There is progeny.
I Corinthians 13
 
I.
Here is a thought experiment. Suppose human beings reproduced, not by the sexual reproduction we know, but by mitosis, that is, asexual reproduction through the dividing of the organism exactly into two, as amoebae do. The result is two fully formed organisms with the identical chromosomal makeup. Then those two in turn divide into two, yielding four identical organisms, and so on.
 
What would that be like? Everybody would be a descendant and an ancestor of identical progeny. We are all siblings. I suppose there could be different ethnicities and races as there are different genus, classes, orders and phyla, but within them all individuals would be identical, that is, they wouldn’t be individuals at all. Come to think of it, those differentiations would not exist either; we would just be an ocean of one human individual. There would be no progeny as we know them.
 
So, would there be what we humans call families? Doubtful, because a “family” would be numerically huge, making living under one roof an impossibility, which is one definition of family. There would be no gestation period, or infancy, adolescence and growth of any kind–we would all be “born” as full-fledged adults. That’s convenient–no school buses or fitting rooms for trying on clothes. Since the descendants are utterly undifferentiated, it might have the benefit of eliminating conflict. But not all, because even human identical twins get into conflicts. In the controversy over nature vs. nurture, nature’s uniformity is trumped by nurture’s differentiation. Witness this song from the Fantastiks–
 
Plant a radish, get a radish, not a brussels sprout–there’s never any doubt.
While with children, It's bewilderin'.
You don't know until the seed is nearly grown
Just what you've sown.
 
Plato’s theory was that in pre-history we were originally single, androgynous creatures that the gods had to cut in half to separate the male and female halves. The result for humans was a built-in longing for one another that cannot be denied.
 
“Surely you can see that no one who received such an offer to come together and melt together with the one he loves, so that one person emerged from two. Why should this be so? It’s because, as I said, we used to be complete wholes in our original nature, and now ‘love’ is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.”
 
Out of that love come families–that’s where you and I surfaced on this planet, each one of us the product of two different sets of chromosomes, no one exactly alike, even twins. We surfaced in a family where all the biology happens, not only copulation and birthing, but dying and decaying, eating and drinking, eliminating and sweating, grooming and hygiene, waking and sleeping, all very personal, very intimate things. While nations contend, and cities cope, and corporations reap, it is in families where the body learns our debt to Nature, for better or for worse.
 
Yes, sometimes for worse. Some of the most basic and truly awful human emotions are wreaked upon each other in families. It’s called growing up. Paul put it simply–when I was a child, I thought as a child. When I became an adult, I thought like an adult.
 
So the bonds formed at home matter all our life long, right into, especially into the aging process when we prepare to leave them behind. The family you start out with is not, and need not, be the one you end up with–fortunately! Lots of mixing and matching occurs as broken families fold into blended families, and extended family members may come back into the picture. Non-family become members too, as obviously happens in every marriage, but also as orphaned children become grafted by adoption into something wholly other than their family of origin. Read Charles Dickens.
 
Many people bemoan their families. But let it be known, the only thing worse than having a family is not having one. People yearn for family. They’ll even call church their family! The possibilities for getting a family now have increased. Due to modern science, there can be progeny for infertile couples or gay couples, all without procreation.
 
So, instead of mitosis, there are progeny, which start life in the home and go on to create homes of their own. The wealth of families is progeny.
 
II.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in (Robert Frost). But the number of people without homes where they have to take you in have increased astronomically. Until Russia invaded Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar, and Venezuela accounted for 63% of the 25 million refugees in the world, but there are even more displaced persons than that within other countries due to civil unrest and violence. These folks have no home to turn to. Soon it will be climate change. It is dire because families are the most vulnerable unit of society.
 
Social service agencies will not have the capacity to place and care for such refugees as are now flooding out of Ukraine. What will our role be? Even the strongest of religious congregations can only host a few families at best. But churches are not social service agencies anyway. We are spiritual communities. We offer things like hope, solidarity, and prayer. It’s not much as the world counts things, but it’s what churches were created for. We also are purveyors of a rare commodity–forgiveness, the lack of which busts families up and drives people out into solitary exile. The slight difference between the Greek notion of love and St. Paul’s is that the content of the word “love” in Christianity is forgiveness. Christ suffered and died because some people prefer their hurts and grievances to health. Such people ask, why solve these problems, why dissolve these emotional knots? I’d rather be right and sleep with my hurts. But Christ brings healing to people who say I’d rather be right than make right my relationship with my father, my mother, my sister or brother.
 
These are just a fraction of the population–the unforgiven and unforgiving number in the hundreds of millions–without a home. In addition, there are 85 million refugees. Do you see what work we have to do? Don’t fret about being a church without a Sunday School. A “family church” doesn’t have to have a Sunday School and be full of families–it has to serve families. Have we got the focus it takes to create such ministries? There are three street ministries locally that I know of in Cambridge, Boston, and Lowell. We could be supporting them financially and in person–attend their services. There is the West Newton Y and Bridge Over Troubled Waters–we can’t do their kind of work but we can partner with them.
 
On this planet, there are only progeny, and universally they (we) each want to take our place in the sequence of generations called “families”–let’s use our church for the healing of families.
 
Rev. Richard Chrisman, March 27, 2022

​Scripture introduction for Matthew 25:14-25.
The lesson for today is the very familiar Parable of the Talents. Very familiar but over-interpreted. The 25th chapter of Matthew contains 3 parables, which are called the Parables of Judgment because the conflict is reaching its climax, and Jesus wants to portray the consequential nature of the Gospel. Know that a “talent” was worth 30 pounds of gold, by approximate estimates of the scholars. It is only used to measure wealth at the scale of rulers or monarchs. So right away Jesus’ listeners knew that the characters were not people banking, and we should know to put this parable into the “fairy-tale” category. So what meaning for real people does that leave us with?
 
What is wealth?
 
I.
What is wealth? Where does wealth come from? How does it grow, and spread? Who owns wealth? Does wealth belong to anyone? Why? Could wealth be something held by a person in trust for all? Is wealth real? Don’t we all have to agree something has value in order for someone to be wealthy? Isn’t wealth just some trees and minerals and grain in another form? Don’t those who had a hand in changing that form have a share in that changed form?
 
I worked on an assembly line of a John Deere factory in East Moline, IL, one summer in college. Down the conveyor belt came former trees and minerals that had been transformed into wires, cables, and engine parts by somebody. I was the next somebody who put together all the electrical parts of the engine, which days before were trees and minerals, so that it would run. Somebody further down the line would put gasoline that once had been a mile underground in the form of oil into a tank, that permitted the engine to pull a plow made of steel, formerly iron ore, that could turn over the soil to plant seeds from which would grow the grain we would later eat out of a cereal box.
 
All wealth comes from Nature plus Labor, but there is an extra ingredient in there. Can you name it? I think the extra ingredient is Necessity. Necessity, we are told, is the mother of invention, and it is dire necessity that drives our will to provide food and shelter for ourselves. We have to make something to sell or we don’t have cash to buy what we need. What’ll we make, who will buy it? Let’s grow something, or manufacture it, steal it, or work for someone who does these things. We can sell our time, or the labor of our bodies, even our own bodies. We are our own most saleable natural resource.
 
In the face of disaster or possible disaster, human beings have resorted to all kinds of desperate schemes. Beginning with the Industrial and the post-Industrial era, with population expanding and land shrinking, mass societies had mass needs that necessitated mass solutions. Enter: the corporation–it’s a story, like many a horror story, wherein a nice young man turns into a vampire. At their inception in the 17th century, corporations were conceived for a given project, for a stipulated time, with particular participants. The charter was reviewed regularly and expired with the project. But one day, actually it was in 1886, corporations were accorded a status as a person by the U.S. Supreme Court, thus to hold a status in perpetuity as a person which shielded the persons in charge from culpability for error or malfeasance. The corporation is accountable externally to the law, of course, but internally it was only to the stockholders and the bottom line. Then the issues became productivity, market share, and the bottom line. Competition is good because it drives prices down, but competition also drives false economies in labor and natural resources and creates products utterly unnecessary to a society.
 
I’m not engaging in corporation bashing here this morning, although it may sound like I am. Principally because, not all young men turn into vampires. Nevertheless, corporations are as susceptible to sin as any persons are. And since corporations sought the status of persons and got it, they must come under the same judgment that persons before God do, just as the three servants in the Parable this morning do. I’ll come back to them momentarily.
 
About the same time I had that job in the John Deere factory, a movie came out about a guy who just came home to his graduation party, and a man takes him aside and tells him, in very personal and confidential tones, “One word, son, one word–plastics.”  The movie, you will recall, was “The Graduate.” It makes practically a straight line from that opening scene to the picture on the cover of your bulletin this morning. How did that happen? Very little social accountability. They know it, they say it, they are proud of it. It took Mother (Mary Harris) Jones to go out in the 1870s and 80s and 90s to the coal fields of John D. Rockefeller to exhort the miners to fight the low wages and dangerous working conditions. She became known as the “most dangerous woman in America” at the time. A hundred years later, Senator Elizabeth Warren earned the title “most dangerous woman in America” for daring to insist on consumer protection laws and start a consumer protection agency. In between there were the Norma Rae’s, the Karen Silkwoods, Erin Brockovich, Naomi Klein, and Michael Moore who documented other real-life versions of them.
 
II.
I know it’s a “catch as catch can” world that demands of business people ingenuity, innovation, extemporizing, improvising, risking, imagining, praying, collaborating, cajoling, some conning, unfortunately a lot of conning of consumers, investors, and lawmakers–. But when “catch as catch can” becomes a “catch me if you can” world, in other words, the world of Enron, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, and Donald Trump, when hutzpah rises and scruples drop, we have a right to claim self-defense and demand a reprieve from this Babylonian captivity. There is nothing wrong with capitalism that a little government regulation and a lot of biblical self-regulation wouldn’t fix.
 
Corporate America has fed and clothed and fueled and armed and overmedicated the country, all the while betraying investors, employees, customers and the whole community–particularly in its obstructiveness about the environment. What to do about it all–at this late stage it has to be through the law and the lawmakers. Nothing short of the Vote will be sufficient. Please follow the CREATION JUSTICE MINISTRY of Eliot Church as it unfolds during Lent toward Earth Day.
 
We need to reclaim our identity as citizens, and Christian citizens at that. When Pope Francis proclaims that nothing short of an ecological conversion is called for, he means a conversion rooted in Christ’s Gospel, as you heard this morning. If you want to apply this parable to corporate performance, remember that the referent of “talent” is the love of God, which only lives in multiplication. This little playlet of Jesus should prompt us to think of the uselessness of unfaith, the needlessness of fear, the superabundance of love, and the joy of fulfilling our responsibilities. Jesus teaches not proselytizing, but multiplying. This parable does not tell you to be either an investor or an evangelist, but to become a big risk taker for the sake of others. John Chrysostom (d. 407 CE) wrote about this parable, “All must use all possessions, material or spiritual, for the good of others. Let us offer all things–wealth, knowledge, influence–for the benefit of our neighbor. Here, those things are called talents that are within the power of a person.”
 
If we don’t heed Christ, we are warned in all three of those Parables of Judgement in the 25th chapter of Matthew, that we will end up in a straight-jacket like Dabney Coleman in “9 to 5,” cast into outer darkness for the lack of the love of God at the hands of Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton, and Lily Tomlin. Dabney Coleman’s character simply lacked the courage of the gospel to resist the corporation-man mentality.
 
If we ask all this of corporations, and churches are corporations, too, non-profit ones, we should ask how we at Eliot Church measure up on the moral conversion scale. Pope Gregory the Great (540-604 CE) challenged his clergy to ask themselves, did they expend the talents of God wholeheartedly in their preaching, almsgiving, intercession, and advocacy? That would be a perfect question to guide an Interim Minister review–do I take the risks for Christ I could or should in my ministry? And how about the congregation–do your hearts overflow with the gospel for all people, in how you articulate yourselves, in how generous you are, in your prayer life and in your public demonstration? That’s for you to say. And you'll have that chance next Sunday when we call for a dialogue following Worship to learn what it might mean to be faithful as a SMALL CHURCH.
 
What is wealth? Where does wealth come from? How does it grow, and spread? Who owns wealth? Does wealth belong to anyone? Why? Could wealth be something held by a person in trust for all? Is wealth real? Don’t we all have to agree something has value in order for someone to be wealthy? Isn’t wealth just some trees and minerals and grain in another form? Don’t those who had a hand in changing that form have a share in that changed form? Let love abound that life be enriched!
 
Rev. Richard Chrisman, Mar 20, 2022 

​Cities are always broke. You knew that, right? New York City had to be brought back from the brink of bankruptcy in 1977. Sixty-three out of America’s most populous seventy-five cities do not have enough money to pay all of their bills, according to Forbes Magazine. Boston is about 5th after NYC, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco.
 
But where do all the skyscrapers and glass emporiums come from? How come there is a Miracle Mile and a Sears Tower in Chicago, a Copley Square and the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston, a Rockefeller Center and Wall Street and the World Trade Center in NYC? City governments may be broke, but the engines of the city aren’t broken.
 
It makes me think of the young maid imprisoned in a dungeon, whom Rumpelstiltskin helped to turn straw into gold with her spinning wheel.
 
The city is such a spinning wheel. The city takes and takes and takes and takes–from the sweat of immigrants’ brows, from the vain fantasy of ignorant investors, from the earth and water around it (stolen in our case from the indigenous peoples), from the bedroom suburbs, from regional farmers, and loggers, and trappers, and miners–it takes and spins from them riches that only the richest kings once knew. Cities operate with impunity, where anything can be bought, and anything can be sold. Including your soul. A city is a free-agent, never heeding the health or safety of those it attracts. Until it is made to.
 
Whoever pointed the fact out? Jesus certainly did, as did the prophets of Israel before him. They called their leaders out because they who put their thumb on the scale were in dereliction of the covenant with Yahweh.
 
Fast forward into our post-Industrial era, the prophet was a novelist, Charles Dickens in England, where the Industrial Revolution had combined with greed and ethical blindness to render city life universally a hazard to health and hope. In America, writers like Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Richard Wright, and F. Scott Fitzgerald held the mirror up to the vanity of the ambitious. It was a social worker named Jane Addams in Chicago who in the first third of the 20th century was the one-woman battering ram that compelled city politicians to address poverty and disease in the poorest part of the city (she also won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, the second woman to do so). In NYC it was Margaret Sanger promoting family planning and contraception. It was Lilian Wald who founded the Henry St. Settlement House in the lower East Side of NYC, it was a Protestant minister by the name of Walter Rauschenbusch in New York City and a Catholic laywoman by the name of Dorothy Day. Cities chew people up, and modern prophets keep redirecting attention to the people victimized. Why? Because people are the wealth of cities. Our question today as a church–what is the churches’ role in the city, whether that be the City of Newton or the greater Boston megalopolis.
 
But did these prophets change anything? Yes, they added to the pressures upon cities coming from every direction. After the Great Depression hit, a great social safety net was created, labor unions were legalized, new sanitation and housing standards were set. Even so, cities remained a vortex of exploitation, crime, and disease. Who are the successors today to Addams, Sanger, Wald, Rauschenbusch and Dorothy Day? Community organizations like the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, Cooperative Metropolitan Ministries, Black Ministerial Alliance, etc. And we should be asking what is churches’ role in the city?
 
Eventually, in the mid-twentieth century, cities became somewhat more habitable and hospitable. In order to survive, cities had to. They need tourists to fleece, knowing fools and their money are soon parted. Cities need to keep the elite residents, too. And cities need artists who live in low-rent districts as the advance guard of the gentrifiers. Urban renewal was conceived to scrape poverty aside and residents shunted into high-rise housing projects for the poor. Cities have been manicured to the degree of a movie set in order to fleece all those people on the duck boats. But the facade disguises the fact that city governments are always operating at a subsistence level and that the wealth of the city engines is created off the backs of millions of people who themselves live at a subsistence level. The volume of products made and sold in a mass society creates economies of scale which yield up volumes of wealth. But people are the wealth of the city, regularly squandered.
 
The cityscape masks the deals that Trump wrote about in his book, the high-risk profiteering and the borderline illegal (and outright illegal) maneuvers deal-makers make. But there are plenty of legal millions made in the city where human labor and natural resources are taken advantage of. Trump is only the latest example of what the Old Testament prophets railed at Jerusalem about in the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Jesus himself wept as he viewed Jerusalem prior to his entrance there. The lack of religious leadership, the corruption of the temple oligarchy compromised a city’s wealth. The lack of standards and enforcement undermines the greatest of cities and invalidates their wealth. The bearers of such criticism encounter lethal reprisal from those in power. They do not welcome restriction. Markets must not only be free, they also must not be questioned. Cities cannot afford to be respecters of persons and still compete.
 
But cities are indeed wonders to behold–the skylines, the parks, the avenues and promenades, the monuments and memorials. What Pierre Charles L'Enfant did for Washington DC, what Baron Haussmann did for Paris, Frederick Law Olmstead did for New York and Boston, fulfilled more grandly what every city strives for–public distinction that makes its citizens feel proud just for living there. And we should never underestimate the creativity and innovation which are only possible in cities, not to mention the satisfaction, the fun and the cultural riches found in them. The city is a miracle, the most advanced artform of human civilization.
 
Cities have a concentration of financial capital, but human capital constitutes the wealth of any nation. One economic theory (Jane Jacobs) holds that a state without a city is a poor state. And that is exactly the lack that Vladimir Putin thinks he will correct by taking Ukraine, because in that country are multiple vigorous cities like Kyiv, etc. Then beyond Ukraine are Poland and all Eastern Europe with their great cities for the taking. The city is indeed a miracle, and Russia badly needs a miracle.
 
Vanity, vanity, all is vanity if the city’s wealth is won at the expense of the women, men and children who populate the city. The existence of the church in the city can serve to remind all the relevant parties of the plumb line held by Yahweh before all people. Whether business heeds it or not, the plumb line determines all–and the religious communities make that known.
 
In the greater city, of which Newton is a small part, people struggle for survival. Race and ethnicity place thick filters over the doors to opportunity. It is interesting that Pope Francis pauses in his encyclical about global warming to remind us that love of nature is empty without love of humanity. That love is scarce when city governments have their own racial blinders on, and often collude with the financial power brokers. Cities deserve judgment, and they deserve support. How can a church, like the one situated here at Newton Corners, do that? Consider calling a minister who serves as a city missioner in a city setting and acts as a chaplain to the congregation on Sunday mornings. Or dedicate a portion of the endowment earnings to a non-profit or agency in the city who fulfills our mission as a proxy.
 
I have been at pains since I came to Eliot to help you see yourselves as a “city church.”  The day you do, you will discover your mission and your destiny.
 
Rev. Richard Chrisman, March 13, 2022
 

I.
 
We live in a time of unprecedented abundance. But not for everybody. Large swaths of scarcity afflict many parts of the world. I guess Russia is acting like it is one of those deprived areas, or pretending to be, or they wouldn’t be out knocking off another country to annex its wealth. Except that Russia is destroying the country in the process. What a stupid, sorrowful tragedy on top of a worldwide pandemic.  
 
Russia’s criminal assault upon a sovereign nation has no justification. Once again, though, it illustrates a universal equation underlying our planetary existence: the equation to which we are all subject being: land=food=survival=land. The territorial imperative governs both nature and civilization, too, from prehistoric times to the establishment of the autonomous nation-states. Invasions like Putin’s have taken many different forms over time, we have committed our own and for the same reasons. Lately, the balance of power and respect for national boundaries has mostly kept the peace. But this invasion of Ukraine is an utterly brazen and ruthless land-grab. It puts Putin in a special line, from Napoleon to Hitler to himself. What has terrified us is that in the nuclear era no nation can afford – even in Ukraine’s defense – to prompt a nuclear attack.
 
As the Ukrainian people have done in resisting this invasion, we must summon our own spiritual strength now. Our part is to take our share of the responsibility for this fossil fuel dependent world. Oil, oil, oil. This war is yet another wake-up call to eliminate our dependence upon oil. Will this country respond to the plain facts and take up the discipline of reducing oil consumption and dependence? We should have done it long since in the cause of reducing fossil fuel consumption and cleaning up our air. The nation should have been prosecuting fossil fuel with the moral equivalent of war, the way President Jimmy Carter told us to during the oil cartel crisis of the mid-1970s, almost 50 years ago. He was right, and of course not enough people listened. After all, we have the best Congress money can buy.
 
At that time, it was a prudential argument, made for American self-interest. But now the very survival of the planet is at stake, the urgency is compounded by arriving at the point of nearly irreversible global warming because of damage to the environment and atmosphere by carbon emissions.
 
But aren’t Russia and the US just mirror images of each other? Isn’t the Ukraine just Russia’s Iraq? The tragedy for Ukraine results from oil being king, just like the tragedy caused when cotton was king. Nations will sacrifice anything, or anybody, for the sake of our creature comforts and its wealth. And, if it comes down to being able to put bread on the table, then stand aside, people are disposable and dispensable.
This is the time to renew the commitments made at the first Earth Day in 1970–this country has strayed from the path, because the Koch brothers, among many others, waged a campaign of disinformation that scared the populace which suited the corporations just fine. American corporations and the Congress hardly bother to dispute the facts any more, they just deny that the facts are their responsibility.
 
II.
 
But here we are, it’s the first Sunday of Lent, and Lent is just another word for mid-course correction, which lines right up with our mission. A mid-course correction today, though, involves something more like a conversion, given the polarization of the nation. Circumstances have changed, miscalculations have occurred along the way (the nation elected a science denier in Donald Trump), and we are significantly more tired.
 
We find ourselves in a kind of wilderness as Christ did. We witness Christ resisting the temptations of the Devil, which comes down to refusing the quick-fix and magical thinking. Jesus had one thing in mind during his ministry only, to get us to focus on our behaviors and decisions. We have first to resist the temptation of blaming our enemies and learn that if there is any “enemy,” it is us. That is a huge spiritual step, hard for individuals and, for nations, a near impossibility. This country always talks about personal freedom, but remains entirely oblivious to the freedom we lack from self-strangulating dependencies.
 
Pope Francis has made our case. Our job is to take up the “ecological conversion” of our nation–and to do this by applying ourselves to legislators and legislation. He says we must do this as a function of our relationship with Christ. This is “not an optional or secondary aspect of our Christian experience.” By all means, let’s uphold our Christian values by example with concrete actions–diet, personal purchases, way of life. We must do this as individuals and families, and also as a church. But self-improvement alone will not do the trick. It is the vote, at this late stage, only the vote which will turn the so-called tide.
 
Lent is often practiced as a penitential season, a season of abstinence, self-denial and mortification of the flesh in preparation for Holy Week and the Passion of Christ. The idea was to approximate sympathetically the suffering of Christ. Wrong. Such a goal is neither attainable, desirable or theologically warranted. It is one of those grotesqueries of religion into which Christianity seems to revel. Mel Gibson’s movie is an obscenity. I want us to use Lent to a positive purpose.
 
The treasure that Jesus wants us to seek gives eternal satisfaction. According to this, the “wealth of nations” must be understood as the land and the people together, and in their indissoluble relation to each other. We sacrificed that vision when we extirpated the native peoples of this continent. There is a record of the early learnings, but that was lost with the genocide. Since then we have paved over the continent three times with our superhighways, our urban sprawl, the glorious suburbs, and our mechanized farming–all fueled by fossil fuels. The commercial world is possessed by a frenetic competitiveness, not to meet human needs, but to beat out someone else who might meet human needs better. This competition is said to keep prices down, but it drives up unnecessary products. The wealth of this nation is fueled with oil. It needs a conversion to Christ, because Jesus said, I am come that you might have life, and that you might have it more abundantly. That’s the Resurrection way. I invite you this Lent to contemplate the abundance of our lives and what we are supposed to do with so much.
 
Rev. Richard Chrisman, March 6, 2022