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.

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 16^thStreet 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 16^thStreet 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 Taizé 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.” 

 

 

 

 

 

On the Road Again

You can see a video version of this sermon here.

Luke 24:13-35 

You probably know that on Easter Sunday morning, some congregations gather at dawn for a sunrise service, capturing the idea of light coming out of the darkness, picking up on the image in the Gospel according to John of Mary Magdalene arriving at Jesus’ tomb “early on the first day of the week while it was still dark.”

 

I’ve been to a few of those over the years. But my wife, Ellen, has never been along for even one of those.

 

I’m the morning person in our house. Ellen, most definitely, is not. She says: “Jesus and I have an arrangement. I’ll meet him later on the road.”

 

That’s where we are today. On the road. Again.

Remember this song from Willie Nelson?

 

Art by He Qi

On the road again

Just can't wait to get on the road again
The life I love is making music with my friends
And I can't wait to get on the road again

On the road again
Goin' places that I've never been
Seein' things that I may never see again
And I can't wait to get on the road again

Think about those words for just a moment.

On the road…making music with friends.

On the road…seeing things that I may never see again.

 

Our  story today from the Gospel according to Luke takes us out on the road…with friends…seeing things in a whole new way. I can understand why Ellen thought it would be a good idea to meet Jesus on the road.

 

The image you see is by He Qi, a Chinese artist currently living in California as the artist-in-residence at Fuller Theological Seminary. I love his vivid use of colors. We’ll see the second part of his portrayal of this story as well as other images as I continue. 

 

I think that much like the two people in the Emmaus story, we’re on the road in our own lives as we try to figure out what it means to follow the way of Jesus. 

 

Sometimes we’re as confused and disillusioned as those two travelers we heard about today. 

 

Sometimes we’re nourished by the encounters we have along the way. 

 

Sometimes we’re energized to go out and share our excitement with others. 

 

So I’d invite you to come along with me on this journey to Emmaus.

 

Of course, finding Emmaus is a little tricky. In the Holy Land today, there are several sites that claim to be that village. Nobody knows for sure where that original Emmaus was, other than about 7 miles from Jerusalem. The folks on the road back then knew where they were going in a physical sense. Their spiritual journey – and ours – is more complicated. 

 

Put yourselves in the place of these two people. They were not part of Jesus’ inner circle. They were on the B team among the followers of Jesus, part of that wider group who had come to look at him as the hope for their future. 

  

Artists’ portrayals usually picture them as two shell-shocked men on the road. That’s the image we have in that Tiffany glass window in the room at the back of the sanctuary that we call the Emmaus room. 

That 131-year old window – the first Tiffany window in Madison – was in our church when it was on the block downtown where the Concourse Hotel now stands. It was in storage here when this building opened 60 years ago but then found this place of honor in the early 2000s.

 

More recent images, like the one from He Qi or this mosaic by Rowan and Irene LeCompte from the Washington National Cathedral tend to suggest it was not two men on the road but a man and a woman, perhaps a married couple. 

 

Personally, I like that image, but what is essential here is that we have two people who are feeling very disoriented and very demoralized. And then they meet a stranger, someone they do not recognize as Jesus. 

 

Perhaps this is because people walking under the hot Israeli sun kept their hoods up over their heads. Perhaps it was because the resurrected Jesus had a new look about him. Whatever it was, he noticed how sad they appeared.

 

“What are you talking about?” he asked them. 

They were amazed that he had not heard about all the turmoil in Jerusalem, the execution of “a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people.”

Then those excruciating words of disappointment, even of despair:  “We had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel.”

 

They felt alone, abandoned, mired in grief. 
They were afraid. 
They were looking for something, not realizing that what they were looking for was already with them.

 

Let’s pause for a moment and consider what has happened up to this point in the story. Jesus encounters two people on the road and recognizes their sadness. He does not walk on by. He reaches out to them, asking what is wrong. That’s one lesson from this story for us.

 

But when they tell him why they are sad, Jesus’ words in the story have a kind of harsh sound: 

 

“Oh, how foolish you are and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared!” And then he gave them a tour of the Hebrew scriptures.

 

Let me frame this just a little bit differently. The couple on the road were in deep grief. They were puzzled over the story about the women who went to the tomb and said that Jesus was in fact alive. How could this be? How could any of this be?

So Jesus walked with them. He helped them understand the sacred writings that were their heritage. The Messiah was not to be a warrior or a powerful ruler but someone who would transform the world with his message and his life. 

 

This stranger reminded them by his presence and by what he said -- that in the midst of their anguish and confusion, God was still walking with them.  

 

It’s not only a reminder to us that God is always with us. It’s also a model of what we do as followers of Jesus. We walk with people in their times of suffering. 

Mosaic by Rowan and Irene LeCompte

They were beginning to see something in him that had not been immediately obvious. And then they did what followers of Jesus do – they offered him hospitality – a meal, a place to stay. 

Their spirits had been nourished. Now their bodies would be nourished as well.

 

Luke has just a brief but powerful description of what happened next: “When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them.”

Breaking bread and sharing it.

 

Folks here do that on the third Monday of every month at Luke House, passing bread around the tables as you eat with strangers you have met. You do that here on Sunday mornings as you invite any and all to share bread at this table. 

In a broader sense, we do that when we put food – bread and other items - in the Community Fridge. We do that when we buy bread and other treats from Just Bakery as through our sharing we open new opportunities for the people learning job skills there.

 

Art by He Qi

The power of Jesus breaking bread at the Last Supper, at this table in Emmaus, in so many places in our lives is what helps us see Jesus in the people we encounter every day – and for them to see Jesus in us.

 

“Then their eyes were opened,” Luke writes, “and they recognized him, and he vanished from their sight.”

 

The reality of this man they had followed so passionately, grieved so deeply, rediscovered so curiously – the reality of Jesus had not changed. But now they saw him differently. 

 

They went back to Jerusalem and told others about their experience. They did not keep it to themselves.  As Luke put it, “The two disciples described what had happened along the road and how Jesus was made known to them as he broke the bread.”

 

Their disappointment had given way to hope. 

 

Their misunderstanding of the sequence of events from Friday’s execution to Sunday’s discovery had given way to a new understanding of what this all meant.

 

Their sense of abandonment as they walked on the road back home gave way to once again knowing they were part of a community of people gathered by Jesus and people unwilling to give up on his message. 

That experience propelled them out into the world with new energy,.

 

Icon by Sister Marie-Paul 

As we move out of here this morning, we can carry with us the images of this good news from Luke. 

We can walk alongside those who are suffering. And if we are the ones suffering right now, we can be assured that our God is walking with us.

 

We can share our bread. And if we are the ones who needs nourishment, we can be assured that the bread of life is there for us.

 

We can live with hope.  And we are walking the road in confusion and disorientation, we can lean on one another on this journey.

Who We Are Becoming – With the Earth

 

You can find a video of this sermon here.

March 12, 2023, Christ Presbyterian Church - Luke 12: 22-31

 

Sometime in the early 1970s, I went off to an individual retreat during the summer at what was then Campion High School in Prairie du Chien along the Mississippi River. I spent time reading, praying, talking with a spiritual guide. 

 

One of my texts for the retreat was Psalm 103. Part way through are these words: “As high as heaven is over the earth, so strong is God’s love to those who fear God. And as far as sunrise is from sunset, God has separated us from our sins.” 

On a clear June evening, I went out for walk and sat down under a tree on the campus, looking up at the star-filled sky. It was one of the most transcendent experiences of my life. I felt pulled into the vastness that was above me, felt God’s love all around me. It was only for a few moments, but I have never forgotten those moments.

 

At the beginning of 2021, at the church that our daughter and son-in-law attend in Chicago - a place that became one of our spiritual homes online during the time of the pandemic - the pastor invited people there to choose a word from a list she offered that would help shape their year ahead. 

I picked the word “branch.”

 

I liked the image of being connected to a tree with roots reaching deep into the earth. For me, the tree would be Jesus, the roots the vastness of creation. My branch reached out a bit, growing each year, giving life to leaves that draw from the aquifer that runs below.

 

The branch holds steady through the seasons, emerging with the spring, offering shade in the summer, holding the colors of autumn and remaining in place even as the leaves fall away. 

Of course a strong wind can take down a branch, so being a bit flexible in the midst of the storms helps. Letting nutrients flow helps with that flexibility. And then growth – slow, steady, continuous – adds strength. 

 

The picture that you see on here has become a vital image for me, connecting my life, the creation around me and God.  It’s a picture by one of my favorite photographers, Bryan Hansel of Grand Marais, Minn.

 

The branches are framed by the starlit sky – stars that stretch out far beyond what I can see, surrounding me with the glory of creation, reminding me that I am just a small being in an enormous universe, all shaped and sustained by a divine energy. 

 

“Consider the ravens,” Jesus told his disciples. “Consider the lilies, how they grow.”

 

Jesus walked through nature all the time, resting under the stars, watching the birds soar overhead, seeing lilies bloom in the fields, praying among a grove of trees.

 

Augustine – the great Christian thinker who lived around the year 400 – once wrote: “Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Note it. Read it.”

 

That was the first articulation of what became known as the “two books theory” of coming to know God. Madison resident Daniel Cooperrider has a new book called Speak With the Earth and It Will Teach You where he explores how this might work in our time as he takes hikes into mountains and walks along rivers and wonders how we might change the world by remembering to learn from it.

 

In our time, when we are all vividly aware of the impact climate change is having on our lives – and on the lives of those living in more vulnerable situations – I think there is wisdom in that idea of reading the created world around us and noting what we might do to protect its livability not just for ourselves but for generations to come.

 

Let me reach back to a moment to someone with roots both among Presbyterian and Wisconsin ancestors. His name is John Muir. He was raised in a strict Scottish Presbyterian home near Portage and attended the University of Wisconsin starting in 1860.

 

Muir is a huge presence in the nation’s understanding of its natural environment, but we also know that his life was complicated by initially horrific attitudes towards the indigenous people who lived here first and the Africans brought here as slaves. His attitudes tempered in time, but are still part of his legacy, because we are a complicated people after all. 

 

For now, though, I’d like to focus on how Muir found new ways to connect to God through nature. This is a brief clip from a brand new video our own Scott Wilson made exploring the spiritual history of the University of Wisconsin. Rebecca Crooks is the narrator.

Muir video clip

 

Think about those words of John Muir: “God’s love covers all the earth as the sky covers it. And this love has voices heard by all who have ears to hear.”

 

John Muir was reading the book of creation. That, in turn, sustained him as he sought ways to expand the nation’s appreciation for and preservation of the earth on which we live.

 

There’s a contemporary story from UW as well. Some of you may know Cal DeWitt, who taught environmental science for many years as UW-Madison and has been one of the leading voices in the faith-based movement for creation care. 

 

Here’s another brief clip from Scott’s video:

 

DeWitt video clip

 

“Behold the earth through the eye of its maker.” What a wonderful phrase that ties together our exploration of the natural world and our call to protect it for generations to come.

Cal DeWitt was one of the advisors who helped shape publication of what is called The Green Bible.

 

This is a regular New Revised Standard Version translation of the Bible, but with phrases related to the natural world printed in green. At the beginning are ten essays from Jewish and Christian authors on how to live in ways that care for God’s creation. One of them is by Cal DeWitt, where he writes, “The Bible turns out to be a powerful ecological handbook on how to live rightly on the earth.”

 

Of course, the problem that we face today is that we are not living rightly on the earth.

 

You all know the litany of climate change impacts – rising temperatures, more violent storms, enormous fires, drought, floods, the glaciers receding, the oceans rising. 

 

We here in Wisconsin can often seem pretty isolated from all this. Yes, our winters are less cold than a few decades ago, but it’s pretty clear that we still have winters. Water is abundant. Our four seasons are still well defined. People talk about our state as one of the places that will grow in desirability as other parts of the nation reel from climate change.

 

We are not free of the impacts, though. And we know that every part of our world has a part to play in countering the causes of that lead to climate change. We are all truly connected.

 

Beyond looking out for ourselves, I believe one of the messages from Jesus is that we are called to look out for each other. And it is the most vulnerable people in our world that will suffer the most from climate change.

Yes, some expensive homes along the shore in Florida eventually may be under water. But the horrific impacts are going to fall on struggling  people in nations all around the globe. 

Our own Angie Dickens recently gave a presentation to a group called 350 Wisconsin on the connections between climate change and migration. Rising sea levels, droughts, food scarcity are all contributing to migration that is hugely destructive of individual lives but also destabilizing to so many nations. 

These are stunning numbers she cited from a report by the World Bank:

 

By the year 2050 – that’s only 27 years away – 40 million people in South Asia will have been forced to migrate within their own county. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the number of those internal migrants will be 86 million. Our neighbors in Latin America will see 17 million internal migrants. Of course, migrants who ultimately leave that region tend to seek refuge in the United States.

And here, in the U.S., we are looking at some 13 million Americans forced to relocate due to sea level rise. That’s five times the size of the Dust Bowl migration in the 1930s.

 

All of this makes me want to shout out the first words of Psalm 69:

 

Save me, O God,   for the waters have come up to my neck.
I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold;
I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me.
I am weary with my crying; my throat is parched.

 

Whew!

 

There are lots of ideas about what we as individuals, as communities, as a nation, as a world can do to offset the pace of climate change and adapt to its impacts. I’m not going to recite those today. You can find many good sources of information for those.

 

What I want to consider is where we might find the hope we need to carry us forward.

I can sit and revel under a starlit sky. I can walk down to the shore of Lake Mendota. I can watch as the sandhill cranes set up a nest in the pond near our home. I can appreciate the beauty of this earth, give thanks to God, read the book of nature alongside the books of the Bible. It all makes me want to do something that will sustain our futures.

 

But then I read about National Public Radio host Ari Shapiro asking author Michael Pollen – known for his books about plants and food and the human relationship with the natural world – why Pollen had not written a book about climate change.

 

Pollen’s response? 

 

He likes to write books that give people hope and he doesn’t know how to do that with climate change.

 

That’s not an uncommon feeling. So one of the things we can do as a congregation of followers of Jesus is to think about who we are becoming with the earth, to think about how we can make a difference in the effort to slow down climate change, how we can give ourselves and others hope. Because without hope, we will all be stuck.

To do that, first we need faith. Listen to the words farther along in Psalm 69, which began waters up to our necks and our feet stuck in the mire:

 

I will praise the name of God with a song;   I will magnify God with thanksgiving.
Let the oppressed see it and be glad;  you who seek God, let your hearts revive.
For the Lord hears the needy  and does not despise God’s own who are in bonds.

 

We are not doing this alone. God is at our side.

 

To act, we need love – love for the world as we experience its beauty, love for our fellow human beings as together we look out for each other. Love is at the core of being followers of Jesus. After all, they will know we are Christians by our love.

 

To act, we need hope. And that’s when I turn to Katherine Hayhoe.

She is a climate scientist and an evangelical Christian. In her most recent book, A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World – which you can find on the book carts in the gathering space – she starts her chapter on hope with a quote from Augustine – the same Augustine who wrote about the book of nature and the books of the Bible.

“Hope has two beautiful daughters,” he wrote. “Their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are and Courage to see that they do not remain as  they are.”

 

Hayhoe quotes UW-Madison ecologist Rick Lindroth as saying he is hopeful because of his kids who are taking the challenges of climate change seriously. That is an answer she hears from many people. Then she adds, “Our hope isn’t based on an expectation that they will fix it for us. Rather, we want to fix it for them.”

 

She acknowledges that success in slowing down climate change is not inevitable. That’s where the courage Augustine wrote about comes in. And hope – well, we need to find that in the things happening around and within us that make protecting the earth possible.  

Hayhoe writes about making hope a practice – recognizing reality, identifying what we hope for, then taking steps in that direction, even if we are not sure we have it all figured out. “Together,” Hayhoe concludes, “we can save ourselves.”

 

At the beginning of this reflection, I talked about sitting under a tree sensing the presence of among  the stars, being inspired by the role branches play for a tree and how they can be a metaphor for my life. 

 

I want my kids and grandkids to have those same opportunities as they encounter the beauty of the world around us.

This is my granddaughter Ellie. She is 19 months old. She delights in new discoveries about the world every day. Here I see her reaching out into the future.
 

One of my tasks is to work to protect that future for her. One of all of our tasks is to protect that future for all of our children and grandchildren, for all of today’s children living in every part of our globe.

 

So we need to touch the earth lightly as we live. The song I am going to invite you to sing is based on a Celtic melody, which fits into one of the threads running through our time together today. The words “touch the earth lightly, use the earth gently” speak to the task before us.

Please join in as we sing this global hymn that comes to us from New Zealand.