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2/2/2025 0 Comments Feb. 2, 2025: God’s Wider View Old Testament Reading: Jeremiah 1: 4-10
The Gospel: Luke 4: 21-30 Isn’t it interesting when you run into your children’s friends or kids you once knew who are now adults? I look at adult Jeff and still see 9-year old Jeff managing to drop the majority of his clothes on the way to the showers at Cub Scout Camp, despite the fact that adult Jeff is a college graduate, has been a Nordic coach at Harvard and Colby College, and currently runs an outdoor recreation area in Maine. I see Graham, a very successful college-educated stone mason, and picture the teenager who was always building campfires in the woods and didn’t try very hard on the AP English exam for my course. Sometimes it is hard for me to adjust my lens to see these kids as the fully formed and fully functioning adults that they now are. My view of them in the past sometimes clouds my ability to see their present. This is probably what the people of Nazareth felt like when Jesus preached to them in the synagogue. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they ask themselves remembering him running around town with the other kids, and even learning a trade from his father. Who was he to be saying, “Today this scripture (about being anointed by God to bring good news to the poor, release those who were captive or oppressed and give sight to the blind) has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And yet they try to see him as an adult version of Jesus of Nazareth. After all, they had heard the stories of the miracles that he had performed in Capernaum and they had heard how well he spoke in the synagogue just then. But Jesus knew they would want to tie him down: celebrate the hometown hero and reap the benefits. Nazareth had plenty of people in need of release and healing, now that he had proven himself, it was time for him to take care of his own, they were likely thinking, but Jesus heads them off knowing that he has a wider view, a mission much bigger than Nazareth. So he tells it like it is, “Truly I tell you no prophet is accepted in his hometown” he says, going on to explain that both the prophets Elijah and Elisha healed and helped foreigners rather than just sticking close to home in their work. This was not well-received, then, when a rampant version of localism, or what we would call nationalism, was popular, and the sentiment was to take care of your own and let everyone else fend for themselves. However, that wider mission was God’s task for them in the old times, and it was still God’s task for Jesus as it is for us today. The unpopularity of God’s wider mission was instantly clear as the Nazarenes went from celebrating Jesus to wanting to hurl him off a cliff. Jesus was indeed right: no prophet is accepted in his or her hometown. They just could not change their view of Joseph’s son or, if they could, they could not accept that the role of a prophet is telling truth to power and it is bigger than one’s own hometown or state or country. No wonder Jeremiah was so intimidated when God called him. “I am only a boy,” he says, feeling unworthy of this role, but God tells him, “You will go to whom I send you and you will speak whatever I command you.” God gave Jeremiah the words and the mission to go out to other nations and kingdoms “to pluck up and pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” And God did indeed protect Jeremiah so he could do that just ,as he protected Jesus when his own townspeople wanted to throw him off the cliff. We have a choice, just as the people of Nazareth did. God did not force them to change, God merely showed them the model of change and love in Jesus Christ. When they were not yet ready for that, God protected Jesus, just as he had protected the prophets before him. Just like God gave Jeremiah the words to speak to God’s people, so does God continue to give words to and protect prophets today, like Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, who put God’s wider mission first in calling for unity in her address at the National Cathedral on January 21. She did not call for the kind of unity that says we all have to agree on everything, but instead cited three foundations for unity: 1. To honor the dignity of every human being just as God created them. 2. To seek out the truth and be honest in public and in private and 3. To be humble, because none of us knows everything, none of us is perfect; we all make mistakes and we should all have the ability to learn more, admit our mistakes, to be forgiven and to forgive others. Bishop Budde went on to say “unity is a way of being with one another that encompasses and respects differences, that teaches us to hold multiple perspectives and life experiences as valid and worthy of respect; that enables us, in our communities and in the halls of power, to genuinely care for one another even when we disagree. “ She went on to say that striving for unity is not always easy, “Unity, at times, is sacrificial, in the way that love is sacrificial, a giving of ourselves for the sake of another. Jesus of Nazareth, in his Sermon on the Mount, exhorts us to love not only our neighbors, but to love our enemies, and to pray for those who persecute us; to be merciful, as our God is merciful, and to forgive others, as God forgives us. Jesus went out of his way to welcome those whom his society deemed as outcasts,” Bishop Budde emphasized. And some have condemned Bishop Budde for calling for unity and seeking mercy for the marginalized, even though she was doing exactly what Jesus did. Prophets indeed are not accepted in their hometowns. Jesus was trying to show the people of Nazareth and us that community extends to all of God’s creation and life is not a binary. People are not all good or all bad; they are not just citizens of their community but not their world; they are not only an x - whatever x is and not also sometimes y, whatever that is. Jesus was indeed Joseph’s boy from Nazareth and also God’s son. Jesus could care for the people in Capernaum And the people in Nazareth, even when they could not always care for him. Jesus could help upstanding citizens and those just trying to stand up. But Jesus especially knew that the ones who needed him most, were the ones who others had marginalized because they were poor, foreign, sick, alone, or different. Like Jeremiah, we too are called to pluck up our courage, to tear down barriers, to destroy discrimination, to overthrow injustices and to build up love, planting seeds of hope for all of God’s creation. In fact, it is even easier for us than it was for Jeremiah because we, unlike him, have Jesus’ model to follow. If we seek to create inclusiveness or unity for all of God’s creation, then we are truly continuing Jesus’ work on earth. To be united does not mean that we are always going to agree but it does mean that we will always seek to respect and care for all of God’s creation, especially the parts that others might try to exclude. And if others try to throw us off of a metaphorical or actual cliff due to our actions of mercy, love, and justice, well, Jesus gave us the model for that as well: just pass through the midst of them and get back to God’s work. Amen Pastor Michelle Fountain
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1/26/2025 0 Comments Jan. 26, 2024 - One Body Our tradition shows us that there is wisdom in our bodies and teaches us that we are made in the image of God. In today’s scripture passage, Paul reflects on the church as the Body of Christ—particularly in how the members of the body care for and are connected to one another. To prepare for this reflection on being the One body of Christ, let us spend a couple of minutes in prayer with our bodies. I’ll guide us through a brief meditation on a small but vital part of our bodies—one that has been working overtime for many of us.
From the Greek word for almond, the amygdala is part of a larger network in your brain called the limbic system, which regulates emotions, behavior, motivation, and memory. The amygdala is most known for its role in processing the emotions of fear and anxiety as well as detecting danger. However, research also shows that the amygdala contributes to much more than just fear-based survival instincts and stress. It also plays a key role in social communication and understanding one another, in the emotions related to parenting and caregiving, and in the feelings we connect to our memories. I invite you to cup your hands like this, imagine that you are holding your amygdala in your hands—or perhaps imagine God’s hands doing so. As you do this, I invite you to reflect on all that your amygdala has been holding, carrying, processing, and protecting for you. It might be working overtime on handling stress, worry, overwhelm, or heartbreak. It might be helping you to love more deeply, understand more broadly, remember more wholly. It could be all of the above. What might it want you to know or see? Just take some time to honor this unique part of your body without trying to change, fix, or judge it. Acknowledge with tenderness all it has been holding for you lately. Hold your amygdala as it has held you. Close your eyes if you are comfortable in this moment of stillness as you hold your emotional brain in your hands. Careful and Caring Creator, we ask that you bless our beautiful brains and complex bodies as a whole. We lift up the part of us that experiences both fear and compassion, anxiety and deeper understanding, feeling and forecasting. Help us to learn to listen to the wisdom of our bodies and to the connective tissue that lives between us through you. Amen. The Gospel: Luke 4: 14-21 The Epistle Reading: 1 Corinthians 12: 12-31a Children’s Message: Bodies are Cool by Tyler Feder Bodies are cool, aren’t they? Although we are often critical of our bodies thinking they are too this or not enough of that, if we step back and think about all that our bodies do - how they have a built in ability to repair themselves, to fight invaders, to expand or contract as needed, to continue to grow neural pathways through new experiences to expand our thinking and capacity to learn, love, and understand our God-given bodies are not only cool: they are amazing! Our bodies are also built to work together. I need both of my legs to walk. I need two hands to tie my shoes, I need my brain to think and feel, my lungs to breathe, my heart to pump blood through my body to let me do all of that and so much more. This body right here, 31 and 27 years ago respectively when joined with love with another, created two more bodies who now have lives of their own. Bodies are cool and the God who created them is amazing! And just as the many parts of our bodies have to work together for us to breathe, move, eat, work, play, think, and love, so must we all, each and every one of us, work together as the ONE body of Christ as Paul reminds us “God arranged the members of the body, each one of them, as he chose.” All parts of our body work together “the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable…but God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension in the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.” God created us, humanity, to work together. Our church, community, country, and world thrive when we remember this. We are at our best selves when we do this. We saw this in the fires in Southern California when, equally impacted, it no longer mattered whether you were a democrat or a republican, rich or poor, Catholic, Protestant, Jew, or Muslim, American or immigrant, cisgender or transgender, heterosexual or homosexual - as they gathered together in hotels, shelters and public spaces to support and care for one another and to plan to rebuild. We are often at our best in times of crisis when all of our senses are firing towards the impulse of survival and caring. Our challenge is remembering that we are all One Body of Christ at ALL times, not just times of crisis. We are called to work together, respecting all of our unique members even if we favor our strong thumb over our weak pinky. Even if we think our lungs or legs are not as strong as they should be, even when we question what our ears hear or our eyes see. God is the Creator - not a creator. God created all of us - each human, each plant, each animal and endowed all of us with life - an interconnected life that thrives through connections, not divisions. Each and every one of us humans, as different as we all are, has been created in God’s divine image and just as God intended. Each of us is a hand, foot, eye, ear, leg, intestine, lung, heart, or blood of the one God. Any separation we envision, any division we have, is created by man, not God. Jesus came to remind us of that. He came to reconnect humanity into the one body of Christ by bringing good news to all those who had been excluded - the poor, the enslaved, the physically and metaphorically blind, and everyone who was oppressed. Each of us is unique and perfectly imperfect, yet we are all part of the One Body of Christ. Let’s honor all of our members and, as Paul says, “all rejoice together with it.” Amen. Pastor Michelle Fountain |
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