Jesus and the disciples went up to the mountaintop and Jesus became radiant and the disciples were terrified and Peter blows it again by suggesting memorials might be built and God gets angry at him and now Jesus must go down the mountain and walk his death walk to Jerusalem. And here we go into Lent and have to give things up and be disciplined and serious and have ashes rubbed on our faces this Wednesday and be reminded that we are going to die one day and that we are nothing but dust! 

Maybe you’ve heard about the kid at the funeral who hears the severe minister say “we are but dust” and the kid turns to his mom and says ”what the heck is butt dust?”

Stop this is not funny. This is serious. But seriously maybe we do a disservice to some of this when we make it only serious. Cause I think some of it has got to be joyful, right? Of course the passion and the crucifixion that we’ll come to at Holy Week is in no way joyful but we haven’t entered into Lent yet and we are not at the point of Jesus’ suffering and death and in Jesus there must have been equal parts joy too right? If he was fully God and fully human then his suffering and sorrow must have been as deep as any humans and his joy and enjoyment must have been as deep as any as well. Many Christians do the suffering and sorrow and judgement quite well, but give short-shrift to the joy and playfulness and and lightness that is equally in God if not more so in God. I mean, look at creation and tell me God is not playful as well as serious! 

As I begin reading a book by Ned Blackhawk called The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History, I’m struck by how it frames the violence in Minneapolis and Maine and ICE aggression against immigrants. While many of us are horrified by what’s going on, shocked as we watch the lawlessness of our own government and the violence perpetrated against citizens no less, we should remember that this isn’t unfortunately a departure from the nature of who we are as a country but endemic to who we are. Our present is so entangled in a terribly violent past of genocidal practices by European colonizers against the people who were here first and so entangled with the violence of slavery against Africans that this is really another chapter of government-sponsored violence in our land not some aberration or distortion of who we are as a country. We are so uncomfortable with that truth that there’s an aggressive campaign to white-wash our history again after we’ve just gotten real about it, to make a cleaner and more righteous picture of who we are, to reclaim once again the sinful Christian doctrine of manifest destiny, that God especially blesses the United States of America. Blessed are we who are meant to rule the world! 

But that is wrong...

my heart is sick.

Listen! The cry of the daughter of my people

from far and wide in the land:

‘Is [God] not in Zion?

Is [Love] not [within] her?’”

These powerful and heart-wrenching verses come from the Prophet Jeremiah. He begins his service to God as an Israelite priest in Jerusalem. God, then, calls Jeremiah to “warn Israel of the severe consequences of breaking their covenant with God through idolatry and injustice” (The Bible Project 2025). In the first half of Jeremiah’s book, he sees that God’s people are turning away from God and worshipping false idols: representations of greed and power contrary to the message of God’s love and faith. He, too, sees his people’s rampant oppression and neglect of widows, orphans, and immigrants, who God seeks to protect and claim throughout the entirety of our Scripture. He recognizes the apathy of the priests and leaders in Jerusalem, and he fears that their ego will lead the people into ruin. In chapters eight and nine of his book, Jeremiah pleads with his people to return to God. He underscores the severity that will fall upon Jerusalem, corrupting even the Temple on Mount Zion, where God’s presence dwells. While these words were written thousands of years ago, one of our roles as people of faith and as caretakers of the Word of God is to try our best, with the help of God, to understand what these words may mean to us in our current context. To do so, I invite you to join me as we apply these verses from Jeremiah to an everyday, almost hidden, ethical dilemma that affects most of us, as well as our neighbors–in four parts

That story of redemption is a deep and beautiful one in the Bible that reaches from the very beginning to to very ending, and within it there are 3 trees that stand to mark that beginning, the great hinge-point in the middle, and at the end of the overarching story. 2 of the trees are of the imaginary, not that they aren’t real but they are of the imaginary, images that represent deeper and truer realities at play, and then the tree in the middle of the story is as material and hard as nails. 

Three trees. The first tree is the Tree of The Knowledge of Good and Evil that stands in the Garden of Eden in the creation story of Genesis that Marisa read for us. The third tree is mentioned at the beginning but really comes into the story most gloriously at the end in the new Eden, the New Jerusalem, and that is the Tree of Life, of which Maggie spoke and the middle tree that is the hinge-point of the narrative is the cross-tree on which hangs the God-man Jesus, a divine victim of human violence.

It does not take much to imagine that our God of love would take issue with some people making multi-million and billions of dollars while so many scrape by without basic necessities. I mean, we need not make it more complicated than that. And our sacred scriptures are clear about it - this Creator God to whom we direct our worship had a particular heart for the enslaved and when God liberated them from captivity God made it clear that they themselves had to operate with particular care for justice and mercy, tending to the marginalized and poor. And as we look around at 10 million children in poverty and 39 million people without health insurance in our very very wealthy country, decreases to food assistance programs and increases to military spending and the making of enemies where there weren’t any before, we must see clearly that there is a chasm, a breach, between the way things are and the way God means them to be. 

So as you can imagine he gave quite a keynote address to the gathered church leaders challenging us not to worship God without putting front and center the plight of the poor, that they are who Jesus cared about. In this country, the plight of the poor is 38 million strong, 38 million who live below the poverty line of 27K/year for a family and 13K for an individual. Though neither Republicans nor Democrats are innocent of neglecting the poor, the neglect is potentially taking on a new level, entering even greater crisis right now with the potential of slashing of government programs, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, section 8 Housing that are critical for helping those living in poverty to survive. Rev. Barber challenged us in the church to be on guard, beware, and stand up for the poor and stand against those who promise greater benefit to those already privileged.

            And the Christmas season ends here in the new year at the feast of Epiphany, which was officially Friday, January 6, but we are celebrating Epiphany today as a community with this service and a meal tonight in the Tucker Room and a walk through the darkened church to the manger.  And it’s good and right to end this way because at the end of the season of God’s coming, we move into the new year and through Epiphany we remember that also we must GO TO GOD.  Like the wise men who journeyed from Persia to Israel, it’s now time for us to consider in this new year how if we want a healthy, strong, dynamic relationship with God, it’s going to take some work on our part, it’s going to take our pursuing it, it’s going to take in many instances a journey, either an inward one or an outward one or a both-and but a willingness to journey towards God.  And using the Matthew story of the magi as our guide I want to lift up 5 lessons from their journey to the Christ Child that might inform us in our own pursuit of God. So let’s get to it!

Preacher: Rev. Will Burhans

Date: October 23, 2022

            The youth and I down a couple Sunday nights ago talked about the 7 Deadly Sins. I thought that would be a nice light conversation to have with them after playing silly games in Chidley Hall.  I was curious to see how much they knew, if Generation Z as they are known, knew anything of the 7 Deadly Sins, this list created by the desert fathers and mothers of the 4th century.  So I divided them into two groups and had them guess what the list would be, thinking they’d guess at a few but likely wouldn’t know the whole list. Well, they got ‘em hands down with some debate about which words but ultimately very little trouble. All 7 of them – Greed, Gluttony, Lust, Pride, Sloth, Wrath and Envy. I asked how they knew and they said it’s something still in popular culture and one of them said they watched the movie Seven, which is a gruesome movie made in 1995 where a killer uses the 7 deadly sins to motivate his killings.

            That movie notwithstanding, it’s heartening in an odd way to know that the 7 deadly sins still remain a concept in the minds and imagination of a new generation cause the list really does a remarkable job of capturing the fallen nature of humanity. All these years later, some 1700 years, Greed, Gluttony, Lust, Pride, Sloth, Wrath, and Envy run amok in our world. Not so sure they’ve dissipated all that much.   I’d like to believe that maybe the virtues – generosity, temperance, humility, right action, purity, contentment, peacefulness – have increased in the world?  Do you think? I guess it’d be matter of perspective.

            The desert fathers and mothers spoke of 2 of the 7 Deadly sins as having a special place as the root of the other sins. The deadliest sin – Pride. And the other deadliest of the deadlies – Sloth. Why sloth? Don’t think laziness in work, think apathy, an “eh it’s not worth my effort to care” attitude and then you can imagine why sloth.  Sloth refuses to address and so enables the run amok nature of all the others.

That is one intense passage, isn’t it, Sarah has laid on you this morning?! The words of the Prophet Jeremiah known as the Weeping Prophet and now you know why – “Oh that my head were a spring of water and my eyes a fountain of tears that I might weep day and night for my people.”

The Hebrew prophets were a remarkable group of people, mostly men, but the Tanakh says at least 7 women and probably more. The way we think of prophecy now is the foretelling of the future and while the original prophets did predict the future and their veracity was often dependent upon what they said, coming true, they are more importantly to be understood as the voice of moral conscience for the nation, speaking on behalf of God or in the words of God to the ways Israel had fallen away from God. The prophets were the original speakers of truth to power. And it was never very pleasant for them…speaking truth to power never is. Poor Jeremiah was one of the more tortured of the prophets required by God to ignite the flame of moral conscience of kings and rulers who frankly were at the top of the heap by ignoring their moral consciences.

Jeremiah was called by God as a teenager and like many of the prophets was like “uh, no thanks” and God was like “uh, yes thank you” And so began his miserable career as a prophet of God and we learn by reading the book of Jeremiah that he was - cursed by crowds, beaten and arrested, nearly lynched, thrown in a cistern, tortured, his hometown and friends came to hate him so much that they tried to assassinate him… remember Jesus saying a prophet is never welcomed in his hometown? There you go. And you might think, well at least he was close to God… but that really wasn’t so great either. He accused God of lying to him and failing him, saying “the God who was once a fountain of living water has become to me no better than a deceitful brook” and he became so utterly depressed that he not only cursed his own birthday. (from Westminster Guide to the Books of the Bible, William Ramsay, pgs. 201-202)

That’s all there in the book of Jeremiah. So you can understand why he was called, poor thing, the Weeping Prophet! And now you can also be grateful that God hasn’t called you to be a prophet!

Scripture:  Luke 15:1-10

Preacher: Rev. Will Burhans

Date: September 11, 2022

O Living Water, O My Redeemer (Oh God my Savior) (O My Great Shepherd)

If I ever needed you. I need you now. 

If I ever needed you. I need you now.

            And that is how we come to God… or rather how God comes to us, not in how we’re filled but in what we need, not in all we’ve found but in what we’ve lost and how we are lost. We say in prayer “if I ever needed you, I need you now” and that’s a prayer that lays us open for grace.  It’s a good place to begin here at the start of another fall, with this beautiful little 5-letter word - grace.  It is the Christian faith in a word, it all hinges upon it, the whole story, the arc of how we begin, how we are sustained and where we will land, so needless to say it’s a big, deep, rich, you might say inexhaustible notion, grace is, and so this morning I thought I’d offer a brief meditation on grace and I want to do so by asking 4 questions - 

what is it? 

How is it gained? 

What does it do for us? 

And how do we respond… to such a thing as grace?  

And so I’d say it’s a good morning to consider a story from our scripture that is et around a family table and contains much of those realities. Kerri Pulaski is going to read our scripture but towards the end of my sermon instead of the beginning.  She’ll read from I Samuel chapter 2, a portion from the story of Hannah.  I Samuel in the Old Testament records the history of Israel from the pivotal point of the Eleventh Century B.C, that’s about three thousand years ago.  Leading up to this time the Israelites were living as twelve tribes in Canaan – remember they had come there after wandering for 40 years in the desert.  But things weren’t much prettier for the Israelites in the Promised Land because they were gathered in this loose collection of tribes and clans in Canaan which left them quite vulnerable and fighting for their lives. If they weren’t at war with one another, tribe against tribe, or battling with the pagan inhabitants of the land, then they were all being steam-rolled by foreign invaders.  It was very tenuous for this infant nation newly freed from slavery in Egypt.

          But then, historians will tell you, something amazing happened.  Over the course of seventy years in the eleventh century, Israel became a united empire, a world power located firmly beside a major trade route in the ancient world, exacting tributes from the very people who just decades before threatened their existence.  Sociologists, economists, military historians, have all done their best to explain the possible causes of this massive transition of power in the ancient world. Some say that internationally, the 11th century BC revealed a power vacuum cause of the weakening of Egypt in the South; and Assyria in the North was still 100 years away from being a major power.  Others say that the Philistines on the very eastern shore of the Mediterranean were a rising threat, which helped unite Israel against a clear common enemy.  But what strikes them as amazing is how this unimpressive disjointed collection of clans and tribes scattered across the land of Canaan joined together in the course of seventy years to form the impressive empire of Israel under the leadership of King Saul, then Solomon and finally the golden age of King David?

          Did it all begin with some backroom deals that brought the tribes together with the promise of fortune to follow?  Was it a mighty military machine that was formed to subdue the Canaanites?  These tribes, though they could be at each others’ throats at times were bound under a common bond of belief in what they called the One True God.  So did it begin with a great heavenly army of angels descending to establish the chosen people of God in their rightful place?  Well, not exactly. The way the Hebrew scripture describes it in the book of I Samuel is that the united empire of Israel in the eleventh century BC began with a family feast around a thanksgiving table and the song of a woman named Hannah.

             Hannah was not really someone anyone would take much notice of, the first wife of some guy named Elkanah who was a member of the tribe of Benjamin, and to beat all, the woman was barren.  For a woman to be barren was shameful in that culture since producing children, especially sons to carry on the family’s name, was of the utmost importance. So Hannah was terribly distraught at her ill-fortune in not being able to conceive.  And furthermore, as if that was not enough, Elkanah took a second wife named Peninnah and she of course had plenty of children for Elkanah.

          The time when this was the most painful for Hannah was when Elkanah would bring his family on the annual pilgrimage to Shiloh, the central sanctuary for the tribes of Israel at that time.  There Elkanah would sacrifice an animal and as was customary the meat from the animal would be distributed to everyone in the family equally.  So there would be Penninah with her sons and daughters with meat piled around them, and across the table would sit Hannah by herself with her one little portion.  Elkanah, who in fact loved Hannah dearly, would give her a double portion out of his love for her but his pity just grieved her even more.  Of course Penninah enjoyed every second of it, or so the story says, and she goaded Hannah every chance she got.

          Hannah was as low as low can get when the time came again that year to go to Shiloh with the family.  It was one of those holidays that Hannah dreaded.  All it did was accent her own misery, which in turn brought much joy to Penninah.  So that night all of Elkanah’s family gathered around the table and feasted and drank to their hearts content; except Hannah who sat there weeping and refused to eat.  But as the meal came to a close and the evening wore on, Eli, who was the priest at the sanctuary noticed Hannah standing by herself with her eyes closed, her head raised to heaven and her lips moving a mile a minute.  “Oh, goodness, she’s drunk!”  Eli thought and walked over to her saying “child lay off the booze a little bit.”  But Hannah lowered her head and opened her eyes she turned to Eli and said quietly “no, my Lord, I am a woman deeply troubled; I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord.  Do not regard your servant as a worthless woman, for I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation all this time.”  Eli must have been moved by what he saw in her eyes, for he only replied “Go in peace then; may the God of Israel grant the petition you have made to him.”  Eli probably never would have guessed that his blessing of her would come back around full circle to him, for Hannah had been pleading with God for a son, a single son, whom she promised she would give back as a servant to the sanctuary in Shiloh to serve God’s purpose.

          And God answered her prayer and Hannah bore a son and called him Samuel, which means “I have asked God.”  And so as she promised, Hannah, after weaning Samuel, the greatest gift of her life, brought him to the house of the Lord at Shiloh and presented him to Eli saying “This is what I promised, thus as long as he lives he is given to the Lord."  She must have given him one last kiss, unable to say much else through her tears, she turned and left the sanctuary.  But as she left, the awful deed done, a song filled her heart and overflowed from her lips.  It was the song of a mother singing a a radical, visionary song of hope, of grace, of thanksgiving; a song that spoke of great faith in a God that reaches out and loves and justifies not the most powerful of people but rather the lowly.  It was a song proclaiming that true power and purpose lies with God: 1 Samuel 2:1-10.

And so in the years that followed in the eleventh century BC, Samuel grew under Eli’s tutelage and in God’s presence and eventually Samuel was the one who chose and anointed Saul, the first king of a united Israel.  Through this lowly at one-time-barren woman’s prayerful song and sacrifice, through her trust in a God of grace and purpose a whole people would be gathered together and formed into the nation of Israel.  God’s design was realized not through the most powerful or influential of Israelites, or even in the most dramatic of battles or changes of power but through the most lowly of God’s servants, Hannah from the house of Benjamin.   

Does that sound familiar to you at all?  A thousand years after Hannah bore Samuel another woman of lowly estate would become pregnant and sing a song to God that would be prayed and sung for thousands of years to follow and she would bear a son called Immanuel, “God with us”, who would be a savior gathering in all of God’s children into a universal kingdom of peace.  And a new table would be set there, where all would be invited, the full range of broken, wounded, troubled humanity gathering to receive God’s love so that God’s purposes might be fulfilled, world without end, amen!