Sunday, January 14, 2024

Beloved


To see a video of this sermon, click here.


Jan. 14, 2024 – Christ Presbyterian Church

Luke 3: 7-21


It was a little over 60 years ago when Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and talked about the dream he had. This is the weekend when that speech shows up in many places. I am sure many of you are familiar with it.

 

But I’ll bet not many of you are not familiar with Gordon Gundrum, known by his nickname “Gunny.” 


He was the National Park Ranger standing next to King at the Lincoln Memorial. You can see him in this picture – a rare white guy on a platform with lots of Black folks. 

I want to tell you a bit of his story because I think it can make a connection to the Gospel reading we just heard and to things we might do in our lives as we look at ways to follow Jesus. 


As Dr. King walked up to the podium, Gundrum realized that the microphones were aimed too high for a person of King’s 5-feet, seven-inches height. So he reached in and lowered each of the mics as King prepared to speak. 


 

Gunny Gundrum was 25 years old and had little familiarity with the diverse world that was now all around him.

 

Jonathan Eig, who just wrote an amazing biography of King, had a conversation with author David Maraniss last September at the Cap Times Idea Fest. He talked about getting to know Gundrum in his research for the book.

 

Eig said that Gunny “was very comfortable with the n-word.” He was from a big family from a rural community near Albany, N.Y. He told Eig he didn’t think of himself as prejudiced, but then again, he never met a Black person while he was growing up.

 

He learned more about prejudice in the Marines when he realized that he and his Black bunkmate could not go to the same restaurants near Paris Island in South Carolina. 

And he was not exactly culturally hip. When he saw a Black man with a beard approaching the stage at the Lincoln Memorial without making eye contact, Gunny stopped him and asked him for his pass, which the man said he had left in his hotel room. It was the famous singer, Sammy Davis, Jr. Gunny had not recognized him.

 

Now here Gunny was, standing next to, guarding, perhaps the most famous Black man in America at the time. King began speaking, quietly in that preacherly style he had. Gunny still worried that the mics were too low. King talked on. Finally, Gunny could not stop himself. He reached in front of King and lowered the microphones one more time. 

 

You can see his hand again reaching in front of King on this picture. He was amplifying King’s message to the crowd, to the world. A small act but symbolically a good lesson for all of us.

 

The speech took off. “I have a dream.” “Let freedom ring.” “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last.” 

 

The crowd roared as King stepped away from the podium. And Gunny stepped right in front of him as they left the stage, making his body a shield for King.

 

Even though he was more focused on the crowd than on the speech, it still had a big impact on Gunny. Fifty years later, he told his hometown newspaper, “I took away from that day and that speech some idea of what the world should be and what we should all strive for.” 

 

He later became a New York State Police officer, and he told a reporter for the NBC Today Show, “Through what I learned that day, I think it made me a better policeman, a more fair policeman and I tried to practice that always.”

 

As Jonathan Eig thought about those moments when Gundrum wanted to make sure that King’s voice was amplified to the crowd, to the world that was watching, Eig told David Maraniss, “what I realized is that that was an act of love from Gunny, it's exactly the kind of Christian love that King talked about all the time.”

 

It was also the kind of love that John the Baptist and Jesus talked about.

 

It’s not that John sounds very cuddly at the beginning of today’s Gospel passage. “You brood of vipers,” he says to the crowd. We hardly ever say that to you here. It’s the kind of rhetoric we are more likely to hear in today’s political debates, but here it is in the Gospel.


Once John has the crowd’s attention, he goes all apocalyptic on them, describing God’s judgment in pretty vivid and unsettling terms. 


The crowd’s response? “What, then, should we do?” 

 

I can imagine that the crowd listening to Martin Luther King 50 years ago had the same question. 

 

I imagine that many of us here today when we look at all the issues facing our world, indeed all the issues facing our own individual and family lives, have the same question.

 

John offers some very concrete ideas to his crowd – share what you have, don’t get greedy, don’t extort money from others or make false accusations. As those who have studied the Gospel according to Luke note, justice is a recurring theme in his writings.

 

The song of Mary before Jesus’ birth – what we call The Magnificat – calls for justice for the poor.  After Jesus’s baptism that we heard about today, Luke tells the story of Jesus going into the desert for 40 days, then going to his home synagogue in Nazareth where he gives what amounts to his inaugural address based on the prophet Isaiah: 


“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
    because he has anointed me
        to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
    and recovery of sight to the blind,
        to set free those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

 

Do you hear the echoes of that in John’s message? Do you hear echoes from that in the life and words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.?

 

Then our Gospel story takes a hard turn. John points toward Jesus, amplifying the message that is to come. And it costs John his life. Before Luke gets to the baptism of Jesus, the Gospel writer tells us of John’s imprisonment. It’s as if he is saying, John’s work is done, now Jesus’ work is beginning.

 

And for Jesus to begin his work, he needs to stop and pray before he emerges from the waters of baptism and then God’s Spirit bursts on the scene: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

 

What then, are we to do?

 

Well, prayer is not a bad place to begin. No matter how we have tried to live out Jesus’ message in the past, taking time to pray provides an opportunity to assess and reassess whether what we have done still makes sense and whether what we might do now provides us a path forward.

 

I think that works both in our personal lives - and in how we choose to respond to the needs of those around us. Among the many messages Jesus gave us, stopping to pray was an action he often took.

 

Another thing we might do is remember that word “beloved.”

Yes, the Gospels tell of Jesus as God’s Beloved One in a very special way. But Jesus is not the only one beloved by God. 

 

So was John the Baptist. So are the people who have followed Jesus across the centuries. So are the Jewish people who proceeded Jesus and were known as God’s Chosen People. And so are we.

 

That sense of know that God’s love is with us – always – can carry us through some pretty hard times.


Just look at the things that happened in the months right after Dr. King told the nation about his dream. Four little girls were killed when white supremacists bombed a church in Birmingham, Alabama. President Kennedy was assassinated. The Black leadership in the struggle for racial justice began to fracture.

 

Dr. King knew what it felt like to be discouraged. Yet he pressed on. He had a sense of being one of God’s beloved ones, even when he recognized his own shortcomings and faced his own discouragements.

 

And still, Dr. King held out the vision of what he and others called the beloved community. There’s that word “beloved” again.

 

One of the people who went to that March on Washington in 1963 was Francine Yaeger, a 19-year-old Black woman from Chicago who took a train to DC for the March. She got a glimpse of that beloved community. Jonathan Eig, the author of that King biography, wrote this about her:

 

“As she got off the train and began walking in the direction of the Lincoln Memorial, she saw young people toting luggage for old people, daddies with their daughters on their shoulders, and mothers pushing babies in strollers. While people called Black people ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’ and said ‘Good morning’ and ‘How are you?’ Everywhere, it seemed, guitars were strumming.”

Francine said to her best friend who had traveled to DC with her: “Florestine, this is what heaven’s gonna be like when we get there.”

 

But here’s another look at what the beloved community can be. It comes from Dr. Luther E. Smith Jr., a scholar of the works of Black theologian Howard Thurman, whose writings had a big influence on Dr. King. Smith spoke in 2019 at a conference on Thurman’s life and work that was held at Upper House here in Madison.

 

For Smith, living in the beloved community is not always such an idyllic place. 

 

He told about visiting a place that served people without homes in North Carolina. 

 

“So, it’s the homeless,” he said, “with all the aromas you get from people who have been living on the street. And some obvious signs of mental illness … But what I saw in that place was … an area for clothing with racks separating the clothing as if you walked into a department store. There was a place over here to help people deal with their disability benefits and other kinds of need they would have in terms of medical care. 

 

“There was artwork that many of them had drawn and their poetry as an expression of beauty that had come through them. I go into the living room and there are tables with tablecloths and china and they are being served four and five helpings of food.”

 

Smith said, “I felt that I had entered the realm of God. This was for me an experience of beloved community. Were there people still there addicted to drugs? Yes. Were some of the people serving wondering, could these people be doing better than they are? Probably yes. Do some of the homeless speak rough to one another? Yes.”

 

He concluded, “I would say that if we found ourselves requiring an understanding of the beloved community stripped of these dimensions of life, we’re always going to be disappointed in the picture of beloved community.”


I think John the Baptist understood that but still called people to be their better selves.


I think Jesus understood that, but still asked us to do the hard things that seem to go against our nature, like forgiving without limit and loving our enemies.


I think Martin Luther King understood that, knowing that it would take hard work, sacrifices, even death to bring that dream closer to reality. 

 

Across the centuries that people taken from Africa and sold as slaves in this country have been here, they have held out hope for freedom, for justice, for dignity. Their hopes and their persistence have been captured in a beautiful hymn that is often sung on this weekend. It’s called “Life Every Voice and Sing.” 

 

Today, we can sing it in solidarity with all those who are God’s beloved ones who have struggled across their lives while never giving up their dreams, the dream that Dr. King held out to us as a challenge 60 years ago.

 

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us.
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
let us march on till victory is won.

 

Gunny Gundrum took a small action to help Dr. King amplify that dream. We, too, can find ways to amplify the words, the hopes, the dreams for justice of those living on the margins in our time. 

 

So let us join together in singing this hymn. (This version is from Kirk Franklin.)

Sunday, September 3, 2023

No Place to Lay Your Head

If you'd like to see a video of today's sermon, you can find it here.

Matthew 8: 14-20

Jesus was not the only one who did not have a place to lay his head. 

This bronze sculpture by Canadian Timothy Schmalz portrays Jesus as person with no place to lay his head.
 
But then neither does David…nor Lizzie…nor Danny…nor Matt.

They are all people I have gotten to know during the last year at Christ Pres. They are all about in their 40s, They are all people who have been with us in our space at one time or another. They are people some of you have gotten to know as well. For today, I’ve changed their names.

They are people we have been able to help a bit with our Compassion Fund. And they are people who have taught me a bit about the challenges of being without a place to lay your head – at least without a place they could call home.

They are hardly alone. As of last Thursday, according to a story in the Wisconsin State Journal, the list of people who are homeless waiting for housing included 609 singles and 72 households with children. And those are just the ones on an official list.

 

Bryan Stevenson, whose book Just Mercy took readers inside his work to free people unjustly on death row and whose Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama brings us face-to-face with the racial injustices across the centuries, talks a lot about proximity.

If you are willing to get closer to people who are suffering,” Stevenson says, “you will find the power to change the world.”

That’s part of what I experienced with these four people. It’s part of what you experience when you eat with guests at Luke House or chat with people who come to the Community Fridge looking for food. 

Danny had been sleeping outside in parks along the lake – including right behind the church. He said that his wife had left him a while ago and brought his kids to Madison, so he came here to be nearby. 

A carpenter by trade, he was looking for a job, but had no place to live. He stayed at the emergency men’s shelter for a while, but then his backpack with his laptop and clothes was stolen, so he took to sleeping outside.

The day I met him at church, he was looking for clothes. All he had at that point, he said, was the tee-shirt and shorts that he was wearing. 

I took him over to the Beacon on East Washington – an amazing place that was packed with other people without homes looking for help – for housing, for a place to wash their clothes, for a place just to hang out for a while. They have been serving up to a record of 250 people a day during August. 

They told Danny they would find some clothes for him, but they were so busy and understaffed that it would take a few hours. He said he understood and would come back later in the afternoon.

A few weeks later, he stopped by to tell me his phone had been stolen. If you are trying to find work, you need a phone where prospective employers can reach you. So I used our Compassion Fund to get him a $50 smart phone and $50 in phone minutes. 

He was thrilled – and grateful. But then within a week, while he was sleeping at James Madison Park someone had stolen my old backpack that I had given him. There went his phone.

“I’m just not good at being homeless,” Danny told me. 

We went over to St. Vinnie’s to get a set of clothes he could wear to a job interview and he was off. He did not get that job – he needed a car to get to the various work sites, but now he has landed one at a company that does masonry restoration. I learned a lot about resourcefulness and persistence from Danny.

But he still has no place to sleep inside. The exhaustion of sleeping outside may well affect his ability to keep that job. I don’t think any of us are very good at being homeless. Even Jesus, after all, noted that he had nowhere to lay his head. 

Lizzie had a place to lay her head – sort of. When she first came to Christ Pres in late November, she and her 12-year-old daughter were sleeping in her car. She fled what she described as a bad situation in Chicago. She had been working with the Beacon and the Salvation Army to find a place to stay, but nothing had opened up. 

Family shelter
So the Compassion Fund got her a couple of nights in a motel until she could move into the Salvation Army Family Shelter on Milwaukee Street. That place – a former nursing home - can hold 35 families.

But life is never simple. She went to Chicago in December to try to get her 14-year old daughter to come back to Madison. She had gone back to Chicago with friends whom Lizzie did not trust. But Lizzie could not get back to Madison that evening and her daughter could not stay at the shelter because there was no adult with her and could I pick her up? No, I could not, for a whole variety of reasons. And it went on like that. 

Lizzie came here for Advent Vespers, sat in on a Bible study or two, tried to navigate dealing with two challenging teens. Through it all, she marked two years of sobriety. Finally, she decided the only thing she could do is go back to Chicago, even with all the troubles she faces there. 

From there, she keeps posting on Facebook about her faith in God to get her through all this and sending good wishes. 

I learned a lot about resilience and faith and determination from her.

I learned a lot about how overlapping issues can send you over the edge from David.

He had been an assistant professor at UW-Madison for six years, was a research fellow at Harvard, taught at Northwestern – and last fall was facing eviction, losing his car and potential arrest for failing to pay child support for his now 16-year old daughter to the tune of some $50,000.

What went wrong? So many things. 

He had emotional and physical disabilities that ultimately cost him his job. Part of what happened is he stopped opening his mail, would not answer or make phone calls and he was very hard to help since he wanted to do things his way. He had no income and his mother – who lived in another country - was draining her savings to support him where she could. 

Yet people did reach out to help. Our own Ron Konkol restarted the process to see if he could get Social Security Disability. The Aging and Disability Resource Center got him a case worker who could try to reestablish health care. The Tenant Resource Center provided an attorney who helped him get an extra month before eviction. Our Compassion Fund covered his car payment and insurance so he would not have his car impounded.

So many complications. At the end of September, a moving truck took his stuff to storage and – as best I can tell – he and his mother fled the country to avoid the warrant that was now out for him for failure to pay child support.

When you are living on the edge, there are not always happy endings.

Men's shelter
Matt is someone who has a better chance for a happy ending, but like Jesus, he has gone through this summer with no place to lay his head other than the Emergency Men’s Shelter near East Towne in the old Gander Mountain building.

That shelter now is setting new records for people staying there – 270 guests were jammed in there on Aug. 22, up from 210 earlier this summer.

Matt was married for 20 years. He and his wife had six kids – one of them now grown and living in Arizona. He worked as a custodian at St. Mary’s Hospital and Home Depot. But then two years ago, he and his wife got divorced.  He is still in touch with his kids. He is very close with his 16-year-old son. But life is so complicated.

Rent at the place where he was living was $1,300 a month, but the building was sold, and the new owner raised the rent to $1,700. Matt could not afford that. He sold his car to keep solvent for a little while. Now he was without a home or a car, so he went to the men’s shelter.

He got a job with the City of Madison Traffic Engineering Department painting lines on streets. But his shift was from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. and the buses don’t run in the middle of night. So he’d sleep in a park after work, then catch one of the first buses at dawn back to the shelter. 

Folks had to be out of the shelter by 8 a.m., so then he’d go to a library, maybe getting a bit of sleep until a librarian woke him up and told him he could not sleep in the library. The Compassion Fund helped get him cab rides from work to the shelter for a few weeks, but now he is back on his own.

He worked with folks at The Beacon to try to find better housing. He applied for other, better jobs and got one at a downtown hotel as a maintenance worker. Rob Striker, who is on our Compassion Fund Committee, met a few times with him to give him some moral support. But in the meantime, Matt is still sleeping in the shelter.  

Here's a guy with no criminal record, dedicated to his family, working a tough shift on a city job, and bumping into one obstacle after another, including having cash from his paycheck stolen out of his wallet one morning at the shelter.  

It became clear to me even with a good job and a clean record how hard it is to find a place to live, even just a room he could rent in someone’s house. He is hardly alone. Finding housing is the biggest challenge for every agency that works with people without homes, domestic violence survivors fleeing their abuser, people returning from prison, immigrants arriving in our city.

The time I spent with Danny and Lizzie, with David and Matt drove home to me so many of the challenges people face when they are trapped in poverty. No place to live, no car for transportation, no job because they have no phone, emotional illnesses, fractured relationships. 

One of my heroes is Fr. Greg Boyle, a Jesuit priest who 35 years ago in Los Angeles started an organization called Homeboy Industries that works with gang members. 

In his 2017 commencement address at the University of Notre Dame, Fr. Greg told the graduates that a healthy community stands “in awe of what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment of how they carry it.” He added that “the measure of our compassion is not in our service to those on the margins but to see ourselves in kinship with them.”

When we encounter the poor, those with no place to lay their heads, we are in a way encountering Jesus.  So many people here know what that means. For some, it is the way you reach out to help. For others, it is how you have experienced the challenges of poverty yourselves. 

One of the great blessings we have here at Christ Pres is the Compassion Fund that has been able to help people both within our congregation and those in the wider community. 

A bequest from a member a few years back has given us the resources to work with. That money will not last forever, of course, and our Deacons Compassion Fund committee works hard to use the funds both generously and wisely. 

That empty plate that the homeless Jesus is pointing to gets filled and refilled thanks to the work of people here.

But we do more that provide resources. In that Gospel story we heard today, Jesus healed people in their distress. That inspired others to follow him. I think for many of us, that inspiration propels us forward as well. 

We are among those who try to love and to serve our city. We cry out for justice. We reach out to those in need. We let their lives affect ours. We experience proximity just as Jesus did.

So let us join together in a hymn. It’s #351, “All Who Love and Serve Your City.” We’ll sing verses 1, 2 and 4.

Sunday, July 30, 2023

I Will Dwell in God’s House

Here is a video of the sermon from on July 30, 2023 at Christ Presbyterian Church in Madison.

Psalm 23:6; Luke 6: 46-49

I was standing outside the 16thStreet Baptist Church in downtown Birmingham on a beautiful Saturday morning in late October of 2018. A sign recalled the evil that had literally exploded at this site on a Sunday morning in 1963. 

A bomb planted by white supremacists went off in the church, killing four black teen girls, injuring others.  As I stood there with others on a civil rights tour that was taking us through several of the historic cities that were part of the story of righting historic wrongs, notifications began to show up on my cell phone. The news was coming out of Pittsburgh. 


Eleven Jewish people gathered at synagogue there had been killed by a white man with a gun after he had posted anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant statements on social media. 

 

Another sacred site had been turned into a killing place.

 

Across the street from the 16thStreet Baptist Church is Kelly Ingram Park, once a place that served as a staging area for the civil rights protests in Birmingham. It was the place where in May of 1963, the Birmingham police and firefighters attacked children as they protested, spraying them with water cannons, setting dogs on them and arresting many of them. 

 

In the middle of the park is a small plaque and tree honoring Anne Frank. She was the young German Jewish girl whose family took refuge in Amsterdam during the rise of the Nazis, only later to be captured and sent to a concentration camp where she died at the age of 15 – just a year or two older than the girls killed in the church bombing. 

 

Evil just keeps returning. Which is why Anne Frank’s words on that plaque were so important on that Saturday morning as we stood outside the site of one atrocity only to be learning the details of another. 

 

“How wonderful it is,” she wrote in her famous diary, “that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”

 

As we have been journeying through Psalm 23 this past month, we have arrived at the last verse today: “Surely goodness and kindness shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.”

 

That is such a happy ending after reading about valleys of death and enemies glaring at us as we sit at a dining table. And yet that day in Birmingham, that day in Pittsburgh suggested that even in the house of the Lord, goodness and kindness could be ripped away.

 

Let me take you this morning through another story that may seem like goodness and kindness are still too far away. But stay tuned for the ending. Goodness and kindness will arrive not just at the house of the Lord, but also at the house of Yonason and Michele Meadows in Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood. 

 


They are the parents of a family of six children. Yoni, as he is known, is an Orthodox Jewish rabbi. He was a chaplain at Meriter Hospital here from 2017 to 2021 and now manages pastoral care education at Advocate Health in Milwaukee. He was one of the rabbis who went to Pittsburgh after that horrific and hate-filled mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue.

For Yoni and his family, though, antisemitism is not something just far away in Pittsburgh. It landed painfully in their front yard in 2021.


We as Christians have a particular need to pay attention to antisemitism. Jesus, after all, was Jewish. So were his closest followers. And yet as the early Christians began to form their own sect, first within the Jewish community and then bringing in people who were not Jewish, hostility began to grow. 

 

The biggest threat to the early Christians came from the Roman Empire, but their Jewish neighbors were much closer, had less power and were easy to cast as the enemy. Contemporary theologian Willie James Jennings of Yale University describes the anti-Semitism of the early Christians as training camps where people learned to hate the “other” – lessons that were transferred to many other groups by Christians across the centuries.


We live with that reality today. It is a reality that does not create a place of goodness and kindness. But it is a reality we can do something about with the way we live in our lives, in this community.

 

Yoni was standing outside his home on an April day in 2021, talking on the phone with his mother. A tall man walked toward him, but Yoni turned away.

Sophie Carson, a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, described what happened next in a story she wrote two months ago.

She wrote that Yoni suddenly “took a ‘tremendous blow’ to the back of his head and crumpled to the ground. One of his hearing aids broke; his glasses bent.” He screamed and considered launching himself at the man but held back, afraid things could get worse.

Yoni told Sophie: “He looked at me, seemed surprised that I reacted, which I took to be: You harass Jews and they just take it.” The man laughed, turned and walked away, never saying a word.

Later, when Yoni told people at the synagogue about the attack, they asked what the man looked like. Once Yoni described him, they said this man had been taunting Jews for months, but this was the first time that they knew of that he had hit anyone.

Anti-Semitism had come to their front yard. But it was the second time in a week it had affected the Meadows family.

Sophie described what happened just a few days before the attack on Yoni.

“Four of his children had purchased ice cream on the city’s east side when a man spotted his 15-year-old son Elazar’s yarmulke. ‘I know you worship Yahweh,’ the man shouted, coming toward the siblings. ‘I know who you are.’

“The four siblings – all teens and young adults – rushed to their car, jumped in, and locked the doors before the man could reach them. Then, they watched as the man crossed the street, giving high-fives to people who appeared to know him.”

Two years later, having processed these things and many other moments when their Jewishness made them stand out in stores, at work. Yoni told Sophie, “It’s like a white noise machine of anxiety and insecurity.” 

Daughter Meira, now a student at UW-Madison, wonders, “What’s happening to our world, what’s happening to our community, what’s happening to our family?” She has gotten involved with organizations on campus working to raise awareness about Jewish issues. And with good reason. 

As classes opened at UW-Madison last fall, antisemitic messages were scrawled in chalk labeling Jewish groups "racist," "genocidal" and "having blood on their hands." 

While there was a political component to that – a reaction to Israel’s policies toward Palestinians – Jewish students – there are about 5,200 Jewish students at UW - understandably felt targeted. 

After all, in the spring of 2022, there was a swastika etched into a dorm bathroom stall, slurs yelled at a student and someone who said they were harassed for “looking Jewish.” 

And if you have been to events at Temple Beth El here in recent years, you know there is always a Madison police officer at the door providing security. With good reason. There has been no shortage of attacks on synagogues.

Last month, in Georgia, two synagogues were the victims of Nazi protests. Members of an overtly antisemitic hate group gathered outside the wearing swastikas, yelling “Heil Hitler,” and they hung a life-size effigy of an LGBTQ+ Jew from a lamp post. They distributed antisemitic flyers in the neighborhoods surrounding the synagogues.

Those Nazi references surely are unnerving to Jews today. They know the horror of Holocaust. 

 

Our own Debbie Simon Konkol and her husband, Ron, traveled to France last month to visit the place where her Grandmother Alice was one of 86 people of Jewish heritage who were executed in a makeshift gas chamber at a concentration camp in France. Debbie’s story of her grandmother’s death and its impact on her family is heart-wrenching. There are a few flyers near the bulletin board in the gathering space about her presentation.

We know that antisemitism has deep roots across the centuries. And we know in this country, it is having a resurgence. 

The Milwaukee Jewish Federation counted 101 antisemitic incidents in Wisconsin n 2022, a 6% increase from a year earlier, with a particularly sharp rise on college campuses. Even more startling, that’s an overall 494% increase in antisemitic incidents in Wisconsin since 2015.

Nationally, Jewish people are the most targeted faith group, according to the FBI. They are the victims of more than half of religiously motivated hate crimes.

Where is the goodness and mercy promised on Psalm 23? 

Where is that house of the Lord where we can dwell for all the days of our lives?

Let’s stay with the house image for a moment. In that short reading from the Gospel according to Luke that we heard from Helena today, Jesus talks about building a house on rock so it does not get washed away in the torrent of a flood.  

So how do we build a house that will be a place of goodness and mercy for our Jewish siblings, for all those facing hatred and oppression and violence in our time? How can we make that house secure, as though it were built on rock.

Here a few ideas. You may have more.

A starting point with so many of these things is proximity, getting to know the people who are facing evil so that we better understand what is happening, so that we care about their pain, so that they do not feel so alone.

On an institutional level, that is one thing we are doing here. Our partner in resettling refugee families is Jewish Social Services. While this is a functional partnership, it also binds us together in a common cause. 

A second thing is to find ways to respond when our neighbors – whether Jewish or Muslim or Sikh, whether Black or Latino or Asian – face direct threats. 

After the hate-based murders at the synagogue in Pittsburgh, nearly 1,000 people in Madison gathered at the First Unitarian Society in a resolve to stand together against hated. The following Friday evening, there was a special Shabbat service at Temple Beth-El, a service intended for healing and solace where the wider community also gathered and – in an extraordinary moment - the synagogue’s three Torahs were passed through the crowd. 


After the white supremacist actions outside the synagogues near Atlanta last month, the Fellowship of Reconciliation gathered messages of love, solidarity and steadfast support from it members around the world. They were delivered on July 2 at an interfaith service by Rev. Fahed Abu Akel, a Palestinian Presbyterian minister who lives in Atlanta. As a side note, he founded an organization called the Atlanta Ministry with International Students, which surely parallels some of the work we do here at Christ Pres.

So standing with our Jewish siblings in moments of crisis certainly matters. We can do that as a congregation and we can also do it by being touch with our friends who are Jewish. 

Two places I can think of where we need to be careful. 

One is the conflict between the state of Israel and the Palestinians. Many folks here are sympathetic to what has happened and is happening to the Palestinians, both in Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza. We need to be clear that the issue is with the Israeli government, not with the Jewish people. There are many, many Jews – here and across the nation – who have big issues with the Israeli government. While criticisms of the government can be interpreted as anti-Semitic, we need to be extraordinarily careful never to cast our criticisms in that light.

And we need to be attentive within our worship life to the tensions in the New Testament between the early Christians – many of whom were Jewish – and the religious leaders of Judaism in those first decades. 

So we should be careful with the words we use in worship. We need to explore the context of the stories in the New Testament that seem to cast all Jewish people as the bad guys. 

We need to be careful about misinterpreting the Hebrew scriptures as if they were written with Jesus in mind rather than the early Christians looking back at those scriptures to help interpret the life and teachings of Jesus in ways that were familiar to them.

Those are a few ways we can bring goodness and mercy into the world around us.

Ann Frank wrote it so well: “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”

But there is still that image from Psalm 23 of living in the house of the Lord for the rest of our days. Surely, the house of the Lord is built on solid rock. But what happens when evil comes to the front yard of the house of the Meadows family?


Even beyond the assault on Yoni, there were well aware of the threats of antisemitism, whether physical or emotional.

Yoni put it this way: “We don’t face antisemitism from one direction. We face it from eight directions at once. So where do we go?”

Sophie Carson described what they did in the conclusion of her story. In that spot where the man assaulted Yoni two years ago, there now is a sign. It reads, “Everyone welcome.”

They are dwelling in the house of Lord’s goodness and mercy. In the midst of their fear and anxiety, they trust that with God’s watchfulness, nothing can really trouble them.

So let us join in that hope with a song. It comes from the Protestant monastic community of TaizĂ© in France, a community that began in 1940 in part to help shelter refugees during World War II, including Jewish refugees. The song is called “Nothing Can Trouble.”