“Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never be forgiven.” 
​Mark 3:29
 
What a cathartic week in the United States of America! We have certainly been given our marching orders now. 
 
The death of John Lewis, Lewis’ words played in the Rotunda, the Edmund Pettis bridge crossing, his funeral with Pres. Obama’s eulogy—an emotional week, powerful both in replaying the important history which we not only witnessed but actually have had a part, and powerful in anticipating history still to be made, as we were instructed by John Lewis himself in his departing message to us.
 
He wrote, just before his death,
“Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.”
 
I said last Sunday that it’s time for Eliot to invoke the Holy Spirit. Because if we are to find our way to the next settled minister, it will take the Holy Spirit working in us. If we are to make our way through this pandemic, it will take the Holy Spirit inspiring us. And, if we are to fulfill John Lewis’ charge, it will take the Holy Spirit in us. 
 
Because the springboard to effective struggle for peace, of course, is through inner peace.   Gandhi, King and John Lewis were unanimous in rejecting hate and promoting love. They unanimously directed us in a spiritual practice. 
 
We are told, aren’t we, be the change, the peace, you wish for the world. I believe a version of that injunction can be found in Jesus: seek the kingdom, the peace, of God and all else will follow. Now that is our subject—the inner peace without which the long march toward justice is impossible. You could detect that peace in John Lewis’ own voice and personal demeanor—where can we get some of that?
 
There is one word for it, and it is in forgiveness, the sum and substance of the New Testament, the core of Christ’s gospel. The good news is that forgiveness will set you free, and forgiveness will free you to seek the freedom of others.
 
I say to you, the Holy Spirit is the spirit of forgiveness.
 
Claim the Holy Spirit of the apostles who found its power to heal in their time of desperate political upheaval.
 
Claim the Holy Spirit of Pentecost—those flames that appeared over the heads of the ecstatic crowds in Jerusalem 50 days after the Resurrection, they were on fire with some experience that made them one, speaking one language in that they mutually understood each other across nationality and race, unifying what was fractured—they were responding to the gospel truth of forgiveness which unites and restores people to right relation with each other.
 
Yes, and claim the Holy Spirit where the Words of Institution in Holy Communion invoke the Holy Spirit over the elements miraculously effecting the forgiveness Christ.
 
Claim into the Holy Spirit as when Christ on the cross asks the Father to forgive those responsible for his innocent death.
 
Claim the Holy Spirit just the way Jesus breathed upon Thomas and the disciples as they gathered after the crucifixion when he said, “The sins you forgive are forgiven, the sins you don’t forgive are retained.”
 
You see, the Holy Spirit is what reveals to you that your perceived opposite is yourself.
 
What’s forgiveness got to do with that?
 
You will only be asking that because you have not yet seen the kingdom of forgiveness in its totality, which include—pardon, grace, amnesty, reprieve, release forbearance, acquit, exonerate—all stream out from under the subsumptive symbol of that single, capacious word, forgiveness.
 
Such are the many different ways forgiveness plays itself out in the infinite variety of day to day conflicts of human life—because forgiveness has multiple dimensions, multiple facets, multiple applications, multiple phases and stages as we take our spiritual walk toward death.
 
Forgiveness is the tip of the proverbial iceberg of human relationships that need righting and reconciling.
 
Are you among the unforgiven? Will you remain so? Are you among the unforgiving? Will you remain so?
 
Perhaps so, but don’t be like people who reject forgiveness assuming forgiveness is like a light switch you flip to turn on the lights.
 
Perhaps your church has not impressed upon you enough the complete dynamics of forgiveness, which include pain, guilt, confession, remorse, repentance, renunciation, reform, acceptance, freedom, then celebration—multiplied by TWO because forgiveness is a two-way street, depending on whether you are unforgiven or unforgiving.
 
There’s no light switch called forgive and forget—there is only the long, gradual life process heated by the Holy Spirit called forgiveness. For lack of the Holy Spirit, you may not yet have accepted that God has accepted you—that you are pre-approved for this mortgage.
 
You heard in the scripture lesson this morning about the one unforgivable sin and probably wondered like everybody else in the last 2000 years why it was the only unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit. Well, Jesus was being hyperbolic because his critics accused him of casting out demons as a demon himself—hence that long preamble. But his conclusion was simple—if you deny the Holy Spirit, which is the spirit of forgiveness, you have thereby disqualified yourself from forgiveness.
 
That’s obviously what makes it an unforgivable sin. Otherwise, there is no such thing as an outright unforgivable sin—so long as you don’t deny forgiveness.
 
Are you among the unforgiven? Will you remain so? Are you among the unforgiving? Will you remain so? Have you accepted your acceptance yet?
 
It is so important that you do so. It’s why we need to do it over and over, which is why we (try to) come to church every Sunday. It will free you to do the good you seem to want but cannot do, it will free you to act (as John Lewis felt free enough to act) for the sake of others, it will heal you of the paralysis (remember Jesus’ miracle) caused by guilt from the past and fear of the future.
 
Are you among the unforgiven? Will you remain so? Are you among the unforgiving? Will you remain so?
 
Jesus said to the disciples at the Last Supper, “Love each other as I have loved you.” The content of the word “love,” in the command “Love one another,” is forgiveness—it is the core, the root meaning of acceptance which we all need and seek. When you “take and eat,” in the communion service, you accept that God accepts you. 
 
In every communion service you hear pronounced, “Behold, the Lamb of God [meaning Jesus] who takes away the sins of the world.” Well, don’t think that happens from the sky by some magical sweep of a wand across the planet. The forgiveness of Christ is perpetual—but your acceptance is contingent until you accept your acceptance?
 
How do you do that?
 
Now, we can’t participate just now in Holy Communion the way we do on the first Sunday of the month. But at any meal today at home, before you begin, you can simply announce, “Jesus says to us, forgive one another as I have forgiven you.” Do you not in this way make holy the communion among your family members? By that means, you renew and continue your way on the path to restored relationships and, ultimately, a healed nation.
 
In a curious way, this democracy—based on Enlightenment principles of the 18th century—really seems to presuppose what Christianity of the 1st century makes possible and calls for—deeply felt, fully mutual interracial acceptance.
 
That blessing of the Holy Spirit is only the beginning, as you then go on to enlarge the circle of acceptance beyond family, beyond church, beyond your social circle, beyond your neighborhood to accept and promote the humanity of everyone, just as John Lewis urged upon us yesterday.
Amen.
 
Rev. Richard Chrisman, 8/2/2020

Acts 4: 23-29
 
These Sunday mornings lately, we have been confronting our history a lot: national and racial history, the colonial history of Eliot Church—all of it is big history, destined one day for the history books. But there’s a whole other department of history for us to discuss—I mean, Invisible History, that is, the history of human relationships and personal development which never makes it into the history books. For churches, the invisible part has a greater share than the visible part of its history—if you wanted to put a percentage on it, maybe 99%?
 
Here’s a perfect example from last week—the Eliot Welcome home to Nadja. Have you seen Patrick’s snapshots of us posted on the website? When you look at the expression on Nadja's face, you see priceless testimony to the personal ties that bind us together. But you won’t see that in the history books—it’s invisible history.
 
Other examples lately are the Food for Kids project that got 14 bags together for the Centre Street Food Pantry and the letter-writing project to promote Ryan’s early release—more invisible history.
 
You know what else, I think of Eliot’s invisible history every time I make the morning rounds of this church building and go through the downstairs kitchen and think of all the meals prepared, all the conversations that took place, and all the laughter shared over the decades of events held there—practically none of it ever makes written history.
 
 It’s what I am calling Invisible History—our spiritual history, the gift to us of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the vital breath of this, and every church, over long, long, long stretches of time, through thick and thin, through wars, depressions, and civil unrest. Christ’s spirit has been our mainstay, and will always remain so.
 
This breath, this spiritual bond, counts more than ever, now that we have entered the Covid era. I won’t say more about the obvious except to place ourselves in our biblical context—Solomon’s glorious Temple, built in approximately 950 BCE, was destroyed in 586 BCE by the new Babylonian Empire, and the Israelites were all mostly carted off to Babylon. Solomon’s temple was rebuilt over the centuries by the Jews returning from exile and then completely destroyed again in 70 CE by the Romans.
 
Such was the utter devastation of their experience of exile in Babylon, the Israelites bemoaned their fate in the most extreme of our 151 Psalms, cursing their captors who mocked them and taunted them, wishing upon their captors in return the cruelest of vengeance, that their babies be dashed against the rocks.
 
We recoil from such a violent wish. But the Psalmist only permits himself such an expression because acting vengefully on such wishes was prohibited—Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord—it’s the difference between expressing the emotion vs. acting on it.
 
Recalling their mortal straits, the Psalmist stresses the importance of honoring the spirit they associated with the Temple in distant Jerusalem and singing to the Lord anyway. There is a lesson here for us during Covid.
 
Jerusalem and the Temple foremost within it, had been utterly and totally wiped out finally by Rome after 100 years of tolerating the pesky state of Judea where Jesus ministered and where he got mistaken for political zealots who agitated to throw out the occupying army. Out of wholesale devastation, emerged two wholly novel and unforeseen developments: first was the rabbinic Judaism which we know today, which is Judaism without the Temple. The second was the early Christian church, of which we are the descendants.
 
The long, gradual extinction of the Judean people was capped with extirpation—and that’s just what we could be looking at here today. The Jesus movement was about dead when he was executed by the Romans, but the Way didn’t die. Their belief in Christ’s resurrection carried over into a belief in their own resurrection.
 
Then we read in the lesson from the Book of Acts today, where the apostles start to form and shape a successor to the Temple (not a replacement, it must be added)—they invoked God’s spirit and did powerful deeds in the face of opposition. Paul himself persecuted the early followers as they became what we call a “church.”
 
Before this pandemic hit, we were facing a comparable situation of our own. Christians in the 20th century had been coping with erosions caused by secularism. The net result for mainline, liberal Protestantism was the evisceration of our supply lines—today we are being told: there are not now viable seminaries even for the few candidates enrolled; the cost of theological education exceeds what its graduates can repay; candidates cannot find church placements that remunerate them above subsistence levels; fewer churches can afford a fully trained Master of Divinity at competitive rates.
 
A famous song once asked people to speculate about a world without religion—and its benefits. That was coming true already pre-Covid. How will Eliot Church fare post-Covid?  Will we come out the other side? What will meet us on the other side? Many churches besides Eliot have reason to wonder. It’s time to tap the Holy Spirit of the apostles, dear church.
 
One professor of the History of Medicine recently observed, “Great crises, like the previous three global pandemics, tend to bring profound social change, for good or ill.” Profound change, she said. It’s time for us to find the Holy Spirit that performed wonders among the apostles.
 
Lately we have been simply dazed and puzzled, especially about how far from ideal our American dream turns out to be. But our professor continued, pandemics are “accelerators of mental renewal,” and so has this pandemic revealed itself to be. If that is true generally, is it true of us? Are we experiencing “mental renewal?”  Have we put on our thinking caps—no, I should ask, our reimagining hats?
 
Don’t try to imagine the world without religion—try to re-imagine our religion! It’s time to invoke the Holy Spirit and perform wonders.
 
Look: Jesus and the dire circumstances of his time combined to prompt two new kinds of community into being. The Temple was destroyed—as a result, Judaism reinvented itself and Christianity was born—the twin daughters of apparent finality.
 
Whether we realize it or not, this is exactly what is happening to us. What’s Eliot Church to do? We are going to need those reimagining hats. Because, you know there have already been creative imaginations out there for 25 years—you’ve heard of them and read their book under previous pastorates—the emergent churches, the divergent churches, the weird churches movement, church 2.0 and church 3.0, oh my!
 
Eliot church will want to redouble those imaginative leaps—and must.
 
We are in a perfect position to plant the seeds for the next Eliot generation with a fantastic history (visible and invisible), material assets (God be thanked), and an ideal location positioned for a city-wide ministry. People may not want their grandmother’s church anymore, but they still need and want a real church, whether they say so or not.
 
So it’s time for Eliot to find the Holy Spirit, because the next version just cannot look like the last—and won’t willy nilly. Consider yourselves from now on in the business of sponsoring a New Church Start—this will require not just the congregation in the aggregate, but also each and every one of you, to be the seed for your successor. You must die first, as Jesus told us that seeds do, before you can rise with new life.
 
It’s time for each Eliot member and friend to find the Holy Spirit, and next Sunday I will devote entirely to how that happens. Unless the plan is to disappear from history, both visible and invisible, Eliot we are going to call upon the Holy Spirit going forward. We are going to proclaim our discipleship to Christ Jesus and promise to see him more clearly, love him more dearly, and follow him more nearly.
 
Do I hear an Amen out there??
 
Amen!
 
 
Rev. Richard Chrisman
7/26/2020

​Elizabeth L. Windsor, DMin
July 19, 2020
The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
Deuteronomy 6: 4-9
Matthew 19: 13-35
 
Commandments, Signs and Blessings, O My!
Weaving through the pandemic and protest of this difficult summer has been the constant stream of images. Doctors in PPE covered from top to bottom. Marchers for justice in our streets. Statues coming down. “Black Lives Matter” painted on our thoroughfares. But one image stands out in my mind - Donald Trump, in front of St. John’s Church holding a Bible for the cameras, after the violent clearing of Lafayette Square.
​
There is so much that troubles me about this image. I am deeply offended by the use of the Holy Bible as a prop. And while I am not certain what Donald Trump intended to convey, the Bible mixed with violence is always dangerous. History reveals the many ways the Bible has been used as a weapon against others – think of the Crusades or the religious wars in Europe. Whatever his intended message, Donald Trump used the Bible as an idol – a “statue” in its own way, closed, fixed and rigid.

Last Sunday, Rev. Rick preached on public art and the messages they send. He posed the question Jesus asked, “Who among you, if their child asks for bread, will give him a stone?” Reflecting on the image of Donald Trump in front of the Church holding the Bible, I wonder whether we see the Holy Bible as stone or bread – for us and for the generations who follow us.

The religious right believes that the Bible is metaphorically etched in stone, unchanging and not to be challenged. There is only one way to live a biblical faith. Their use of the Bible is intended to keep us – and our children on the straight and narrow. It proclaims the power of hierarchy and patriarchy– forever.

To be sure, the Scripture from Deuteronomy makes unambiguous demands: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.” We are commanded to love the Lord and to make sure that our children and the generations that follow us learn to love the Lord too. But how do we teach our children by example what it is to love God?

The image behind me is from a Godly Play story called “The Ten Best Ways” and, of course, it is about the Ten Commandments. You will notice the heart shape of the box the pieces are stored in and that the commandments themselves are written on miniature tablets. The three tablets that form the heart are a summary of what it means to live biblically;
“Love God, Love People, God Loves You” – That heart reveals love, relationship and mutuality. It offers us space to grow as we learn to live the way of love through Scripture. It is not stone, rather it is living bread to nourish and sustain us and those to whom we will pass the faith.
​
We have to break open the bread, however. We need a relationship with the Bible, not as a set of demands to be obeyed, but as a life-giving exploration of living love. So here are some suggestions to break open the word of God in Scripture.

Find your favorite Bible story or better yet, one that perplexes you – doesn’t matter from which testament. Read it out loud to yourself or with your spouse or children. Then put yourself into the story. Is there something or someone that has been left out that you can fill in? Are there questions that you want to ask the people in the story? Imagine how they would respond. Act out the imagined conversation or actions with your kids, add costumes if you like – or simply write it out in dialogue with yourself. For example: I continue to listen for the folks who are missing from the story of the Prodigal son: I have always suspected that a discussion between the “good” son and his mother is taking place in the kitchen while she oversees the cooking of the fatter calf for the prodigal.

Another way to approach the Bible is to think about the stuff of your own life. There is no human experience that cannot be found in the Bible – everything from abandonment, to infertility, to family difficulties, to joy, failure, and worry – and everything else – are found within this living word. You can find the passages that speak to your situation by googling your experience followed by “in the Bible.” You will be surprised how much turns up. Once you have found a story, let the text be your partner in dialogue. What questions, concerns, or feelings are you experiencing? Tell them to the people in the story. See what wisdom might be there for you as you converse.

The Holy Bible is not fixed in stone as are statues and idols. It is a living expression of faith. You do not need anyone’s permission to imaginatively explore it. Scholar John Dominic Crossan, reminds us, “[It] is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.” Taking them symbolically gives us plenty of freedom to play with biblical stories.

As you do, remember the commands that “form” the heart. Look for the places in the Bible and in your own life where you see people loving God, people loving people and the ways God shows love for us. Let the Bible knead you into living bread for yourself and the generations to come.

United Methodist Bishop Karen Oliveto posted the following on her Facebook page this week: “We are the ancestors of the future church.” Let that sink in. As ancestors of the faith, our vocation is to pass the biblical way of love to those who follow us. May our lives of faith be the living bread that will nurture our children and the generations to come. Amen.

Rev. Richard Chrisman
July 12, 2020
 
Not purity, but honesty.
 
Today’s controversies over monuments represent a profound teachable moment, which everyone should embrace with all due seriousness and hope. However, the subject of public art, e.g., war memorials, monuments to heroes, historical markers, decoration of public spaces, etc., generally is beset with more perplexity than clarity.
 
The first perplexity about public art is—who does public art belong to anyway? In the case of civic monuments, history is involved, which belongs to no one person, yet affects everyone. A monument not only celebrates history, it affects the course of history. The derivation of the word monument is from “monere,” to remind, to remember gratefully.
 
A good example is the memorial to John Lennon in Central Park in NYC, called Strawberry Fields.

Independence Day—for whom?
Mark 11:20-25
 
As Jesus approached Jerusalem during the Passover festival, he cursed the fig tree on the Mount of Olives for a specific reason: not out of petty spite, but because he was expressing his dismay at the spiritual barrenness of Israel, as had the prophets before him, basically saying, everything may as well be dried up and dying, whether it be this little tree or a valley of dry bones. He could not stand the thought of a people’s soul, the soul of the “tree” of Israel, being spiritually barren and guilty of the crimes that necessarily follows from that barrenness.
 
When the disciples pointed out to Jesus that the fig tree actually had shriveled up, Jesus cites a common proverb about the power of prayer, which is more than the power of positive thinking—it is the power of faith. But the clincher here is the post-script: whenever it is that you may pray, be sure to forgive your debtors and ask forgiveness for your own sins.
 
I pray for our souls’ transformation and the remaking of this nation, and I pray this in Jesus’ name.
 
The face of George Floyd is now on posters, tee-shirts, huge murals everywhere. He stares back at us—imperious, impassive, serene, collected, confident—as if to say to us, My children, you have let it happen once again. You’ve let it happen once again, he seems to be saying, Yes and you know it.
 
And here we are, another Independence Day weekend in America, more speeches although without the parades this year. Independence Day indeed!—for whom? Frederick Douglass asked that very question in 1852.
 
Douglass had turned down an invitation to give an Independence Day speech, because American freedoms were not extended to everyone, former slave that he was—but he agreed to speak in protest on the next day, on July 5, 1852.
 
Born into slavery himself, and freed in 1838 at the age of 20 not by any declaration of independence but only by his own wiles and the encouragement of a freed black woman in Baltimore whom he later married, Douglass said that “above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them.”
 
It was in Rochester, NY, the city of his residence and the site of his national abolitionist newspaper, the “North Star,” where Douglass enumerated over the course of his 1½ hour speech before an audience of 600 people, the individual crimes of slavery and the national corruption of soul at the root of them. The speech was greeted by a tumultuous standing ovation of the all-white audience.
 
Today, the murder of George Floyd represents in microcosm the million punitive daily strokes that send little boys and girls to bed each night wondering what their parents got them into.
 
I pray for our souls’ transformation and the remaking of America, a nation that cannot seem to find the door, a nation grasping and groping in night sweats, the guilty dreaming of release and redemption. I pray for our souls’ transformation and the remaking of America, and I pray in the name of Jesus who told us to pray for forgiveness of our sins and for the repentance, expiation, reform and renewal that go with it.
 
We are talking about sin here, not only crime—crime, like this crime of murder, arises from the heart where sin resides. The crime was against a man, the sin is always against ourselves. Of all the stupid sacrifices—not one but two lives lost in the same 8 minutes and 46 seconds!
 
Think of the love foregone, heights forsaken, hopes erased. Yes, we witnessed the self-immolation of the white man and nation right along with our ongoing crimes against the black man and nation.
 
One tragedy is that it didn’t have to be, if America had been following Jesus. The other tragedy is that it had to be, because so much of America believes only in itself and its personal freedoms. 
 
Churches are not just complicit in that tragedy, we partake of it, we own it, we experience it, we grieve daily over the tragedy, just for being American. As Douglass put it in his speech, the churches of that time “are not only indifferent to the wrongs against the slave, they actually take sides with the oppressors.” Since then, every Christian denomination has formally denounced racism but with quite uneven commitment and results.
 
Individual churches have not all figured out the role they want to play in the national soul’s transformation and the remaking of America. If only every church had simply followed our Christian vocation—to resist oppression, work for justice, and to love like Jesus.
 
There it is—and you can read it on our own front lawn today in the memorial there to black women and men killed by white police. That profession, that declaration of intent, just needs more fleshing out for our present time, for 2020, granted that during this pandemic it is harder than ever to find the right handle to grab and the most effective lever to push.
 
We must promise to keep informed, form smart alliances, enter partnerships, use our financial power and our institutional example right on this street corner at the intersection with Exit 17 of the Massachusetts Turnpike, bordering with Waltham, Watertown, Oak Square, Brighton Center, and the rest of Newton.
 
Already one nucleus of Eliot people has reorganized to strengthen our mission and social justice outreach and another nucleus is studying how to project our ministry into the community.
 
But it won’t be enough to study racism without understanding sin the way Jesus did (which actually is something quite other than how many churches, mainly evangelical, understand it)—otherwise, we lose sight of our own sin. What good is our analysis of the problem of racism if we import our own sin into the solution? Can we graduate from and add to being anti-racist whites becoming freedom-bound Christians?
 
If we truly want to “do” something, Christians first must reattach ourselves to Jesus. I pray that Eliot Church will get religion all over again somehow. I pray we will get over being so Jesus-shy, because what other basis for freedom goes deep enough into the problem of Independence and who does or doesn’t have freedom?
 
To love like Jesus is to know that true freedom means seeking the freedom of others—spiritual freedom, emotional freedom, freedom from drugs, political freedom, intellectual freedom.
 
Dr. Elizabeth and I encourage you and your family to spend some time on the Anti-Racism Study page of our website. There are a variety of materials there to help you understand and talk about systemic racism (including materials for children and you), reading and study recommendations and materials put together by members of our congregation about how we can be part of anti-racism work locally. Becoming anti-racist is a life-long practice and it’s one we can do together. We invite you to begin by reading How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. The book is available in hardcover, ebook and audible formats at Amazon. We will announce opportunities to discuss and share questions about the book in the next several weeks!


Ultimately, I wish for you a personal thunderclap that permanently shakes up your individual souls—the redemption of our national soul is at stake.
 
You have heard us read two stanzas of the Black National Anthem so far—the first stanza says, Sing! The second stanza says, Keep marching! The third is a prayer, like mine—for the transformation of our souls and the remaking of America. 
 
Let us pray. . . God of our weary years
God of our silent tears
You who have brought us thus far on the way
You who have by Your might
Led us into the light
Keep us forever in the path, we pray
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met You
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget You
Shadowed beneath Your hand
May we forever stand
True to our God
True to our native land
 
--Rick Chrisman 7/5/2020

SPECIAL PRAYER by Dr. Elizabeth Windsor

Good and gracious God, you teach us through the prophets to “to act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God. This Sunday as we celebrate our nation’s Independence Day, we are simultaneously grateful for the aspirations of our founders and yet concerned for our future.

We are thankful for those who came before us paving the way for liberties that allow us to freely make choices about our work, our worship, our convictions, and our lifestyle. But we confess that we have often failed to extend these freedoms to all people of the United States. Race, class, gender and immigration status limit the possibilities of some, and give others the power to exploit and deny those who still yearn for these same freedoms.

During this time of national celebration we are grateful, yet concerned….concerned about our nation, and concerned about the future. Our nation suffers through pandemic with no end in sight, our people are divided, children remain in cages, black men and women are endangered by our policing, and our economy is in pieces.

These concerns elevate our anxiety about the stability of our government, the dependability of our employment, and the longevity of our freedom. And we confess that these anxieties often distract us from our mission to “love mercy, act justly, and walk humbly” with you.

We confess that we have too frequently taken our freedom for granted and we have too often been negligent in living up to the responsibilities of our citizenship. We also confess that our self-interests have too often taken priority over the best interest you intend for all who live in our nation.

As we celebrate this Independence Day weekend, we ask you to forgive our sin and to heal our land. We pray for the leaders of our nation, our state, and our community that they will lead with integrity, courage, and wisdom. Guide us to exercise our freedom responsibly and to pursue “liberty and justice for all” people, without discrimination, fear or favor.

O God, grant us wisdom, grant us courage as we seek a “more perfect union” with you and one another. Amen.

What are we missing here?  PROLOGUE
 
For the prayer on confession last Sunday, I offered a prayer by Flannery O’Connor, the celebrated fiction writer from Milledgeville Georgia, who, I learned the next day from a church member, was also a racist of very standard southern issue. This was a surprise to me, and I was ashamed I was not more informed or I probably wouldn’t have used her prayer on a Sunday devoted to African-American oppression from the racism in all of us. On the other hand, she prays to lose her blind spot, even though she didn’t recognize the particular one we are focused on. By the same token, blind spots were a concern of Jesus, as you will be hearing in the scripture lesson and sermon later. So I think it is very appropriate to repeat Flannery O’Connor’s prayer this morning and the assurance of pardon I wrote for it.
 
Prayer of Confession—Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self-shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and I will judge myself by the shadow which is nothing. I do not know you, God, because I am in the way. Please help me push myself aside. Please help me get down under things and find where you are. Please help all the ones I love to be free from their suffering.  Please forgive me. Amen.  –Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964).

Assurance of Pardon—The forgiveness of God is perpetual. God’s forgiveness inspires humility, honesty, repentance and reform—let it be so for every one of us and for every American citizen today. Amen.
 
What are we missing here?
 
Matthew 7:1-3 “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? 
 
I.
 
Over the years of reading history, I can remember my silent reaction when encountering the account of some particularly egregious inhumanity. Romans crucified thousands and thousands of people for robbery or sedition, as Jesus was himself—a barbarous cruelty that absolutely defies belief. The church gave Joan of Arc over to the secular authorities to be burned at the stake—how could they possibly burn anyone to death, least of all her?? They dunked women they thought were witches to see if they would live—what on earth kind of logic is that? People were stolen from their peaceable lives and after a perilous passage across the Atlantic sold into slavery—who could possibly conceive of human beings as property and treat them that way? Lately, the American military would torture captives nearly to death—how could they possibly abide by what they were doing to another person with their own hands?
 
The few objections to these practices went unheeded at the time, if they were even heard.
 
II.
 
I do not judge that there are satisfactory answers to excuse those behaviors today, and nobody does—but what I probably ought to be more worried about is, what could there be that is comparably barbarous, cruel, inhuman, and illogical that we are overlooking in our front yard today?
 
Jesus not only was preaching a commonplace ethic of his time—judge not that ye be not judged; he was making a particularly Jewish point—that God is the ultimate judge, not you or me. But Jesus characteristically added a little dig at our hypocrisy by using the wildly exaggerated analogy between the speck in other person’s eye and the log in our own to put our own sin in correct proportion to its real importance.
 
It is to our great shame that the Kerner Commission Report in 1968 got it right—poverty and institutional racism were driving inner-city violence. But nobody in power gave heed, and we continued living our precious lives while African-Americans continued dying—.  It is to our great shame that Americans to this day will make points out of “welfare queens” so-called and poorly educated blacks and unstable families without seeing our direct role in their existence. It is to our great shame that we could not get a clue, neither from plain common sense nor all the sociological data, until people had to pour out into the streets last month in 99 cities in the midst of a pandemic to express the heartbreak of life in America for people of color.
 
What are we missing here, like those people in past centuries who condoned barbarity, cruelty, inhumanity, and lethal illogic?
 
White flight to the suburbs has baked into our living habits a casual insouciance. What are we missing here?
 
American self-reliance has baked into our living habits a malignant stinginess. What are we missing here? What are we looking straight at and not seeing?
 
An axiom of urban studies is that people in every age and culture want safety for their families and education for their children. Safety and education—for lack of which cultures must endure high anxiety and ceilings to their aspirations. Safety and education—everything I got growing up white so I have wealth that isn’t even measured in dollars. The promise of safety and education for our children populated American suburbs with 10s of millions of white families.
 
Here is what I know we are missing: it’s the barbarous, cruel, inhuman and illogical way we fund education on the basis of local real estate taxes. We fund public education on the basis of taxes on local real estate values.
 
Seems obvious, but we don’t see the mistake here—or, if we do see it, we don’t and won’t do anything about it. Germany saw it. They fund all national education from the state level with state-wide taxes—not municipal real estate taxes—so school quality does not vary significantly between rich and poor towns and cities.
 
Maybe in 50-100 years down the road, people will read about us in their history books and say, “How could they possibly have missed seeing the barbarous, cruel, inhuman and illogical way they funded public school education??”
 
III.
 
But let’s take this analysis back to the personal level where Jesus had pointed us. For lack of practicing at the personal level what Jesus preached, we persist in habits of judgments we call “opinions” on how other people dress, about their decisions and mishaps and, worst of all, we form ill-considered opinions that form the substratum of political positions we take on public issues. How qualitatively different opinions are from wisdom!
 
Opinions are judgments not substantiated by positive knowledge—not thoughtful discernments.  (“In my opinion. . .”, “Well, if you want to know my opinion. . .”.)  How destructive opinions are when people live on an exclusive diet of them.
 
This is a distinction I was trying to cultivate last fall with my “Soundings” program, where I urged us as we entered our Transition phase at Eliot Church to get beneath or around or over the mere opinion level into a more discerning faculty. Opinions are born from our judgmental reflexes, our vested interests, our blocked emotions, and the imperfect vision we have of God.  We hardly know ourselves, let alone others, because we are always batting around opinions we wish others would come to their good senses and concur with.
 
Before you judge a man or a woman, walk a mile in his or her shoes, goes another proverb. See what walking in George Floyd’s shoes for only 8 minutes and 46 seconds did for this country.
All this applies to us in our Discernment phase at Eliot Church as we seek to make a path forward in 2020, just as much as it applies to developing sound political positions in a country in a racial crisis. To ask God for us to remove ourselves from our line of vision of God, is not a bad prayer, it’s a very good prayer that O’Connor prayed. In fact, it certainly meets my definition of prayer as a moment of honesty before your God.
 
Flannery O’Connor probably didn’t even know she was racist, but her prayer asked for the honesty to find what she didn’t know about herself. Well, it’s up to her to find the speck in her eye, and up to us to find the log in ours.
 
Will people continue to value her books and stories? Should I? Of course she will be read, but with the additional awareness of her fallibility as a human being. Because, as a matter of literary fact, Flannery O’Connor was a mordant critic of white people, especially of religious white people.
​
IV.
 
Besides missing the barbarous, cruel, inhuman and illogical funding inequities that are right in front of us in our educational system, there’s one more thing we might be missing, which we don’t want to be caught without—heart, a heart. I have to think what that Minneapolis officer was missing was a heart; what Mitch McConnell is missing is heart; what Kelly Ann Conway is missing is a heart.
 
We don’t want to be caught missing a heart and funding public education through local real estate taxes. This would be a fitting chapter in a study on what reparations to the African-American community might look like, if we dared to look that closely.
 
--Rev. Richard Chrisman, 6/28/2020
 ​

​Can we do justice to this moment?
Romans 8:18-25.
 
I.
 
It’s been a week, it’s been a three weeks, it’s been a year, it’s been a three and a half years of national turmoil which has finally reached this boiling point, perhaps (hopefully) this tipping point, as popular demonstrations in the streets have again brought to the surface America’s long wrestling match with its own soul.
 
That’s it, you know, we are witnessing our national soul struggling with itself to bring our fallible selves into line with our democratic aspirations. But it is an uneven and lately very turbulent moment, with our history popping up in surprising and inconvenient ways. In 99 cities, Americans took to the streets in revulsion, in disgust, in a towering rage at who we are as a country--a nation unable yet to harmonize individual freedom with moral obligations, so we privilege some lawbreakers (like the impeached President and some police who go unconvicted for excessive force) but harshly penalize others like anyone born with dark skin.
 
But Americans have always had a tough assignment—how difficult it is for us to reckon with our history because there is this contradiction, you know, this fatal flaw, as it were: we flourished only because of an extraordinary dependency upon forced labor and stolen land which makes it very hard to square with our claims of independence and fair play. It’s a moral quandary which we have never owned up to and diminishes our claims to uniqueness.
 
Well. America is unique alright, but not in the way exceptionalists like to think. America was uniquely born and raised in violence. America was uniquely nursed on competitiveness and the hustle. America, in its adolescence, uniquely did not resist the lust to satisfy our material appetites. America uniquely showed off our grown muscles in two world wars and proudly claimed the admiration of the world. America then proceeded to master the globe under a tsunami of transnational businesses reinforced by 600 to 800 military bases in 70 different countries.
 
All this while our not-so-hidden assumptions of white supremacy played a well-executed game of keepaway such that today the networth of white families exceeds that of black families by a factor of 10.
 
II.
 
How can the most diverse nation in the world be so immature as to promote the xenophobia and racism which presently cripples our country? I don’t fathom it, myself, but for sure we won’t attain maturity until we are able gratefully to acknowledge our racial interdependencies and celebrate—no, revel—in our diversity. We are poised at the brink of that maturity this week as the world sees us humbled and convicted nationally of subjecting our black nation under the knee of our white nation. But will America attain maturity before we self-destruct? Will we do justice to this moment? Or will America let the moment pass? Or embrace it but not follow through, as happened after Eric Garner’s murder?
 
But all of a sudden the wires are hot; corporations and nonprofits are retooling their programs, editing their advertisements; district attorneys are calling for legislation. The courts are getting on board. Then here came Juneteenth the day before yesterday, people turning out in a spirit of celebration it seems like in every city. Suddenly (finally), making it a national holiday is being discussed. People marched in Boston, in Newton, and in cities across the country. A healing day has followed directly upon the trauma of the last month.
 
It’s all happening so fast, and we could hope we are turning some kind of corner.
 
III.
 
What of the churches? Many are starting anti-racism campaigns, or reviving old ones.
 
Eliot Church has our own—1) a congregation wide viewing and dialogue about “Just Mercy,” the film about Bryan Stephenson’s work with death row inmates (June 30); and 2) installing a banner on the front lawn to memorialize those since Eric Garner killed by white police officers.
 
But churches have an additional role, particular to us, I believe, because this struggle is not only political but moral, and not just moral but religious. Because what evil so profound as racism can be met only by human effort and good will? This problem is so wide and so high and so deep as to resist rational comprehension.
 
American racism needs repentance for the wrongs—the crimes—committed. American racism necessitates asking forgiveness of God and promising never to sin again. It means being willing to come back to the fountain of forgiveness again until we are truly renewed and remade.
 
We understand all this at a personal level, of course, but is there such a thing as national repentance? Is there any way that a nation can confess its sins, repent, and ask forgiveness of God and be freed from the bondage of our sin? Can a nation promise never to sin again and be renewed and remade as we should be? Can the United States become one nation under God after having riven a continent’s worth of people over a period of 400 years into opposed and opposing races?
 
And when will we come to the African-American peoples for forgiveness? Only if we repent, but what does national repentance look like? 
 
Take, for one example, Germany, which by the time of its third generation after WWII was able to look itself in the mirror and confess the sins of the Third Reich and the horrors they committed upon Jews, gays, the disabled, Roma, the continent of Europe, the helpless citizenry of Britain, the people of Russia, the armies of the Allies including the United States, and its own German population. They overhauled the entire educational system, and installed physical reminders at cultural and historical sites across the major cities!
 
Can we do something like that—as a nation? It’s a question worth asking, and it is up to the churches to ask it over and over and over again.
 
We could start by passing H.R. 40 in the U.S. Congress which seeks funding for the study of what reparations to African-Americans might look like. Only such a study will bring about the kind of dialogue and self-scrutiny that can meet and vanquish the beast that racism is.
 
St. Paul puts our travail into the widest possible perspective today when he wrote that “the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us,” meaning the forthcoming freedom that comes with forgiveness which creation waits for with eagerness. We thrash about in futility, Paul wrote, until the time when we experience freedom from our bondage to entropy and decay.
 
God’s purpose is for us and everyone to enjoy that freedom fully one day. All human societies groan in the labor pains which will, most certainly, deliver our freedom. I interpret the groaning of this American moment to include those who are resisting the breakthrough to the higher consciousness—like those in the present administration and their supporters Saturday night in Tulsa, Oklahoma—the ultimate freedom being that which God is revealing.
 
And it is not only us humans but also the whole of creation that has been groaning in labor pain until now—witness the planet itself in travail as we sort out what kind of a nation we want to be.
 
We are only at the first stage of the spiritual life, Paul assures us, having been visited by Christ, as we proceed toward ultimate release from our racism.
 
We can live in hopeful expectation with patience—with impatient patience, if you will—even though we do not yet have the end in sight. If there is any life left in this nation at all, we will yet do justice to this moment and to the democratic aspirations that brought the United States into being and continue to sustain us today.
 
It is only for us churches to remember and to repeat, repeat, repeat: [Micah 6:8] “God has told you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”  Amen!
 
--Rev. Richard Chrisman, June 21, 2020

Elizabeth L. Windsor, DMin.
June 14, 2020
The Third Sunday after Pentecost
Ephesians 6:10-17
Luke 10:30-37  

In a blog post this week, the author Annie Lamott tells this story, “When my son was five or six, we were visiting my friends in the city, when all of a sudden we heard a tiny distressed voice. . . Sam had managed to get his head stuck in the slats of a chair he had been clamoring on. He stared at us like a dwarf in the stocks of Salem. He said, “I need help with me.”

“I need help with me.”  Exactly. The combination of Covid-19 lethality - especially in communities of color, the harassment of black folks for nothing more than going about their daily lives, the murder of George Floyd, the tumult of the protests, the cruelty of police all overwhelm me. I am outraged. I am appalled. I am sick to my soul.

“I need help with me.” Not because my feelings deserve attention in order to make me feel better – I want to be VERY clear about that. “I need help with me” because what is wrong in policing, our educational system, our health care system, our economic policies, our housing crisis, is also wrong with me. By virtue of my skin color, I benefit from these structures of injustice, whether I want to or not, and no matter my intentions.  My life has had its share of bruises and soul-crushing experiences, but NONE of them had anything to do with my skin color.

In seminary, the first of my field education placements was in an after-school program in the South End. Run by the Society of St. John the Evangelist, those we tutored were poor, black and Latino boys and girls. I helped with math problems and vocabulary words, and made snacks –these kids were always hungry; but I could do nothing to change the structures in which these children of God were caught. Unsafe housing, family difficulties, incarceration, unemployment and little medical care were their life experiences. Their daily reality taught them they were NOT valuable human beings made in the image of God. Rather they were disposable. It was heart-wrenching. I drove home most days in tears. And on one of those drives, I realized I could LEAVE.  Returning to my warm home and family, I could choose what we ate for dinner, with no concern about having clean clothes for the next day, never fearing for our physical safety. I could choose to look away and never go back. These children could not.

“I needed help with me” and I was part of a community that did just that in seminary. Wise folks helped me to reflect on my experiences so that I could name and know the oppressive structures of which I was a part.  They held me accountable, so that I could not choose to forget the systemic oppression I had witnessed. In community, I learned that “justice is what love looks like in public” as Dr. Cornel West still reminds us.

Racism is a sickness of our souls that leads to a sickness in the systems in which we all live.  Eliot is a congregation of mostly white folks. Good white folks – we give generously, we volunteer in food pantries, march for many causes, serve our neighbors across lines of color and social-status. We vote. We do our best to mitigate the consequences of the unjust systems in which we live –all good, necessary and faithful responses. But do we recognize the structures that create the oppression our black siblings live – and die- with each day?  How do we even begin to challenge injustice if we can’t? “We need help with us.”

In our baptismal vows, and as a community of disciples, we vow “to resist oppression and evil, to show love and justice.” Our baptism requires us to identify and confront systemic racism in our social structures. And we must confront how we have internalized these structures if we are going to be faithful disciples of Jesus.
In her book “The New Jim Crow,” Michelle Alexander challenges us:  We must do what is required of all liberation struggles; educate ourselves and others, speak unpopular truths, provide support for those who have been harmed, and organize against the systems that seek to oppress, control and divide us.”  If we are going be faithful to our baptismal promises, this is work we white folks need to continue doing at Eliot. It is our sacred obligation to understand and recognize how we have internalized the unjust structures of racism, individually and as a community of faith. It is hard work. It is essential work. It is painful work. And we need each other to do it.

Rev. Rick and I invite you to join us for some in-depth learning this summer. Please watch the movie “Just Mercy” based on Bryan Stevenson’s book of the same name. It is free on all platforms during the month of June.  On the “Adult Education” page of our website, there are a wide variety of resources to help us wrestle more deeply with racism. There are also materials to share with our children.  Stay tuned to TWEC and our website for times for us to gather via Zoom and share our learnings.

Annie Lamott ends her blog post with this: “I need help. We all do and it is how it should be . . . [our] country will need millions of people joining together for justice and reconciliation. We need help with us. It is the prayer of the miserable and scared and very stuck, who still against all odds believe that we can be changed and freed. It is my prayer for us now.”  It is also my prayer – and I hope it will be yours too. Amen.

​Democratic Vistas
 
I would like you to listen for a moment to these words, which are really a kind of hymn.
 
“Democracy alone can bind, and ever seeks to bind, all nations, all men and women, of however various and distant lands, into a brotherhood, a family. It is the old, yet ever-modern dream of earth, out of her eldest and her youngest, [out of] her fond philosophers and poets. Democracy is adhesiveness or love, that fuses, ties, and aggregates, making the races comrades, and fraternizing.”  --Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 1871
 
The world is in the grip of a pandemic, on top of which America is in convulsions. What a month, what a week, my congregation. 
 
The historic drama spans so many emotions—we felt sorrow, such deep deep sorrow at the killing of George Floyd, horror at the maleficence, stupefaction at stupidity, anger at mealy-mouth foot-dragging, shame that a familiar crime was happening all over again. 
 
We felt pride, too, in the surge of people flooding the streets, the millennial, the old-timers, whites in huge percentages, and all colors—to grieve and rage at this base, cruel, senseless and too familiar act of inhumanity.
 
But these demonstrations which have run eleven consecutive days and nights in 30 different cities in the US and many others around the world, are just the late-breaking of a colossal wave on our democratic shore, a wave whose power started building in the aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s murder, when the black community finally managed to push the nay-sayers aside and get their movies written and produced, like 13th, Selma, 12 Years a Slave, Moonlight, I Am Not Your Negro, Get Out, and many, many more.
 
African-Americans also got their books published over this period like Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Tears We Cannot Stop by Michael Eric Dyson, Just Mercy by Bryan Stephenson, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.
 
It seems these testimonies of black pain in America cumulatively have seeped part of the way into white consciousness and consciences such that three police murders in a row in Minneapolis, or three in a row in one month between Georgia, Kentucky, and Minnesota, or the ten in a row going back to Eric Garner, finally ignited the simmering outrage into a full-blown national convulsion.
 
Today the country is calling us out and calling us up—we are being drafted into a movement.  The nation is witnessing a street plebiscite, and we should be taking very personal instruction from it. We are witnessing in real time that Eliot Church is needed in this community and the whole city around us. Prof. Gary Dorrien of Union Seminary in NYC told us at the CMM annual meeting Thursday, “The love ethic of Jesus makes you care, makes you angry. This is a moment to put everything on the line.”
 
Our poet Walt Whitman celebrated the Democratic Vistas of continental America in the immediate aftermath of the war to end slavery. This week has visited upon an entire nation a new glimpse of those democratic vistas as they burst into millions of peoples’ hearts and raised us to a new level of hope—real hope again.
 
But Whitman had something interesting to add. Democracy, he wrote, “is vitalized by religion.  . . .  For I say at the core of democracy, finally, is the religious element. All the religions, old and new, are there.” Whitman saw that religion brings life into every human enterprise, most especially and essentially into democracy because democracy is a religious vocation—arduous, compelling, exciting. Because Whitman saw religion at the core of those democratic values, we have another source lifting up our mission in front of our eyes.
 
Our silence is violence—let us find our voice, Eliot Church. Our inaction is complicity—let us put our shoulder to the wheel, Eliot. Our impatience is healthy—let it fuel us during the long haul ahead, church, because it has only just begun.
 
On Thursday, Rev Al Sharpton quoted from Ecclesiastes in his eulogy for George Floyd in order  to say to America its time has come. (Did you watch that sermon??)  Two weeks ago I said something very like that—Eliot Church’s own time has come, I said. I called it our Kairos, which is the Greek term for a special time, pregnant time, due time, past time, you might say, as Rev. Al did, out of time. The Kairos moment for us has arrived, and we are stewards of that moment.
 
If we are to endure, if we are to produce another generation, if we are to be effective, if Eliot Church is to find our grip again—two things, I believe, need to happen:
 
First, Eliot Church must undertake to right-size itself. We must use this transition time to reorganize and rebuild. Our Discernment Committee and our Leadership Council are going to use this summer to get some remediations started, the better to position us to call a settled pastor.
 
And second, Eliot members have to find some trust. Take heart in yourselves. Look at the confidence that St. Paul had in the fledgling little communities he started in Ephesus, Corinth, Galatia and Rome. He was addressing you by extension, another Christian community in a secular environment. St. Paul wrote of them, I have no doubt in my mind that you yourselves are full of goodness and equipped with knowledge of every kind, well able to give advice to one another. He prayed that out of the treasures of glory God may grant you inward strength and power through his Spirit, that through faith Christ may dwell in your hearts in love. St. Paul enjoined us to pursue justice, piety, integrity, love, fortitude, and gentleness. Run the great race of faith, he said, and take hold of eternal life, for to this you were called.
 
The French have a saying, they have many sayings, but one in particular applies to our transition time--reculer pour mieux sauter—pull back just enough to spring forward.  If we pause and make the effort to re-establish a bridgehead, to use Dr. Elizabeth’s analogy from last Sunday, one day soon we will be able to provide others with the means to vault from this bridgehead into action.
 
Today is a day of mourning for George Floyd. So today, on our Annual Meeting Sunday, it is for us to believe in the democratic vistas that Walt Whitman could see and that people of all ages and races are seeing in this important week in America. Tomorrow Monday is two weeks since the police killing of George Floyd—Rev. William Barber and national clergy are calling for a day of fasting Monday to culminate at 5:00 with 8 minutes and 47 seconds of silence, the length of time it took George Floyd to expire.
 
Let us all participate in these rituals of respect and national contemplation. And let us renew our Christian vocation as a public in a community that needs us.
 
 
--Rev. Richard Chrisman, June 7, 2020
 
 

​Elizabeth L. Windsor, DMin.
The Day of Pentecost
Genesis 11: 1-11
Acts 2: 1-18
May 31, 2020
 
Broken Towers; New Songs
Lord, take my lips and speak through them.
Lord, take our hearts and set them on fire. Amen.
 
Today is the day of Pentecost, the time when the Church celebrates the arrival of the Holy Spirit among the disciples. Traditionally, the Church prefaces the reading of the Acts account with the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis. For most of my life, I could not see what these two stories had to do with each other. It wasn’t until I told the Pentecost story from a children’s curriculum called Godly Play, that these two stories together made sense to me.
 
A people united by their common language and hubris build a Tower that is displeasing to God. In the words of the Godly Play script, “The Tower crashes down and at the same time, the one human language is broken into many different languages. Each language was beautiful, but the people of God could no longer understand each other.”
 
Language is the bridge between this story and the Pentecost narrative in Acts. The power of the Holy Spirit gives Peter and the disciples the ability to preach the Good News to a crowd of many nations and languages. Amazed, the crowd asks “And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?” What had been broken has been made whole – and the Church is born.
 
This is a familiar pattern in our Scriptures. God creates a Garden; human pride sends Adam and Eve into exile. God tries again and again – giving the people law and then a Temple. But human beings being human, these too end badly and the people are exiled to Babylon, believing God has abandoned them. God sends Jesus to re-create God’s vision of wholeness for the people, but human choices result in his execution. The disciples flee into a self-imposed exile until Jesus rises from the dead and meets them in the Garden and the Upper Room. But then, Jesus ascends to heaven and again, the disciples are abandoned – until the Holy Spirit promised by Jesus arrives with her flames and wind – and a new creation is birthed.
 
The passages we heard today do not speak to the time between the breaking of the languages and the wholeness re-created through the Spirit. But the Bible tells us over and over that God’s people often felt abandoned while exiled.
 
We know that same experience all too well in this time of pandemic. We are exiled from our building. As people we love die alone from this virus, and the violence of systemic racism erupts in our streets, how can we not feel abandoned?
In an essay in Time Magazine this week, New Testament scholar and Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright calls us to “to recognize the present moment as a time of exile. We find ourselves “by the waters of Babylon,” thoroughly confused and grieving for the loss of our normal life.”  We miss our sanctuary. We miss each other. And we have no idea if that for which we yearn will be possible again.
 
Bishop Wright reminds us, “Jesus does not need church buildings for his work to go forward . . . A proper theology of “sacred space” ought to see buildings for public worship as advance signs of the time when God’s glory will fill all creation. Church buildings are not an escape from the world, but a bridgehead into the world . . .”
 
“Bridgehead” is a peculiar description. The dictionary defines it as “the strategically important area of ground around the end of a bridge or other place of possible crossing which at time of conflict is sought to be defended or taken over by the belligerent forces.” While I dislike using martial imagery – particularly when preaching – I think the metaphor is an apt one as we see the death and violence around us. We at Eliot are the Church, but not physically within it. I envision us standing on the front lawn with the Eliot Church building and all the love, service and creativity it holds supporting our backs. Grounded by Eliot’s past, we are ready to spring from our “bridgehead” of faith to extend it out into our city and the world which so desperately needs us. Exiled from our building but standing firmly on the “bridgehead” looking out into a world made unfamiliar by pandemic and the injustice of systemic racism we ask as the Babylonian exiles did: “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”
 
Today, the Holy Spirit answers with fire and wind, empowering us to sing the Lord’s song in a new language of hope and possibility. But before we can sing, we must listen. We must listen deeply to the pain and despair beyond Eliot’s walls. 

We must listen as we prepare for our annual meeting, continue our discernment process, and share our experiences through our Building Blocks of Faith project. All reveal something about what the Lord’s song has been at Eliot Church. And if we listen deeply, beneath the blowing winds and crackling fire of the Holy Spirit, we can also hear strains of the new language in which we will continue to sing the Lord’s song in a land made strange to us by Covid-19 and broken by systemic racism. This song demands that we “seek the welfare of the city” where we are, as the prophet of the Exile, Jeremiah wrote so long ago. In so doing, we claim the promise that Peter quotes from Isaiah at the end of the Acts reading we read today: “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young shall see visions, and your old shall dream dreams.”
​
Expanding our bridgehead, listening for the Spirit’s guidance, a renewed Eliot Church will be born. Amen. Alleluia.