God Helps Those Who Help Themselves - Half-Truths

Transcript of the sermon preached by Pastor Shawn Coons on May 14, 2023

So here we are on our second week of our Half Truths series, where we look at sayings commonly associated with Christianity and said by well-meaning Christians. But sometimes when we look closer at these sayings, we find that they may not be as true as we think they may be. Last week we talked about "Everything happens for a reason," and this morning we're moving on to "God helps those who help themselves." Now, there was a survey done by the Barna Group and they asked a whole bunch of people, "Is 'God helps those who help themselves' found in the Bible?" And 8 in 10 Americans said, "Yes. We're pretty sure that's found in the Bible." Half the people in that survey were very strongly convinced that this was a strong, major message found in scripture.

When we do a little bit of historical research, we find that this saying or similar sayings actually predate much of scripture and can be traced back to Greece and some Greek mythology five centuries before Jesus. God helps those who help themselves has been said a number of different ways throughout history. Probably the most famous that we know is by Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard's Almanac. And I would guess a number of us here have probably said it at one point or another, and often what we mean by it is, well, you can't just sit back. You can't just be lazy. You can't just do nothing and expect that God's going to take care of everything for you. If you want a job, then put together a resume. Get out there and look for a job. Don't just hang out at home, pray for a job, then hope the phone will ring. Or I guess nowadays your email will buzz with that job offer. God helps those who help themselves.

When we mean this, we sometimes mean don't offer prayers to God for something unless you are willing to put forth your effort for it as well. Maybe sometimes we'll say God answers prayers like that, but sometimes God's answer to prayer is, "I've given you everything you need to accomplish this. Go out there. You have the brains, you have the strength, you have the resources to get it, so go for it." There is this saying that I came across on Facebook one day. "I dreamed I was face to face with God, and so I asked God, 'There's so much suffering in the world, so much poverty, so much violence, racism and sexism. People are treating each other so horribly. God, why don't you do something about it?' And then God looked at me and said, 'That's interesting. I was just about to ask you the same thing.'"

Adam Hamilton, in his book, Half-Truths, which this series is based on, he writes this. "We don't sit around waiting for God simply to miraculously write the wrongs in society. Scripture reveals over and over again, God works through people. We are the instruments God uses to change the world." Our times of prayer are meant to empower us and guide us into action. Those who fought for civil rights did not simply show up at church and pray. They prayed and then marched, knowing they were likely to be beaten and arrested, but that God would somehow see them through.

Okay, that makes, I think, a lot of sense. But what about the people who seem incapable of helping themselves, who seem for any number of reasons helpless to get out of a situation? What about someone trapped in circumstances that have gotten out of control? Will God help them? Well, just a moment ago, Randy read from Psalm 18, he read, "The cords of death encompass me. The torrents of perdition assail me. The cords of Sheol entangled me. The snares of death confronted me." That sounds to me like someone unable to help themselves. So what does God do? What does God say? "Well, it was your choices that got you there. You'll have to figure out how to get yourself out."

No, it says God reaches down from on high. It says, "God delivered me for my strong enemy." God delivered me. Think about that language. God delivered me. When I think of deliveries these days, I think of the UPS driver. The package gets delivered. The package doesn't contribute any help to the delivery guy. The package doesn't lift itself. The package is passive. So when we say God delivers us, that's not "Okay, we did our part. Now God's going to do God's part." That means God does the delivering. God does the rescuing. God does the saving.

Let's turn to the gospels for a second lesson this morning and we will look at it in this lens of does Jesus only help those who help themselves? And we'll be reading from Mark chapter five, starting with verse one. "They came to the other side of the lake to the country of the Gerasenes, and when he had stepped out of the boat, immediately a man out of the tombs with an unclean spirit met him. He lived among the tombs and no one could restrain him anymore, even with a chain, for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart. The shackles he broke in pieces, and no one had the strength to subdue him.

Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains, he was always howling and bruising himself with stones. When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and bowed down before him and he shouted at the top of his voice, 'What are you to do with me, Jesus, son of the most high God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.' For Jesus had said to him, 'come out of the man you unclean spirits.' "Then Jesus asked him, 'What is your name?' And he replied, 'My name is Legion for we are many,' and he begged him earnestly not to send them out of him. 'Send us into the swine, let us enter them.' So Jesus gave them permission and the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine and the herd numbering about 2000, rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned in the lake." This is the word of God.

The word of God.

There's a number of things going on in this passage. I would be remiss if I didn't point out this was the first known known instance of deviled pork. Sorry, I know it's Father's Day, a little dad joke for you. No, we've got a guy here. He's in the grips of these demonic forces. He is trapped by forces beyond his control. He is trapped by forces beyond other people's control, as the passage says. They're making him do strange things. They're making him do destructive things. They're making him hurt himself, things that no one in their right mind would do by choice. Here is a man in need of help and he cannot help him himself.

We might talk about these kind of forces differently. We're probably not going to talk about demons in supernatural possession, but there are forces that people are in the grip of that are beyond their control. People trapped in poverty, in situations of war and violence and famine, racism and sexism. And while we may admit that people mired in their circumstances too deep to get out on their own, sometimes we want to nuance that just a little bit. And we don't quite say, "Well, God helps those who help themselves," but we say a little bit of a different version of it. "God helps those who don't get into that kind of trouble in the first place." We go beyond saying, "Well, use what God has given you to help yourself," and we move on to labeling.

We move on to judging. We move on to implying that there are people out there, yes, maybe they can't help themselves, but they had a chance to and they didn't choose it. And so they got themselves into this situation and maybe they don't quite deserve God's help as much as we think. So sometimes when we say, "God helps those who help themselves," we mean "Well, you made your bed and now you have to lie in it. You made some bad decisions. Maybe you deserve some consequences for your actions."

We see someone on the street corner asking for money, and we question whether they truly deserve our help or God's help, because surely they could have done something to get themselves there. Surely they could have went out and looked for work that day instead of standing on the street corner. Maybe they chose to do drugs. Maybe they didn't work hard enough, maybe they spent recklessly. If we think about this a little bit, it's probably somewhere at the heart of this is a desire for fairness. We want life to be fair. We want God to be fair. We don't want someone getting something they don't deserve, especially if it seems to be at our expense. We want people who do good things, who make good choices, to get good results. We want people who do bad things, who make bad choices, to get bad results.

To borrow from another faith. We want this sort of karma. And is it bad to want that? Is it bad to want fairness? Is it bad to want God to be fair? It may not be, but we have to be very careful. We have to be cautious. This idea that God is fair, by our definition, can expose some deeper unhealthy beliefs. George Barna of the Barna survey writes that "God helps those who help themselves. That belief exposes our theological cornerstone, that maybe we are the center of all things. That it is up to us to determine our own destinies, that God is merely our assistant and where we end up in life, not our foundation."

If we go further with this belief, it can allow us to labor under what's sort of an illusion, that you and I have earned every blessing we have in our lives, we have earned every blessing God has given us, while others, who are not as hardworking as you and I, haven't really earned their blessings. They're probably on sort of a divine welfare, if you will. Yes, we deserve every last blessing God has given us. We haven't done wrongs but those others ... But if we're honest and God is truly fair, there's a real possibility we might get what we deserve sometimes instead of what God has blessed us with.

I don't think it is a good idea to impose our idea of fairness on to God. God is not fair in that way. Not if it means being unmerciful or being without grace. Jesus didn't ask the man who was possessed, "Well, how did this happen? How did you get there? How did you let these unclean spirits in?" Jesus helped him. I can't think of a single story in the gospels where Jesus pre-screens somebody and then offers them healing, wholeness, help. "What did you do to become sick? What bad choices did you make to become hungry?" Jesus never says anything like that.

Jesus didn't ask those kind of questions. He did just the opposite. In John chapter eight, Jesus comes to a woman accused of adultery, the Pharisees, the stones in their hand, ready to convict her, ready to punish her according to the law, according to what's fair. Did she deserve help? She sinned, and so she must pay the price. She was helpless. She was defenseless before the law, but Jesus helped her, especially when she could not help herself. We see this concern for those in need throughout Jesus' ministry. It defines Jesus' ministry. It defines Jesus. It's a fundamental characteristic of God. God helps those who are in a hole so deep they can't get out, and that hole can be poverty, racism, war, homophobia, transphobia, violence, but like the woman caught in adultery, sometimes we do dig our own hole and even still, God comes to us.

Adam Hamilton again writes, "Thankfully, the idea that God helps those who help themselves does not capture the truth of the Bible." Sometimes we cannot help ourselves, not because we are poor or destitute or without resources, but because we've descended too deeply into sin or despair. God is the God of the hopeless cause, the God who loves sinners, the God who walks with us through the darkest valleys. He is the God who brings light into our darkness and helps us find peace amid our times of anxiety and despair. God rescues, God redeems, God forgives. We receive blessings from God even though we cannot earn them and we don't deserve them. Even when we have made a mess of things and cannot fix them, God extends mercy to us. There is a word for God's mercy towards those who cannot help themselves, and we call it grace. This concept of grace is central to the Christian gospel. It is the undeserved work of God in our lives, the unmerited favor of God.

Grace is not something we earn, buy, or work for. We cannot help ourselves into grace. We can only ask for and accept it. The essence of grace is that God helps those who cannot help themselves. The core message of our faith is God most certainly helps those who cannot help themselves. Paul writes in Romans that, "While we were sinners, Christ died for us." Paul doesn't write, "When we got our act together, when we repented, when we made whatever goals we're trying to make, then God, then Christ died for us." It's when we were helpless that Christ died for us. Those who are helpless, those who cannot help themselves, are the ones most in need of our help.

There are times when we can help ourselves and we absolutely should. God is counting on us to do the best we can to pray and to work, but there are times when people, including ourselves, cannot make it on their own, and God prompts us to help. We become the hands of God. We become God's answers to someone else's prayer. God's instruments of grace. You will find a time where you cannot help yourself. You probably already have. There are things from which you simply cannot save yourself, no matter how hard you try, and you will not have the strength or the resources or the knowledge. There may be times when you don't believe you deserve the help, because you know that somehow you are responsible for the situation you find yourself in.

In those moments we cry out to God, the one who can help us, the one who can put other people in our lives to help us, despite the fact we are poor and pitiable, weak and afraid, despite the fact that we may have made a mess of things, God reaches out and picks us up and makes us clean and whole. God says, "I love you. I will not abandon you. Put your trust in me. Together, we'll make this right." This is the message we find from God over and over again in scripture. "I am here," says God, "You matter to me. Your life has meaning and nothing, no matter what you may have done, what you have been unable to do, what has been done to you, can ever separate you from my love."

Everything Happens for a Reason - Half-Truths

Transcript of the sermon preached by Pastor Shawn Coons on May 7, 2023

All throughout the month of May, we're going to be looking in this series at a number of what we're calling half truths, often said by Christians. These particular half truths, they're coming from a book by Adam Hamilton of that same name, called Half Truths: God Helps Those Who Help Themselves and Other Things the Bible Doesn't Say. And each week, we're going to explore one of these half truths and we'll try to find the truth in it, as well as explore what may not be so true about it.

If this sounds familiar, we did this series about five years ago, and I think it was important. I think it was very valuable. For a time, actually, it probably still is true, we posted the sermons on the website and it got shared in a newsletter somewhere. And for a time, we were getting about a thousand different visits to these set of sermons every month from all over the world. And so there was something in them that resonated with people. So we thought it would be good to revisit them again.

But before we go further, I want to say this. The goal of this series is not to offend anyone. Chances are that many of you and me, we've said these things and we've meant well. So I'm not saying that if you say these things that you're a bad person. It's just to explore a little bit what it really means to think through some of these things. It's important to talk about these half truths even if it makes us a little uncomfortable.

So if you do feel a little unsettled, that's okay. I promise that we're going to get through this together. But I want to start with the question, why then is it important to talk about these things? Why is it important to label half truths like, "Everything happens for a reason," or, "God helps those who help themselves," or, "God won't give you more than you can handle."?

I think it's important to address these. It's important to talk about these, because even with our best intentions, sometimes when we share these with someone else, they can be harmful. They can be hurtful to someone, especially sometimes these are said in people's hour of grief or an hour of need and it can make people more uncomfortable and, when we are just trying to help out and maybe help them draw closer to God, can maybe give them questions about God instead. So we're going to look at these half truths, the truth that is there, the truth that is not, and then we'll ask questions as to maybe what we should say instead and maybe how we can honor what we're trying to do in a better way.

So this morning, we're going to begin with the half truth, "Everything happens for a reason." And I'm guessing we've all heard this at some point. I'm guessing maybe we've said this at some point. And usually, when we say it, it's at a time when something bad has happened, right? It's at a time when someone is suffering and we're trying to help them through a difficult time. And so we might say, "Well, it was meant to be. It must have been that way all along. It was God's will. It was all part of God's plan. Everything happens for a reason."

And I think what we're saying at these moments, especially these moments of loss, we're trying to affirm that even in tragic circumstances, even in the worst of circumstances, that God is in control, that whatever the worst thing that has happened in your life, whatever the most awful thing that has happened, God has a greater purpose in mind. When tragedy strikes, it can be comforting to know that when we are riding through the storm, when the waves threaten to overturn that ship, we want to know the captain is at the helm and keeping the ship on course. So it's perfectly natural at times like that to look for God's loving hand, to look for God's strong hand to guide things through our darkest hour.

But let's look at just a little bit closer at this idea of everything happens for a reason and ask this question, "Does everything happen as part of God's plan? Is that plan immutable? Is that plan set in stone? Is that plan detailed down to every event in our life?" And this is a fundamental question.

If the answer to this question, "Does everything happen as part of God's plan?," is no, then we can't trace everything that happens back to God's immutable plan, then everything does not happen for a reason, at least not a reason that is according to God's will.

Think of it this way. Imagine that you're watching the news, you're reading the newspaper, and every story that you read, every story that you see on the news, you're watching it, shootings, war, famine, terrorism. And then after every story, you say out loud, "Everything happens for a reason. That was part of God's plan." How does that feel to see a story of a murderer and say, "Everything happens for a reason. That was part of God's plan."? The war in Ukraine, "Well, everything happens for a reason. That was part of God's plan."

When Carrie and I were pastors serving in our church in Florida, there was a four-year-old boy named Mitchell there. Mitchell was not a member of this church. His family wasn't a member, but he went to our afterschool program. They lived a block away from the church and we saw them frequently. One Halloween, Mitchell and his mother were crossing a busy street to get to the Methodist church trunk or treat, and a car hit them and killed Mitchell. Mitchell's funeral was at our church and I spent a lot of time with the family at this time, and it was awful. And I heard things, "Well, I guess God needed another angel. It must have been Mitchell's time," and other versions of, "Everything happens for a reason."

And then and now, I have a hard time believing that. I don't believe God has a plan that causes four-year old children to be killed. I don't believe God has a plan that causes anyone to be killed. So if everything happens for a reason as part of God's plan, then somehow God is responsible for Mitchell's death, for war, for famine, for the Holocaust, for terrorism.

And I don't think that sits well with any of us. I don't think it lines up with our experience either. I don't think it lines up with the whole witness of the Bible.

So I want to read a passage this morning. I want us to go to Genesis chapter two. This is the second creation story. This is where we are introduced to Adam and Eve. And I want to see how this helps us understand our topic this morning.

"These are the generations of the heaven and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no urban of the field had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth and there was no one to till the ground. But a stream would rise from the earth and water the whole face of the ground. And then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground, the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food and the tree of life also in the midst of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil."

"And the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall die."

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Thanks be to God.

So this is from the second version of the creation story. The first one, you find in Genesis 1. The second one starts in Genesis 2. And we see things from the very beginning. God is with Adam first, and then later Adam and Eve. And God creates Adam. God creates the garden, and then God puts the forbidden tree of knowledge in the garden and he tells Adam, "Don't eat from that tree. You can eat from everything else here, just not that one."

And then God gives Adam one more thing. God gives Adam a choice. God doesn't say, "I'm going to make it so you can't eat from that tree.: God says, "The tree is there and you can choose whether you eat from it or not. But I'm asking you not to, to obey or disobey, to choose life or to choose death."

If everything happens for a reason, if everything was part of God's unchangeable plan, then is there really a choice in this story? God would've had to have made Adam eat the forbidden fruit as part of God's plan. If everything is a part of God's plan, then do we have free will? Do we actually have choices? If everything we do, if everything we say is part of God's plan, every action we take, every choice we make, has everything been predetermined by God as part of God's plan and we're just actors in a play? Including the evil that we do, including the tragic actions that we take, does that mean God is the author of these evil acts, that these evil acts are somehow part of God's plan, even if something better seems to redeem them?

So we said this is a half truth. What is the truth in, "Everything happens for a reason."? Let's talk for a moment about the concept of God's sovereignty. That's not a word we use often, although I've heard it a few days around King Charles' Coronation. Sovereignty basically means who's in charge, who is the ultimate authority. It means the boss, if you will. If someone is sovereign, there is no one above them. There is no higher authority.

In our Christian tradition, God is sovereign. The sovereignty of God is very important. We don't believe that anyone has power over God or that anyone can control God or have more control than God. And so when we say, "Everything happens for a reason," it's a way of affirming the sovereignty of God. God is still the ultimate authority, not the powers of hate, not the powers of death, not the powers of violence. God is supreme.

So then we're back at another quandary. If God is supreme and bad things happen, but God doesn't cause them to happen, who does? Well, there are a couple ways that Christians have answered this question. One way is to say, "Yes, everything happens for a reason. But often, that reason is because we are making bad choices. Everything happens for a reason, but it's not God. Sometimes, it's us that cause bad things to happen. Much of the suffering, much of the pain, much of the tragedy of this world, we inflict on one another and sometimes we inflict on ourselves. That's not a part of God's plan. Sometimes we make it part of our plan."

When you read the beginning of one of the creation stories in Genesis, where later on in that same story, God speaks to Adam and Eve and he tells them, "You are caretakers of this garden. You are caretakers of all creation, of the land, of the sky, of the water, of the plants, of the animals. You have dominion. You have authority over it." "I'm giving that to you," God says.

God remains in charge. God remains sovereign, but delegates, if you will. And furthermore, God gives us all sorts of instructions and guidance for how to choose the right thing, how to take care of creation, how to take care of ourselves, how to take care of one another.

But time and time again, just like Adam and Eve, we choose to do wrong and someone gets hurt. Does that mean that God just said, "Okay, Adam and Eve, you're in charge. I'm going on vacation. I'm checking out."? No. Are we on our own? God created everything and then gave us the tools, the keys to make everything work and then moved on? No.

There's a fancy name for this kind of thinking though. It's called deism, and it was actually very popular with a number of the Founding Fathers of America. It was sometimes called the watchmaker God. God is like a watchmaker that makes the watch, winds it up, and then it just goes on its own and the watchmaker doesn't need to do anything anymore.

But we don't believe in a watchmaker God. We reject this idea that God is no longer here, God is not active in our life. We believe God does not abandon us.

So we've said that God doesn't control and script every last part as this internal unchangeable plan. We've rejected the idea that God got creation started and then went on vacation. So if God isn't in total control of every last event in the world, if God isn't completely hands off, then how do we understand that balance of how God works in our life?

Ray Firestone is a Methodist in Kansas City, and he lost his wife in a car accident. And he shares these words, "Suffering is not God's desire for us, but it occurs in the process of life. Suffering is not given to teach us something, but, through it, we may learn. Suffering is not given to punish us, but sometimes it is the consequence of our sin or poor judgment. Suffering does not occur because our faith is weak, but, through it, our faith may be strengthened. God does not depend on human suffering to achieve God's purposes, but sometimes, through suffering, God's purposes are achieved. Suffering can either destroy us or it can add meaning to our life. God is present at all times, in all places, even when tragedy strikes. Maybe especially when tragedy strikes, God is with us and can bring healing and comfort and, in time, maybe new perspective and insight."

And think back to the most painful times of your life. With time, do you now see God working at places in that tragedy, not as the author, not causing the tragedy, but coming to you when you are vulnerable, when you are in need, lifting you up, teaching you compassion, showing you love?

I want to close with a story this morning, and then I'm sorry, this is another tragic story. This is about parents Todd and Kathy. Their son Austin was three years old when he died. And it was a horrible time for them. But through it all, their faith in God emerged stronger. And this is how Kathy reflects back on that time.

"At the time, I had people tell me that it was Austin's time. And I was having a hard time believing in a God who had planned to take my child at age three. I learned that tragedies weren't necessarily part of God's plan, but God gave us free will and bad things sometimes happen. Understanding this helped me to turn to God instead of away from God."

"Since Austin's death, I believe that my faith has grown and continues to grow. His death changed the way I view God and my faith, and I no longer have a naive childlike faith where God protects you from all harm and makes everything okay. It's a deeper faith that has been tested through tragedy. I know that God doesn't promise me a pain-free life, but God does promise always to be there, to love me, to comfort me and guide me."

Does everything happen for a reason? That's not what our faith teaches us. Does God have this immutable plan that scripts everything, good and evil, that will ever befall us? No. But we believe God has a plan, and that plan is to love us. That plan is to be with us no matter what. That plan is a promise. We hear it over and over again in Scripture, and I want to close with where we hear that promise from the Apostle Paul in the book of Romans.

"Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship or distress, or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? No. I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor death, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord."

Big Feelings - Fear

Transcript of the sermon preached by Pastor Shawn Coons on March 26, 2023

This is our final week in our big feelings series, and we're going to talk about fear this week as our final emotion, as we've got happiness and anger and sadness. What am I missing? No, happiness, anger, sadness. Oh, there was an intro week. There we go. I'm like, "There's an emotion I preached on and I don't remember it at all." If I can't remember what I say, how can I expect you to? So there we are.

So we're talking about fear this week, and as we approach Easter, as we get towards the events of Holy Week, Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, and those last hours of Jesus, starting to get closer to that story, starting to reflect a little bit. In a moment, we're going to read the story of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, which takes place after the Last Supper. That's where Jesus prays that, "Can there be another way, God? Do I have to go through with this?" It's always been for me a powerful passage, a very moving passage. I've felt as I read it, and sometimes there are movie versions of it that bring it out very well, but I felt the grief in there that Jesus has at that moment. I felt the worry that Jesus has at that moment.

But until I started preparing for the sermon this week, I had never really thought about that story in terms of the fear that Jesus must be feeling at that moment. And as I started to reflect on that, well, obviously He's worried, He's stressed, but I've never really thought of Him as afraid. I'm like, well, why haven't that thought occurred to me? And I wonder if it's partially because it's troubling to think of Jesus as afraid. I wonder if that's troubling because that leads us to the next step, well, can God be afraid? So I want to ask that question and we're going to unpack it as we move along. Is it troubling for you to believe in Jesus or a God who can be afraid?

Keeping this lens of fear in our mind, let's hear our gospel lesson this morning. Matthew 26, starting with verse 36. "Then Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane, and He said to His disciples, 'Sit here while I'll go over there and pray.' And He took with him, Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and He began to be grieved and agitated, and He said to them, 'I am deeply grieved even to death. Remain here and stay awake with Me.' And going a little farther, He threw himself on the ground and prayed, 'My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me. Yet not what I want, but what You want.' Then He came to the disciples and He found them sleeping, and He said to Peter, 'So could you not stay awake with Me one hour? Stay awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.'"

Again, He went away for the second time and prayed, 'My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, Your will be done.' And again, He came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were heavy. So leaving them again, He went away and He prayed for the third time saying the same words. Then He came to the disciples and said to them, 'Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? See the hour is at hand, the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand.'" This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

So let's back up a little bit. Let's walk through this passage, where it fits into the night, Jesus' final night before His crucifixion. The passage, it begins just as the Jewish Passover begins, as this festival, this ritual, begins. And Passover is an ancient Jewish tradition. It's still practiced to this day. Many of the same practices are done as have been done for millennia.

And one part of the ritual of the Passover dinner, the Seder dinner, is reading from the Psalms. Some certain sections of the Psalms are read every year, year after year. I wonder though if Jesus could really focus on those words, on the ritual of the Passover, knowing what was ahead of Him. I want you to think of a time where you have had something coming up very soon that you're not looking forward to, that you're fearful of, that you're worried about. Maybe it's confessing up to a mistake, like you have to share with someone how you kind of let them down or something that happened and you don't want to tell them. Maybe you're sitting on bad news and you don't know how you're going to be able to tell your family member, a coworker, a friend, a classmate. Maybe it's the night before you go into surgery.

Something is coming up and you're worried and you're scared, but you still have to go through with daily life, to go through your job, you have to go through classes, go through sitting down to meals with folks. I think this is where Jesus was at this moment. He knew what was ahead, maybe not in every last detail, but He knew generally what was coming. But it was the Passover. It was with the disciples. They were expecting Him to kind of lead them through this ritual. And so He did. But as He broke bread, He was probably thinking, "What's up next?" And maybe there was some worry and maybe there was some fear as He poured the cup. He was anxious. Maybe His hand trembled a little bit.

As He washed his disciples feets as it says in John, scared of what the next day would bring. And so it's in this state of mind that Jesus is hearing these Psalms read at the Passover meal. And some of the words from those Psalms are the words that Rick read just a moment ago from Psalm 118. This is verse five and six, "Out of my distress, I called on the Lord. The Lord answered me and set me in a broad place. With the Lord on my side, I do not fear. What can mortals do to me?" With the Lord on my side, I do not fear. I wonder how Jesus heard those words on this night. Was it reassuring? Were they words of comfort? "With the Lord on my side, I do not fear." Or was it a gut punch to a Jesus who was afraid?

During the Passover, He shares that one of the disciples is going to betray Him. Then after they leave the supper, as they head to the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus shares, "You know what? You're all going to desert me. You will all become deserters of me this night,"" Jesus says to them. Peter protests, he says, "Not me Lord. Never going to leave you." And Jesus tells him, "Not once, Peter, but three times you're going to deny even knowing me." And so this is how Jesus comes to the Garden of Gethsemane. He comes grieved. He comes fearful of what is to come. He goes there knowing His closest companions, who have been with Him every step of the way these last three years, they are all going to scatter. None of them are going to be there when He needs them most. "With the Lord on my side, I do not fear." What do these words mean to Jesus at this time when He has every reason to be afraid?

We've talked about our emotions during this series. Fear is one of those emotions. And we said there's no good emotions, there are no bad emotions. Fear serves a good purpose in our life. It tells us something is out there and you should be paying attention. Something is out there that could be threatening your wellbeing. There is nothing wrong with being afraid. It is not a sign of weakness. I would suggest to you that there are some people actually who could use more fear. I read this week a story of these two pilots who were working with Red Bull, that energy drink, to do this stunt where each one would go up in their plane, they would put their planes into nose dives together right near each other. They would each exit their plane. They had a parachute on their back, but they would try and swap planes as they're falling, and their planes are falling. One of the pilots made it to the other plane. The other pilot did not. He parachuted out and was safe. The plane was not. Some people could use more fear in their life.

We lift up fearlessness in our society, but it serves a good purpose. Maybe one reason we don't like the image of a God, of a Jesus, who can be afraid can be because we have bought into this sign that being afraid is a sign of weakness. And so we are, ironically, scared to reveal our own fears. I want to question, a question for you to think about real quickly. When was the last time you shared your fears with someone else? Just think about that for a moment. When was the last time you shared what you are afraid of with someone else?

We've been reading through the book This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley, and she writes, "For something at the root of so much of human behavior, it is rare that we ever truly behold another person's fear. So many of us express our fear in ways that only serve to mask it. In conflict we may see anger or hate or apathy, but it is much more difficult to perceive fear in a person. It's even more difficult to name it. Yet fear stalks so much of our words and actions and even loves." How alone do you feel in your fear? How comfortable are you sharing your fears with other people? Let me flip the question a little bit. Can you think of a time someone close to you shared their fears with you? How did that make you feel? Trusted? Important? It is a gift to be able to have someone who sees in you something that says, "I am safe to share my fears with you." It doesn't make the fear go away, but it makes it easier to bear.

Another quote from Cole Arthur Riley, "Find those who tell you do not be afraid, yet they stay close enough to tremble with you. This is a love." Reflecting on fear in this way, let's look back at Jesus in the Garden, praying with all His being, with everything He is, praying to God, "Let this cup pass from me. God, I don't want to do it. If there's another way, let's find that way." And He goes to his friends, looking for some support in this hour. But they can't stay awake. They are so tired. I don't know what stresses they are under, but they just are unable to stay awake with Jesus. Three times this happened. Three times He goes to them for support. I mean, who knows? Maybe this would've kept happening over and over again if Judas hadn't shown up with the soldiers at that moment. I don't think Jesus got over His fear. I don't think God calls us to get over our fear. We're called to move forward, fear and all. Not get over it. Not erase it. Just move forward with the fear.

Oftentimes, if we think about what are we afraid of? What's the root of our fear? And sometimes we go, "Well, I'm afraid the worst is going to happen. I'm going to afraid that this situation is going to go down this road and it's going to be an awful. And the worst thing I can possibly think of will happen." If we think through, usually the worst won't happen. Oftentimes, the worst can't happen. And usually the worst does not happen. But let's also be honest, sometimes the worst does happen. Jesus feared the worst and the worst happened to Jesus, but He still moved forward. And even if the worst happens, even if our fears are realized, we move forward.

How do we move forward? Well, there's lots of different ways, and then sometimes time helps. But I'm going to come back to kind of our lessons that we've been trying to learn during this series. One way of move forward is simply naming the fear, naming the feeling. "I'm afraid. That's what I'm feeling right now. I'm trembling, I'm short of breath." Name the physical sensations that go along with that feeling. Share the fear. I think that's what I'm convicted of most as I was getting ready for this, is we keep our fears to ourselves way too much, maybe more than any other emotion. Sharing the fear. Find those who tell you, "Do not be afraid," yet stay close enough to tremble with you.

So here's your homework for today. Share a fear with someone, today, this week. And it can be a small thing. If you want to share, "I'm afraid of clowns," share that. If you want to share something that's been weighing on you heavily, and you find that person, you have that person in your life that you trust, share that fear. Let people help you. Invite people into your life.

Let me leave you this morning, as our closing prayer, a blessing from Kate Bowler. "God, I feel afraid. My heart is melting like wax. God save me and quiet my fears. Hold me when I feel there is no place to stand. God have mercy. Christ have mercy. Spirit have mercy. Blessed are we who admit, 'God we're afraid.' Blessed are we who confess, 'We don't know how to rest.' You know our anxious minds. You fill our restless hearts. You promise us Your presence, the quiet of Your love, God. You say, 'Come away with Me and I will give you rest.' God have mercy. Christ have mercy. Spirit have mercy. Breathe. Settle on this truth. Our God is closer than air." Amen.

Big Feelings - Anger

Transcript of the sermon preached by Pastor Shawn Coons on March 19, 2023

Our theme for our big feelings series has been every emotion has a story to tell. Every emotion is a storyteller. There are no good emotions, there are no bad emotions, there are just emotions. Some may be more welcome than others. Some may be more challenging than others. I want to talk today about what happens once we listen to that story. Our theme for today is the emotion of anger, and I want to suggest that once we listen to the story our emotions are telling us, we still have a choice. We can go down any number of paths with that emotion. So when we listen to the story that our anger may be telling us, what path do we follow? Where will our anger lead us?

Robin read just a moment ago from Exodus and it was a passage where God gets angry, and passages where God gets angry are not uncommon in our Bible, Old and New Testament, when God gets angry with the Hebrew people at this point for making that golden calf, turning to worship an idol. God initially starts down a path, one path, a path of a violent destruction of his people. Moses talks to God and has God follow a different path, as we continue on in that passage. As I said a moment ago, anger is prominent in scripture. There's the anger of God. But if you read in the New Testament, you're going to find the apostle Paul as he writes letters to certain folks in various places, he expresses joy but Paul also expresses anger. We can read in the Book of Ruth, Naomi, who is angry at her situation. We read in the Book of Job, Job is angry. Moses gets angry.

In Judges 4 there's a very wild story of a woman named Jael and what she does in anger. We can read from the Psalms, there are a number of Psalms that express anger. Even Jesus gets angry as we read the gospels. There's points where Jesus uses such colorful phrases as calling a group of Pharisees you brood of vipers. He says angrily to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan." And then there is probably the most famous passage of Jesus' anger that we're going to read today, although it's found in multiple gospels, we're going to read it from John 2 starting at verse 13. And this is the beginning of Jesus' ministry, at least in the Gospel of John. This scene, this cleansing of the temple, takes place at the end of Jesus' ministry in the other gospels. But in John, it's at the beginning of Jesus' ministry right as the Passover is beginning

John 2 starting with verse 13, "The Passover of the Jews was near and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple He found people selling cattle, sheep and doves and the money changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords He drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables, and He told those who were selling the doves, 'Take these things out of here. Stop making my Father's house a marketplace.' His disciples remembered that it was written zeal for your house will consume me. The Jews then said to Him, 'What sign can you show us for doing this?'.

"And Jesus answered them, 'Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.' The Jews then said, 'This temple has been under construction for 46 years and you will raise it up in three days?' But He was speaking of the temple of his body. And after He was raised from the dead his disciples remembered that He had said this and they believed the scripture and the Word that Jesus had spoken." This is the Word of the Lord, thanks be to God.

So as I mentioned a moment ago, we find this story, this cleansing of the temple, in all four gospels. They were written, the gospels, at different times out of different circumstances. And there are many stories and sayings of Jesus that are unique to one gospel or just a couple of the gospels rather than being in all four. So the fact that we see this in all four gospels means this is a significant story. This is a memorable story. The gospel writers included it in their gospels. The church included passing these stories down. Why did it get passed down? Why do we remember this? Probably in part because Jesus gets angry. This is not the image of Jesus that we tend to have. We like the warm, fuzzy Jesus. We like the Jesus that welcomes all. We like that Jesus that says love your neighbor, love your enemy. But Jesus gets angry here.

Jesus gets really, really angry here. And it can be tempting to say, "Well, I'm not sure Jesus, you should have done that. That's a little overboard. I don't know, Jesus, that you should be getting angry." But remember, anger, not bad. Anger is not bad. Anger isn't necessarily good. It just is. And anger happens for many reasons. I want to suggest this morning we mull over two questions for when we get angry. Why are we angry and where will our anger lead us? Why are we angry? Where will our anger lead us? All right, so let's start with that first question. Why do we get angry?

There are all sorts of reasons we get anger and some of them are big, injustices of the world, and some of them are small, stubbing your toe. None of them are good or bad, they just are. My most regular source of anger is, I hate to admit it, is driving. I get mad at people when driving, especially if they're taking liberties or getting something I don't think they should. They're getting ahead of me when they shouldn't. But why? Why do I get angry when I'm driving? Well, I think if I boil it down to just kind of a statement it's because I feel like someone's getting something they don't deserve. Now, when I do this and someone merges late when all the rest of us have merged before and they're getting ahead and not waiting in the line of cars we all wait in, does that hurt me? No. Is it really hurting anybody else? No.

Maybe it's making us a couple seconds later but that is no big deal, and that's not really my reason for being angry. It's because they got away with something. Let's look at bigger reasons. Nobody mentioned politics as a source of anger, indirectly at least, but anger is so present in our political world and our political discourse for today. And all sorts of different kinds of anger for all sorts of different kinds of reasons, but turn on some of those news shows and it's just outrage. What's the latest reason to get outraged today? If you remember years ago there was the outrage and the anger when President Obama wore a tan suit on the wrong occasion. I'm not fashion conscious enough to know why that was a bad thing. I thought he looked pretty good, but I guess you don't do that.

But when we think about this political anger and the anger in our political discourse, is it anger that someone is getting something they don't deserve? Someone is getting something more than me? Or is it anger that someone is being hurt, someone is being denied justice? One of the questions we need to ask when we are angry, one of the stories we need to let our anger tell us, who is my anger for? Is it for someone in need? Is it for someone who is vulnerable? Is it for someone that needs protecting or am I feeling angry because I feel slighted? Not that that's always a good or a bad thing, but who is your anger for? Is it for, let's put it in biblical language, is it for the least of these? Is it for the marginalized? Is it for the oppressed? Is it for someone who can't defend themselves or speak up or is it for me?

And sometimes that can be us, absolutely, but a lot of times it's not. Jesus' anger, as we go back to the story in John 2, Jesus' anger was for people whom the faith was supposed to be protected. Jewish faith is all about caring for the marginalized, the poor, the oppressed, the refugee, the widow, the orphan, and Jesus' own faith, the temple, the centerpiece of the Jewish faith, was mocking those people, was taking the need of those people, especially the poor and impoverished, and turning in temple into a marketplace. And there were some unfair practices going on if we look deeper in to that. Jesus was angry because He saw the Jewish faith, He saw following God being perverted. It was supposed to be fruitful, it was supposed to be producing all sorts of wonderful fruit. In this story, I think it's one of the other gospels, I can't put my finger on it, it's sandwiched with this weird story of a fig tree Jesus comes across.

I don't know if you remember this story. Jesus was just kind of walking along with His disciples. It is not the season for fig trees to producing fruit, and so He sees a fig tree, He goes over to see if there's any figs on it. It's not that time of year, so it's not, and Jesus gets angry and He curses that fig tree. Later they come across it and it's withered and died. And that seems like a little, I don't know if you can get road rage while walking, but I mean we look at it and go, "It wasn't supposed to do fruit." It wasn't about the fig tree, it was about the message. It was about a bigger message of the people of Israel, of the Jewish religion as a whole at that point. It was supposed to be fruitful. It was supposed to be producing wonderful fruit and instead they did things like this in the temple.

And probably a good point as an aside, when talking about the Gospel of John, the author of Gospel of John uses the phrase the Jews a lot, and Christians throughout the centuries have done some pretty antisemitic things with verses like that. And more proper reading of that might be the Jewish authorities or the Jewish leaders, it was not Jews as a whole. I mean, Jesus was a Jew, so let's just put that there. Jesus was angry because the people who His faith were supposed to be protecting and lifting up were the ones His faith was stepping on. Cole Arthur Riley in her book, This Here Flesh, says that anger is never holier than when it acts in defense of the dignity of a person or a piece of creation, but you can be a person of profound anger without allowing it to eclipse your or anyone else's personhood. Every emotion has a story to tell.

Our anger rises at times when we perceive that something is not right and so we need to listen. We determine who is our anger for? Is it for truly someone in need, someone truly wronged? And that can be ourselves, and if it is, then what choice or what's the choice we have? Which path are we going to go down? We have seen one path many times in our history. We can go down the path of just blindly striking out, just going into a rage and just being angry at whomever comes across or being horribly angry and mean and even violent to people we think are the perpetrators or maybe not even, the people who are just in front of us. We've seen too many mass shootings in our country that have been the result of that. Put the January 6th protests in there. There are other protests that have turned from a peaceful protest to violence and destruction, treating others with contempt, a blind rage that spills into all of our interactions onto anyone in front of us.

Have you known, do you know, that person who's kind of always angry? That person who's just kind of simmering at this low level of anger and it comes out in all of their interactions, at work, in the family. They're dealing with some levels of anger and so you ask them and ask that question and you get this tone of voice or you get a response from them that is just attacking you and you know haven't done anything, but they're just so angry and they haven't really listened to the story. They're angry and they've chosen a certain path to follow that anger down. It's not the anger that's bad, it's the path we let it lead us down. Gandhi once said, "I have learned to use my anger for good. Without it, I would not be motivated to rise to a challenge. It is an energy that compels me to define what is just and unjust."

Brian McLaren, another Christian author, says it this way, "So yes, you bet I'm angry. It's my source of creativity. It's a vaccination against apathy and complacency. It's a gift that can be abused or widely used. Yes, it's a temptation, but it's also a resource and an opportunity as unavoidable and necessary as pain. It's part of the gift of being human and being alive. And if you're not angry, I think you should check your pulse, because if your heart beats in love for something, for someone, anything, you'll be angry when it's harmed or threatened."

In today's passage the disciples recall that scripture that says zeal for your house will consume me. Zeal is not a word we use very much anymore, and I think part of it is because we don't really associate it in a positive way. Zeal, another form of that word is zealot, and usually when we talk about zealot we talk about someone so blindly devoted to something they're just doing kind of extreme actions and usually not good. We hear the word zealot in the Bible. There's Simon the Zealot was one of the disciples of Jesus. That's a Zealot with a capital Z. The Zealots were a group within first century Judaism. They wanted to see a more military kind of overthrow of the Romans. Jesus got angry and when He listened to that anger He was moved to drastic action on behalf of those in need.

Sometimes it is okay for zeal to consume us as the scripture says, as long as it leads us down that path of standing up against what is wrong, what is unjust. Anger is not the opposite of love. Even when we are angry, even if it's a righteous anger, especially if it's a righteous anger, it calls for love. Methodist minister Steve Garnaas-Holmes says it this way, "Let the furnace of repentance refine your rage into desire of kindness for all. Some things need to be burned down but not people. Let nothing diminish your love for wrongdoers." That's hard. Let nothing diminish your love for wrongdoers. I mean, we can all think of those people that we're angry at, that we feel are just doing injustice in the world, that are doing wrong. And to hear let nothing diminish my love for them, I don't want to hear that. There are hard things in the Bible. There are parts of the Bible I don't want to hear.

There are parts in the Old Testament where God seems to encourage genocide. There's violence in the Old Testament. But maybe one of the most troubling things in the Bible for me that I don't want to hear is love your enemies. Why did you have to say that, Jesus? Even in my anger I'm called to love my enemies. How do we do that? How even in our anger do we continue to work with love? Well, don't be afraid of anger. Listen to the story it tells. Name it, feel it, name how it feels in your body, but then be aware you have a choice of what path to take. Nadia Boltz-Weber is a minister and author and speaker and prominent kind of personality in certain circles, and she gets a lot of internet trolls, if you're familiar with that phrase, people online who harass and then say awful things to her. She does not look like your typical minister. She's tattooed very heavily and just kind of looks a little bit alternative. But she writes how she has tried to learn to respond to her harshest and most mean critics online.

"Well, I'd like to say my first response to almost everything is screw you." She uses a different word there. "But I almost never stay there. But if I'm honest, I have to admit that I almost always start there. It's only by the grace of God that I ever move from my first reaction to something softer. But the older I get, the quicker that grace seems to come. Option one, take my hurt and pass it like a basketball either back to the person who hurt me or to someone more convenient, like the guy driving too slow in the left lane, or maybe my partner. Option two, perhaps I remember that no one who feels well loved, who is a psychologically integrated person, who has a happy life, would ever choose to send someone a message telling them they look like a freak and should get cancer. Someone has hurt them, and I know what that feels like. I'm never going to get this right, but option one feels like poison and option two feels like freedom."

It's hard to take option two. I mean, when someone is just so unjustly mean and cruel to us, it's hard not just to want to dish that right back like Nadia says, pass that hurt like a basketball right back to them. That's the poison. It's hard to say why would someone do this? They must have been hurt already. How can I love them? So I'm sorry I'm asking you to do the same thing. I'm asking you to do something really hard. Listen to your anger but don't let it overwhelm you. Act in righteous anger but act in love at the same time. I'm asking you to do that, but really it's God asking all of us to do that. Let me close with, I think this is again from the writing of Steve Garnaas-Holmes, and I think I put that in the bulletin at the end of it.

You can see Steve's writing... well, let me close with that, with his words. Let your rage be refined with sorrow. Out of the death of grief let passion rise, burning desire for love among all. Let that passion fuel your work for restoration. The fire of love be your courage to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly with God. Let us pray. God, we thank you for the gift of anger that when we listen to the story helps us to see that not everything is right. That helps us to move in love to work for justice for all. Let us listen to our anger and let it lead us down the right path. In your name we pray, amen.

Big Feelings - Sadness

Transcript of a sermon preached by Pastor Shawn Coons on March 12, 2023

Week three of our Big Feelings Series and we've been talking about the various emotions that we experience. Not wanting to call some of the emotions good and some of the emotions bad, maybe some of them are more welcome and some of them are more challenging, but every emotion that we feel has a story to tell, has something important to tell us, and there's something for us to be gained if we sit, if we listen to the story that emotion has to tell.

I want to start this morning by reading a little bit from the book that we're kind of going through this year, Flesh, to hear about the story that sadness may have to tell us, and this is a story from the author, Cole Arthur Riley, of a time she was in college or after college, sorry.

"When I moved to Philly after college, my first friends were a group of nuns. I was leading small groups at a quaint Catholic university and Sister June worried that I was lonely, but never saying so, but invite me for meals and rosary walks. I went with her a handful of times to a prayer labyrinth that she walked weekly. The first time I went, I thought it would be a maze. I was hoping it would be, but prayer labyrinths aren't meant to trap you and the goal isn't to get out. It's a journey to the center and back again, and the way is long but clear. It's an ancient practice of embodied meditation and Sister June would mumble to herself as we walked the path from different ends. I'd pick leaves and rip them into smaller and smaller pieces as I made my way.

"Sometimes when Sister June approached the center, she'd begin to cry. I'd linger awkwardly in places to avoid the center while her mumbles became a gentle whaling. But one time she just peeked over her shoulder at me and said, 'Well, come on then.' And I entered the center with her and she slid a photo from her skirt pocket and pressed it flat between her two palms without showing me. 'My sister,' she said, and she wasn't wiping her tears away. I asked, 'Older or younger?' And maybe she knew I just didn't know what else to say because instead of answering, she said, 'I come here to cry for her and then let me tell you about her.'"

"We walked the path out together and as she told me about their love and the loss and how she once and still sometimes hated God, she told me that as she walks to the center, she travels into sadness. As she walks out, she reminds herself that she isn't imprisoned by it. We are born knowing how to cry, but it takes another to teach us how to cry well and with purpose. As we watch our elders cry, we are learning. Sister June taught me how to grieve with my body. She taught me how to feel the tears on my face and not wipe them away. Her rhythm of lament has settled into my soul."

This morning I'm inviting us to try and learn how we can let the rhythm of lament settle into our soul. This rhythm of lament we find a lot in scripture. There's an entire book of the Bible dedicated to lament, appropriately called Lamentations, and I realize coming upon the sermon I've never preached from Lamentations, but we're going to hear from it today. Lamentations chapter one, starting with verse one. It's a short book of the Bible. It's five poems, all of lament.

"How lonely sits the city that was once full of people! How like a widow has she has become, she that was great among the nations! She that was a princess among the provinces has become a vessel.

"She weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks; among all her lovers she has no one to comfort her; all her friends have dealt treacherously with her; they have become her enemies.

"Judah has gone into exile suffering and hard servitude; she lives now among the nations and finds no resting place; her pursuers have all overtaken her in the midst of her distress.

"The roads to Zion mourn, for no one comes to the festivals; all her gates are desolate; her priests groan; her young girls grieve, and her lot is bitter.

"Her foes have become the masters; her enemies prosper, because the Lord has made her suffer for the multitude of her transgressions; her children have gone away, captives before the foe."

This is the word of the Lord. This passage marks the fall of Judah, the southern kingdom of Israel, the fall of Jerusalem, the exile where many of the inhabitants were taken off in captivity to Babylon. And the rest of the chapters of Lamentations are similar themes on this, and we can go to the Book of Psalms and we will find Psalms of lament. Often we read some of them in our Lent services at Ash Wednesday or on Good Friday, or Monday, Thursday.

Why is there so much lament in the Bible? Why is there so much sadness in the Bible? If every emotion has a story to tell, what are these stories of lament and sadness trying to tell us? It's the story of a world gone wrong. It's the story of a life gone wrong. It's the story that something is not the way it's supposed to be. The temple should still be standing. Judah should still be a kingdom. Our loved ones should not be prisoners in Babylon.

I want to ask you this morning, what stories of sadness, what stories of lament are you hearing from your emotions, of a world not as it should be, of a life not as it should be. My loved one should still be here. I shouldn't have to choose between rent and medicine. Bombs shouldn't be falling.

Cole Arthur Riley writes, "When we weep for the conditions of this world, we become truth tellers in its defense. People who can say this is not good. It is not well. It is born in the knowledge that things were good and can be good. We know sadness because we know there is more than sadness." I think that's an important line. We know sadness because we know there is more than sadness. It's hard for us at times because we know things were better, things can be better.

The Bible is full of sadness because it witnesses to a world that should be and can be better. And actually, let's think for a moment. Imagine if there weren't these stories of sadness, if there weren't these stories of lament in the Bible. Imagine, and some of you may not have to imagine so hard, imagine you're in a time of sadness and you're in this time of lament. And so you turn towards scripture, you open your Bible, and all you find in that Bible is be happy. All you find in that Bible is praise God, isn't life great? Imagine you turned toward the Bible and your story of sadness was not in there. Imagine you turned towards scripture and you couldn't find your story. You'd wonder, wouldn't you? You'd wonder if God had room for you. You'd wonder if God had room for your sadness. Your story is there. All of your stories, including the sad ones.

We even turn to points of scripture and find that God is sad in the Bible. Remember in John when Jesus' dear friend Lazarus died? The shortest verse in the Bible, good memory verse, if you ever want one, John 11:35, "Jesus wept." Jesus cried. God grieves for Israel in the Old Testament time and time again. We hear the sadness, the grieving, the mourning, the loss that Israel has gone away from God.

Another quote from Cole Arthur Riley, "I have never felt closer to God than when he has tears running down his face. There is no such thing as a lone whale. Every howl reverberates off the walls of God's chest and finds its way back to us carrying God's own tears with it." I think when God bears witness to our lament, we discover we are inviting God as a nurturer. A mother who hears her child crying in the night, she wakes, rises and comes to the place where we lie. She rushes her holy warmth against our flesh and says, "I'm here."

Our stories of sadness are God's stories, and so we need to listen to those stories of sadness. Often I think we are afraid. We're afraid to listen to those stories of sadness. We're afraid to sit with those stories of sadness. We're afraid if we do that, that sadness is going to overwhelm us, that there's going to be nothing else left. We believe that if we sit with our sadness, if we listen to our sadness, that's going to be all that we can feel. But it turns out the opposite is true.

Michael read Ezra 3 just a moment ago, and it was a time when they were rebuilding the temple that had been destroyed and they were dedicating the new temple. And we heard that as they were celebrating the new temple, there were people there who remembered the old one and they were sad and there was joy and sadness at that moment, both, and there was room for both. There's room for joy and sadness in the community. There's room for joy and sadness in us, both of them. I do actually kind of find it interesting. I didn't plan it this way to hear that scripture. As we sit in our sanctuary, there's joy and sadness. As we home our pews to good places and we remember the memories and the fondness and all the folks that have sat there, we can be sad for that and be excited for some new pews that allow us some new possibilities.

If you're familiar with the movie Inside Out, there is this point in the movie, I don't want to give too many spoilers, but it's been out for a while and it's still a great movie. There's this point in the movie where there's the character Bing Bong there, the elephant-looking character, and he is sad. The folks need his help to move forward and he can't help because he's sad. And the way they move forward is not by rushing him, but by sitting with him listening to his sadness. And it's in that listening that there is allowed to be more than sadness.

I'm reminded of Sister June again. As she walks to the center, she travels into sadness. As she walks out, she reminds herself that she isn't imprisoned by it. The Book of Lamentations is a journey into sadness, but it's also a communal journey into sadness. It isn't the sadness of one person just writing, it's the sadness of the nation. It's the sadness of the community. It's been an honored part of scripture handed down to us. It's part of our communal journey into sadness, our communal grief work. So much of scripture is that communal sadness, sharing with one another our laments.

Psalm 1:37, if you remember that, "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, there we wept, when we remembered Zion," which is Jerusalem. But, if you notice that, they're mourning for the loss of Jerusalem, of the country. But notice it's plural. There we sat down, there we wept. How could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?

Tragedy can be even more tragic if we keep it to ourselves. Tragedy can be more tragic if we don't share it. In the Jewish tradition, there is a festival holiday called Tisha B'Av and it's when they remember the destruction of the temples. They remember other losses. It is a time for sadness. We listen to the story that our sadness is telling. We aren't afraid to name it and we aren't afraid to share it.

There's a powerful example I came across this week of sharing sadness. Rachel Held Evans was a Christian author who died suddenly at the age of 37, very beloved, and it was a hard loss for many people. Nadia Bolz-Weber's another preacher and writer, but she was a friend of Rachel's and she gave the sermon at her funeral and she was preaching on Jesus in Lazaruth. She's preaching on Mary Magdalene coming to find Jesus, not find Jesus at the tomb. And Nadia says this: "Right now, I have faith that our grief is actually holy to God. I have faith that Jesus stood at the tomb of his friend Lazarus and cried tears as salty as our own. And yes, I do have faith that in any spiritual and eternal way, death has no sting whatsoever, but it stings now and I feel it sting in my eyes."

So as I read this text about Mary Magdalene from John again, I'm starting to see the question, "Woman, why are you weeping?" Not as an accusation, but as an invitation. So for those gathered who have been crying quite a lot, I invite us to the same question. Why? Why are you yourself weeping? It's a holy question. Maybe just for this moment, we choose not to bypass the real truth of our sadness and ask one another, why are you weeping? What's the thing under the thing? What's the thing under the thing? Why are you weeping?

What if we go deeper? What if we go into the why behind the why? Well, I'm weeping because I lost a loved one. Okay, why? Well, I miss them because they did this. I miss being with them because of this. Why? Well, I miss how it made me feel. And if we dig deeper, we name some things that maybe we didn't realize. It's hard. It sounds hard, and it is, and we may be worried that it leads us too deep into sadness. But remember that rhythm of lament? "As she walks to the center, she travels into sadness. As she walks out, she reminds herself that she is not imprisoned by it."

Nadia Bolz-Weber, again, in that funeral sermon, I've heard it said, "Grief is the price we pay for having loved." So yeah, I think this love soaked grief of ours is holy to God. Because while there are those who reduce the Christian faith to moralism and delusional positivity, we know that the God we worship is not a shiny tooth motivational speaker churning out cheerful memes in times of suffering, because the God we worship a crucified and risen God, which is to say we worship a God that is not unfamiliar with darkness. God works in the darkness. God works in the sadness. Let me just leave you with this poem from Cole Arthur Riley.

"Aren't your eyelids tired of keeping prisoners? Those tears are precious minerals. Lap them up like a medicine. It's called healing.”

May the rhythm of lament settle into your soul.

Big Feelings - Happiness

Transcript of a sermon preached by Pastor Shawn Coons on March 5, 2023

Good morning, friends. Here we are on week two of our Big Feelings series where we are taking a deeper look at our emotions, our emotions as gifts from God, and how we can honor that, and how we can understand our emotions in that way. We talked last week that every emotion has a story. And we like to think there are good emotions and bad emotions, but we wanted to reframe that a little bit in terms of there are challenging emotions, that are maybe emotions we welcome more, but all of our emotions they just happen. They are part of who we are as God's being and so we don't want to say that these emotions are bad, they shouldn't happen, we shouldn't feel them.

Every emotion has a story to tell, and when we feel an emotion, something important is happening, and we need to listen more carefully to that emotion. Too often we don't want to listen to the stories that our challenging emotions tell us. If we're sad, if we're angry, if we're scared, something bad is probably happening, and that's not something we want to focus on. But this morning we're talking about happiness, but I want to suggest that sometimes we don't want to listen to the stories that happiness is telling us, that happiness isn't always a welcome emotion or maybe as welcome as it should be.

I learned a new word, a new fear this morning, cherophobia, C-H-E-R-O phobia, which is an irrational fear of being happy, which made me wonder if there's a rational fear of being happy, I hope not. But it's about rejecting opportunities that could lead to positive life changes often due to the fear that something bad is going to happen. And so I want to ask you to assess yourself this morning. Are any of these statements true for you? I worry that if I feel good, something bad could happen.

Do you ever think, "I don't deserve to be happy. I'm too frightened, I'm too scared to let myself be happy." Do you often think that, "Well, disaster often follows good fortune." Or maybe you think, "I'm too old now to really be happy. When I was younger, I could feel that joy and happiness, but now just too old. Or maybe if I'm happy, if I'm in too good of mood, people are going to want things from me, they're going to expect things more from me. Or maybe everyone else around me, they're not happy so it'd be wrong for me to be happy too."

Now, maybe there's some truth to some of these statements or some cautions in there that we can listen to, but I think too often we are reluctant to be as happy as we could be. We are reluctant to be happier when we're happy. We're just worried, "Okay, everything's going right, now the other shoe's going to drop. Something bad's going to happen," and so we don't allow ourselves to really feel that happiness.

So this morning the first thing I want you to do is I want to give you permission to be happy. I want to give you permission to be really, really happy. I want you to give you permission to feel your happiness. But I'm going to say that permission actually doesn't really come for me, I'm just a messenger of that permission going to say God wants us to feel happiness. God created us to feel happiness, and maybe that doesn't sound like a very radical message, but I want to explore it a little bit, but we're going to do that through a particular passage in John chapter five starting with verse one. And this is a healing of Jesus as He comes up to Jerusalem.

After this, there was a festival of the Jews and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now, in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool called in Hebrew, Beth-Zatha, which has five porticoes and in these lay many invalids, blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been ill for 38 years. And when Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, "Do you want to be made well?" And the sick man answered Him, "Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me." Jesus said to him, "Stand up, take your mat and walk" and at once the man was made well. And he took up his mat and he began to walk. This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

All right, so let's talk a little bit about the setting of what's going on so we can understand this passage a little bit more. It says it's at the Sheep Gate, which is a particular gate in Jerusalem, particular area that we know kind of where it is. And in this area there were pools of water, think maybe cisterns, kind of bricked up pools not naturally occurring. Maybe there was a spring there at that time.

And supposedly every now and then the water would be stirred if you will, kind of roiled a little bit. Later manuscripts actually of this portion of John add a little explanation about the Lord troubling the water. If you have ever heard that song Wade in the Water, the Lord's going to trouble the water, that song is partly an illusion to this scripture. And when the water was troubled, it was thought that the first person down there, maybe the first people down there would be healed of whatever illness they were afflicted with.

And so people would gather here, they wait for the water to be troubled, and they try and make their way down. And so we had this person who had been there for 38 years, a man who had been there for 38 years, and who was afflicted, and sounds like he wasn't very mobile, and that was probably part of his affliction. He couldn't get down to the water in time. And Jesus comes along and asks him, "Do you want to be made well?" Do you want to be made well?

Let me ask you, how would you feel if you're suffering from something and someone comes up to you and says, "Hey, do you want to be made well?" How do you hear that question? We don't know what tone of voice. We don't know the particular emphasis Jesus put on it, but I can imagine that man in this situation, I can imagine me being asked that question and hearing kind of an accusation in that question hearing kind of one unspoken word. Do you really want to be made well?

Almost feeling accused like somehow my condition is my fault, like I'm not doing enough to be better, to make myself well. I don't think that's what Jesus is doing here. I don't absolutely think that's not what Jesus is doing here. We have other points in scripture where Jesus says people's affliction, people what they're suffering it's not their own fault, they didn't do anything to deserve this. But I can see how that question could be heard in that way.

So you would think that the man would answer, "Yes, I want to be made well," but maybe he's a little defensive at this point. Maybe he hears, "Why aren't you well?" And so he offers this explanation. He doesn't say, "Yes, I want to be made well." He says, "Well, I can't be made well because I can't get down to the water fast enough. I've got no one to bring me down there, and so this is why I'm here, and I've been here for 38 years, and this is probably where I'm going to be until I die."

He didn't hear Jesus' question, do you want to be made well? He heard what keeps you from being made well, not do you want to. Jesus was asking about his desire. Jesus was asking about his wants. What do you want? It reminded me when Carrie and I first moved here, we had a realtor, his name was Roger Howard. He's the brother of our retiring handyman we have here, brother of a former associate pastor here. Roger is a bubbly, just jovial person. And I remember we were visiting a one house and looking at it, and there was a neighbor next door, and Roger called the neighbor over. He was always talking to folks, and Roger said "Here, and he held up his hand, nothing in his hand. He's like, "I'm going to give you something."

This is a magic wand and he like mimed giving it to her, and she was like, "What's going on?" He's like, "This is a magic wand and you can change anything about this neighborhood you would like. What would you change?" Yeah, and it was Roger's way kind of learning a little bit more about the neighborhood, but it was like, "Here's your magic wand. You can have anything you want," and I feel like Jesus is saying here, "What do you want? You can have it."

Jesus says, "Imagine there are no barriers. What do you want? What do you desire? Do you want to be made well?" This is a good time to mention that this word well can also be translated as whole. Do you want to be made whole? Do you want to be made whole? Do you want to be made healthy? I'm going to suggest do you want to be made happy? What would you say if Jesus asked you this question? Do you want to be made well? Do you want to be made whole? Do you want to be made happy? Would your mind immediately jump to the reasons you can't? Mine kind of mind kind of does. I would like to, but.

It would be great to be happy but. I mean, and maybe, well, you don't even answer yes. Maybe, but I can't because. Jesus is asking, "Do you want to be made well? Do you want to be made whole? Do you want to be happy?" Jesus asked that of the man because he wanted the man to be whole. He wanted him to be healthy and happy. And God wants us to be whole, and healthy, and well, and happy.

There's a man in the Hindu tradition guru Paramahansa Yogananda who says, "Happiness is the greatest divine birthright. It is the buried treasure of the soul." This is a good time to mention that happiness is one of our emotions, and it happens, and we just can't choose to be happy. That would be wonderful if at any moment we could say I'm going to be happy right now, and we were. We can choose to do things that generally make us happy, but happiness, it happens. But we are all created as emotional beings. We are all created with the capacity for happiness. We are all created and there will be moments and times where we are happiness, where we are happy, and we feel happiness.

Not all the time, not to the exclusion of all the other emotions, but God has designed us to be happy. And so when happiness comes and it will and does, we need to embrace it. We need to listen to the story that happiness tells. We need to sit with happiness, and part of that is to embrace it, and not stop ourselves. Not say, "Okay, I'm feeling happiness, but I'm not sure I should or what." Just feel happy. Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up and while I'm making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.

I think there's something key here. I have no one else to help me. Happiness so many times, if you think about it, the moments when we've been really happy, the moments when we are happy, how many of them involve other people? I'm willing to bet a whole lot of them. There was a study that was done, kind of a depressing study. It was people who had completed suicide and they looked at the writings, the notes they had left behind, and so much of their writing was that first person singular I, me. This is how I feel. This is my life. This is what's going on. And they didn't use a lot of we, they didn't use a lot of us.

Being with other people, sharing your happiness with other people, putting yourself in relationship and community. It allows us to be more happy. It allows us to sit with our happiness. Sometimes we also want to delay our happiness, I think. I ain't got time to be happy. Too much to do. Notice that Jesus asked, "Do you want to be made well?" And the man put Jesus off, didn't he? Jesus didn't wait though, did he? And the man said, "Well, I can't be well. I can't be whole ..." and Jesus said, "Not listening," and He made him well right then and there. He did not wait. Now was the time for that man to be whole. Now was the time for that man to be happy.

There were some Jewish leaders if we read on in this passage who were there. They didn't think now was the time for that man to be whole and healthy, and they didn't like what Jesus did. This was the sabbath. Not only did Jesus heal on the sabbath, which was seen as a form of work, which you weren't supposed to do. Then he says to this man, "Take your mat, stand up, walk away." And in some interpretations of what you could do on the sabbath, that was work. That act of picking up the mat and carrying somewhere was work.

Jeremiah 17 says, "Thus says the Lord for the sake of your lives, take care that you do not bear a burden on the sabbath day." Do not carry a burden out of your house on the sabbath. There are still some Orthodox Jews today who follow these strict rules I don't want to say strict rules, that makes it sounds bad. Who follow these laws, these gifts as they see it from God for honoring the sabbath. I was looking on TikTok the other day, and there was this TikTok about what does a Jew do if they're riding in an Uber and the sabbath begins?

And then in this tradition of Judaism, the rabbi said, "Well, here's what you do. You need to ask your Uber driver to carry your phone and your keys in your house for you because you're not supposed to carry that burden." That's what they're getting from Jeremiah. That's what these folks thought Jesus was telling this man to do to break the commandments of the sabbath. Like Jesus, you should have waited. You could have waited until the sabbath was over for this man to be happy, for this man to be whole. Jesus said no. He said the right time to be happy is now.

There's no reason to delay our wholeness, our healthiness, our happiness. Jesus did not wait for that man's happiness. Why do we sometimes want to put our happiness off? Finally, we tell ourselves, "Well, I can't feel happy right now because I'm still sad about this. Can't feel happy because I'm grieving the loss of a loved one." We tell ourselves we can't feel two emotions at the same time. We view happiness and sadness on a spectrum and we can be only at one point of the spectrum, like happiness is over here, here's the happy side, and sadness is over here.

Okay, well, I've recently lost a loved one, I am sad so I'm going to be sad, and there's no way I can be over there until I am done respecting this loss. And so when we are over here, we're like, "Oh my gosh, that means I don't feel sad anymore. I'm not grieving this person and that feels wrong, and that pulls us back." It's not a spectrum. You can feel two emotions at the same time. You can feel lots of emotions at the same time.

If you ever gathered for a funeral and enjoyed the time with family as they get together, you can grieve, and feel sad, and be happy at the same time. Allowing ourselves moments of happiness in times of profound or not so profound sadness, it doesn't lessen our loss. If you ever seen the movie Inside Out, that's one of the wonderful important lessons from that movie, and we're going to talk about that next week when we talk about sadness a little bit more.

So we've talked about, last week especially, sitting with our emotions, attending to our emotions, attending to our inner lives by naming them, and naming how they make us feel physically. And so I invite you to do that with happiness. The next time you're happy say I'm happy. Think it, articulating it and then say, "How does this make me feel? Oh wow, my jaw is unclenched for the first time in I don't know how long. My muscles, they're not tight. I'm bouncing a little bit. This is nice." Recognize that, embrace it.

It's easy to think when we say listen to our emotions, that we mean just the challenging ones, but we mean the welcome emotions as well. God's invitation to us is for us to sit with our happiness, name it, name it how it makes our body feel. And if you want to go a step further say, "Why am I happy? Maybe I should do that again" if it was something that caused you to be happy.

So let me just leave you with this simple once again message, God wants you to be whole. God wants you to be well and healthy, most of all, God wants you to be happy.

Big Feelings - Honoring and Understanding Our Emotions as Gifts from God

Transcript of a sermon given by Rev. Shawn Coons on February 26, 2023

We're beginning this morning a new sermon and worship series called Big Feelings. And it's about honoring and understanding our emotions, all of them, as gifts from God. Sometimes, maybe too often in our life, as busy Americans, and sometimes especially as mainline Protestant Christians, we don't value our emotions enough, we don't value our inner life enough. We're very much about doing, we're very much about producing, we're very much about working, keeping busy, but we're not always good on slowing down on just sitting, just being introspective and reflecting on what's going on around us, but maybe, more importantly, what's going around and on in inside of us. But that's not how we were created. Brad just read from Psalm 139, where God says we were intricately made, wonderfully made, and we are made as physical and spiritual and mental and emotional beings. All of those parts. We have emotions, we have lots of emotions, and every emotion has a story to tell us. I [inaudible 00:01:39] to think this morning as every emotion, each and every one of your emotions as a storyteller.

We're going to read this morning, in our second lesson, from Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, and that's a familiar passage to many. But I want you to think about it in terms of emotions, and think about in terms of the variety of emotions, and when they come, bidden or not.

Ecclesiastes 3:1, "For everything there is a season, a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance; a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; a time to tear, and a time to sow; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace." This is the word of the Lord, thanks be to God.

Ecclesiastes is a familiar verse to a lot of people, even outside of the faith from a few kind of key sections. We hear this, "A time to be born, a time to die," we may think of that song Turn! Turn! Turn! by The Byrds. We also get from Ecclesiastes, the phrase, "There's nothing new under the sun." But if you read Ecclesiastes, if you dig deep into it, it is a unique book of the Bible. It is a different book of the Bible. You get this message in the beginning of Ecclesiastes, all is vanity, that nothing really matters, that whatever you do in life, life is going to happen, bidden or not, and there's nothing we can do. We often hear these verses and we think, well, there's certain seasons where God has ordained certain things to happen, and if you just wait long enough, it'll turn around. That's not quite what this is saying. Oftentimes, if you read Ecclesiastes and you look at it, you think it's a depressing message. Well, life just happens and there's, there's nothing you can do about it.

Good things happen and bad things happen, and who knows when they're going to happen. But if we read it alongside the Book of Proverbs, you get a balance between two ways of looking at the world. The Book of Proverbs is all about if you follow God, if you honor wisdom, if you raise your children right, if you do X, Y, and Z, then all of these good things are going to happen to you. If you do certain things, your life is going to be wonderful. Ecclesiastes is kind of no matter what you do, sometimes good things happen and sometimes bad things happen, and who knows when and why. So if we take this balance between the two, we get, I would say, a more holistic view and realistic view of life. So when we read this from Ecclesiastes here, and it says, "There's a time to be born, a time to die, time to love, a time to hate." This is not God has ordained these seasons, that right now is a time to love, and guess what? Pretty soon is the time to hate. It's not like summer follows spring.

It's more descriptive than prescriptive, if you will. If you live long enough, there's going to be a time for love, if you live long enough, there's going to be a time for hate. If you live long enough, if you experience enough things, there's a time to seek and there's a time to lose. We don't know precisely when Ecclesiastes was written, we don't know exactly where it was written, but based on some detective work and looking at the language and its influences, we can say it was after the fall of Israel to the Babylonians, where they took a lot of their folks and removed them into exile, after this time of turmoil and upheaval. And then there was a lot of new influences coming in. So we know it was during a time of change, and good things happened and bad things happened.

And so the writer is basically saying, "I've lived long enough. I've seen that all things happen, and you know what? I can't always make sense. Sometimes I do the right things, and things don't work out. Sometimes I don't, and good things happen." I want to think about this in terms of emotions. Emotions happen. We don't get to control when we're happy and when we're sad, and when we're angry and when we're scared. Certainly there are things we can do that either seek to avoid certain emotions or seek after, but emotions happen to us, they come, and you live long enough, you're going to be sad and you're going to be angry and you're going to be happy and you're going to be fearful, sometimes all in the same day, sometimes all in the same hour. We are created as emotional beings, we have all of these emotions within us.

So the question is, what do we do with them? The question is, do we allow ourselves to feel them? Do we listen to the messages they are giving us? Do we listen to the stories each of our emotions is telling us? I want to start just with a definition of what an emotion is. Dr. Paul Ekman is one of the premier research, made the pioneer and scientific research into emotions. He started with facial expressions. And when you were happy, what facial expression did you make? And when you were sad? And he says that emotions are a process, a particular automatic appraisal influenced by our evolutionary and personal past in which we sense that something important to our welfare is occurring. And a set of psychological changes and emotional behaviors begins to deal with the situation. I want to highlight three important parts of this, and we're going to touch on each one of these. The first one we already kind of touched on, emotions are automatic.

They're not voluntary. We don't say, "Oh, I'm starting to feel angry, I'm going to stop." "I'm starting to feel sad. No, I don't have time to feel sad, I'm going to stop." Actually, I skipped over a part I was going to do earlier, but it ties in here so well. One of my favorite eighties movies is Predator. I don't know if you remember Arnold Schwarzenegger, jungle action movie. Well, Jesse 'The Body' Ventura, former governor of Minnesota, former professional wrestler, is in there, and at one time after a fight, he's bleeding on his arm and one of the guys says next to him, "You're bleeding." And he looks at him, says, "I ain't got time to bleed." Sometimes I feel we say, "I ain't got time to feel." "I don't have time to be sad today, I don't have time to be angry today." Coming back to this, emotions are automatic. We don't get to choose the emotions we feel. Second part of Ekman's definition here, something important to our welfare is occurring. We get emotions because our body senses that something important is happening right now and we need to pay attention.

There's that story the emotion is telling. What is it telling? Something important. It's got an important story to tell us, and then changes happen that begin to deal with the situation. The emotion brings about changes within our body, within our brain, to deal with this something important that the body senses is going on. So we know our emotions are automatic, we know they just happen, but we still say there are good emotions and there are bad emotions. And we know which ones are good and which ones are bad. What are the good emotions? Shout them out. Happy, joy. love, delight. Now, what are the bad emotions? Anger, pain, sadness, jealousy, disgust, embarrassment.

We label our emotions. Some are good, some are bad. We need to stop that. We absolutely need to stop saying these emotions are good, these emotions are bad. Now, we can certainly say some emotions are comfortable and some are uncomfortable, some are more challenging than others, but they are all our emotions, and they all have a story to tell about something important that is happening. There are no bad emotions. But we do that, we say, "I don't like this emotion. I don't want it, and it's a bad one. And so I'm going to bottle up. I'm just not going to feel. I'm not going to not feel sad anymore. I'm tired of feeling sad, I'm just going to put it away. Ain't got time to be sad today." And we bottle that up. How does that work? It doesn't work very well. So when I was, I think it was just out of college 'cause I remember the apartment I was in, so in my early twenties, and I got this kit for making your own root beer. And some of you can see where this is going already, can't you?

This is fun, I like root beer, I've never done this. And so I don't remember the exact process, but you bottle it up and then you let it ferment for a while. I don't know if I followed the directions correctly or not. So I bottled it up and it said keep it out of the light. And I had a little apartment kitchen and it had no windows, so I put them in a box in there, and I'm in the other room a while later, a couple of days later I think, and I'm watching TV and all of a sudden I hear this bang. And I hear glass and I hear liquid dripping. And I go in there and yeah, one of the bottles couldn't be contained. I'd bottled up too much yeast, or however the fermentation worked, and it exploded.

I cleaned it up, I went back in to watch the TV, bang, cleaned that one up. I got wise at this point, I got a big heavy-duty trash bag, put the rest in there and I said, "Surely they're not all going to." Yeah, surely they did. We can't do that with our emotions, else that's what's going to happen. We bottle up or say, "I'm not going to feel you." It doesn't go away, our emotions don't go away. Surely we feel better, maybe temporarily, but if we're taking that sadness and we're just pushing it down, as I say, "I'm not going to feel sadness," it's still sending messages to our body. If we're taking that anger and we're pushing down, "I'm not really going to feel my anger today," it's putting your body in this state, a fight or flight state, sending signals to your body, and that takes its toll, physically takes its toll on us when we don't listen to the story our emotions are telling us.

It would be nice if Ecclesiastes said, "For everything there's a season, a time for every matter under heaven, there's a time to be born, and a time to be born; and a time to love, and a time to love; and a time to laugh, and a time to laugh." But all of our emotions happen, all of our emotions come to us. That is the way we were created, emotional beings. Our bodies send us this message, something important is happening. Every emotion has a story to tell. So once again, let's stop judging our emotions. Some good, some bad. Heidi Goehmann wrote a book called Emotions & the Gospel and she writes, "Is it possible that emotions like sadness and angers are still gifts of the Creator? How would we process a broken world without tears? How would we respond to injustice without anger? How would we keep ourselves safe from harm without fear?" Every emotion has a purpose, every emotion has a story to tell.

Now, it is possible, and it happens more than we would like, that the stories our emotions tell us and their purpose get altered. If there's a significant trauma in our life where the emotions come and something is happening, and it says, "This is dangerous, you need to protect yourself," you need to whatever, and that emotion has that message, if that trauma is not dealt with or if that trauma is significant enough, you know what? That message stays with us. You have to protect yourself, you have to protect yourself, you have to beware, you have to be fearful. And sometimes that message gets altered, but still we need to listen, maybe more in those situations. We need to listen to the story that emotion is telling us, even if it's a story from years ago. One of the most loving things we can do is attend to ourselves. One of the most loving things in this world we can do is attend to our own wellbeing.

In the Book of Job, Job is afflicted with horrible things in his life, and he is grieving, and his friends come to be with Job. And I want to listen here to how Job's friends initially greet him. Now, when Job's three friends heard all of these troubles had come upon him, each of them set out from his home and they met together to go console and confront him, comfort him. And when they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him, and they raised their voices and they wept aloud and they tore their robes, threw dust in the air upon their heads. They sat with him on the ground for seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him. For they saw that his suffering was very great. They saw that his suffering was great, so they sat with him for seven days in silence and solidarity. We need friends like that, and we need to be a friend like that to ourselves, to sit with ourselves, to sit with our emotions. That's what God calls us to do, to attend to our inner life.

Peter Scazzero wrote a book on a emotional leadership in the church, and he says that John Baptist went away from people and paid attention to his inner life, Jesus spent time in the desert, paid attention to his inner life, Paul took time away before his public ministry and paid attention to his inner life. We can't ignore inner life, it's a vital part of our faith. Loving God with all our soul, with all our heart, with all our mind, all of ourselves, it's the most loving thing we can do, for ourselves, for God, and for others. Pay attention to our inner life, make space and time just for being. This is going to be the theme of our series, listening to our emotions and the stories that they tell us. What does that mean?

Sometimes it just means simply naming the emotion, pausing for a moment and saying, "I'm feeling something. I'm feeling fear right now," "I'm feeling happiness," and if you want to take it a step further, "How does this make my body feel?" "I'm feeling sadness right now and it feels like there's just this rock in my chest," "I'm feeling anger right now, and whoa, my jaw is clenched and my fists are clenched." Naming the emotion, thinking about what it's feeling physically in your body, just doing these two things, science has shown is good for you, is healthy for you, helps us process. Every emotion has a story to tell, every emotion is sending a message to us. I want to close today just by reading a section of the book that we're doing a book discussion on in the next two weeks at 10 o'clock, I'd love to have you join us, This Here flesh. And I just want to read a story just from near the beginning of it. This is by Cole Arthur Riley, a younger African American woman.

When I was eight years old, before I could make sense of why I fled the other children on the playground, my hair began to turn gray. Coarse, white strands shriveled up on the crown of my head without an invitation, politely wrapping themselves around their black peers and strangling them in the night. It was an invasion, and the attention was agonizing. Every day, I'd sit squirming and rocking in my desk, head bowed like a monk, praying for my own invisibility. The gaze of Alex DeMarco at my back, he'd only pointed out a hair once, but the moment stuck to me. I asked my teacher if I could switch to the empty desk in the back row, knowing there I could exhale, she said no. By the time I turned 11, I would spend ages in front of the mirror parting my hair just right, so as little white as possible was visible. One night we were all going out and my family was waiting downstairs for me to finish parting. Eventually, my dad sent everyone to wait in the car, and came to the bottom of the stairs and called for me.

And when he asked how much longer I'd be, all of the shame that had crusted over my muscles from years of parting my hair combusted, and I threw a fit. I don't remember the details surrounding it, apart from a comb thrown against my brother's door. I mainly recall the episode by the memory of my father's face, which had a calm blankness, that only made my own body flailing and loud more of a spectacle. When my crying softened, I finally said, feeling more embarrassed than before, "I can't do this anymore," and then, with certainty, "I have to dye my hair." And my father's response, his face still lives in me, he calmly asked me to come down from the stairs and the low sound waves from his voice slid under my feet and flew me from the top stair to where he stood. And he tucked my head into his chest, he sewed a kiss into my hair, and just said, "Okay, honey, we can dye your hair."

I was so addled that my tears dried up and I didn't say another word, and he summoned my hair into a bun and we walked to the car together. The strange thing is we never did buy the hair dye, and in fact, I never asked about it again. And by the time I was in high school, the white began to go away all on its own.

Her father could have judged her anger as bad, could have said, "That's a bad emotion you are feeling," but he didn't. Could have judged her sadness as bad, "Oh, you don't need to be sad. It's just a little thing." But he didn't, he listened to the story that her emotions were telling, and that made all the difference. He loved her and so he listened. Friends, love yourselves and listen to the stories your emotions are telling you.

Embracing Progressive Christianity - The Environment

Transcript of sermon preached by Rev. Shawn Coons on February 12, 2023

Come with me on a journey here a little bit. I want you to imagine the scene. We are in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, but we're high above. We're looking kind of down on it from a little bit. And you can see it's a calm day. It's a sunny day, can feel the breeze, smells of the ocean. And as you look down, there is something just under the surface of the water, it seems to be breaking the surface of the water.

And it's a pod of whales. And now as we zoom in a little bit on these creatures, we can see they're breaking to the surface to take a breath, and then they dive down deep just a little under the surface. And we're going to zoom in again to see around the whales. And the water looks a little cloudy there.

There's all sorts of small little things in it. And you can see that it's krill, the food that whale eat, small little crustaceans. And they just open their big mouth and take them in by the hundreds, by the thousands to sustain themselves. But as we zoom in on the krill, we can see there are other little particles and little things around.

And what we're seeing is hundreds of thousands, millions of little tiny nano-particles in what they're called of plastic. And so we stick with this view. The whale opens its mouth and inhales, big gulp of water, the krill come in and all these nano-particles of plastic come in. And now our camera goes like Jonah inside the whale.

And what we see in here is the digestive system of a whale, but we also see more plastic. Those garbage bags or those bags we get at the grocery store. Old fishing nets and fishing mines sometimes referred to as ghost gear. The equivalent of a garbage truck of plastic gets put into the ocean each day, eight tons of plastic end up in the oceans each year.

At this rate in another 20 years, it's estimated that there will be more plastic in the ocean than there will be fish in the ocean. So we pull back from our scene in the Atlantic Ocean and we go to the coast, the coast of the United States, eastern coast along South Carolina. And we kind of zoom in there and we see where the ocean meets the coast in this area.

There's a lot of marshes around. And we see an African American woman dressed colorfully, almost regally. Her name is Queen Quet of the Gullah Geechee people, the Gullah Geechee people are descendants of slaves brought to America that have lived on the coasts of North Carolina down to Florida for generations.

This is their land traditionally, but it's being threatened. The waters rise, development happens that takes up some of the marsh land where the flooding used to go and abate so it wouldn't go further inland. There have been offers by the government to buy out these folks, have them go somewhere safe or have them leave the land that they have been on for generations.

Queen Quet asks, why is there no interest in buying out the hotels? Why is there no interest in buying out the resorts, locating them somewhere safer? We're in our final week of embracing progressive Christianity, understanding what it is and what it means to be a progressive Christian. And this morning we're talking about the environment and the focus that progressive Christians and many others have in caring for creation and working for environmental health.

I wanted to begin with these stories this morning because oftentimes we can kind of abstract environmental harm and environmental issues. But really what it comes down two in terms of advocating for our environmental justice is loving and protecting our neighbors.

It's a fulfillment of that great commandment, love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul, and love your neighbors as yourselves, whether they are our human neighbors or whether they are our animal neighbors. And to be fair, this is an area that many Christians, many people and many churches and maybe our own included, have not emphasized as strongly as they should.

Statistically speaking, the older we get, the more right-leaning we get, the less likely we are to be concerned about environmental destruction. At this day and age, almost everyone can agree that there is global warming. We only look at the charts to see that temperature is rising over the years, over the decades. But then we start to differ.

There's a consensus among scientists over 80%, sometimes they'll say over 90% of climate scientists say that this warming is human made, that it's harmful and that we can do something about it. Global temperatures, as I've said, we can see have gone up. Here's a chart showing over since 1880, the steep rise that they've had. And coinciding with this carbon dioxide has spiked up incredibly in the last recent history.

You can see this is a timescale of 400,000 years that have [inaudible 00:06:54] almost all that time it was steady until just recently. And you put these side by side and we can see that the rise in carbon dioxide, the rise in the temperatures, they are together. They're happening at the same time.

But I'm not here this morning to lecture about global warming, I'm not here this morning to go into the science and make the case for it. Instead, I want to shift our focus. What does it mean for us as Christians? What does it mean when progressive Christians make these issues a forefront of their faith?

We talked last week when we talked about politics, that as Christians, we are political. We don't shy away from politics, but our faith doesn't lead us to partisanship. There's no one candidate, there's no one party that represents God. We also said partisan neutrality does not mean moral neutrality.

Environmental destruction is a moral issue. It is about loving our neighbor. It is a faith issue. We heard a moment ago, Stephanie read from Genesis chapter one. And some people have said that in Genesis chapter one, specifically in verse 28, we get the first ethical commandment found in all the Bible where God says, "Be fruitful and multiply.

Fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." The first ethical commandment we get in scripture. Now on first reading, especially as we hear these words in English, we can say, okay, subdue. Dominion sounds a lot like dominate.

It's like, okay, we're in charge. We're the boss. We have the earth to do with whatever we want. God put us in charge, yeah. But if we look in the Hebrew at these words, there's a different sense of them. There are words, one of them is a word, the dominion word is a word like a shepherd has dominion over their flock. And a shepherd cares for their flock.

A shepherd protects their flock. This isn't have at it. This isn't all right, here's your play things. The earth is yours to do what you will. It is God saying to us, "You are in charge of creation. Care for it as I would care for it. You are my steward," if you will. We talk about stewardship in the church a lot. And usually we mean money. We are stewards of creation.

We are stewards of the earth. We are stewards of the water, of the air, of the animals, of the land. "Care for it as I would," says God. And we haven't. We've failed. We've sinned. So the question is, how can we do better? And as Christians, why should we do better? Why do we emphasize this? So let's turn to our second scripture lesson this morning. Deuteronomy chapter six. And we're going to start with verse one and go through verse nine.

Now this is the commandment, "The statues and statutes and the ordinances that the Lord God your, the Lord your God charged me to teach you, to observe in the land that you are about to cross into and occupy so that you and your children and your children's children may fear the Lord your God all the days of your life and keep all his decrees and his commandments that I'm commanding you, so that your days may be long.

Here therefore, oh, Israel, observe them diligently so that it may go well with you so that you may multiply greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey as the Lord, the God of your ancestors has promised you. Here, O Israel, the Lord is our God. The Lord alone.

And you shall love the Lord your God with all your hearts and with all your soul and with all your might. Keep these words that I'm commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead.

Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates." This is the word of the Lord. [inaudible 00:11:43] So after wandering in the wilderness for 40 years, after coming out of Egypt, the Hebrew people, they're on border of coming into Israel, of coming in to take this land God has given to them. And God says, "Wait. Before you go here, listen to what I've said.

I've given you a lot of guidelines and the rules and the law and the wilderness. Listen to it. Remember it. Remember what I have taught you." And why does God say to do that? God says it several times here in this passage, but also multiple times in other parts of scripture. Why is Israel supposed to do that? So that it may go well with you, but not just for you, for your children and for your children's children.

Just as in Genesis, the people of Israel are not given the land of Israel for themselves. It's not here. This is yours, do with it what you will. It's hold it in trust for me. Hold it as a steward so your children may live here and do well. So your children's children may live here and do well. Once again, we are stewards of what God has given us. We are stewards for our children, we are stewards for our children's children.

There's a saying, and it's been attributed to a number of people said throughout the decades, we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children. From the beginning, literally in the beginning, we have been charged to be stewards of creation, stewards of creation for us, for all people, for our children, for all of creation. And when we see this multiple places in scripture in the 10 Commandments, we're given a day of rest, a Sabbath.

And if you remember, it's a sabbath for you. No one should do work on that seventh day, not you, not your slaves, not your animals are included in that. In Leviticus, every seven years, the Israelites are instructed to let the land go fallow, give the land rest.

It's a sabbath for the land. Taking care of the animals, taking care of the land is good. It's good for the land, it's good for the animals, but it turns out it's good for us as well. You remember that saying, you take care of the people that take care of you? You take care of the land, you take care of the animals that take care of you.

Once again, we have not done this. We have not done this as well as we should. We have sinned in becoming consumers rather than stewards. A consumer sees what they have been given as merely for their own use. A steward sees what they have been given as something in their trust and something in their charge to hold, to care for for somebody else, for the good of others.

And as Christians, we are never called to be merely consumers. This applies to many areas of life. We have embodied this at Fairview, moving from consumers to stewards. I see it in the 10, almost now, 11 years that I've been here in how this church has operated. When I first came here, there was a lot of people doing a lot of good work, but sometimes we kind of leaned back and we relied a little bit too much on others.

And there was a video I used to show a couple times in a sermon and I said, "Are we on a cruise ship or are we on a battleship?" On a cruise ship, you ask, "Oh, what's the activities that are playing for me today?" You pay your fee and you get people to wait on you, and you just kind of kick back and let others do the work. On a battleship, we're all together, we're all the crew, we're all working towards a common mission.

Over the years, I have seen this congregation just embrace that mission of being stewards and not consumers, of everyone pitching in and everyone doing their part. And there is a wonderful spirit and a camaraderie here. And I am just amazed at how everyone serves here. You have become even more than you were before, stewards of this church rather than consumers. And it's incredibly heartening. That's what we need to do as we approach the environment, as we approach all areas of life.

And I think sometimes if you're like me, I will admit, here's my confession this morning. I am not as passionate about environmental issues as I am about other issues. This has never been kind of my area and my cause. And as I reflect on that and as I talk to some others who feel similar, it's such a big issue, and it's complex and it's abstract and it's kind of indirect.

We don't see the direct effects of global warming. It affects this weather system, which it affects this here and goes here. I was thinking about racial justice with the George Floyd video. With the Tyre Nichols video. There is no George Floyd video for environmental destruction, for global harm.

And so sometimes it just may not feel as pressing. Or maybe sometimes it's too big. So what do we do? Well, there are small steps we can do, but frankly, even if you and I, if we all recycle, if we all get solar panels on our house, that's a step. But it's going to take big changes as well. Big changes from government, big changes from corporation, from corporations.

So there's our call to be politically active again, be active with our wallets. But I don't want to skip over doing the small things because I think that's important, especially as we talk about changing kind of our own hearts and changing our own practices. I realize as I was doing the sermon, this is the first time I've ever preached directly on the environment in any church I've served.

20 years of ministry and I've never done this sermon before. And that's too long, that's on me. I have been in my practice as more of a consumer than a steward, and that's on me as well. So what do we do? What do change? Well, I want to challenge you to embrace one small step. And maybe together we can kind of move in this direction.

My small step, I usually have a case of bottled water up in my office and I drink it throughout the week. I drink it on Sunday morning. I'm finishing off my last case that's up there right now. I've got a brand new water bottle that I'm not going to do plastic water bottles. It's a small thing. It's not going to revolutionize things, but it's something for me to do. And so I challenge you.

What is one thing that you can embrace, one thing you can do? And it may not be easy, I forgot my water bottle this morning. Carrie had to bring it to me. But it's a step, it's a small step. I'm trying. If you want some ideas, you'll see here on the screen a few websites. You can go back. I want to say I put these in the bulletin, but I can't remember if I did. Maybe I didn't. I was going to.

But you can go back on the Facebook video and find these links. Snap a picture of it. Now they're just some ideas, just some ways that we can make a difference. So let me leave you with this. What kind of world do we want to leave? What kind of world do we want to leave for our children, for our children's children?

Do we want to leave a world where 50 years from now, 2070 water levels, maybe four to five inches higher? Air temperature, four degrees. Higher barrier reefs, which are already being threatened, half or more of them gone. Plastics, more plastic in the ocean than there are fish. We can do something collectively, we can do something. What kind of world do we want to leave? What kind of stewards will we be? Let us pray.

Embracing Progressive Christianity - Politics

Transcript of a sermon preached by Rev. Shawn Coons on February 5, 2023

So here we are on week four, almost done with our series, Embracing Progressive Christianity. And we're on to how progressive Christianity is very active and doesn't shy away from the political sphere. Once again, this is not unique to progressive Christianity. Many other Christian traditions also have their faith lead them into the political sphere. But the approach of progressive Christians can be a little bit different.

But the question that we begin with in terms of our faith leading us into the political realms is why? Why don't we keep that separation between church and state? Politics never enter the church, and the church never enters politics. It begins with a simple reality which you are all well aware of, and that's that our world is not as it should be. In our world there is violence, in our world there is poverty and racism and oppression and injustice and sexism and homophobia and transphobia and environmental destruction. And the world shouldn't be like this. I think everyone at some level knows that.

As Christians, we take the position that the answer to that is not simply just pray that God fixes it. Just stay in our home, stay in our churches and pray. God, there's so many ills in the world, please come down and make everything right. That's not a bad prayer, but it doesn't stop there. Sometimes we even take the attitude, some Christians take the attitude as, Well, you know what really matters is heaven. What really matters is the next life. There's this bumper sticker, this saying, This world is not my home. And some Christians will take that so far as to say that we don't really need to be concerned about the problems of the earth because the earth is temporary. And what are any problems that we face here on the earth compared to an eternity in heaven, an eternity with God.

There's a simple logic to that that maybe sounds good and comforting at some point, especially if you're wondering if the problems of the world will ever be solved. Or, the problems of the world will be too much, to take comfort in eternity without those problems sounds really good. The trick is the Bible, and the God witness to in the Bible, and Jesus in the Bible, is full of concern for this world. For the poor, for the hungry, for the oppressed, for the sick, for the grieving. Jesus didn't ignore the problems of this world in favor of heaven, in favor of the next life. So neither should we.

For progressive Christians and other Christians addressing the problems of the world is our responsibility, both as Christians and as citizens. And we acknowledge that there are things that we are called to do as individuals, actions we are called to take. But we also acknowledge that governments and institutions have a role, a big role, an important role, in solving the problems of the world, in taking care of people and addressing the evils that are around. Not that governments are the only solution or sometimes even the best solution, but without government action, without government reform, sometimes these solutions will always be incomplete. And in fact, there are times where governments can be part of the problem. And as Christians and as citizens, we're called to work for reform.

Now we see this in scripture. We heard it just a moment ago in our scripture lesson from Amos. God often in the Old Testament uses the prophet, speaks through the prophets, to address the kings, to address the nation of Israel and say, You're not taking care of [inaudible 00:04:48] people. I don't care how well you worship, God says. I don't care about your solemn assemblies. I don't care about your offerings. If justice isn't flowing to everyone, if righteousness isn't in part, if you're not taking care of the widows and the poor and the orphan, doesn't matter how you worship me, let justice flow like mighty waters, Amos says. God's laws in scripture are given to protect all people, but especially the oppressed; especially the poor, the widows, the orphans, the foreigners.

And so we start this morning by beginning with the premise that God cares about injustice in the world. And God wants to take care of all those who suffer from injustice. God calls us, as Christians, as the body of Christ, to help those people in their circumstances. To work for changes, whether that's political or otherwise, that address these needs. So with this dual call in mind as Christians, as citizens to God, to political action, I want to turn to our scripture lesson this morning. And we're going to read from Mark chapter 12, starting with verse 13. And this is going to help us answer the question, Okay, well we're called to bring our faith into the political world, but how do we do that?

Mark 12, starting with verse 13. Then they sent to him, some Pharisees and some Herodians to trap him. In what, He said. And they came and said to him, Teacher, we know that you are sincere and show deference to no one. For you do not regard people with partiality. But teach the way of God in accordance with truth. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not? Should we pay them or should we not? But knowing their hypocrisy, Jesus said to them, Why are you putting me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me see it. And they brought one. And then he said to them, Whose head is this and whose title? They answered, The emperor's. And Jesus said to them, Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor's and to God, the things that are God's. And they were utterly amazed at him. This is the word of the Lord.

So I like in this story how they butter them up at the beginning. Jesus, you're sincere. You show no harsh reality. You teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. And if you're Jesus at that point you're like, Okay, what's coming? Because something is coming, and it is. They're trying to trap him. Trying to give him that impossible question that has no right answer, because that they can catch him. No matter how he answers it one way or the other, they're going to get him. They ask him the question, Should we pay taxes to the emperor? To Rome, to the Roman Empire? Should we as Jewish people under Roman occupation, should we pay those taxes? If he says no, all right, it's off to the Romans. Jesus is inciting rebellion. He's speaking against Rome. If he says yes, now he is out of favor with the Jewish people. Oh, we're supposed to pay our taxes to the occupiers, to the people who have conquered us. You must not sympathize with your Jewish people.

So Jesus doesn't fall for the trap. Instead, he lays a trap of his own, so to speak, although it's a trap based in the truth of the matter. And he says, Bring me denarius. A denarius is a coin at that time, a Roman coin. It's about the pay for an average day's labor. And he says, Whose image is on it? And it's the emperor, like this coin we have up here. That's the emperor there. And I think if I remember this coin, it says something along the lines of, Son of the divine, Caesar Augustus. He says, Okay, here's this coin. It's got Caesar's picture on it. And then we get this phrase, and many of us know the King James version, Render unto Caesar, what is Caesar render unto God? What is God? Caesar can have everything that is his and God can have everything that is God's.

The trick is, these are good Jewish folks. They know their scripture. And so when Jesus brings this coin, it says, Whose image is on it? Well, Caesars, that's obvious. But these Jewish folks, they know their scripture and they think, Okay, the coin is made in the image of Caesar, but what is made in the image of God? And they're going to go back to Genesis and they're going to say, People, you and I, humanity is made in the image of God. So if we give to Caesar what is in Caesar's image, then we give to God what is in God's image. And that is us, our humanity, all that we say and do.

And so this is going to be our starting point here for how we practice our politics as Christians. There are things that belong to God and there are things that belong to Caesar. As progressive Christians, we embrace the American ideal of the separation of church and state. We don't believe that the state should promote, the government should promote any one religion, should promote Christianity above any religion, should promote any other religion. We are against the Christian nationalism that says, Well, our country was founded to be a Christian country and the government should make sure it stays a Christian country. Should mandate certain Christian practices, or preference certain Christian practices over others. Neither should the state interfere with the church. We feel that we should be free to practice our religion how we see fit and how we choose as long as it's not harming anyone else.

But this isn't to say that our faith doesn't influence our politics. Give to God what is God, give to Caesar what is Caesar's. We do it in such a way that our highest allegiance is to God, and not to the government and not to a particular candidate and not to a particular party. We like to say, as Christians, we are political, but our faith does not make us partisan. There is no one party, there is no one candidate, there is no one platform that is a substitute for God's will and how God would have us act in the world. Our politics should conform to the gospel, not the other way around.

If we read scripture, if we read the Bible, if we practice our faith and we find that Jesus and God supports every one of our political positions, we should wonder about that. I think it's Anne Lamont, I want to say, who said, If it turns out God hates all the same people we hate, that's not right. Bishop Michael Curry says, Partisan neutrality though does not equal moral neutrality. Sometimes we as Christians can say, Well, we don't want to be partisan. And we take that to mean that we shouldn't act, we shouldn't live out our faith. God has values that come through in scripture, and we should be living those and seeking to achieve those politically wherever that leads us.

One of the best examples is we can point to in our history is the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. This was led in large part by churchgoers, by clergy, by their wives. Black clergy, especially. We know of Martin Luther King Jr's religious background. We know the imagery he used to embrace the struggle for racial justice. He talked about the Promised Land. And the Civil Rights Movements they met and they organized in churches. They sang hymns and they sang spirituals at protests and on freedom rides. And as I have learned more about American Christianity and its culpability in white supremacy over the years, it makes sense some way that the only way to ever overcome the racism, the white supremacy, that was part of our land and laws, was through the church. Because the church, the white Christian church, had a hand in supporting and forming that racism in our country.

Our involvement in politics as Christians is complex, but we cannot shy away from it. When we act politically as Christians; when we vote, it's not simply a political act. It is a moral act and it is an expression of our faith. It's an act that expresses love for neighbor and love for the stranger. It's an act that expresses how strongly we believe in God's call to love, to compassion, to justice. Our beliefs are shown oftentimes more strongly in our actions than they are in our words.

So I just want to leave you this morning with this idea that how we act as Christians, whether that's out in the world at work, at school, in the voting booth, in the Capitol, how we act in the world shows what we believe even more than what we say and what we profess. Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, give to God what is God's.

Embracing Progressive Christianity - Other Faiths

Transcription of the sermon given by Rev. Shawn Coons on January 29, 2023

Week three of embracing progressive Christianity. And we've talked about what is progressive Christianity, how does it differ from maybe some other traditions of Christianity? We've used different kind of metaphors. One word that I want to emphasize today is that progressive Christianity really embraces and acknowledges is “limits,” that we are limited as people in our understanding of God. We are limited in our ability to understand God, and that God's revelation to us, how God is known and the ways God communicates with us and has communicated with God's people is also limited. It's not an open book where every secret of the universe, every secret about who God is and how God operates in the world is out there if we can just find it. We acknowledge there are limits to our understanding and our information we have about God.

If you remember First Corinthians chapter 13, mostly what we remember for the passage is love is patient, love is kind, the beautiful imagery of Paul's chapter on love. But he also says in there, "For now we see in a mirror dimly. Now I only know in part," acknowledging that that limitation we have of our ability to fully know God. The way we've expressed that about embracing progressive Christianity is to use the metaphor of windows where there are certain windows and you can only see so much out of a window, right? And some windows are clear, and some windows are big, and some are distorted, but each view through a window has its limits.

This is important to remember as we go into today's topic. When we as Christians talk about other faiths, especially as progressive Christians, we need to remember this idea of limits and we need to talk about limits. This is kind of our approach to other faiths. It's kind of, well, we know what we know, and we can be confident in that. But we also don't know what we don't know, and we need to acknowledge and have that in front of us as well. This is a very Presbyterian idea to say, "Well, there are certain things we know, and let's be confident in what we know. There are certain things we don't know, and let's hold that loosely and say, okay, there's mystery out there. There's more than we can know. There's new light to be shined."

In 2002, the Presbyterian church put out a study paper about salvation, about other faiths. And it's long. It's a good read, but it's long. It was called Hope in the Lord Jesus Christ. And I want to read one paragraph for you that kind of talks about this we know what we know, we don't know what we don't know, and we hold them together.

"Jesus Christ is the only savior and Lord and all people ever are called to place their faith, hope and love in him. No one is saved by virtue of inherent goodness or admirable living. For by grace, you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing. It is the gift of God. No one is saved apart from God's gracious redemption in Jesus Christ. That's what we know. Yet we do not presume to limit the sovereign freedom of God our Savior, who desires everyone to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. Thus, we neither restrict the grace of God to those who profess explicit faith in Christ, nor assume that all people are saved regardless of faith. Grace, love and communion belong to God and are not ours to determine."

So what do we as Christians know? We know that Jesus is Lord and Savior. We know that we are saved by grace alone. We heard Kathy read that from Ephesians a moment ago. Grace is a gift from God, not something we earn, not something we work for. It is a gift. It is completely on God's part. Not through works, not through right belief, not through anything of our own doing. All right, so what don't we know? We don't know the extent or how God's grace is given. If it is a gift from God, God can give that grace to anyone regardless of anything that they do or anything that they are. We don't know how the saving acts of Jesus work with people who aren't Christians.

Thus, we neither restrict the grace of God to those who profess explicit faith in Christ, nor assume that all people are saved regardless of faith. Grace, love and communion belong to God and are not ours to determine. I want us to pause here for a moment and notice something. Often, usually, when we as Christians start to talk about other faiths and how do we view other faiths, the conversation quickly goes, as I've led it today, into a question. Who is saved and who is not saved? And I'm not sure that's a great thing that we so quickly go to this idea of salvation, and we go this quickly idea of who's saved, who's not saved when we talk about Christianity, when we talk about other faiths. That being said, we need to address it because that's naturally kind of where we go. So we're going to talk about that this morning.

But first, we're going to read our morning scripture. And this is going to be from Matthew, chapter 15, starting with verse 21. And we're looking at this scripture this morning because Jesus is interacting here with someone of another faith. We have a Canaanite woman. The Canaanites, were a specific people, but at this point in the history of Israel, Canaanite also kind of generally refers to people who lived there but weren't Jewish. So kind of by definition, Canaanite is someone of another faith than Jesus.

Matthew, chapter 15, starting with verse 21. "Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. And just then, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, 'Have mercy on me Lord, Son of David. My daughter is tormented by a demon.' But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, 'Send her away for she keeps shouting after us.' He answered, 'I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.' But she came and knelt before him saying, 'Lord, help me.' And he answered, "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.' She said, 'Yes Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table.' And then Jesus answered her, 'Woman, great is your faith. Let it be done for you as you wish.' And her daughter was healed instantly." This is the Word of the Lord God.

There's a lot that happens in this passage. And there's a lot we could talk about, especially as it relates to progressive Christianity. But let's first, let's be clear at what happens here. This Canaanite woman, this non-Jewish woman, has a sick daughter. And as any good mother would do, she wants desperately for her daughter to be healed. She wants her daughter to be helped. And I'm guessing at this point, she's tried many ways and probably failed. And so she makes a scene. She makes a ruckus. She shouts to get Jesus' attention. And Jesus ignores her, just doesn't even acknowledge her. The disciples are annoyed by her. Jesus isn't taking care of this. So the disciples go to Jesus and say, "Hey, can we get rid of her? Can you get rid of her? She's loud, she's annoying, she's causing a scene."

And then Jesus says to the disciples, "I'm only here for the Jewish people. I'm only here for the lost sheep of the House of Israel, not for this Canaanite woman." We don't want to hear that as Christians. That's not our image of Jesus. So he says this not to the woman, says it to his disciples. But nevertheless, she persists. And Jesus, after she goes to him and says, "Lord, help me," she makes him acknowledge her, Jesus then says no, and he calls her a dog, basically. Some people say is a racial slur of the time. It's not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dog, the children being the lost children of Israel. She still persists. She verbally spars with him using that metaphor, not protesting the name he's called her. She says, "Yeah, but even the dogs, they eat the crumbs from the master's table." And then Jesus says, "Great is your faith." And he heals her daughter, just like that.

This is a problematic passage for many people. If you really read it and you really kind of dig into it and understand what's going on, Jesus is not acting very Christlike in this point. We see Jesus making mistakes. We see Jesus making bad mistakes. We see Jesus maybe even learning and being corrected by this woman, this non-Jewish woman. For many Christians, if you understand the passage this way, and I don't see another way to understand it, that's hard to reconcile with a certain image of Jesus. There's this image of Jesus, well, Jesus is fully God. Jesus is fully divine. Jesus didn't make mistakes. Jesus didn't commit sins. Jesus never learned. He was fully God, and God doesn't do any of those things.

But as progressive Christians, we remember Jesus was also fully human. And as human beings, we have limits. We have gaps in our knowledge. We make mistakes, big ones, and we need to learn throughout our lives. So if Jesus is fully human, wouldn't he embrace and be part of those as well? Now, we could go more into that, but let's notice how Jesus interacted with this woman because that's what we're talking about today. We're talking about other faiths. How did Jesus interact with this woman of another faith? Well, at first, he does it poorly, I would say. But then he comes around, right? And he praises her for her faith. Notice what he doesn't do, though. Notice what he doesn't do. There's no talk of being saved. There's no talk of salvation. There is no talk of repentance. There is no talk of conversion.

Jesus seems not to be concerned that she's not Jewish. Jesus doesn't seem to care much that she's of a different faith other than that's not he's here for. He doesn't try to say, "Let me quote you some scripture. Let me tell you about the God of Judaism. Let's see if we can get you away from your Canaanite beliefs." He's not concerned that she's not Jewish. That doesn't stop him from healing her daughter, and then he lets her go on her way with her beliefs intact and unchallenged. I would go on to say in the whole of scripture, certainly in Jesus' ministry, but even in the whole of scripture, there's very little emphasis on converting people of other faiths to Judaism or then Christianity. The harshest judgment in scripture, the talk of hell, the talk of punishment, are all directed at people who are already following God, already following Jesus. Not people of other faiths.

But somewhere in Christian history, somewhere especially in Western Christian history, we developed this notion that God wants us to go out and find people of other faiths and save them, convert them. Say, "Your beliefs are wrong. Our beliefs are right. You need to believe what we need to believe, or horrible things are going to happen to you." But that's not the message of scripture.

There are scriptures that suggest this. Let's not deny that or downplay that. The Great Commission in Matthew, "Go out into all the world baptizing in my name." Yes, that has that sense. But in the whole of scripture, the harshest words, the harshest punishments, are for those who are already following God and don't live up to it. So what about being saved? Let's get back to that. We've talked around it, we've talked about it. Our typical understanding of salvation, the kind of Western Christianity, especially American Western Christianity, is being saved means at some point in your life, you've invited Jesus to be your Lord and Savior. Maybe you've said a prayer at that point, and at that moment you are saved, and your status goes from the not saved column to the saved column. And now you have a ticket to heaven and you won't go to hell.

There are scriptures that support that. But the trick is there's a lot of different scriptures on salvation. There are a lot of different windows on salvation, and they each provide a little bit different view. I can't go into it in its entirety. I did this for a sermon a couple years ago. But I have here this page of probably 15 or so different scriptures, and I've got salvation divided up into categories. Sometimes scripture says, we're saved through repentance. Zacchaeus, if you remember him, the wee little man, he repented. 2 Corinthians 7, "Godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation."

At other parts, faith is the qualifier for being saved. In Romans, in Thessalonians, in Luke, in John, "Everyone who believes in him may not perish." "Sir, what must I do to be saved?" in Acts. They answer, "Believe in the Lord Jesus." So it's that faith, it's that belief in some parts of scripture. Then there is you're saved by works. We know James, first and foremost. "What good is it, my brothers, if you say you have faith, but do not have works? Can faith save you?" Well, according to the earlier scriptures, yes, but now it seems to be more emphasized on works. And then we have our scripture from this morning that says, it's grace. It's not your belief because that's something you do. It's not your works. That's something you do. It's grace. It's purely a gift from God.

Then we have a few other scriptures. One scripture, 1 Timothy says, "Women will be saved through childbearing provided they continue in their faith and love and holiness." So there's a combination of childbirth saving you and faith. And then sometimes you're saved by being baptized. And then there's a few random verses. "How hard it will be, Jesus says, for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God." So if you want to enter the kingdom of God, you can't be a wealthy person. So maybe salvation is dependent on how much money you have. Matthew, chapter 18, "Unless you become like children of God, you won't enter the kingdom of heaven." So maybe entering heaven has to do with how childlike we are.

All of these provide a window onto how God works in the world. All these provide a window into this thing we call salvation. And so if we try and wrap this word salvation with one little simple definition, it just doesn't honor all of scripture. So we hold all these intention and we say, "Well, we know what we know, and there's a lot of things maybe we don't know." And so we cling to that loosely as well. So how do we proceed not being able to kind of discern exactly what salvation is, exactly who was saved, exactly who is not saved? We know what we know. We don't know what we don't know. And here's how I've illustrated this. And I know I've told this story here before and I'm going to tell it again. Eventually if I stay here long enough, you're going to be able to tell it on my behalf.

When I met Carrie, her parents, Richard and Nancy, were living in Ashland, Kentucky. Ashland, Kentucky is where Ohio and West Virginia and Kentucky meet. It's in kind of the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. And it's very curvy, mountainous. There's very few straight roads there. It's a smaller town. And we got married there. And so I needed to know how to get from Carrie's parents' house to the church where Carrie's dad was the pastor, and we were getting married. And I knew about one way to get there. And it was go down here, take a right, wind around here, maybe go past the hospital. It was confusing. But eventually I learned it. And every now and then, Carrie would say, "You know there's a faster way? You know there's a better way?" And I would say, "I'm sure there is, but I don't know it. This is the way I know, so this is the way I'm going to go."

I want to say that is our attitude we should have about our faith. As a Christian, I know that way to God. That is the way that I know, and I'm going to practice it. And if someone wants to ask me, what do you think about spirituality? What do you think about faith? I'm going to tell them the way that I know. But in the same breath, I'm going to say, "You know what? There may be other ways. And heck, there may even be better ways. But I don't know those ways. I'm not going to limit them and say they don't exist. But those are the ways I know. So let me tell you about the way that I do know." So that's what I want to leave you with this morning. Don't be afraid to share about the path that you know, the path that you walk. But respectfully remember that God is God, and God's grace is expansive, and there may be other paths that we don't know of as well.