What’s Love Got to Do With It?

You can see a video of the sermon at this link.

Aug. 25, 2024, Orchard Ridge UCC

Ephesians 6: 10-20

I would imagine that many folks here watched parts of the Olympics this summer and even more of you know the great comeback story of Simone Biles.

She dropped out of the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo when she realized that her mental and emotional state threated her ability to perform – even threatened to cause her physical injury.

Then over the past four years she worked to return to gymnastics. This summer in Paris she won three gold medals and a silver, bringing her lifetime gold medal total to 7. 

During the games, The New York Times had a wonderful story about how she navigated all the mental health issues and the sometime hostile public response leading up to the games in Paris.

Reporter Juliet Macur wrote: “Since Tokyo, Biles said, she has regained control of her gymnastics and her self-confidence, having secured armor around herself, plate by heavy plate.”
 
Now I don’t think Biles was actually wearing heavy plates of armor as she was catapulting through the air with so many twists and turns. The image, of course, was a metaphor.

That brings us to what Paul wrote in to the Ephesians from the passage that Nancy Wettersten just read. You know – “put on the breastplate of righteousness and lace up your sandals… take the shield of faith… take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit.”

Lillian Daniel, a UCC pastor who now is conference minister in Michigan, wrote that she once had a parent complain that this was a particularly bad passage for children to hear since it seemed to glorify war. 

 

Lillian replied: “Paul takes the language of the warrior and turns it on its head, so that all the tools of war proclaim peace. You don’t put on real armor made of metal, but the spiritual armor of God to protect you when you boldly declare ‘the mystery of the gospel’.

 

OK – so it’s a metaphor.

 

Here are two contrasting images. 

 

This is from the Art Institute of Chicago in what is called the Arms and Armor Room. Looks pretty fierce, right? And that soldier seems very well protected. Keep in mind that the uses of armor that Paul was talking about were all defensive, intended to keep the warrior safe. Yes, there was a sword, but even that could only be used in close combat.
 
 Here’s the second image. It is the garb of a Dominican monk. You don’t see Dominicans in this garb very often these days, but there is an interesting bit of symbolism in the traditional clothing.

Notice the belt. It is called a cincture, and the Dominicans say that is to remind them of the need to gird themselves for the challenges of each day. But even more to the point, notice the rosary hanging from the cincture. The Dominicans say the rosary is worn on the left side where men used to wear a sword.
 
They have transformed the message from Paul.

 

It actually matters to think about what these words from Paul mean, what the metaphor represents. That’s because some of our fellow Christians – those at the extremes of Christian nationalism - use this passage among others to justify using violence to advance what they see as their cause.

 

I’d like to take a few minutes to delve into that and then offer a few ideas of how we might use the words from Paul – and from Jesus – to offer a different way to approach the world around us.

 

A religious studies scholar named Matthew D. Taylor has a book coming out at the end of next month called The Violent Take It By Force. I had a chance to read an advance copy.
 
In it, Taylor writes: “Spiritual warfare is a common belief and practice among evangelicals…Demons are bent on attacking Christians, who must resist.” It is not just an individual struggle. It is communal one. Christians must overcome the territories the demons control. There is a sense among some that demons have taken control of our nation.
 
And Taylor says that one dimension of that approach is the passage we heard today. They focus on the words that “Christians do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”

 

How do they do this? Taylor writes: “They believe that God has mandated them to use spiritual violence to defeat Satan and then build the kingdom of God on earth.” Keep that word kingdom in mind.

 

That takes us to a phrase from the Gospel according to Matthew that Taylor used as the title of his book: “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.” (Matthew 11: 12).

 

Notice the movement from battling spiritual forces to using spiritual violence to using actual violence to take back the territories that the envisioned demons control. 

 

Taylor traces the culture of violent rhetoric and what he calls “the romanticization of spiritual violence” that then begins to shift into real violence.

A preacher named Ché Ahn – a name I had not heard before I read Taylor’s book – turns out to be a hugely influential figure. He is a highly recognized charismatic leader in the world. 
 
In September of 2020, he was part of a massive Christian rally on the National Mall in Washington. There were hundreds of thousands of teenagers and 20-somethings there. A man named Lou Engle – a close associate of Ahn’s – said of the day, “I just feel like there is holy violence in the air.” Later, he said, “We are in a war and if we don’t win, we lose everything.”

 There may have been “holy violence” in the air at that September gathering. A few months later, on Jan. 6, there was real violence in the air. Many of you know the images of Christian symbols during the assault on our nation’s Capitol on that day.
 
The day before that, there was something called the Rally to Revival on Freedom Plaza in DC, with praise bands and pastors, including Ché Ahn. He told the crowd how important it was to gather the next day at the Capitol. “We are here to change history,” he said. “We are going to take a stand until justice prevails because the foundation of God’s throne is justice and righteousness.”

 

And they were there. And spiritual violence morphed into physical violence. 

 

That’s a long way from Paul telling the people of Ephesus to “lace up your sandals in preparation for the gospel of peace.”

 

I should be clear about something. There are many strains that come under the umbrella of Christian nationalism. I know that David Anderman guided a multi-week exploration of that here earlier this year.

 

While I – and I suspect many of you – disagree with the basic ideas of Christian nationalism, it is a widely held viewpoint, even if not all Christian nationalists would support using violence on behalf of their beliefs. But far too many do.

Here are a few numbers from last year from PRRI – the Public Religion Research Institute. 

 

Among all Christians – that includes mainline Protestants - about a third either embrace or are sympathetic to the concept of Christian nationalism – the idea that the U.S. government should declare this a Christian nation with laws explicitly based on Christian values, that being Christian is an important part of truly being an American and that God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.

 

Among our brothers and sisters in the white evangelical Protestant world, that is the view of about two thirds of those surveyed. 

 

But let’s go to the next step. While there is an increase in the willingness of Americans to suggest political violence might be necessary, that is about 16% of the whole population. The PRRI survey found that “Christian nationalism adherents are nearly seven times as likely as Christian nationalism rejecters to support political violence.”

 

That’s why it is important for those of us who read Paul’s letter as a metaphor rather than a call to arms to be clear about what we believe and how we act.

 

Let me introduce you to two more people. 

 

One is Sean Feucht. This picture is of him at a rally outside our State Capitol in 2020 as part of his “Let Us Worship Tour.” Matthew Taylor calls him “the heavyweight champion of politicizing worship.”  He was not involved in the events on Jan. 6 but has risen to national prominence blending political activism and worship.
 
Feucht will sometimes say the “worship is our weapon.” He wants to expand the spiritual territory of the Christian nationalists.
 
In his X post two days ago, he was calling people to gather at the Minnesota state Capitol on Friday night to, in his words, “take Minnesota for Jesus.” Last night he was in Ohio, tonight in Michigan. And underpinning of that is to expose what he calls the Demonic Agenda of the DNC” – the just completed Democratic National Convention. 

The other person I’d like to introduce you to is Caleb Campbell. 

He, too, comes out of the world of evangelical Christians. He has been a pastor since 2006 at Desert Springs Bible Church in Phoenix, Arizona. 
 
During 2020, when many of the more conservative churches were wrapped up in debates over COVID and the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, Campbell says he gradually became aware, in his words, “that many within the American church were not placing their ultimate hope in Jesus but were instead buying the false promises of Christian nationalism.”

That awareness led to sermons and the sermons led to painful pushback from the people he had served for a decade and a half. Members of his congregation accused him of ungodly attitudes and teachings, of spreading divisive and demonic teachings. He tallied up 300 broken relationships and said, “the pain in my guts was overwhelming.”

 

So he tried to learn more about what was going on. One day he got an invitation from an employee of a group called Turning Point USA to meet to learn about their Biblical Citizenship classes. You may have heard of Turning Point and its charismatic leader, Charlie Kirk. It is a huge, Phoenix-based organization that fuses Christianity and nationalism into political action.

 

Caleb went to meet with the woman who called him, prepared to argue with her. Instead, he heard her say, “Politics is really important to me, but at the end of the day, I really want to follow Jesus.” 

That encounter ultimately led to his new book, Disarming Leviathan: Loving Your Christian Nationalist Neighbor. He sets out a guide for how to engage with those wrapped up in Christian Nationalism and his approach draws more deeply on his evangelical roots than I or many of us here might find useful. But still…

 

In that section of Paul’s letter we heard today, he does not say put on all that armor to go to war. He writes about how he is in chains, in fact. And yet he wants to talk about Jesus’ good news of transforming the world through love. 

What’s love got to do with it? Everything.

 

In another letter, this one to the people of Galatia, Paul writes about what he calls the fruit of God’s spirit – “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” Those are not worlds that show up so much in the lexicon of Christian nationalism. 

 

As Matthew Taylor put it in an article for Sojourners magazine: “The self-emptying God did not take on flesh to elevate his followers above the rest of humanity. No! Jesus, gentle and humble of heart, taught and lived service to others and self-denial.”

 

We can choose the way of Jesus.

When Jesus confronted the injustices of his age – the cruelty of the Roman occupation, the hypocrisy and rigidity of the religious leaders, the dismissals of people thought to be less than worthy – he did not join the Zealots to overthrow the Romans. 

 

He told Peter to put away his sword. He accepted his own execution as the price he paid for laying out a path to bring the world not to a Kingdom but to a kin-dom.

Today, we might call that vision the creation of a Beloved Community. In Jesus’ day, he was envisioning an alternative to Caesar’s Kingdom, so his use of the word kingdom made sense. In our time, that word carries lots of baggage, as folks here know. So we use kin-dom or beloved community to capture the vision. This, it seems to me, is who we strive to be – not people seeking power through violence, but people sharing love.

I’d like us to close with a song that has a familiar tune but new words. Amanda Udis-Kessler is a Colorado Springs hymn writer who specializes in music and lyrics for liberal/progressive religious people and communities. When I heard this hymn recently, it seemed to me to capture what I think communities like Orchard Ridge aspire to be.

So let’s join together in singing “The Kin-dom of God is the Queerest of Nations.”

Here are the lyrics:

The Kin-dom of God is the queerest of nations
With peasants its leaders, no borders in sight.
There’s kindness and peace at the heart of its creation,
An endless celebration of joy and delight.

The Kin-dom of God is an upside-down kin-dom
The first are now last and the last are now first.
The humble exalted, the children bearing wisdom.
The wealthy and the poor have their stations reversed.

The Kin-dom of God is a lot like the leaven
We use in our baking when we add the yeast.
The work of a woman will point us to the heaven
Awaiting the lepers, the lost, and the least.

The Kin-dom of God welcomes all to the table,
No matter your status, your heart will be fed.
Whatever your sadness, the Realm of Love is able.
Whatever your label, partake of the bread.

The Kin-dom of God is our ultimate promise
If we, like the prophet, will open our hearts.
The hour is here and the work is now upon us.
Our lives will be a witness. In wonder we start.

You’ve Got a Friend (or Three)

 Here is a link to a video of the sermon, starting with the scripture reading.

August 18, 2024, Orchard Ridge UCC

Job 2: 1-13 (From The Message)

Annette flew from Madison to Ireland about a quarter century ago to attend the wedding of a good friend and her soon-to-be husband. So much joy! Such a bright world ahead!
 
Three weeks later, Annette flew to Ireland again, this time to attend the funeral of the husband, who had been killed in a motorcycle accident. So much grief! Darkness covered the world! 

How could this happen? What could anyone do? Annette struggled with these questions as she pondered how she could console her friend.

Annette told this story several years ago at a conference on dealing with grief. It is a story had has embedded itself within my being.

 

When Annette arrived at the wake, the line of mourners was long - very long. She had brought along a red rose for her friend and stood in line clutching it as mourner after mourner tried to find the right words to console the young widow. There were soft words, tears, the line moving slowly as Annette tried to fashion the rights words to say to her friend when she arrived at the place where she was sitting.

 

Finally, she was there. And no words came to her. She simply sat down, handed her friend the rose and remained there in silence for a minute. Then she got up and walked away, embarrassed, feeling that she had failed her friend.

 

A few weeks later, she called her friend to check in. She told her friend how sorry she was that she could not find the right comforting words at that moment at the wake.

 

“Oh, Annette,” her friend said. “There were hundreds of people who spoke to me that day. I don’t remember anything they said. The only thing I remember is that you gave me a rose and sat next to me. That was all I really needed.”

 

Carole King wrote a song about friendship a few decades ago. James Taylor made it popular. I’ll bet many of you will recognize it. Vicki will play a bit of it on the piano and I’ll read some of the lyrics.

 When you're down and troubled
And you need some lovin' care
And nothin', nothin' is goin' right
Close your eyes and think of me
And soon I will be there
To brighten up even your darkest night
 
You just call out my name
And you know, wherever I am
I'll come runnin'
To see you again
Winter, spring, summer or fall
All you have to do is call
And I'll be there
You've got a friend
 

This brings us to the story we heard today about Job and his friends. 

 

As someone you know – Daniel Cooperrider – wrote in his study guide for the Book of Job, “Job’s story is the kind of story that never was but always is because it’s the timeless story of what it’s like to be human.” 

 

Often discussions of Job focus on the question of suffering. How can God allow this? Did God even encourage this as a brutal test? How do we respond to suffering? Those are important questions and so much of the Book of Job revolves around those kinds of questions. 

 

But for today, I’d like to focus on Job’s friends and what we might learn from them.

We, after all, live in a time when many suffer, when we can feel overwhelmed by the chaos all around us. I think one of the lessons from today’s reading is that we need to stand together to care for one another, not with easy answers but with an openness to each other.

Job’s friends started out like the story of Annette. They heard that Job was suffering and went to be with him – “to keep him company and comfort him.” They cried out, they showed their grief, “Then they sat with him on the ground. Seven days and nights they sat there without saying a word. They could see how rotten he felt, how deeply he was suffering.”

Let’s pick up the next verse of "You've Got a Friend":

If the sky above you
Grows dark and full of clouds
And that old north wind begins to blow
Keep your head together
And call my name out loud
Soon you'll hear me knockin' at your door
 
You just call out my name
And you know, wherever I am
I'll come runnin', runnin', yeah, yeah
To see you again
Winter, spring, summer or fall
All you have to do is call
And I'll be there, yes, I will

 

The story of Job and his friends goes on and it is a reminder that it is not easy to just sit there in silence and be supportive. The next chapter begins this way: “After this, Job broke the silence. He spoke up and cursed his fate.”

OK, so Job was not quite as grateful and comforted as Annette’s friend. That opened the floodgates for Job’s friends. 

 

Eliphaz assumes that Job has done something wrong. “Would you mind if I said something to you?” he asks politely. What a set up. “Has a truly innocent person ever ended up on the scrap heap? Do genuinely upright people ever lose out in the end?” 

Clearly, Eliphaz thinks Job must have sinned to deserve this punishment. But he has a solution. “If I were in your shoes, I’d go straight to God. I’d throw myself on the mercy of God.” In other words, acknowledge your faults and trust in God. 

 

Job is not buying that. He replies, “Comfort me with the truth and I’ll shut up, show me where I’ve gone off track. Honest words never hurt anyone, but what’s the point of all this pious bluster?”

So much for friend number one. On to Bildad, who is all into the scales of justice and offended that Job is ranting at God.

 

“Does God mess up?” asks Bildad. “Does God Almighty ever get things backward? It’s plain that your children sinned against him, otherwise why would God have punished them?”

 

The solution? “Get down on your knees before God Almighty.”

 

As Eugene Peterson wrote in his commentary in his translation of Job in The Message: “Job didn’t need an argument. He needed empathy.” He described Bildad’s words as “the sterile diagnosis of a doctor with no bedside manner. And then he scrawled out a prescription.”

Job has no more patience with that either. 

“Believe me, I’m blameless,” he tells his friends. “I don’t understand what’s going on. I hate my life.”

 

Enter the third friend, Zophar. Peterson describes him as sitting in the chair “as a pious moralist” whose world is black and white – “no shades of gray, no uncertainties, no ambiguities.” 

 

What Zophar has to say is hardly comforting. How about these words: “You haven’t gotten half of what you deserve.” And he too has a prescription for Job: “If you scrub your hands of sin and refuse to entertain evil in your home, you’ll be able to face the world unashamed and keep a firm grip on life, guiltless and fearless.” 

Job is not impressed. He replies with more than a touch of sarcasm: “I’m sure you speak for all the experts, and when you die, there’ll be no one left to tell us how to live. But don’t forget that I also have a brain.”

 

Let’s go to the final verse of the Carole King song.

 

Now, ain't it good to know that you've got a friend
When people can be so cold?
They'll hurt you, yes, and desert you
And take your soul if you let them
Oh, but don't you let them

 

You just call out my name
And you know, wherever I am
I'll come runnin', runnin', yeah, yeah
To see you again…

 

I suspect many of us here have been either in the position of Job – why is everything going wrong, why does nobody understand – or the position of his friends – I wish I could find the right thing to say to make it all better – and then we say the wrong thing.

 

I learned a bit about this from my wife. It took a few years, but she is a patient teacher who also loves me – so that helped.

 

When she would be discouraged about something, worried about something, I would go into Mr. Fix-It mode. Fortunately, I don’t think I was like Job’s friends in blaming her – at least not very often. But I surely had good ideas for how she could make it all better. 

 

Over time, she taught me that she did not need my great ideas. She needed someone who would listen, who would empathize. If she wanted my great ideas, she would ask for them. But mostly, like Job, she knows that she also has a brain – a very good brain, actually.

 

What I learned from her has also – I hope – helped me when I encounter others who are struggling with something in their lives. First empathize. Offer ideas if they ask for them. Walk through the journey with them. Don’t offer a map right away.

 

I think this applies when dealing with people in the midst of illness and grief, facing broken relationships or trouble at school or in the workplace. 

 

But I think it is also useful in this time in our society when political divisions break us apart and we are pretty sure if people only saw the world as we saw it, if they listened to our wise solutions, if they followed the map we are offering them, that all would be well.

 

Author Brian McLaren has a new book out called Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart. One of the stories he tells is about the night he was babysitting for his granddaughter who was crying because her parents were gone. He remembers an old pattern – tell her to stop crying and be brave. You know, words like “Don’t be a baby.” 

But Brian had learned not to deny another’s feelings, but to look for what they needed. He reassured his granddaughter that he knew she was missing her parents and that he would help her have a good time. And then he added, “It’s really tough being a kid sometimes, isn’t it?” She nodded, knowing that he had tapped into what she was feeling. 

Then he added what became a mantra for them: “There’s only one thing to do when life is tough like this,” he said. “When life gets tough, we get tougher…and eat ice cream.”

 

Empathy. Encouragement. And when appropriate, a touch of humor.

 

Now let’s carry that over to the folks we may encounter in the next few months. We may need to feel an inner toughness when we face people with whom we have deep disagreements. 

 

We don’t need to give up our core beliefs to hear their concerns and worries, to empathize with them. We probably won’t have any more luck than Job’s friends if we try to tell them how wrong they are. But we might still be able to have ice cream with them.

 

Since I am weaving music through this reflection today, I’d like us to end with a song that I think gets to our lives when we may feel abandoned and alone. Those friends who we hoped would be with us cannot find the right words. But like Job, we still at our core trust that God’s love can be with us, no matter what is happening.

 

Thomas A. Dorsey was a successful blues musician in the 1920s, even accompanying famous blues singer Ma Rainy for a couple of years. Then he made a slow transition to gospel music. But in 1932, his wife died in childbirth and their son died the next day. He was performing in St. Louis at the time. He of course was devastated.
 
In deep despair, he was walking around a college campus with a friend and went into a music room. He tells what happened next:

"I sat down at a piano and began to improvise on the keyboard. Suddenly, I found myself playing a particular melody that I hadn't played before that time. (It was an adaptation of George N. Allen's melody used with the old hymn, Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone?) As I played I began to say, 'Blessed Lord, blessed Lord, blessed Lord.' My friend walked over to me and said, 'Why don't you make that precious Lord?' I then began to sing, 'Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on, help me stand.'"

 

It has been a go-to hymn for so many since then. It was the hymn Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. requested just before he was murdered. And today, we can join our voices together with confidence that no matter whether we’ve got friends who know what to do or not, God’s love is always there.

It’s number 472 in the hymnals. Let’s sing “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.”

 

Here’s version by Mahalia Jackson

 

More contemporary version