​Elizabeth L. Windsor, DMin
March 14, 2021
The Fourth Sunday of Lent
Psalm  23
Romans 8: 37-39
Matthew 5: 1-6
The Comfort of Mourning
 
“Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.” I cannot think of a sentence that better describes where we are as a people at this moment. It has been a year since Covid-19 changed our lives in profound ways. We have been mourning the loss of so much that we loved; family and friends sickened or dead, time lost with siblings and grandchildren, colleagues, and friends, the loss of work and in-person schooling, the loss of gathering for worship, concerts, sporting events and those major life markers – graduations, weddings, and yes, funerals.
 
Even as the light at the end of the Covid tunnel is approaching, the mourning feels as though it will go on forever. Among my clergy friends and colleagues, there is a growing sense of unease – all of the funerals and memorial services that could not be held due to Covid restrictions now will stretch across the late spring and summer. There is so much grief compounded by delay, so much trauma that requires acknowledgement and tending to. Mental health professionals are already cautioning that after the immediate jubilation of re-joining something like “normal” life, there will be a flood post-traumatic stress disorder breaking into our communities – from the youngest among us to our elders. We already know of the deep depression that has overwhelmed so many in all ages and stages of life. We have mourning permanently etched into our souls.
 
The promise Jesus makes to us in today’s beatitude is that we will be comforted in our mourning. While I trust in the promise, I confess I cannot see how we are going to be comforted or how we are going to offer comfort to others on such a massive scale. A rabbi friend remarked the other day, “We should sit Shiva for at least a year.” A Catholic priest friend is thinking along the same lines: “How do we hold a wake for the world?”
 
For people of faith, gathering together to mourn is how we give and receive comfort. Those with whom we mourn reveal the presence of God with us in our mourning–and that particular gift IS comforting. As both my rabbi friend and my priest friend’s wise words remind us, in our mourning of the past year that comfort has been denied us.
 
But has God’s presence been absent? Paul’s words from Romans assure us that God has been with us in our solitary mourning, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” These are some of the most comforting words in the New Testament and there is a reason that this passage is often included in funeral or memorial services. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Jesus – not even during a pandemic. The question is: how will we live that truth?
 
For us to realize promise that Jesus is with us in our lives at the present moment and in the post-pandemic months and years to follow, requires us to remember that “Christ has no body but ours,” as Teresa of Avila teaches. WE are to comfort the mourners – a challenge to each one of us as we are not only those who comfort but also those who mourn. This is a complicated process. We know that those who live with trauma can be triggered again by others’ traumatic experiences. We also know that we live in a society that is deeply afraid of illness and death. Many of those around us will choose anger as a response rather than admit that no one of us is strong enough to heal ourselves. We need the comfort of others on this journey to be present to our own pain and we need to be present to the pain of others in order to comfort them. This is not going to be easy; we are in unfamiliar territory and the scope and scale of whatever the new normal will be is going to require faith, action and our presence in ways it has not before.
 
As I have been talking with friends and colleagues of faith, I realized I have been struggling with just how to comfort others and receive comfort in the face of such overwhelming need. A Wise Woman friend from a church I previously served reminded me that we had read together The Book of Joy by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dali Lama. In it, the Dali Lama tells of his experience on an overnight flight from San Francisco to Japan. Seated near him were a couple with a three-year-old toddler and a baby. Both parents did their best to keep the children occupied. But the Dad eventually fell asleep and the Dali Lama noticed the mother’s swollen, exhausted eyes as she continued to care for the two tired and cranky children herself. He writes, “I thought about it and I don’t think I would have had that kind of patience.” The Dali Lama names this type of self-giving love as compassion. The narrator of the book further observes, “It probably takes many years of monastic practice to equal the spiritual growth generated by one sleepless night with a sick child.” The same can be said about caring for a sick parent, sick spouse or sick friend.” And I think the same can be said for a year of social distancing, isolation and mourning.
 
Aware of it or not, this past year has been an unsought exercise of the practices that lead to spiritual growth. The disciplines of mask-wearing, self-isolation and hand washing in order to care for ourselves, those we love and those who are our neighbors is a spiritual exercise–and we have had ample time to practice it. This practice has taught us patience and compassion–the exact spiritual gifts that we will need to be Christ’s hands and heart comforting a post-pandemic world. Patience with ourselves and others and compassion for ourselves and others will be stretched in new ways as we live into whatever lies ahead in a post-pandemic society. We have the promise that Jesus is with us and in us–both as we mourn and as we comfort. And that will be more than sufficient in a world where “Christ has no body but ours.” Thanks be to God. Amen.

Mercy begets mercy.
Matthew 18:23-35
 
I have a question to ask this morning, as I did last Sunday, for which I do not have a definitive answer. This time it is: what is the difference between mercy and forgiveness? Both are referred to in the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant--are they indistinguishable?
 
Mercy begets mercy—that’s what this Beatitude of Jesus today says. “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.” This is one of God’s promises, and the promises of God are good.   The parable of the Unforgiving Servant this morning confirms it, although through a negative example and one in which mercy and forgiveness appear synonymous. Someone who owes money is “forgiven” their debt, wherein “forgiven” is only a manner of speaking about loans that are cancelled. But forgiveness is not actually applicable, because there is no wrong doing when you borrow money. This is not an act of forgiveness, but an act of mercy. 
 
As the story goes, a man is mercifully relieved of a huge debt and then that man turns right around and denies the same mercy he received to another man who owes him very little money.  The first debtor (the Greek is “slave,” but many translators put “servant” to indicate someone in the king’s retinue) owes 10,000 talents—what would amount to 15 times the annual tribute paid to Rome by Galilee; but he is owed a pittance by one of his fellow servants. Jesus means by this difference between the sizes of the loans to highlight how great is the mercy of God towards us compared to us human beings who can be so petty. The King’s reaction is exaggerated by Jesus, in his typical way to make his point, when he says he condemns the servant to be tortured, when of course Jews never countenanced or permitted torture. It was to signify how grievous was the servant’s failure to forgive. And that is the point of the parable, which Jesus tells by way of amplifying on his answer to Peter’s question about how many times we are expected to forgive, saying you must forgive 70 times 7 times, from your heart. So, this parable must be about forgiveness, right?
 
But let’s not lose complete sight of the language about mercy in the parable because it is the correct characterization of relieving a debt or canceling a loan. And also, because mercy correlates with the Beatitude about mercy. Forgiveness and mercy don’t seem to be interchangeable terms exactly, but why?
 
Mercy is a special kind of act. Like forgiveness, it can’t be earned. But unlike forgiveness, there need be no wrongdoing, so no confession or repentance or reform is involved. Mercy is pure grace, unexpected and unprompted. It made me think of the “Pay it forward” movement in the 1970s and ‘80s, remember?—when people who received a benefit from someone and couldn’t thank or reciprocate it to the benefactor so she chooses to pay it forward to another deserving person. Like having received the gift of college tuition from someone then paying someone else’s tuition in turn. But this breaks an act between two people into one between three. It also reminds me of the bumper sticker, “Commit random acts of kindness,” except that it sounds a little trivial.
 
It strikes me that mercy applies only in the cases where absolute power is exercised over another person or persons. For instance, in this parable the king has absolute power over the servant and may relieve the debt if he wants to. Or, as when a court commutes a death sentence, which it can do having absolute power over the defendant. Or again, in the case of Presidential pardons (but so abused by the most recent incumbent) who can vacate excessive punishments. Still again, student loans can be zeroed out by the bank in their absolute power over a debtor. In some cases, a cost has to be absorbed by the King or bank or society. In Shakespeare’s words, mercy “'is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes the thronèd monarch better than his crown.” Then too, when someone has the power to feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, visit the imprisoned or sick (Matthew 25:31-46), one has been merciful with the simplest of powers.
 
Mercy has mainly to do with instances of power over others. Then, what is the possible relevance of Jesus telling the disinherited and the powerless on that hillside that, if they are merciful, mercy will be shown to them? They have no kind of power over anyone. But, in fact, whoever you are, there is always someone else to lord it over. And so it is with all of us regular, powerless folk—people have power over animals; parents have power over their children; husbands and wives have power over their spouses; employers have power over employees; police over their communities; prison guards over their charges. But because many of these in many instances failed to bestow mercy where it was appropriate, laws had to change to limit power or oblige mercy (husbands have less now since draconian divorce laws giving only the husband absolute powers have been liberalized). Nevertheless, even law can’t reach into private lives where mercy is cruelly withheld. Mercy is pure grace, pure generosity, exacting less than the full measure.  Not to be merciful is an abuse of power. The opposite of mercy is cruelty.
 
Here are three practical implicates of mercy--1) refrain from cruelty; 2) refrain from vengeance; and 3) refrain from taking all the compensation you are entitled to, say, the rents owed in a pandemic.
 
Your mercy will be rewarded, is God’s promise. And God’s promises are good. But even if you are not rewarded, mercy is fertile. As my Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “I believe that justice produces justice, and injustice produces injustice”—a handy echo of today’s Beatitude, “Blessed are the merciful, for you shall receive mercy.” Let’s see what we can do about that!  Amen.
 
Rev. Richard Chrisman, March 7, 2021

I want to ask a question this morning, that I don’t have the answer to. But I want to ask the question so well, that you will want to answer it, that you will want so deeply to be a part of Eliot’s answer to it, and make of Eliot Church a community devoted to finding and living the answer. Here is my question: Shall the disinherited inherit the earth, really?
 
Can we agree that the complaint of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes is not so far-fetched? Elizabeth only read you a small part of his inventory of discontents. The Preacher frankly acknowledges that injustice is endemic, which made him and us, too, feel it’s all useless, futile emptiness. Even so, he doesn’t say “helpless.”  I’ll come back to that later.
 
Although the feeling persists among us in the U.S. today that we’re not moving the baseline at all, of course we do move the baseline. Jesus acknowledges as much in today’s Beatitude when he says the meek, or the gentle, will inherit the earth. As someone we know paraphrased it, the arc of the universe bends toward justice. The first shall be last, and the last will be first, Jesus promised.
 
Who are the meek, anyway?  --the gentle, the unassuming, the cooperative, the non-squeaky wheels? They are the decent people certain presidents call losers. They are simply those regular people often at a competitive disadvantage in this competitive society of ours--they are the ones likely to get cheated by cheaters, duped by grifters, over-mastered by the hyper-achievers. Just like so many in the Israelite economy who were at the wrong end of the abusive debtor laws, the dishonest market practices, and the courts that let rich violators off with fees instead of physical punishment. Sound familiar? Ancient Israelite society was a caste society and would fit right into the description of the U.S. in Isabel Wilkerson’s book about caste.
 
Jesus said the lowest caste would be vindicated and in so saying, Jesus was also dignifying their status in life as human beings, no matter what their society deemed them or made them into. And by validating them, he activated their sense of justice and their indignation at any injustices they experienced. We like to say, God loves everybody, but frankly such news matters more to those without means than to those to whom money sticks. It is only those without earth who need to be reassured that they will indeed inherit the earth—Jesus was speaking a social religion to the disinherited.
 
Perhaps Jesus was just trying to make people feel better, so was this Beatitude only a bromide to salve hurts that he couldn’t heal himself? It certainly sounded rather cynical for him to have said to Judas, when Judas later in the gospel complained about the expense of the spikenard being lavished on him, “the poor you always have with you.” Jesus was not minimizing them or depreciating the obligation to minister to them. His was simply making a comparative statement—yes, the work on behalf of the poorest is our mission, but you only have me for a few more days, best attend to me just for this last moment. Jesus doesn’t say it explicitly, but he means that soon you will be resuming the work for the disinherited without me. Our conclusion should be, if we want to do good, don’t omit first and last to celebrate Jesus in our life, Jesus who is the Good among us and our inspiration to do justice.
 
Jesus means it when he says the disinherited will inherit the earth, I believe. But we have a right to ask, exactly how?
 
How? The answer Howard Thurman gave was, we will only inherit the earth by resisting, and then he adds, by resisting in a very specific way--by laying hold of and controlling certain emotions that the disinherited are subject to in their condition. Thurman, who died in 1981, was an African-American public intellectual and theologian who taught at Howard University and was Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University from 1953-65, just at the same time ML King was a student here. In his book, Jesus and the Disinherited, published in 1949, he warned about the disabling emotions which betray the disinherited into the hands of the dominant, white society. “To revile because one has been reviled--this is the real evil because it is the evil of the soul itself.”  Again and again, Thurman writes, it all has to come back to the inner life of the individual--the prior condition of resistance must be the health of the soul. “Anyone who permits another to determine the quality of his inner life gives into the hands of the oppressor the keys to his destiny.”
 
They are three spiritual weaknesses that undermine resistance, and I want to describe them and then to point out a very surprising correlative.
 
First is fear--the black man and woman in America had reasons without number to fear whites. And while fear is originally a protective reflex to survive, yet ultimately it becomes death for the self. Thurman counseled his people to banish their fears of whites through an acceptance and internalization of God’s love.
 
Second is deception--Thurman understood that to survive under the conditions of white supremacy, American blacks went to extremes of self-distortion and dissembling. Deception shelters and protects us temporarily, but it distorts the soul. The penalty of deception is to become a deception, without a moral compass anymore. A man or woman who lies becomes a lie. However, during slavery the cost of honesty was death, so resistance was blocked until the Emancipation. Even so, Thurman was writing in the era of the Great Migration north where blacks would find very different kinds of rejection to navigate.
 
Third, hate. Hatred is only natural when black men and black women are confronted with arbitrariness from their first waking moment every day until they fall asleep. When hatred becomes a source for you of the validation of your personality and the entire reason for being, you have murdered yourself. Hatred must be met on the battlefield of the inner life for resistance even to happen let alone succeed.
 
Such was Thurman’s counsel to his community of the disinherited. But is there possibly a curious parallel here—with the white supremacists? Even though they have not been disinherited, at all, white supremacists feel disinherited and that’s where their malignant behavior stems from. And, in their way, white supremacists are proving the truth of Thurman’s observation--fear, deception, and hate are corrupting, debilitating influences upon the soul and actually disempowering. Thurman was right in his analysis of the black man and woman’s predicament. I’m certainly not saying white supremacists merit sympathy, but they might benefit from the same analysis and advice. If they are to be weaned off of the toxins of fear, deception and hate, we might have to ask what a Christian ministry to them might need to look like. Isn’t it worth asking, if we want to change this racist society? Don’t we have to address directly those who are captives of their own debilitating resentments? And to the extent that we write white supremacists off as hopeless deplorables to be feared, we have our own inner work to do. We too must attend to the inner life and seek the higher self we are meant to be, or our resistance will only be so much vanity, futility and chasing of the wind.
 
Howard Thurman, a black preacher, could speak commandingly to the disinherited blacks--. How would I, a white preacher, and you my white (mostly) congregation, go about speaking to white supremacists? It probably won’t work to tell them to read books on my shelf like, “White Too Long,” or “Dear White Christians.” However, I could see spending money to distribute these books the way the Gideons put Bibles in every hotel and motel in this country. I would love to evangelize the evangelical churches of this country, stand outside as they leave their sanctuaries and ask, “Jesus loves you: what do you have to fear and hate and lie about?” How would you change peoples’ hearts in rural Pennsylvania, in McConnell and Rand Paul’s Kentucky, in Chicago, in North and South Dakota and Minnesota, Texas? It would require a Johnny or Sally Appleseed with missionary zeal.
 
But here we are in Newton Corner in greater Boston, and we have a church. We have a community and a building and a history as the foundation for a new ministry not yet even conceived of. You are on the threshold today of fashioning that ministry! What an exciting thought—to see that the disinherited inherit the earth and with their and our souls intact.  Moreover, we have to be concerned what state the earth is in that the disinherited shall inherit. But that’s another subject.
 
The Preacher in Ecclesiastes was driven to the conclusion that all is vanity because human beings never seem to change, but that was no reason to suspend our commitment to God’s Word. God’s Word, he said, is the foundation of our inner life and the way out of fear, deception and hate. Religion is inescapably social; religion is not a gated mental community for us to escape into. Climate change will force us into each other’s laps and each other’s fates, so let us commit to become a church here that will minister to the world of the disinherited which is only getting bigger. The best part about today is that you will be discussing how to trade in this lumbering 18-wheel semi-trailer truck for a more maneuverable, economical, sharp-cornering sports car!
 
As I said, I don’t have the answer to my own question—I am betting on Eliot Church to come up with it! Bless you and amen!
 
Rev. Richard Chrisman, February 28, 2021

​Elizabeth L. Windsor, DMin.
February 21, 2021
Lent 1
Psalm 51 (excerpts)
Matthew 4: 1-11, 5: 1-3
 
When is the Kingdom of Heaven?
 
Worship for the first Sunday of Lent last year was the final time Rev. Rick, Monique and I were in the Sanctuary together before the pandemic sent us home to lead worship via Zoom. Hard to believe – if the dates don’t make sense to you, remember Lent began in March in 2020.
 
I can’t help but hear in Matthew’s accounting of Jesus in the wilderness tormented by the Tempter something of our own experience this past year. It feels as though we, too, have been in the wilderness – far longer than 40 days. Our temptations aren’t the same as those Jesus confronts, but the landscape of our lives has been a wilderness experience none-the-less. We have lost loved ones, lost work, lost physical contact with the people we love; lost the things we enjoy doing with others, lost confidence in our government and so much more.
 
As Rev. Rick, Monique and I prepared for Lent 2021 a few weeks back, we made a decision not to have a traditional penitential Lent – which all too often is Lent’s sole focus, but rather a Lent that would feed our souls with renewal, refreshment and restoration as we face the still difficult months ahead. And so, we decided to focus on the Beatitudes – the “declarations of blessings . . . [that assure] the addressees of the vindication and reward that attend the salvation of God” as the Harper-Collins Bible Dictionary describes the Beatitudes – and that salvation is personified in life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Following his time in the wilderness, Jesus begins teaching his disciples with the words, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
 
It is important to remember that at the time the Gospels were written, followers of Jesus were waiting for his imminent return. There was an expectation of “when” the Kingdom of Heaven would come. Jesus would return and time as it was known would end. 
 
But Jesus has not yet returned. Those who depend on God, the “poor in spirit,” – including us –are still waiting.  The Church has been trying to figure out how to make sense of this for two millennia now. Over time, the question shifted from “when is the Kingdom of Heaven” to “where is the Kingdom of Heaven?”
 
Christians in the early centuries believed the Kingdom of Heaven would come when Jesus returned to judge “the living and the dead.” Those who died “in the Lord” would “sleep” until Jesus would cause them to rise from the dead and “ascend to heaven,” as the Creeds of the Church put it. And as time marched on, Christians began to believe in a three-tiered universe – the Kingdom of Heaven above, life on earth in the middle and Hell below. How one lived on earth would determine where one would wind up in the after-life. This belief system still lives in our theologies to both the hope and terror of many, even though science has shown us that we do not live in a three-tiered universe.
 
I have been leading a Confirmation class this winter. The subject of Heaven and Hell, and the journey to either, has been a large topic of discussion and constant concern. We have spent several weeks wondering what Jesus meant by “Kingdom of Heaven.”

We have been asking: Is Heaven a place? A destination? Is Heaven where people go after they die? Is Heaven eternally located in a place we have not yet experienced?
           
Heaven may well be all of these things, but that is not what Jesus emphasizes in his teaching. He rejects the Tempters gift of dominion over the Kingdoms of this world during his time in the wilderness; the Kingdom of Heaven seems not to be located in this world. Think about the parables Jesus uses to describe the Kingdom of Heaven. Over and over, he begins a parable with “the Kingdom of Heaven is like . . .  a merchant seeking a pearl of great price, a woman who searches for a lost coin, a sower who goes out to plant, a woman using yeast to make bread . . .” Jesus is not describing a place far away; he is describing ordinary things familiar to his listeners that are tangible and part of their daily life experience. The Kingdom of Heaven seems to be less about where and more about when.
 
Our elementary Sunday Schoolers and I have been reading Madeline L’Engle’s Time Quartet. You are perhaps familiar with the first book in the series A Wrinkle in Time. The stories follow the adventures of two siblings, Meg and Charles Wallace who travel through time and space to wrestle with the powers of light and the powers of darkness. Each book is a story of their wilderness experience. In the third book, A Swiftly Tilting Planet which we are reading now, Charles Wallace journeys through the wilderness with a unicorn guide named Gaudior – wordplay on the Latin for “joy” – to avert a nuclear disaster. As the unicorn accompanies Charles Wallace through time to find the origin of the problem, Charles Wallace keeps asking where he is. Gaudior has to over and over again convince Charles Wallace that “where” is the wrong question, telling him “You are not in a different “where,” you are in a different “when.” And Charles Wallace finally begins to understand that he is experiencing the place where he lives during several different “whens” in time. And that got me thinking.
 
Perhaps those early Christians were right – What if the Kingdom of Heaven is not a “where”? – what if the Kingdom of Heaven is a “when?” Would our experience of this seemingly eternal Lent change if we were to focus on finding the Kingdom of Heaven in our present when?
 
What if we try this instead: The Kingdom of Heaven is when . . .  a small congregation collects and distributes kid-friendly groceries to Food for Kids. The Kingdom of Heaven is when we gather via Zoom to pray or study together. The Kingdom of Heaven is when Monique and the soloists work so hard to get the right blending of sound in our worship. The Kingdom of Heaven is when we do anti-racism work. The Kingdom of Heaven is when we check in on an elderly neighbor. The Kingdom of Heaven is when a friend calls us. The Kingdom of Heaven is when we choose to look for it – in the trust of a familiar hand we hold, in the first crocus that heralds the coming of spring, the meal cooked for us or by us, in the needle of vaccine in our arms, and in the patience to wait our turn.
 
This Lenten season, I invite you to be on the lookout for when the Kingdom of Heaven appears in your life and in our life together as a community of faith. The Kingdom of Heaven is always right now if only we look for it in the when of the lives we are living – even in the midst of our pandemic wilderness. Let that truth restore and refresh your soul: “Blessed are we– the poor in spirit, for ours is the Kingdom of Heaven – today, tomorrow and always.” Amen.

Transfiguration Sunday, St. Valentine’s Day 2021

Song of Solomon
Our theme for Epiphany has been, “Where shall wisdom for our day be found?” We have turned to the Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament—we already have looked into Ecclesiastes, Job, Esther, Ruth and Proverbs. 

Today on this last Sunday in Epiphany, we open the Book called Song of Songs, or Song of Solomon who was for a long time thought to be the author because he is cast as having a role in the drama described. At most, he is the sponsor of the Book because its source may go back to his court. But that, of course, would have been a long time before it was actually set on paper in the 2nd or 3rd centuries BCE. Over that period, the various poems gathered here accumulated, possibly from Egyptian sources or Persian anthologies of wedding poetry or paeans to a goddess of love.

Why is it in the Bible at all? Many rabbis said no to its inclusion in their canon, as did early Christian commentators. The great Rabbi Akiba of the 2-3rd century CE said yes, justifying it partly as a parable about God and Israel, or, as Christian theologians did, about God and the church. Yet, although the utterly and explicitly erotic nature of the book could not be gainsaid, here we have it.

What exactly have we here, then? First, it is in verse, it is poetry. By (my) definition, poetry tries to say what can’t be said (because words are insufficient) or, more importantly, what shouldn’t be said (because it is antithetical to the proprieties of proper society). The poem asks an unanswerable question: what is beauty that we should desire it so; what is desire that it should drive us so?

Taken all together, these poems make us wonder whether we are reading a fantasy, a daydream, or for that matter a night-dream, or a ritual of courtly love or just the exaggerations of romantic frenzy.
The exterior form of the book is a dramatic dialogue between a bride, a bridegroom, and a chorus of companions. The two are young lovers, perhaps a boy and girl (just post-adolescent), the girl a young woman of color and very beautiful, as she describes herself, the boy possibly being a king-to-be or at least king in the girl’s eyes. The chorus is comprised of “the daughters of Jerusalem,” her companions and peers.

The content of the dialogue is, in fact, very like the whole Bible—close to the ground, graphic, real, existential, not at all different than its candor about war, murder, deception, and—love. It has the taste of actual human life as lived.
With its romantic and sexual subject and no reference to God anywhere, is the Song of Solomon setting up a dichotomy between romantic love and divine love? Is it opposing the sacred and the profane, the demonic and the angelic? It all puts me in mind of Mae West’s quip—or was it Better Middler’s—“Ain’t love divine?—which is to banish the dichotomy. Read in its biblical context, the book says that physical and spiritual love are one. To experience either is to experience both. The physical rapture contains a spiritual revelation that leads to a mystical rapture. It has always been my personal opinion that sex is nature’s way of leading us to God, and I got that from the Bible.

How can this be, since the Bible is wholly concerned with our actions, the ethics of our decisions, as evident in the ten commandments, the book of Proverbs, and Jesus’ sermon on the Mount? It is, because the Bible is equally and simultaneously concerned not only with ethics but with metaphysics (please excuse the technical philosophical term). That is, what scripture reveals is life’s most basic makeup at the granular level. It proposes that beneath, around and beyond the ethic of loving your neighbor and loving your enemy is the simple fact that love is a property of the universe. At the same time that the universe is expanding, it is simultaneously tending towards unification, this paradox being the source of the tension we feel in living human lives.  Our “nature” is to be in love with God, with life, with the world as it is—if only someone would tip us off, which would help us make better decisions. In the Bible, metaphysics is prior to ethics.

Without the metaphysic, the ethics would surely seem unrealistic. Reinhold Niebuhr famously wrote that love is an impossible ethic, which indeed any Christian ethic is without the metaphysics. Think about how we feel today, following January 6th and the acquittal of the former President. How do we think we will cope ethically, with this political 9/11 of white supremacy facing us? White supremacy is not a political ideology, which you could argue with, it is something much more challenging, it is a state of mind. White supremacy has no political platform or program over which to debate possible benefits to society—white supremacy is a deep illness of the soul exacerbated by fear and a seemingly unquenchable resentment. If we are to be adequately empowered for our time, we must acknowledge the Bible’s metaphysics as the pre-condition for its ethics.

So, back to sexual love for a moment, because of Biblical metaphysics, sex is more than what it appears. Yes, it presents itself to us like all other human loves, as an inescapable blend of happiness and pain, a concoction of loss and consummation and more loss. Love not only can end (with somebody’s death), it can be ended by someone when it goes wrong. Yet love we will.
Martin Buber wanted us to understand love not as a feeling but as a cosmic force, like a magnetic field. Whosoever realizes they stand in and within that force, will always behold any other person not to be an Other but as a Thou, an individual complete in their integrity, the opposite of an It that can be used or abused. The Bible shows us what it really means to be human.

Thus, it is believable when Jesus tells us that we, as planetary creatures, have a glorious destiny.  He was not misleading us. To love and be loved is our unavoidable, glorious destiny, and to miss it is not to have lived at all. What the disciples saw on that mountainside, when Jesus’ face and clothing were transfigured in radiant light, was a signal formerly hidden in plain sight of life’s transcendence. In Jesus’ presence, they experienced the metaphysics which precedes ethics. In their midst, Wisdom was standing who revealed the key to their lives’ puzzle. They called Jesus the Son of God because he personified the divinity of humanity, mixed as we inescapably are with earth. That was the ultimate epiphany and the reason we conclude this church season of Epiphany with Transfiguration Sunday today. 
Rev. Richard Chrisman, 2/14/2021

Wisdom Embodied

During this Epiphany Season, we have been asking “Where is Wisdom to be found?” Rev. Rick has been guiding us through what is called the Wisdom Literature in biblical studies. We have sought wisdom in the pages of Ecclesiastes, Job, Ester, and Ruth. The people of God in these stories actively search for wisdom and what it reveals about living in relationship with God and with one another. Each one of these stories makes an important theological statement: Wisdom is reflected in the lived experience of the people of God.
 
But what about wisdom itself? Is wisdom something ephemeral? Something esoteric? Is it the second definition of a noun “an idea, feeling or concept?” The Old Testament Scripture for this morning tells us wisdom is embodied in persons. Wisdom is a first-order noun that has both a name and a personhood – Woman Wisdom.
 
In the book of Proverbs, we meet Woman Wisdom, “She comes down from heaven into the city. She “cries out in the street; in the squares she raises her voice. At the busiest corner she cries out: at the entrance of the city gates she speaks. She chastises the people of the city, she reproves their behavior, she “will pour out [her] thoughts to [us]; she “will make [her] words known to [us].” Woman Wisdom is the embodiment of God in the female form in the Hebrew Bible; she reveals the hopes of God for common life in a city of refuge, a city of justice, a city of care for one another, a city of peace. She has a lot to say.
 
In the early Church and even today in the orthodox traditions of eastern Christianity, the divine wisdom of God is expressed in female form. There are beautiful paintings, mosaics and icons of the divine woman in cathedrals and churches in Turkey, Russia and throughout Asia Minor.
 
You won’t find these images in western cathedrals and churches. In western religious art when women appear in paintings, stained glass, and sculpture, they are women who fall into two categories, the virgins, particularly the mother of Jesus – and the prostitutes. In part this is because the reformed Protestant tradition has little imagery as a whole, but it is also true that a deep suspicion of women’s knowledge and experience – of women’s wisdom in fact – permeates the history of western Christianity. And the images that do exist in our tradition center their focus on the Trinity which is historically understood as male – two men and a bird – as generations of seminarians have referred to it.
 
So – why has the divine Woman Wisdom of Proverbs been exiled from the New Testament? Why has she been silenced? In part, the answer to that is found in the prologue to John’s Gospel that Rick read a few minutes ago. The personification of divine wisdom is embodied in the person Jesus – the Word of God eternally existing and without whom not one thing would have come into being. The Word is gendered – he became flesh and dwells among us, the light of the world that darkness cannot overcome.
 
The women of Eliot participating in the Real Housewives of the Bible study know that I read all Scripture paying attention to where women and their experience have been silenced or left out of the story entirely. And to be truthful, I am uncomfortable with John’s conversion of wisdom from female to male embodiment. It privileges male experience and knowledge of God over female experience and knowledge of God. As a result, the Woman Wisdom has been excluded from the New Testament in western Christianity, and therefore, women’s experience of the divine has no theological place – at least none worth mentioning.
 
That wisdom is embodied in human beings is a great theological truth in both the Old and New Testaments. Having bodies, no matter if they are gendered male or female, or manifested in non-binary gender, is an important answer to the question of where wisdom is to be found. Wisdom is to be found in us, the people of God in community.
 
As Epiphany winds down – next Sunday is Transfiguration (be sure to pay attention to the bodies when we read that Scripture) and Ash Wednesday leads to Lent the following week – we shift our focus to Jesus of Nazareth, the divine human whose life, death and resurrection is the model for our own experience of God – no matter our gender or lack thereof. Especially during Lent, we study the person of Jesus in his teaching, his healing, and the Kingdom of God he invites us to help create. That Kingdom is the same city Woman Wisdom comes down from heaven to build and what that city could be is found in the words of wisdom we heard from the poet Amanda Gorman this morning,
 
 “Today in the spine of this meeting ground, new city, new village, we've reached a summit,
and are ready to loudly name another.
This be hope, this be home, we are hope, we are home, we be vigilant, we be united, we be good, we do good, we are good, as we should in the place where a millennium stood for what we understood was right.”
 
Divine wisdom is found in us. And that wisdom gives us the courage to proclaim and to live “we be good, we do good.” Thanks be to God, who is both Wisdom and Word. Amen.

Our story begins in Bethlehem actually, more than one thousand years before Christ. A man and woman set out from Judah, because there was a famine in the land, into the neighboring hostile territory of Moab. Naomi and her husband, Elimelech, had two sons, and they each married Moabite women—Orpah and Ruth. The husband died, and then the two sons died, leaving their wives and their mother to survive as best they could. Another famine arose and Naomi, having heard there was food in her homeland, decided to return to Bethlehem, but she discouraged her two daughters from coming with her.
 
I.
Our time is one not just one of difference and opposition, but of bitter estrangement. This diverse nation has cracked open along the fissures defined by diverse ethnicities, races, sexual orientations, and religions. What was once a matter of disagreement over points of opinion or philosophy has become armed rage.
 
We all know what happened last January 6th at the Capitol. Everybody followed the buildup to this climax, going back to Charlottesville, going back further to having a black President in this white country. According to one scholar, Danielle Allen at Harvard, it goes back to 1955.
 
Prof. Allen writes, “Citizens of the U.S. have not yet fully come to grips with what changed for them since the 1955 Supreme Court decision of Brown vs. Board of Education.” Slowly, painfully, tortuously, as the meaning of that decision became real on the ground, the push back came slowly, painfully and tortuously until it climaxed three weeks ago. Part of this country wants no part of democracy, if it means sharing life with strangers.
 
Increasing population since then, increasing diversity, the white majority about to be in the minority, led to where the gated community became the logical conclusion. This fortress mentality, at first a defensive move, has taken to the offensive. Which is where we are in 2021.
 
What is it about strangers, anyway? It is a way of thinking that keeps us in power by drawing a line around ourselves, or at least allows us to maintain the illusion of power. Everyone else is Other, as Toni Morrison writes in her last book, The Origin of Others (The Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard). The designation of Other to someone, to some nation, to some class, to some race, ascribes impurity, contagion, and threat to them—imputes a well-nigh extra-planetary mystery about them. And woe to anyone who befriends the Stranger, for to identify with the Other is to risk becoming a stranger to your own group. And so, the ever-tightening circle gives to mere difference of skin color (etc.) an absolutely negative value.
 
Toni Morrison wondered out loud, “How can you create a coherent nation out of immigrants?” There is only one way—when you accept the possibility of a friendship with strangers who may never become your friends. How to explain this paradox requires a look at the Book of Ruth and the political philosophy of Danielle Allen.
 
II.
 
The Book of Ruth is a short book of 4 short chapters essentially about immigrants across enemy boundaries. As you heard in this morning’s scripture, Naomi was living in a foreign land when her husband and two sons eventually all died and she decided to go back to her native land. She would have gone alone, but one daughter in law, Ruth, insisted on going with her, although that would make her a stranger in a strange land with no husband. Ruth said, “Your people will be my people, your God will be my God.” Making this extraordinary testimony of love, loyalty, and complete bonding with the Other, she will leave her native country to become an alien in another and seems utterly unafraid.
 
When Ruth arrives in Judah, in the precincts of Bethlehem, although she stays out of the way as much as possible, eventually she is befriended by a wealthy landowner and they get married.
(Aside: Ruth the foreigner became a mother to a son who was to be the grandfather of King David.) The moral: societies can absorb immigrants—they can even give birth to rulers.
 
III.
Although making democracy work suddenly seems harder than ever, as I said last week, Amanda Gorman held up for our inspiration the imperative to “be the light.” What that light reveals is that the stranger is hidden treasure. To make friends of the stranger is possible if you see friendship the way Danielle Allen does, not as an emotion but as a practice. I would add, it is a spiritual practice, not just an institutional duty. And like all spiritual practices, it involves sacrifice, according to Prof Allen.
 
The first sacrifice is dealing justly even though we can’t address everyone’s interests to the same degree at the same time. Sacrifice is required by the democratic covenant when all agree: my consent is required, my autonomy will be respected; nevertheless, I am not above the law. We also have to sacrifice the luxury of our personal judgements about other people—it’s none of their business what I think of them. It is a sacrifice to give up our hatreds, as James Baldwin said it was given to him to do. It is a sacrifice to have to negotiate loss and reciprocity. And worst sacrifice of all is to exercise self-restraint in the freedoms you are guaranteed by the Bill of Rights—you just may find it advisable not to use a right in certain cases.
 
All of this sacrifice in the service of maintaining faith with people who are strangers to us. And why should that be so novel to a Christian—Jesus taught us to love our enemies, by which he never meant anything like “liking” them—it was more like the friendship of strangers. How remarkable that a nation founded on Enlightenment principles should require application of Christian virtues, now more than ever before.
 
So, churches still have a vocation—we have work we can do. People are asking, what can we “do” about racism, how do we eliminate it. It seems that we never can and never will, such a tall mountain of kryptonite rises before us! But it will help if we understood that it is not the abstraction of racism to be fought, but the very human reality of “interracial distrust,” the rejection of strangers. Let’s rethink our public mission and goals to focus on what it would take to rebuild trust as the path to a society that is just.
 
Rev. Richard Chrisman, January 31, 2021
 

January 3, 2021
Ecclesiastes 1, 2, and 3
 
The suffering of this world’s population under Covid in 2020 will never be, could never possibly be recorded. The number of times every day that people must be crying out, “Lord, why hast thou forsaken me,” has to be astronomical. No remedies exist, no therapies, no vaccine exists that will meet the anguish caused by the safety and security endangered, and by so many plans foreclosed.
 
What have we learned in 2020--? Have we learned any worthwhile lessons? Have we grown at all, have any of us grown in wisdom and stature as a result of this emergency, now 10 months old? Surely, the deaths by pandemic of over 300,000 Americans and the death by police force of George Floyd has had the effect of turning our thoughts inward toward our own lives and deaths and inward toward the life and death of our illusions about American society.
 
Obviously, we have been confronted this year by our natural limitations and our social sins, some Americans have anyway. But what have we actually learned? Have we been forced to reappraise things in any fundamental way, or have we only been focused on coping with Covid and temporizing with racism? Have we stepped back from this rolling catastrophe far enough to learn anything? 
 
The writer Lawrence Wright took a good look in his superior (40-page) New Yorker article this week—did you see that?
 
Have we stepped back as far back as Koheleth did, to take it all in and derive some insight from history for living—some rock-bottom, rock-solid truth to live by? For this kind of moment, we need not advice, not consolation, not placation, but something from beyond that reaches to the soul within.
 
The great literary scholar, the late Harold Bloom, in his own personal need when undergoing the traumas of aging, a grave illness, and the loss of his friends and family, himself cried out in desperation—where shall wisdom be found?
 
Where shall wisdom be found, indeed! We crave, in this combined pandemic of both a virus and American racism, we should be craving wisdom. Harold Bloom didn’t want to be bothered with nostrums—nothing avails but the strongest medicine. Where did he turn?—Bloom turned first to the Bible, to the Book of Ecclesiastes, and to Job (where we will go in two weeks).
 
What wisdom does the Speaker or Preacher in Ecclesiastes have to offer (which is what the title means)--? In the readings and litany this morning, taken from Ecclesiastes, you will have picked up what sounds like a certain world-weariness, a certain inability to take any satisfaction from small or great things, maybe a refusal to accept the ordinariness of life. He writes, “All is vanity, all is futility, all is emptiness--I applied my mind to understanding wisdom and knowledge, madness and folly, and I came to see that it’s all folly and chasing of the wind.”
 
He goes on, “What reward does anyone have for his labor, his planning, and his toil here under the sun--all of it pain and vexation?” Then, “I saw the tears of the oppressed, and there was no one to comfort them. Power was on the side of the oppressors and there was no one to comfort them.”
 
You would be entitled to ask, What useless kind of cynicism is this? Are these the thoughts of a spoiled brat? Readers find it hard to warm up to the jaded sophistication of the Preacher, tinged with melancholy of an overindulged dandy.
 
But look again, listen more closely--the Preacher offers the bracing kind of realism necessary when crisis hits--brush aside your illusions and distill from your experience wisdom worth the name.
 
The resulting clarity actually invigorates the Preacher—the energy is wholly apparent in the high-flying prose which races along a chain of defiant complaints. In sum, when the Preacher looked back over his personal history, over his experiments and extravaganzas and excesses, he felt something was missing--he saw through the tinsel and found that not all is gold that glitters.
 
The Preacher only sees the same things that we see but which we won’t admit to ourselves—doesn’t the year 2020 tell us that we are overdue for a mid-course correction (if you remember that phrase from the moon-shots?). Covid’s bleakness forces us to reckon with our personal past—just what were we doing back then, how important were those pursuits?
 
In addition to this health crisis came the murder of George Floyd--it inspired worldwide outrage at yet another of the police crimes that we swore would not happen again. George Floyd’s death should have sharpened the focus of our personal reckoning upon what exactly our lives add up to in the glare of the American criminal in-justice system. The Preacher wrote, “I saw the tears of the oppressed, and there was no one to comfort them. Power was on the side of the oppressors and there was no one to comfort them.”
 
Has the nation hit absolute bottom yet—aren’t we just about ready to conclude ourselves that all our labor and planning amounts to so much vexation and futility? Doesn’t this crisis make us see that we are wasting our precious time, and always have been, on ephemera, when we simply need to focus on human relationships and follow God’s commandments, that’s where the Preacher brings us—that is the antidote for all that ails us, especially the Covid-19 and racism pandemic.
 
If this emergency has worked on our minds at all, it should have us conclude the time is overdue to repair ruptured relationships. We will be renewing our anti-racism programming at Eliot right away in this new year--the black lives matter will be one half of it: the other half should be a focus on our namesake the Rev. John Eliot, who conducted the first mission to convert the native population to Christianity. All surely is futility if we do not investigate our history at Eliot Church. Our namesake at Eliot Church mandates that we engage with our part in American racist history.
 
What an opportunity it would be to minister to this region if we opened a conversation with the Wampanoag people and jointly developed an educational program! What else is worth doing against the backdrop of this pandemic which has just revealed to us all our past efforts are so much vanity? How do we stop doing to each other what people have always been doing to each other? We certainly can’t erase or undo the sins of past generations—we can’t escape or even heal them.
 
But we can make amends by creating new history together--! Eliot church is under obligation by virtue of our namesake to open a conversation here where you could say the Trail of Tears started. Eliot Church has some great assets with which to initiate a conversation---space, a social justice commitment and tradition. Wouldn’t it make good sense to form common cause with the indigenous (Wampanoag/Nipmuk/Massachusett) peoples on environmental issues which is close to the heart of both communities? (Happy birthday Greta Thunberg, who is 18.)  Possibly, we could collaborate on the annual spring festival of giving thanks that native peoples have traditionally done and still do in our region.
 
In conclusion, Nature will have its way with us, we must accept our natural limits, and now we must adjust the way we make decisions. The wisdom of Ecclesiastes is that endurance is not good enough, we must prevail. It used to be called re-ordering our priorities. It’s more than a mid-life crisis—the Preacher is talking about epiphany here, about revelation, and it’s not a revelation unless it inspires new choices because we all end up before the same judge.
 
Jesus reached into the human prospect long ago and incarnated the wisdom revealed by God that promised forgiveness and makes a New Year truly possible, indeed it does so every day.
 
Rev. Richard Chrisman