That's the Power of Love
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For February 17, 2019:
That’s the power of love
by Chris Keating
Luke 6:17-26
In this week’s Gospel passage, Jesus stands eye to eye with human suffering and pain, decrying injustices shown to the poor, the hungry, and rejected. In contrast to Matthew’s extended version of the Sermon on the Mount, Luke’s version is concise and not delivered from the top of a mountain. The content is similar, yet Luke’s mixture of blessings and woes cut to the chase by reframing images of God’s power. Power and authority for Luke are grounded in Jesus who stands with, not over, those who are hurting.
It’s actually a bit like Amazon’s Super Bowl commercial describing Harrison Ford’s ill-fated attempts to keep his dog from ordering truckloads of dogfood from Amazon’s Alexa. The dog, equipped with a bark-recognizing collar, manages to thwart Ford’s control. The hilarious ad points at the foibles of power: we think we have it, until we don’t.
But that is very different from the way we generally understand power.
Take the State of the Union address, with its pomp, circumstances and traditions. The President — no matter the incumbent — displays power from above. Even though we know that the Speaker of the House holds the key to inviting the President to speak, each moment is designed to highlight presidential authority. From entering the chamber until the final applause line, each step is meant to demonstrate control and command.
Jesus’ power, on the other hand, is a power that stands with the disenfranchised and disadvantaged. Coercive power leads to abuses like racist black-face performances, where the powerful white majority mock and deride persons of color. It blows like a winter wind, freezing the otherwise resilient and fertile ground of human capacity and imagination. It enriches self, without ever being concerned with the needs of others.
Jesus interrupts this abusive dynamic, blessing the weak and warning the allegedly-powerful. “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you,” Jesus says. It’s another way of saying that you can’t have hope and salvation with ego and manipulation. It just doesn’t work that way.
In the news
Despite the presidential heft and obligatory nods to American exceptionalism, in the end President Trump’s State of the Union address was essentially a hard sell pitch to build his border wall. The speech, which clocked in as the third longest in modern presidential history, included swipes at partisan investigations, birthday greetings to an elderly survivor of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, and tepid calls for unity, seemed to be constructed around a single point: building a wall.
There were little signs that he intends to use his power to achieve the unity he praised.
“I’ll get it built,” he declared, though he offered no clear path to end the budget stalemate. Even his comments praising the newly-seated women in Congress felt more ironic than irenic. More memorable than his words were Speaker Pelosi’s glances at her copy of his speech and her sarcastic applause at its conclusion. The chorus revved the troops but did little to bridge the nation’s gaping political divide.
In its analysis of the speech, the London Financial Times remarked, “It was the speech of a president whose power is rapidly draining.”
Building a wall is one thing, building bridges is another.
While President Trump remains unequivocal in his demands for a wall, House and Senate negotiators continued exploring options. An announcement was made late Monday that they had reached a deal “in principal” that would avoid another government shutdown while resolving disputes about border security. If the deal advances, it would point to progress at bridging gaps between Republicans and Democrats.
A successful deal would also be a reminder of the power of mutuality and negotiation.
Closing the social, gender, political and economic gaps of our time will require cultivating the power of mutuality. The diversity of our nation and world will require new approaches to handling power. It may even involve studying the work of a woman who died 85 years ago.
The creative management writings of Mary Parker Follett, a New England social worker, philosopher and management pioneer, may prove to be more relevant today than President Trump’s “The Art of the Deal.” Follett, who died in 1933, was a London School of Economics graduate and personal consultant to President Theodore Roosevelt. Central to Follett’s thinking was her advocacy of participatory democracy.
Follett drew a distinction between “power with” (co-active power) and “power over,” or coercive power. Looking beyond the typical organizational hierarchy, Follett argued in 1924 that the central problem of “social relations” was the way power was shared or distributed:
What is the central problem of social relations? It is the question of power… But our task is not to learn where to place power; it is how to develop power. We frequently hear nowadays of ‘transferring power as the panacea for all our ills.’ Genuine power can only be grown, it will slip from every arbitrary hand that grasps it; for genuine power is not coercive control, but coactive control. Coercive power is the curse of the universe; coactive power, the enrichment and advancement of every human soul.
Power with is relational. It arises from eye-to-eye connection and relationship. It does not hide behind hoods and is not disguised by shoe polish. Rather, as Jesus says, it is willing to make sacrifices in love, even if that means turning the expected structures of power upside down.
In the scripture
Following a night of prayer, Jesus in Luke 6:12 turns his attention to calling and training the disciples. The sermon in chapter 6 differs in style and length from Matthew’s version. Instead of speaking from a mountain, Jesus stands “on a level place.” He is surrounded by a great multitude who have been drawn by his reputation and who are captivated by his power. Luke notes that those pressing around Jesus try and touch him, because “power came out from him.”
While Jesus is aware of the crowd, it appears his focus remains on the disciples. The crowd becomes part of the sermon, functioning as living illustrations offers the image of Jesus standing among a hurting, broken mass of people. His words are indeed “on the level.”
The power which comes out of Jesus is the power of reversal. The prevailing social strata are reconsidered: the poor are blessed, the hungry filled, the despised honored. God’s power is indeed power with and not power over. It is co-active, manifesting what commentator F. Scott Spencer notes are the core virtues of love, kindness, and mercy offered to all. (See Spencer, “The Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Apostles,” Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2008, p. 143.)
These virtues are to be reflected in the daily lives of disciples. Luke’s readers would have heard these are words of encouragement. The completion of the kingdom will come in due time, but for now those who follow Jesus are called to do display power in radically new ways: loving enemies, blessing those who oppose you, and resisting violence.
Those who are abiding in this love will experience the blessing of God. On the other hand, Jesus pronounces woes on those who practice exclusionary “power over” and who are comfortable with earthly goods. It’s a message destined to make most North American Christians squirm: “for you have received your consolation.”
In the sermon
Jesus outlines a new understanding of power and relationships. Blessed are preachers who can thoughtfully engage congregations in what it means to live in that sort of mutuality and covenant relationship. Blessed are those who bring joy to the poor and good news to the hungry, comfort to the mourning.
Blessed, yes; but that does not make the construction of such a sermon easy. But the deep divisions within our country and churches demand that preachers consider the plain meaning of Jesus’ sermon. Quite literally, Jesus is leveling with the disciples, telling them “This is not going to be easy.”
Yet the Gospel dares to declare the promise of God who dwells with those who have nothing.
For that reason, a sermon could possibly find its focus not with the well-known beatitudes, but instead with verse 19. Center the congregation in the presence of the crowd. Filled with those in pain and yearning for healing, the crowd is where Jesus emerges, and the locus of his words to the disciples. Context matters — and this Sunday there may be plenty who could identify themselves as among those yearning to be healed.
But Jesus’ words are not only for the scared and misfit. He speaks to those whose relative comfort has privileged them with power. Identifying our comfort so that we may be invited to transformation is an earnest homiletical task, and one that requires thoughtful consideration.
Among the winners of this year’s Grammys was singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile, whose sixth studio album, “By the Way, I Forgive You” won best Americana Album. Carlile understands that her music speaks to those abused by coercive systems of power.
On stage at the Emmy’s, Carlile told the crowd “Americana music is the island of the misfit toys [and] I am such a misfit. I came out of the closet at 15 years old, when I was in high school, and I can assure you that I was never invited to any parties.”
In an interview with Mary Louise Kelly of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Carlile spoke of the hurt she felt when her pastor refused to baptize her because she was gay. The theme of forgiveness, she says, appeared the way an artist chisels away at a sculpture. For Carlile, understanding forgiveness included forgiving the pastor who had withheld baptism. “It took me a long time to forgive him,” she said. “It threatened my faith and self-worth.”
Ultimately, Carlile knew that as she was inviting others to consider forgiveness, she had to also find a way of forgiving the pastor. Such is the power of God: it is a power which is not coerced but rather comes freely. It is the power of love.
SECOND THOUGHTS
Keep Watch on Those Who are Certain
by Tom Willadsen
Jeremiah 17:5-10, Psalm 1, 1 Corinthians 15:12-20, Luke 6:17-26
Luke 6:17-26
People are coming great distances to see, hear and touch Jesus. Lots of people are travelling great distances. Healing is coming out from him and with this set up he speaks…to his disciples. We know this passage as the beginning of Luke’s version of The Sermon on the Mount found in Matthew’s gospel. Luke gives Matthew’s version a few tweaks. Luke has the blessings that Matthew had, but he adds woes, the other side of blessing. Today’s reading has been used in ways to defend injustice, even leading some to say that one should not work for equity, but embrace the suffering of poverty — for the greater reward that Christ promises. The poor will receive “the kingdom of God;” Jesus says it right there in the red letters! Those who are hungry will be filled…sometime. Those who mourn will laugh.
That last one is true in a way that is often overlooked. The contrast is not between those who have losses to grieve and those who do not have losses to grieve. The contrast is between those who feel and express their grief, those who move through grief, as opposed to those who keep themselves from feeling or expressing it. Those who experience grief, who do not repress it, will laugh.
What kind of recruitment plan could Jesus have in mind in telling his disciples (maybe those crowds who have come all the way from Tyre and Sidon can eavesdrop) that they should rejoice when they are afflicted as the prophets who spoke the Lord’s word before them were? Dietrich Bonhoeffer made the same point in The Cost of Discipleship, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
Today’s portion from Luke turns the blessings into woes. Or perhaps more clearly, the last three verses offer a balance. Those who are high and mighty now will be brought down. The idea that the wealthy have already gotten their reward may be a difficult one for our congregations to hear. The mainline churches I’ve served have been composed of people who are wealthy by any standard in human history — except for those who are even wealthier than us in the First World. Where is the Good News for them/us?
Jeremiah 17:5-10 / Psalm 1
It is not clear whether Psalm 1 is indeed the first psalm or a preface that helps the reader anticipate and benefit from reading the psalms that follow. It appears that Jeremiah was familiar with the words of today’s psalm reading; he drops them into this morning’s lesson from the Hebrew Bible.
Consider trees. They grow both deep and tall. While their roots are invisible to us who live and move and have our being above ground, they are the source of trees’ stability and nourishment. Those that survive in parched, barren places have roots that reach deep underground for the moisture they need to survive. Deep roots enable them to withstand seasons of drought. And when trees are near water they do not need to work very hard to find what they need to live and bear fruit. They draw strength from their depth just as wise people draw direction from studying the Torah, not only the first five books of what some Christians call “The Old Testament,” but the totality of the Lord’s revealed instruction. The kind of stability Jeremiah and the psalmist endorse does not spring up in a day, like the castor bean plant that brought Jonah temporary respite as he sat on the hill waiting for the Lord’s fireworks to destroy Nineveh.
The wicked are not so. They cannot endure times of drought. Compare chaff to trees, as Jeremiah does. A breeze blows chaff away. Chaff is so light, of so little consequence, that just a puff of air sends it off, leaving the weightier, more substantial grain.
But the wisdom of trees is not rooted only in their roots, nor their strength. The truly strong are strong enough to bend.
There's a tree out in the backyard
That never has been broken by the wind
And the reason it’s still standing
It was strong enough to bend
Tanya Tucker had a hit country song 30 years ago expressing the wisdom of trees in “Strong Enough to Bend,” by Beth Nielsen Chapman / Don Schlitz
1 Corinthians 15:12-20
In last week’s 1 Corinthians reading Paul laid the groundwork for today’s reading. It seems the Corinthians have written to Paul so he knows some of the issues they are wrestling with. Today he takes on the notion that some Corinthians believe that there is no resurrection of the dead. The consequences are too much for Paul to bear. If that is the case he has wasted his time in preaching Christ to the Corinthians. If that is the case he has misrepresented the Living God to them. If that is the case those who knew Christ who have since died, are really dead. If there is no resurrection, then all those witnesses Paul mentioned in last week’s reading were mistaken. If there is no resurrection then we are all still in our sins.
Paul is writing with great passion because the stakes are so high. It’s the difference between hope and despair. Paul’s point is not to explain in theological terms the significance of Christ’s death and resurrection — he saved that for seminarians to ponder in the coming millennia — he was just going back to the facts, the witnesses, the credible, verifiable truth that God’s power was demonstrated in Christ’s rising from the dead. That is the power that welcomed and enfolded those who had died in Christ prior to Christ’s return. That is the power that was strong enough to turn Paul from the church’s chief antagonist to its most vocal (and humble, just ask him) spreader of the Good News. That is the power to remove sin, power to make a person completely new.
For the Corinthians, at least for those who have been denying the resurrection, Paul lays out the issue, the confusion of where one should place one’s trust.
In the news
Last week’s State of the Union message revealed, again, that our current president sees issues in a strictly binary way. It seems to me he much prefers winning to governing. It remains to be seen whether his endorsement of working with the Democrats’ new return to power in the House of Representatives will come to pass. By the time you, dear readers, are perusing these lines another government shut-down may be looming, or actually in effect, depending on your sermon composition schedule. It’s a time of brinksmanship, power plays, symbolic gestures and rhetoric.
The President made an emotional case for the threat that immigrants who enter the country without documentation pose to the people, and his conviction that a wall will stop them. He has bet a lot of political capital on the wall as a symbol of his determination and our national strength. From where I sit it appears that he has put his trust in getting “his wall” built. While he may believe sincerely that The Wall will make us safer, he certainly trusts delivering The Wall will improve his popularity and possibly lead to his re-election.
Does the parable of the farmer who pulled down his barns to make bigger barns resonate here?
What about the happy or blessed person who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord?
While today’s lessons appear to show stark contrasts between blessing and woe, wisdom and folly, trust and its opposite they needed to be viewed with a wider lens.
The trees that are strong and healthy and drought resistant didn't appear in an instant. They grew both taller and deeper for many years. The wise one who delights in the Lord’s instruction did not gain wisdom on the opening day of first grade. The wise one has spent years in relationship with the living God, creator of heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in it — and the Law. And for the record, Jesus said old wine is better than new. These things take time.
Jesus sets no time limits on how long one must grieve before tears turn into laughter. Suffering will be turned into blessing, Christ promises, but not overnight. Yes, there’s a difference between hope and despair, but neither is governed by a toggle switch.
Looking for nuance in today’s readings that at first reading seem to be such stark opposites, I found this quote:
“We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.” — Eric Hoffer
True faith, deep trust, take time. Keep watch on those who are certain. Certainty is the root of extremism. Trees that grow strong have roots that keep them strong enough to bend.
ILLUSTRATIONS
From team member Dean Feldmeyer
1 Corinthians 15:12-20, Luke 6:17-26
Kinds of power
The Epistle and Gospel lessons for this Sunday both speak of different kinds of power. In the Corinthians text Paul speaks of power given to Christians through the resurrection of Jesus. In the Gospel lesson Luke speaks of the power which flowed out of Jesus and healed those who came near to him.
Psychologists John French and Bertram Raven created a list of five types of social power that effect relationships between people in both formal and informal settings. The original list of five was later amended two others.1
Legitimate or Titular Power is sometimes also called titular power is the type of power that comes with a title or position: president, C.E.O., chairperson, etc. Used wisely this type of power can achieve much, it is fragile, however, and can be easily undone if abused.
Coercive Power uses threats or punishments to manipulate the behavior of others. It rarely produces respect or admiration and most often leaves the user resented or even hated by those over whom he or she has power.
Reward Power is usually described as the opposite of coercive power in that it finds its success through rewards or the promise of rewards. Used well, those over whom the leader has power come to see themselves as having an investment in the goals of the group.
Referent Power comes from personal charisma or likeability or sometimes just being nice. People enjoy being around or even desire to be like people with referent power and they desire to give such people what they want.
Expert Power is held by someone who has special knowledge or skills in an area.
Additional Types of Power:
Informational Power is held by a person with certain information that others do not possess. This person will be sought to provide insight and guidance in areas where others have no knowledge. This power differs slightly from expert power in that is limited in scope and can be lost once others have the same information.
Connection Power is closely related to referent power, but different in that a person may have an advantage over others simply because of who they know.
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1 Corinthians 15:12-20, Luke 6:17-26
11 tips to becoming powerful
According to entrepreneur.com, these are the 11 characteristics of powerful people you can cultivate:2
1. They are confident.
Powerful people are confident. They aren’t afraid to tackle risks and challenges head-on. They can appreciate the contributions of others and the importance of small achievements. People are naturally attracted to confident people.
2. They don’t seek fame and fortune.
Powerful people aren’t looking to flaunt their success. They tend to focus on what is best for the group — company, community, club, etc.
3. They take up more space.
A 2010 experiment conducted by psychologists Dana Carney and Amy Cuddy found that subjects who stayed in a position that took up more space for longer than one minute actually felt more powerful. This was caused by a biochemical reaction that increased testosterone and decreased cortisol.
4. They know when to speak.
They don’t talk a whole lot but what they do say is useful, powerful and insightful.
5. They break eye contact.
You’ve probably heard that the best speakers and leaders make strong eye contact. It turns out that this isn’t exactly the case. Based on research by psychologists Frances Chen and Julia Minson, it was found that eye contact can actually be counterproductive because it lessens persuasion. Instead of looking into someone else’s eyes, leaders should look at their audience member’s mouth. Go figure.
6. They aren’t afraid of criticism.
When you’re in a position of power, some of your decisions will be unpopular. Powerful people are not afraid of the backlash.
7. They look powerful.
Mark Zuckerberg being the exception which proves the rule, powerful leaders set themselves apart from others by dressing, speaking and acting like a distinguished professionals.
8. They are team players.
While they may have a larger role than others on the team, they never undervalue the hard work of other team members.
9. They're flexible.
Life is unpredictable. Powerful people are able to make the right adjustments to solve the problem at hand.
10. They ask better questions.
Powerful people ask astute questions that tend to result in good and helpful answers.
11. They pick a hard seat and carry heavy objects.
According to study published in Science, people who opted to sit in an uncomfortable chair become tougher at negotiating because the rigid sensation seems to lessen a shift in decisions. In the same study, it was also discovered that the subjects who were carrying heavier objects appeared to be more important.
* * *
1 Corinthians 15:12-20, Luke 6:17-26
The most powerful person in history
Any answer to this question would, of necessity, be subjective but, using the classical measures and types of power, self-described history buff, Balaji Viswanathan, writing for Quara and, then, Slate, nominates the Indian Emperor
Ashoka, aka Ashoka the Great of the Maurya Dynasty, who ruled almost all of the Indian subcontinent from c. 268 to 232 BCE.
Ashoka ruled over 44 percent of the world population with close to a half of world Gross Domestic Product of his time, and he did so for nearly half a century.
After beginning his rule as a warrior king, Ashoka became horrified by the violence and bloodshed of war. He converted to the little-known cult called Buddhism and sponsored monks whom he sent throughout and into the furthest reaches of his empire turning it into the world’s fourth-biggest faith. Ashoka’s actions directly impacted more than three-quarters of the known world of his time — from Japan to Afghanistan. Asia was suddenly connected and also pacified by this new faith.
Ashoka realized the folly of violence and impacted many cultures with his own. This, according to Viswanathan, hardly any evidence of complaint in any of the cultures he impacted. Even today, after 2,300 years, he is celebrated across Asia, and the “Pillars of Truth” he left all over the subcontinent are still intact.3
1 Elisabeth Natter. "5 Types of Power in Businesses" Chron, February 04, 2019.
2 Murry Newlands. "11 Characteristics of Powerful People You Can Cultivate" Entrepreneur September 16, 2015.
3 Quora Contributor "Who Was the Most Powerful Person in History?" Slate Dec 18, 2013.
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From team member Ron Love:
Luke 6:21-23 “Blessed are you…”
The Unicode Consortium is a nonprofit organization that provides standards for text on the internet and oversees emojis. Unicode recently approved 59 new emojis, as well as variants for 230 options. The new symbols include an otter, a sloth and a waffle. But most significant is this year’s emphasis on inclusiveness. Recent additions also include a hearing aid, a prosthetic limb, sign language, a cane, a wheelchair, a guide dog and couples holding hands with each having a different skin tone. The dating app Tinder said the new emojis allows couples of different races and genders to be included in the “universal language of the digital age.”
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Luke 6:21-23 “Blessed are you…”
Joanna Gaines, along with her husband, host HGTV Fixer Upper. Prior to being launched into stardom, Joanna gave little thought to her Instagram postings. Before reaching celebrity status she said of her postings, “There wasn’t any pressure to post anything at all, so whenever I did, it didn’t really cross my mind whether or not people would ‘like it.’” Now, when she makes a post, she scrutinizes every aspect of the picture. She will even place a flower pot in the background if she feels that it is necessary to enhance her image. Regarding posting with her new status Gaines said, “I could feel insecurity start to creep in, and posting a photo was no longer an act of enjoying the in-the-moments of life but rather a more calculated decision. With every picture I found myself critiquing if there were messy backgrounds or blurry smiles.” She went on to say that she “realized that I was letting this small square on my phone become yet another thing to perfect.” She then became concerned if her life “looks as good as someone else’s?” This led to excessive anxiety. She realized that, “It is so easy to let social media rob us of authentic moments.” Gaines is now aware of the “red flags of comparison.” So, now she shares the “moment” rather than get caught up in staging the perfect picture.
***
Jeremiah 17:5 “Cursed are those…”
Luke 6:24 “But woe…”
It has now become public that Roman Catholic priests have not only sexually abused children and youth, but they also sexual abused nuns. Like the hierarchy did regarding pedophile priests, they covered up the abuse the women who wore the habit. On Tuesday, February 5, aboard the papal plane returning to Rome from the United Arab Emirates, reporters asked Pope Francis about these new allegations against the church. He admitted they were true, but went on to say “It’s not that everyone does this, but there have been priests and bishops who have.” When the Pope was asked if he would take a similarly broad approach to this issue as he did with pedophile priests, he replied, “Should we do something more? Yes. Is there the will? Yes. But it’s a path that we have already begun.”
***
Jeremiah 17:5 “Cursed are those…”
Luke 6:24 “But woe…”
Four years ago Kobani, a Syrian city near the Turkish border, was liberated from ISIS contol. Even though several years have passed since the liberation, the Church of the Brethren is still receiving converts from Islam. Even though ISIS is a violent faction of Islam, for many people in Syria it still represents Islamic beliefs and practices. The citizens witnessed multiple beheadings of its residents by ISIS of those who did not believe in Allah or who violated the laws of the Islamic religion. One man was put in jail for six months for not knowing certain tenets of Islam. For the new Christian converts coming to the Church of the Brethren they are accepting Christianity because they could not accept the ISIS violence that was done in the name of Allah. Farhad Jasim, a Christian convert from Islam, told NBC News, “If ISIS represents Islam, I don’t want to be Muslim anymore. Their god is not my God.” He went on to say, “After I witnessed [ISIS] brutality with my own eyes, I started to be skeptical about my belief. It didn’t take me long to discover that Christianity was the religion I was searching for.”
* * *
Luke 6:18 “they had come to hear him…”
Last week House Speaker Nancy Pelosi shared her favorite Bible verse with a group of Christian college and university presidents. The verse reads, “To minister to the needs of God’s creation is an act of worship. To ignore those needs is to dishonor the God who made us.” The problem is, Pelosi is unable to find the verse in the Bible. She told the college presidents, “I can’t find it in the Bible, but I quote it all the time and I keep reading and reading the Bible. I know it’s there someplace. It’s supposed to be in Isiah.” Will Kynes, the Old Testament professor at Whitworth University, and Greg MaGee, the biblical professor at Taylor University, both concur that there is no such verse in the Bible.
* * *
Luke 6:21-23 “Blessed are you…”
Gateway Church is a megachurch in Dallas, Texas. The senior pastor is Robert Morris. In November the church opened a campus at the Coffield Unit maximum security prison in Anderson County. A second campus has recently been opened. The first campus has become an evangelical success with 650 inmates attending worship and 500 inmates dedicating their lives to Christ. The inmates perform all the duties of a normal church service, pastored by an ex-offender Stephen Wilson. Pastor Morris told Fox News, “At Gateway Church, we’re all about people because God is all about people.” He went on to say, “Many of the men and women inside prison have been forgotten by society, but we want them to know we love them and God loves them, and they are our brothers and sisters in Christ.”
* * *
Jeremiah 17:5 “Cursed are those…”
Luke 6:24 “But woe…”
Zaxby’s restaurant, in a limited market area, ran a Super Bowl advertisement that tried to take business away from its competitor Chick-fil-A. The message was that Zaxby’s is open on Sundays, and Chick-fil-A, a Christian based restaurant, remains closed on Sundays. The founder of Chick-fil-A, Truett Cathy, established this policy in 1946 when he opened his first restaurant in Hapeville, Georgia. The ad shows former NFL player Jeff Saturday and former Major League Baseball player Rick Monday (note the names of the two players Saturday and Monday) walking up to a restaurant as an announcer says, “The only thing that comes between them is where to go for chicken on Sundays.” They try the door at Zaxby’s, and think the restaurant is closed. Then they realize they need to push on the door, not pull on it for it to open. Then the announcer describes a Zaxby’s sandwich and finishes with this remark, “On Sunday and every day, only at Zaxby’s.” The commercial went viral on social media, with most respondents defending Chick-fil-A’s policy.
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Jeremiah 17:5 “Cursed are those…”
Luke 6:24 “But woe…”
Luke 6:21-23 “Blessed are you…”
Pope Francis made the first papal visit to the Arabian Peninsula, the birthplace of Islam. In that historic location he also offered Mass. In his sermon on Monday, February 4, he called for world peace. He asked world leaders to resist the “logic of armed power…the arming of borders, the raising of walls.” The Pope went on to say, “There is no alternative: we will either build the future together or there will not be a future.”
***
1 Corinthians 15:13 “If there is no resurrection…”
In 1844 a group of 50,000 followers expected the immediate return of Jesus. So strongly did they hold these beliefs, that many sold their possessions and others let their fields lie fallow. When Jesus did not return the aftermath was called the Great Disappointment. Some, sadly, even committed suicide. In May of that year, the remaining followers organized themselves into a church. They called themselves Adventists for they expected the immediate return — advent — of Jesus.
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Luke 6:21-23 “Blessed are you…”
Fred Rogers was invited to be the baccalaureate speaker for Boston University’s class of 1992. During the address he shared from one of his favorite books, The Little Prince. The passage he cited discussed that which is most important about people “is invisible to the eye.” Personal significance is not found in honors and in prizes but in integrity. He then asked the class this question, “What is essential about you that is invisible to the eye?” He then paused for a considerable amount of time, allowing each student and faculty member to ponder the question. Even the president of the university, sitting to his side with his tasseled cap and impressive gold medallion, was gripped by the question. It was not a time for self-absorption, but one for self-reflection. Rogers then broke the silence and answered his own question by singing the song, “It’s You I Like.” Everyone sat in silence, and some even cried, as they listened to these lyrics, “It’s you I like. It’s not the things you wear. It’s not the way you do your hair, but it’s you I like. The way you are right now. The way deep down inside you. Not the things that you hide — not your diplomas, they’re just beside you. But it’s you I like. Every part of you.” This is the love of total acceptance, blemishes and all.
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From team member Mary Austin:
Luke 6:17-26
Being Filled Up
In his sermon on the plain, as Luke has it, Jesus promises reversals from people’s current woes. God’s blessing is coming, he tells the crowd. “‘Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.” One non-profit, Vehicles for Changes is making Jesus’ promise come to life. The group re-purposes former school buses, and turns them into homes called skoolies. “While there’s a growing movement amid skyrocketing housing prices to transform school buses into homes, appropriating them to shelter the homeless, as we are doing, is still unique. Ours is the only nonprofit we know of housing children this way.” The first family to receive this kind of home was squeezed out of their previous home by rising costs. “The Floods’ rent had gone up and David had lost his job — that was about all it took for the family to end up homeless. They had been living in their car for seven months, roaming parking lots for places to sleep. ‘We didn’t think it would happen to us — but it did,’ David tells me while standing outside his new skoolie home. ‘It’s not just the uneducated. I’m finishing my master’s degree. I had nowhere to work, so the skoolie enables me to get it done. I’m so relieved.’”
As a bonus, families living in a converted bus don’t look homeless. They look cool. “And here’s the thing — the idea of living in a skoolie that you can build and own for $30,000 has been trending for years among students and young professionals who don’t want to get trapped in a day job, paying off a mortgage all their lives. Skoolie Nation, a Facebook page that offers advice to those building and living in converted buses, predicts several thousand new homes coming on line every year. So, this home we’re offering unsheltered families is among the fresh new ideas of the upwardly mobile. We hope that continues so our families aren’t further stigmatized.”
The empty places get filled up, thanks to an innovative group seeking to fill in the gaps, and bring blessings to the hungry and homeless.
* * *
Luke 6:17-26
Weeping No More
After the deaths of her parents, Mallory McDuff found herself deep in grief. Living without their presence left her raw with grief. “I carried my parents’ deaths inside me, like the weight of the soil. I wasn’t sure how to be a single mom after the sudden deaths of both of my parents, whose marriage had only gotten stronger with time. Approaching my 40th birthday, I nursed my newborn daughter in their four-poster double bed I inherited, facing the Blue Ridge Mountains, underneath their quilt in the colorful pattern of Grandmother’s Flower Garden.” As time went on, the quilt frayed, like life does. She looked for someone to repair it, as “the quilt’s white cotton background was yellowed and nearly brown in places. The bunting escaped from the stitches like bunny tails poking out of a rabbit hole. When my children flung themselves on the bed, their growing limbs tore at the seams. I called fabric stores and wrote Facebook messages to quilting bees. One hot summer day, I heard from Sharron, The Quilt Lady, who had seen my online pleas and made repairs at reasonable prices.” The Quilt Lady arrived “with her car filled with stacks of colorful spools because she taught sewing at the women’s prison, where she precut the squares because her students weren’t allowed to have scissors. She described the process of soaking cloth with Lipton tea bags to match the tint of my mother’s material. After one year, she’d repaired 127 colored hexagons and 39 white diamonds, working 80 hours in small blocks because of arthritis. When we placed the patchwork blanket on my sheets, I read aloud to my daughters the embroidered names of those who’d worked on the quilt, including their grandmother, Ann Jones McDuff.”
Her father was represented in her life by the family toboggan, “which stood like a sentinel outside my front door in North Carolina, although the old wood had splintered with age.” A friend offered to fix it, and then brought back a gorgeously restored sled before the first snowfall. “The wood glistened with a waxy sheen, as he’d replaced rotted sections with solid pieces. He’d found the exact replica of the original screws. Strangers asked my daughters for a ride on the faster flyer on the big hill on campus, and we shared the sled and its story. Four adults piled onto the wooden frame, setting a distance record, met by applause that echoed in the valley.”
The quilt and the sled have restored her parents’ presence to her, and turned her weeping into laughter.
* * *
Luke 6:17-26
Jesus and Wisdom
As he instructs the crowd in the way of blessings, Jesus is offering them insight for living that contradicts the prevailing wisdom of the day. If anyone in the crowd thought that money was a sign of God’s favor, Jesus has another vision to present. People seek wisdom in all kinds of ways, as three philosophers recently found. They set up a booth on the street near their convention, with a banner reading “Ask a Philosopher.” They wondered if anyone would take them up on the offer of free wisdom. “Then someone stopped. At first glance, it was hard to tell if she was a penniless nomad or an emeritus professor, but then she took off her hat and psychedelic scarf and came over to the desk and announced, “I’ve got a question. I’m in my late 60s. I’ve just had life threatening surgery, but I got through it.” She showed us the jagged scar on her neck.” Then she announced that she didn’t know what to do with the rest of her life. What kind of help could the three philosophers offer?
“And then it happened: A crowd gathered. At first I thought they were there to eavesdrop, but as it turned out they had their own existential concerns. A group of teenagers engaged the philosopher on my right. One young woman, who turned out to be a sophomore in college, stepped away from the group with a serious concern. “Why can’t I be happier in my life? I’m only 20. I should be as happy as I’m ever going to be right now, but I’m not. Is this it?” It was my turn. “Research has shown that what makes us happy is achieving small goals one after the other,” I said. “If you win the lottery, within six months you’ll probably be back to your baseline of happiness. Same if you got into an accident. You can’t just achieve happiness and stay there, you have to pursue it.” “So I’m stuck?” she said. “No…” I explained. “Your role in this is huge. You’ve got to choose the things that make you happy one by one. That’s been shown from Aristotle all the way down to cutting-edge psychological research. Happiness is a journey, not a destination.” She brightened a bit, while her friends were still puzzling over whether color was a primary or secondary property. They thanked us and moved on.”
As the philosopher says, “During the quiet I reflected for a moment on what had just happened. A group of strangers had descended upon us not to make fun, but because they were carrying around some real philosophical baggage that had long gone unanswered. If you’re in a spiritual crisis, you go to your minister or rabbi. If you have psychological concerns, you might seek out a therapist. But what to do if you don’t quite know where you fit into this world and you’re tired of carrying that burden alone?”
Or, as Jesus might says, “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.”
* * *
Luke 6:17-26
Jesus and Marie Kondo
As he teaches the crowd, Jesus invites them to reconsider the role of possessions in their lives. In contrast to how people then and now think about these things, he says, “woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now.” He’s promising a re-ordering of the world. Our value comes from the way God sees us, and not our material worth.
Marie Kondo, the de-cluttering guru who now has her own show on Netflix, talks about re-ordering our own personal worlds by shedding things we don’t need. Her view of possessions mirrors what Jesus is saying, in a much smaller way, but with a parallel spiritual emphasis.
Kondo says we should only keep the items that “spark joy” for us. The things we bought to impress someone can go, along with gifts that we don’t need, and things that have worn out. One writer who followed these instructions talks about a feeling of spiritual relief in clearing things out. When she set aside a day for clearing things out, she says, “Six hours later, I’d filled 12 bags with non-joy-giving clothes. Instead of panic, I felt relief — 12 times lighter.” She adds, feeling the kind of freedom that Jesus teaches about, “All sorts of decisions are falling into place. This might be the best payoff of all: Once you’ve looked at hundreds of things and asked yourself if they give you joy, decision-making gets a lot easier: which book to read, which projects to pursue, what to make for dinner, whether to say yes or no to the many optional obligations that come our way.”
* * *
Luke 6:17-26
Jesus and the complication of possessions
Talking to a group of people who probably don’t have much in the way of material possessions, Jesus says that their worth is not measured by their wealth or their current situation. He has a stern word for the people who have too much — including most of us. Reflecting on the place of possessions in our lives, a writer for the New York Times says that Marie Kondo came along at just the right time to inspire us to think about our own stuff, and why we have so much more than we need. Taffy Brodesser-Akner says, “By the time her book arrived, America had entered a time of peak stuff, when we had accumulated a mountain of disposable goods — from Costco toilet paper to Isaac Mizrahi swimwear by Target — but hadn’t (and still haven’t) learned how to dispose of them. We were caught between an older generation that bought a princess phone in 1970 for $25 that was still working and a generation that bought $600 iPhones, knowing they would have to replace them within two years. We had the princess phone and the iPhone, and we couldn’t dispose of either. We were burdened by our stuff; we were drowning in it.” We have created our own woes, to use the word that Jesus uses.
The lessons work for more than just an excess of tools, baseball cards or sweaters. At a workshop, one women said, “I found the opposite of happiness is not sadness. It’s chaos.” “Another woman said she KonMaried a bad boyfriend. Having tidied everything in her home and finding she still distinctly lacked happiness, she held her boyfriend in her hands, realized he no longer sparked joy and got rid of him.”
Jesus points us to the fact that wealth and poverty are spiritual issues. In our own lives, we know that our things reflect our deepest values.
* * *
Jeremiah 17:5-10
Trust
The prophet Jeremiah says, “Thus says the Lord: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord.” Trusting our fellow human beings without a good reason puts us on shaky ground, and counterintelligence expert Robin Dreeke says we can be wiser with our trust. We place our trust in God, and yet we have to interact with each other. Dreeke says, “Whenever there are two human beings interacting and you hope to move forward, you’re not going to do it without trust.” Dreeke says that much of building trust is about serving one another. “Ultimately, if you’re talking in terms of what the priorities of others are and you offer resources for them to achieve those things, that’s what starts begetting trust. And do it with no expectation of reciprocity, which is the real key. You can’t do it for the gain.”
We often encounter people who seem untrustworthy, as Jeremiah warns us, “Negativity is happening mostly because people are insecure. They are trying to demonstrate their own value to other people with inappropriate behavior, whether they’re name-dropping, self-promoting and all these things. When I encounter someone who has annoying, negative behaviors, the first thing I try to do is understand them. I try to understand why they are insecure and what are they insecure about. As soon as I can discover those insecurities, I can start validating them and validating other aspects of them. Everyone has something they’re working on, and everyone has great strengths. If you take time to focus on the strengths and validate those strengths, the negativity will start flowing away.”
These are all spiritual principles, although Dreeke doesn’t frame them that way. When we follow the example of Jesus, who came along long after Jeremiah, we become trustworthy, even as mere mortals.
* * *
Jeremiah 17:5-10
Trust, part two
Jeremiah is probably right, with his dour view of trusting our fellow human beings. Of course he’s right that our primary trust belongs to God. But human beings can be surprisingly trustworthy. Paul Bellis Jones decided to test whether people can be trusted. He left his camera, in a bag, on a mountaintop, asking hikers to take a picture of themselves and leave the camera for the next groups of hikers. With the camera, “over 30 ramblers took photographs of themselves at the beauty spot, which overlooks two large rocks near the summit. When the film ran out four days later, the camera was personally returned to his house by a National Park warden…” Jones launched the experiment after talking to a friend, who insisted that you can’t trust anyone these days. He didn't want to believe that, so he set up the experiment to see what might happen.
He started with a picture of his own friends, and then didn’t know what would happen next. Even the park warden who brought the camera back demonstrated that he could be trusted, along with all the people who shared in the experiment. Perhaps we can trust one another, even when we place our deep trust in God.
WORSHIP
by George Reed
Call to Worship:
Leader: Happy are we when we do not follow the advice of the wicked.
People: For our delight is in the law of God on which we meditate day and night.
Leader: Then we are like trees planted by streams of water.
People: We yield our fruit in its season and our leaves do not wither.
Leader: In all that we do, we prosper as we walk in God’s ways.
People: For God watches over the way of the righteous.
OR
Leader: We come to worship the One who created all that is.
People: With reverence and joy we stand before our God.
Leader: The power of God is not in thunder and might.
People: The power of God is in love which knows no bounds.
Leader: The power of God is given to us to be given away.
People: We share the power of God’s love with all.
Hymns and Songs:
All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name
UMH: 154/155
H82: 450/451
PH: 142/143
AAHH: 292/293/294
NNBH: 3/5
NCH: 304
CH: 91/92
LBW: 328/329
ELA: 634
W&P: 100/106
AMEC: 4/5/6
Renew: 45
A Mighty Fortress Is Our God
UMH: 110
H82: 687/688
PH: 260
AAHH: 124
NNBH: 37
NCH: 439/440
CH: 65
LBW: 228/229
ELA: 503/504/505
W&P: 588
AMEC: 54
STLT: 200
I Sing the Almighty Power of God
UMH: 152
H82: 398
PH: 288
NCH: 12
W&P: 31
Renew: 54
Jesus Shall Reign
UMH: 157
H82: 544
PH: 423
NNBH: 10
NCH: 300
CH: 95
LBW: 530
ELA: 424
W&P: 341
AMEC: 96
Renew: 296
O Christ, the Healer
UMH: 265
NCH: 175
CH: 503
LBW: 360
ELA: 610
W&P: 638
Renew: 191
Heal Me, Hands of Jesus
UMH: 262
CH: 504
W&P: 636
We Meet You, O Christ
UMH: 257
PH: 311
CH: 183
W&P: 616
The Gift of Love
UMH: 408
AAHH: 522
CH: 526
W&P: 397
Renew: 155
Cares Chorus
CCB: 53
Turn Your Eyes upon Jesus
CCB: 55
Music Resources Key:
UMH: United Methodist Hymnal
H82: The Hymnal 1982
PH: Presbyterian Hymnal
AAHH: African American Heritage Hymnal
NNBH: The New National Baptist Hymnal
NCH: The New Century Hymnal
CH: Chalice Hymnal
LBW: Lutheran Book of Worship
ELA: Evangelical Lutheran Worship
W&P: Worship & Praise
AMEC: African Methodist Episcopal Church Hymnal
STLT: Singing the Living Tradition
CCB: Cokesbury Chorus Book
Renew: Renew! Songs & Hymns for Blended Worship
Prayer for the Day/Collect
O God who has all power in heaven and on earth:
Grant us the wisdom to realize you give your power away
and grant us the courage to give our power to others;
through Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
OR
We worship you, O God, because you hold all power. You are the creator and the redeemer of all. You come to us in your power and give it to us. Help us to be your true children who share our power with the powerless. Amen.
Prayer of Confession
Leader: Let us confess to God and before one another our sins and especially our addiction to power.
People: We confess to you, O God, and before one another that we have sinned. We are a people addicted to power. Even if we don’t have it, we worship it. Whether it is on the football field, the corporate board room and a mafia movie, we are enamored by power and it is usually brutish. We forget who we are. We forget who God is. We forget that real power is in love. God forgive us. Amen.
Leader: Because God is love, God does forgive us. And God continues to give us love and grace to give to others.
Prayers of the People
Praise and glory and honor are yours, O God, because out of love you called forth all of creation. By you very word, all that exists came into being.
(The following paragraph may be used if a separate prayer of confession has not been used.)
We confess to you, O God, and before one another that we have sinned. We are a people addicted to power. Even if we don’t have it, we worship it. Whether it is on the football field, the corporate board room and a mafia movie, we are enamored by power and it is usually brutish. We forget who we are. We forget who God is. We forget that real power is in love. God forgive us.
We thank you for your love that saves us from the destruction that false power offers us. We thank you that you never leave us but always seek our salvation.
(Other thanksgivings may be offered.)
We pray for each other and for all who suffer at the hands of brutal power, whether they wield it or face its violence.
(Other intercessions may be offered.)
All these things we ask in the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ who taught us to pray together saying:
Our Father....Amen.
(Or if the Our Father is not used at this point in the service)
All this we ask in the Name of the Blessed and Holy Trinity. Amen.
Children’s Sermon Starter
Talk to the children about power. You can talk about super heroes or rockets or sports figures. We like power but the greatest power is love. We celebrate love’s power every Sunday when we come and see the empty cross. Nothing could stop the power of God’s love which raised Jesus from the tomb.
CHILDREN'S SERMON
Jesus Nuts and Holy Fruits
by Dean Feldmeyer
Jeremiah 17:5-10, Psalm 1
You will need:
Using the marker, print on each orange one of the fruits of the Spirit as described in Galatians 5: 22-23 -- love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Leave one orange blank with nothing written on it.
Presentation:
(Holding up the blank orange.)
Who can tell me where oranges come from?
That’s right, they grow on trees. This one was grown on a tree in Florida. Sometimes we get them from California or Mexico or countries in Latin America or sometimes even as far away as Israel. But our point this morning is that they grow on trees. Can you name other fruits or nuts that grown on trees? (Apples, bananas, pecans, walnuts, etc.)
I remember the first time I went to Florida and we drove down the highway and saw these vast, huge orchards of trees with orange balls on them and I said to Mrs. Feldmeyer, “Oh, wow, look at those trees. What do you suppose those orange balls are?” And she said to me, “Those are oranges, Dean. We’re in Florida, remember?”
I felt so silly! I had forgotten that oranges grew on trees in Florida. And lucky us, we were in Florida in orange season. It wasn’t long before we saw people selling oranges in big bags alongside the road.
And you know what else we discovered? All oranges aren’t grown in big orchards. Down there, in Florida, some people have orange trees growing in their yards. Yep, they can just go out in the yard and pick an orange off a tree and eat it. Wouldn’t that be cool if we could do that? Yeah, we can do that with apple trees and pear trees but Ohio’s too cold for oranges.
Anyway, I guess those people bought those trees and planted them in the yard, or maybe someone gave them the trees. And they planted the tree and it grew and produced oranges.
But what if you went out and bought an orange tree and you planted it in your yard and you put fertilizer on it and watered it and took care of it but it didn’t produce any oranges? What would you think of that tree?
Pretty worthless, right? An orange tree that doesn’t produce oranges isn’t really an orange tree, is it? It’s just a tree. So, if you wanted oranges you’d probably cut down the tree that didn’t produce oranges or dig it up and throw it away and plant a new one, right?
Well, in this morning’s lesson in the Bible, the prophet, Jeremiah and the writer of the first psalm compare us, the people of God, to orange trees. But we don’t produce oranges or even apples or nuts; we produce other fruits.
(Take oranges from bag and read them as you hand them out.)
God calls on us to produce fruits like love and joy, and peace, and patience, and kindness, and generosity, and faithfulness, and gentleness and self-control. Those are called the “fruits of the spirit.” And if we are God’s people, those are the fruits we are supposed to produce.
And if we don’t produce those fruits we’re just like an orange tree that doesn’t produce oranges, right?
An orange tree that doesn’t produce oranges isn’t an orange tree, it’s just a tree.
And the people of God who don’t produce the fruits of the Spirit aren’t the people of God, are they? No, they’re just people.
Closing:
Close with a prayer asking God to help us produce the fruit which God calls us to produce.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Immediate Word, February 17, 2019 issue.
Copyright 2019 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to The Immediate Word service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons and in worship and classroom settings only. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
- That's the Power of Love by Christ Keating — Power and authority are grounded in Jesus who stands with, not over, those who are hurting.
- Second Thoughts: Keep Watch on Those Who are Certain by Tom Willadsen — Trees that grow strong have roots that keep them strong enough to bend.
- Sermon illustrations by Dean Feldmeyer, Ron Love and Mary Austin.
- Worship resources by George Reed that focus on power and the contrast of Jesus’ power to worldly power; not everything is binary, there are degrees between the poles.
- Children’s sermon: Jesus Nuts and Holy Fruit by Dean Feldmeyer — An orange tree that doesn’t bear oranges is just a tree. What are we if we don't produce fruits of the Spirit?
That’s the power of love
by Chris Keating
Luke 6:17-26
In this week’s Gospel passage, Jesus stands eye to eye with human suffering and pain, decrying injustices shown to the poor, the hungry, and rejected. In contrast to Matthew’s extended version of the Sermon on the Mount, Luke’s version is concise and not delivered from the top of a mountain. The content is similar, yet Luke’s mixture of blessings and woes cut to the chase by reframing images of God’s power. Power and authority for Luke are grounded in Jesus who stands with, not over, those who are hurting.
It’s actually a bit like Amazon’s Super Bowl commercial describing Harrison Ford’s ill-fated attempts to keep his dog from ordering truckloads of dogfood from Amazon’s Alexa. The dog, equipped with a bark-recognizing collar, manages to thwart Ford’s control. The hilarious ad points at the foibles of power: we think we have it, until we don’t.
But that is very different from the way we generally understand power.
Take the State of the Union address, with its pomp, circumstances and traditions. The President — no matter the incumbent — displays power from above. Even though we know that the Speaker of the House holds the key to inviting the President to speak, each moment is designed to highlight presidential authority. From entering the chamber until the final applause line, each step is meant to demonstrate control and command.
Jesus’ power, on the other hand, is a power that stands with the disenfranchised and disadvantaged. Coercive power leads to abuses like racist black-face performances, where the powerful white majority mock and deride persons of color. It blows like a winter wind, freezing the otherwise resilient and fertile ground of human capacity and imagination. It enriches self, without ever being concerned with the needs of others.
Jesus interrupts this abusive dynamic, blessing the weak and warning the allegedly-powerful. “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you,” Jesus says. It’s another way of saying that you can’t have hope and salvation with ego and manipulation. It just doesn’t work that way.
In the news
Despite the presidential heft and obligatory nods to American exceptionalism, in the end President Trump’s State of the Union address was essentially a hard sell pitch to build his border wall. The speech, which clocked in as the third longest in modern presidential history, included swipes at partisan investigations, birthday greetings to an elderly survivor of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, and tepid calls for unity, seemed to be constructed around a single point: building a wall.
There were little signs that he intends to use his power to achieve the unity he praised.
“I’ll get it built,” he declared, though he offered no clear path to end the budget stalemate. Even his comments praising the newly-seated women in Congress felt more ironic than irenic. More memorable than his words were Speaker Pelosi’s glances at her copy of his speech and her sarcastic applause at its conclusion. The chorus revved the troops but did little to bridge the nation’s gaping political divide.
In its analysis of the speech, the London Financial Times remarked, “It was the speech of a president whose power is rapidly draining.”
Building a wall is one thing, building bridges is another.
While President Trump remains unequivocal in his demands for a wall, House and Senate negotiators continued exploring options. An announcement was made late Monday that they had reached a deal “in principal” that would avoid another government shutdown while resolving disputes about border security. If the deal advances, it would point to progress at bridging gaps between Republicans and Democrats.
A successful deal would also be a reminder of the power of mutuality and negotiation.
Closing the social, gender, political and economic gaps of our time will require cultivating the power of mutuality. The diversity of our nation and world will require new approaches to handling power. It may even involve studying the work of a woman who died 85 years ago.
The creative management writings of Mary Parker Follett, a New England social worker, philosopher and management pioneer, may prove to be more relevant today than President Trump’s “The Art of the Deal.” Follett, who died in 1933, was a London School of Economics graduate and personal consultant to President Theodore Roosevelt. Central to Follett’s thinking was her advocacy of participatory democracy.
Follett drew a distinction between “power with” (co-active power) and “power over,” or coercive power. Looking beyond the typical organizational hierarchy, Follett argued in 1924 that the central problem of “social relations” was the way power was shared or distributed:
What is the central problem of social relations? It is the question of power… But our task is not to learn where to place power; it is how to develop power. We frequently hear nowadays of ‘transferring power as the panacea for all our ills.’ Genuine power can only be grown, it will slip from every arbitrary hand that grasps it; for genuine power is not coercive control, but coactive control. Coercive power is the curse of the universe; coactive power, the enrichment and advancement of every human soul.
Power with is relational. It arises from eye-to-eye connection and relationship. It does not hide behind hoods and is not disguised by shoe polish. Rather, as Jesus says, it is willing to make sacrifices in love, even if that means turning the expected structures of power upside down.
In the scripture
Following a night of prayer, Jesus in Luke 6:12 turns his attention to calling and training the disciples. The sermon in chapter 6 differs in style and length from Matthew’s version. Instead of speaking from a mountain, Jesus stands “on a level place.” He is surrounded by a great multitude who have been drawn by his reputation and who are captivated by his power. Luke notes that those pressing around Jesus try and touch him, because “power came out from him.”
While Jesus is aware of the crowd, it appears his focus remains on the disciples. The crowd becomes part of the sermon, functioning as living illustrations offers the image of Jesus standing among a hurting, broken mass of people. His words are indeed “on the level.”
The power which comes out of Jesus is the power of reversal. The prevailing social strata are reconsidered: the poor are blessed, the hungry filled, the despised honored. God’s power is indeed power with and not power over. It is co-active, manifesting what commentator F. Scott Spencer notes are the core virtues of love, kindness, and mercy offered to all. (See Spencer, “The Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Apostles,” Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2008, p. 143.)
These virtues are to be reflected in the daily lives of disciples. Luke’s readers would have heard these are words of encouragement. The completion of the kingdom will come in due time, but for now those who follow Jesus are called to do display power in radically new ways: loving enemies, blessing those who oppose you, and resisting violence.
Those who are abiding in this love will experience the blessing of God. On the other hand, Jesus pronounces woes on those who practice exclusionary “power over” and who are comfortable with earthly goods. It’s a message destined to make most North American Christians squirm: “for you have received your consolation.”
In the sermon
Jesus outlines a new understanding of power and relationships. Blessed are preachers who can thoughtfully engage congregations in what it means to live in that sort of mutuality and covenant relationship. Blessed are those who bring joy to the poor and good news to the hungry, comfort to the mourning.
Blessed, yes; but that does not make the construction of such a sermon easy. But the deep divisions within our country and churches demand that preachers consider the plain meaning of Jesus’ sermon. Quite literally, Jesus is leveling with the disciples, telling them “This is not going to be easy.”
Yet the Gospel dares to declare the promise of God who dwells with those who have nothing.
For that reason, a sermon could possibly find its focus not with the well-known beatitudes, but instead with verse 19. Center the congregation in the presence of the crowd. Filled with those in pain and yearning for healing, the crowd is where Jesus emerges, and the locus of his words to the disciples. Context matters — and this Sunday there may be plenty who could identify themselves as among those yearning to be healed.
But Jesus’ words are not only for the scared and misfit. He speaks to those whose relative comfort has privileged them with power. Identifying our comfort so that we may be invited to transformation is an earnest homiletical task, and one that requires thoughtful consideration.
Among the winners of this year’s Grammys was singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile, whose sixth studio album, “By the Way, I Forgive You” won best Americana Album. Carlile understands that her music speaks to those abused by coercive systems of power.
On stage at the Emmy’s, Carlile told the crowd “Americana music is the island of the misfit toys [and] I am such a misfit. I came out of the closet at 15 years old, when I was in high school, and I can assure you that I was never invited to any parties.”
In an interview with Mary Louise Kelly of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Carlile spoke of the hurt she felt when her pastor refused to baptize her because she was gay. The theme of forgiveness, she says, appeared the way an artist chisels away at a sculpture. For Carlile, understanding forgiveness included forgiving the pastor who had withheld baptism. “It took me a long time to forgive him,” she said. “It threatened my faith and self-worth.”
Ultimately, Carlile knew that as she was inviting others to consider forgiveness, she had to also find a way of forgiving the pastor. Such is the power of God: it is a power which is not coerced but rather comes freely. It is the power of love.
SECOND THOUGHTS
Keep Watch on Those Who are Certain
by Tom Willadsen
Jeremiah 17:5-10, Psalm 1, 1 Corinthians 15:12-20, Luke 6:17-26
Luke 6:17-26
People are coming great distances to see, hear and touch Jesus. Lots of people are travelling great distances. Healing is coming out from him and with this set up he speaks…to his disciples. We know this passage as the beginning of Luke’s version of The Sermon on the Mount found in Matthew’s gospel. Luke gives Matthew’s version a few tweaks. Luke has the blessings that Matthew had, but he adds woes, the other side of blessing. Today’s reading has been used in ways to defend injustice, even leading some to say that one should not work for equity, but embrace the suffering of poverty — for the greater reward that Christ promises. The poor will receive “the kingdom of God;” Jesus says it right there in the red letters! Those who are hungry will be filled…sometime. Those who mourn will laugh.
That last one is true in a way that is often overlooked. The contrast is not between those who have losses to grieve and those who do not have losses to grieve. The contrast is between those who feel and express their grief, those who move through grief, as opposed to those who keep themselves from feeling or expressing it. Those who experience grief, who do not repress it, will laugh.
What kind of recruitment plan could Jesus have in mind in telling his disciples (maybe those crowds who have come all the way from Tyre and Sidon can eavesdrop) that they should rejoice when they are afflicted as the prophets who spoke the Lord’s word before them were? Dietrich Bonhoeffer made the same point in The Cost of Discipleship, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
Today’s portion from Luke turns the blessings into woes. Or perhaps more clearly, the last three verses offer a balance. Those who are high and mighty now will be brought down. The idea that the wealthy have already gotten their reward may be a difficult one for our congregations to hear. The mainline churches I’ve served have been composed of people who are wealthy by any standard in human history — except for those who are even wealthier than us in the First World. Where is the Good News for them/us?
Jeremiah 17:5-10 / Psalm 1
It is not clear whether Psalm 1 is indeed the first psalm or a preface that helps the reader anticipate and benefit from reading the psalms that follow. It appears that Jeremiah was familiar with the words of today’s psalm reading; he drops them into this morning’s lesson from the Hebrew Bible.
Consider trees. They grow both deep and tall. While their roots are invisible to us who live and move and have our being above ground, they are the source of trees’ stability and nourishment. Those that survive in parched, barren places have roots that reach deep underground for the moisture they need to survive. Deep roots enable them to withstand seasons of drought. And when trees are near water they do not need to work very hard to find what they need to live and bear fruit. They draw strength from their depth just as wise people draw direction from studying the Torah, not only the first five books of what some Christians call “The Old Testament,” but the totality of the Lord’s revealed instruction. The kind of stability Jeremiah and the psalmist endorse does not spring up in a day, like the castor bean plant that brought Jonah temporary respite as he sat on the hill waiting for the Lord’s fireworks to destroy Nineveh.
The wicked are not so. They cannot endure times of drought. Compare chaff to trees, as Jeremiah does. A breeze blows chaff away. Chaff is so light, of so little consequence, that just a puff of air sends it off, leaving the weightier, more substantial grain.
But the wisdom of trees is not rooted only in their roots, nor their strength. The truly strong are strong enough to bend.
There's a tree out in the backyard
That never has been broken by the wind
And the reason it’s still standing
It was strong enough to bend
Tanya Tucker had a hit country song 30 years ago expressing the wisdom of trees in “Strong Enough to Bend,” by Beth Nielsen Chapman / Don Schlitz
1 Corinthians 15:12-20
In last week’s 1 Corinthians reading Paul laid the groundwork for today’s reading. It seems the Corinthians have written to Paul so he knows some of the issues they are wrestling with. Today he takes on the notion that some Corinthians believe that there is no resurrection of the dead. The consequences are too much for Paul to bear. If that is the case he has wasted his time in preaching Christ to the Corinthians. If that is the case he has misrepresented the Living God to them. If that is the case those who knew Christ who have since died, are really dead. If there is no resurrection, then all those witnesses Paul mentioned in last week’s reading were mistaken. If there is no resurrection then we are all still in our sins.
Paul is writing with great passion because the stakes are so high. It’s the difference between hope and despair. Paul’s point is not to explain in theological terms the significance of Christ’s death and resurrection — he saved that for seminarians to ponder in the coming millennia — he was just going back to the facts, the witnesses, the credible, verifiable truth that God’s power was demonstrated in Christ’s rising from the dead. That is the power that welcomed and enfolded those who had died in Christ prior to Christ’s return. That is the power that was strong enough to turn Paul from the church’s chief antagonist to its most vocal (and humble, just ask him) spreader of the Good News. That is the power to remove sin, power to make a person completely new.
For the Corinthians, at least for those who have been denying the resurrection, Paul lays out the issue, the confusion of where one should place one’s trust.
In the news
Last week’s State of the Union message revealed, again, that our current president sees issues in a strictly binary way. It seems to me he much prefers winning to governing. It remains to be seen whether his endorsement of working with the Democrats’ new return to power in the House of Representatives will come to pass. By the time you, dear readers, are perusing these lines another government shut-down may be looming, or actually in effect, depending on your sermon composition schedule. It’s a time of brinksmanship, power plays, symbolic gestures and rhetoric.
The President made an emotional case for the threat that immigrants who enter the country without documentation pose to the people, and his conviction that a wall will stop them. He has bet a lot of political capital on the wall as a symbol of his determination and our national strength. From where I sit it appears that he has put his trust in getting “his wall” built. While he may believe sincerely that The Wall will make us safer, he certainly trusts delivering The Wall will improve his popularity and possibly lead to his re-election.
Does the parable of the farmer who pulled down his barns to make bigger barns resonate here?
What about the happy or blessed person who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord?
While today’s lessons appear to show stark contrasts between blessing and woe, wisdom and folly, trust and its opposite they needed to be viewed with a wider lens.
The trees that are strong and healthy and drought resistant didn't appear in an instant. They grew both taller and deeper for many years. The wise one who delights in the Lord’s instruction did not gain wisdom on the opening day of first grade. The wise one has spent years in relationship with the living God, creator of heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in it — and the Law. And for the record, Jesus said old wine is better than new. These things take time.
Jesus sets no time limits on how long one must grieve before tears turn into laughter. Suffering will be turned into blessing, Christ promises, but not overnight. Yes, there’s a difference between hope and despair, but neither is governed by a toggle switch.
Looking for nuance in today’s readings that at first reading seem to be such stark opposites, I found this quote:
“We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.” — Eric Hoffer
True faith, deep trust, take time. Keep watch on those who are certain. Certainty is the root of extremism. Trees that grow strong have roots that keep them strong enough to bend.
ILLUSTRATIONS
From team member Dean Feldmeyer
1 Corinthians 15:12-20, Luke 6:17-26
Kinds of power
The Epistle and Gospel lessons for this Sunday both speak of different kinds of power. In the Corinthians text Paul speaks of power given to Christians through the resurrection of Jesus. In the Gospel lesson Luke speaks of the power which flowed out of Jesus and healed those who came near to him.
Psychologists John French and Bertram Raven created a list of five types of social power that effect relationships between people in both formal and informal settings. The original list of five was later amended two others.1
Legitimate or Titular Power is sometimes also called titular power is the type of power that comes with a title or position: president, C.E.O., chairperson, etc. Used wisely this type of power can achieve much, it is fragile, however, and can be easily undone if abused.
Coercive Power uses threats or punishments to manipulate the behavior of others. It rarely produces respect or admiration and most often leaves the user resented or even hated by those over whom he or she has power.
Reward Power is usually described as the opposite of coercive power in that it finds its success through rewards or the promise of rewards. Used well, those over whom the leader has power come to see themselves as having an investment in the goals of the group.
Referent Power comes from personal charisma or likeability or sometimes just being nice. People enjoy being around or even desire to be like people with referent power and they desire to give such people what they want.
Expert Power is held by someone who has special knowledge or skills in an area.
Additional Types of Power:
Informational Power is held by a person with certain information that others do not possess. This person will be sought to provide insight and guidance in areas where others have no knowledge. This power differs slightly from expert power in that is limited in scope and can be lost once others have the same information.
Connection Power is closely related to referent power, but different in that a person may have an advantage over others simply because of who they know.
* * *
1 Corinthians 15:12-20, Luke 6:17-26
11 tips to becoming powerful
According to entrepreneur.com, these are the 11 characteristics of powerful people you can cultivate:2
1. They are confident.
Powerful people are confident. They aren’t afraid to tackle risks and challenges head-on. They can appreciate the contributions of others and the importance of small achievements. People are naturally attracted to confident people.
2. They don’t seek fame and fortune.
Powerful people aren’t looking to flaunt their success. They tend to focus on what is best for the group — company, community, club, etc.
3. They take up more space.
A 2010 experiment conducted by psychologists Dana Carney and Amy Cuddy found that subjects who stayed in a position that took up more space for longer than one minute actually felt more powerful. This was caused by a biochemical reaction that increased testosterone and decreased cortisol.
4. They know when to speak.
They don’t talk a whole lot but what they do say is useful, powerful and insightful.
5. They break eye contact.
You’ve probably heard that the best speakers and leaders make strong eye contact. It turns out that this isn’t exactly the case. Based on research by psychologists Frances Chen and Julia Minson, it was found that eye contact can actually be counterproductive because it lessens persuasion. Instead of looking into someone else’s eyes, leaders should look at their audience member’s mouth. Go figure.
6. They aren’t afraid of criticism.
When you’re in a position of power, some of your decisions will be unpopular. Powerful people are not afraid of the backlash.
7. They look powerful.
Mark Zuckerberg being the exception which proves the rule, powerful leaders set themselves apart from others by dressing, speaking and acting like a distinguished professionals.
8. They are team players.
While they may have a larger role than others on the team, they never undervalue the hard work of other team members.
9. They're flexible.
Life is unpredictable. Powerful people are able to make the right adjustments to solve the problem at hand.
10. They ask better questions.
Powerful people ask astute questions that tend to result in good and helpful answers.
11. They pick a hard seat and carry heavy objects.
According to study published in Science, people who opted to sit in an uncomfortable chair become tougher at negotiating because the rigid sensation seems to lessen a shift in decisions. In the same study, it was also discovered that the subjects who were carrying heavier objects appeared to be more important.
* * *
1 Corinthians 15:12-20, Luke 6:17-26
The most powerful person in history
Any answer to this question would, of necessity, be subjective but, using the classical measures and types of power, self-described history buff, Balaji Viswanathan, writing for Quara and, then, Slate, nominates the Indian Emperor
Ashoka, aka Ashoka the Great of the Maurya Dynasty, who ruled almost all of the Indian subcontinent from c. 268 to 232 BCE.
Ashoka ruled over 44 percent of the world population with close to a half of world Gross Domestic Product of his time, and he did so for nearly half a century.
After beginning his rule as a warrior king, Ashoka became horrified by the violence and bloodshed of war. He converted to the little-known cult called Buddhism and sponsored monks whom he sent throughout and into the furthest reaches of his empire turning it into the world’s fourth-biggest faith. Ashoka’s actions directly impacted more than three-quarters of the known world of his time — from Japan to Afghanistan. Asia was suddenly connected and also pacified by this new faith.
Ashoka realized the folly of violence and impacted many cultures with his own. This, according to Viswanathan, hardly any evidence of complaint in any of the cultures he impacted. Even today, after 2,300 years, he is celebrated across Asia, and the “Pillars of Truth” he left all over the subcontinent are still intact.3
1 Elisabeth Natter. "5 Types of Power in Businesses" Chron, February 04, 2019.
2 Murry Newlands. "11 Characteristics of Powerful People You Can Cultivate" Entrepreneur September 16, 2015.
3 Quora Contributor "Who Was the Most Powerful Person in History?" Slate Dec 18, 2013.
* * * * * * * * *
From team member Ron Love:
Luke 6:21-23 “Blessed are you…”
The Unicode Consortium is a nonprofit organization that provides standards for text on the internet and oversees emojis. Unicode recently approved 59 new emojis, as well as variants for 230 options. The new symbols include an otter, a sloth and a waffle. But most significant is this year’s emphasis on inclusiveness. Recent additions also include a hearing aid, a prosthetic limb, sign language, a cane, a wheelchair, a guide dog and couples holding hands with each having a different skin tone. The dating app Tinder said the new emojis allows couples of different races and genders to be included in the “universal language of the digital age.”
* * *
Luke 6:21-23 “Blessed are you…”
Joanna Gaines, along with her husband, host HGTV Fixer Upper. Prior to being launched into stardom, Joanna gave little thought to her Instagram postings. Before reaching celebrity status she said of her postings, “There wasn’t any pressure to post anything at all, so whenever I did, it didn’t really cross my mind whether or not people would ‘like it.’” Now, when she makes a post, she scrutinizes every aspect of the picture. She will even place a flower pot in the background if she feels that it is necessary to enhance her image. Regarding posting with her new status Gaines said, “I could feel insecurity start to creep in, and posting a photo was no longer an act of enjoying the in-the-moments of life but rather a more calculated decision. With every picture I found myself critiquing if there were messy backgrounds or blurry smiles.” She went on to say that she “realized that I was letting this small square on my phone become yet another thing to perfect.” She then became concerned if her life “looks as good as someone else’s?” This led to excessive anxiety. She realized that, “It is so easy to let social media rob us of authentic moments.” Gaines is now aware of the “red flags of comparison.” So, now she shares the “moment” rather than get caught up in staging the perfect picture.
***
Jeremiah 17:5 “Cursed are those…”
Luke 6:24 “But woe…”
It has now become public that Roman Catholic priests have not only sexually abused children and youth, but they also sexual abused nuns. Like the hierarchy did regarding pedophile priests, they covered up the abuse the women who wore the habit. On Tuesday, February 5, aboard the papal plane returning to Rome from the United Arab Emirates, reporters asked Pope Francis about these new allegations against the church. He admitted they were true, but went on to say “It’s not that everyone does this, but there have been priests and bishops who have.” When the Pope was asked if he would take a similarly broad approach to this issue as he did with pedophile priests, he replied, “Should we do something more? Yes. Is there the will? Yes. But it’s a path that we have already begun.”
***
Jeremiah 17:5 “Cursed are those…”
Luke 6:24 “But woe…”
Four years ago Kobani, a Syrian city near the Turkish border, was liberated from ISIS contol. Even though several years have passed since the liberation, the Church of the Brethren is still receiving converts from Islam. Even though ISIS is a violent faction of Islam, for many people in Syria it still represents Islamic beliefs and practices. The citizens witnessed multiple beheadings of its residents by ISIS of those who did not believe in Allah or who violated the laws of the Islamic religion. One man was put in jail for six months for not knowing certain tenets of Islam. For the new Christian converts coming to the Church of the Brethren they are accepting Christianity because they could not accept the ISIS violence that was done in the name of Allah. Farhad Jasim, a Christian convert from Islam, told NBC News, “If ISIS represents Islam, I don’t want to be Muslim anymore. Their god is not my God.” He went on to say, “After I witnessed [ISIS] brutality with my own eyes, I started to be skeptical about my belief. It didn’t take me long to discover that Christianity was the religion I was searching for.”
* * *
Luke 6:18 “they had come to hear him…”
Last week House Speaker Nancy Pelosi shared her favorite Bible verse with a group of Christian college and university presidents. The verse reads, “To minister to the needs of God’s creation is an act of worship. To ignore those needs is to dishonor the God who made us.” The problem is, Pelosi is unable to find the verse in the Bible. She told the college presidents, “I can’t find it in the Bible, but I quote it all the time and I keep reading and reading the Bible. I know it’s there someplace. It’s supposed to be in Isiah.” Will Kynes, the Old Testament professor at Whitworth University, and Greg MaGee, the biblical professor at Taylor University, both concur that there is no such verse in the Bible.
* * *
Luke 6:21-23 “Blessed are you…”
Gateway Church is a megachurch in Dallas, Texas. The senior pastor is Robert Morris. In November the church opened a campus at the Coffield Unit maximum security prison in Anderson County. A second campus has recently been opened. The first campus has become an evangelical success with 650 inmates attending worship and 500 inmates dedicating their lives to Christ. The inmates perform all the duties of a normal church service, pastored by an ex-offender Stephen Wilson. Pastor Morris told Fox News, “At Gateway Church, we’re all about people because God is all about people.” He went on to say, “Many of the men and women inside prison have been forgotten by society, but we want them to know we love them and God loves them, and they are our brothers and sisters in Christ.”
* * *
Jeremiah 17:5 “Cursed are those…”
Luke 6:24 “But woe…”
Zaxby’s restaurant, in a limited market area, ran a Super Bowl advertisement that tried to take business away from its competitor Chick-fil-A. The message was that Zaxby’s is open on Sundays, and Chick-fil-A, a Christian based restaurant, remains closed on Sundays. The founder of Chick-fil-A, Truett Cathy, established this policy in 1946 when he opened his first restaurant in Hapeville, Georgia. The ad shows former NFL player Jeff Saturday and former Major League Baseball player Rick Monday (note the names of the two players Saturday and Monday) walking up to a restaurant as an announcer says, “The only thing that comes between them is where to go for chicken on Sundays.” They try the door at Zaxby’s, and think the restaurant is closed. Then they realize they need to push on the door, not pull on it for it to open. Then the announcer describes a Zaxby’s sandwich and finishes with this remark, “On Sunday and every day, only at Zaxby’s.” The commercial went viral on social media, with most respondents defending Chick-fil-A’s policy.
* * *
Jeremiah 17:5 “Cursed are those…”
Luke 6:24 “But woe…”
Luke 6:21-23 “Blessed are you…”
Pope Francis made the first papal visit to the Arabian Peninsula, the birthplace of Islam. In that historic location he also offered Mass. In his sermon on Monday, February 4, he called for world peace. He asked world leaders to resist the “logic of armed power…the arming of borders, the raising of walls.” The Pope went on to say, “There is no alternative: we will either build the future together or there will not be a future.”
***
1 Corinthians 15:13 “If there is no resurrection…”
In 1844 a group of 50,000 followers expected the immediate return of Jesus. So strongly did they hold these beliefs, that many sold their possessions and others let their fields lie fallow. When Jesus did not return the aftermath was called the Great Disappointment. Some, sadly, even committed suicide. In May of that year, the remaining followers organized themselves into a church. They called themselves Adventists for they expected the immediate return — advent — of Jesus.
* * *
Luke 6:21-23 “Blessed are you…”
Fred Rogers was invited to be the baccalaureate speaker for Boston University’s class of 1992. During the address he shared from one of his favorite books, The Little Prince. The passage he cited discussed that which is most important about people “is invisible to the eye.” Personal significance is not found in honors and in prizes but in integrity. He then asked the class this question, “What is essential about you that is invisible to the eye?” He then paused for a considerable amount of time, allowing each student and faculty member to ponder the question. Even the president of the university, sitting to his side with his tasseled cap and impressive gold medallion, was gripped by the question. It was not a time for self-absorption, but one for self-reflection. Rogers then broke the silence and answered his own question by singing the song, “It’s You I Like.” Everyone sat in silence, and some even cried, as they listened to these lyrics, “It’s you I like. It’s not the things you wear. It’s not the way you do your hair, but it’s you I like. The way you are right now. The way deep down inside you. Not the things that you hide — not your diplomas, they’re just beside you. But it’s you I like. Every part of you.” This is the love of total acceptance, blemishes and all.
* * * * * * * * *
From team member Mary Austin:
Luke 6:17-26
Being Filled Up
In his sermon on the plain, as Luke has it, Jesus promises reversals from people’s current woes. God’s blessing is coming, he tells the crowd. “‘Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.” One non-profit, Vehicles for Changes is making Jesus’ promise come to life. The group re-purposes former school buses, and turns them into homes called skoolies. “While there’s a growing movement amid skyrocketing housing prices to transform school buses into homes, appropriating them to shelter the homeless, as we are doing, is still unique. Ours is the only nonprofit we know of housing children this way.” The first family to receive this kind of home was squeezed out of their previous home by rising costs. “The Floods’ rent had gone up and David had lost his job — that was about all it took for the family to end up homeless. They had been living in their car for seven months, roaming parking lots for places to sleep. ‘We didn’t think it would happen to us — but it did,’ David tells me while standing outside his new skoolie home. ‘It’s not just the uneducated. I’m finishing my master’s degree. I had nowhere to work, so the skoolie enables me to get it done. I’m so relieved.’”
As a bonus, families living in a converted bus don’t look homeless. They look cool. “And here’s the thing — the idea of living in a skoolie that you can build and own for $30,000 has been trending for years among students and young professionals who don’t want to get trapped in a day job, paying off a mortgage all their lives. Skoolie Nation, a Facebook page that offers advice to those building and living in converted buses, predicts several thousand new homes coming on line every year. So, this home we’re offering unsheltered families is among the fresh new ideas of the upwardly mobile. We hope that continues so our families aren’t further stigmatized.”
The empty places get filled up, thanks to an innovative group seeking to fill in the gaps, and bring blessings to the hungry and homeless.
* * *
Luke 6:17-26
Weeping No More
After the deaths of her parents, Mallory McDuff found herself deep in grief. Living without their presence left her raw with grief. “I carried my parents’ deaths inside me, like the weight of the soil. I wasn’t sure how to be a single mom after the sudden deaths of both of my parents, whose marriage had only gotten stronger with time. Approaching my 40th birthday, I nursed my newborn daughter in their four-poster double bed I inherited, facing the Blue Ridge Mountains, underneath their quilt in the colorful pattern of Grandmother’s Flower Garden.” As time went on, the quilt frayed, like life does. She looked for someone to repair it, as “the quilt’s white cotton background was yellowed and nearly brown in places. The bunting escaped from the stitches like bunny tails poking out of a rabbit hole. When my children flung themselves on the bed, their growing limbs tore at the seams. I called fabric stores and wrote Facebook messages to quilting bees. One hot summer day, I heard from Sharron, The Quilt Lady, who had seen my online pleas and made repairs at reasonable prices.” The Quilt Lady arrived “with her car filled with stacks of colorful spools because she taught sewing at the women’s prison, where she precut the squares because her students weren’t allowed to have scissors. She described the process of soaking cloth with Lipton tea bags to match the tint of my mother’s material. After one year, she’d repaired 127 colored hexagons and 39 white diamonds, working 80 hours in small blocks because of arthritis. When we placed the patchwork blanket on my sheets, I read aloud to my daughters the embroidered names of those who’d worked on the quilt, including their grandmother, Ann Jones McDuff.”
Her father was represented in her life by the family toboggan, “which stood like a sentinel outside my front door in North Carolina, although the old wood had splintered with age.” A friend offered to fix it, and then brought back a gorgeously restored sled before the first snowfall. “The wood glistened with a waxy sheen, as he’d replaced rotted sections with solid pieces. He’d found the exact replica of the original screws. Strangers asked my daughters for a ride on the faster flyer on the big hill on campus, and we shared the sled and its story. Four adults piled onto the wooden frame, setting a distance record, met by applause that echoed in the valley.”
The quilt and the sled have restored her parents’ presence to her, and turned her weeping into laughter.
* * *
Luke 6:17-26
Jesus and Wisdom
As he instructs the crowd in the way of blessings, Jesus is offering them insight for living that contradicts the prevailing wisdom of the day. If anyone in the crowd thought that money was a sign of God’s favor, Jesus has another vision to present. People seek wisdom in all kinds of ways, as three philosophers recently found. They set up a booth on the street near their convention, with a banner reading “Ask a Philosopher.” They wondered if anyone would take them up on the offer of free wisdom. “Then someone stopped. At first glance, it was hard to tell if she was a penniless nomad or an emeritus professor, but then she took off her hat and psychedelic scarf and came over to the desk and announced, “I’ve got a question. I’m in my late 60s. I’ve just had life threatening surgery, but I got through it.” She showed us the jagged scar on her neck.” Then she announced that she didn’t know what to do with the rest of her life. What kind of help could the three philosophers offer?
“And then it happened: A crowd gathered. At first I thought they were there to eavesdrop, but as it turned out they had their own existential concerns. A group of teenagers engaged the philosopher on my right. One young woman, who turned out to be a sophomore in college, stepped away from the group with a serious concern. “Why can’t I be happier in my life? I’m only 20. I should be as happy as I’m ever going to be right now, but I’m not. Is this it?” It was my turn. “Research has shown that what makes us happy is achieving small goals one after the other,” I said. “If you win the lottery, within six months you’ll probably be back to your baseline of happiness. Same if you got into an accident. You can’t just achieve happiness and stay there, you have to pursue it.” “So I’m stuck?” she said. “No…” I explained. “Your role in this is huge. You’ve got to choose the things that make you happy one by one. That’s been shown from Aristotle all the way down to cutting-edge psychological research. Happiness is a journey, not a destination.” She brightened a bit, while her friends were still puzzling over whether color was a primary or secondary property. They thanked us and moved on.”
As the philosopher says, “During the quiet I reflected for a moment on what had just happened. A group of strangers had descended upon us not to make fun, but because they were carrying around some real philosophical baggage that had long gone unanswered. If you’re in a spiritual crisis, you go to your minister or rabbi. If you have psychological concerns, you might seek out a therapist. But what to do if you don’t quite know where you fit into this world and you’re tired of carrying that burden alone?”
Or, as Jesus might says, “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.”
* * *
Luke 6:17-26
Jesus and Marie Kondo
As he teaches the crowd, Jesus invites them to reconsider the role of possessions in their lives. In contrast to how people then and now think about these things, he says, “woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now.” He’s promising a re-ordering of the world. Our value comes from the way God sees us, and not our material worth.
Marie Kondo, the de-cluttering guru who now has her own show on Netflix, talks about re-ordering our own personal worlds by shedding things we don’t need. Her view of possessions mirrors what Jesus is saying, in a much smaller way, but with a parallel spiritual emphasis.
Kondo says we should only keep the items that “spark joy” for us. The things we bought to impress someone can go, along with gifts that we don’t need, and things that have worn out. One writer who followed these instructions talks about a feeling of spiritual relief in clearing things out. When she set aside a day for clearing things out, she says, “Six hours later, I’d filled 12 bags with non-joy-giving clothes. Instead of panic, I felt relief — 12 times lighter.” She adds, feeling the kind of freedom that Jesus teaches about, “All sorts of decisions are falling into place. This might be the best payoff of all: Once you’ve looked at hundreds of things and asked yourself if they give you joy, decision-making gets a lot easier: which book to read, which projects to pursue, what to make for dinner, whether to say yes or no to the many optional obligations that come our way.”
* * *
Luke 6:17-26
Jesus and the complication of possessions
Talking to a group of people who probably don’t have much in the way of material possessions, Jesus says that their worth is not measured by their wealth or their current situation. He has a stern word for the people who have too much — including most of us. Reflecting on the place of possessions in our lives, a writer for the New York Times says that Marie Kondo came along at just the right time to inspire us to think about our own stuff, and why we have so much more than we need. Taffy Brodesser-Akner says, “By the time her book arrived, America had entered a time of peak stuff, when we had accumulated a mountain of disposable goods — from Costco toilet paper to Isaac Mizrahi swimwear by Target — but hadn’t (and still haven’t) learned how to dispose of them. We were caught between an older generation that bought a princess phone in 1970 for $25 that was still working and a generation that bought $600 iPhones, knowing they would have to replace them within two years. We had the princess phone and the iPhone, and we couldn’t dispose of either. We were burdened by our stuff; we were drowning in it.” We have created our own woes, to use the word that Jesus uses.
The lessons work for more than just an excess of tools, baseball cards or sweaters. At a workshop, one women said, “I found the opposite of happiness is not sadness. It’s chaos.” “Another woman said she KonMaried a bad boyfriend. Having tidied everything in her home and finding she still distinctly lacked happiness, she held her boyfriend in her hands, realized he no longer sparked joy and got rid of him.”
Jesus points us to the fact that wealth and poverty are spiritual issues. In our own lives, we know that our things reflect our deepest values.
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Jeremiah 17:5-10
Trust
The prophet Jeremiah says, “Thus says the Lord: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord.” Trusting our fellow human beings without a good reason puts us on shaky ground, and counterintelligence expert Robin Dreeke says we can be wiser with our trust. We place our trust in God, and yet we have to interact with each other. Dreeke says, “Whenever there are two human beings interacting and you hope to move forward, you’re not going to do it without trust.” Dreeke says that much of building trust is about serving one another. “Ultimately, if you’re talking in terms of what the priorities of others are and you offer resources for them to achieve those things, that’s what starts begetting trust. And do it with no expectation of reciprocity, which is the real key. You can’t do it for the gain.”
We often encounter people who seem untrustworthy, as Jeremiah warns us, “Negativity is happening mostly because people are insecure. They are trying to demonstrate their own value to other people with inappropriate behavior, whether they’re name-dropping, self-promoting and all these things. When I encounter someone who has annoying, negative behaviors, the first thing I try to do is understand them. I try to understand why they are insecure and what are they insecure about. As soon as I can discover those insecurities, I can start validating them and validating other aspects of them. Everyone has something they’re working on, and everyone has great strengths. If you take time to focus on the strengths and validate those strengths, the negativity will start flowing away.”
These are all spiritual principles, although Dreeke doesn’t frame them that way. When we follow the example of Jesus, who came along long after Jeremiah, we become trustworthy, even as mere mortals.
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Jeremiah 17:5-10
Trust, part two
Jeremiah is probably right, with his dour view of trusting our fellow human beings. Of course he’s right that our primary trust belongs to God. But human beings can be surprisingly trustworthy. Paul Bellis Jones decided to test whether people can be trusted. He left his camera, in a bag, on a mountaintop, asking hikers to take a picture of themselves and leave the camera for the next groups of hikers. With the camera, “over 30 ramblers took photographs of themselves at the beauty spot, which overlooks two large rocks near the summit. When the film ran out four days later, the camera was personally returned to his house by a National Park warden…” Jones launched the experiment after talking to a friend, who insisted that you can’t trust anyone these days. He didn't want to believe that, so he set up the experiment to see what might happen.
He started with a picture of his own friends, and then didn’t know what would happen next. Even the park warden who brought the camera back demonstrated that he could be trusted, along with all the people who shared in the experiment. Perhaps we can trust one another, even when we place our deep trust in God.
WORSHIP
by George Reed
Call to Worship:
Leader: Happy are we when we do not follow the advice of the wicked.
People: For our delight is in the law of God on which we meditate day and night.
Leader: Then we are like trees planted by streams of water.
People: We yield our fruit in its season and our leaves do not wither.
Leader: In all that we do, we prosper as we walk in God’s ways.
People: For God watches over the way of the righteous.
OR
Leader: We come to worship the One who created all that is.
People: With reverence and joy we stand before our God.
Leader: The power of God is not in thunder and might.
People: The power of God is in love which knows no bounds.
Leader: The power of God is given to us to be given away.
People: We share the power of God’s love with all.
Hymns and Songs:
All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name
UMH: 154/155
H82: 450/451
PH: 142/143
AAHH: 292/293/294
NNBH: 3/5
NCH: 304
CH: 91/92
LBW: 328/329
ELA: 634
W&P: 100/106
AMEC: 4/5/6
Renew: 45
A Mighty Fortress Is Our God
UMH: 110
H82: 687/688
PH: 260
AAHH: 124
NNBH: 37
NCH: 439/440
CH: 65
LBW: 228/229
ELA: 503/504/505
W&P: 588
AMEC: 54
STLT: 200
I Sing the Almighty Power of God
UMH: 152
H82: 398
PH: 288
NCH: 12
W&P: 31
Renew: 54
Jesus Shall Reign
UMH: 157
H82: 544
PH: 423
NNBH: 10
NCH: 300
CH: 95
LBW: 530
ELA: 424
W&P: 341
AMEC: 96
Renew: 296
O Christ, the Healer
UMH: 265
NCH: 175
CH: 503
LBW: 360
ELA: 610
W&P: 638
Renew: 191
Heal Me, Hands of Jesus
UMH: 262
CH: 504
W&P: 636
We Meet You, O Christ
UMH: 257
PH: 311
CH: 183
W&P: 616
The Gift of Love
UMH: 408
AAHH: 522
CH: 526
W&P: 397
Renew: 155
Cares Chorus
CCB: 53
Turn Your Eyes upon Jesus
CCB: 55
Music Resources Key:
UMH: United Methodist Hymnal
H82: The Hymnal 1982
PH: Presbyterian Hymnal
AAHH: African American Heritage Hymnal
NNBH: The New National Baptist Hymnal
NCH: The New Century Hymnal
CH: Chalice Hymnal
LBW: Lutheran Book of Worship
ELA: Evangelical Lutheran Worship
W&P: Worship & Praise
AMEC: African Methodist Episcopal Church Hymnal
STLT: Singing the Living Tradition
CCB: Cokesbury Chorus Book
Renew: Renew! Songs & Hymns for Blended Worship
Prayer for the Day/Collect
O God who has all power in heaven and on earth:
Grant us the wisdom to realize you give your power away
and grant us the courage to give our power to others;
through Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
OR
We worship you, O God, because you hold all power. You are the creator and the redeemer of all. You come to us in your power and give it to us. Help us to be your true children who share our power with the powerless. Amen.
Prayer of Confession
Leader: Let us confess to God and before one another our sins and especially our addiction to power.
People: We confess to you, O God, and before one another that we have sinned. We are a people addicted to power. Even if we don’t have it, we worship it. Whether it is on the football field, the corporate board room and a mafia movie, we are enamored by power and it is usually brutish. We forget who we are. We forget who God is. We forget that real power is in love. God forgive us. Amen.
Leader: Because God is love, God does forgive us. And God continues to give us love and grace to give to others.
Prayers of the People
Praise and glory and honor are yours, O God, because out of love you called forth all of creation. By you very word, all that exists came into being.
(The following paragraph may be used if a separate prayer of confession has not been used.)
We confess to you, O God, and before one another that we have sinned. We are a people addicted to power. Even if we don’t have it, we worship it. Whether it is on the football field, the corporate board room and a mafia movie, we are enamored by power and it is usually brutish. We forget who we are. We forget who God is. We forget that real power is in love. God forgive us.
We thank you for your love that saves us from the destruction that false power offers us. We thank you that you never leave us but always seek our salvation.
(Other thanksgivings may be offered.)
We pray for each other and for all who suffer at the hands of brutal power, whether they wield it or face its violence.
(Other intercessions may be offered.)
All these things we ask in the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ who taught us to pray together saying:
Our Father....Amen.
(Or if the Our Father is not used at this point in the service)
All this we ask in the Name of the Blessed and Holy Trinity. Amen.
Children’s Sermon Starter
Talk to the children about power. You can talk about super heroes or rockets or sports figures. We like power but the greatest power is love. We celebrate love’s power every Sunday when we come and see the empty cross. Nothing could stop the power of God’s love which raised Jesus from the tomb.
CHILDREN'S SERMON
Jesus Nuts and Holy Fruits
by Dean Feldmeyer
Jeremiah 17:5-10, Psalm 1
You will need:
- Oranges — Tangerines or other light-colored fruits will also work. If you have a small group of kids, one for every child would be nice. If you have a large group a half dozen or so for demonstration purposes will be sufficient.
- A Felt Tip Marker — My favorite is a black Sharpie but others may work.
- A bag or box to hold the fruits until you are ready to show them to the children.
Using the marker, print on each orange one of the fruits of the Spirit as described in Galatians 5: 22-23 -- love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Leave one orange blank with nothing written on it.
Presentation:
(Holding up the blank orange.)
Who can tell me where oranges come from?
That’s right, they grow on trees. This one was grown on a tree in Florida. Sometimes we get them from California or Mexico or countries in Latin America or sometimes even as far away as Israel. But our point this morning is that they grow on trees. Can you name other fruits or nuts that grown on trees? (Apples, bananas, pecans, walnuts, etc.)
I remember the first time I went to Florida and we drove down the highway and saw these vast, huge orchards of trees with orange balls on them and I said to Mrs. Feldmeyer, “Oh, wow, look at those trees. What do you suppose those orange balls are?” And she said to me, “Those are oranges, Dean. We’re in Florida, remember?”
I felt so silly! I had forgotten that oranges grew on trees in Florida. And lucky us, we were in Florida in orange season. It wasn’t long before we saw people selling oranges in big bags alongside the road.
And you know what else we discovered? All oranges aren’t grown in big orchards. Down there, in Florida, some people have orange trees growing in their yards. Yep, they can just go out in the yard and pick an orange off a tree and eat it. Wouldn’t that be cool if we could do that? Yeah, we can do that with apple trees and pear trees but Ohio’s too cold for oranges.
Anyway, I guess those people bought those trees and planted them in the yard, or maybe someone gave them the trees. And they planted the tree and it grew and produced oranges.
But what if you went out and bought an orange tree and you planted it in your yard and you put fertilizer on it and watered it and took care of it but it didn’t produce any oranges? What would you think of that tree?
Pretty worthless, right? An orange tree that doesn’t produce oranges isn’t really an orange tree, is it? It’s just a tree. So, if you wanted oranges you’d probably cut down the tree that didn’t produce oranges or dig it up and throw it away and plant a new one, right?
Well, in this morning’s lesson in the Bible, the prophet, Jeremiah and the writer of the first psalm compare us, the people of God, to orange trees. But we don’t produce oranges or even apples or nuts; we produce other fruits.
(Take oranges from bag and read them as you hand them out.)
God calls on us to produce fruits like love and joy, and peace, and patience, and kindness, and generosity, and faithfulness, and gentleness and self-control. Those are called the “fruits of the spirit.” And if we are God’s people, those are the fruits we are supposed to produce.
And if we don’t produce those fruits we’re just like an orange tree that doesn’t produce oranges, right?
An orange tree that doesn’t produce oranges isn’t an orange tree, it’s just a tree.
And the people of God who don’t produce the fruits of the Spirit aren’t the people of God, are they? No, they’re just people.
Closing:
Close with a prayer asking God to help us produce the fruit which God calls us to produce.
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The Immediate Word, February 17, 2019 issue.
Copyright 2019 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to The Immediate Word service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons and in worship and classroom settings only. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
