When You Are Still Called
Children's sermon
Illustration
Preaching
Sermon
Worship
For August 30, 2020:
When You are Still Called
by Bethany Peerbolte
Exodus 3:1-15, Jeremiah 15:15-21
In the Scripture
We find Moses and a flock of sheep in the wilderness. The flock does not belong to Moses, it does not represent his success post-Egypt, these animals belong to his father-in-law. Moses has become merely a shepherd. Might be the oldest prince to pauper story. Even though Moses is not able to boast of success he is a good shepherd. He has learned all the good spots. The fields other shepherds leave untouched because they are too far away and the patches where winter rain sprouts up surprising green pastures. Moses will not be home for dinner or even to rest with his wife this night. He is alone with his thoughts and sheep quietly tugging and munching on grass.
Moses wanted to help his people. The rage and sense of justice that boiled inside him was more than he could control, and it caused him to lash out. He now wears the label of murderer in the one place he longs to be. The rage must bubble up from time to time knowing his people are still mistreated, but what can he do. He blew it. He had a chance to make a difference and he botched it up by being naïve and idealistic. He has to find ways to distract him from his grief and sense of helplessness.
This day a special kind of distraction pops up. A bush, burning, but not being consumed. The diversion will take hold of his rage and prop it up with resources and support. God affirms that the boiling and bubbling in his soul are not to be ignored. They are a God-given calling. Moses is naturally hesitant, but God ensures that Moses will have everything he needs this time. God will be there to help keep him from lashing out again. God will give him proof of his authority and Aaron to speak when Moses cannot. This time Moses goes in with backup.
Jeremiah had a similar sidetrack to his calling. Frustrated that the message he is giving is not enough. The people are still wandering away from God. Jeremiah turns away from the call fed up with the lack of progress. God’s “assurances” are not helping. These future plans for justice to prevail are ludicrous to Jeremiah. He wants to see the fruits of his message now. He wants to progress and hope that his work is achieving something.
Jeremiah asks God to remember. Many prophets ask God to remember when they speak to God. Where Christians often pray in a way that points out to God areas they would like help with, the prophets see prayer as a way to remind God of the promises already made. We hear them say things like “remember you are good and just” “remember you are on our side” “remember you promised me you would always be there with me.” Jeremiah is asking God to remember who God is and what has been promised. Invoking all that goodness to save him from his situation.
Inside Jeremiah there is a pain that will not subside. Jeremiah wants God to remember him and all the sacrifices he has made for his call. Jeremiah had made God’s justice his only source of joy and ignored all earthly festivities. Yet through all this God has not taken away the pain. The only comfort God seems willing to give is that “someday” it will all be right.
God does give Jeremiah a path back to his work. God says you do not need to worry about turning back to the people. The effort that will be worth it is to turn back to God. When the people see Jeremiah back with God they will make the move to turn to Jeremiah. Turning back to God will make Jeremiah strong enough to withstand the insults and debates.
In the News
When someone’s name becomes a verb they have really done something with their life. If you “Erin Brockovich” something you have investigated and advocated for a cause without giving up. Essentially, to “Erin Brockovich” is to be true to your calling no matter what stands in your way. In her new book Superman’s Not Coming Brockovich empowers people to do what they can to fight back against the water crisis in our country.
Erin Brockovich reached celebrity status when Julia Roberts played her in the movie named after her. The movie recounts Brockovich’s fight against Pacific Gas and Electric who she found had dumped harmful chemicals into the water supply of Hinkley, California. Her relentless force for justice eventually got the town $333 million dollars in damages. Since then she has been advocating for water justice issues all over the country from Texas to Flint Michigan.
A recent interview with her shows how her sense of self and commitment to what she believes is right helped her persist in this turbulent court case. She admits to falling for the search for “Prince Charming” but in Hinkley she learned “that we’re often perceived, labeled, judged, put into a box, don’t fit into the square or the way somebody else thinks we should be doing something. Looking to ourselves, realizing who we are, not by what we have but who we are.” This internal mechanism, as she calls it, is her driving force in life. Every time someone challenged her because she was not a doctor or a lawyer or a water specialist she would remind them who she was. She was the one who would show up. She was the one who was not going to let this go. She was the one who was going to make it right.
In the interview, Erin also admits to coping with dyslexia. She learned from her mother a sense of “stick-to-itiveness” and that commitment to see things through helped her overcome many obstacles. She says the trick to cultivating a sense of “stick-to-itiveness” is to always pick the ball back up.
With students heading back to school in ways they have never encountered before, “stick-to-itiveness” may be their motto for the school year. Gosh, with the way 2020 is going it should be a motto for all of us. It can feel like the rules keep changing and what was right yesterday is no longer allowable. We can get angry that we dropped the ball, or someone else dropped the ball, but if the ball stays on the ground we are never going to get a touchdown. Somehow collectively we need to commit ourselves to “stick-to-itiveness” and keep being the ones who show up to make it right.
In the Sermon
Erin, Moses, and Jeremiah are all aware of their call. Moses and Jeremiah talk about it as a burning. For Moses it burns a bush in front of him, and for Jeremiah it burns inside his body. These calls are not easy to achieve. Moses tried once and totally botched the effort. Jeremiah got frustrated at how long it was taking for the people to turn back to God. Erin had to fortify her commitment to “stick-to-itiveness” to see out the whole process of investigating and advocating for water justice. In all three their calling is what defines their identity and gives them a drive to keep striving.
For Christians, we recognize our call as coming from God. When we do not root our call in God we lose track of who we are and what we are here for. Moses feels his call to help the people but does not tap into God at first. This leads to rash decisions and mistakes that chase him into the wilderness. Jeremiah lets his disappointment turn him away from God and he tries to reach the people on his own. These attempts to live out the call fail because they are not rooted and supported by God.
After some time away from the issue, Moses is reintroduced to God and the call. This time he asks questions and gets a full game plan. He determines, with God, what he will need and who will go with him. Of course, God also promises to be with him in this effort. Jeremiah expresses his frustration with God. He is honest about who he believes God to be and his feeling that God has not been that for him. God points out that in his effort to turn the people Jeremiah has turned away himself. God assures Jeremiah that he is still in partnership with God — all he needs to do is turn back.
There is a similar pain in us now. This year has had a way of fanning the flames of justice in us. We have remembered calls we forgot about. Maybe they were buried because of past failures, maybe we foolishly thought we could do it alone. These calls have been reheard because we have had time out to pasture with the sheep to think about the world we live in. The busyness of our lives had dulled and distracted us from the pain inside us. Now we realize we need to answer God’s call.
Social media has made us feel connected to others who will go with us in the fight. We will need the right people by our side to support us when we cannot find the words. Social media does a great job of bringing the right people together to free us from an oppressive system. We will need a continuous drive to push forward when Pharaoh says “no” or changes his mind.
That is when we need to realize along with the pain for justice inside us is the fire of God’s presence within us. God has promised to be with us for what is ahead. We may become frustrated when justice does not show up right away. We will need to commit to “stick-to-itiveness.” The thing that should always give us hope that justice will come is that God says it will. Moses was not sure, but God was. Jeremiah wanted to see it now, but God was there to assure that it would happen.
In that way Erin was God’s representative. She was the one who would make sure it was right. Her persistence, presence, and assurance reflected what God says to Moses and Jeremiah and to us. God will be the one who is there. God will be the one who will make sure it is made right.
SECOND THOUGHTS
What Will It Take For Us To Recognize The Little Girl In The Red Coat?
by Ron Love
Exodus 3:1-15
Steven Spielberg's movie Schindler's List, which premiered on December 15, 1993, is based on a true story. The movie is about Oskar Schindler, who was a German businessman in Poland during World War II. As a businessman, Schindler saw an opportunity to make money from the Nazis' war machine. Schindler started a company to make cookware and utensils, using bribes to win military contracts. By staffing his plant with Jews from the Krakow's ghetto, Schindler had a dependable unpaid labor force.
However, in 1942, all of Krakow's Jews were assigned to the Plaszow Forced Labor Camp, which was overseen by a commandant who was an embittered alcoholic. The commandant would occasionally shoot prisoners from his balcony. This is also when Schindler saw many of his Jewish employees being taken to the gas chambers. It is now that he suddenly realizes he is unwittingly contributing to their deaths. It is at this point in the movie that Schindler develops a conscience. He realizes that his factory, which now manufactures ammunition, is the only thing preventing his Jewish workers from being shipped to the death camps. Soon Schindler demands more workers and starts bribing Nazi leaders to keep Jews on his employee lists and out of the camps.
By the time the camp is liberated by the allies, Schindler has lost his entire fortune. He had used all his money on bribes and employing workers he did not need in order to save 1,100 Jews from death in the gas chambers.
On May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered and the war came to an end. On this day, Schindler gathered all of his workers together on the factory floor and shared the good news. He then asked the Jews not to seek revenge for what had been done to them, and called for a moment of silence in memory of those who had died. He also encouraged the members of the SS who were present to go home peacefully and without further bloodshed.
When the war was over the Schindlerjuden, which means “Schindler Jews,” as those Jews who were on the work list that spared their lives called themselves, gave Schindler a ring engraved with this verse from the Talmud, “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.” Schindler died in Hildesheim, Germany on October 9, 1974. He wanted to be buried in Jerusalem, saying, “My children are here.”
In his movie Schindler’s List Steven Spielberg provided a visual representation of evil. Spielberg filmed the movie in black-and-white, which Spielberg considered a representation of the Holocaust. He said, “The Holocaust was life without light. For me the symbol of life is color. That's why a film about the Holocaust has to be in black-and-white.”
What most people who have seen the movie best remember is the little girl in the red coat. She appeared twice in the movie. While the film is shot in black-and-white, the red coat is the only object seen in color. In the scene when the Krakow ghetto was being liquidated, Schindler’s attention affixed upon this one girl wearing a red coat. The next time the red coat appears, Schindler sees the child is lying on a cart transporting bodies to the crematorium. Schindler suddenly realized his own contribution to the Holocaust. This was when Schindler realized the evil of the Nazi regime, and began his plans to save the lives of his Jewish workers. Film critics refer to the girl in the red coat as a “marker,” used by Spielberg to denote the transformation of Oskar Schindler’s change of conscience.
Spielberg said the scene of the little girl in the red coat was intended to symbolize how members of the highest levels of government in the United States knew the Holocaust was occurring, yet did nothing to stop it. Spielberg said, “It was as obvious as a little girl wearing a red coat, walking down the street, and yet nothing was done to bomb the German rail lines. Nothing was being done to slow down ... the annihilation of European Jewry. So, that was my message in letting that scene be in color.”
The little girl in the red coat also represented something more — much more. The numbers of those executed, in the millions, are just that to us, just numbers. We shake our heads in disbelief but the number is so large that those individuals who cumulatively make up the millions are just a blur to us. When we focus on one person — one little girl in a red coat — then suddenly it all becomes so very too real for us.
The girl in the red coat depicted in the film was Roma Ligocka. Ligocka was known among those in the ghetto for her red coat. Unlike Spielberg’s child, Ligocka survived the Holocaust and wrote her autobiography titled, The Girl in the Red Coat: A Memoir.
In a small way history was made recently on NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt. For the first time in more months than I can count, the broadcast opened with a story that was not related to the coronavirus. It may have happened earlier and I missed that broadcast, but my point is this — individuals are suffering beyond the reaches of the coronavirus.
On the Friday evening broadcast on August 21, the virus was later discussed in the context of how it affected parents decisions to send children back to school. Prior to that, there were several other news stories. We learned on that broadcast that 100,000 people had been evacuated in California from the wild fires started by lightning strikes, burning an area larger than the state of Rhode Island. As a result of the fire, hundreds of homes have been destroyed and nearly a 100 people have perished. We also learned from Al Roker two days earlier that, for the first time ever, two Category 1 hurricanes will strike the Gulf Coast at the same time — the center of the storms only 375 miles apart.
“What will it take for us to recognize the little girl in the red coat?”
Suffering surrounds us as it did for the Hebrews under the tyrannical rule of Pharaoh. As we read the story, like the movie Schindler’s List, the number of Hebrews involved is beyond our comprehension, thus causing us to become distanced from the story. Though when the account of the little girl in the red coat became a part of the Genesis story — suddenly the story becomes real to us.
Then, moving one step further, when Roma Ligocka was the girl wearing the red coat who survived to write her autobiography titled, The Girl in the Red Coat: A Memoir, it helped us to understand suffering. We now have in Genesis someone else in the symbolic red coat — Moses — being called by God to help us understand liberation from suffering.
As you prepare your sermon, I suggest that you contemplate these two points. First, can you frame the suffering of the masses as the suffering of a single human being? Second, what can you do to liberate that individual who is a single member of all those collective individuals?
To understand the suffering of one among many we need to begin by having compassion. The English word for compassion is derived from two Latin words, com “with” and pati “to suffer.” Compassion means “to suffer with.” It means total and complete solidarity with another individual in which his or her suffering becomes that of my own.
The New Testament Greek word that is usually translated into English as “to show compassion” or “to have compassion” is splanchnitzomai. As used in the New Testament, splanchnitzomai literally means “to have one’s bowels turned over.” Splanchnitzomai, meaning “to show compassion,” is related to splanchnon, the Greek word for “bowels, the viscera, inward parts, intestines, entrails.”
What is the connection between showing compassion and a person’s bowels? By creating a linguistic link between the idea of compassion and the bowels or inward parts of the body, the people of Bible times were affirming in a very vivid way that, when we truly show compassion for someone who is suffering, we feel their hurt, and we feel a nagging ache in the pit of our stomach. When we truly have compassion for someone who is suffering, we feel their pain in such a way that it feels as if our insides are being turned inside-out.
This is underscored for splanchnitzomai as a verb — a word of action, engagement, involvement. In English we can act with compassion, or we can be compassionate; but, it is not possible for us to “compassion” someone.
Judaism associates compassion with maternity. The Hebrew word for compassion, rachamim, is related to the noun rechem which means “womb” or “uterus.” If one becomes engaged in a compassionate act, the womb — the sacrosanct nurturer of life — is pained.
As of Saturday, August 22, the coronavirus has killed 175,406 Americans and has infected 5,623,727. This number is really too big for us to get our arms around. But, if we think of the 175,406 as 1 + 1 + 1 + 1…, then perhaps we can relate to the individuals who have perished.
Moses understood that the Egyptians were also killing Hebrew children in the thousands. I am sure that this really became a stark reality for him when he encountered God at the burring bush.
Standing there, absent of sandals, for it was holy ground, God called Moses to respond to the suffering. Most of us have read the story enough to outline the multiple excuses that Moses gave as to why he was not qualified to carry out God’s mission of liberation. God, patiently (perhaps impatiently) listening agreed that Moses really was not the best choice. But then, no one would have really been the best choice. This is why God declared that he would spiritually accompany Moses with the words of self-declaration: “I AM WHO I AM.”
Myself, you the pastor standing in the pulpit, those sitting before you in the pews wearing (I hope) face masks, and the many more who are watching at home in their PJs on Zoom, all stand before God with limitations and hesitations. This is why we accept the power of the Holy Spirit to grant the wisdom to guide us.
As we think about our lectionary reading for this Sunday perhaps the words of Joe Biden, delivered during his acceptance speech as the 2020 Democratic Presidential candidate, will make us aware and motivate us. Biden, who lost his first wife Nelia and his 13-month-old daughter Naomi in a car accident on their way to buy a Christmas tree, and then later his adult son Beau to brain cancer, can help us understand suffering and tragedy. Joe Biden said, “I know how it feels to lose someone you love. I know that deep black hole that opens up in your chest. That you feel your whole being is sucked into it. I know how mean and cruel and unfair life can be sometimes.”
ILLUSTRATIONS
From team member Dean Feldmeyer:
Going With: The Four Most Beautiful Words (Going With)
I’ll. Go. With. You.
They are, perhaps, the four most beautiful words in the English language.
How many times have you heard and been comforted by them? The first time I remember hearing them was when I was about six or seven years old.
We were in a rural county in southern Indiana, where my parents grew up, and they had dropped me and my younger brother off at our great grandma’s farm while they made those boring rounds, visiting the family elders.
It was a hot summer day, we had eaten a hearty lunch and, as was the custom, everyone settled down for a brief siesta before returning to their work.
Halfway through the nap time I realized that I needed to get to the bathroom but Gramma’s only bathroom was an outhouse in the barn lot that was patrolled by the meanest rooster that ever lived. His name was Tom Jones and dogs were afraid of him. That’s how mean he was.
I was afraid of him, too.
I stood, looking at the privy and the rooster through the screen door, sure that I was either going to die if I tried to make it to the outhouse or have an embarrassing accident if I didn’t. In despair, I began to cry.
Then I felt a hand on my shoulder and there was my little, round, great grandmother with a broom in her other hand, smiling down at me. “Come on, Dean,” she said. “I’ll go with you.”
* * *
Going With II: Sidekicks (Going With)
Sidekicks are those characters in literature and entertainment whose role it is to go with the protagonist or hero of the story. They give the hero a sounding board, someone to talk to and think with, but they also provide the storyteller or writer with a way to provide exposition and explanation through dialogue. If you grew up when I did, you’ll easily remember Tonto, who went with the Lone Ranger, or Poncho, who went with the Cisco Kid, or Zoro’s deaf sidekick Bernardo, or Kato who went with the Green Hornet.
The writers at flavorwire.com say that these are the top ten sidekicks in literature based on loyalty, friendship, and overall awesomeness:
10. Friday (Robinson Crusoe)
9. Phineas (A Separate Peace)
8. Dean Morarity (On the Road)
7. Horatio (Hamlet)
6. Sancho Panza (Don Quixote)
5. Huckleberry Finn (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer)
4. Lacey Rawklins (All the Pretty Horses)
3. Ron and Hermione (Harry Potter)
2. Samwise Gamgee (Lord of the Rings)
1. Dr. Watson (Sherlock Holmes)
* * *
Going With III: A Gift Of Time (Going With)
Nelle did not want to be a lawyer, she wanted to be a writer. So, she dropped out of law school and moved to New York where she believed the creative energy of Greenwich Village would inspire and propel her to literary success.
Her friend, a young writer named Truman Capote, knew that she was talented but, perhaps, a bit naïve, so he called his friend Michael Brown, a Broadway writer, and asked him to look after Nelle as she attempted to navigate the big city.
Michael and Nelle met in 1949 and they got along marvelously. When Michael married Joy Williams, a ballerina in 1950, Joy immediately loved Nelle and the three became close friends who were together almost constantly.
Michael said that the three were drawn together by their love of the arts and each other. Perhaps that’s why Michael and Joy were so frustrated that the 23-year-old Nelle was not able to pursue her writing in a way they wanted for her because she had to work long hours as an airline reservationist to make ends meet.
In 1956, Michael came into a substantial sum of money for a show he had written and he and Joy agreed on what they would do with a significant portion of that money.
On Christmas of that year Nelle received a Christmas card from her friends. It contained a year’s wages and said, “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.”
She took the year off and wrote the first draft of her first novel. It would be published in 1960 under her middle name and, in 1961, it won the Pulitzer prize.
The novel was To Kill a Mockingbird by Nelle Harper Lee.
* * *
What Doesn’t Kill Us (Grief)
And you thought it was Kelly Clarkson who said it first. But no.
In 1888, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in his book of aphorisms, Twilight of the Idols, “Aus der Kriegsschule des Lebens.— Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker,” which, loosely translated is “Out of life’s school of war — what doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.”
He paraphrased or rephrased the notion in his autobiography Ecce Homo, wherein he describes certain lucky people as those for whom, “that which does not kill him makes him stronger.”
Anyone who has lived more than two score years, however, knows that Neitzshe’s aphorism should not be taken too seriously. We’ve all known or seen people who, though not killed by their suffering, have become horribly and permanently wounded.
Many diseases don’t kill their victims but leave them horribly disabled. Count Polio, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Schizophrenia, Cerebral Palsy, and Meningitis among them.
Now we can add Covid-19 to the list. Not everyone who gets this disease dies, but many are left with life altering debilitations. According to a survey conducted by Survivor Corps, a Facebook support group for Covid-19 survivors, and Natalie Lambert, Ph.D., of Indiana University’s School of Medicine, the most common effects reported by Covid-19 “long haulers” include: fatigue, muscle or body aches, shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, difficulty concentrating or focusing, inability to exercise or be active, heart palpitations, and nearly 60 other symptoms.
And, of course, there is grief.
Grief rarely kills us, but it can be as debilitating as any physical disease. It can cause depression, mania, and physical symptoms not unlike those of Covid-19. And some people, though they do not die, never recover.
* * *
But For Jesus (Grief)
In 1858 Scottish missionary John G. Paton and his wife sailed for the New Hebrides (now called Vanuatu). Three months after arriving on the island of Tanna, his wife died. One week later his infant son also died. Paton fell into despair. Feeling terribly alone, and surrounded by native people who showed him no sympathy, he wrote, "Let those who have ever passed through any similar darkness as of midnight feel for me. As for all others, it would be more than vain to try to paint my sorrows...But for Jesus, and His fellowship...I would have gone mad and died."
* * *
Lost To Grief (Grief)
The home of Paul Laurence Dunbar, noted poet, is open to the public in Dayton, Ohio. When Dunbar died, his mother left his room exactly as it was on the day of his death with his final poem, handwritten on a pad, laying on his desk. After his mother died, her friends discovered that Paul Laurence Dunbar's last poem had been lost forever. Because his mother had made his room into a shrine and not moved anything, the sun coming through the window had bleached the ink in which the poem was written until it was invisible.
* * * * * *
From team member Mary Austin:
Exodus 3:1-15
Fight for Your Calling
Dave Isay, the founder of StoryCorps, disagrees with the idea that we find our calling in life. He contends, “When people have found their calling, they’ve made tough decisions and sacrifices in order to do the work they were meant to do. People who’ve found their calling have a fire about them.” Moses gets an actual fire to attract his attention, and Isay says that the rest of us can also find the work that God wants us to do.
He believes that our calling in life is at the intersection of a Venn diagram of three things: doing something you’re good at, feeling appreciated, and believing your work is making people’s lives better. “When those three things line up, it’s like lightning,” Isay says. This doesn’t have to be working as a brain surgeon. It may be the letter carrier who checks on all of the people on her route each day. Or the store clerk with a smile for everyone. Finding this intersection takes some quiet listening, much like Moses out in the desert. Isay says, “You have to shut out all the chatter of what your friends are telling you to do, what your parents are telling you to do, what society is telling you to do, and just go to that quiet place inside you that knows the truth.”
As Moses knows, finding our work for God in the world isn’t a one-time event — it’s the start of a process. “The old ‘finding your calling’ phraseology makes it sound like a calling is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow — you find it, and the story’s over. But Isay stresses that your calling is an ongoing process. “Understanding what your calling is — that’s very different than the blood, sweat and tears of actually doing it,” he says. Pursuing a calling may require going back to school or apprenticing; it may require starting a business. Often, notes Isay, it leads a person into a line of work that’s in service of others.”
* * *
Exodus 3:1-15
Giving What is Yours
Quaker teacher and writer Parker Palmer says that when we find our true calling, like Moses found his by the burning bush, we serve others with what is ours to give authentically. Before Moses takes a step toward Egypt, God makes sure that Moses is grounded in his divine calling. God spends a lot of time reassuring Moses about what he has to offer the people of Israel, even when Moses protests vigorously. Parker Palmer says, “Years ago, I heard Dorothy Day speak. Founder of the Catholic Worker movement, her long-term commitment to living among the poor on New York's Lower East Side — had made her one of my heroes. So it came as a great shock when in the middle of her talk, I heard her start to ruminate about the "ungrateful poor." I did not understand how such a dismissive phrase could come from the lips of a saint — until it hit me with the force of a Zen koan. Dorothy Day was saying, "Do not give to the poor expecting to get their gratitude so that you can feel good about yourself. If you do, your giving will be thin and short-lived, and that is not what the poor need; it will only impoverish them further. Give only if you have something you must give; give only if you are someone for whom giving is its own reward." When I give something I do not possess, I give a false and dangerous gift, a gift that looks like love but is, in reality, loveless — a gift given more from my need to prove myself than from the other's need to be cared for.”
God’s call to Moses sets him free from that kind of falseness. The way God roots Moses in the work ahead serves Moses well when the people begin to grumble later on in the journey. Parker Palmer says that one sign we’re giving the wrong gifts is when we experience burnout. “One sign that I am violating my own nature in the name of nobility is a condition called burnout. Though usually regarded as the result of trying to give too much, burnout in my experience results from trying to give what I do not possess — the ultimate in giving too little! Burnout is a state of emptiness, to be sure, but it does not result from giving all I have; it merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place.”
Part of serving God, Parker Palmer says, is trusting that God has other people to do the divine work, in addition to us. We have our part to do, and God has other people to do the rest, as Moses experiences through the support and co-laboring of his brother, Aaron, also called by God.
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Jeremiah 15:15-21
Grief on Wheels
The prophet Jeremiah calls out to God using words that echo the feelings of many people in deep grief:
I did not sit in the company of merrymakers, nor did I rejoice;
under the weight of your hand I sat alone, for you had filled me with indignation.
Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed?
Richard Nares found himself in a similar place of pain after his young son died of leukemia. Not content only to lament, and seeking the kind of transformation that Jeremiah longs for, he returned to the hospital where his son died. He asked the staff how he could help other families, and their answer was simple: transportation. “Children diagnosed with cancer and their families must travel far and frequently to receive treatments, such as chemotherapy. One family that Richard encountered lived 120 miles away from the hospital. Another had to travel to the hospital six times a week but did not have a car. For some children, the caustic chemotherapy treatments leave their immune systems so weak that they are unable to ride germ-ridden public transportation.”
For Nares, one answer to his own grief was to do something for other families. “Many parents do not have the liberty to take unpaid time from work. Some single-parent families are forced to choose between sending their sick child on a bus to chemotherapy alone or leaving their siblings unsupervised. He found that many children were riding the bus for over 4 hours to and from the hospital or, worse yet, forgoing important treatments altogether. Although Richard and Emilio had rides and the support of family throughout Emilio's illness, Richard saw how tough cancer was on many low-income families and decided to do something.”
“In the beginning, he drove around the area in his Buick, giving families rides to and from the hospital, but soon more requests came in. With the help of nurses and social workers, he started the Emilio Nares Foundation to expand his work into a formal program, named Ride With Emilio. Now, the Emilio Nares Foundation gives 2,500 free rides to children and families a year to several hospitals in Southern California. The foundation also provides support to families providing bilingual patient advocacy, and even bereavement and burial support.” Serving other families keeps his son alive, in a different way, and eases his own grief.
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Jeremiah 15:15-21
Grief With a Voice
As the prophet Jeremiah calls out to God with his cry of grief, one of his sorrows is the voiceless nature of grief. God answers him, promising, “If you utter what is precious, and not what is worthless, you shall serve as my mouth.” The Missing People Choir in London also gives voice to the grief of families who have a missing loved one, and live with the complicated grief of not knowing what happened to someone they love. “At St. Martin in the Fields recently, in the heart of central London, a choir lifted its voices out of the depths of despair. Nearly every member has endured the anguish of a missing loved one — children mostly. Some, like Peter Boxell's son Lee, disappeared decades ago without a trace. "If he is in heaven, then I just pray that he can hear us and that he will know that we're still thinking of him, that we still love him," Boxell said. They call themselves the Missing People Choir — 30 or so voices from every walk of life. Most had never sung a day in their lives, until music producer James Hawkins volunteered to start the choir back in 2014.”
He says, "To be eye-to-eye with family members that are there singing to you, who in their heads they're singing to their missing loved one, that's incredibly powerful.”
Peter Boxell's 15-year-old son, Lee, left home in 1988 to go to a soccer match in South London, and was never seen again. The family has never heard a word about what happened to him. Boxell and his wife couldn’t bear to move from the home their son knew. Boxell said. “We always hoped that Lee would come home one day.” They are still hoping. “For decades, he and his wife Christine have waited for any news of his whereabouts. And in all that time, Lee's room has stood just as he left it — his school blazer on a hanger, homework unfinished on his desk…One night in 2013, Boxell had a dream that he was singing a song he had written for Lee. With the help of James Hawkins, whom he had met through the Missing People charity, they literally turned that dream into a reality. Over and over he practiced his song for his son, knowing full well he couldn't really carry a tune. But that didn't matter. At the annual Missing People charity's event, Boxell got up and sang it — belting out his solo as if he'd been singing all his life.” The choir gives grief a voice, and the members call out in much the same way Jeremiah does.
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Matthew 16:21-28
Jesus Brings the Wind
In his book Uproar, subtitled Calm Leadership in Anxious Times, Peter L. Steinke says, “In the Biosphere in Arizona, a three-acre greenhouse in the desert, people noticed that the fruit was falling off the trees prematurely. What had happened? Inside this encapsulated environment, wind, a force that challenges the trees’ branches and strengthens them, is absent. Without wind, the branches do not gain sufficient strength to hold the fruit to the time of maturation.”
When he gives this word about taking up the cross, Jesus is supplying his followers with some of the wind that will strengthen their branches for the upheaval ahead, both for him and for them. He tells them, and us, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” He’s announcing that following him will involve embracing the winds of change, disappointment and suffering, and preparing them for the work they will do after his death. Peter Steinke adds, “The leader can most influence the system by challenging it. The leader functions like the wind.” Jesus embodies this, in his own way of leading and teaching his friends.
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From team member Chris Keating:
Exodus 3:1-15
Responding to trauma
God sees the oppression and pain of the Hebrew people. “I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings.” In other words, God understands the trauma they have endured, and God is intent on correcting the wrong.
Educators face a similar task as students head back to school. Whether they are teaching online or in person, educators who are aware of how trauma impacts their students will be better equipped for understanding and addressing its effects. Responding to trauma, however, requires paying attention the way God hears the cries of the oppressed.
“We tend to think of trauma as the result of a frightening and upsetting event,” writes Caroline Miller. “But many children experience trauma through ongoing exposure, throughout their early development, to abuse, neglect, homelessness, domestic violence or violence in their communities.” Yet sometimes the suffering of children is harder to see. Miller goes on to quote Nancy Rappaport, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, who says that kids disguise trauma because “they are masters at making sure you do not see them bleed.”
Consider this composite story, an example of the sort of trauma faced by up to 35 million elementary school students yearly:
Ben arrives late to school almost every morning. When he enters his second-grade classroom, his teacher asks for his homework. He slaps classmates on the backs of their heads and knocks books off their desks. His teacher tells him to sit down in a loud, annoyed voice. Ben continues walking around the room distracting other students. The teacher raises her voice and points a finger at Ben, ordering him to sit. Ben kicks his chair and spins around the room. “That’s it! I am calling your mother!” the teacher threatens, but Ben does not hear her. He has run out into the hallway. The teacher picks up the phone and dials the main office to alert the principal.
But perhaps the school might respond differently to Ben if they knew other details about his life. His backstory includes watching his father die in a car accident. Following the accident, his mother fell into a deep depression. Ben and his two siblings now live with relatives in a small apartment on the other side of town. It takes his aunt two hours to drive Ben to and from school, and as a result his meal and sleeping patterns are disrupted. Except for kids who tease Ben, nobody at school has noticed that many days he wears the same clothes several days in a row.
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Exodus 3:1-15
“Who am I that I should speak to the nation?”
Moses isn’t sure he’s the right person for the job. Afterall, he’s a fugitive on the run — not exactly the sort of person who gets tapped to lead revolutions. Are you sure he is your go-to guy, God? But leaders come in all shapes, sizes, colors, ages, and genders.
Likewise, you wouldn’t expect that a 13-year old kid would grab the nation’s attention at a political convention. But that was exactly what happened last week when a New Hampshire teenager addressed the Democratic National Convention. Brayden Harrington, a boy who stutters, addressed the nation, explaining how his meeting with Joe Biden in February changed his life. Whatever your politics, watch the video of young Brayden and try to imagine the courage he summoned in speaking — especially when he knew it was likely his stammer would make speaking difficult. Brayden pushed through his speech, smiling and confident, sharing how Biden had told him of his own difficulties with stuttering. By early Friday morning, more than three million persons had viewed Brayden’s speech. “I’m just a regular kid,” said Brayden.
“Brayden Harrington,” tweeted Dan Rather, “the 13-year old boy with a stutter. Pure, unvarnished, courage.”
You know, a regular guy, just like Moses.
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Jeremiah 15:15-21
You will soon see sorrow go down with the sun
Jeremiah’s laments are poetically rendered theological reflections. He articulates complaints about suffering, God, and faith — but never wavers from hope. As a poet, he weaves a theology of justice rooted in passion.
Cathleen Perez Brenycz argues for a robust return to reading and memorizing poetry, suggesting that poetry in a time of pandemic is especially therapeutic.
“Poetry continues to be a strong, emotional outlet. While public spaces are closed due to the pandemic, groups have moved to the virtual stage. Open mic nights and poetry workshops fill with people sharing poems committed to memory. Personally, I enjoy sharing Maya Angelou’s poetry. I talk about And Still I Rise to anyone who would listen!”
Last week offered a couple of great examples of poetry engaging our attention. Brayden Harrington (referenced above) reminded us that former Vice President Joe Biden turned to the poetry of William Butler Yeats to help cope with his stuttering. Then Biden himself quoted a familiar line from Seamus Heaney in his own speech Thursday evening. A few days before, Prince Charles used the words of 19th century Australian poet Victor Daley to bring comfort to the people of Victoria, Australia following their struggles with wildfires and Covid-19.
"It is our heartfelt wish," he said, speaking on behalf of himself and his wife, Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, "That in the words of Victor Daley, the 19th century poet who found his voice in Victoria and who was himself no stranger to hardship, 'you will soon see sorrow go down with the sun'."
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WORSHIP
by George Reed
Call to Worship:
Leader: O give thanks to God, call on God’s name.
People: Let us make known God’s deeds among the peoples.
Leader: Sing to God, sing praises to our Sovereign.
People: We will tell of all God’s wonderful works.
Leader: Seek God and the divine strength;
People: We seek God’s presence continually.
OR
Leader: God calls us to enter into the world with God.
People: We are never far from the presence of our God.
Leader: When God gives us a task, God empowers us to do it.
People: With God’s Spirit within us, we will do God’s work.
Leader: Share God’s love with all you meet this week.
People: We will be God’s loving presence for others.
Hymns and Songs:
All Creatures of Our God and King
UMH: 62
H82: 400
PH: 455
AAHH: 147
NNBH: 33
NCH: 17
CH: 22
LBW: 527
ELW: 835
W&P: 23
AMEC: 50
STLT: 203
Renew: 47
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
ELW: 503/504/505
W&P: 588
AMEC: 54
STLT: 200
Great Is Thy Faithfulness
UMH: 140
AAHH: 158
NNBH: 45
NCH: 423
CH: 86
ELW: 733
W&P: 72
AMEC: 84
Renew: 249
I’ll Praise My Maker While I’ve Breath
UMH: 60
H82: 429
PH: 253
CH: 20
Pues Si Vivimos (When We Are Living)
UMH: 356
PH: 400
NCH: 499
CH: 536
ELW: 639
W&P: 415
Abide with Me
UMH: 700
H82: 662
PH: 543
AAHH: 459
NNBH: 247
NCH: 99
CH: 636
LBW: 272
ELW: 629
W&P: 307
AMEC: 495
STLT: 101
Hymn of Promise
UMH: 707
NCH: 433
CH: 638
W&P: 515
Lord, You Give the Great Commission
UMH: 584
H82: 528
PH: 429
CH: 459
ELW: 579
W&P: 592
Renew: 305
Here I Am, Lord
UMH: 593
PH: 525
AAHH: 567
CH: 452
ELW: 574
W&P: 559
Renew: 149
O Zion, Haste
UMH: 573
H82: 539
NNBH: 422
LBW: 397
ELW: 668
AMEC: 566
Cares Chorus
CCB: 53
Through It All
CCB: 61
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
ELW: 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 is ever present in all of creation:
Grant us the faith to trust that you are always with us
as we go about the tasks that you have set before us;
through Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
OR
We praise you, O God, because you are always with your creation. You never desert us or leave us alone. You have given us the task of sharing your light with the world and you are there to supply the light and the courage to share it. Help us to trust in you as we share your light today. Amen.
Prayer of Confession:
Leader: Let us confess to God and before one another our sins and especially our lack of trust in God’s constant help.
People: We confess to you, O God, and before one another that we have sinned. We have failed to rely on you as we go about the mission you have placed before us. We try to accomplish things in our own strength when we know we can only do your work in the strength of your Spirit. Call us back to yourself as our center that we may be empowered by you Spirit for your work. Amen.
Leader: God is always with us and ready to assist us. We need only ask. Receive God’s grace and share the blessings of God with others.
Prayers of the People
Glory and praise are yours, O God, because you are our ever present help and strength. You are our rock and our fortress.
(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 have failed to rely on you as we go about the mission you have placed before us. We try to accomplish things in our own strength when we know we can only do your work in the strength of your Spirit. Call us back to yourself as our center that we may be empowered by you Spirit for your work.
We give you thanks for your presence among us and within us. We thank you for your strength that enables us to live as your people even during times of grief and stress. We thank you for our loved ones who are no longer physically present to us. We thank you for their love and care and for your assurance that you hold them safely in your love.
(Other thanksgivings may be offered.)
We pray for one another in our needs. We pray for those who are grieving and for those who mourn. We pray that we may be a source of care and solace to them.
(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
Learning to ride a two wheel bike can be scary as we learn how to balance and ride. Having someone beside us helps give us confidence. Lots of things can be scary but God is always with us to help us.
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CHILDREN'S SERMON
Holy Ground
by Tom Willadsen
Exodus 3:1-15
Do something surprising to get the kids’ attention. Maybe sit close to them and shout “boo!”
Ask what their parents do to get their attention. Calling their name when it’s time for supper…waking them up in the morning…getting them to turn off their games to listen… It depends on the kids and their ages.
Tell them about Moses and the burning bush. Ask what it would look like, a bush that was on fire, but getting consumed by the fire. That’s pretty strange; it got Moses’ attention.
God called to Moses from inside the bush; God called Moses by name.
Then God told Moses to take off his shoes. What’s up with that? God said that Moses was on holy ground.
Ask the kids why God wanted Moses to take off his shoes.
Here are some of the explanations that have been offered over the centuries:
— Some cultures do this as a sign of respect.
— Taking off one’s shoes is a kind of denial, one makes oneself humble.
— Some people believe that one should untie every knot when coming into God’s presence, to symbolize that one is free to obey the Lord only.
— A Chassidic tradition holds that Moses was barefoot so he could feel every pebble, symbolizing that as their leader he would feel their smallest sorrows.
Thank the kids for their good ideas, and remind them that God made all places and can speak to us through bushes. So pay attention.
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The Immediate Word, August 30, 2020 issue.
Copyright 2020 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.
- When You are Still Called by Bethany Peerbolte — When God calls us to the work of liberating others the only thing that matters is God's promise to remain with us.
- Second Thoughts: What Will It Take For Us To Recognize The Little Girl In The Red Coat? by Ron Love — We all stand before God with limitations and hesitations. This is why we accept the power of the Holy Spirit to grant the wisdom to guide us.
- Sermon illustrations by Dean Feldmeyer, Mary Austin, Chris Keating.
- Worship resources by George Reed that focus on grief and how God’s call comes with God’s presence.
- Children’s sermon: Holy Ground by Tom Willadsen — Moses was on the lam, tending his father-in-law’s sheep.
When You are Still Calledby Bethany Peerbolte
Exodus 3:1-15, Jeremiah 15:15-21
In the Scripture
We find Moses and a flock of sheep in the wilderness. The flock does not belong to Moses, it does not represent his success post-Egypt, these animals belong to his father-in-law. Moses has become merely a shepherd. Might be the oldest prince to pauper story. Even though Moses is not able to boast of success he is a good shepherd. He has learned all the good spots. The fields other shepherds leave untouched because they are too far away and the patches where winter rain sprouts up surprising green pastures. Moses will not be home for dinner or even to rest with his wife this night. He is alone with his thoughts and sheep quietly tugging and munching on grass.
Moses wanted to help his people. The rage and sense of justice that boiled inside him was more than he could control, and it caused him to lash out. He now wears the label of murderer in the one place he longs to be. The rage must bubble up from time to time knowing his people are still mistreated, but what can he do. He blew it. He had a chance to make a difference and he botched it up by being naïve and idealistic. He has to find ways to distract him from his grief and sense of helplessness.
This day a special kind of distraction pops up. A bush, burning, but not being consumed. The diversion will take hold of his rage and prop it up with resources and support. God affirms that the boiling and bubbling in his soul are not to be ignored. They are a God-given calling. Moses is naturally hesitant, but God ensures that Moses will have everything he needs this time. God will be there to help keep him from lashing out again. God will give him proof of his authority and Aaron to speak when Moses cannot. This time Moses goes in with backup.
Jeremiah had a similar sidetrack to his calling. Frustrated that the message he is giving is not enough. The people are still wandering away from God. Jeremiah turns away from the call fed up with the lack of progress. God’s “assurances” are not helping. These future plans for justice to prevail are ludicrous to Jeremiah. He wants to see the fruits of his message now. He wants to progress and hope that his work is achieving something.
Jeremiah asks God to remember. Many prophets ask God to remember when they speak to God. Where Christians often pray in a way that points out to God areas they would like help with, the prophets see prayer as a way to remind God of the promises already made. We hear them say things like “remember you are good and just” “remember you are on our side” “remember you promised me you would always be there with me.” Jeremiah is asking God to remember who God is and what has been promised. Invoking all that goodness to save him from his situation.
Inside Jeremiah there is a pain that will not subside. Jeremiah wants God to remember him and all the sacrifices he has made for his call. Jeremiah had made God’s justice his only source of joy and ignored all earthly festivities. Yet through all this God has not taken away the pain. The only comfort God seems willing to give is that “someday” it will all be right.
God does give Jeremiah a path back to his work. God says you do not need to worry about turning back to the people. The effort that will be worth it is to turn back to God. When the people see Jeremiah back with God they will make the move to turn to Jeremiah. Turning back to God will make Jeremiah strong enough to withstand the insults and debates.
In the News
When someone’s name becomes a verb they have really done something with their life. If you “Erin Brockovich” something you have investigated and advocated for a cause without giving up. Essentially, to “Erin Brockovich” is to be true to your calling no matter what stands in your way. In her new book Superman’s Not Coming Brockovich empowers people to do what they can to fight back against the water crisis in our country.
Erin Brockovich reached celebrity status when Julia Roberts played her in the movie named after her. The movie recounts Brockovich’s fight against Pacific Gas and Electric who she found had dumped harmful chemicals into the water supply of Hinkley, California. Her relentless force for justice eventually got the town $333 million dollars in damages. Since then she has been advocating for water justice issues all over the country from Texas to Flint Michigan.
A recent interview with her shows how her sense of self and commitment to what she believes is right helped her persist in this turbulent court case. She admits to falling for the search for “Prince Charming” but in Hinkley she learned “that we’re often perceived, labeled, judged, put into a box, don’t fit into the square or the way somebody else thinks we should be doing something. Looking to ourselves, realizing who we are, not by what we have but who we are.” This internal mechanism, as she calls it, is her driving force in life. Every time someone challenged her because she was not a doctor or a lawyer or a water specialist she would remind them who she was. She was the one who would show up. She was the one who was not going to let this go. She was the one who was going to make it right.
In the interview, Erin also admits to coping with dyslexia. She learned from her mother a sense of “stick-to-itiveness” and that commitment to see things through helped her overcome many obstacles. She says the trick to cultivating a sense of “stick-to-itiveness” is to always pick the ball back up.
With students heading back to school in ways they have never encountered before, “stick-to-itiveness” may be their motto for the school year. Gosh, with the way 2020 is going it should be a motto for all of us. It can feel like the rules keep changing and what was right yesterday is no longer allowable. We can get angry that we dropped the ball, or someone else dropped the ball, but if the ball stays on the ground we are never going to get a touchdown. Somehow collectively we need to commit ourselves to “stick-to-itiveness” and keep being the ones who show up to make it right.
In the Sermon
Erin, Moses, and Jeremiah are all aware of their call. Moses and Jeremiah talk about it as a burning. For Moses it burns a bush in front of him, and for Jeremiah it burns inside his body. These calls are not easy to achieve. Moses tried once and totally botched the effort. Jeremiah got frustrated at how long it was taking for the people to turn back to God. Erin had to fortify her commitment to “stick-to-itiveness” to see out the whole process of investigating and advocating for water justice. In all three their calling is what defines their identity and gives them a drive to keep striving.
For Christians, we recognize our call as coming from God. When we do not root our call in God we lose track of who we are and what we are here for. Moses feels his call to help the people but does not tap into God at first. This leads to rash decisions and mistakes that chase him into the wilderness. Jeremiah lets his disappointment turn him away from God and he tries to reach the people on his own. These attempts to live out the call fail because they are not rooted and supported by God.
After some time away from the issue, Moses is reintroduced to God and the call. This time he asks questions and gets a full game plan. He determines, with God, what he will need and who will go with him. Of course, God also promises to be with him in this effort. Jeremiah expresses his frustration with God. He is honest about who he believes God to be and his feeling that God has not been that for him. God points out that in his effort to turn the people Jeremiah has turned away himself. God assures Jeremiah that he is still in partnership with God — all he needs to do is turn back.
There is a similar pain in us now. This year has had a way of fanning the flames of justice in us. We have remembered calls we forgot about. Maybe they were buried because of past failures, maybe we foolishly thought we could do it alone. These calls have been reheard because we have had time out to pasture with the sheep to think about the world we live in. The busyness of our lives had dulled and distracted us from the pain inside us. Now we realize we need to answer God’s call.
Social media has made us feel connected to others who will go with us in the fight. We will need the right people by our side to support us when we cannot find the words. Social media does a great job of bringing the right people together to free us from an oppressive system. We will need a continuous drive to push forward when Pharaoh says “no” or changes his mind.
That is when we need to realize along with the pain for justice inside us is the fire of God’s presence within us. God has promised to be with us for what is ahead. We may become frustrated when justice does not show up right away. We will need to commit to “stick-to-itiveness.” The thing that should always give us hope that justice will come is that God says it will. Moses was not sure, but God was. Jeremiah wanted to see it now, but God was there to assure that it would happen.
In that way Erin was God’s representative. She was the one who would make sure it was right. Her persistence, presence, and assurance reflected what God says to Moses and Jeremiah and to us. God will be the one who is there. God will be the one who will make sure it is made right.
SECOND THOUGHTSWhat Will It Take For Us To Recognize The Little Girl In The Red Coat?
by Ron Love
Exodus 3:1-15
Steven Spielberg's movie Schindler's List, which premiered on December 15, 1993, is based on a true story. The movie is about Oskar Schindler, who was a German businessman in Poland during World War II. As a businessman, Schindler saw an opportunity to make money from the Nazis' war machine. Schindler started a company to make cookware and utensils, using bribes to win military contracts. By staffing his plant with Jews from the Krakow's ghetto, Schindler had a dependable unpaid labor force.
However, in 1942, all of Krakow's Jews were assigned to the Plaszow Forced Labor Camp, which was overseen by a commandant who was an embittered alcoholic. The commandant would occasionally shoot prisoners from his balcony. This is also when Schindler saw many of his Jewish employees being taken to the gas chambers. It is now that he suddenly realizes he is unwittingly contributing to their deaths. It is at this point in the movie that Schindler develops a conscience. He realizes that his factory, which now manufactures ammunition, is the only thing preventing his Jewish workers from being shipped to the death camps. Soon Schindler demands more workers and starts bribing Nazi leaders to keep Jews on his employee lists and out of the camps.
By the time the camp is liberated by the allies, Schindler has lost his entire fortune. He had used all his money on bribes and employing workers he did not need in order to save 1,100 Jews from death in the gas chambers.
On May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered and the war came to an end. On this day, Schindler gathered all of his workers together on the factory floor and shared the good news. He then asked the Jews not to seek revenge for what had been done to them, and called for a moment of silence in memory of those who had died. He also encouraged the members of the SS who were present to go home peacefully and without further bloodshed.
When the war was over the Schindlerjuden, which means “Schindler Jews,” as those Jews who were on the work list that spared their lives called themselves, gave Schindler a ring engraved with this verse from the Talmud, “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.” Schindler died in Hildesheim, Germany on October 9, 1974. He wanted to be buried in Jerusalem, saying, “My children are here.”
In his movie Schindler’s List Steven Spielberg provided a visual representation of evil. Spielberg filmed the movie in black-and-white, which Spielberg considered a representation of the Holocaust. He said, “The Holocaust was life without light. For me the symbol of life is color. That's why a film about the Holocaust has to be in black-and-white.”
What most people who have seen the movie best remember is the little girl in the red coat. She appeared twice in the movie. While the film is shot in black-and-white, the red coat is the only object seen in color. In the scene when the Krakow ghetto was being liquidated, Schindler’s attention affixed upon this one girl wearing a red coat. The next time the red coat appears, Schindler sees the child is lying on a cart transporting bodies to the crematorium. Schindler suddenly realized his own contribution to the Holocaust. This was when Schindler realized the evil of the Nazi regime, and began his plans to save the lives of his Jewish workers. Film critics refer to the girl in the red coat as a “marker,” used by Spielberg to denote the transformation of Oskar Schindler’s change of conscience.
Spielberg said the scene of the little girl in the red coat was intended to symbolize how members of the highest levels of government in the United States knew the Holocaust was occurring, yet did nothing to stop it. Spielberg said, “It was as obvious as a little girl wearing a red coat, walking down the street, and yet nothing was done to bomb the German rail lines. Nothing was being done to slow down ... the annihilation of European Jewry. So, that was my message in letting that scene be in color.”
The little girl in the red coat also represented something more — much more. The numbers of those executed, in the millions, are just that to us, just numbers. We shake our heads in disbelief but the number is so large that those individuals who cumulatively make up the millions are just a blur to us. When we focus on one person — one little girl in a red coat — then suddenly it all becomes so very too real for us.
The girl in the red coat depicted in the film was Roma Ligocka. Ligocka was known among those in the ghetto for her red coat. Unlike Spielberg’s child, Ligocka survived the Holocaust and wrote her autobiography titled, The Girl in the Red Coat: A Memoir.
In a small way history was made recently on NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt. For the first time in more months than I can count, the broadcast opened with a story that was not related to the coronavirus. It may have happened earlier and I missed that broadcast, but my point is this — individuals are suffering beyond the reaches of the coronavirus.
On the Friday evening broadcast on August 21, the virus was later discussed in the context of how it affected parents decisions to send children back to school. Prior to that, there were several other news stories. We learned on that broadcast that 100,000 people had been evacuated in California from the wild fires started by lightning strikes, burning an area larger than the state of Rhode Island. As a result of the fire, hundreds of homes have been destroyed and nearly a 100 people have perished. We also learned from Al Roker two days earlier that, for the first time ever, two Category 1 hurricanes will strike the Gulf Coast at the same time — the center of the storms only 375 miles apart.
“What will it take for us to recognize the little girl in the red coat?”
Suffering surrounds us as it did for the Hebrews under the tyrannical rule of Pharaoh. As we read the story, like the movie Schindler’s List, the number of Hebrews involved is beyond our comprehension, thus causing us to become distanced from the story. Though when the account of the little girl in the red coat became a part of the Genesis story — suddenly the story becomes real to us.
Then, moving one step further, when Roma Ligocka was the girl wearing the red coat who survived to write her autobiography titled, The Girl in the Red Coat: A Memoir, it helped us to understand suffering. We now have in Genesis someone else in the symbolic red coat — Moses — being called by God to help us understand liberation from suffering.
As you prepare your sermon, I suggest that you contemplate these two points. First, can you frame the suffering of the masses as the suffering of a single human being? Second, what can you do to liberate that individual who is a single member of all those collective individuals?
To understand the suffering of one among many we need to begin by having compassion. The English word for compassion is derived from two Latin words, com “with” and pati “to suffer.” Compassion means “to suffer with.” It means total and complete solidarity with another individual in which his or her suffering becomes that of my own.
The New Testament Greek word that is usually translated into English as “to show compassion” or “to have compassion” is splanchnitzomai. As used in the New Testament, splanchnitzomai literally means “to have one’s bowels turned over.” Splanchnitzomai, meaning “to show compassion,” is related to splanchnon, the Greek word for “bowels, the viscera, inward parts, intestines, entrails.”
What is the connection between showing compassion and a person’s bowels? By creating a linguistic link between the idea of compassion and the bowels or inward parts of the body, the people of Bible times were affirming in a very vivid way that, when we truly show compassion for someone who is suffering, we feel their hurt, and we feel a nagging ache in the pit of our stomach. When we truly have compassion for someone who is suffering, we feel their pain in such a way that it feels as if our insides are being turned inside-out.
This is underscored for splanchnitzomai as a verb — a word of action, engagement, involvement. In English we can act with compassion, or we can be compassionate; but, it is not possible for us to “compassion” someone.
Judaism associates compassion with maternity. The Hebrew word for compassion, rachamim, is related to the noun rechem which means “womb” or “uterus.” If one becomes engaged in a compassionate act, the womb — the sacrosanct nurturer of life — is pained.
As of Saturday, August 22, the coronavirus has killed 175,406 Americans and has infected 5,623,727. This number is really too big for us to get our arms around. But, if we think of the 175,406 as 1 + 1 + 1 + 1…, then perhaps we can relate to the individuals who have perished.
Moses understood that the Egyptians were also killing Hebrew children in the thousands. I am sure that this really became a stark reality for him when he encountered God at the burring bush.
Standing there, absent of sandals, for it was holy ground, God called Moses to respond to the suffering. Most of us have read the story enough to outline the multiple excuses that Moses gave as to why he was not qualified to carry out God’s mission of liberation. God, patiently (perhaps impatiently) listening agreed that Moses really was not the best choice. But then, no one would have really been the best choice. This is why God declared that he would spiritually accompany Moses with the words of self-declaration: “I AM WHO I AM.”
Myself, you the pastor standing in the pulpit, those sitting before you in the pews wearing (I hope) face masks, and the many more who are watching at home in their PJs on Zoom, all stand before God with limitations and hesitations. This is why we accept the power of the Holy Spirit to grant the wisdom to guide us.
As we think about our lectionary reading for this Sunday perhaps the words of Joe Biden, delivered during his acceptance speech as the 2020 Democratic Presidential candidate, will make us aware and motivate us. Biden, who lost his first wife Nelia and his 13-month-old daughter Naomi in a car accident on their way to buy a Christmas tree, and then later his adult son Beau to brain cancer, can help us understand suffering and tragedy. Joe Biden said, “I know how it feels to lose someone you love. I know that deep black hole that opens up in your chest. That you feel your whole being is sucked into it. I know how mean and cruel and unfair life can be sometimes.”
ILLUSTRATIONS
From team member Dean Feldmeyer:Going With: The Four Most Beautiful Words (Going With)
I’ll. Go. With. You.
They are, perhaps, the four most beautiful words in the English language.
How many times have you heard and been comforted by them? The first time I remember hearing them was when I was about six or seven years old.
We were in a rural county in southern Indiana, where my parents grew up, and they had dropped me and my younger brother off at our great grandma’s farm while they made those boring rounds, visiting the family elders.
It was a hot summer day, we had eaten a hearty lunch and, as was the custom, everyone settled down for a brief siesta before returning to their work.
Halfway through the nap time I realized that I needed to get to the bathroom but Gramma’s only bathroom was an outhouse in the barn lot that was patrolled by the meanest rooster that ever lived. His name was Tom Jones and dogs were afraid of him. That’s how mean he was.
I was afraid of him, too.
I stood, looking at the privy and the rooster through the screen door, sure that I was either going to die if I tried to make it to the outhouse or have an embarrassing accident if I didn’t. In despair, I began to cry.
Then I felt a hand on my shoulder and there was my little, round, great grandmother with a broom in her other hand, smiling down at me. “Come on, Dean,” she said. “I’ll go with you.”
* * *
Going With II: Sidekicks (Going With)
Sidekicks are those characters in literature and entertainment whose role it is to go with the protagonist or hero of the story. They give the hero a sounding board, someone to talk to and think with, but they also provide the storyteller or writer with a way to provide exposition and explanation through dialogue. If you grew up when I did, you’ll easily remember Tonto, who went with the Lone Ranger, or Poncho, who went with the Cisco Kid, or Zoro’s deaf sidekick Bernardo, or Kato who went with the Green Hornet.
The writers at flavorwire.com say that these are the top ten sidekicks in literature based on loyalty, friendship, and overall awesomeness:
10. Friday (Robinson Crusoe)
9. Phineas (A Separate Peace)
8. Dean Morarity (On the Road)
7. Horatio (Hamlet)
6. Sancho Panza (Don Quixote)
5. Huckleberry Finn (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer)
4. Lacey Rawklins (All the Pretty Horses)
3. Ron and Hermione (Harry Potter)
2. Samwise Gamgee (Lord of the Rings)
1. Dr. Watson (Sherlock Holmes)
* * *
Going With III: A Gift Of Time (Going With)
Nelle did not want to be a lawyer, she wanted to be a writer. So, she dropped out of law school and moved to New York where she believed the creative energy of Greenwich Village would inspire and propel her to literary success.
Her friend, a young writer named Truman Capote, knew that she was talented but, perhaps, a bit naïve, so he called his friend Michael Brown, a Broadway writer, and asked him to look after Nelle as she attempted to navigate the big city.
Michael and Nelle met in 1949 and they got along marvelously. When Michael married Joy Williams, a ballerina in 1950, Joy immediately loved Nelle and the three became close friends who were together almost constantly.
Michael said that the three were drawn together by their love of the arts and each other. Perhaps that’s why Michael and Joy were so frustrated that the 23-year-old Nelle was not able to pursue her writing in a way they wanted for her because she had to work long hours as an airline reservationist to make ends meet.
In 1956, Michael came into a substantial sum of money for a show he had written and he and Joy agreed on what they would do with a significant portion of that money.
On Christmas of that year Nelle received a Christmas card from her friends. It contained a year’s wages and said, “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.”
She took the year off and wrote the first draft of her first novel. It would be published in 1960 under her middle name and, in 1961, it won the Pulitzer prize.
The novel was To Kill a Mockingbird by Nelle Harper Lee.
* * *
What Doesn’t Kill Us (Grief)
And you thought it was Kelly Clarkson who said it first. But no.
In 1888, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in his book of aphorisms, Twilight of the Idols, “Aus der Kriegsschule des Lebens.— Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker,” which, loosely translated is “Out of life’s school of war — what doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.”
He paraphrased or rephrased the notion in his autobiography Ecce Homo, wherein he describes certain lucky people as those for whom, “that which does not kill him makes him stronger.”
Anyone who has lived more than two score years, however, knows that Neitzshe’s aphorism should not be taken too seriously. We’ve all known or seen people who, though not killed by their suffering, have become horribly and permanently wounded.
Many diseases don’t kill their victims but leave them horribly disabled. Count Polio, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Schizophrenia, Cerebral Palsy, and Meningitis among them.
Now we can add Covid-19 to the list. Not everyone who gets this disease dies, but many are left with life altering debilitations. According to a survey conducted by Survivor Corps, a Facebook support group for Covid-19 survivors, and Natalie Lambert, Ph.D., of Indiana University’s School of Medicine, the most common effects reported by Covid-19 “long haulers” include: fatigue, muscle or body aches, shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, difficulty concentrating or focusing, inability to exercise or be active, heart palpitations, and nearly 60 other symptoms.
And, of course, there is grief.
Grief rarely kills us, but it can be as debilitating as any physical disease. It can cause depression, mania, and physical symptoms not unlike those of Covid-19. And some people, though they do not die, never recover.
* * *
But For Jesus (Grief)
In 1858 Scottish missionary John G. Paton and his wife sailed for the New Hebrides (now called Vanuatu). Three months after arriving on the island of Tanna, his wife died. One week later his infant son also died. Paton fell into despair. Feeling terribly alone, and surrounded by native people who showed him no sympathy, he wrote, "Let those who have ever passed through any similar darkness as of midnight feel for me. As for all others, it would be more than vain to try to paint my sorrows...But for Jesus, and His fellowship...I would have gone mad and died."
* * *
Lost To Grief (Grief)
The home of Paul Laurence Dunbar, noted poet, is open to the public in Dayton, Ohio. When Dunbar died, his mother left his room exactly as it was on the day of his death with his final poem, handwritten on a pad, laying on his desk. After his mother died, her friends discovered that Paul Laurence Dunbar's last poem had been lost forever. Because his mother had made his room into a shrine and not moved anything, the sun coming through the window had bleached the ink in which the poem was written until it was invisible.
* * * * * *
From team member Mary Austin:Exodus 3:1-15
Fight for Your Calling
Dave Isay, the founder of StoryCorps, disagrees with the idea that we find our calling in life. He contends, “When people have found their calling, they’ve made tough decisions and sacrifices in order to do the work they were meant to do. People who’ve found their calling have a fire about them.” Moses gets an actual fire to attract his attention, and Isay says that the rest of us can also find the work that God wants us to do.
He believes that our calling in life is at the intersection of a Venn diagram of three things: doing something you’re good at, feeling appreciated, and believing your work is making people’s lives better. “When those three things line up, it’s like lightning,” Isay says. This doesn’t have to be working as a brain surgeon. It may be the letter carrier who checks on all of the people on her route each day. Or the store clerk with a smile for everyone. Finding this intersection takes some quiet listening, much like Moses out in the desert. Isay says, “You have to shut out all the chatter of what your friends are telling you to do, what your parents are telling you to do, what society is telling you to do, and just go to that quiet place inside you that knows the truth.”
As Moses knows, finding our work for God in the world isn’t a one-time event — it’s the start of a process. “The old ‘finding your calling’ phraseology makes it sound like a calling is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow — you find it, and the story’s over. But Isay stresses that your calling is an ongoing process. “Understanding what your calling is — that’s very different than the blood, sweat and tears of actually doing it,” he says. Pursuing a calling may require going back to school or apprenticing; it may require starting a business. Often, notes Isay, it leads a person into a line of work that’s in service of others.”
* * *
Exodus 3:1-15
Giving What is Yours
Quaker teacher and writer Parker Palmer says that when we find our true calling, like Moses found his by the burning bush, we serve others with what is ours to give authentically. Before Moses takes a step toward Egypt, God makes sure that Moses is grounded in his divine calling. God spends a lot of time reassuring Moses about what he has to offer the people of Israel, even when Moses protests vigorously. Parker Palmer says, “Years ago, I heard Dorothy Day speak. Founder of the Catholic Worker movement, her long-term commitment to living among the poor on New York's Lower East Side — had made her one of my heroes. So it came as a great shock when in the middle of her talk, I heard her start to ruminate about the "ungrateful poor." I did not understand how such a dismissive phrase could come from the lips of a saint — until it hit me with the force of a Zen koan. Dorothy Day was saying, "Do not give to the poor expecting to get their gratitude so that you can feel good about yourself. If you do, your giving will be thin and short-lived, and that is not what the poor need; it will only impoverish them further. Give only if you have something you must give; give only if you are someone for whom giving is its own reward." When I give something I do not possess, I give a false and dangerous gift, a gift that looks like love but is, in reality, loveless — a gift given more from my need to prove myself than from the other's need to be cared for.”
God’s call to Moses sets him free from that kind of falseness. The way God roots Moses in the work ahead serves Moses well when the people begin to grumble later on in the journey. Parker Palmer says that one sign we’re giving the wrong gifts is when we experience burnout. “One sign that I am violating my own nature in the name of nobility is a condition called burnout. Though usually regarded as the result of trying to give too much, burnout in my experience results from trying to give what I do not possess — the ultimate in giving too little! Burnout is a state of emptiness, to be sure, but it does not result from giving all I have; it merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place.”
Part of serving God, Parker Palmer says, is trusting that God has other people to do the divine work, in addition to us. We have our part to do, and God has other people to do the rest, as Moses experiences through the support and co-laboring of his brother, Aaron, also called by God.
* * *
Jeremiah 15:15-21
Grief on Wheels
The prophet Jeremiah calls out to God using words that echo the feelings of many people in deep grief:
I did not sit in the company of merrymakers, nor did I rejoice;
under the weight of your hand I sat alone, for you had filled me with indignation.
Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed?
Richard Nares found himself in a similar place of pain after his young son died of leukemia. Not content only to lament, and seeking the kind of transformation that Jeremiah longs for, he returned to the hospital where his son died. He asked the staff how he could help other families, and their answer was simple: transportation. “Children diagnosed with cancer and their families must travel far and frequently to receive treatments, such as chemotherapy. One family that Richard encountered lived 120 miles away from the hospital. Another had to travel to the hospital six times a week but did not have a car. For some children, the caustic chemotherapy treatments leave their immune systems so weak that they are unable to ride germ-ridden public transportation.”
For Nares, one answer to his own grief was to do something for other families. “Many parents do not have the liberty to take unpaid time from work. Some single-parent families are forced to choose between sending their sick child on a bus to chemotherapy alone or leaving their siblings unsupervised. He found that many children were riding the bus for over 4 hours to and from the hospital or, worse yet, forgoing important treatments altogether. Although Richard and Emilio had rides and the support of family throughout Emilio's illness, Richard saw how tough cancer was on many low-income families and decided to do something.”
“In the beginning, he drove around the area in his Buick, giving families rides to and from the hospital, but soon more requests came in. With the help of nurses and social workers, he started the Emilio Nares Foundation to expand his work into a formal program, named Ride With Emilio. Now, the Emilio Nares Foundation gives 2,500 free rides to children and families a year to several hospitals in Southern California. The foundation also provides support to families providing bilingual patient advocacy, and even bereavement and burial support.” Serving other families keeps his son alive, in a different way, and eases his own grief.
* * *
Jeremiah 15:15-21
Grief With a Voice
As the prophet Jeremiah calls out to God with his cry of grief, one of his sorrows is the voiceless nature of grief. God answers him, promising, “If you utter what is precious, and not what is worthless, you shall serve as my mouth.” The Missing People Choir in London also gives voice to the grief of families who have a missing loved one, and live with the complicated grief of not knowing what happened to someone they love. “At St. Martin in the Fields recently, in the heart of central London, a choir lifted its voices out of the depths of despair. Nearly every member has endured the anguish of a missing loved one — children mostly. Some, like Peter Boxell's son Lee, disappeared decades ago without a trace. "If he is in heaven, then I just pray that he can hear us and that he will know that we're still thinking of him, that we still love him," Boxell said. They call themselves the Missing People Choir — 30 or so voices from every walk of life. Most had never sung a day in their lives, until music producer James Hawkins volunteered to start the choir back in 2014.”
He says, "To be eye-to-eye with family members that are there singing to you, who in their heads they're singing to their missing loved one, that's incredibly powerful.”
Peter Boxell's 15-year-old son, Lee, left home in 1988 to go to a soccer match in South London, and was never seen again. The family has never heard a word about what happened to him. Boxell and his wife couldn’t bear to move from the home their son knew. Boxell said. “We always hoped that Lee would come home one day.” They are still hoping. “For decades, he and his wife Christine have waited for any news of his whereabouts. And in all that time, Lee's room has stood just as he left it — his school blazer on a hanger, homework unfinished on his desk…One night in 2013, Boxell had a dream that he was singing a song he had written for Lee. With the help of James Hawkins, whom he had met through the Missing People charity, they literally turned that dream into a reality. Over and over he practiced his song for his son, knowing full well he couldn't really carry a tune. But that didn't matter. At the annual Missing People charity's event, Boxell got up and sang it — belting out his solo as if he'd been singing all his life.” The choir gives grief a voice, and the members call out in much the same way Jeremiah does.
* * *
Matthew 16:21-28
Jesus Brings the Wind
In his book Uproar, subtitled Calm Leadership in Anxious Times, Peter L. Steinke says, “In the Biosphere in Arizona, a three-acre greenhouse in the desert, people noticed that the fruit was falling off the trees prematurely. What had happened? Inside this encapsulated environment, wind, a force that challenges the trees’ branches and strengthens them, is absent. Without wind, the branches do not gain sufficient strength to hold the fruit to the time of maturation.”
When he gives this word about taking up the cross, Jesus is supplying his followers with some of the wind that will strengthen their branches for the upheaval ahead, both for him and for them. He tells them, and us, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” He’s announcing that following him will involve embracing the winds of change, disappointment and suffering, and preparing them for the work they will do after his death. Peter Steinke adds, “The leader can most influence the system by challenging it. The leader functions like the wind.” Jesus embodies this, in his own way of leading and teaching his friends.
* * * * * *
From team member Chris Keating:Exodus 3:1-15
Responding to trauma
God sees the oppression and pain of the Hebrew people. “I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings.” In other words, God understands the trauma they have endured, and God is intent on correcting the wrong.
Educators face a similar task as students head back to school. Whether they are teaching online or in person, educators who are aware of how trauma impacts their students will be better equipped for understanding and addressing its effects. Responding to trauma, however, requires paying attention the way God hears the cries of the oppressed.
“We tend to think of trauma as the result of a frightening and upsetting event,” writes Caroline Miller. “But many children experience trauma through ongoing exposure, throughout their early development, to abuse, neglect, homelessness, domestic violence or violence in their communities.” Yet sometimes the suffering of children is harder to see. Miller goes on to quote Nancy Rappaport, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, who says that kids disguise trauma because “they are masters at making sure you do not see them bleed.”
Consider this composite story, an example of the sort of trauma faced by up to 35 million elementary school students yearly:
Ben arrives late to school almost every morning. When he enters his second-grade classroom, his teacher asks for his homework. He slaps classmates on the backs of their heads and knocks books off their desks. His teacher tells him to sit down in a loud, annoyed voice. Ben continues walking around the room distracting other students. The teacher raises her voice and points a finger at Ben, ordering him to sit. Ben kicks his chair and spins around the room. “That’s it! I am calling your mother!” the teacher threatens, but Ben does not hear her. He has run out into the hallway. The teacher picks up the phone and dials the main office to alert the principal.
But perhaps the school might respond differently to Ben if they knew other details about his life. His backstory includes watching his father die in a car accident. Following the accident, his mother fell into a deep depression. Ben and his two siblings now live with relatives in a small apartment on the other side of town. It takes his aunt two hours to drive Ben to and from school, and as a result his meal and sleeping patterns are disrupted. Except for kids who tease Ben, nobody at school has noticed that many days he wears the same clothes several days in a row.
* * *
Exodus 3:1-15
“Who am I that I should speak to the nation?”
Moses isn’t sure he’s the right person for the job. Afterall, he’s a fugitive on the run — not exactly the sort of person who gets tapped to lead revolutions. Are you sure he is your go-to guy, God? But leaders come in all shapes, sizes, colors, ages, and genders.
Likewise, you wouldn’t expect that a 13-year old kid would grab the nation’s attention at a political convention. But that was exactly what happened last week when a New Hampshire teenager addressed the Democratic National Convention. Brayden Harrington, a boy who stutters, addressed the nation, explaining how his meeting with Joe Biden in February changed his life. Whatever your politics, watch the video of young Brayden and try to imagine the courage he summoned in speaking — especially when he knew it was likely his stammer would make speaking difficult. Brayden pushed through his speech, smiling and confident, sharing how Biden had told him of his own difficulties with stuttering. By early Friday morning, more than three million persons had viewed Brayden’s speech. “I’m just a regular kid,” said Brayden.
“Brayden Harrington,” tweeted Dan Rather, “the 13-year old boy with a stutter. Pure, unvarnished, courage.”
You know, a regular guy, just like Moses.
* * *
Jeremiah 15:15-21
You will soon see sorrow go down with the sun
Jeremiah’s laments are poetically rendered theological reflections. He articulates complaints about suffering, God, and faith — but never wavers from hope. As a poet, he weaves a theology of justice rooted in passion.
Cathleen Perez Brenycz argues for a robust return to reading and memorizing poetry, suggesting that poetry in a time of pandemic is especially therapeutic.
“Poetry continues to be a strong, emotional outlet. While public spaces are closed due to the pandemic, groups have moved to the virtual stage. Open mic nights and poetry workshops fill with people sharing poems committed to memory. Personally, I enjoy sharing Maya Angelou’s poetry. I talk about And Still I Rise to anyone who would listen!”
Last week offered a couple of great examples of poetry engaging our attention. Brayden Harrington (referenced above) reminded us that former Vice President Joe Biden turned to the poetry of William Butler Yeats to help cope with his stuttering. Then Biden himself quoted a familiar line from Seamus Heaney in his own speech Thursday evening. A few days before, Prince Charles used the words of 19th century Australian poet Victor Daley to bring comfort to the people of Victoria, Australia following their struggles with wildfires and Covid-19.
"It is our heartfelt wish," he said, speaking on behalf of himself and his wife, Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, "That in the words of Victor Daley, the 19th century poet who found his voice in Victoria and who was himself no stranger to hardship, 'you will soon see sorrow go down with the sun'."
* * * * * *
WORSHIPby George Reed
Call to Worship:
Leader: O give thanks to God, call on God’s name.
People: Let us make known God’s deeds among the peoples.
Leader: Sing to God, sing praises to our Sovereign.
People: We will tell of all God’s wonderful works.
Leader: Seek God and the divine strength;
People: We seek God’s presence continually.
OR
Leader: God calls us to enter into the world with God.
People: We are never far from the presence of our God.
Leader: When God gives us a task, God empowers us to do it.
People: With God’s Spirit within us, we will do God’s work.
Leader: Share God’s love with all you meet this week.
People: We will be God’s loving presence for others.
Hymns and Songs:
All Creatures of Our God and King
UMH: 62
H82: 400
PH: 455
AAHH: 147
NNBH: 33
NCH: 17
CH: 22
LBW: 527
ELW: 835
W&P: 23
AMEC: 50
STLT: 203
Renew: 47
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
ELW: 503/504/505
W&P: 588
AMEC: 54
STLT: 200
Great Is Thy Faithfulness
UMH: 140
AAHH: 158
NNBH: 45
NCH: 423
CH: 86
ELW: 733
W&P: 72
AMEC: 84
Renew: 249
I’ll Praise My Maker While I’ve Breath
UMH: 60
H82: 429
PH: 253
CH: 20
Pues Si Vivimos (When We Are Living)
UMH: 356
PH: 400
NCH: 499
CH: 536
ELW: 639
W&P: 415
Abide with Me
UMH: 700
H82: 662
PH: 543
AAHH: 459
NNBH: 247
NCH: 99
CH: 636
LBW: 272
ELW: 629
W&P: 307
AMEC: 495
STLT: 101
Hymn of Promise
UMH: 707
NCH: 433
CH: 638
W&P: 515
Lord, You Give the Great Commission
UMH: 584
H82: 528
PH: 429
CH: 459
ELW: 579
W&P: 592
Renew: 305
Here I Am, Lord
UMH: 593
PH: 525
AAHH: 567
CH: 452
ELW: 574
W&P: 559
Renew: 149
O Zion, Haste
UMH: 573
H82: 539
NNBH: 422
LBW: 397
ELW: 668
AMEC: 566
Cares Chorus
CCB: 53
Through It All
CCB: 61
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
ELW: 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 is ever present in all of creation:
Grant us the faith to trust that you are always with us
as we go about the tasks that you have set before us;
through Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
OR
We praise you, O God, because you are always with your creation. You never desert us or leave us alone. You have given us the task of sharing your light with the world and you are there to supply the light and the courage to share it. Help us to trust in you as we share your light today. Amen.
Prayer of Confession:
Leader: Let us confess to God and before one another our sins and especially our lack of trust in God’s constant help.
People: We confess to you, O God, and before one another that we have sinned. We have failed to rely on you as we go about the mission you have placed before us. We try to accomplish things in our own strength when we know we can only do your work in the strength of your Spirit. Call us back to yourself as our center that we may be empowered by you Spirit for your work. Amen.
Leader: God is always with us and ready to assist us. We need only ask. Receive God’s grace and share the blessings of God with others.
Prayers of the People
Glory and praise are yours, O God, because you are our ever present help and strength. You are our rock and our fortress.
(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 have failed to rely on you as we go about the mission you have placed before us. We try to accomplish things in our own strength when we know we can only do your work in the strength of your Spirit. Call us back to yourself as our center that we may be empowered by you Spirit for your work.
We give you thanks for your presence among us and within us. We thank you for your strength that enables us to live as your people even during times of grief and stress. We thank you for our loved ones who are no longer physically present to us. We thank you for their love and care and for your assurance that you hold them safely in your love.
(Other thanksgivings may be offered.)
We pray for one another in our needs. We pray for those who are grieving and for those who mourn. We pray that we may be a source of care and solace to them.
(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
Learning to ride a two wheel bike can be scary as we learn how to balance and ride. Having someone beside us helps give us confidence. Lots of things can be scary but God is always with us to help us.
* * * * * *
CHILDREN'S SERMONHoly Ground
by Tom Willadsen
Exodus 3:1-15
Do something surprising to get the kids’ attention. Maybe sit close to them and shout “boo!”
Ask what their parents do to get their attention. Calling their name when it’s time for supper…waking them up in the morning…getting them to turn off their games to listen… It depends on the kids and their ages.
Tell them about Moses and the burning bush. Ask what it would look like, a bush that was on fire, but getting consumed by the fire. That’s pretty strange; it got Moses’ attention.
God called to Moses from inside the bush; God called Moses by name.
Then God told Moses to take off his shoes. What’s up with that? God said that Moses was on holy ground.
Ask the kids why God wanted Moses to take off his shoes.
Here are some of the explanations that have been offered over the centuries:
— Some cultures do this as a sign of respect.
— Taking off one’s shoes is a kind of denial, one makes oneself humble.
— Some people believe that one should untie every knot when coming into God’s presence, to symbolize that one is free to obey the Lord only.
— A Chassidic tradition holds that Moses was barefoot so he could feel every pebble, symbolizing that as their leader he would feel their smallest sorrows.
Thank the kids for their good ideas, and remind them that God made all places and can speak to us through bushes. So pay attention.
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The Immediate Word, August 30, 2020 issue.
Copyright 2020 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.
