked about it unless the word “money” was mentioned in that tone of voice. A few years ago, I decided that I have this congenital disease known as “financiaphobia”—the fear that since “money” is supposed to be the root of all evil, if I talk about “money,” you will not like me because I might make you uncomfortable while I am making myself uncomfortable talking about “money.” And of course that is silly. And of course you already know that the church needs money and that the only way for that to happen is for all of us to do our part, by making an annual pledge and then doing as well in our giving as we are able. It’s called proportional giving—giving that reflects our blessings—some give lots and some give less, but all give proportionally. Many of us have discovered the miracle of tithing. Some of us set aside five or ten percent of our incomes each year to give to others through the church or through hundreds of other caring institutions. Some of us have figured out that the more we are able to give of ourselves, the more we have—not only in dollars, but in joy, because there is a real happiness to be had when we give our time and our dollars. A few of us even believe that the many good things happening around this place have something to do with the blessings our dollars and our volunteer efforts are having in places like Angola or with the dreamers. A lot of us have the idea that our family is a whole lot bigger than the faces on our refrigerators and that God wants us to see the whole world as family. But I think you know most of that. You know also that there are real expenses and real challenges. You know that there are mission partners locally and around the world who count on our caring as a congregation. You know that there is insurance and lighting and salaries and maintenance. You know that there is a carefully managed budget and hundreds and hundreds of volunteer hours that multiply our giving and touch this community in beautiful ways. You know all of that because you give with a beautiful generosity that has overflowed the budget the last several years in a row and you care and you are here and the last time I checked, you did not fall off a turnip truck or belong to that very tiny group of people who someone once described as “the takers”—you are the givers and the sharers and the thinkers and the carers and the ones who know that when good things happen it is because good people get together to make them happen and that you know; you already know. And you also know, or I believe that you know, that God gives first and God gives strength and God gives wisdom and when we give we are giving back and giving forward and investing a part of what we have been given because God first loved us. And so, while I may make a joke about not wanting to talk about money, or asking you to fill out your pledge card and turn it in today or next Sunday, the best thing is that I really don’t need to, because you already know. And so let me say something else that underlies the money talk that’s really faith talk and provides the foundation for what I believe we do in this place and in our lives. It might even be the foundation of civilization, because wherever people are not being civil to one another—wherever there is injustice or hate or bigotry or even war, this quality seems to be in short supply. Let me talk about giving as gratitude. There are lots of beautiful emotions. There are many positive attitudes of heart and mind that can build up a life and build a community and make our lives more meaningful and touch the world in positive ways, but I can think of none more powerful or more life changing or world impacting than simple gratitude. The medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart said once that if the only prayer you ever said in an entire lifetime was the single word “thank you” that would be enough. (Quoted in Spiritual Literacy by Brussat) Let me attempt a tongue twister: Gratitude as a life attitude is the foundation of happiness. Do you remember when Jesus said “Blessed are the poor in spirit”—those words simply translated could be: “How happy we are when we know that we can’t make it on our own and that we don’t have to.” I have noticed that happy people are grateful people. I have noticed that successful people are grateful people. I have noticed that people who spend their time rocking the boat are not grateful people. I have noticed that the ones who row the boat on any project or who get behind good ideas to make them happen are grateful people. I have noticed that if you look closely at anything that is growing, at its very center you will find gratitude. Gratitude is like sunshine and fertilizer in the garden. Gratitude is what makes the flowers grow and when that attitude is missing, nothing good grows. I once had a friend who said to me that if worrying was an Olympic event she would be a medal contender. Did you ever notice that worry is not a team sport? Jesus talked about his eternal presence wherever two or three of us were gathered together. Maybe another understanding of his words about the “poor in spirit” would be that true happiness is to know that no matter what, we’re in this thing called life together and that’s all about gratitude. Gratitude as a life attitude is the foundation of happiness. Let me try another tongue twister: Gratitude as a life attitude is the foundation of healthy relationship. Or as Jesus said it: love your neighbor, love your enemy, and love yourself. Some years ago a major study was undertaken to figure out if there was a way to predict whether a relationship would be successful or not; whether a marriage or a committed relationship would be long term. And they filmed and studied couples interacting with one another and they recorded what they said to one another early in their relationship and they followed them for years and years and years. And the strangest thing emerged. Maybe you read this report. The researchers discovered that the single biggest negative predictor was whether they rolled their eyes in one another’s presence. You know: (demonstrate an eye roll). Rolling the eyes was a sign that deep down, one or the other of them disrespected the other—was not grateful to the other, was not truly thankful for the person they were with---did not see the other as bearing the image of the Holy—that the other was not really worthy and the relationships failed on that basis. It was simply a failure of gratitude. And does that say anything to us about the family of nations on this good earth? Does that say anything about why it is so easy to trash-talk people who follow different religions or people who look different or think differently or are stuck in a political rut different than the one we’re stuck in? If I am grateful to God for you, if we are truly grateful for one another and for this amazing human family, then so much that leads to strife and disharmony and even war is placed in the light of God’s love. One of you said it so well: we can never make our own candle any brighter by attempting to blow out the candle of another. Gratitude as a life attitude is the foundation of healthy relationship. Here’s another tongue twister: Gratitude as a life attitude is the foundation of healing. Now I know that all of you have read about the correlation between stress and illness. People under stress get sicker quicker and stay sicker longer or so I have heard. Now I have to be very careful here. I am not a scientist and I am not that kind of doctor, but I do know that lots of illnesses are organic or just happen because these wonderful bodies of ours wear out or have genetic imperfections. Little bugs doing wicked things cause lots of illness, but a failure of gratitude is like offering those little critters a red carpet and an engraved invitation to take up residence; failing to be grateful feeds whatever ails us with its favorite food. Jesus was a healer because Jesus sought to put harmony in our hearts and peace in our minds. Stress causes distress and distress takes away our ease and when the ease is gone, the dis-ease takes its place. Gratitude, being thankful, thankful for others, for care givers and friends, for life and for this world is a way of throwing the entire power of the creator God into the battle with whatever it is that robs us of our ease. Gratitude as a life attitude is the foundation of healing. One last thing: Gratitude as a life attitude is the best hope we have for the future. I don’t have a crystal ball and I was absent the day they talked about prognostication in the seminary I attended so I missed out on that too. Please, I beg you, don’t ask me what the stock market is about to do or what tweet or trick might appear in the night, but I do know that if you and I understand our life journey as a pilgrimage of gratitude from God to God, hand in hand with God-giving as God gives, the future is taken care of. In the future that we might doubt or worry about, nothing that can hurt us or surprise us or offend us or confuse us, because we belong and are safe and loved and accepted, by the one who will never let us go. Gratitude as a life attitude is the best hope we have for the future. Now, this was supposed to be a sermon asking you for money, but it has degenerated into a discussion of gratitude. May I be so bold as to suggest, my beloved friends, that if you and I get the attitude of gratitude, the money around this place will take care of itself? Thank you, thank you all and thank God! Amen. AuthorThe Rev. Ron Patterson came to Plymouth as our interim for the fall of 2017 during the Rev. Hal Chorpenning’s 2017 sabbatical. Ron has served many churches from Ohio to New York City and Naples UCC in Florida, where he was the Senior Minister for many years before retiring. Ron’s daughter-in-law and grandchildren attend Plymouth.
October 1, 2017
Philippians 2:1-13 Rev. Ron Patterson This morning, as you heard, we begin our annual Stewardship campaign. This is when we are asked to support our congregation with our dollars and our dedication. I hope you know that Jesus spent more time talking about money and how we use it than any other topic. I need to confess right up front that I used to begin stewardship sermons with an apology, not wanting to offend anyone by talking about money, because in my family and in my mind that was a forbidden topic, private, secret, and off limits. But Jesus rescued me with his honesty and some good congregations nurtured me with their generosity and dedication and helped me forget my fear. And while I will be speaking again on this topic in a couple of weeks with more specifics, I want to use my sermon time today to tell you a story. My beloved always says that 'my little kid on the farm' stories are the best ones I tell, because unlike the other stories that help me make sense of life as a person of faith, the 'little kid on the farm' stories come from the time that molded how I look at the world as a child of God. The farm is gone, the people who touched my life then are gone, but the memories animate my day to day. When I was seven, I was sent to my great-grandparents dairy farm in rural Ohio to stay and for the next ten years, I spent every summer and almost every school vacation on that farm working and experiencing the rhythms of nature and the life cycle of a working farm with hogs and sheep and chickens and beef cattle and a raft of dairy cows and hay and corn and wheat and oats and gardens and canning and fields and woods and springs of cool clear water and endless chores and just plain hard work. That experience, more than school or college or seminary molded that place on the inside of my heart that I would describe as my soul. Today, I want to tell you the story of the miraculous peach tree. But to share this story, I need to give you a little farming background. When we made hay on the farm, the hay would be cut and then when it was dry, it would be raked together into windrows so that the hay bailer could pick it up and pack it into bails. This process normally took about three days and as a little kid, since I couldn't drive the tractor yet, I didn't have much to do with it, other than helping collect and stack the bails and bring them into the barn. But sometimes, just when the hay was about dry, there would come a sudden thunder storm and you just can't bail wet hay--and then would come a chore which I hated more than any other. It involved picking up a three tine hayfork and fluffing up the windrows of hay just enough to permit the breeze to blow in under the hay to dry it so that by afternoon it could be bailed. And I hated that job, because it was hot and it was dusty and it was in the sticky humid sun of an Ohio summer. And once in a while a snake or rabbit or a mouse would be hiding under the hay and as you walked along fluffing the hay they would jump out and for a little kid that was terrifying. And the job was endless in a way that things are often endless for a child. One summer on a miserable hot day I was alone doing this job way out around the hill from the barn, fluffing the windrow with my hayfork when I came to the end of the field. I was so hot and feeling totally sorry for myself and suddenly I looked up and there was a tiny tree growing in the fencerow that divided our farm from the neighbor’s woods. And as I looked, I noticed that something was growing on the tree. The tree was loaded with gigantic peaches--the size of small grapefruit, and they were ripe and they were wonderful and I ate a couple and each time I finished fluffing a windrow I stopped and ate another peach and I forgot about the heat and the snakes and the sun. That little tree became my best friend that afternoon and to this day they were the best peaches I have ever tasted. The next summer, when it came time to work that field again, I looked for that peach tree—and the first time that summer I managed to make it to the end of that field, I was cutting thistles along the edge of the field where corn was now growing. I looked and looked for the peach tree and finally found the same place and there it was—only that year, it was just a nearly dead stump of a thing—uncared for and unplanned, it had pretty much died over the winter. There were no more peaches. It was gone. And I have thought about that peach tree many times since. Every time I've tasted a good peach and you have great peaches here in Ft. Collins, I've wondered about that peach tree. Where did it come from? How did it get there? Chances are one of my relatives—some cousin or great uncle, had passed that way eating a peach and tossed the peach pit into the fence row. Chances are, by some miracle that peach pit grew—and by another miracle, uncared for and unbidden—that little peach tree had managed to bloom and prosper for a few years, half a mile from no where in the back of the beyond. And while those peaches were the sweetest ones in the world—something was missing--something important was missing. There was no planning and there was no ongoing care or giving to nurture that little tree and so when the harsh wind blew across those Ohio hills that next winter, the little tree stunted eventually died. So often in the life of the churches I have known over the years, I have seen the same thing happen to great ideas and even great congregations that did not take to heart the call of Jesus to give and to care. Too often there was this assumption that someone else would do it, or that an individual’s giving did not make a difference. Growth and leaders and mission and our work in this community depend on our enthusiasm and our financial support. And so I am a believer. I believe in planting trees I will never live to enjoy. I believe in doing what I can to make the dream others gave me come true in a future that will not include my presence. I believe in giving that supports people as they do the love of Jesus in this community and around the world. I believe in giving to maintain this building so that my grandchildren will find the same love I experienced in my home church as a child. I believe in a music and youth program that exists to proclaim God’s love with verve and excellence. I believe in giving to support the cause of peace and justice. I believe that the more we give, the deeper our experience of God’s presence will be. I wandered in here six weeks ago and what I discovered was a living outpost of the Jesus movement named Plymouth: people working together and loving, thinking and living, people daring and dreaming. The gifts we share and the commitment we make will strengthen this congregation and this community. The lives we live and our giving makes that possible today and for the sake of the future. I thank God for your witness and for the ministry we share. Amen. AuthorThe Rev. Ron Patterson came to Plymouth as our interim for the fall of 2017 during the Rev. Hal Chorpenning’s 2017 sabbatical. Ron has served many churches from Ohio to New York City and Naples UCC in Florida, where he was the Senior Minister for many years before retiring. Ron’s daughter-in-law and grandchildren attend Plymouth.
September 24, 2017
Rev. Ron Patterson Matthew 20:1-16 Recently a friend who supports my sermon-writing habit sent me a list of one liners. Some of them were humorous, some of them were common sense, some of them were outrageous and a few of them were absolutely irresistible. The list included such gems as: “Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it”; “If you can’t be kind, at least have the decency to be vague”; “It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others”; “When everything’s coming you way, you’re in the wrong lane”; “Birthdays are good for you. The more you have, the longer you live”; “Never buy a car you can’t push”; and “Never put both feet in your mouth at the same time, because then you won’t have a leg to stand on.” Those were all pretty good, but the very best of the bunch, as far as I’m concerned, as a former resident of New York City, was the one which stated: “Accept that some days you’re the pigeon, and some days you’re the statue.” I found that one almost good enough to commit to needlepoint and hang on the wall, because it does seem to define a good portion of the human dilemma and especially the topic I want to consider with you today. I want to think with you about fairness. What is fair? How do we define it? How do you know when you are being fair or when someone is treating you fairly? And for the person of faith, is there a difference between fair and faithful? Two comments from friends, two vivid memories, and one troubling Bible story raised this issue for me a couple of weeks ago. We were talking and a friend casually mentioned: “life is not fair.” They were commenting on something in the news, perhaps one of those hard luck situations we have all seen or experienced; or maybe some tragedy major or minor that involved the innocent in undeserved suffering. Life is not fair, they said, the good sometimes die young, the virtuous are not always rewarded, and evil seem to prosper. And then later that same day someone in our building in Tacoma mentioned that during the housing bubble some years ago, they became on paper a millionaire, but that when the bubble popped, it was a very different story. And somehow, that just didn’t seem to be fair. And those two comments brought back two memories. A number of years ago, on Long Island, I was at a public hearing on a new housing development planned in the community where I lived. The developer stood up and said that if he succeeded with his new development, everyone in that community would benefit from higher housing prices. And he was right, he built his mammoth houses, he constructed his 5,000 square foot “McMansions” and the housing prices in that historic area soared. Everyone who owned a house became wealthy on paper at least. A couple of years later, I saw that builder and reminded him of what he had said at that meeting. I told him he was right, everything he had said was true, except for one thing. I told him that he was like the Pied Piper; that he made that town a whole lot wealthier, but that he took away our children, because virtually, none of the children who grew up in that community could afford to live there anymore and somehow, that just didn’t seem to be fair. The other memory is one I’m sure many of you share. It’s the memory of groups of people waiting to be hired as day laborers. I’ve seen it on St. Thomas in the Caribbean, and in some cities I’ve visited in Africa and Mexico and it probably happens somewhere here in Colorado too. Men and women who want to work, day laborers, standing on street corners or in a park, waiting for a contractor to offer them a job. Waiting to pick vegetables, or shovel dirt, or pass roofing tiles. Willing to work and hoping for a job. Some of them get work and some of them don’t. Some of them feed their families, and some of them don’t. And somehow, that doesn’t seem fair. And finally, the Bible story that Jesus told us this morning. It’s a tough one: the story of the landowner who went out to hire laborers for his vineyard. On the surface this is a story about fairness and it’s not fair. The day laborers are hired at different times. Some of them work the entire day, some of them work for just a few hours in the heat of the day and at the end of the day, they are not treated fairly. They are all paid the same wage for different amounts of work and the ones who have worked the whole day protest that the landowner is not fair. And the landowner says look, I don’t care about fairness, it’s my farm and my money and I can do as I wish, get over it. And then he asks the grumbling workers: “Are you envious because I am generous?” Every one of them who went into the field, early or late was paid the same wage. Every one of them received the money necessary to make it through another day. Every one of them was able to feed their family. Was that landowner being fair? Or was that landowner dabbling in something way beyond fair? Now at this point, I have to tell you that I struggled for several hours trying to think about what to say next. But then I went back and looked at the story again and noticed something. This story is a parable and not a news report and so the facts are not nearly as important as the meaning behind the facts. The story begins with those little words: “The Kingdom of God is like,” the reign of God is like this… which should have been a tip off to me and to you that we are not dealing here with how the world works—or with any concept of fairness we might be able to understand—like how when we were kids Mom divided up the chocolate cake so that your piece was exactly the same size as your brothers. That’s how moms are supposed to do it and that’s what you and I expect. But this is a story about what the reign of God will be like, how the “kingdom of God” will unfold. This is a story about how the world might work and about how life might become if and when we choose to live it by the light of God’s love. This is a story about how God as you understand God or how the God spark in you and me might be operating. And then it dawned on me. I can’t think of a single fair thing—as I learned about fairness as a kid, or as an adult or as we might think about it in terms of politics or business or our day-to-day lives—I can’t think of anything fair in the entire sweep of biblical history. Fairness is just not a biblical idea. Let me tell you what I mean. If it were simply a matter of fairness, every one of us would always get exactly what we deserved every day of the week and then big time at the end of the line. If God were running the universe like a chartered accountant and keeping tabs on our actions and our attitudes like some sort of heavenly bookkeeper, then most of us would be a far piece up the wrong creek. Fair is what I expect from my banker, thank God, I don’t receive fairness from God. How does the Psalmist say it? “God is merciful and gracious; slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love”? (Ps. 103:8) Now, it is just possible, since I don’t know most of you, that there is a perfect person present here today. It is just possible that there’s someone here today who has never said or done something that they hope to heaven no one ever finds out about. It is possible that there is someone here today who hasn’t messed up big time or small time and who carries absolutely no regrets about anything. That’s possible, I suppose, but I doubt it. God is not fair. God is gracious and operates with grace. It is God who is the landowner in the story of the workers in the field. It is God who gives to each one of those workers the means to live and to survive another day. It is God who gives me and you the next breath and who does not judge us based on our actions or our attitudes or our foibles or our imperfections. God begins from the place of grace, accepting us and renewing us and giving us the chance to be gracious and caring for one another. And Jesus lays out the story of the workers in the vineyard to invite us to treat one another and this world with the same sort of grace. In my mind, this story says something about hungry children. It has something to say about the children who have never seen a dentist or the thousands of families right in our back yard who can’t afford houses or proper health care. It is a judgment on the pettiness of the political arguments that oppose universal health care. It says something about the grace we are called to show in our dealings with the world and our call to live justice. In my heart I might argue that if the world were fair, every person would have a living wage, every person would have a place to live, everyone would have enough to eat and basic health care—but we all know the world is not fair. Well, the idea behind this story is that God expects something a little more powerful than fairness from those of us who choose to become the servant disciples of Jesus—God is inviting us to embrace the amazing way of grace and become little outposts of an outbreak of the reign of God—tiny encampments of the mercy and caring of God, small settlements of justice doers reflecting the goodness of God in a world that defines fairness mathematically rather than mystically. One more thing: Were you ever in love? If you were or if you are, then you know that love has absolutely nothing to do with fairness. Relational fairness is about quid pro quo. Relational fairness is about giving something to get something. You scratch my back and I will scratch yours. You invite me to you house for dinner and I will invite you to my house for dinner. I give you a present, you give me a present. I am nice to you so you will be nice to me—all a part of a very pleasant and very necessary social contract. Polite people do this sort of thing all the time and there is nothing wrong with it, it’s all very fair, but it’s not love. Love is giving expecting nothing in return. Love is sacrifice without any expectation of reward. If I love you only because I am hoping that you will love me, that may be fair, but it is not love, it is business. Love is giving yourself away, because it is really the only thing any of us has to give. It is the way of God. Our little bible story ends with a very strange sentence. Jesus says: “the last will be first, and the first will be last.” That, too, is not fair. That, too, is not the way the world works; but then we have a different path to follow. We are called to follow the way of Jesus. We are called to love and we are called to forgive, we are called to work for justice and peace and we are called to give, because we are loved and we are forgiven, and we have received God’s grace in Jesus Christ. It’s not fair; it never was and never will be. We didn’t earn it, we don’t really deserve it, but it’s a free gift. Accept that gift and you will know abundant life on your journey today, and forever and in the process, together we might make this world a better place. Amen. AuthorThe Rev. Ron Patterson came to Plymouth as our interim for the fall of 2017 during the Rev. Hal Chorpenning’s 2017 sabbatical. Ron has served many churches from Ohio to New York City and Naples UCC in Florida, where he was the Senior Minister for many years before retiring. Ron’s daughter-in-law and grandchildren attend Plymouth.
September 17, 2017
Rev. Ron Patterson Matthew 18:21-35 This morning I am going to venture into dangerous territory and beg your patience as I do so. I know a great deal about a few things and a little bit about a lot of things. That makes me a pretty good Trivial Pursuit player and an armchair devotee of the TV show, Jeopardy. I like to flatter myself with the belief that I received a pretty good liberal arts education. But...of all the things I do well and of all the things I do less well, the very bottom of the list is anything grammatical. When my grade school teachers asked us to open our grammar books, I must have been looking out the window. When they taught that lesson about sentence structure and pushed the importance of sentence diagramming—remember that (?)--I must have been absent that day and during the week they laid out the parts of speech, I must have had the measles or maybe the mumps. If I learned anything at all about adverbs, adjectives and gerunds it was because the people who did pay attention and did learn those lessons—have been patient with me and kind and caring. So, I ask for a bit of that same patience today, because my sermon idea is about the difference between a noun and a verb. I think I know that a noun is that part of speech that includes persons, places and things and if I remember correctly a verb is a state of being or an action. Taken superficially, you and I are nouns. I am standing in a pulpit and we are sitting in a church, up there is the steeple and you are the people. There is the table which some call an altar. On the table are candles and there’s a cross. This is my sermon. And those are just a few of the nouns that surround us. The subject of my sermon today is heaven and heaven is a noun. In classical religious terms, some folks will tell you it is a place; and for some people who love Jesus, it is a destination. Some will tell you that have to do things to get there. I was taught (and maybe you were too) that if you live a good life, heaven is where you end up when this chapter of life is over. The streets are paved with gold, the houses there are mansions and even those of us who can’t manage a tune in a bucket get to join the heavenly host, pick up our golden crowns and harps and spend eternity hanging out. Does that sound wonderful to you? There’s an old preacher’s joke about the preacher who got wound up one morning on the subject of heaven. He got his congregation all stirred up with his picture of heaven and then shouted at the top of his lungs, “If you’re ready to go to heaven, stand up.” And everyone stood up except an older man in the front row, who didn’t even stir. And that bothered the preacher and so he pointed to the man and said “Why aren’t you standing, brother?” And the man answered: “If you don’t mind, pastor, for the present I’m doing fine right here.” And I guess I feel the same way. And while if you asked me about heaven, I would invite you to wonder with me about what it might mean to imagine a place of joy and reward and a destination where the pain and sorrow of this life will be replaced with something a whole lot better than what we have here, I do confess that I am not anxious to get there. I look forward to heaven, but heaven can wait, because life is good and I’m not quite ready to make the trip. And that’s the thought that came to me as I looked at the parable we heard just now and at the whole string of little parables Matthew share about the Kingdom of God or the reign of God. Jesus did say a few things about heaven as a noun. He did offer a few glimpses of the other shore, but the funny thing I noticed as I was preparing for today is that most of what Jesus said about heaven had absolutely nothing to do with a place or a destination. He never talked about streets of gold. He never mentioned harps or halos. And when he did talk about the Kingdom of Heaven, he mainly talked about this life and this place, as if heaven was right here and right now and not up there or out there somewhere in a place a whole lot better than this place. He actually said that the Kingdom of Heaven is within—in the heart and in the mind and in the soul of every one of us. And if I asked you now to open your heart and your soul and your mind do you think you would find heaven there? I took a look inside and I have to say that what I saw didn’t leave a whole lot of room for heaven. In fact what I saw was a little scary. I saw some fears about the future. I saw a bundle of worries over things I’ve done and said that I wish I had not said or done. I saw a pile of regrets and a swamp of inadequacies. I saw a dozen or two doubts and a dried out stack of disappointed dreams. Did you ever notice that when you go looking for trouble, you usually find it? That when you believe the glass is half-empty it usually is or when you think negative things, negative things happen? Well, I don’t think Jesus looks at us in that way. I think when Jesus looks at your life and mine the first thing he does is look right past all of those negative things and Jesus sees heaven—not as a place, not as a destination, but as a living reality. Not as a noun, but as a verb. And here I am at the very edge of my grammatical ability and at the far side of my ability to understand or to communicate, but the heaven that is in you and in me is about loving, caring, serving, giving, forgiving, and living to make all of those things real possibilities in our own lives and in the lives of other people and out there in the world. Do you want to go to heaven? Let me say it simply: if you want to get the noun, become the verb. If you want to lead your life in the sure and certain hope of eternal life right now and in the world to come whatever that looks like, don’t worry about heaven the place, be heaven, become heavenly, live your life ‘heavenescently.' Forgive me, I think I just created a new word. I think you know the word: “effervescent”—it means bubbly, sparkling, engaging, thrilling, lively—the sort of person who makes an entire room come to life with their joy. Well, ‘heavenescent’ is living so fully in the present that nothing this life can throw at us can cloud the powerful reality that we are God’s children called to be Jesus to one another in every part of our living. And so Jesus, a little earlier in Matthew, says the Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed—that little wonderful spark of the divine in you and in me. Jesus says the Kingdom of Heaven is like yeast--that tiny miracle of life added to the ordinary substance of life that transforms every moment with life renewing possibility. Jesus says that the Kingdom of Heaven is like treasure hidden in a field—and the hidden treasure is the power of love to make everything worn out and weary in our hearts into something bright and beautiful. Jesus says, the Kingdom of Heaven is like the pearl of great price—a treasure so precious that just having it puts every single thing in your life and mine in perspective. And then finally in answer to Peter’s attempt to build the reign of God into a noun bound box of religious rules and regulations about how often we need to forgive, Jesus tells a wild tale of extravagant love known as the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant that breaks open life with grace that is amazing. And all of that is an invitation to live heaven and do heaven and in our very humanity become heavenly. Heaven is not a noun, it’s a verb. When you dreams are dashed and you keep on dreaming, that is heaven. When you think you can’t forgive and you forgive anyway and keep on forgiving, that is heaven. When you know that despite what you have done in the past, you hear Jesus promising you that you can begin again, that’s heaven. When you come to believe that even your worst nightmare will have a happy ending, that’s heaven. When you lay your head down at night and never worry whether you’ll wake up or not because you know God loves you, that’s heaven. When you come to realize that you can be the missing piece to another creature’s puzzle, that’s heaven. When you give someone else the permission to be themselves in your presence without pretense or phoniness, that’s heaven. When you realize that because God accepts you as you are and you come to accept others, that’s heaven. When you give another person the strength and the courage they need to take an unpopular stand and join them in letting the love of God get a hearing in this cold cruel world, that’s heaven. When you overwhelm another person’s cynicism with understanding and compassion, even if you disagree with them, that’s heaven. When you give yourself away without any thought of return, that’s heaven. When you become an answer to another person’s problem or their prayers, that’s heaven. When we look around this place and realize that our job as the church of Jesus Christ is not to judge but to care, that’s heaven. When we get together to make a difference in this community in our mission and in our service, that’s heaven. When we pray together and trust the power of our prayers, that’s heaven. When we speak the truth in love to one another, that’s heaven. When we sacrifice our cherished opinions and love our enemies beyond any logical expectation, that’s heaven. When we stand up for the poor, or those who lack health care or confront the haters and the hoarders with powerful love in action, that’s heaven. And even when we feel like we’re walking the very streets of hell and know that on that walk we are not alone, that’s heaven. Heaven is not a noun, it’s a verb. Let me end now with a story you may have heard before. It was told first in the writings of the poet and scientist Loren Eiseley. (The Star Thrower) “Once upon a time there was a man who was walking along a sandy beach where thousands of starfish had been washed up on the shore by a storm. He noticed a boy picking the starfish one by one and throwing them back into the ocean. The man observed the boy for a few minutes and then asked what he was doing. The boy replied that he was returning the starfish to the sea, otherwise they would die. The man asked how saving a few, when so many were doomed, would make any difference whatsoever? The boy picked up a starfish and threw it back into the ocean and said: ‘Made a difference to that one….’” “The man left the boy and went home, deep in thought of what the boy had said. He soon returned to the beach and spent the rest of the day helping the boy throw starfish into the sea…” God in Jesus Christ is calling us to life. Who we are is whom God loves and heaven is in our loving. God give us the strength to be heavenly. Amen. AuthorThe Rev. Ron Patterson came to Plymouth as our interim for the fall of 2017 during the Rev. Hal Chorpenning’s 2017 sabbatical. Ron has served many churches from Ohio to New York City and Naples UCC in Florida, where he was the Senior Minister for many years before retiring. Ron’s daughter-in-law and grandchildren attend Plymouth.
The Rev. Ron Patterson preaches on Romans 12:1-8.
AuthorThe Rev. Ron Patterson came to Plymouth as our interim for the fall of 2017 during the Rev. Hal Chorpenning’s 2017 sabbatical. Ron has served many churches from Ohio to New York City and Naples UCC in Florida, where he was the Senior Minister for many years before retiring. Ron’s daughter-in-law and grandchildren attend Plymouth. |
Details
|