Before the Bible Was the Bible - Week 1

The Bible wasn't dropped from heaven leather-bound, red-lettered, and ready to go. Understanding how our sacred texts came to be can help us engage them more honestly and deeply today. Learn how God has worked through human hearts and minds over the centuries to share meaning and love.

Why Christians Should Use Inclusive and Expansive Language for God

Transcript of the sermon preached by Pastor Shawn Coons on June 11, 2023

We're spending a couple weeks at the beginning of June on welcomed, included, embraced, how our call is to reflect God's inclusive love as individuals and as a church. And there's this morning we're going to be talking about something and I don't know that I've ever, in my almost 21 years of ministry preach directly on this. I've tried to model it. Mostly we're going to talk about inclusive language. What do we mean when we say inclusive language? It's using gender-neutral or sometimes what we call gender expansive language specifically for God and for faith. Most often you and I, we refer to God as he and exclusively as he and gender-neutral language would be referring to God as simply God or creator or some other gender-neutral term, gender expansive language would be using he or she, his or her for God.

We're going to start with a scripture lesson that kind of gets at some of why we might want to do this and we're going to begin with Paul this morning, the writings of Paul and some people may say, "Okay, we're talking about gender-neutral, gender expansive language in our faith, we're talking about gender and we're going to go to Paul." Paul is not often the most friendly person, some people think. When it comes to writings and scripture, particularly regards to women and sometimes in regards also to people who are LGBTQ plus, but we heard last week that we can't simply just take one isolated piece of scripture. We take the witness of scripture, we take the principles behind it, learn what scripture is like in its context, but also what it's like in other contexts like us today. We need to do that with Paul's writings as well.

And if you look at the whole of Paul's writings, you're going to see some strong themes come through and one of those themes is the radical love and grace of God that Paul found personally. Undeserved love, undeserved grace. If you remember Paul's story when you first meet Paul, he's called Saul. He is a Pharisee, he is a Jew and he is vehement, merciless in his ... I hate it when I do that. He is merciless in his persecution of the followers of Jesus, even to being kind of a cohort in the stoning of Stephen in Acts chapter eight, I believe it is.

Shortly after that Paul meets Jesus on the road to Damascus and he has this experience of God calling him, of God calling him even though he's done these awful, awful things and that radical acceptance of Paul, by God, that grace that was shown to Paul by God shapes his ministry and he preaches that the grace of God is a gift for everybody regardless of anything we have done, anything we've left undone. And so if we hear Paul's writings with that underlying principle, we get a little bit different perspective on some of his writings. I can't excuse them all, but that's another sermon. Anyway, this morning we're going to read from First Corinthians chapter nine, starting with verse 19.

Paul writes, "For though I am free with respect to all, I've made myself a slave to all so that I might win more of them. To the Jews I became as a Jew in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law. Though I myself am not under the law so that I might win those under the law to those outside the law, I became as one outside the law though I am not free from God's law, but I'm under Christ's law so that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that I might by any means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel so that I may share in its blessings.

Do you know that in a race the runners all compete but only one receives the prize run in such a way that you may win it? Athletes exercise, self-control, in all things. They do it to receive a perishable garland, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly nor do I box as though beating the air, but I punish my body and enslave it so that after proclaiming to others, I myself should not be disqualified." Says the word of the Lord. So Paul writes, "I have become all things to all people." Usually when we say something like that, we say just the opposite. You can't be all things to all people. And when we think of someone who is all things to all people, oftentimes, if you're like me, you think of a politician who is trying to please everybody. And when they're speaking to this group of people, they're representing their views and they're saying, "Oh yes, I'm I'm fully on your side." And then they speak to a completely different group of people maybe with competing views or priorities and say, "Yes, I'm a hundred percent with you, your priorities are my priorities."

We think of that sometimes when someone's trying to be all things to all people and they end up kind of if you stand for everything you end up standing for nothing kind of thing. But this is not exactly what Paul is talking about here. Paul is talking about having a larger purpose in mind and with that larger purpose in mind, everything else doesn't matter. Everything else can be malleable, everything else can be flexible. Paul is talking and somewhat by kind of following customs and trying to fit in with people. When I was reading this, I was reminded of my family's recent trip to Ethiopia where when we visited folks, when we visited people and had they had us in their home, we followed their customs. Sometimes we'd remove our shoes. We visited a cathedral in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia and we were supposed to remove our shoes as a sign of respect as we were walked in. So we did.

My daughter and my wife don't normally wear dresses, but that was the custom when visiting people so they wore dresses at that point. I remember in seminary I took a class of school down the road. It was a historically Black college, Virginia Union University, and I remember walking across the campus with Reggie one day, one of the students there and we were just kind of walking in their quad, in their courtyard and I was about to kind of walk through the middle of it and there was this kind of logo in the center of it, kind of an emblem of the school and Reggie me to walk around it said, "We don't walk across that as a sign of respect." And so of course I did that. When we are with other people, we try and follow their customs. When in Rome you do as the Romans. That is what Paul is talking about here is respecting other people so that when you have something important to say, they can listen to you.

Paul was willing to meet people where they are because he cared for them. Paul was willing to meet people where they are because he loved them and he wanted more importantly for them to experience the love of God. The last thing Paul wanted was for something he did that really didn't matter to get in the way between someone else and the love of God. And so this is the attitude, this is the posture that you and I should have. And so as we talk about the language we use about God, the language we use about our faith, I want you to keep that in mind because language is tricky, it's personal and we have a tendency to get defensive when someone says, "Maybe you should use different language." So I want you to keep in mind this attitude that what's important is showing God's love.

We know that language is powerful. We know that the words we use shape our perception of reality. There was a study I read about this week where they took two groups of people and they had gave them an article about crime and in one article they described crime as a beast that that's tearing up the city. In another article that the other group had, they described crime as a virus that's hurting the city and then they gave each group a survey and they measured kind of their attitudes and the group that had crime described to them as a beast were much more in favor of having more police on the streets, more having more law enforcement than the group that was described as a virus and they were more prone to say, "Well, let's try and address the systemic causes of crime." Words shape our perception of reality.

Another example of this, they took German speakers and Spanish speakers and they asked them, "Describe different kinds of objects." And one of those objects was a bridge. The German speakers associated bridges with adjectives like pretty and elegant and peaceful and slender. Spanish speakers used adjectives to describe a bridge like tall and long and powerful. Now in German it's a gendered language and so objects have gender bridge is feminine and so they used feminine kind of characteristics more than masculine. While Spanish bridge is a masculine word and so they use more masculine terms, but here's my favorite that I thought is really interesting. There's this aboriginal tribe in Australia, the Punthamara and they don't use right and left as their kind of measure of where things are. They use cardinal directions, north and south and east and west. So they will say, "That microphone's not to the right of me, it is to the west of me."

Sorry I had to face north to figure out where I was. But that's kind of the thing. This tribe, they don't have to do that. They always kind of know where they are. They know the direction they're facing. Because their language requires them to know, they have this awareness of their position, they have this awareness of their reality about where they are and it's really kind of interesting. When asked to put images in chronological order, you and I who speak English, we will probably put them from left to right because that's the way our language goes, right? If you're a Hebrew speaker that goes right to left. And so if you're putting images in chronological order, you might put the first one on the right side and then go to the left. The Punthamara tribe, when they are asked to put images of chronological order, they go from east to west. And so here's east, there's west, and if they're facing this way and you put them in chronological order, they're going to put them this way.

If they're facing this way, they're still going to put them east to west. No matter which way they're kind of seated and oriented, they're always going to put those images east to west. The language we use shapes how we think. It shapes how we see the world. The language we use shapes our faith. It shapes our image of God. I want you to do an exercise with me. I want you to picture the Garden of Eden right now. We heard from the first creation story in Genesis one. Now we're going to go to the second creation story in Genesis two. Picture that biblical Garden of Eden. Picture how it looks, maybe the lush vegetation, maybe lots of fruit around, picture the sounds, maybe the wind going through the leaves, birds and animals, the smells maybe of the earth and the trees and picture Adam and Eve in the garden and you can picture the fig leaf or not. That's up to you. And picture God. I mean in Genesis chapter two, God comes and speaks with Adam and Eve. Picture God walking alongside Adam and Eve. Hear God speaking to Adam and Eve.

And I want you to think. What was God like in your image? What was God like? Chances are for the majority of us, God took a male form. Chances are when God spoke, we heard a male voice. Maybe it's that kind of classic Michelangelo white beard, almost Zeus looking figure of God walking there in the garden. But God is not a man. I mean the Bible uses male language to refer to God and so it shapes it that way for certain, but God is not a man. In Genesis chapter one, we heard Steph Reed that we were created in the image of God, male and female. Didn't say man was created in the image of God and, "Oh, God also created woman." That God created us in God's image, male and female.

God is beyond gender. God is beyond our human limitations. And intellectually I think you and I, we know that. If we're asked point blank, "Is God a man?" We're going to say no. God is beyond gender. God is beyond our human categories, but probably we can't help default to that sort of thinking of it. And this may not seem like much of a problem, it's very typical. But there are people who find exclusively masculine language about God problematic, who have a hard time hearing about the message of God if God is always referred to as a male.

Some people may have had a difficult relationship with a father and so to hear God called father all the time may bring up really bad associations and they don't have good associations with that. Others will find that this exclusive use of masculine language reinforces kind of a patriarchy, reinforces a sexism in our society. It makes women seem less godlike over time, that men are more godly somehow and women are not. And I would argue that in many Christian traditions over time and still today with the role that women play in leadership or in the life of the church, that that patriarchy is built into certain Christian traditions and, to some extent, our Christian tradition as well.

For other people, just calling God he or father is just too limiting it. It's not big enough for God. It ignores biblical aspects, scriptural aspects of God that we find in the Bible that we find in Christian tradition. One of the themes that we find in scripture, especially in the Old Testament, especially in that first part of the Old Testament, is the prohibition against idolatry. That's making an idol of God, a carved image of God, a visible statue or something right there, you can see, "This is our God, this is who we're going to worship." The Hebrew and Israelite people are told over and over again, "Don't reduce God to an idol. Don't reduce God to an image." The danger of idolatry is that you've limited God to just what you see before you.

I think that our language can be an idol if we limit ourselves to any small set of language about God, whether that that's masculine or feminine or maybe some people think of God only as a judge, only as a strict disciplinarian and they have that kind of idol of God or other people think of God is simply just the loving person who accepts everything no matter what and never has a bad word to say and never asks anything of you, that can be an idol. But when we also say God is only masculine and that that's all I'm going to speak about God, we're limiting God a little bit and we sort of make an idol of our language.

God is bigger than that. God is bigger than any language we can use. Let's admit that first. But the Bible has many feminine images of God. First one we'll highlight this morning, Deuteronomy 32:18. "You were unmindful of the rock that bore you. You forgot the God who gave you birth." It is women who give birth, not men. Isaiah 66:13. "As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you. You shall be comforted in Jerusalem." Luke 13:34. These are Jesus words. "How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hand gathers her brood under her wings?"

Our first hymn this morning spoke of wisdom and it's this from Proverbs and it personifies wisdom as a woman and many people will hear echoes of the Holy Spirit described in that verse of Proverbs. So when we expand our language about God beyond just masculine language, we're not only honoring this larger biblical witness about who God is, we are making it so that some people will be able to hear us more, will be able to hear about God more, about God's love more. We are doing what Paul did. To someone who has difficulty with masculine exclusive language about God, we are meeting them where they are.

This goes beyond gender language if we're talking about inclusive language. One of the things that I became aware of kind of midway through my career and I've tried to honor it a little bit more is there is language in our faith. There's language in the Bible that talks about light and darkness and almost exclusively light is good. Think of images as white as snow. We're made white as snow, we're purified. That's good. And the language of darkness is bad. In our society today, I mean that goes beyond faith. And there there's many examples where dark is bad and light or white is good and we have to be careful about that language. Similar, we have to be careful with language about disability. We have traditionally in scripture, in the Bible, in our faith, in our hymns, we've traditionally linked being blind and deaf, crippled or lame as less desirable, as less than whole. As something is wrong with you, you have any of those conditions and you need to be made better or whole.

All these things are learning. All these things are ... There's not hard and fast rules, but it is to be aware of our language that is to be loving. And maybe this is a good place, it's just a little segue, but I think it's appropriate. It's a good place to mention that we love through our language in many different ways. And one of those ways is by using someone's preferred pronouns, by using someone's preferred name. There is a lot to be said about this, but I just want to say this, what harm does it do us to call someone how they want to be called?

We do know it does harm to mis-gender someone, to misname someone or dead-name someone. I mean do you this with other people? Someone comes to you and they say, "Hi, my name is Jen." You say, "Well, I'm sorry your name is Jennifer and I'm not going to call you Jen." We don't do that. And I would guess, well, I know many of you are grandmothers and grandfathers, but how many of you are a grandma, a grandpa, a Mee-maw, a mamma, a Gigi, a nana? We want to be called what we want to be called, right? And that's okay. Being aware of our language and its potential to exclude even when we mean well, if we pay attention to this, if we are aware of that, we can make someone feel loved. We can help someone to feel God's love.

I remember a simple example of this in Florida. I was asked one time to give a prayer at the Chamber of Commerce breakfast and I gave a prayer knowing that it was probably mostly people identified as of faith. It's probably a Christian faith, but I knew it could be beyond that. It wasn't explicitly Christian group. And so I made more of a general prayer and I had a rabbi come up to me who was there and she said, "Just really appreciate that I felt included in your prayer." And I'm like, "Well, yeah, that's kind of what we do."

Our language matters. One other person I remember that, and I don't know what she thinks today. When I was in my first church in Michigan, I kind of took from someone in seminary when I closed every one of my sermons and I've sometimes done it at the benediction here, I would say, "The name of God, the Father, son and Holy Spirit, one God, mother of us all." And I'm trying to use that gender expansive language of using both images. And so we're talking one night in youth group about our language about God or whether God's male or female. And Jessica, who is one of the kids in the youth group says, "Well, how we often say the father, son and Holy Spirit, one God, mother of us all?" And for Jessica that was something the church often says. I guarantee I was the only one Jessica ever heard say that. But when we model it, it becomes kind of normal and people get used to it and especially for younger generations, they're going to hear and they're going to be able to speak differently about God and more inclusively.

So I realized, as we kind of draw to a close here, language about God is personal, language about faith is personal. And as I said before, it's very easy to get defensive. And so if I've offended you, if I've made you feel defensive, that wasn't my intent. I'm not going to say that anyone needs to change their language about God, but I want you to consider it. I want you to be aware of how you speak about God, how you speak in your faith. Going back to Paul, does any of us want to get in the way? Does any of us want to get in between someone and the love of God?

Paul said, "As long as I get to tell someone about God's love, as long as I get to show someone God's love, I'm willing to accommodate myself to them. I've got one goal, one goal in mind. I've got one prize, I'm running forward. Everything else doesn't matter. I'll do whatever it takes to achieve that." Our goal is to love. Our goal is to respect. Our goal is to include, our goal is to welcome and embrace. And if that means being aware of our language, then let's do that. If it means changing our language, shouldn't we do that?

I know it's hard and we're not asking that we're going to give up all of our gendered language about God. We're going to hear music today that has gendered language about God and there's nothing wrong with that, but we should be aware and we should try and be as inclusive and expansive as possible. And if it's too much to change your language right now, then just be aware. Just think about it. Just notice how you speak. Take note. I want to close this morning with a short little, I guess poem, but it's actually, it's from a piece of music by Brian Renn. It's from a libretto, from the song of the Three Children. "God is not a she, God is not a he. God is not an it or a maybe. God is a moving, loving, doing, knowing, growing mystery."

A Christian Foundation for Fully Affirming Those Who Are LGBTQ+

Transcript of the sermon preached by Pastor Shawn Coons on June 4, 2023

For the next two weeks, we're going to hear messages on the general theme of, "Welcomed, Included, Embraced: How We are Called to Reflect the Inclusive Love of God." And it is no coincidence that this coincides with Pride month, a very appropriate message for this month as we celebrate Pride, and everyone being able to express who they truly are. Part of this celebration for us in the church is acknowledging that we have not, as a whole, always done right by folks who are LGBTQ+. Certainly as a whole, I think for the most part things are getting better, churches are getting better. We're able to reflect the inclusive love of God much more than we have in the past.

But I think it's important for us, especially as churches, we have a number of years ago declared ourself a welcoming church, and wanted to be very intentional and very public about that. But it's important for us to know why. I mean, it may just feel right and that's great, and it's great that we do it, but often as Christians, we want to have a good, solid, biblical and theological reason for why we do what we do.

And being a welcoming church, being a welcoming person in this way is solidly Christian, is solidly biblical, and it's great to have a further understanding of why that is. So we're going to explore today the Christian foundation for inclusion of all people, including folks who are LGBTQ+. We're going to look at this, what I'm going to call and others have called the arc of inclusion that we see in the Bible, and then we see beyond the Bible in Christian tradition.

And we're doing so through a story this morning from Acts 15, which Terry began just a moment ago. And it's a story of inclusion. It's a story of inclusion in the early church of the Gentiles, Gentiles being those who were non-Jewish.

And it is good for us as Christians to be reminded that the Bible, even the New Testament, is a very Jewish book in some ways. It is the story of Jewish people, almost more than it is the story of Christians. Jesus was a Jew. Jesus' followers were Jewish. The people, largely, that Jesus came and preached with and did ministry with were Jewish. The early church in Acts was Jewish. The early church leaders were Jewish.

So the first reading that Terry did is talking about Paul and Barnabas, and they're doing good work. Paul was a solid Jew. His title he gives himself was a Jew among Jews, a Pharisee among Pharisees, which is a Jewish leader. And Paul and Barnabas are doing good work spreading the gospel, but they're also trying to spread the gospel to Gentiles. And Gentiles were certainly welcome into the church from early on.

But at this point in the history of the Book of Acts, it's thought that, okay, yes, Gentiles can be followers of Jesus, but they're going to have to follow Jewish law. They're essentially going to have to be Jewish as well. Because many people saw Christianity at that point, not as a separate religion, but just as a kind of a sub-sect of Judaism. And Paul and Barnabas are trying to seek to be as welcoming, to be as inclusive as possible. And so they're pushing back against some of these rules and these laws that are trying to be put on these folks who are not Jewish.

And so they come back to Jerusalem after doing some of their work. After wonderful results, they come back and they start to meet with some of the Jewish leaders or the Christian leaders at that point, who many of them were the apostles of Jesus. And that's where we're going to pick up in Acts chapter 15, verse 12.

They've met, they've talked, and now we're getting to the result of what's going to happen.

The whole assembly kept silence and listened to Barnabas and Paul. They told of all the signs and the wonders that God had done through them among the Gentiles. After they finished speaking, James replied, "My brothers, listen to me. Simeon has related how God first looked favorably on the Gentiles, to take from among them a people for his name. And this agrees with the words of the prophets, as it is written, 'After this, I will return and I will rebuild the dwelling of David, which has fallen from its ruins. I will rebuild it, and I will set it up, so that all other peoples may seek the Lord. Even all the Gentiles over whom my name has been called.' Thus says the Lord who's been making these things known for long ago.

"Therefore I have reached the decision that we should not trouble those Gentiles who are turning to God. Well, we should write to them to abstain only from things polluted by idols, from fornication, from whatever has been strangled, and from blood, for in every city, for generations past, Moses has had those who proclaim him, for he has been read aloud for every Sabbath in the synagogues," says the word of the Lord.

So this passage begins with Barnabas, with Paul kind of making their case, and they're basically saying, "Look at what God is already doing. Look at all the good works that we have done. And it's not through our own efforts, it's through God's effort among the Gentiles." And James, who is representing the leadership here of the early church, announces a compromised deal, if you will, between what some were wanting and what others are wanting. There's kind of this middle ground they arrive at.

They say, "Okay, no, they don't have to follow all the Jewish laws. They don't have to be circumcised. We are going to ask that everybody follow these particular four laws." And then that's where they talk about things polluted by idols, the fornication, not partaking of anything strangled or of blood. Out of all the Jewish laws to lift up, those seem kind of like an odd four to lift up.

But a lot of this has to do with the situation that's going on in Israel and surrounding areas at this point. Under the Roman Empire, there's a lot of temple worship, a lot of Greco-Roman temple worship. And these particular practices were things that were going on within those temples. And so they're kind of saying, "Okay, all these kind of worshiping other gods in various ways that are all around you, that you walk down the street and you see them, you may be tempted by them. Don't do those. Keep your public witness up, as separate from that."

So it seems odd to us today, but at that point it was a daily occurrence. They saw it all around them, and just basically said, "Stick on your course, stay with God, not with these other gods."

So we see once again this kind of compromise here, and it's kind of broadening the circle of the church, welcoming more people in. And we're going to paraphrase Martin Luther King here. The arc of God's story bends toward inclusion. The arc bends toward inclusion. But here's the thing, this is not the beginning of inclusion in God's story, and it's not the end of inclusion in God's story.

There's this ever-expanding embrace that we see from God. So let's go back to the beginning. In the beginning, the very beginning of Genesis, actually Genesis chapter two, where the biblical story starts, let's say small, with two people, with Adam and Eve. And if you read the narrative of Genesis for that time, we are following just Adam and Eve for a while, and then Adam and Eve's family, and then their descendants. And so God starts real small with just a handful of people, but then the story expands, and there's more generations of people. And we hear the story of God beginning to deal, not just with one family but with multiple families, in this one small area of the world.

But eventually we go through Noah, and we have a reset, and then we get to what the heart of Genesis is, it's Abraham, Abraham and Sarah and their family. And for a while, for many chapters, we get the story of Abraham and Sarah, their sons, and it's just this one family, although it's a big family, we get several generations of it. And there's a dozen sons at one point, but then Genesis ends with this family, with one particular son of this family, Joseph.

And if you remember the story of Joseph, the end of story of Joseph, he is in Egypt, and he's reunited with his family in Egypt. And that's where Genesis ends. And where Exodus picks up is, now we are with, several generations later, we are with the Hebrew people, all the descendants of this one family, and they number thousands.

And these are the slaves who are in Egypt. The story has just gotten bigger. We're not just with one family anymore, but a people, the Hebrew people. Moses leads them out of Egypt, they wander for a while, and then we get to Israel and they start to become a nation. Although they're kind of a quasi nation. They're 12 tribes now, descended from the 12 sons of Jacob, but eventually they come to be a nation, a nation of people. Now, God's embrace has expanded beyond just this one family, beyond just this groups of family, into this nation of people.

And eventually we even go beyond the nation of Israel. We're still kind of in the Jewish family here, but there's Jews, not just in Israel. There's Jews all over. There's this Jewish diaspora that is part of God's story.

And then we get to Jesus. And Jesus goes beyond just the good Jewish people, and he starts to include the bad Jews as well. There's tax collectors in there, there's prostitutes, there's sinners. And then he even goes beyond that. And so there's a few Samaritans that are thrown in there as well, lepers, and people who were kind of traditionally seen as outside the good Jewish circle. That arc of inclusion keeps expanding.

And that's when we get to our scripture for today, where, okay, yes, we've expanded it to pretty much still mostly include the Jews and those Gentiles who are willing to become Jews as well. And then the doors are blown wide open, with this compromise that we get from James.

So we see this arc of inclusion continually surprising people. All along there were those, and good Jews and good folks in God's eyes who said, "We know where the boundaries are, we know who is in and who is out." And then God says, "You thought you knew." And that circle widens, and that's where we are again today.

We can continue to see this throughout the history of the Christian Church, with the one time understanding of slavery. Slavery seems to be okay in the Bible. It was okay for the majority of the Christian world, for thousands of years. We see this with the inclusion of women in ministry, at least in our tradition, and we see this with inclusion of folks who are LGBTQ+.

But then we have to go back and say, "Well, doesn't Paul write about homosexuality? Doesn't Paul say homosexuality is wrong? Not according to God's plan? And looking at those verses would be several more sermons, but the short answer is, "Different time, different contexts." Paul and the biblical writers knew nothing about what we know today, as relationships among people who are gay, among people who are straight, that there are gay relationships that are loving, that are monogamous, that are respectful.

That was not seen back in Paul's day, or at least that's not what Paul was writing about. Paul was writing about temple practices. Paul was writing about power differences. Paul was writing about temple prostitution. Very specific examples that have nothing to do with whether it's same gender or not. It just has to do with the power dynamics, with the abuse that may be going on, about promiscuity. The principles Paul was addressing were monogamy, was love, was respect, healthy loving relationships. And we know today that any two people can form these healthy loving relationships. It doesn't matter what their gender are.

So in all these cases of expanding this arc of inclusivity, including Acts 15, there are changes that we make in who we see as in and who as out, but the principles behind them don't change. And that's what we need to rest on.

The principles don't change. Love, respect, justice, building each other up, healthy relationships. For many people, and we know in society our perspectives have changed, just as a society, somewhat dramatically over the last five to 15 years, let's say. For many of those people, it happened when someone they knew came out to them. Someone they knew, someone they loved, and it became personal. And for many Christians, it really was driven home when they met someone, when they knew someone, and they saw how their identity played out with their faith.

I remember reading a book, it's called God's Yes to Homosexuality, or I think it's The Bible's Yes to Homosexuality, and I can't think of the name of the author, but he describes in it how he was certain that the Bible did not approve of homosexuality. But then he knew gay Christians, and he saw what denying their identity did to them. He saw that when they tried to follow the Bible as he understood it, they were miserable, they were depressed, they were suicidal. He saw when they embraced who they were and lived, they became better people. They became better Christians. They were able to do more with their lives and honor God more.

Peter in Acts chapter 15, in a portion we skipped, said, "God, who knows the heart, showed that they, the Gentiles, were accepted by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as the Holy Spirit was given to us." Peter looked at what was going on in the life of the Gentiles, and he said, "I see God at work there, and if God is at work there, how can I put limits on that? How can I say God is at work in your life, but the Bible doesn't say it is, so God really can't be at work in your life."

And that's what happened with a lot of folks, with people they knew who were gay. They saw God at work in their lives as they embraced all of who they are. And they said, "If God is doing all these great things in their life, how can God not approve of who they are?"

If good things are happening and those good things are from God, then who are we to get in the way of that? I mean, Jesus even says that, says, "We will be known by our fruits, by the fruits we produce."

Paul and Peter are showing the good fruit that is growing in the Gentiles. They're essentially saying, "God has already accepted the Gentiles, whether the church has or not. God has already included them." And the question is, will the church catch up and include those who God has already included? And that is the question that many churches are facing, many churches have faced. God has already included those who are LGBTQ+. When is the church going to catch up to God?

We'll be known by our fruits, by the good and the love we produce and share. Often the church has produced spoiled fruit in this area. We need to change that. We have a lot of ground to cover as a whole, before we catch up to God's loving and inclusive embrace.

I want to close with a song we'll watch in just a moment. It's from Spencer LaJoye who learned, unfortunately, the ground that the church has to cover. They're a musician who grew up as a closeted Queer student at a conservative Christian college. Spencer wrote a song called A Plowshare Prayer, using the imagery of swords to plowshares from the Book of Isaiah, turning weapons into instruments of creation. The premise of Spencer's song is simple. What would a prayer sound like, if it was used as a balm rather than a weapon, a plowshare instead of a sword? They had been on the receiving end of prayers that had been used as weapons, and so they poured their heart into this song about God's loving and inclusive welcome. I think it is the perfect way for us to be challenged, the perfect way for us to be moved to widen our embrace and our hearts as well.

Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin - Half-Truths

Transcript of the sermon preached by Rev. Shawn Coons on May 28, 2023

We’re on our final week of our Half-Truths series. This series is based on a book by Rev. Adam Hamilton called Half-Truths. In this series we are looking at common sayings that are often associated with Christianity and said by many Christians. And at first, they may sound OK, and we often mean well when we say them. But when we look a little closer we realize that these sayings aren’t as true or as Christian as we first might have thought. The final saying we are looking at today is “Love the sinner. Hate the sin.”

Love the sinner. Hate the sin. It sounds Ok, on first read. How can it be bad to love anybody? And doesn’t it sound really Christ-like to love sinners? And shouldn’t we hate sin? Especially if we think of sin as things that we do that hurt ourselves, others, or hurt God.

The phrase is not in the Bible, though. It is thought to have originated with St. Augustine several hundred years after Jesus. In one of his letters he called for early Christians to have a “love for mankind and a hatred of sins.” Over the ages, this saying has appeared in various forms, but they all mean basically the same thing. If we know of someone who is sinning, we should continue to love them as a sinner, but hate and condemn the sinful actions they do. And this does sound true, right?

Never stop loving someone no matter what horrible things they’ve done. But here’s the catch. Rarely, are we ever able to contain our hatred only to the sin. Ghandi once spoke about this saying:

‘Hate the sin and not the sinner’ is a precept which, though easy enough to understand, is rarely practiced, and that is why the poison of hatred spreads in the world.

Love the sinner. Hate the sin. If we practice this, we end up focusing much more on sin and the label of sinner, much more than we focus on love. Jesus never said love the sinner. Jesus said love your neighbor. Jesus knew that if he commanded people to love the sinner, they would begin looking people more as sinners than neighbor.

Think about it. If I said to you right now, I want you to love everyone sitting here in the congregation today, especially those who have been recently diagnosed with a highly contagious form of smallpox. Are you going to focus on loving your neighbor, or on who looks a little under the weather today?

Love the sinner. Hate the sin, doesn’t lead us to love, instead it leads us immediately to a place of judging who is a sinner and what sins are they guilty of. Love the sinner. Hate the sin, is often used as code for saying “I judge you. You are a sinner, you should be ashamed that you do _____, but even though I am better than you, I will love you anyway.”

This is a good time to read our second scripture this morning. Because it addresses this very topic.

Luke 18: 9 He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: 10‘Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax-collector. 11The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax-collector. 12I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.”13But the tax-collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” 14I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.’

In Jesus day, the Pharisees were certain Jewish scholars and authorities, who by all accounts, should be considered as righteous. They strictly lived their lives according to proper Jewish laws. And to many who first head Jesus tell this story, they would probably agree with the Pharisee’s self-assessment. He was a righteous man, especially when compared with the tax-collector. The tax-collector would have even agreed that the Pharisee was more righteous than he was.

But in a twist at the end of the story it is the tax collector who is justified by God, and not the righteous Pharisee. Seminary professor, David Lose says this about the story:

“Here is the essential contrast. One makes a claim to righteousness based on his own accomplishments, while the other relies entirely upon the Lord's benevolence. Rather than be grateful for his blessings, the Pharisee appears smug to the point of despising others. In his mind there are two kinds of people: the righteous and the immoral, and he is grateful that he has placed himself among the righteous. The tax collector, on the other hand, isn't so much humble as desperate. He is too overwhelmed by his plight to take time to divide humanity into sides. All he recognizes as he stands near the Temple is his own great need. He therefore stakes his hopes and claims not on anything he has done or deserved but entirely on the mercy of God.”

What matters to God in this story, and in our own lives, is not who is righteous, but who is judgmental and who is not. Not who lives a so-called perfect life, but who realizes their dependence on God and that righteousness is a gift from God and not our own doing.

So coming back to Love the sinner. Hate the sin. The problem with this saying is that it focuses us on the sins of others, on judgment of others, rather than on our own sin and being honest about where we are with God. Love the Sinner. Hate the sin, at its heart focuses on the sins of others and our judgment of them.

In the Half-Truths book, Adam Hamilton tells this story about Billy Graham:

Some time ago I read an interview with Billy Graham’s eldest daughter, Gigi. She was her father’s date to Time magazine’s seventy-fifth anniversary party, a banquet in Washington, DC. President Bill Clinton spoke at the event. He had just been impeached by the House of Representatives for perjury and obstruction of justice. The charge of perjury involved what President Clinton had said, under oath, about his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. At the banquet, her father sat with President and Mrs. Clinton. He was warm and gracious to them. After the dinner ended and Graham and Gigi were riding back to their hotel, the two discussed difficulties the president and First Lady were going through with so many people gossiping and judging. Gigi said her father’s simple comment was, “It’s the Holy Spirit’s job to convict; it’s God’s job to judge; and it’s our job to love.”

It is our job to love. Not to judge. It is our job to love. When we label someone as sinner, we stop seeing the person and we start seeing the sin. Our job is not to convict but to love.

Should we keep silent about the problem of sin? Of course not. There are absolutely times when Christians must stand up and name sin and evil for what it is. We’ve lived through many moments in the life of our country when we are called to name the evil before us. We must name hatred, racism, white supremacy, and the failure to condemn them, as sin. Any Christian who engages in actions or rhetoric motivated by hate or racism, has ceased to represent Christ. Any Christian who remains silent in the face of racism, homophobia, and hatred, will have to answer to God for their complicity.

But we must resist the urge to judge, label, and dismiss those who perpetuate this evil simply as sinners or to think of them as lesser people. And that’s hard. But our job is not to convict but to love. In fact, Adam Hamilton says:

The truth in “Love the sinner, hate the sin” stops with the first word: Love.

Let me ask you this. Where have you most often heard the phrase Love the Sinner, hate the sin, used? I have most often heard it used in terms of homosexuality. For those Christians, who believe that Bible says that homosexuality is sinful, this verse has been used to explain how someone can condemn a large part of someone’s identity while still claiming to love that person. Ask someone who is gay, ask someone who is transgender, ask them if they feel loved by people who say love the sinner, hate the sin.

When we use this saying we are first and foremost defining that person as a sinner, rather than as someone we love. In Matthew, Jesus says that we should not be judging other people, we have enough sin in our own lives that makes us liable to judgement. The only person we should label as sinner is ourselves. Love the sinner, hate the sin should be rewritten and we should instead be saying, I love you, even despite the fact that I am a sinner. Or as Mark Lowry says:

Love the sinner, hate the sin? How about: Love the sinner, hate your own sin! I don't have time to hate your sin. There are too many of you! Hating my sin is a full-time job. How about you hate your sin, I'll hate my sin and let's just love each other!

Pentecost – a day of expanding the church beyond what people then thought possible

Including more and more people, that’s the arc of the story of God. We will hear more about that in the next 2 weeks

• Everything happens for a reason.

• God helps those who help themselves.

• God wont’ give you more than you can handle.

• Love the sinner. Hate the sin.

Four half-truths. So if I have done my math correctly, that makes 2 whole truths. And isn’t that better than no truth? If there is some truth to these why do we really need to be worried about saying these things? If we mean well, isn’t that enough. Unfortunately, that’s not enough. The reality is these half-truths can hurt people who need hope and healing. These half-truths can be destructive to someone in a time of need. These half-truths can discourage people and turn people away from God and Christianity.

And even more importantly, why would we give someone a half-truth when we could give them the whole truth of a God who loves them and is there to support and guide them every step of the way.

I am indebted to Rev. Adam Hamilton and his Church in Kansas that made the inspiration for this sermon series available to other churches and preachers, and so I’d like to close with his words today:

I’d like remind you of the “whole truths” we found behind the half truths we have rejected. We reject the idea that everything that happens is God’s will. Instead we say that whatever happens, God is able to able to work through it, to redeem it, and to bring good from it.

We reject the idea that God only helps those who help themselves. We recognize that God expects us to do what we can to help ourselves. We pray and we work. But ultimately the very definition of grace and mercy is that God helps those who cannot help themselves.

We reject the idea that God won’t give us more than we can handle. This is partly because we reject the idea that whatever adversity we face is given to us by God. What we do believe is that God will help us handle all the adversity life will give us.

We reject the idea that every verse of Scripture should be read, out of context, as the literal words of God. Instead we recognize that the biblical authors were people, influenced by God but not merely stenographers. Like all of us they were shaped by, and responded to, the historical circumstances in which they lived. And thus we believe that, when they are rightly interpreted, God speaks through the words of Scripture in order to teach, guide, shape, and encourage us.

Finally, we reject the notion that God calls upon Christians to “love the sinner, hate the sin.” When we choose to focus on the sins of others and speak of hating their sin, we violate the words and spirit of Jesus. Paul calls us to hate our sins, and Jesus calls us to love our neighbors, all of whom are sinners. When we demonstrate love and not judgment, we draw people to Christ rather than repel them from him.

God Won't Give You More Than You Can Handle - Half-Truths

Transcript of the sermon preached by Pastor Shawn Coons on May 21, 2023

We're going to dive right into our second scripture lesson this morning, and it's from Luke chapter 11, beginning with verse nine. And these are Jesus' words to the gathered crowd. And he said to them, "Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, 'Friend, lend me three loaves of bread. For a friend of mine has arrived, I have nothing to set before him.' And he answers from within, 'Do not bother me. The door's already been locked. My children are with me in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything.'"

"I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he's his friend, at least because of his persistence, he will get up and give him whatever he needs. So I say to you, ask, and it will be given you, search and you will find, knock and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks, receives, and everyone who searches, finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there any among you if your child asks for a fish will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg will give a scorpion? If you then who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?" Says the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

So on week three of our series of half-truths, looking at sayings that Christians, we as Christians, often say. Many we think we can find in the Bible, but when we look a little bit closer, we find they're maybe not quite as true or don't mean exactly what we're trying to convey. The series is based on a book by Reverend Adam Hamilton called Half Truths. So far, we've talked about everything happens for a reason. We've talked about God helps those who help themselves. And this week, we are tackling God won't give you more than you can handle.

With each of these sayings, we acknowledge that many of us have said these things before. And when we've said them, we mean well. Often we might say "God won't give you more than you can handle" to someone who's dealing with a lot of adversity, with too much problem in their life, one hardship piled on top of another. And so when we say this, "God won't give you more than you can handle," what we're really trying to say is, "You are strong. You got this. You're tough. I know you feel overwhelmed, but you're going to make it. You'll get through this." All wonderful things to say.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to be encouraging. There's nothing wrong with wanting to give someone hope when they're going through tough times. It's very natural to say, "This isn't going to defeat you. This won't overwhelm you. God is still with you, and God loves you and won't allow you to be defeated by this." And we can even find support for this kind of outlook in scripture. If we look at 1 Corinthians 10, verse 13, "No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength. With the testing he will also provide the way out so you may be able to endure it."

So Paul writes, "God is faithful and will not let you be tested beyond your strength." And that sounds very similar to "God won't give you more than you can handle." But there are some differences. There's some nuances that I think are important. So let's explore this verse first little bit written by the Apostle Paul to the Christian Church in Corinth in the first century, just a couple decades after Jesus' death and resurrection. Corinth was a crossroads. Corinth was kind of on an isthmus, and there was even kind of a little dry canal there that they would sometimes pull ships from one sea to the other. So it was a very cosmopolitan place. It was a place with lots of different people from lots of different places, lot of activity.

The folks there for the most part would've been labeled pagans by our New Testament church, simply meaning they weren't Jews and they weren't Christians, and they would've worshiped, as many did in that region, a variety of gods and goddesses, especially of the Greek and Roman pantheon. And they would've worshiped them in a number of different ways. There would've been idols. Sometimes there would've been raucous celebrations with drunkenness. There were temple prostitutes. There were feasts. But it's these pagans that make up that church in Corinth. And in following Jesus, they were giving up their former religious practices that they might have done in these various temples.

The problem for them is that they were tempted. Just by being in Corinth, just by walking around their town, they saw the temples, they saw what was going on, saw where all of these practices were still happening. And so these particular group of Christians in Corinth struggled with these temptations to revert back to their ways in those temples, to the immorality, to the gluttony, to the drunkenness. And so this is what Paul is writing to. He's writing to this group of Christians who are surrounded by temptation where they walk. Reverend Hamilton in his book, Half Truth, writes about this passage. The context in this verse is self-discipline in the face of temptation with the hope of avoiding sin, particularly the sins of sexual immorality and idolatry. Paul is telling the Corinthian Christians their experiences not unique. Just as the Israelites were tempted, so too the Corinthians will be tempted. In fact, we'll all be tempted. Jesus himself experienced temptation.

This passage is not about God deciding to give you more burdens in your life than you can handle. It is about God helping you when you are tempted. And temptation is indeed a test of your resolve, your character and your faith. And that's what Paul was talking about here, not about adversity and the difficult circumstances that come into life at some point. So we do need to make this distinction between temptation and the adversity that happens in our life. There are things that tempt us to do things against God's will, to do things that hurt ourselves, hurt God, hurt others. Then there's adversity in life. There's tragedy in life. There's things that overwhelm us that may have nothing to do with temptation.

What Paul is saying here, at least two things he's saying, he's not addressing these tragic circumstances, the hardship we face, the loss, the pain, the suffering. He's addressing temptation to former practices that led us into bad places. And Paul is not saying that God is the author of all hardship and all tragedy and all temptation, that God makes bad things happen to you, that God puts things in your path to test you. To go back to one of our earlier things, Paul is not saying that everything happens for a reason and that reason is God.

When I was in middle school, in high school, I was very active in my church youth group in my Presbyterian church, and it formed me in some very important ways and some very positive ways. But in this particular tradition that my youth group kind of embraced of Christianity, I received some messages about Christian faith that weren't so helpful. And one of these messages is that that God uses, God causes, trials and tribulations in our life to strengthen us, to refine us, to make us tough. The image is like a blacksmith who purifies metal by heating it up, putting it in the fire and taking the big old blacksmith hammer and hammering it until it's strong and in the shape it needs to be. And I was told that the hardships we sometimes face may be God just strengthening us, testing us, toughening us up.

I think there's several problems with that as I reflect on it now, but let's just say that metal doesn't suffer. Metal doesn't feel pain, and God doesn't treat us like objects with no feelings. Paul is saying that temptation is real. We are tempted to do things that are not good for us or for others, often for both. But those aren't tests from God. Those aren't from God, and often they're usually kind of from ourselves, of our own doing.

Really simple example, which is almost trivial, when I go grocery shopping, I don't like to go grocery shopping, so I like to reward myself. I don't know if anyone else does that as well. A candy bar, a cookie, a bag of chips, and there's nothing wrong with that. Often though I'm tempted to do maybe more than just a candy bar. Oh look, there's a eight-pack of brown sugar cinnamon Pop-Tarts, something for my childhood that I really love. Cheese Pringles. Let me get a whole can of cheese Pringles. And I will tell you, I am the target consumer. You know how Oreo puts out these new flavors, like five a week? I am a target for every single one of those. I look at it go, "Oh, that would be really good." And of course you can't buy just an Oreo to try it. You have to buy the whole pack. So I go there and I see Swedish Fish flavored Oreos, and I'm like, "Yes, please." They were good. I'll tell you that.

But I'm also telling you, God didn't put Swedish Fish Oreos into my life to test me. God wasn't sitting around saying, "Well, there's war, there's poverty, there's racism, there's greed. What should I do now? Shawn's going shopping. Let's get the new Oreos out." I was the author of my temptation there, or maybe Nabisco was the author of my temptation. And God had actually already given me what I needed to deal with it. As I said, that's a very small trivial temptation. But unfortunately at one time another, we are all prone to giving into those bigger temptations, those bigger temptations that lead to hurt for ourselves, for others. Maybe we're tempted into drug or alcohol use, unhealthy practices at home, cheating at school, self-harm, infidelity, dishonesty at work, silence or apathy in the face of injustice.

When we are tempted to these destructive choices, we hear in scripture that God provides us assistance in those moments of temptation. Paul is saying we're not on our own in those moments. Even it doesn't feel like, we have a choice and we have the strength to get through it. There are times when we do seem powerless to choose what's healthy for us, and that the destructive choice is just too strong. But even in those moments, God gives us an alternative. If we feel no, we can't deal with this on our own, sometimes the only choice we have is to ask for help, is to admit our powerlessness and say, "Yes, I need your help. I need someone to help me," to admit that we cannot help ourselves and that we need God and we need others in our lives.

This asking for help is often portrayed as a weakness. We want to be seen as self-sufficient, pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. But there are times in our life when asking for help is the bravest thing that we can do. If you go to any Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, Narcotics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, every person there begins their road to recovery by admitting their need for help, that they cannot do it on their own. In our scripture lesson from Luke, Jesus says, "Ask and it will be given to you. Everyone who asks shall receive."

And we heard the story right before that about a man who needs something late at night and he goes to his neighbor's house, he bangs on his door, and the neighbor doesn't want to help him at that late hour. The scripture says he's not going to help him because they're friends. He's going to help him because the guy keeps banging on the door. He's persistent. The guy helps him not out of altruistic motives but out of selfish motives. But he still gets what he's asking for. And Jesus says, "Even if this guy can help grudgingly, what about God who loves you?" What about God who loves you is the ultimate good. Surely God's going to take care of you more than this neighbor. We all need help at various times in our life, and God wants us to ask for help. God wants us to cry out in prayer. God wants us to turn towards each other. We are here as God's answers to prayer. We are here to help one another.

I received a phone call here at the church once from a woman who was in some pretty hard straits and as I listened to her, I could tell that she probably needed more help than I could give. I said, "I'm happy to listen, but I think you might benefit from talking to a therapist, a mental health professional." She replied, she didn't need that because she had God. And so I asked her, if God's help was all she needed, why was she calling me? She realized she needed help, but it was just harder to take even one more step. But we've been put here for one another from the very beginning.

In that second creation story in Genesis 2, God makes Adam out of dust, breathes life into him, and then says, "It's not good, Adam, for you to be alone." It is not good for any of us to be alone. We are created to help each other. God doesn't give us more than we can handle, but that doesn't mean... Well, we say God doesn't give us more than we can handle, but sometimes we get more than we can handle even though it doesn't come from God.

Adam Hamilton writes in his book, Half Truths, about a conversation on this subject, the woman, and she said, "For years this statement helped me when I was facing difficult things. I kept telling myself that God wouldn't give me more than I could handle, and it reassured me that somehow I was going to make it through. Then one day I was at my therapist's office and I mentioned it to him and he laughed. And he said, 'Are you kidding me? Surely you don't really believe that. I can tell you plenty of stories about people who had more than they could handle. In fact, my profession consists of helping just such people.'"

The counselor reminded the woman that in her own case, she had come to him because the emotional pain and difficulty she was facing had been more than she could handle. In addition, the woman's mother had committed suicide because life had become more difficult than she could handle. Now, first, the one was angry that her therapist had called her belief into question, but the more she reflected, the more she concluded he was right. We will face adversity in our lives and we will experience hardships. We or someone we love may face terminal illness. We may struggle with debilitating depression, suicidal thoughts, grief so heavy we'll feel we'll suffocate. We may walk through financial circumstances where it seems there's no way out. We are like every human being. At some point, we will absolutely face things that are more than we can handle.

And the promise of scripture is not that we won't go through hard times. What scripture does promise is that all times good or bad, God wants to be our help and our strength. It's not that God won't give you more than you can handle, but that God will help you handle all that you've been given. That's the message. That's the important message. It's not that God won't give you more than you can handle, but that God will help you handle all that you've been given.

One last word I'd like to give you. It's possible someone is sitting here today and they absolutely feel like they have more than they can handle. If that's you, if you are facing a challenge that has overwhelmed you, addiction, financial difficulties, relationship challenges, depression, mental health issues, grief, pain, whatever it is, please ask for help. You can start this moment by asking God for help, but don't stop there. Talk to someone. Talk to a friend here, talk to me. Talk to a teacher, a family member, a therapist. God has already put people in your life that can help you. It's not that you have been given more than you can handle... No, sorry, it's not that God won't give you more than you can handle, but that God will help you handle all that you've been given.

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.