Elizabeth L. Windsor, DMin
October 18, 2020
The 20th t Sunday after the Day of Pentecost
Micah 6: 6-8
Philippians 4: 4-8
 
I spent this past week preparing for today’s worship service, knowing that in-person early voting would begin yesterday in Massachusetts. I knew what scriptures, hymn and litany I wanted to use. But I began my preparation for the sermon by researching of all things, etiquette.
 
There is a well-known trope that “religion and politics should not be discussed in polite company.” I searched Emily Post and Miss Manners as well as several Victorian writings on etiquette to discover why. The most succinct explanation I found comes from a blog called The Modern Man. The author Jean-Marc writes, “People maintain that religion and politics are topics that should never enter polite, civilized conversation. People often feel so strongly about these areas that things can become heated very quickly, sometimes descending into unpleasantness.”
 
Well, that seems reasonable – polite people don’t want to make things unpleasant for others, and most polite Christian people don’t either. After all, as church historian Dr. Diana Butler Bass writes in a recent piece, “I suspect we can’t talk about religion and politics because we equate “faith” and “public life” with triumphal partisanship, with yelling more than reason and prayer, and, of course, with winning and losing. When it comes to religion and politics, conventional labels have come to mean less than how certain spiritual themes shape the [body politic]: irony, humility, lament, charity, forgiveness, generosity, neighborliness, hope, hospitality, justice, and compassion.”
 
And it is not just in public that Christians shy away from discussion politics and religion; we do the same in our churches. “No politics from the pulpit” is something preachers are often told, this one included. But is politics – the way societies organize themselves and live together – off limits for the Church in a democracy?
 
The late New Testament scholar and theologian, Marcus Borg was convinced that Christians who follow the Bible MUST be engaged in the politics of the world in which we live, “Taking the Bible seriously should mean taking politics seriously. The major voices in the Bible from beginning to end are passionate advocates of a different kind of world here on earth and here and now . . . In a democracy, politics in the broad sense does include how we vote . . . [We] are called to take seriously God’s dream for a more just and nonviolent world.”
 
Neither the Bible nor the Church tells us for whom to vote, and I am not advocating that they should. But our tradition and the Bible give us very clear criteria Christians should apply when making our decisions to vote for or against either a person or a ballot initiative. We heard some of those criteria in the Scripture read this morning. In the passage from Micah, the prophet makes his case against corrupt political and religious leaders who exploit the people of God. He tells these publicly pious self-serving leaders that all the sacrifices of the Temple will not make their practices holy or acceptable to God. Instead, Micah reminds the leaders that God requires only three things from them: “Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God.”
 
Paul’s letter to the Philippians is written from jail. A political prisoner, Paul believes he is about to be put to death for treason (and he eventually will be). Yet, in this letter, Paul instructs the church to continue living as disciples of Jesus with these powerful and hopeful words:
“Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”
 
It may seem naïve to apply these teachings to our political life right now. “Truth” doesn’t seem to matter much. “Justice” is only for some people. “Mercy” is in short supply. “Humility” seems beyond our reach, and there doesn’t seem to be much that is “worthy of praise.” We are overwhelmed by all that has gone wrong and it is hard to find enough space to “think about these things.”
 
It is easy to feel discouraged and wonder if our votes will even be counted. But as I watch the lines of folks waiting to vote around the country on the news, I am reminded of something the Rev. Dr. William Barber III said to Chris Hayes’ on the “Why Is This Happening?” podcast in July of 2019. As we prepare to vote, I take courage from Rev. Barber’s prophetic words – you can hear the echo of Paul’s words: “You have to make one decision. Do I stand here and die? Do I shrink back? Or do I believe that some things are so precious, some things that are so loving, some things are just and true that even if it means fighting with my last breath, I’m going to fight for them and I’m going to win, because I am either going to do one of two things. I am going to win or I am going to sow the seeds of the victory to come.”
 
As Christians, our votes are our testimony to our belief in the Beloved Community and the Peaceable Kingdom revealed in Scripture. Dr. Butler Bass insists “[politics and religion] are things we must talk about. And if we don’t talk about them, it will be the moral death of us.”
 
So this election season, I invite you to ponder these scriptures as you think about how you will cast your vote. Talk with neighbors, family and friends via phone, text or Zoom or Facebook or Twitter about your faith and what it means to you in choosing for whom and for what you will vote.  
 
Pray for our nation. If you are looking for prayers to help you pray, you can find them on the Eliot website and our Face book page. I can also send them to you daily via email.
 
Dr. Butler Bass concludes a recent column with these words: “Do pray. Offer public prayers, prophetic ones, private ones. Polite ones, challenging ones, angry ones. Ones that bless, others that call down justice. Every single prayer is welcome. All are needed. And don’t worry about [religion] being political. It always is.” Amen.           

My text is from 2 Samuel 12:1-14, and from John 12 where Jesus says,
“The truth shall make you free.”
 
The historical baseline for this sermon on Indigenous Peoples’ Day weekend is King Philip’s War, so-called, considered the bloodiest war in US history, on a per capita basis, between the English colonists against Metacomet and his nation in 1675-76 in this very region.

1. START.  
David wanted Bathsheba, killed her husband, and took her. The first son died, but the second one, Solomon, became king himself and built up legendary wealth.
 
A great parable this is for American history.
 
What King David saw in Bathsheba, the colonial settlers saw in the vast continent spread out before them—namely, freedom without responsibility, emancipation from social constraints, realization of the male prerogative—there was rich soil for an abundant harvest of whatever you want so badly. 
 
That’s what settlers saw as the frontier moved forward, past the Massachusetts woods, past the Connecticut River, the Hudson River, the Delaware and the Ohio Rivers, past the great Mississippi River and beyond. The pioneers were the foot soldiers before there was law and order, who broke and invaded the ground and “settled” the West, that is, to make it fit for European habitation.
 
It’s breathtaking, the sweep of the pecuniary harvest at a time when “law and order” was employed to control everybody but speculators who went about realizing our wildest dreams of lucre and pleasure.

After 400 years, and through the advancing frontier, today the theme of “law and order” we are hearing so much about from certain quarters is being invoked by people in power, again and true to type, who actually don’t want it applied to themselves. The refrain of “law and order” goes back a long way in human civilization because of the universal need to keep violence in check that was used to secure food, shelter, family—and fortunes.
 
Other than love, there’s nothing more personal than violence and, therefore, nothing more fundamentally threatening to us. Everyone wants to live out our lives in health and tranquility and keep the wolf from the door—that’s how cities grew and walls were built around them, and how nations and empires came to be, including our empire which has 800 military bases in 70 countries around the world.
 
The American situation today was born from the collision of the colonists with a wild continent both stimulating and fearful to them, a land whose natural assets required law and order to be imposed on everyone but me. The “Indians,” which is what the colonists called the occupants of this “empty” continent, were the only obstacles to those riches.
 
The Massachusetts Bay Colony (Boston) founded in 1630, in order to remove impediments to clearing the forests and their occupants, used our own laws and courts against the Wampanoag nation, who were being educated through the schools created for them, including a special program for them at newborn Harvard College. The Boston colonists were the first to earn the expression that the White man speaks with forked tongue, by manipulating English “law and order” in the service of extirpating the subhuman population.
 
An important part of the story, however, is that while the “Indians” inspired fear, they also inspired a certain envy in the newcomers, especially in the male subconscious as they could not help but witness the liberty with which the Indian communed in nature, because they perceived the spirit of the hunter and the physical grace that came with that.
 
The “savagery” of the savages was paradoxically both repellent and attractive for its promise of freedom in the wilderness life which the colonists wanted on our orderly terms—legal, cultural, religious—a contradiction in terms that has us working at cross purposes with ourselves all these years.
 
One particular tactic of the colonists was to convert the native Americans to Christianity—to set about saving their souls from damnation and civilizing them in order to make them subservient to colonial needs. Thereby, the colonists established a psychic homestead in native heads which ultimately proved fatal to the Indian populations because it drove a wedge between the different tribes and the different families of those tribes.
 
Our John Eliot was part of this colonizing of the mind—his mission began right nearby, preaching a Calvinist deity to believers in Father Wisdom and Mother Earth.
 
A variation on this story took place on Cape Cod and the Islands where that branch of the Wampanoags were evangelized by a more “ecumenical” variety of Christian missionary (who came from Plimoth colony, not Boston) and so, when it finally came to the bloody war in 1675, they took the side of the English against the mainland Wampanoags.
 
The literature on this subject is now vast, and the conclusion is impossible to miss—John Eliot operated, albeit humanely, out of the same aggrandizing assumptions as his iron age society facing a stone age people; nevertheless, those assumptions fated a brief experiment in coexistence to succumb in short order to the logic of conquest.

2. STOP.
King David committed murder for the sake of his adulterous affair with Bathsheba. But his violence against a man and a woman and against his God came in for a reckoning through the ministrations of the prophet Nathan who cleverly made Yahweh’s righteous expectations plain to David. A moral law straight from the spirit world brought David to face his own sin—inconvenient, but liberating—without truth there can be no order.
 
Who was there to bring a reckoning to the colonists as we converted, harassed, attacked, and extirpated the native peoples? The colonists had no prophet Nathan to our King David, except Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams (she kicked out of Boston and Williams expelled from his Salem church), both of whom exiled to the region he renamed Rhode Island and Providence where they defended and took the side of the Indians.
 
The colonists had no authority beyond their sponsors in far-off England to account to, except experience itself. At one point in the war, actually, a day of fasting and prayer was declared by the clergy when everybody came to the realization that they had become the brutes that they thought they were sent by God to fight. In the midst of the war, that they had discovered they were no different—the preachers cried out how they had become like their enemies and deserved the judgment of God.
 
The prophet Nathan in effect came, but nothing changed, and in the short and brutal one and a half years from 1675-1676, the Indians had been driven out, leaving barely a trace of their former civilization and way with Nature.

3.THINK.  
How do we take in this history, and what do we do with it, standing here a mile from Nonantum, 350 years later? (Newton is a contraction of Nonantum.) What is to be “done?”
 
The history can’t be changed, but we can change ourselves. The first step is always confession. You can’t do that often enough, though many like to say, once is enough.
 
Samuel Sewall, one of the “hanging judges” in the Salem witch trials, stood in the midst of the Sunday morning congregation of Old South Church once a year thereafter to repeat publicly his role in condemning the accused in Salem to death.
 
To what would we be confessing? That our society is captive to a frontier mentality, to which you can directly trace our fights over climate change, gun control, Wall St. regulations, women’s rights, reproductive rights, gay rights.
 
Having compared the President to Samson last week, which showed the unreliability of flexing your own muscles, I will resist the temptation to compare him with King David.  However, we could wish that a visit from some prophet today would levy the heat of Yahweh’s righteousness upon the President’s soul that would result in his saying, as David did, “I have sinned before the Lord.”
 
Instead, I want to draw a different parallel, because we are King David’s heirs, and Solomon’s heirs, who sit upon riches made on a genocidal policy. To confess means to say publicly we know the truth, and so saying we are able to be held accountable, to repent and without which no one is able to reform.
 
So on this particular weekend, we must confess that we still make decisions as if our mother Earth and our own immediate environment, will continue to yield us sustenance and profits without side effects.
 

4. SPEAK.  
1. We could make our confession once a year, too, on our own property, on Thanksgiving just as they will be doing in Plymouth again for the 51st time. Maybe we need to renew the prayer and fasting of the Mass. Bay Colony to acknowledge the horror we feel at having become the brutes we thought we were putting in their place.  

2. Open a conversation between the John Eliot Church of Nonamtum with the Wampanoag nation—study the history of the partial remediations made over time and learn from them where to go from here. The hunger felt because of the pandemic disproportionately among native populations is an illustration—hence our special offering today: Neighbors in Need.  

3. Co-write the letter with our four UCC congregations letting the City of Newton redesign its Seal. I will bring such a proposal to LC next week. And note the name change at Plimoth Plantation to Plimoth-Patuxet to honor their 400th anniversary 1620-2020.  

4. Justice Thurgood Marshall gave us our orders—“Speak out.” So, don’t just stand there, Eliot pillars and steeple: say something. That’s my very message to the Art(iculation) Mob.  We have the whole exterior of this property (originally belonging to the native Americans)—it is essentially mute (like every other beautiful Congregational meeting house on our New England village squares). Can’t we get some money, form a jury of professionals, commission an artist, and erect a monument that acknowledges our history? Look at the message the Monument to Forgiveness by Danish sculptor Francis Jansen (attached) sends.  It stands now at the foot of the 1000 mile-long Trail of Tears at Northeastern State University in Oklahoma (go to www.graceinstone.com). We have our own memorial in our stained glass panel at the rear entrance of the Sanctuary to consider in that light. Of course, we will have other ideas and craft our own message and form for it. But let’s be thinking about this on Indigenous Peoples’ Day!  

If we Stop, and Think, and then Speak our confession, we thus lay the foundation necessary for reforming our national attitudes and policies toward Native Americans. As someone said, the truth will make us free, but first it will make us mad as hell. We will be reminded of Christ’s gospel that true freedom is seeking the freedom of others. May it be so!
 
Amen.
Rev. Richard Chrisman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I tell you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not get back very much more in this age, and in the age to come, eternal life.”  Luke 18:30.
Voting in this year’s national election has become an explosive issue. What’s to become of this country when voting is so contentious and so subject to interference from the outside and (now!) from the inside?   

Like those very worrisome fires in California last week, it feels like our democracy has become an inferno. Like Louisiana after Laura, our souls have been flooded and flattened by the cyclone of the political campaigns, which have only now begun in earnest. The year 2020 is what we call a live moment when anything can happen in this election.

But vote we can. Vote we must. And vote we will.

But did you know that when you go to the polls on November 3 (or mail in your ballot), you will be following the same practice observed by Town Meetings in Massachusetts since 1630—voting. In those days, only men with property were allowed to vote; today, all citizens over the age of 18 can vote, black or white, male or female, although it took a long long time before the franchise was universal. We celebrate the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage this year, but we sometimes forget that it was 60 very hard fought years in the making. Such that now, finally, we have more than 127 women in the US Congress, 26 in the Senate, 101 in the House, of whom 48 are women of color!

The practice of voting started in colonial, Congregational Massachusetts. 160 years before the US Constitution was signed by the 13 colonies, public decisions were made collectively. A point of theological significance lay at the foundation of this policy—self-governance was a virtue rooted in the spiritual freedom in Christ, and the common-wealth depended on honoring a covenant between citizens to consult and to support each other.
Now, even though voting in our American democracy has been cast into some doubt, nevertheless, we still govern ourselves very reliably that way in our Congregationally rooted churches in the United Church of Christ—so we are a democracy here. What kind of a democracy—direct democracy or representative democracy? 

Well, it’s a blend of both. Members cast votes directly when it comes to hiring or firing the minister, buying or selling property, and approving or amending the budget—that’s the direct part. But members also elect officers, council members, and commissioners who deliberate and carry out with the staff programmatic and administrative matters for them all year long—that’s the representative part.

You may be asking yourselves, just what have I done by joining a congregational church? Did you realize what you were getting into? I’m curious, What was involved in your becoming a member in the first place—classes, vows, sign a book? Were the rights and responsibilities outlined for you? Did anyone describe the uniqueness of churches, being living organisms whose different parts act in concert, being wellsprings of inspiration and the source of an alternative perspective on life that you can’t get from the MFA, the country club or any other voluntary association?
What a concept, a congregational church is run by the congregation! But to be a Congregational church, unlike a nation, a vote means more than voting and forgetting. Voting means ownership and accountability, which in turn means attention and follow-through. I like to say that a Congregational church is an Owner-operated, Equal-opportunity, Total Participation GOSPEL MISSION CENTER.

As a consequence, to be successful (just like a nation), a church needs an informed electorate and a committed one. Right now, that is more true than ever at Eliot Church. Because, Eliot is in a transition as you know perfectly well. But also because, occasionally, the elected leadership goes back to the congregation to vote on other matters of consequence, which is what I want to discuss with you today, one year and two months into this Interim period.  
Although an Interim Minister is not a REAL minister, as someone here once wondered if it was the case, I want to clarify that my role is to be a resource, a cheerleader—and a TIMEKEEPER. And right now, I’m saying it’s time for you to decide what kind of a church you want to be, and to find the appropriate words to include in the church Profile which goes out to prospective candidates for Settled Pastor.

The Interim process is like a sabbatical when there is no pressure and there is time to reflect and rethink life a little bit.
Our process began last fall with the “Soundings” program, then shifted gears last January when the Discernment Committee was appointed by the Leadership Council, and now it will continue soon with Small Group discussions to collect data and solicit the ideas and opinions of the congregation.

This will lead you ultimately to two Congregational Votes, the first one about the Church Vision and the second one when you appoint the Search Committee for Settled Pastor. No dates have been set yet for these votes, but I believe we can be ready with the Congregational Profile and to appoint a Search Committee by January 1st. Setting any and all deadlines is the responsibility of the Leadership Council—I’m just putting a stake out there for leadership to adjust as they see fit and for a target for you.

So right now, your Cheerleader and Timekeeper is asking for your concentration over the next 3-4 months, during which a Church Vision for the future will emerge from surveys and conversations led by the Discernment Committee, and they are hard at work as we speak.
 
No one is asking you to leave house or husband or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God exactly, but any alteration you can make in your plans, any extra effort you might dedicate, any new way you could devise to participate in the building up of this beloved Eliot community will be repaid, Jesus said to the disciples and, by extension, us, as much in this age as in the age of eternal life to come.
 
What repayment did Jesus have in mind, in this age, during your lifetime—the peace of God which surpasses all human understanding, enrichment of spirit, wisdom, well-being, fellow-feeling—that’s what’s in store for you!
 
So let me involve you, let me entice you to find a place or a role in the exciting work of this church at this particular juncture. Think of it this way--you’re not betting on a horse and hoping it wins—you are investing in a horse to help it win.

Mainly, commit yourself to follow the action, read all our media, and respond (write RevRick “I loved what you said about. . .” or to Dr. Elizabeth, “That book looks interesting but I can’t attend.”)  Here’s a quick run-down of some of the action at your church today--
​

1. Discernment now (Search later).
2. Reorganization—3 of our projects are to Right-size (a Discernment sub-committee is studying different models to bring our operations into proportion with the congregation; a new Operations Manual is being developed; and (my pet wish) cleaning out storage spaces (Ugly Room, Chapel rail, parlor kitchen, boiler room, behind the stage).
   
3. Rebuilding. This means strengthening the congregation’s interconnectivity—despite Covid-19, we will replace the missing glue in this congregation through phone and internet. One more Outdoor Service is planned for Sept 13 (maybe more weather permitting) which we could target as a ReGathering Sunday.

• Dr. Elizabeth’s initiatives—Anti-Racism, family reading group, Real Housewives of the Bible.
• RevRick’s initiatives (ART(iculation) Mob, John Eliot Research (as part of 175th Anniversary and Anti-Racism), Columns, Zoom Environmental Interviews, One-Minute Minister).
• Monique’s initiatives--working with the Section Leaders and integrating them into our Online recorded worship services this fall.
• 175th Anniversary--we have to go back to the drawing board due to Covid-19, but Susan Nason will let us know about next steps.

I am asking you to accept roles where we have vacancies (MSJ, Facilities, Spiritual Life), and by all means participate and be prepared to Vote the Vision by Christmas time.

We are not many, so we must be judicious in what the staff offers and what volunteers take on. But we can increase the quality and depth of the Eliot experience and get some momentum going toward the Call of a Settled Pastor, however short or long a time that may take. We are in it for the duration.

This sermon sounds to me a little like a political convention speech of which we have heard too many now; nevertheless, I will circulate this in our different media in the hopes of corralling each and every one of you faithful.
We face some headwinds from COVID-19; and there is natural resistance to change. But your devotion to Christ will overcome those impediments!

No one is asking you to leave house or husband or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God exactly, but any alteration you make in your plans for the sake of building up this beloved community will be repaid, Jesus said to the disciples and, by extension, us, as much in this age as in the age of Eternal Life to come.

--Rev. Richard Chrisman

​Psalm 62
Revelation 8:1-5
 
I.
 
Just listen again to all the ways our Psalmist this morning describes what God means to him—hope, rock, mighty rock, salvation, fortress, deliverance, honor, refuge.
 
And listen to how human beings are described—a breath (if you're poor), a delusion (if you are rich), and because together we are lighter than air itself, we aren’t even able to weigh down our side of the scales.
 
We the vulnerable have one recourse and one only in this earthly life, not crime nor violence nor riches, none of which will add to our security or happiness.  It was a world where life was uncertain and wellbeing a sometime thing—that’s certainly not what we grew up believing in middle class American households.
 
Today for the first time for all of us, life is reverting to what had once been a normal baseline for planetary existence for millennia—what we are calling the “new normal” was really the old normal before there were bank accounts, retirement savings, health insurance, mega-hospitals, a pharmacopeia of 20,000 drugs on the market, jet air travel, paved roads, seat belts, lighted streets, sewage and sanitation systems, etc.  All of which had the effect over the last 70 years of adding 10 years to American life expectancy.
 
So the notion of absolute dependence upon God for all things, as professed by the Psalmist, is foreign to us.
 
II.
 
Even so, we do make known what needs we may have through the prayers we say when we lay our heads on the pillow at night, or those we have said for us at church.  Practiced the way we commonly see them done, these petitions are rather utilitarian.  They are as such not invalid, but they do not bring us much satisfaction either.  Because as prayed, such prayers are haunted by age-old speculations on whether prayer gets answered, and why some prayers get answered and others do not, and whether it makes a difference to God if we enlist many other people in praying for what we need, and is it right for God to answer my prayer and not somebody else’s, and if I ask for the rain my garden needs, will I be ruining somebody’s parade?
 
These questions never get answered because they have no answer, given the mistaken assumption upon which they are based about a mechanistic God sitting at a cosmic telephone switchboard.  So, surrounded as we are by a bevy of uncertainties, we pray but we don’t always raise very confident prayers—or some people just give up praying for that matter.
 
And so, listen again to the exhortation of the Psalmist, who enjoins us to “pour out our hearts before God.” Just take a cursory glance at any two or three or four psalms, and you can see that’s exactly what the Psalmist does over and over again—he pours out his heart before God.  The Psalmist, in fact, models for us the very life of prayer which he urges upon us when he says, “pour out your hearts before God”—because his prayers are expostulations, explosions of feeling, eruptions of felt emotion originating in the depths of his being.
 
The Psalmist’s prayers are not so much petitions asking for solutions to problems or relief from exigency, but rather are acts of pure expression—what we call emotional honesty, a good example of which comes from Jesus himself when he prayed in Gethsemane, “Let this cup pass from me,” in other words, I am deathly afraid.
 
True prayer—the kind of prayer we need in this pandemic—amounts to moments of honesty before our God, which is not so easy when we are not even honest with ourselves and shy about doing so in front of our friends.
 
The spiritual goal is elusive—prayer is a gradual process of increasing honesty, of self-clarification.  Ultimately, prayer will bring me to see myself as God sees me and lead me out of my paralysis, my fears, my quandaries about what the heck to do next.  This kind of prayer rises from the spiritual depths, the words coming from a deeper place than asking for favors, or solutions, or anything of that sort.
 
So, what we call prayer is really not at base an activity at all; prayer is a state of being which occasionally makes its difficult way gradually into words or tears or sighs (remember St. Paul’s sighs too deep for words?), or into physical gestures like the use of worry beads or rosaries, the lighting of candles, the kneeling, or the standing, or the davening at Orthodox Jewish Shabbat.
 
Prayer starts somewhere before words but which eventually releases an infinite variety of moods, depths, dimensions, shapes, sounds, words, and smells—yes even smells, as when in the Book of Revelation, John of Patmos sees “the smoke of the incense from the angel’s hand go up before God with his people’s prayers” (Revelation 8:4), an image which draws from the smoke of Israelite sacrifices which were pleasing to God and also anticipates the incense of traditional Christian practice at Holy Communion.
 
Before even finding such words or gestures, prayer is the state of being in which I am open and responsive to that creative process which is God, a process that will transform me as I cannot transform myself, which is why the Psalmist calls God his rock, his salvation, his fortress, and refuge, but not for the purpose of mere rescue.
 
Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great Jewish theologian who taught at Jewish Theological Seminary in NYC and walked with King in the civil rights marches, and who died in 1972, wrote about prayer in this way:
 
“The essence of religion does not lie in the satisfaction of a human need.”  Prayer serves us principally to express “our sense of the ineffable,” our wonder at the sheer fact of being, and thanks for the inexplicable facts of daily life which are mistakenly called “miracles” but really are.
 
In sum, religion is not to be viewed as an expedient, and prayer is not to be construed as the petitioning of God off the top of our heads to give us this day our daily wishes.
 
So I believe the title of Anne Lamott’s book on prayer has the right ingredients, just in the wrong order—it shouldn’t be HELP THANKS WOW, it should be the reverse: WOW THANKS HELP—first praise, next gratitude, and then succor redefined.  Maybe Lamott addresses this in her book, which I haven’t actually read, but I use her schematic to help put our prayer life on a more secure footing—not misunderstanding prayer as a strictly or even remotely utilitarian affair it is commonly taken to be—we need to, we must be, praying more powerfully.
 
Worldwide and national circumstances today have us falling back on our religion, and it will only help us mightily if we get the depth of prayer right.
 
 
III.
 
Yes, prayer works—you hear people say that, and it’s true. Funny thing about it is, though, it’s a mystery.  Nobody understands how it works, because prayer is not the words, it’s the source of the words coming from our spiritual core, our foundation. 
 
Of course, we would naturally want to know: how do I situate myself in that state, how do I place my feet on prayer’s true foundation?
 
Another great Jewish theologian, the mystic and philosopher, Martin Buber, who died in 1965, wrote, “Religion is essentially the act of holding fast to God.”  The foundations of prayer are simply what Buber called “holding fast,” embracing the Other—the God beyond God, the creative spirit which is divinely infused into all matter and all manner of being, whose nature is, again the Psalmist’s human terms, everlasting mercy and lovingkindness,. 
 
Religion, Buber wrote, is not the “massive body of statements, concepts, and activities including liturgical prayers that one customarily describes by the name of religion and that [men and women] seem to long for more than God,” with all its instructions how to worship, how to pray, how to be saved.  Rather, just hold fast to God.
 
This is perhaps the place, in conclusion, to say a word about the prayers I offer here or at meetings or at bedsides or in my church office.  With me, the distance between my own personal depths and the surface where my words break forth is very great (due to being in my head so much!), and so it helps me sometimes to take recourse to the written prayers, or the liturgical prayers, or the famous prayers (Lord’s Prayer, St. Francis, the Serenity Prayer), which is what we all do in public worship in our tradition.
 
At other times, the depths are closer to the surface and an emotional honesty spontaneously breaks through.  I never reach the pitch achieved in the black store-front churches where I worshiped in Chicago, I suppose because of my training, class and race and the inhibitions that come with that—although I can write such prayers, and do.  When we say, “Let us pray…”, we are trying to break through the surface, the best our poor spirits can, to pour out our hearts to God.
 
As a minister, I see my function and vocation as being to proclaim the gospel in such a way that you may find your own way to prayer’s depths, for you to experience, not communication, as if “talking” to God, but real communion with God.
 
And that’s what I want for you to do—to hold fast to God, and every day to say, WOW, THANKS, HELP.
 
Rev. Richard Chrisman, August 16, 2020