PALM UNITED METHODIST CHURCH

Sermon for July 26. Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52 and Romans 8:26-39. The last couple of verses today include Jesus talking about Treasures new and old. In Jesus God was doing a new thing. This is the first and only time God has become incarnate and walked around completely in human skin. And with that new thing of becoming enfleshed in Jesus of Nazareth, God was also bringing about a new sphere of being, Continue reading →

July 12. (Romans 8:1-11 and Matthew 13:1-9 & 18-23) I am by nature, a people pleaser. I sometimes don’t speak up when I know the other person might be upset by what I say. It is my tendency to hold myself back, to make a good impression, find favor, keep things smooth.

I know that this is not the true way of Jesus. I’m working on it.

I know too that some people think they need to interact with God in this way. Hold back parts of themselves they think God won’t like. Try to be a different person than what is authentic, try to hide away what might make God upset.

So if you find yourself in that crowd, hear this phrase from Romans: There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

No condemnation. No judging to be found lacking. No wish to punish. Continue reading →

June 28. (Matthew 10:26-42)  What are you most afraid of?

There is plenty that people fear in this world. Some people fear death. Some people fear suffering. Some people fear rejection or unkindness or embarrassment. Maybe it comes out in that recurring dream. Even though some may say, I’m not afraid of anything, it turns out in some way we usually are.

Myself, when I think about it I still fear in some ways, though not as much as I used to, what people think of me. People thinking I’m weird or not doing good enough in certain ways. I recently had one of those dreams where I had forgotten some clothing items… I hadn’t had one in awhile. There’s a fear of being vulnerable somewhere in there perhaps.

Jesus says to his disciples in this passage, three times not to be afraid- and once to be afraid. Continue reading →

June 21. (Matthew 9:32-10:8, 16-27) This past Friday was Juneteenth, a celebration I had never heard of growing up in Indiana, I think I first learned about it in college. When the civil war ended and slaves were freed, the news of that freedom took a good long time to reach all the enslaved people. The last ones found out on June 19th, two years after they could have been free. I heard from our Conference Lay Leader Micheal Pope in her recorded video about the celebration, that they immediately put on their best clothes, which they were forbidden from doing before, and began to celebrate with gatherings and food. Reading this gospel, the message that was brought to them and their reaction made me think about this passage: the mission of Jesus that would become the mission of the twelve, bringing healing, casting out demons, what we would call maybe removing obstacles to fullness of life, and preaching the good news that God’s kingdom had come near. Those messengers from the North brought good news to remove barriers to fullness of life to those who had been treated as property. No longer a slave! Free! What a difference there would be in their lives.

But yet. Michael Pope also shared that it was a week or less before those former slave owners made up a lie to keep their cheap labor. You may be free, but you are still my property, they said to those Black persons now in a new limbo between freedom and servitude. It doesn’t make any sense, what they said. How could they be free and be property? But people who have any kind of power over others usually will not just give that power away. They will fight tooth and nail to keep what they had-indeed, that was the cause for the long bloody civil war. Now individual slave-holders would Lie, fabricate to maintain their advantage, their way of life, which was built on free labor of other people.

We hear in this Gospel of Luke how Jesus was moved with compassion for the people he encountered as he traveled throughout the region of Galilee (?), for he saw them as sheep without a shepherd. We have a lot of cute ideas about sheep and shepherds and how Jesus is our Good Shepherd, he is, he is. But this reference thrown in here is anything but cute. There is nearly identical wording in Ezekiel 34;5, and that passage is talking about how the political leaders have wronged the people of Israel, God’s flock. They are not caring for the sheep, they are taking care of themselves, endangering and slaughtering the sheep to do so.

A couple of weeks ago I shared a brief version of a testimony, how the Holy Spirit reached into me and showed me ugly parts of myself, racist ideas I had internalized. A part of the story I didn’t include is that just before that, God had kind of pointed me to Ezekiel 34. That’s what I was reading just before that Spirit intervention, about just how evil some of Israel’s leaders had been, how they had taken advantage of, used the people instead of serving them, and how angry that made God.

I will tell the truth. I never quite made the connection consciously between what I had been reading and what God spoke to my heart, except for a vague sense of how when harm is done, when we sin, God calls us to repent. Just this past Friday June 19th I opened a Bible on my husband’s office shelf to read this Matthew passage in Spanish -sometimes I find different words help open things up for me- and lo and behold was a little asterisk with a reference, and it said, this is referring to Ezekiel 34.

They are sheep without a shepherd because those in charge, the leaders, were not caring for the people. In Ezekiel it was a corrupt king and corrupt class of leaders. For Jesus it was the Roman empire and all those who were aligned with them who were devouring the sheep, taking resources and making their poverty worse, and with it illness and death rates – the reason Jesus needed to do so much healing. Jesus is moved in his belly to feel for the people, that’s the root of this word compassion, and knows that it is the evil the leadership is doing that is making people suffer. Like sheep without a shepherd, as Ezekiel says, who are left to be devoured by the predators.

The sheep without a shepherd in the time of the Emancipation Proclamation were those slaves. Their masters did not care about their well-being but only what they could take from the labor of their bodies.

What kind of leadership we have, matters. Who we are following, and how we are leading others, matters.

The trend from what happened on Juneteenth has continued throughout our history, as a nation overall. There is struggle for recognition of equal rights, human dignity, a little progress is made, and then we take another step back. It happens whenever the leaders, those in power, care more about themselves than the people they are supposed to be serving and caring for. It has happened over and over in our nation’s history, especially concerning Black and Brown people. And it was going on in me, on that day about 20 years ago. No I wasn’t a president or mayor or any kind of important leader, but those impulses, considering some people below me, not equal in some ways, inhabited my being, and God wanted that to be known to me so I could work to change it. To become a better disciple, a better follower of Jesus Christ.

And what that means-what it means to be a disciple- is made as clear in this passage as in any other. We hear how what Jesus did was bring healing, pronounce good news about God. When he was moved to compassion he said, they are like sheep without a shepherd. Let there be workers for this great harvest! He told his disciples to pray to God for workers, then he looked around him and said- hey you guys, you are going to be the answer to our prayer! And the exact same things he had been doing, he empowered and commissioned them to do as well: to heal, to cast out demons, to proclaim the good news of God’s kingdom coming near. He was the leader, the model, and they copied him.

If we call ourselves disciples of Jesus, this is what we do. There were crazy hard times throughout the Bible, they were living some crazy hard times under the Roman Empire. We are in some crazy hard times now, too. But what we do now, is the same as those first 12 disciples, the same as what Jesus did. Work to bring healing. To remove barriers to fullness of life, to proclaim that God is indeed coming near, indeed already here.

But almost as soon as he finishes instructing them, Jesus begins to warn them. This is a dangerous mission. But why?

The little story starting at verse 32 illustrates this point. Jesus cast out a demon. The crowds, you can think, the poor, preyed upon people, are amazed. But the Pharisees, who were part of Israel but who at least partly were working with the Romans said, he must be in league with the demons, to be able to cast one out. They see Jesus, his ability to heal, as a threat to their power. So they make up a lie about him.

Just like the slaveholders made up a lie to keep the now-free people, under their control.

Jesus knows that his mission of healing and teaching is going to have an effect on people. On the poor ones who are like sheep without a shepherd. And he knows that the effect he has is going to irritate the people who have power, who will have to work harder to keep that power. He says, They are calling me Beelzebul, a demon lord, so they will call you the same thing if you follow me and do what I do. They will cast Jesus and his followers as the evil ones, and themselves as right.

Which brings me back to our Conference Lay Leader, in her reflection she made a comment. She said she has heard a mega church pastor say he doesn’t like to say “white privilege” he wants to call it “white blessing.” If you haven’t heard of white privilege, it refers to how white people like me live an existence where our experience is generally considered “the norm” placed at the center, and we don’t have to worry about someone fearing us or assuming the worst of us merely because of our skin color. That is a privilege people of color do not share. There is more to it but in a nutshell. So for a pastor to say, let’s call it white blessing, is the same old story of all these devouring leaders. Making up a lie to hold onto the power and how things are. God does not want some people to automatically have easier lives than others. That is false. There is no “white blessing” that God has ordained. No.

Because we know God through Jesus. The one who saw the mistreated oppressed crowds, and was moved to compassion for them. Who would spend his ministry among them, doing that work of healing and removing barriers for fullness of life, telling them God was coming and right there with them. Whose ministry would irritate the powerful people to the point they needed to put him to death.

So Jesus warned them. You do this work, and they will come for me and then they will come for you, too. But he will go on to say- don’t be afraid of them. And Jesus was not afraid of them. Yes they even killed him but, God would raise him to life again.

There are leaders who are not good leaders in this world. There are people with power who use it for their own ends and not to care for others. But we have a leader we can trust, the compassionate one, the healing one, who continues to empower us to join in this mission, Jesus. Some of the barriers needing to be removed these days have to do with systems of racism that harm our brothers and sisters. Some of the healing has to do with relationship healing, on top of healing from COVID 19 and all the other ways humanity also needs healing.

One of my mentors once told me to consider daily, how are you leading? Because you are always leading someone. Someone is always watching and might follow your example. We are called to be leaders in the way of Jesus. Disciples who follow in those life-giving, healing ways, leading others even as we follow Jesus. Amen.

May 31. (Acts 2:1-21) “May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing before you O Lord for you are our Rock and our Redeemer.”

I pray this prayer before I preach aloud, but I also pray it as I think, as I write. I invite God to let my words be the words God wants me to say.

And last week I had some thoughts for this sermon, I wanted to preach a good word about Pentecost, a moving sermon about the power of the Holy Spirit and knowing we want to lift up our graduates today also, I thought, well we sometimes think about Pentecost as the birthday of the church, and it is= but I wonder if I could talk about the commencement of the disciples- the new beginning God was giving to them, after their course of study with Jesus their rabbi, which means teacher. They had been students training in the ways of the God of life, they had been training in the situation of the Roman empire of death, of strict hierarchy, to reject those ways and live out the kingdom of God- and now they would become professors- for they would profess, with their mouths, the words they knew to be true, about God’s power to save. So it was kind of a commencement, complete with the centering speech of Peter, who everyone thought was the dullest student but turned out to be the valedictorian…

But something happened this week. And as I thought about this sermon and this amazing thing that happened at that Pentecost, the particular way the Holy Spirit came to them, God lay on my heart some things that I need to say. And so this is a Pentecost sermon, but it is not the one I imagined giving a week ago. Because the Holy Spirit does not wait for an invitation, the Holy Spirit shows up, and I have learned that it is best if I listen when she does.

What happened this week, my beloved brothers and sisters, you know. A white police officer kneeled on the neck of a large black man for around 8 minutes and killed him. It was caught on video .This happened just a couple of months after the story came out of another murder of a black man by white men as he went for a jog. They shot him from the vehicle as if he were an animal they were hunting. That also was caught on video. This in the context of COVID-19, a horrific virus that has killed more than 100,000 people, in just over 100 days in our nation- but a virus that has proven more dangerous for Black and Brown Americans, and for poor Americans who are “essential” workers, than for white Americans who are more likely to have financial security and flexible jobs that allow them to work from home. Additionally many Asian Americans have been discriminated against as somehow being more likely to be infected because of their appearance. COVID 19 is a horrific virus which has exposed some of the horrors of the virus of racism that we already lived under in a horrific way.

And then all of that injustice, all of that systemic racism, all of that needless suffering hit a boiling point and protests began, that happened this week and yes there has been looting and yes at least one more person lost their life in a struggle for protection of property.

Precious lives lost, needlessly. Some because of the coronavirus, some because of systemic racism, some because of the overlapping of the two.

We need to stop and say, lord have mercy. Lord have mercy for Ahmaud Lord have mercy for George, Lord have mercy on our nation. We need to lament together all of these needless deaths. But then we start to say, okay what can we change?

Jim Wallis, evangelical pastor and editor-in-chief of Sojourners magazine has said that America’s original sin is racism. I think we can go farther and say humanity’s original sin is devaluing of a human life, assuming one life is worth more than another. Humanity’s original sin is one person saying to another, I have something you don’t- something is different between us, so I will have control over you, and all the systems that are built up to keep that imbalance of power existing. Humanity’s original sin is fearing difference instead of celebrating it as a gift. This sin manifests itself in many ways, one very clear way was the white officer with his knee on George Floyd’s neck.

What happened at Pentecost, was a huge wind and tongues of flame and people speaking in languages they shouldn’t have known how to speak. It was a huge day, it caught attention, yes the church as we know it was born that day.

But we sometimes don’t go deep enough in what was really going on.

The miracle was not just that these Galilean peasants, most of them as they were, could suddenly speak other languages, the miracle was that they were understood. They weren’t throwing out words that made no sense, they were getting the message through. If you have learned to speak a second language you know, How, in order to speak a language other than your mother tongue, you have to let go a little bit of yourself. You have to relearn some things. Because language is not just syntax and grammar, language carries history and culture. You think differently when you speak in another language. You have to be vulnerable, you let go of some of your power. You have to listen well so that when you speak, So that you can truly be understood.

The Holy Spirit does that, on Pentecost, had them relinquish their sense of control so they could be available to others who were different. The spirit makes the disciples vulnerable, so that some who are there, write them off as fools and drunks. And then, when Peter does get up to speak, he quotes from the prophet Joel, about how the spirit would –in the last days, which he interpreted to be beginning at that moment- be poured out on young and old, male and female, slave and free.

There in that verse we have some of the great differences, the power imbalances that humanity has institutionalized, codified, even worshiped. The spirit of God breaks all of that down. The spirit is not saved for the oldest, malest, most powerful- the spirit is poured out just as well on that powerful old man’s slave girl’s baby girl. Equal. Celebrating each one with all their particularities.

We are used to paying attention when powerful men speak. The spirit asks us to listen just as carefully to the enslaved, the oppressed, the young. In our country today those with less power are usually Black and the Brown persons.

The spirit redistributes the power of voice. The spirit makes us to speak the message of the gospel in a way that is understood, no matter what cultural or power imbalance differences there might be between us.

Here now are two stories that came to me on facebook this week. The first is a pastor colleague in Los Angeles, his name is Jonathan Hemphill. I don’t know Jonathan super well but from what I do know he is dedicated to his family and his church, and always ready with a smile. He is African American with long beautiful dreads and impressive girth. He posted this:

“I’m not going to lie. I don’t really ever get pulled over by the police, but I keep thinking these days, if I ever get stopped and ask to get out the car, because of my size they might kill me. Imagine them tying to get me to the ground. They are going to use excessive force, they are going to be rough with me, they are going to want to choke hold me. Not because I’m resisting, but because they think my size will overpower them. Wow, Im kind of sick of writing these types of things”…. He goes on about how this keeps happening and ends with an appeal to others to flood the world with a message of love.

He knows that his difference, skin color coupled with size, could be feared enough by others to cause him harm. His physical characteristics make some see him as dangerous, needs to be feared, this is humanity’s original sin playing out in the body of a good hearted servant of the Lord.

The second story is from a white cop, not anyone I know personally, but a police officer in Colombia Heights, a diverse city bordering Minneapolis. Justin Pletcher, had always wanted to be a police officer. May 25 was his 10 year anniversary on the force of Colombia Heights. I will paraphrase some of his comments- he was shaken by the murder of George Floyd, he has watched the video trying to be able to justify what his fellow officer did but he sees none, he calls it a murder. He joined the police to change the world and though he has changed moments he hasn’t been able to effect change like he has wanted to.

After seeing the video, when he had to go back to work he was dreading it, another officer told him he watched the video and it made him feel sick. As a shift they discussed and mourned together what had happened.

Then he goes on, saying “I got a phone call from a man named Calvin, a health inspector and that he would be inspecting some neighborhood homes today. Calvin said, “I’m a big black man with dreads,” and he wanted to make sure that police were aware in case we got a call about him walking around the neighborhood. Calvin asked that I come out there to verify his employment so I could squash any calls before they became something bigger. I obliged and I apologized to him for this even being necessary, but I told him I understood.” – Here is another large African American who needs to fear for his safety because of the pattern of how others perceive him. -When they met they quickly found out they had a friend in common, then they decided to walk the neighborhood together. “Calvin was about 15 years older than me, but we talked about how we both loved to travel and about our kids. We spoke about George Floyd and police brutality, and how it’s a different world for black men. We talked about the importance of getting to know people and how racism is borne of fear and ignorance. Calvin spoke and I listened.”

It was an encounter that helped both men that day, in their own way they both believed something bigger had brought them together, then they took a picture together.

Justin knows that that doesn’t make everything okay, he thinks Black and white people should be angry, and he is angry too= but he offers himself to listen, and to work together to find answers.

He finishes with= “We need to listen to each other. We need to support each other. I’m only as good of a police officer as my community says I am. If my community doesn’t trust me, I need to listen. If my community fears me, I need to listen. I met Calvin today and I listened, and because of this I gained an ally and a friend. I know enough about change to know that you can’t tell people what to do, you need to listen to them and build change together. I’m here. As both a police officer and as your friend. So speak. I’m listening.

Love, Justin”

Here is one police officer who has decided to share the power he has as a white cop. He does not hoard it but in this imperfect system we have, this sinful reality of hoarding power, trying to have control over, and weaponizing power, Justin tries to use the power he has as a white police officer for good. By trying to listen, by trying to understand.

That is what the Holy Spirit does. It helps us to listen to understand one another. So we can see that we never had to fear those differences in the first place. That the Spirit pours out on all, that all bear the image of God.

I want to tell you my testimony of one time the Holy Spirit worked in me. I have told this story before I know. I will tell the shortest version:

When I sat and prayed and was still long enough, God showed me my own racist biases. When I listened, the Holy Spirit spoke, and it was of how I needed to repent. How I had been taught to consider others as inferior, and the utter wrongness of it. My own version of this original sin.

The Holy Spirit does some amazing wonderful things- but often what the Spirit does is challenge us. The Spirit calls us to look deep and make a change. We call this repentance. It is often not comfortable. We need to repent, and I am speaking especially to white people here, we need to repent of how we let the original sin of fear of difference continue on. Because people are dying from that.

They are Black and brown people, at the hands of white people. So we have work to do, to undo messages of control over and superior/inferior that sometimes we are so used to we don’t even see are there.

The Holy Spirit can help us in this work, as the prophet Joel that Peter quotes has said, to start seeing the slave girl’s baby girl as, just as honorable and worthy and important as the rich old guy. The Holy Spirit gives us the boldness to get vulnerable so that we can listen and understand. The Holy Spirit makes the understanding possible that God wants this message of abundant life and equality to get around to everyone, so by being vulnerable to one other we all can see the great gift of our differences, not try to squash them, not fear each other.

The Holy Spirit arrived that day with a mighty wind and tongues of fire. May we sense what the Holy spirit is doing today. May today be for all of us A new commencement, a new beginning. God still does new things, God still does life -giving things, God still reconciles us and God still saves! God still gives out the visions and the dreams –if we can listen to the voice of the Spirit, still speaking today, and listen too, to one another.