Psalm 121
Judges 16:4-6
 
“I lift up my eyes to the hills--
    from where will my help come?”
 
The oldest English translations of Psalm 121 (Geneva Bible 1599, King James 1611) render the first lines as a statement, as an affirmation of the certainty that our help comes from God. The modern translations of this Psalm, however, begin with an honest question—from where/ will my help/ come?
 
The tone is more than quizzical; it is almost desperate. The confident answer that God will help follows quickly, but you can guess where the Psalmist is coming from. If somebody is looking up and to the hills, somebody is in trouble. Somebody is wondering just where to turn.
Your strength has run out, the ground feels like it’s moving under you—this is implied by the question.
 
Then right away in the second verse, the Psalmist answers his own question: your help comes from God. He says, “God will not let your foot be moved. . . God will keep you from all evil.”
The Lord may be the source of the Psalmist’s strength, ultimately, but for some scary moments the question is gravely in doubt.
 
That’s where we have been for weeks and months now, reaching to a crescendo of natural disasters last week of fire and flood and contagion in this land. And I have been thinking about just how many, many people must be up against it right now. I wonder daily, to whom or to what do people turn under these sustained, dire circumstances? What are families saying to each other at the dinner table?  What do people carry in the solitude of their hearts as they survey this scary mess and worry about a way out it? Whence cometh their help?
 
And now the same goes for the nation—I don’t know a scarier moment for a democratic country than when a sitting President declares publicly that there may be no transfer of power after the election, just a continuation, based on his surmise that the vote will be invalid—this won’t be an “honest” election, he says. What this ominous expression amounts to remains to be seen, but very likely we, the people, will be calling to the hills somewhere for deliverance from this anxious situation.
 
The human animal is a vulnerable creature—survival was a sometime thing for millennia—food, shelter had to be fought for and attacks from enemies who want your food and shelter had to be fought off—as it still is today in many parts of the world and in this country. So my thoughts turned to the Israelites’ early history when they dropped in to Canaan and faced enemies on all sides. In their frontier era, before there were kings, long before, the 12 tribes of Israel each had their own militia and each had their “warlord” to lead them. Their story is told in the Book of Judges which tells about eight of these warlords, who doubled as “judges” or community arbiters of cases in appeals for settlement of disputes.
 
But they really were wild men (and one wild woman, Jael) who, like the desperados of the American West, were kind of military adventurers with blood on their minds—the Book of Judges is close to bloodiest in the Bible. Their names may be vaguely familiar to you—Ehud, Gideon, Abimelech, Jephthah, and Jael, Jael, who drives a stake through the temple of Sisera, an enemy commander!
 
The most familiar, of course, will be Samson, the strong man who famously gave away the secret of his strength and was captured, bound and blinded then finally took his revenge after a long captivity when his hair grew back by pulling down the roof of their temple onto the heads of 3000 enemies and killed them.
 
You only heard a portion of the 3-chapter-long tale in which we learn that Samson is a vain man, given to violent excess, a sucker for sexual allure, and a fomenter of chaos unleashed by Yahweh upon the Philistines. I take the prerogative of a biblical preacher to draw a serious comparison of Samson, that just might have come to your mind, also, with our President, Donald Trump—a vain man, given to violent excess, a sucker for sexual allure, and a fomenter of chaos unleashed by Yahweh upon the Philistines.
 
The President has only invoked God once ever, and then very indirectly, by gingerly (awkwardly) holding up our Bible before a church across from the White House where the streets had just been swept of protesters by federal agents armed with tear gas and rubber bullets—so the divine calling does not apply, except perhaps in the President’s mind. The comparison between Samson and the President has its humorous parallels, which I won’t pursue, but I do find their appetite for mayhem to be a very consequential similarity.
 
As Prof. Greg Mobley wrote in his 2005 book, “There is something comic about Samson: he is the bull in the china shop, the rube, the hillbilly, who topples all the carefully arranged structures of Philistine urban society.” –and there you have the President.
 
But there is also something tragic about Samson, Prof. Mobley goes on—“Samson is human enough to be aware of human love, but he is too wild ever to experience it,” (referring to his serial attraction to attractive women.) “Samson is a mule, powerful but producing no offspring, employed temporarily to clear the field of Philistines,” a man whose search for love never gets fulfilled by the time he pulls down the whole edifice over his own head and everybody else’s in the bargain.
 
I would agree with Prof. Mobley that the story is tragic in Samson’s case, but in the President’s case, only pathetic. Because what’s missing in the President, and I am by no means the only one to point this out, is the spiritual underpinning which gives anyone a vocation, a God-given call to a higher purpose than one’s own self-aggrandizement—like the example of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life and career whom we mourn today.
 
Such spiritual underpinnings lend a person humility in the face of one’s own ambiguities and vulnerability. There is no presumption possible of self-righteous infallibility, not even in the over-wrought Samson. Samson would not say, “Only I can fix it.”  Because Samson was dedicated from birth to God. It was forbidden by the angel to his mother for his hair to be cut—this was the traditional sign of being set apart for holy purposes.
 
Again as Mobley writes, “for all his ups and downs, criss-crossings of topographic and cultural borders, Samson [knows] he remains betwixt and between.” So, the “heroes” of the Bible—as some people, even religious ones, mistakenly take them—are not “heroes.” They approximate Christ’s story, of which Jesus is the type, whereby strength is internal and is God-given.
 
Another serious consideration in this secular country which is not biblically literate, is: in what hills are today’s population looking for their help—to what “heroes” do they turn? This is worrisome when you run down the inventory of cultural icons and the many “strong men” among them—Superman, Batman, Spiderman, who else? Go back to our movie westerns and the detective and police TV serials—figures who alone can fix it for us, and do.
 
The question to ask is, what strength does the hero impart to the reader or viewer, or does the victory which comes at the end belong only to the fantasy object of wish-fulfilment? If so, our only recourse is imitation—imitate the violence—or wait for the next movie hero. In Samson’s case, we are not being asked, and we are not remotely tempted, to imitate his violence. It would rather be for us to ask, how long with the Lord would it take me to grow that much hair—that is, that much strength—with which to endure and prevail through a captivity?
 
There are mortal consequences to follow from this coming election. It’s why the Psalms contain so many prayers for a good king. Nobody has a choice about a king, so it really matters if it is a good man or not, an able man or not, a strong person or not. Similarly, in a democratic country, we consider who is a good man or woman, an able man or woman, a man or woman called to a higher purpose, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg was.
 
I want for us to find the strengths that are hidden in us by the grace of God—ask yourselves today what gifts your family, your community, your church or temple gave you that has been growing in you unawares. Think of it, Monday is Yom Kippur when Jews examine themselves in the strong light of God’s requirement of mercy and justice. It is for us to seek the strength to fulfil that requirement ourselves, and to be measured by it. But, for that, we must truly affirm, with today’s Psalmist, that our help comes from God.
 
Next Sunday I will explore with you what kind of strength Christ imparts to us. And the next Sunday, I want us to appreciate just how God confers or transfers strength to us. In the meantime, may God’s strength be yours. Amen.
 
--Rev. Richard Chrisman, September 23, 2020

Elizabeth L. Windsor, DMin.
The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 20, 2020
Psalm 130
Isaiah 40: 6-8
Matthew 6: 25-34

We are a people in the midst of waiting – waiting for a Covid-19 vaccine, waiting for the fires in the West to burn out, waiting for the next hurricane to make landfall, waiting for the election, waiting for racial and environmental justice. And if that isn’t enough, our individual lives are hold too. We wait to hug our grandchildren, we wait for our kids to go back to school, we wait for Symphony Hall, theaters and the Church Sanctuary to open safely. We wait for “normal” to return.
 
The explosion of waiting not only happens around us, but in us. Our bodies – as well as our souls – feel the weight of the dread in which we live. The Washington Post reported last weekend that dentists are treating an astronomical increase in night time teeth grinding due to the stress, anxiety and depression we carry in our bodies. We are in good company – our biblical ancestors ground their teeth too. The phrase “and there will be weeping and great gnashing of teeth” appears five times in the New Testament alone.
 
As we wait and wait and wait some more, I find myself constantly remembering a truth my Dad has shared with me throughout my life:  “You can hang by your fingernails for as long as you have to – as long as you know when you can let go. It becomes difficult only if you don’t know when you can let go” – pretty much sums up where we are, doesn’t it?
 
Waiting has us all hanging by our finger nails indefinitely. It is excruciating. I don’t know about you, but while I am hanging by my fingernails, I am also weeping and gnashing my teeth.
 
For many of us, waiting for this duration of time is unfamiliar. In a 1st world, 21st century nation, waiting is not something we are used to experiencing. After all, strawberries are available year round in our grocery stores, even though their growing season is over in the Northeast as summer ends. Amazon delivers most things we need and want the next day. We haven’t had to wait very often.
 
The spiritual and emotional pain of our waiting can make us feel unfamiliar to ourselves. It is disorienting and overwhelming. No wonder we gnash our teeth.
 
The Scripture passages that Rick just read tells us that we are like the grass that will wither away while God will endure, that worry will not add even an hour to our lives, that God knows what we need and cautions us “Today’s troubles are enough for the day” – yep, and then some. But somehow, these words aren’t sufficient no matter how much truth is in them. Do they teach us what we are to do in this prolonged experience of waiting that has been forced upon us? 
 
This morning’s Psalm gives us a clue: “I wait for God, my soul waits, and in God’s word I hope.”  Hope. The Biblical stories show us that “hope” is a verb, not a noun. The people of God had plenty of reasons to despair: Slavery in Egypt, wandering in the desert, exile in Babylon and a host of unanticipated disasters and tragedies along the way. There was never a moment when salvation was complete. Life was a constant struggle - or as my Dad puts it, There is no rest for the weary.”
 
In her book, Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, Benedictine nun, Joan Chittister writes, “There is a deep down bone weariness that comes with struggle. The sheer weight of going on knowing that nothing we can do will change things as they are, that there is no going back to what was, exhausts the timbre of the soul. We want to give up. We want to quit.”  There were plenty of times in the biblical stories when quitting seemed to be the only choice – the baby boys of the Hebrews killed by the Egyptians, Moses smashing the tablets as a result of the people’s idolatry, the destruction of Jerusalem and the Exile from Temple, the crucifixion. And yet – Moses’ mother, sister and Pharaoh’s daughter conspire to save him and he lives. He goes back up Mt. Sinai and again brings back the tablets of the law. The exiles return to Jerusalem. The Temple is re-built. Jesus rises from the dead.
 
Hope requires the active choice to endure. Sister Joan points out that there are instructions for living hope in all of the biblical stories. “We see that our creating God goes on creating – whatever the apparent failures of the process- and asks the same of us. When we refuse to give up, either on ourselves or on the world around us, we become our own small sign that God is, that in the end right will prevail . . . Hope is not a denial of reality. But it’s also not some kind of spiritual elixir . . . Hope is a series of small actions that transform darkness into light. It is putting one foot in front of the other when we can find no reason to do so at all.”
 
It is hard to keep putting one foot in front of the other – especially while hanging on by our fingernails, weeping and gnashing our teeth. But that is what God asks us to do. Each bag of food we collect for the Centre Street food bank, each time we venture out in our masks and patiently wait in a line spread six feet apart, each on-line Zoom session we help another navigate, every time we laugh at a child’s joke, every budget we plan, every call to our elders, every plan we make to vote –each of these – and so many more- are small actions of hope that transform us and the world around us.
​
Sister Joan ends her book with these words, “We think of hope as grounded in the future. That’s wrong . . .Hope is fulfilled in the future but it depends on our ability to remember that we, like [our ancestors in faith] have survived everything in life to this point . . .Why not this latest situation too? Then we hope because we have no reason not to hope. Hope is what sits by a window and waits for one more dawn, despite the fact that there isn’t an ounce of proof in tonight’s black, black sky that it can possibly come.”  Let us continue our small actions of hope as we wait together for the dawn. Amen.

I.
 Our streets are not quite as empty as they used to be—they bustle with a little more traffic now.

But the intersections look abandoned, buses are largely empty, the trolleys going past our window at home are empty. A feeling of desolation has overcome the city. People are being taken from their homes to hospitals by the Covid virus, and some do not return. All this happens in isolation—there is no one to hold your hand in sickness or in death.
 
The author of the Lamentations wrote, “How deserted lies the city, once thronging with people!”  The book of Lamentations in the Old Testament, a six-chapter book of uninterrupted weeping, was written in the aftermath of the conquest of Israel (in 536 BCE) by the Babylonian empire. The city was destroyed and the population was marched away into exile after the invaders stripped Jerusalem. Like the Israelites, we have lost the city we knew and what cities are known for—commence and culture, congestion and conflict, convivial gatherings with food and drink, excitement, here, there, hither and yon. It is quite gone.
 
The result? “Once great among the nations, [the city has] now become a widow; once queen among the provinces, now put to forced labor.”
In Lamentations, God is silent. The Temple was destroyed, and no Word of comfort from God went forth.
 
At the very same time, we are also witnessing at long distance the horror of the West Coast fires.  In Washington, Oregon, and California, by the tens of thousands, people’s homes are being taken from them—and entire communities, churches and all. The biblical fire next time is knocking on our door today.
 
I could go on. As one Eliot member put it, “There’s too much, I just don’t know what to do. . . not know where to send my money, what cause to support and how. . . .”
 
Consider Jerusalem, without its houses of worship, what would any city like Jerusalem be? If people can’t go inside to sing, pray and be inspired, where will they find comfort? And consider ourselves, unlike Jerusalem, we still have our synagogues and mosques and churches. And our congregation is intact, however dispersed we may be.
 
II.
 
How do we feel about this? Do we know? Have we consulted ourselves? How does the city feel, its denizens, its citizens? Where would you find that out? Among all the big problems of this our poor old planet, could the biggest one be that we don’t know the grief we feel about these very big problems?
 
The Psalmist of lamentations continues—“She weeps bitterly in the night, tears run down her cheeks.” At least she knows what she feels. Have we come to tears yet, do we cry? I know we want to—I certainly do! We get as far as feeling anxious, disoriented. . .  Our souls are grieving through this onslaught, hardly knowing it. And if we do know it, do we remotely understand what our sadness is about—what is the loss that causes our sadness? Unwitting, we live with fires of our own, like peat bog fires, way in the underground of our souls.
 
Maybe the children show it better than we do—petulance, opposition, maybe tantrums. Likely  as not, some adults experience similar outbursts. Grief is insidious. If not expressed, it undermines the will, saps our strength, it depletes our core.
 
For individual grief, normally, we have funerals, we have intimates with whom to share, we have counselors, although not now. And what do we have for national grief? Who attends to that?  Societies eventually respond and build some memorial years later—Holocaust memorials, the Vietnam Memorial, 9/11 in NYC—they have become destinations where we can cry, later. Our spirits need tending now, and this pandemic isn’t nearly over.
 
How do we lance the ongoing and unacknowledged grief of a nation? This is the crisis within the crisis of 2020—we have not begun to mourn and have no way to do so.

III.
I believe this is the church’s vocation, if we can conceive of such a ministry. Is the church big enough for it in the year of Our Lord 2020? It is up to us to name this moment, to validate the feeling, and to create a platform for its free expression. So, we still have a role to play, we always have and always will. Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever—although human circumstances may change. But now we must project this ministry publicly.
 
Now, fact is, Paul named you when he wrote to the Corinthian church. When Paul started the congregations around the Mediterranean, they were pretty rag-tag outfits. They had no assets of a material sort, and not many were very educated. But whatever he started there had legs, because the movement grew. In no time, it seems, a rudimentary organization emerged from the movement in Galatia, in Ephesus, in Colossae, in far off Corinth and Thessalonica. But not before some confusion. Paul wrote to the church at Corinth after his first two visits that they had all they needed for sustainability—each of their various needs could be met internally by different kinds of participants—they had prophets, they had teachers and healers, ecstatic speakers. Their only mistake was to suppose that communities are uniform and to underestimate the way a variety of gifts come together to build up the community. You can rely on each other to build up your community, Paul exhorted them, and you can also rely on something even more reliable—the love of God.
 
This is true right here. So don’t be misled by the biblical language—you may be wondering, where are any prophets, teachers and healers to be found today, except among people like you who have found their way to articulate their faith in God.
 
They say actions speak louder than words, and Eliot’s actions over the decades in service to social justice have been heard. But did you ever consider how words are actions? Here is a ministry during Covid and post-Covid that is begging for attention, a vacancy needing to be filled. Some of you already fill these roles—incognito.
 
You are no different than the church in Corinth (except you have no St. Paul). However, nobody till now gave you permission, nor orders either, to speak till now. We have a canvas on which to paint our ministry to a grief-stricken but grief-blind country. We have the whole exterior of the Eliot Church grounds.
 
IV.
Don’t resist the call because you have some sense of ecclesiastical propriety. Put aside your own resistance to a new role for yourselves as a church, a public ministry. Whether Covid goes away or not, we have a public ministry to perform. Is this church big enough, spiritually speaking, to conceive ministry big enough to address society’s need to grieve? This is our country, this is our city, this our church—this is our year!
 
After we educate ourselves, individually and as a congregation, we will discern just what way to minister to the city’s most fundamental needs. And when that time comes, don’t resist. When the Discernment Committee sponsors the Small Group discussions for you to consider models and missions for the future, don’t resist the call of God into a new ministry of which you could have a part. Find your way beyond resistance to exaltation in this moment when Eliot Church will find its true vocation. 
 
I am not holding out some silver lining among these dark clouds—this is actually the whole point of having been born at all, which is to serve. If you feel like that one Eliot member who said, “There’s too much, I just don’t know what to do.”  Then what I have to say to you is, “Don’t just do something—FEEL something.” Feel your grief, and help others to do so, too.
 
This ministry may be something we may be able to conceive if we follow the ArtMob’s lead this fall and explore how we might better use the great space around the church as a means of articulating faith, hope and love to this community.
 
In 2020, many of the things you thought were important really aren’t anymore.
 
Things you paid little attention to—like your church—turn out to be the most important thing in a desolate city whose most fundamental needs aren’t being addressed but could be—by us!
Let’s see how big Eliot Church really is, spiritually speaking, and whether we can minister to the needs of this grief-stricken and grief-blind nation.
 
Amen.
--Rev. Richard Chrisman, Sept. 13, 2020

I am going to tell you what I see in the American world of black and white. I am going to relate my vision to you. This is not a vision that I once had and which passed. This vision has stayed with me continuously ever since it was born, and is how I see the world and the people in it, in real time, now.
 
This vision had a birth, yes, a gradual birth that became and remains today fully present to me. It started rather early in my dark American journey, when I found myself before dawn on the Lord’s Day walking the deathly city streets of a great metropolis, not this one. The city was foreign to me at first but became my home.
 
As I stepped out onto and through its streets that day, the dawn broke. No one stirred at this early hour of the Sabbath, so for a little while I had the lonely buildings to myself, with their blank windows and empty doorways in the poorest part of the city.
 
I wandered for a while, being early for church, without purpose or particular destination. With the advancing sun, I expected that soon, out of the tall and crowded apartment buildings, would flow the aggrieved people of this metropolis, bearing all the signs of their rancorous relation with the powers that be, showing the fatigue in their postures, the world-weariness in their faces.
 
Then I awoke, not from sleep because I had already shaved as usual and dressed while I had my coffee—I awoke from my pedestrian life which I shared with all Americans, amidst the noise of racial enmity, the competition for bread and gold, and the hype of this entertainment nation.  Strangely, though, I found that, as people began to fill the streets, everyone was dressed not just for church, what can I say except that they were dressed—for heaven!
 
The scene could have been from the Book of Revelation, which is why I picked this passage for you this morning, where the multitudes were dressed in robes, but here these were purple, beautiful, floor length velvet robes draped over azure satin tunics, flowing gowns, every one of them, with full sleeves and elegant ribbons streaming out.
 
I recognized that, being people of color, these were of course all the descendants of the enslaved.  And being dressed in purple, which I knew was the ceremonial color for suffering and for royalty, they projected outward the history they carried in their bones, a history that made its tortuous way from auction block to lynching tree to northern public housing tracts—“Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod. . .”
 
They moved into their streets with dignity, with determination, with the solemnity of knowing the secrets that only pain divulges. And each was making their way in the same direction as I was going, but they were not the only ones, other people of color came into the thoroughfare from other avenues, to join this river of spiritual solidarity.
 
I recognized another group as workers, some from the SEIU and the UAW (I was a member for the two summers in college when I did factory work), others were day workers. These moved splendidly along dressed in silken blouses with matching blousy pantaloons and capes from their shoulders that caught the breeze.
 
Their heads were graced by headdresses—what I saw were stylized imitations of the bonnets that women wore in the 19th century, bonnets that Mother Jones always wore to the organizing events in West Virginia and Pennsylvania and Colorado where she helped those men and their families face down the mill and mine owners. The flouncy purple and violet hats were emblems of the soft hand that Mother Ann Jones brought up against the iron fist, and they carried themselves with dignity and determination and solemnity.
 
Then I saw more coming from another direction into our stream, I guessed because of their candy-cane red gowns of humorous academic design that these were people who sacrificed their educations to care for aging grandmothers, or their own children, or jobs they needed just to eat.  Heads high, they flowed along, assured of their place in the universe although displaced in time, having earned not just knowledge but wisdom from the altered path of their intentions, all of them radiating dignity, determination and solemnity. 
 
I went along with the multitude into a church, though it was only a storefront church whose name was Mt. Zion Tabernacle of Love. I witnessed multitudes and multitudes that Sabbath morning, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, gracefully approaching the sanctuary door, over which were the words, “Victory to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.”
 
I saw, as everybody entered without crowding, each one being given a palm branch, the sign of victory over death carried by pilgrims on the Passover day Christ entered Jerusalem for the last time. Thousands were gathering in a room that could only seat 50, approaching the dais where sat the elders and deacons of this church on either side of a great throne which I could not see but radiated light. My view was obstructed but I plainly heard the words the choir sang--
 
Amen! Praise and glory and wisdom, thanksgiving and honor, power and might be to our God forever! Amen.
 
By then, I had time to notice that their outer robes had somehow turned pure white. I was told that, having passed through the great ordeal, through the daily depreciation, daily denigration, daily underestimation, how they had washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb in the holy sanctuary.
 
The next day I just had to return with a friend and see if it happened again, and people in the street were going about their business on the way to work or school, again dressed just as I saw them yesterday, only in their original robes. I said to her, see how everybody is robed, just like I told you, except she said what did I mean, they look like people going to work.
 
Somehow, I had new eyes.
 
Henceforth, so it was to be, that I would always see people from the vantage point of their ultimate triumph over death—death which had undone so many people of color for so long in our country. Now I had been given always to see the descendants of the enslaved, the workers, those who sacrificed for their family’s subsistence, fully dressed in their dignity, their determination, and the solemnity of knowing the secrets that come with pain. And then I saw them going out from the sanctuary, warmed by the ardor of their devotion to the Lamb who will shepherd their march on “till victory is won.”
 
That’s what I see, when I teach my GED classes, when I see you the congregation of Eliot Church—I see everybody dressed in the hardships and conflicts that people endure and dressed in the triumph that awaits them.
 
America is certainly getting an education lately in the unseen lives of the African-American people. We are having to reckon today with the raw emotions of a community regularly traumatized by the American Way of Life. 
 
To think people had no idea! They are getting an idea now from the outpouring in the media of black passion and suffering. The testimonies of black intellectuals, artists, writers, movie makers, poets, rappers, politicians, fathers, mothers, working people should shame and educate us.
 
Shame upon America, not even to guess what systemic racism costs the souls of black people and whites as well. And shame, to side with armed police against unarmed black men. But a nation went to the streets, thank God, over the latest violation of a black body.
 
Americans just can’t seem to see past the conditions of poverty that we ourselves have put African-Americans in. Americans only see the surfaces, and they are either too frightened or appalled or disgusted to see the reflection of their own policies.
 
We should be ashamed. Why should it take a Poor Peoples’ March on Washington, whether in 1963 or last week, to make the point--we live in the aftermath of slavery.
 
In a moment, we will sing these words:
 
O shame to us who rest content while lust and greed for gain in street and shop and tenement wring gold from human pain, and bitter lips in deep despair cry, “Christ has died in vain!”
 
Americans can change how we see African-Americans, and must. We can triumph over the living death of systemic racism in America, if we learn to see all people attired in the colors earned by their suffering and act accordingly.
 
That’s what I see.
 
In a moment we will be singing these words and let it be our most earnest prayer:
 
Give us, O God, the strength to build the city that has stayed too long a dream, whose laws are love, whose ways are your own ways, and where the sun that blazes is your grace for all our days.
 
Amen.
 
--Rev. Richard Chrisman
September 3, 2020