I.
This famous biblical phrase comes from the Book of Hebrews–”Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.” But how can this claim still be true when there are hundreds and hundreds of Christian denominations and sects in this country and across the world, with wide variations in worship, teaching, and spiritual practices. Yet I believe this remains true because what has not changed is the one thing Christ’s ministry was about: forgiveness. Everything you see in Christianity is premised on this one ministry. It’s not that Christianity is the only religion to promote forgiveness, many others do too, not to mention it has an important place in psychotherapy, AA and its variations, and plain common sense.
 
But Christianity is unique in focusing on only one grace–a grace which comes from God and is the doorway to freedom and eternal life. One clue to its importance is its location–Jesus speaks of forgiveness at the end of the gospels–from the cross where he says, “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do,” and in his post-Resurrection appearance recorded in the Gospel of John where he says to the disciples, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” The last word is usually the most important word. These are not just the last words of a story; they are the last words of Jesus’ life. They deserve attention.
 
II.
They resurface in the Roman Catholic sacrament of Extreme Unction where the priest, summoned to the sick or dying person’s side, performs two functions–first, to apply oil to the body in a healing act, and, second, in another healing act, to pronounce the forgiveness of sins. You shouldn’t want to leave home, or life, without it.
 
Forgiveness is not only an end-of-life work, it is a lifelong work. Our lifework consists in continuous dissolving of unresolved conflicts, where injury has been inflicted and emotional damage done. Sometimes this work is ignored, and so even greater psychic costs are incurred, such as guilt, depression, self-hatred. Many work and family situations need someone to be asking the question everyone is waiting for, what needs forgiveness here? Me? The other person?  God? Even if forgiveness never comes, because one party is dead or because the walls of alienation just can’t be overcome, it is still a world in which forgiveness is at least possible. And that makes all the difference between hope and despair.
 
III.
For many people, Christianity is about getting to heaven when you die, which is all well and good if you want to wait that long. Or it’s about the romance of religion, the “smells and bells” being the sum and substance of the Christian life. Which is to commit what philosophers call “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” that is, to mistake the rituals for ends in themselves. The rituals are simply dramatizations, visualizations, propellants of the forgiveness work Jesus came to us to authorize. “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them,” he said; “if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” Could there be anything remotely more important than this?
 
IV.
A quality community such as ours is one that is bound together (re-ligio means to bind together a people) in a common work toward a common goal, where, in the phrase “Living Love,” the content of the word love is forgiveness. That’s our raison d’etre. The truth that Jesus tells us will make us free would be unbearable if it were not for forgiveness. Forgiveness is the door to freedom and to eternal life. Jesus is just another word for forgiveness.
 
Don’t leave home, or life, without it.
 
Rev. Richard Chrisman 8/14/2022

​You are strangers in a strange land.
Isaiah 11:1-5
 
I.
Thanks for the memories, Eliot Church! I’m taking with me so many great Eliot memories.
 
We first got to know each other at my drop-in office hours that first summer. Then we had a series of small group meetings called Soundings when we shared thoughts and feelings on pertinent questions. There was Regathering in September. Christmas Eve was jammed packed. And of course there was “Make a Joyful Noise.” Then Covid shut down our indoor services and we switched to Zoom. Monique and Dr. Elizabeth and I scrambled to put together a new kind of service with new technology. We lost a few people during the Zoom. And of course traffic in the building dropped to almost zero except for the preschool. I felt that I was the emperor of an empty empire. But we got many people back when we reopened, and we’re almost today where we were two years ago, because you have been steady and faithful. A body of you maintained a quality community here.
 
II.
 
I want you to know how remarkable and important it is that you are here today. Not for recognizing me, but in order for me to encourage you as you go forward. I make a special point to do this because it is possible that you are unaware how unique you are, you and people in churches anywhere. People like you are unique because you are a minority. People say this is a religious country, and compared to England or France we are. In fact, though, we just like to think we are a religious country. In fact, this is a secular society, through and through. And people who turn up in church, whatever your degree of belief or unbelief, are refugees from the secular atmosphere out there. People are not sure how they feel about that.
 
The religious climate today goes back a long way. It predates your births and mine. So, very likely, many people here are not aware at all that we live in a religious environment that has sucked all the oxygen out of the air. We don’t notice because we have long since adapted to it and compensated. What is that oxygen?  A sense of the transcendent, or the “more” in life, the presence of God. The other-worldly exaggerations of earlier Christianities caused an equal and opposite reaction toward an exclusive this-worldliness. This is what “secular” means–knowing only this time and age. The change was so pervasive and subtle, that Christianity itself took on different qualities to compensate, almost insensibly to us. Other parts of Christianity overcompensated–we know these as the fundamentalist sects.
 
No, this is not our grandparents’ era or faith. We’ve had to evolve to find meanings that they didn’t dream of. We’re not sure how we feel about that.
 
At the same time, many more religious traditions have tried to fill that transcendent void, and people rushed to sample other kinds of worship and spiritual practice. Such that, a country which (mistakenly) views itself as “Christian” has become the most religiously diverse society in the world (Diana Eck). We’re not sure how we feel about that.
 
Charles Taylor, the McGill University philosopher, calls this the “nova effect,” i.e., we are watching a super-nova bursting into many more stars. This makes us a “cross-pressured” pressured people. We live in an era of “contested meaning” with religions politely at war with each other (what else is new?)  and us not feeling like we want to join any particular camp. The contest of faiths makes them all seem equally “unbeliev-able” (Charles Taylor). In sum, we are sick at heart and don’t know it.
 
It’s like the effects of acid rain that we used to hear more about. A pervasive but imperceptible mist from far away that falls on us and causes a 12-month winter. That’s a real problem when you can’t remember the spiritual summer any more.
 
However, this vast change did not change human beings, and you are the proof of it. Because you are here, it means you seek to fulfill your human need for a complete picture of life, one that incorporates time and eternity, the visible and the invisible. You want a true accounting of the human universe. Somehow you made it here, you came to a place that remembers, or tries to remember, the compendium of stories in the Bible which rests on the Communion Table, as our fund of memories.
 
III.
This makes you survivors, and this is what I want to impress on you this morning. You belong to a very important Biblical category. You are among what the Bible calls the “faithful remnant.”  Remnant here is not to be associated with the carpet industry where it means rejects. Rather, it means survivors, those remaining after disaster, “a people reduced to a vestige of its former grandeur, who keep the faith alive despite being yanked out of their spiritual habitat.” The remnant is a critical mass, a catalyst, a minion, the starter for a new batch of bread. That’s you.
 
Like the Israelites who were marched off from Jerusalem to Babylon in 586 BCE and made to honor their gods. “By the waters of Babylon, we laid down and wept” (Psalm 137). [See the bulletin cover.] They eventually made it back to Jerusalem, and the prophet Isaiah saw in them a remainder from which a renewed faith would grow. This is why he speaks of “the stump of Jesse,” the remains of a blighted tree, the stump of whose roots will sprout again. Sprout–into what? Something that will proclaim and effect the restoration of what has been lost–equity, truth, righteousness, mercy and lovingkindness. Isaiah identifies this sprout as a man, harking back to Jesse’s son, David, and Christians saw in this prophecy a messianic harbinger of Christ, and thus Mary, too, played a role in Israel’s restoration as Jesus was the fruit of her womb. My point this morning is that the stump of Jesse also refers to a remnant people, the Israelite survivors, and therefore possibly a people like you. Isaiah summons a quality community that will “again take root downward and bear fruit upward.”
 
Of course, you have not been marched off anywhere; but your religious surroundings changed on you over a period of 150 years. You find yourselves to be strangers in a strange land, in the land in which you were actually born! “The ruthless disenchantment is more than you can bear” (Charles Taylor). When you found yourself gasping for the Spirit, somehow you made the decision to try church, even though you may not understand or remotely subscribe to its doctrines. You just like the vocabulary of faith and wanted to try it on, to turn the words over and hear how they sound and mean in different combinations. You didn’t know it, but you have been responding to the poetry of faith more than the binding of doctrines, which is why you have kept coming back to Eliot, to make your own personal version of the Christian way. You want to fulfill the very meaning of the word “religion” which is to bind together, to bind things and meanings and peoples together, apart from the empty alternatives. Naturally, you don’t want religion pre-packaged, you want to make meaning for yourselves. Could that be why this congregation’s motto is “Growing faith,” meaning, “growing with faith” or “the growing and evolving of faith”?  Yes, yes, and yes. You have made Eliot Church a quality community, a home for seekers, for those others who are ill and don’t know it.
 
IV.
 
Yes, thanks for the memories, Eliot Church! I am so grateful that you gave me this opportunity to live my vocation, the longer the better, as far as I’m concerned, but the fullness of time has come. And I’m grateful not just for the memories you and I made, I’m grateful you keep before you the memories preserved for you in the Bible. Within the sinews and interstices of the Bible on this Communion Table lives a spiritual experience of the original remnant people–the Word was made flesh, and the flesh made bread.
 
Rev. Richard Chrisman, August 7, 2022

Ephesians 2:19-22 

I.
 You remember how Alice sees a bottle marked “DRINK ME,” which she does and shrinks so small she can’t reach the key to open the door to the garden. And you remember how she eats a piece of cake that grows her back up to size again, only to shrink once more then drinks from another bottle that makes her grow so big she gets stuck in the house.
 
Children love this story probably because it reflects their frustrations at never being the right size to do what they want. It’s no joke, it can be scary. Are we ever the right size? Churches wonder, too, whether we are ever the right size. Like Alice, at times we feel like we are too short to reach the table which has the key on it. At other times, our to-do list is so long it won’t fit through the door. Churches can be too small to afford a full time minister. Some can be so big that they are unable to organize effectively, for education or action. Just like when we were children, never being the right size to do what we want is frustrating.
 
Eliot Church was once so big it contemplated going to two Sunday services. Since then, our liberal progressive tradition has shrunk from its origin in the early 20th century with Walter Raushenbush and the Social Gospel from our heyday in the 1940s, 50s and ‘60s. Eliot Church has shrunk right along with that once grand tradition. It deeply concerns us now when we wish our influence was big enough to counter the “Christian” white nationalists today.
 
What was in that bottle anyway? Will we ever locate the other bottle which “right-sized” Alice?
 
II.
Eliot Church has taken steps to understand and adapt to the size we are. That happened during the SMALL CHURCH seminar Susan Nason led here last March when we awoke to the fact that Eliot is SMALL. People were feeling the effects–volunteers shorthanded, overworked. The advice was welcome: do less–better, be selective.
 
Another step was taken last year when Eliot acknowledged we didn’t have the families or children to keep our CE Director, nor the likelihood such a person could turn that around, right now.
 
And even before that, a decade ago Eliot took steps to prune its governance structure to fit the size of the congregation. That was a much-needed practical step. What other adaptive steps might be needed now? Well, that remains for you and Rev. Domenik to determine. But today, I want you to take just one spiritual step.

III.
We only have to remind ourselves today and every Sunday of what a church is. There are different ways of describing what churches do–field hospital, half-way house, refuge, oasis, gas station–these are some functions a church can fulfill. Now I just want you to consider what, at base, we are. A church is a “quality community,” not just a menu of programs in a building, not a “Community Center,” or in a cohort like the intelligence community, the academic community which are special interest, solidarity, or professional groupings.
 
Jesus wanted Israel to restore the Temple to its true purpose, which is to be a home for God and place of prayer for all people. Jesus was not afraid to place the Temple in the category of “disposable.” He challenged them, destroy this temple, and I will rebuild it in three days. He couldn’t have meant this literally of course, and the early church understood that He was referring to his own Resurrection. But the Resurrection of Christ wasn’t just a one-off. It is a model for the never-ending process of regaining and reshaping life against threats to our existence. Resurrection is a perpetual possibility, a spiritual process. At the same time, Jesus was referring to rebuilding of the institution, the Temple of which he was a part, meaning even physically.
 
A small church needs not simply to do less–it needs to own the fact of our being a quality community and do what fosters in everyone the feeling of being a “quality community.”  Whatever else we may do, this spiritual achievement falls within our grasp. Every Sunday people can go out feeling they have been received by a quality community, i.e., a real church. This is what Paul promised you–that you no longer feel you are strangers and aliens; that you would be Fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. He wanted us to feel the confidence of having for foundation the apostles and the prophets, and Christ himself as the cornerstone, being an organism, as it were, that grows into a holy temple, such that what you have “built” (with or without an actual building) becomes spiritually a dwelling place for God.
 
If we believe we are that “quality community,” people will feel all these things when they walk into this sacred space, this Temple, or hopefully by the time they leave. We should measure ourselves against this expectation. We are all about being something older, bigger, deeper and newer than ourselves. We offer through this building an alternative space in which to create God’s Temple–us, a quality community. We acknowledge that we are subject to creation, destruction, and re-creation, and all that at many different levels–spiritually, programmatically, etc. But we are the Body of Christ, born to die and rise again, even as we sit here. It is well worth the effort to maintain this edifice, although right now and for a few more years this small congregation strains to do so. But it will not always be thus, if you allow your old dreams to crumble and to dream new ones. Allow God’s impossible vision to be planted in you. As I like to say, “Don’t just DO something, be still and put on the mind of Christ.”
 
To this end, a church needs to get out of the way of its own life-process, as we have periodically done, admit we are a small church, and allow this fact to take its course. Realize that nevertheless you are meant for more. Not just more personal success or more personal gain, but you are meant for more than is even dreamed of in the workday world where people are preoccupied (and understandably so) for their survival.
 
IV.
Churches are forever shrinking or bursting their seams. As for Eliot Church, the answer to the question whether we are too big or too small, the answer is–maybe it doesn’t matter. Whatever its size, a church is in the Resurrection business, the business of breaking down and rebuilding as a quality community. There is a classic expression for this in our theology–reformata, semper reformanda.
 
So, see if you catch Paul’s spirit in this translation from Eugene Petersen’s The Message:
 
That’s plain enough, isn’t it? You’re no longer wandering exiles. This kingdom of faith is now your home country. You’re no longer strangers or outsiders. You belong here, with as much right to the name Christian as anyone. God is building a home. He’s using us all—irrespective of how we got here—in what he is building. He used the apostles and prophets for the foundation. Now he’s using you, fitting you in brick by brick, stone by stone, with Christ Jesus as the cornerstone that holds all the parts together. We see it taking shape day after day—a holy temple built by God, all of us built into it, a temple in which God is quite at home.
 
Don’t just DO something, be still and put on the mind of Christ.
 
Rev. Richard Chrisman 7/31/2022

Genesis 11:1-9
 
I.
 
Today human societies are in the same trap we set up for ourselves at Babel. The fantasy behind it is this: only if we remain a single people with a single language and a single purpose, can we be all-powerful! The builders of Babel feared being split up and spread out across the earth, yet that’s just what happened to them. For fame and power, they wanted to build a city with a monolith touching the heavens. They sought hegemony. But God wouldn’t have it. When they organized themselves, God intervened and split them up after all. The human will to power was and remains God’s greatest challenge. 
 
The unity–really, the monopoly–humans wish for is contrary to God’s purpose. God stands for the whole people of God. The accumulation of wealth and the intensification of power such as you can have in a city conflicts with care of people and planet. Babel would not be a city built by God. Their self-exaltation was inconsistent with human responsibility to God. As one commentator put it, “God is going to limit human possibility for the sake of greater possibilities.” God seems to be saying, diversity is now going to be a permanent fact, live with it, learn to live through it. God the Creator in whose image we are made stands not for monopoly but for creativity.
 
Well, but just how? The disarray of diverse societies is challenging, inconvenient, conflictual, unmanageable. This continues to be the greatest challenge to every society.
 
Then see how the New Testament comes along and continues the question with its own vision. The Pentecost story in the Book of Acts shows ethnic and national differences to be a fact of life, a fact of life that could be lived with, that could be transcended. The Holy Spirit comes not to homogenize society but to help us humanize it. It is through the gospel of forgiveness that this will be accomplished, if it is ever to be accomplished.
 
This moral of both stories remains relevant to us in the churches of Christ. Throughout history, not only do nations collide, seek hegemony (Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin), only to collapse, religions follow the same pattern–even the smallest splinter of a religion harbors fantasies of hegemony. Faiths collide, and factions within faiths collide. Whenever faiths collide it has been a mortal disaster, now reaching another climax this very day through Christian white nationalism, although long before this, two competing Christianities on this continent sought monopolies through force. Christianity, reinforced by the state, has sought unity by conformity to doctrine–a lust to be the orthodoxy of the state religion. And as American Protestantism splintered into competing sects and denominations, much of the population said, “a plague on all your houses,” and chose none.
 
II.
 
I see the sad truth of all this, but I personally look at religion differently. The riches to be found in religion can be known and savored best when you look behind or around, beside or below the doctrines.
 
It means keeping our eyes open without proprietary assumptions or preconceived notions. It means putting aside the self-abasement that is inculcated by Christianity in places.
 
You have been sitting here in your usual pew, and the worship service has followed the bulletin, just as has been unfolding here so far.
 
But now I ask you to imagine with me that this space is actually a great theater, a really large one–in fact, picture an opera house, the grandest of grand opera houses.
 
These pews here are where the audience usually sits, in the orchestra and the mezzanine and balconies.
 
The stage itself is huge, a vast proscenium arch, with deep wings, high fly tower, and the rear wall is recessed far away behind the flats.
 
Now I invite you to leave your pew and actually step up onto the stage itself, because you are in this drama–a church service is the closest thing to an opera–that’s why I put the image of a cast of The Magic Flute by Mozart on the bulletin cover.
 
All of you have parts, some spoken, some sung.
 
You may walk among the actors, or pull up a chair and watch it all close-up.
 
You recognize many others on the crowded stage because all of church history is telescoped into the space.
 
At this moment, you are in the middle of the fable of Babel where it says, “The Lord came down to see the city and the tower.”
 
As the line is spoken by a narrator, you become aware in an extra-sensory way of past interpreters of this story–Luther (two kingdoms) and Mother Teresa (City of God) and Jorge Luis Borges (the library of Babel).
 
You can hear the music accompanying the line appropriate to the time–Gregorian chant, Bach chorale, colonial plainsong, Appalachian shape note hymn.
 
And on the flats are conceptions drawn by Pieter Breughel and Gustave Dore and Salvador Dali, as they successively proceed through time to the present.
 
Throughout this moment, God is shapeshifting, now a judging God, then a punishing God, and then a mischievous God, even a laughing God.
 
It’s marvelous, you are in the middle of an opera that simultaneously stands still over a single line and collects time like looking in the wrong end of a telescope.
 
Over there at the edge of our performance, on another elevation of this vast stage you see a performance of Jewish liturgy going on, also enacted in the same way, such that you can catch the voice of the cantor as she is pronouncing “The Lord came down to see the city and the tower” for people who are in the Alexandria diaspora, the Warsaw Ghetto, and modern Jerusalem.
 
Yet in another plain of the stage, you walk over to Islamic chanting of the story, where in this case it is Pharoah who puts up a henchman Haman to build the tower in a challenge to Moses. There too as you mingle among the prayerful, an imam interprets, and you experience the three-dimensionality of the story. Now you hear the interplay of the same story in other frames, similar images, words that speak to each other. God is One, but human relationships to God are many.
 
All of a sudden a fire engine goes by, siren blaring, and you realize you are in your pew with everybody else.
 
You shake your head and see that everybody went into the coffee hour.
 
So I believe there is a remedy to the ego-driven conflicts of religion. Nobody has to change their religion, or give religion up.
 
Change your lenses. Change your seat. Step through the proscenium arch and enter the story, the mythic journey of God’s people to embrace all of humanity. Experience art, creativity and the sacred.
 
I used to be an ecumaniac. I believed in ecumentism. I had a Catholic priest participate in my ordination in 1970. I loved the idea of religions being one. I applauded the many interfaith dialogues that sprouted after Vatican II. All kinds of conversations were going on between different denominations and different religions. Inter-communion took place, unthought of before.
 
Now I am a recovering ecumaniac. It all fizzled. After Roe, reproductive rights drove a wedge between the Christian denominations and divided churches internally. In the 1990s, gay marriage and ordination prompted profound conflicts among and within the churches. After 9/11, Islamic terrorism inspired hate from many Christian communities. Religion, religion everywhere in the news and not a dialogue to be found.
 
Today, I understand religion to be less a matter of belief in particular doctrines and more about story. I have shown you religion as a huge theater, painting its own sets over the centuries, writing its own scripts, composing its own music. People are meant to get up on the stage–to sing, speak some lines, walk among the actors, or pull up a chair and watch it all close-up. No one has to agree or disagree to anything, just absorb the spiritual atmosphere that totally surrounds you. People leave magically transformed.
 
And the curtain never comes down, the way I see religion now. All the world is a religious stage. Maybe you get what I mean?
 
Rev. Richard Chrisman

​ A holy “unholy” love, Part II
Song of Solomon
 
Reproductive freedom has been gutted, but gay rights, too, are threatened by the Supreme Court. You would think good Christians would applaud couples who promise eternal fidelity to each other, as gay couples want to be able to do, in keeping with universal marriage values. That’s how I always felt. If two people come to me to bless their intention to live together in a permanent, sexually exclusive relationship, that’s what the church has always been in business for! There are plenty of heterosexual couples who promise the same thing and are either not able to keep those promises or never intended to from the outset. Why in heaven or on earth would a minister or priest deny either the wish or the opportunity for the most fulfilling of relationships to anyone? This is a point of bitter contention between and among Christian denominations.
 
It all depends on how you look at the Bible. There are big differences between the various churches on this score. First, many hold with the literal inerrancy of the Bible–one of the four fundamentals of fundamentalism. Second, many view the Bible as a blueprint for society, which it isn’t and couldn’t be. It is written in our Eliot Church covenant, “we accept the Holy Scriptures as our rule of faith and practice.” But the Bible is like the US Constitution–it needs interpretation. Basically, there are only two Christianities: one in which the Bible is God, and the other in which the Bible points to God. We belong to the latter.
 
And it depends on where you look in the Bible. If the Church really wanted to promote satisfying, long lasting, and sexually exclusive relationships, there needed to have been a basic understanding of and respect for human sexuality, but the Church couldn’t handle it. It is hard to find such in the Bible, but there is a place to look, the Song of Solomon. The Church included this unique book in the Bible, but only grudgingly, without knowing really what to do with it.
 
It’s a short book of 8 chapters, made up of what seem to be bursts of 31 intense lyrics between two lovers, identified in some translations as the Bride and Bridegroom. This engaged couple are profoundly, almost painfully in love–they address each other in superlatives of tenderness and yearning. They are clearly in the throes of the “carnal consummation of love,” as Robert Alter put it. Yet their “unholy” love is sanctified, made holy, by the presence of the Spirit.
 
Prof Renita Weems, emerita professor of Old Testament at Vanderbilt, herself a womanist Christian theologian, identifies this as a countercultural book. It is the only book of the Bible in which the female voice predominates, she is anonymous and she is black-skinned. Her speech is bold and un-self-censored, and perfectly reciprocated by her lover. This leads Prof Weems to observe that this book is a protest against crass materialism–it honors the body, it honors woman and women’s sexual experience and men’s. Their sexual identity is outshined by the power of love at once human and divine. Their gender identity pales in significance compared to their humanity. This sexual drama reveals a snapshot of divine possibility in the human sphere–the intimate bonding of love is the incarnation of the Spirit. Their sexual orientation reflects cultural norms of that time, of course, but the Bible is making a more fundamental point about sexual love–the body is the Temple of the Spirit. Spirits unite when bodies unite–this is the miracle of human loving.
 
This is why divorce is so painful, and I have been through that, or the dissolution of any intimate relationship. The Bible declares that this love is the birthright of any two people who give themselves to each other in this way–person to person, person seeking person, person serving person. These love lyrics between a heterosexual couple are just as relevant to same-sex couples.
 
So, as I said at the outset, you would think good Christians would applaud couples who promise eternal fidelity to each other, as gay couples want to be able to do, in keeping with universal marriage values. Let’s just ask, what is marriage for? Theories abound–for the protection of progeny, being the principal one. Another is to secure property rights over females.
 
What if we turned the question around and asked, why do people get married? The fact is, “as studies show,” people consistently find that same-partner sex is most fulfilling. In fact, the spiritual union that results from sexual union is indelible and wants celebrating. The two become one flesh, as the Bible itself says, amazingly affirming the pleasure bond. You could just say that marriage is a need, a fundamental human need. As the marriage liturgy inveighs, “Let no one put asunder whom God hath joined together.” The point we celebrate every Sunday here is the reality of the Incarnation, the mystery of spirit in flesh.
 
 The great story of Jesus’ at the wedding in Cana where he turned water into wine is a fitting symbol and summary of the Bible–there is more than meets the eye to human life. Water miraculously gives life to flesh. But we are also a volatile mix of flesh and spirit, and wine symbolizes the indissolubility of flesh and spirit. Ultimately, we are persons seeking persons.
 
We sometimes start in unholy ways, but everyone’s birthright is to be sanctified in a relationship made holy by God.
 
–Rev. Richard Chrisman, July 3, 2022

​Like a Breath
Psalm 144: 3-4, 12-15
June 26, 2022 – Eliot Church of Newton, MA
Rev. Emma Brewer-Wallin
 
The gift of the psalms is that they hold within them the tensions of human existence: joy and pain, hope and despair, hunger for food and hunger for God. The psalms do not box us into one feeling: they enable us to experience complexity of our lives, individually and collectively.

In this psalm – and particularly in this translation – we see a portrait of a community of riches. The sons in their youth are like full-grown plants, whose vitality provides shelter and food. The daughters are like cornerstones, the sure foundation on which palaces are built. The barns are full, the sheep and cattle are increasing. The city is secure, and no one on the margins is distressed either. This community is thriving! And yet, this psalm does not box us into one feeling. This psalm does not force us to remain feeling contentedness or celebration, noting that humanity is like a breath. Humanity is fleeting. Humanity is part of a cycle – in and out, not stagnant. This is a thriving community, full of riches – but humanity is like a breath. Everything changes, nothing is permanent.

One way we could interpret the picture of a thriving community alongside a reminder that everything changes is something like the phrase what goes around comes around. When the psalmist says that humanity is like a breath, we could understand this as something like the wisdom from Ecclesiastes – for everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven… a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to break down, and a time to build up. When the psalmist says humanity is like a breath, we could understand this as a reminder that riches do not last – there is a time for wealth and a time for poverty. Throughout the psalms, and elsewhere in scripture, we hear those in poverty, bondage, or exile yearning for what they do not have. They lift up prayers to a God of justice and mercy that they may be well-fed and liberated and returned to their homeland. These are the powerful texts we turn to in our times of trouble, knowing that we are not the first to travel a difficult path, and from which we understand God’s love for the poor.

Both we and the biblical wise ones and prophets live in a world with dramatic economic inequality, summed up with the truism that the rich keep getting richer while the poor keep getting poorer. This is not an accident, nor a law of nature. The rich keep getting richer while the poor keep getting poorer because the rich are exploiting the poor. A select few are benefiting from the labor of the many. Those few contract out their problems to the many – and due to systems that protect their wealth and power, the few are able to avoid uncomfortable or unpleasant tasks and burdens, everything from preparing food to living near landfills and toxic industries.

Throughout scripture, we see people living under the rule of various empires, in which the fruits of most people’s labors are exported to the elite few and the local leaders who colluded with authorities. Although we in contemporary New England may not think that we live in an empire, the injustices of our modern world are inextricably bound up in empire. The land now known as the United States was colonized by British, French, and Spanish powers as part of their sweeping empires attempting to rule the globe – attempts that involved the genocide and forced removal of indigenous nations. Those empires created the transatlantic slave trade, a massive source of wealth generated through the exploitation of coerced, stolen people. The modern United States is an empire, waging wars to build wealth off the labor and resources of foreign nations. The fossil fuel industry is its own kind of empire: one in which energy alternatives are not given a fair hearing and people and earth are exploited.

The empires of our time allow the prophets’ cry to echo across the ages, imploring us to see that our collective accumulation of wealth will be our downfall. Indeed, the psalmist tells us that humanity is like a breath: riches do not last. There is a time for wealth and a time for poverty. Throughout scripture, we see that the worshiping of material resources leads to the undoing of those who hoard their wealth – a pattern reflected again in the climate crisis. But I do not think that the psalmist’s declaration that humanity is like a breath is mere criticism, justly founded though it is. I think that when the psalmist tells us that humanity is like a breath, we are being offered a way out – not an excuse, but an opening. Yes, like a breath, humanity may be fleeting. But this is not all that a breath is – our breath is sustaining. Our breath is what enables us to be adaptable. Our breath is responsive. When our context demands it, our respiratory rate increases. In times of trouble or in situations where we must work hard, we breathe harder. Our breath is regulating. Breathing deeply allows us to settle down. We can control our response to a situation – how panicked we feel or how agitated we are – through our breath.

Humanity is like a breath – and our breath is responsive. Responding to the climate crisis surrounding us and looming over our futures, Gen Z-ers – that’s those under 25 – are increasingly engaged in climate justice, not only in their personal habits, but in their vocations as well. Young adults are taking on climate work in their educational and professional lives, and are joining together for collective action towards a just transition through the Sunrise Movement and others. In the vision this psalm presents, young people are like flourishing plants. What if the vision this psalm presents is one where their vitality is not due to the accumulation of riches, but to a vibrant ecosystem – an ecosystem that is responsive to the climate crisis? To promote the flourishing of young people within this climate crisis, how might we – as individuals and as churches – be as responsive as a breath? Might we be as responsive as a breath by following the leadership of children and youth, ensuring that there is enough air in their lungs as they proclaim the need for climate justice? Might we be as responsive as a breath by being a faith community that tells the truth about climate grief, giving people a place to turn so that they get life-sustaining oxygen as their hard work increases? Might we be as responsive as a breath by advocating for needed policy changes that remove carbon dioxide from the body of this earth, just as our respiratory systems remove carbon dioxide from our bodies?

Humanity is like a breath – and our breath is regulating. There are older adults regulating the rate of this climate crisis, using the skills and experiences they've developed over lifetimes. In the vision this psalm presents, there are stores of resources, built up over generations. What if these quantities are not a stockpile, but an abundance shared with all? Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation, who collectively own 70% of this country’s financial assets, are joining together as the ThirdAct movement to influence the banks that fund climate destruction – they’re ensuring their collective wealth is not funding our collective downfall. To promote an abundance for all people rather than the wealth of the few, how might we – as individuals and as churches – be as regulating as a breath? Might we be as regulating as a breath by being a faith community grounded in simplicity, slowing down the rate of consumption that fuels the climate crisis? Might we be as regulating as a breath by advocating for a transition away from a fossil fuel economy that is not only for the wealthiest communities, but for all, ensuring the removal carbon from throughout the system? Might we be as regulating as a breath by being a faith community that can raise a strong voice, crying out loudly, boldly, and consistently?
​
In this psalm, we see a portrait of a community of riches. Some people are like full- grown plants, whose vitality provides shelter and food. Others are like cornerstones, the sure foundation on which palaces are built. The barns are full, the sheep and cattle are increasing. The city is secure, and no one on the margins is distressed either. This community is thriving! They have not arrived here by accident – they are people who are like a breath, responsive and regulating. The gift of the psalms is that they hold within them the tensions of human existence: joy and pain, hope and despair, hunger for food and hunger for God. Tension is what allows us to breathe – what allows our muscles and lungs’ cycle of expansion and contraction to continue. We are like a breath: respond to the climate crisis by dwelling in the tension between hopeful action and overwhelming grief, simplicity and abundance, the need for change and the need for steadiness. We are like a breath: regulate the climate crisis by dwelling in the tension between global scale and local specificity, youthful vision and age-earned wisdom, the need for change and the need for steadiness. This community has not arrived here by accident – you are made up of people who are like a breath, responsive and regulating. One breath at a time, we can bring about climate justice. One breath at a time, we are regulating. One breath at a time, we are responding. May it be so, may it be soon. Amen.

Psalm 144:3-4, 12-15 – translation by Wilda C. Gafney
 
Womb of Life, what is humanity that you even know them, or the woman-born that you think of them?
Humanity is like a breath;
whose days are like a passing shadow.
Our sons in their youth are like plants full grown,
our daughters are like cornerstones, cut for the building of a palace.
Our barns are full,
from produce of every kind;
our sheep have increased by thousands, many thousands in our surroundings.
Our cattle are heavy,
there is no breach in the walls, no exile, and no cry of distress in our surroundings.
Happy are the people to whom such blessings fall; happy are the people whose God is the Womb of Life.

A holy “unholy” love, Part I
Song of Solomon
 
 
In the church calendar, today is Trinity Sunday. It follows Pentecost which celebrates the arrival of the Holy Spirit last Sunday. The Holy Spirit makes the third person of the Trinity in orthodox Christian doctrine. It is also a good morning to catch us up on Gay Pride Month and anticipate Gay Pride Day on June 28. This is among the most important subjects for me, as a Christian, a minister, and a straight, white, married man.
 
I.
 
Why did I choose those love lyrics between a heterosexual couple to read on a day when I want to celebrate Gay Pride? You’ll see.
 
Do you know the French expression, Chacun a ses sexes? I remember hearing this expression for the first time on a summer trip to France as a teenager. I thought it made sense, and there is no reason at that age that I should have. Yet, I caught the freedom of its meaning, the carefreeness, and the politics implied.
 
Chacun a ses sexes. It’s a play upon the phrase, “to each his own,” but it means “to each their own gender” —chacun a ses sexes. This would have been 1962, not exactly the age of Aquarius in the United States. Well, there is nothing like getting out of the United States of America, for sure!
 
America is finally coming to realize, ever so gradually, that sexuality ranges along a wide spectrum of experience and expression. Human sexuality is wildly fungible–there is not just one channel on this tv, or just two either, but many, perhaps as many as there are people. Christian doctrine has tried to fence it in–sexual behavior, sexual orientation, sexual ethics, marriage, children, divorce. And the Church has turned out to be wrong on every score.
 
Take divorce—of course, we want marriage to last “till death do us part,” as it is intended. But before there was divorce there was mayhem, abuse, contempt, neglect, self-abnegation, hatred, self-hatred, depression, psychosis, suicide, even homicide. The “Christian sexual ethic”—no divorce, no homosexuality, no sex outside of marriage, no sex that did not have procreation for its intent (Roman Catholicism), no contraception, no abortion–is neither Christian, nor about sex, nor an ethic, and it has abused the Bible to that end. None of this is biblical, unless you regard the Bible as a blueprint for society, which it is not. The Church developed an airtight system that perpetuated woman as the property of the male.
 
II.
 
If the Church really wanted to promote satisfying, long lasting, and sexually exclusive relationships, there needed to have been a basic understanding of and respect for human sexuality, but the Church couldn’t handle it. It is hard to find such in the Bible, but there is a place to look, the Song of Solomon. The Church included this unique book in the Bible, but only grudgingly, without knowing really what to do with it.
 
It’s a short book of 8 chapters, made up of what seem to be bursts of 31 intense lyrics between two lovers, identified in some translations as the Bride and Bridegroom. This engaged couple are profoundly, almost painfully in love—they address each other in superlatives of tenderness and yearning. They are clearly in the throes of the “carnal consummation of love,” as Robert Alter put it. Yet their “unholy” love is sanctified by the presence of the Spirit.
 
Prof Renita Weems puts the poetry in focus—this is the only book of the Bible in which the female voice predominates, she is anonymous and she is black-skinned. Her speech is bold and un-self-censored, and perfectly reciprocated by her lover. This leads Prof Weems to observe that this is a counter cultural document—it honors the body, it honors woman and women’s sexual experience. Their sexual identity is outshined by the power of human love. Their gender identity pales in significance compared to their humanity. Their sexual drama reveals a snapshot of divine possibility in the human sphere—the intimate bonding of love is the incarnation of the Spirit. We know this is not confined to their orientation, because the body is the Temple of the Spirit. Spirits unite when bodies unite—this is the miracle of human loving. This is why divorce is so painful, or the dissolution of any intimate relationship. It is, however, the birthright of any two people who give themselves to each other in this way.
 
 Sex is nature’s way of leading us to God.
 
Why did I choose those love lyrics between a heterosexual couple to read on a day when I want to celebrate Gay Pride? You’ll see.
 
 To be continued next Sunday.
 
 
Rev. Richard Chrisman
June 12, 2022
​

We need comfort. We certainly do today. We need comforting. Trauma everywhere, every day. From Buffalo to Uvalde, from Detroit to Houston, from San Bernadino to Newton Ct. We mourn lives lost, and we mourn that there are so many who are mourning today. Let us pray: O God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations our all our hearts give wings to the faith in you which lies so deep within each of us here this morning, O God, my Strength, my Redeemer, and my Comforter. Amen.
 
I.
The appointed text for Ascension Sunday is from the conclusion of Luke’s gospel–
 
Then Jesus led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and they were continually in the temple blessing God.
 
This report is a way of saying Jesus was not just a part of life, but ALL of life. Jesus’ material image had to be erased so that he could be seen in everything everywhere. The cosmic Christ is all in all. He arose from the dead to rise from the Earth into heaven, the heavens, the cosmos. Jesus’ ascension does not mean divinity deserted us on Earth. On the contrary, it says that God and nature are one. Earth is God’s body, and only an infinitesimal part of it.
 
This insight energized Christian thinkers from Hildegard of Bingen to Meister Eckhart to Thomas Merton. This insight energized Jewish philosophy from Spinoza to Martin Buber. This insight energized the scientists of the Muslim efflorescence of Umayyad Spain in 14th and 15th century Spain.
 
II.
We need comfort. We certainly do. We need comforting. On Memorial Day we memorialize the war dead, but originally only the Union dead, then later on the United States casualties of foreign wars. But we should memorialize all the war dead because they are the victims of our hubris. We seem never to have learned the lesson that God is all in all, and humanity is a very small part of it. Somehow humanity got lost in our own importance. We mistakenly concluded that we were the apex of the natural ladder, the climax of Creation, the peak of evolution, the center of the cosmos. Even today, after the Copernican revolution, we behave as if the sun revolves around man. Because, at some point, we concluded that Nature was our plaything, our servant, an engine for our wealth.
 
That occurred with the rise of science–no, not until the rise of “scientism.” That is the belief that all nature’s secrets could be discovered and exploited, to master our fate. But scientism couldn't conquer death. It tried and instead became an engine of death–the atomic bomb. Hiroshima changed our relation to Nature permanently and irrevocably. At Hiroshima a bomb was dropped so powerful it killed 140,000 by splitting an atom. Three thousand people died on 9/11 at the World Trade Center–140,000 in one minute on August 6, 1945, at Hiroshima. The horrific antithesis of comfort, splitting the atom changed our relationship to nature forever, and we are paying for it now with weapons of mass destruction and the commercial degradation of the environment. Today’s climate crisis resulted from a war against the Earth that dates from the dropping of the atomic bomb. In sum, scientism is Christ denied.
 
III.
We need comfort. We certainly do. We need comforting. On this last Sunday of Easter, Ascension Sunday when Christ withdraws from the periphery of the world into the invisible center, we can find comfort in the truth that God is all in all. There is comfort in Nature. I mean comfort, not the comforts of nature, not the comforts of sunsets or the fantasies of our screensavers. Inside nature, properly understood, nestles comfort. I mean the nature of which, at a molecular level, we are a part. Nature is not outside of us, but inside, even unto the molecular insides of us.
 
We seldom feel nature that deeply. Oh, we get down to nature at the level of our aches and pains, but that’s nothing, that’s not it, not what I mean. But it’s close. Pain is cellular dysfunction, so it’s a partial clue. However, it takes real imagination to get where I want you to go, to get to the comfort of nature.
 
Here’s an exercise that might help: drink a glass of water, slowly, all of it, as I am presently doing, and imagine while you’re drinking where it’s headed, where it goes, imagine how far it goes on its way, how deep into your thirst, when it reaches tissue and marrow and the atomic makeup of the cell. It brings health, vitality–and comfort–to us. So fragile and tender is life. You should realize that you can’t get any closer to Nature, or God, than you already are.
 
Besides the “sacrament” of drinking water I have just demonstrated, there are other ways, like, read more Emerson, more Dickinson, more Whitman, more Mary Oliver, more Annie Dillard. Breathe with the yogis. Bathe in the hot springs. Savor the food you eat. Move your body. Every day we can receive the comfort of nature.
 
Nature is the bosom of God. Our hope lies not in conquering nature but in following it. The body heals itself, if treated well–if we allow the body to find its homeostasis. Way back in the 1970s, Norman Cousins showed us the way with laughter and spirit. The title alone of one book confirms our celebration today–The Biology of Hope and the hope of biology lie inside us.
 
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
–William Blake, 1794
 
Rev. Richard Chrisman, May 29, 2022

​How is the church like the MFA?
Ephesians 4:17-24
 
I celebrate the church, and I invite you to celebrate the church with me during this wonderful season at Eliot when our Stewardship Campaign ends, our candidate for Settled Pastor comes to preach, and we prepare for our Annual Meeting.
 
Let us pray. . . O God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts give wings to the faith in you that lies so deep within each of us here this morning, O God, my strength and my redeemer. Amen.
 
Paul had the same problem in his day that we do now–keeping the church together. In his case, because they were so new, the churches experienced conflict on the inside and threats from the outside. In our case, it is the effects of Covid, the widening secularism of our era, and white Chrisitian nationalism infecting the faith. How to keep the church together indeed! Paul gave us one clue by stressing unity and not uniformity. Another clue came with his stress on the personal. Paul wanted for his young Christians to experience dynamic personal growth. He exhorted them to “put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.” Put away your old self with its pursuit of blind alleys, and put on the new self truly freed to love and serve–that is the goal. If all of us here keep our eyes on this prize, the church will survive its divisions.
 
This goal distinguishes us from the Museum of Fine Arts. We are similar in being a nice place to visit and to pass through enriched. Like the MFA, we are a destination where something important happens, even if you can’t exactly put your finger on it.
 
But the church I celebrate and invite you to celebrate this morning offers our society its one, single live moment in the week, where you can hear music, hear the Word read and preached, and where you can sit still until God finds you! Where else is there a “live” hour to be found but here?
 
Yes, and isn’t it curious how people come together here to be alone with God. We unite in this gathering to say the same words and songs, but we each are here to make contact with our God, as individuals. What a paradox and something to celebrate and give ourselves up to. Unlike going to an art museum, Sunday morning presents us with a solitary experience enveloped in a community experience.
 
Another difference is that at church you feel something, or should. I still cry through some hymns, but as the “master of ceremonies” I have to contain it. But I’ve always felt that if you don’t cry in therapy and in church, you haven’t gotten your money’s worth! I never cried in an art gallery, but I do remember sitting transfixed on the bench in front of the Guernica at the Museum of Modern Art when it was still there–for thirty minutes.
 
And you know what else–church is a place where you can do something. People instinctively want to help. They come to church for the link to action and to take action. Despite Covid, when we had to give up the Fall Fair and the Thanksgiving Dinner, this church still found ways to be active. Here is a list I made last night–the Free Library project, lawn signs, the environmental campaign of Lent and of last two weeks, charitable gifts (MSJ), charitable projects (MSJ again), the improved acoustics of the Sanctuary, indoor Sanctuary worship (required making and installing those pew cords), outdoor summer worship (required installing a portable P/A system from the windows), and what will soon be a new and comprehensive pictorial directory that includes the full spectrum of Eliot “alumni.” What did we ever do at the MFA, although I remember an interactive exhibit several years ago.
 
I have celebrated church at every church I served. Like the Morningside United Church of Christ in south-central L.A. that I served in the 1980s–a church consisting 50-50 of both Black and white members, something that only happened because my predecessor twice-removed, Rev. John Flucke, devoted himself to knocking on doors during white flight and urging Black residents to save his church from being just a “club” by joining.
 
In conclusion, here is one definition of church that moves me profoundly–I believe the aim of church is a faith that is “as considerate of persons as the teachings of Jesus; as devoted to justice as the Old Testament prophets; as responsive to Truth as science; as beautiful as art; as intimate as the home; and as indispensable as the air we breathe.” That is church to me, and I celebrate it.
 
Rev. Richard Chrisman, May 22, 2022