Light through the cracks

June 7, 2020, Edgerton Congregational UCC

Genesis 1: 1-5; Matthew 28: 16-20

(You can find a video version of this here as part of the whole service at Edgerton Congregational UCC.)

In the beginning…there was chaos…there was darkness.

That’s how the book of Genesis begins, the first words of the Bible. That was so long ago. And yet, chaos…darkness - they seem so much a part of life on this day as well, don’t they?

And then a wind from God’s breath, God’s spirit - swept over the waters. 

“Let there be light,” God said. And there was light. And it was good.

In 2008, Canadian composer and poet and singer named Leonard Cohen was doing a concert in London. He sang a song that he had written some 20 years earlier - a song it had actually taken him a full decade to write.

You may know Cohen from one of his hits in the 1960s - “Suzanne.” He is more well know today for the song “Halleluiah.” But this song that caught my attention is called “Anthem.”

 As he introduced it to his audience in London, he said, “We are so privileged to be able gather in moments like this when so much of the world is plunged in darkness and chaos.”

There are those words again - darkness and chaos.

It seems like that’s what it is like for many of us today. Just like it was in the beginning, there is chaos, there is darkness. Yet we are so privileged to be able to gather together this morning, even if it is at a distance connected through Facebook. 

“The birds they sang
At the break of day,” Cohen’s song began.
“Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
Has passed away
Or what is yet to be.”

But soon he gets to the chorus that can frame this morning’s reflection.

“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in…”

And God said, let there be light and there was light and it was good.

And it’s the cracks where the light breaks through.

In a video at Cohen’s performance in London, there’s a scene of a cloudy grey sky with a slim crack in the clouds where the sunlight shines through. 

There’s a landscape with a narrow canyon and as the camera moves forward, it opens to a sunlit waterfall touched by a rainbow.

“There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in…”

When John was writing his Gospel, his account of the life and message of Jesus, he begins with these words: “In the beginning…was the Word.”  Then he writes what came into being in that Word was life and “the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.”

“There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in…”

I invite you to think with me for a moment about the places of darkness we live with right now. 

It may be a darkness in your personal life - the death of a loved one, an illness, a relationship that is shattering, economic hardship, a deep sense of uncertainty about the future. 

It may be the darkness we see in the world around us - a pandemic that threatens life and livelihood. Pandemonium that disrupts the normal order of life. The murder of a black man on the streets of Minneapolis, the daily threats to people of color in our world, our own anxieties about how we relate to one another - to those we love and to those we fear.

There are no shortages of places of darkness.  But the more important question for us is where are the cracks that can let the light get in?

They are not always easy to find. Sometimes they surprise us - the clouds breaking apart, the waterfall just around the corner of the dark canyon. But we need to keep our eyes open for them when they are not so obvious.

There have been no shortage of cracks where light gets in at our hospitals over the past few months where medical staff not only work to heal bodies but to help people connect across the very real barriers that keep them apart.

In the midst of the chaos on the streets in the last two weeks, over and over there have been places where light has broken in as people protect one another from harm and deter others from inflicting damage to property. Not all of them were successful - there is still darkness, yet the darkness could not overcome those moments of light.

Cracks have let the light shine on the racial injustices, the manifestations of hatred in our nation.

And we have seen people sharing the stimulus payments they got from the government, getting food to people who need it, helping with child care, do all manner of things to help each other survive the impact of this pandemic.

And don’t sell short those places where light shines through in very simple ways - with prayers for each other, with notes of encouragement sent, with a phone call to just check in.

As we notice those cracks, perhaps we can widen them just a bit more, let a little more of the light get in to our lives and to the lives of those around us.

You may have noticed that a theme in the early part of our worship today is that of the Trinity. Even though that notion of Trinity is one of the distinctive marks of Christianity, it is also one of the most confusing and - over history - and one of the most contentious. I don’t intend to replay either the theology or the controversies over the Trinity today. But I would like to stay with the image of light as I offer one way of thinking about the multiple dimensions of God.

This was an image used by some of the earliest Christian writers. It’s pretty simple.

Think of the sun, the source of light.

Think of the beam of light coming from the sun down to the earth. 

Think of how that light not only illumines the area around it but warms it as well.

All one light but functioning in three distinctive ways.

And God said, let there be light.

The Word was the light of all people.

On Pentecost, the light of the Spirit filled the room and propelled Jesus’ followers out into the world.

That takes us to that short second scripture reading we had today from the Gospel according to Matthew, a reading where the words “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” helped shape Christians’ idea of God as Trinity.

Jesus 11 closest followers - Judas was gone by this time - went up the mountain with him. It is after the Resurrection. They have gone through the grief of his death, the amazement of him being among them in a new way. They have walked with him, eaten with him, listened to him. 

First, notice this line - “they worshipped and they doubted.”

Really? They still doubted? And yet they worshipped him?

Doesn’t that sound like just about every gathering of Christians on any given day? We gather to worship. We come with our doubts. Maybe there will be cracks where a bit of light will break through. But we never really figure out this whole God thing, this Creator, Jesus, Spirit thing, this Trinity thing. And that’s OK. We are in good company with the people who knew Jesus best.

It’s the end of this passage that I really want to focus on, though. It’s Jesus talking to the eleven - and to us.

Teach people my message, people everywhere, he said.

I don’t think he was talking about adult ed classes here. I don’t think he was talking about missionaries inserting themselves into cultures they do not understand and forcing people to be baptized - things Christians have done far too often over the centuries, including the way we treated the tribal people of our land. 

Thomas Long, one of the wonderful preachers of our era, says when Jesus was sending out his followers to take on what seemed like an impossible task: “Go into all the world and cure cancer, clean up the environment, evangelize the unbelievers and, while you are at it, establish world peace.”

I think Jesus’ message was both simpler than that and harder than that.

What was Jesus’ message? What was his command?

Well, there was the long version is that section of the Gospel of Matthew we call the Sermon on the Mount. It’s worth reading every now and then.

There is the vivid example he gave his followers at the Last Supper when he washed their feet. “If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.” Ah, so being a teacher means serving.

And then there words that are crystal clear at that same Last Supper: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”

Now he is about to leave his small band of followers. He sets out the words used across the centuries for baptism. They should baptize “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

When we were baptized with those words, we were commissioned follow the way of Jesus. But in the process, whether water was dabbled on our heads or we were plunged into a pool, we were immersed in the whole being of God - a God who creates, who redeems, who sustains. We were not left powerless. God’s light now breaks into our lives.

That takes us to the last words of Jesus on our earth. 

“Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Can there be a better message in a time when chaos and darkness seem to be dominating our lives? 

At the very beginning of the Gospel according to Matthew, he calls Jesus “Emmanuel,” which means “God is with us.” Matthew ends with the same idea - God is with us.

Maybe what breaks through the cracks that we find is not just light, but the light of God. Maybe what breaks through the cracks that we find is not just light, but the love of God.

Maybe what breaks through the cracks that we find is not just light, but a path to serve and love each other.

Let’s watch for those cracks. Let’s let the light in. 

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in 

Lost on the road to Emmaus

Mosaic from the Washington National Cathedral.

If this were a normal Sunday, people who gather in many churches would be hearing a story from the Gospel of Luke about two people encountering Jesus on the road to Emmaus. 

Of course, this is not a normal Sunday. People are not gathering in churches - although many may be gathering around a computer screen in their homes. They may still hear or read that same story. It’s a wonderful story for the moment we are in right now.

It’s a story of disorientation. It’s a story of loss, of grief, of discouragement. It’s a story of two people feeling adrift, lost on the road to a village that has no clear historical record of its existence. Yet it’s story of hope that emerges from hospitality.

For those who do not know this story, here it is in brief. Two people - perhaps a man and a woman, perhaps two men - who had been followers of Jesus are walking towards home having left Jerusalem after the execution of Jesus on the previous Friday. They presumably stayed put on Saturday, the Sabbath, and now were making the seven-mile journey home. They encounter a "stranger" on the road who asks them what they were talking about.

They tell him about this Jesus fellow, “a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people” who they had hoped would be the one to redeem Israel - the Messiah - but he was killed through the collusion of the religious and political powers of that day. Then, before they left Jerusalem on that Sunday, some women who were followers of Jesus reported to the group that his body was no longer in the tomb where he had been placed after his death. 

You can feel their anguish as they tell the story. They don’t have any idea that the man walking with them is Jesus - a clue that there was a transformation that had occurred to him through the resurrection.  His transformation and their disorientation dominates the moment. 

I am writing this on about the 45^th day of my sheltering in place. Oh, there have been occasional trips to the grocery store (during senior hours) and for take-out at restaurants. There have been many, many walks through the neighborhood and lots of time in video chats on Zoom. But life as I knew it is totally disoriented - and it’s going to stay that way for quite some while - even if the world arounds me starts to slowly reopen. 

For me, this is a relatively mild disorientation compared to what so many others are experiencing - illness for themselves or the death (alone) of a loved one; economic dislocation; exhausted health care workers; educational setbacks; a home bursting at the seams with frantic children and overstressed parents. Plus there is the shared anxiety for all of us about what life will be like a month from now, a season from now, a year from now. 

All of that makes it pretty easy to identify with these two people on the road. It’s almost like this stranger who is walking with them is wearing a mask and his identity is lost in the midst of the chaos of their lives.

Mosaic from the Washington National Cathedral.

He talks with them, offers new ways they can consider the sacred stories that had guided their lives. Dusk is arriving. In the midst of their grief and confusion, they reach out to the stranger who seemed about to go on into the night that was not far away.

“Stay with us,” they say.

And he did.

They share a meal. A real meal, at a table. No social distancing at that time. The conversation continues. Then the stranger does something they recognized. Here’s how Luke describes that moment: “He took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight.”

Their hospitality offered them a path forward in their grief. His sharing opened their vision to a new way of being. 

On this disorienting path I am now on, one way to stay connected to those beyond the four corners of my dwelling is to be reaching out, to connect, to find ways to offer some form of hospitality, even when it seems to be from a distance. And then the second piece of the story - to watch for ways in the breaking of bread - metaphorically at this point - that I can recognize where God is at work in my life and in our world. 

Even sheltering in place, there are places where light and hope break through. Jesus and his friends arrived where they needed to be before the darkness fell. That’s the path I want to be on.

(If you want to read the actual Gospel story from Luke 24: 13-35, you can read it here.) 

A season full of Holy Saturdays

Holy Saturday - that day between when we remember the crucifixion of Jesus and the dawn of resurrection - can often seem like a lost day. Not this year.

On this Holy Saturday, I feel as though I am joining Jesus' followers in grief about what has happened, fear about what is happening and anxiety about what may happen next. 

For me, Holy Saturday holds within it so many of the emotions that are part of my life right now. Perhaps they are part of yours as well. And perhaps there are bits of wisdom we can draw from the ancient traditions in the Christian church about this day.

As the wise United Church of Christ minister Rev. Laura Everett wrote in a piece for Religion News Service this week, “I’ve never pastored through a plague before, but the church has.”

One vivid example of that was Pope Francis on March 27 using the image of Jesus’ followers terrified in a boat in the midst of a storm. He was standing near a crucifix taken  from the Church of San Marcello al Corso in Rome for the occasion. It was a crucifix that had been carried through the streets of Rome in 1522 in the midst of the black plague, offering hope - and perhaps some healing - to the beleaguered citizens of that time.

He knew that we have been through plagues and pandemics before. Pope Francis said this as he stood near that historic crucifix: “We find ourselves afraid and lost. Like the disciples in the Gospel we were caught off guard by an unexpected, turbulent storm. We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other.” 

For Francis, Jesus sleeping in the boat in the midst of the storm carries two messages - trust in God in the midst of the storm and a reminder that “we are not self-sufficient; by ourselves we founder.”

In the storm of our day, there is grief, fear and anxiety all around us.

Let’s start with grief. Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun, writes in her book The Liturgical Year, that within church life, this is a particularly empty day. She notes that in monasteries, they might sing “the morning chant of Tenebrae, a series of psalmic lamentations that punctuate the emptiness with grief.”

In many churches, this day would be the day when people arrive to decorate for Easter, to arrange the flowers, to make things ready for joy. But that is not happening this Saturday. We are left with that emptiness and the grief of our time - grief over deaths, grief over the stress health care workers are facing, grief over the horrible impact COVID-19 is having on African-Americans and people living in poverty or clustered in nursing homes. And yes, grief over the fact that people cannot gather together on this Easter Sunday.

Here, then, is an image of hope in the midst of this emptiness and grief. On that Saturday after Jesus died, the Gospel writers tells us, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Salome, Joanna and other women were gathering spices and cloths they would take to the tomb to anoint Jesus. They were preparing in the midst of grief and they discovered unexpected hope.

Fear, however, accompanies grief on this Holy Saturday. Fear for ourselves - what if I get COVID-19? Fear for those we love. Fear for a world thrown into panic. Fear for the disorder that accompanies such dislocation. Fear for our democracy as we see elections disrupted by both health concerns and political maneuvering.

Like Pope Francis said, we are all in the same boat, but we fear those whose actions increase our risk, whose selfishness could sink the boat. We retreat more and more to self-preservation in the midst of our fear.

That Saturday after Jesus was killed, his followers surely were living in fear as well. They knew one of their members had betrayed Jesus. They knew that others had drifted off to sleep as the forces were coming to arrest him. They knew Peter, their leader, had denied ever knowing Jesus. They knew the Roman authorities would be looking for them to quash any remnant of the Jesus movement. So they stayed inside behind locked doors. They may not really have trusted each other much at that point.

It would not be until the women who made the brave journey to the tomb came back and said “He is risen” that anyone else dared go out. It was not until the transformed Jesus entered that room that they began to regain their courage. 

“Do not be afraid,” Jesus tells the women at the tomb. “Peace be with you,” he tells his followers in that locked room.

With the grief about the past and the fear about the present comes the anxiety about the future.

We each know the anxieties we hold in our lives. New York Times columnist David Brooks captured those across the nation when he wrote on Thursday about responses from readers who wrote to him how they were faring in the midst of this. “What you sent gutted me. There have been over 5,000 replies so far, and while many people are hanging in there, there is also a river of woe running through the world — a significant portion of our friends and neighbors are in agony.”

For college students, there is deep worry about the future. One wrote: “My future, which seemed so bright a few months ago as I anticipated graduating in May, now seems bleak and hopeless: How will I find a job with the economy tanking? How will I pay hundreds of dollars per month when my loan bills kick in during August?”

For the elderly, there is anxiety about whether this disease will kill them, whether they will wind up dying alone, whether they will ever get to see their grandchildren in person again. 

For workers, they do not know when or if they will get their jobs back or how they will pay their bills. For restaurant and bar and small shop owners, there is no certainty the businesses they have built will survive this. 

For all of us, we have no idea what our worlds will look like next month, next fall, next year. We know it will all change. We don’t know what that will mean for us. It is totally a sense of Holy Saturday anxiety.

Back to Sr. Joan. She wrote: “Every human being who has ever walked the earth has known what the emptiness of Holy Saturday is about…We will all know the power of overwhelming loss when life as we know it changes, when all hope dies in midflight…Holy Saturday faith is not about counting our blessings; it is about dealing with darkness and growing in hope.”

See if her description of Holy Saturday matches what you are experiencing now:

“Today, the church is empty. Today, the loss finally sets in. We sit in the empty pews, pass the empty churches, heavy-hearted from the reality of yesterday, of Good Friday and its dashing of our securities. Today, alone and bereft, we come face-to-face with the question we try so hard to avoid the rest of the year: how do we deal with the God of darkness as well as the Giver of Light?”

Grief. Fear. Anxiety. 

They are all around me these days. They are all around on what seems like an eternal Holy Saturday. The followers of Jesus in his time had no idea that Easter would arrive with the next sunrise. We have no idea when we will get to the other side of this pandemic and what that will mean to us. 

But we do know that as we watch new life emerge from the earth that spring follows winter. We do know that as the sun creeps over the morning horizon, another day emerges from the darkness of night.

We do know that grief and fear and anxiety are part of our lives but they are not the only parts.

So I look forward to this Easter - whether that means Sunday, April 12 or some day farther in the future.

I look forward to the hope that it holds, the recognition that joy and sadness can co-exist and hold to the belief that ultimately, goodness is stronger than evil and life is stronger than death. 

One of my favorite traditions on Holy Saturday evening is to listen to this six-minute piece of music that ends Marty Haugen’s musical “That You May Have Life.” It’s the story of resurrection. It is the story of hope. May this be our future.

Worship in a streaming world

“We now have 8-track churches in a streaming world…the church is struggling to adapt,” is how the Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III put it in his sermon on Sunday morning for Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

Notice I said “sermon for,” not “sermon at.” Because like at churches all across the nation, Sunday worship is now coming through Facebook Live or You Tube or Zoom or some other video platform, beamed into people’s homes.

I have spent the past three Sundays surfing worship (that’s the worship nerd in me), trying to get a sense of how churches are doing this, to see if there were some approaches that appealed to me more than others.

And it’s not always easy, either for members or pastors. As Pastor Kristin Gorton from Memorial United Church of Christ in Fitchburg wrote last week after a service with leaders in the sanctuary and others online, “For me personally, the service felt connected beyond the physicality of the building. Yet I choked up as service ended and I took the light of the Christ candle out of the sanctuary. The joy of gathering collided with the reality we would not be able to be together in this space for an indeterminate period of time..."

Even though I am a minister who has led my share of worship services, this is not a critical review of what people did or a handy guide to what might be done better. It’s a very personal reflection on the things that touched me with an awareness that each person and each congregation has to find the approach that works for them in this very unusual time.

“This is a period of time that is going to vastly reshape what church looks like,” said Pastor Breanna Illéné at Trinity United Methodist Church in Madison. “This is scary…Society is going to change.”

So here are some of what church in this era - or more specifically - worship - looked like to me.

There was quite a spectrum, based in part on the size of the congregation and past experience with sending out worship online. Blackhawk Church, in Madison, has great technological abilities as it has weekly beamed sermons to three different physical sites while also posting it online. While the feel of the worship changed with no people beyond worship leaders in the room, the service was smooth and engaging. 

At the other end of the spectrum was the Church of the Three Crosses in Chicago, where my daughter and son-in-law are members. Pastor Britt Cox leads the service all alone on Facebook Live from her living room. The service has evolved a bit over the past three weeks - more on that in a bit - but I appreciated the warmth and sense of community she created in a low-tech setting.

My home congregation, Orchard Ridge United Church of Christ in Madison, sent out a sort of do-it-yourself service before Sunday, an order of worship with links to musical presentations by youth in the congregation, a link to the text of the sermon, prayers, a link for the offering. 

Some of the more traditional mainline Protestant churches beamed out the service from their sanctuaries, pastors in robes and stoles, perhaps a few musicians at the site as well. For some people, it may have felt comforting to see their church and pastor like it was almost a normal Sunday, but the impact on me was one of distance and a formality that did not fit the medium. I'm also not sure an hour-long service works as well in this medium - shorter might be better, although some of my favorites did run for an hour.

A few congregations I watched used a combination of Zoom and Facetime Live. This probably works better for smaller congregations, but seeing many people on the screen along with the pastor created a good sense of community. The handoffs from reader to musician to pastor were often more informal - pauses, "your turn now" - but it helped create a sense of engagement in the service.

Some churches are recording their worship services ahead of time, which provides an opportunity to make the experience smoother and weave in elements from other places online. Others are literally doing this live, which adds a sense of immediacy - and a willingness to deal with glitches - to the experience. 

There were some interesting approaches I saw. 

At Messiah Lutheran Church on Madison’s east side, Pastor Jeff Vanden Huevel led the pre-recorded service from a rocking chair in the gathering space at the church with a fireplace going behind him and his wife Melissa sitting next to him. He brought in a choir from a video, replayed a sermon he gave a few years back in the church and read the words of communion and shared bread and wine with his wife while inviting viewers to do the same at home with bread or juice.

At First United Methodist Church, Pastor Mark Fowler led the service from his study while Pastor Tina Lang participated from the back porch of her home where wind chimes and bird songs added to the moment. 

Some churches have extraordinary musicians who could play a role. At First Methodist, a quartet and a pianist in the sanctuary performed a stunning rendition of “Breathe on Me Breath of God.” At First United Church of Christ in Washington DC, a pianist and French horn player offered sheer beauty while today, very talented child violinists offered music. Latanya Maymon sang powerful solos at Christ the Solid Rock in Madison. 

Yet there could also be a sense of dislocation. At Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Madison, where their Gospel choir has a regional reputation, seeing only five singers in the sanctuary (appropriately spaced apart) seemed odd - although the music was great.

But sometimes simplicity has its own power. At Church of the Three Crosses, a husband and wife recorded hymns with vocals and a keyboard at home to lead the congregation in singing during the service. The congregation is seeking more of that from members in the weeks ahead.

And then there was communion. This is wholly new territory for many congregations. At Messiah, Pastor Jeff shared bread and cup with his wife while people were invited to share at home. At Blackhawk, Pastor Charles Yu explained that Jesus’ original communion happened in someone’s home and now people would share communion in their own homes. He read the words of institution and invited people to eat the bread and drink the cup.

“We are so used to doing communion in a certain way,” Pastor Yu explained. And like so much else, those ways are changing. 

Church, as Pastor Moss said, has entered a streaming world.

My phrases to live by

 

At the end of June, 2017, I gave my last sermon as pastor of Memorial United Church of Christ in Fitchburg WI. I talked about the phrases that I have used to guide my life. I went back to look at them as we begin 2020 to remind myself and I thought I’d share them. Some are my phrases, some are from the Bible. (I have modified the reflection a bit from the original sermon.)

May your 2020 be filled with goodness and hope. 

“We are made in God’s image” You probably recognize that phrase from the first chapter of the first book in the Bible – Genesis. For me, it’s a constant reminder that I have dignity and, more importantly, so does every person I encounter every day. There may be things about them that I don’t like. I may not want to spend much time with them. I may want to challenge them on what they are thinking and might be doing. 

The bottom line, though, is that both they and I are in made in God’s image. If I can’t see the divine in them – or in me – I need to dig a little deeper.

“I might be wrong.” To me, this is an essential phrase in our time when political, theological, cultural, personal polarities so divide us from one another. 

It’s a reminder to me to listen to what those who disagree with me are saying, to seek the underlying principles that have led them to their conclusions, to question whether the way I prefer is really the only way or even the best way. As the line in that prayer that reflects the spirit of Francis of Assisi says:  “grant that I may not so much be understood as seek to understand.”

Here’s another important part of that “I-might-be-wrong” phrase. It’s not one that I impose on you, as in “You might be wrong.” Yes, you might be wrong, but let’s keep working on understanding the different ways we see the world. And if you are not willing to do that, well, then at some point I have to shake the dust off my feet and move on.

“It’s not that simple.” That’s kind of a corollary to “I might be wrong.” It acknowledges that there are usually more than just two dimensions to any issue we are struggling with. This is a particularly useful saying in the political arena, where politicians and advocates tend to frame issues as really stark choices between good and evil.  It’s the bumper sticker I have on my car.

Yes, it’s easy to get paralyzed by never choosing the path you think is best on any given issue. Ultimately, we have to make choices. But what “It’s not that simple” reminds me is that I should never think I’ve got the solution all figured out when I first learn about the problem.

“It’s only temporary.” That’s a phrase that has gotten me through some tough times in my life. It’s not about the state of the world. It’s about the state of my being. And yes, I know, some things are not temporary, like chronic pain or a degenerative disease or a terminal illness. I have never had to live with something that drastic, for which I am grateful. 

But the “it’s-only-temporary” phrase speaks to me about both short-term and long-term distress. It gives me a calm place to go when things in my life seem to be spinning out of control. And it gives me hope in the long term because I believe that God’s love carries me beyond the limits of my body. 

“Be still and know that I am God.” This comes from Psalm 46 and is a phrase I often use when I want to slow down, breathe, be mindful. Sometimes I drop off a word until the only word left is “be.” Then I add the words back. I like the rhythm it helps create in my life. But more importantly, it reminds me that I am not the one in charge, so teaches me to try to approach what I do with a bit of humility. 

"Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” You know that line from the prayer of Jesus that is in the Sermon on the Mount that we sometimes call the Lord’s Prayer or the Our Father. To me, the whole idea of forgiveness is one of the essential messages of Jesus. 

Any of us who have ever been wronged by another know that forgiveness does not come easy. The greater the wrong, the greater the harm done to us - the harder it is. And there are times a glib message from others to forgive an offender can be destructive in itself. It’s not something those on the outside should be pressuring us to do.

Yet forgiveness is so intertwined with my understanding of God and Jesus. I trust that God will forgive me when I take a wrong turn. I love that image of the God of Second Chances. I know that I need to reach inside myself and forgive myself for mistakes I make, without overlooking the impact those mistakes may have on others. And then I need not to let the harm others have done to me take control of my life. 

It’s a hard phrase, one that I can spend a lifetime working on. And that leads to another phrase.

“Jesus asks us to do the hard things.” Just think about the things Jesus said in what we call the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) – hunger for righteousness, be a peacemaker, forgive your offender, turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, love your enemies. Whoa! Who can do all that?

To me, that’s the hard part of being a follower of Jesus. We like the portrayals of Jesus as someone who understands our humanity, who offers comfort, who embraces little children and heals those in torment. I am consoled by his promises of God’s love.

Still, the challenges that he holds out for me will take a lifetime to even approach accomplishing. Step by step, I try to get there, recognizing that what Jesus asks often goes against my very human instincts and society’s very seductive norms.

 “He took bread, blest it, broke it and gave it to them.” This is a line from the story of Jesus meeting a couple of followers on the road to Emmaus on the first Easter. They did not know who he was until be blest, broke and shared the bread. 

The scripture reference to that verse is on my car license – LK2430. I think that whole Emmaus story defines for me how we ought to living as we follow Jesus. But for a moment, I’ll just focus on that one line. 

When we take what we have, give thanks for it, treat it as a blessing to be shared, not to be hoarded, then we are on the road with Jesus.  That’s a pretty simple idea. It’s not as simple to live out. If we see ourselves made in God’s image, then we will see God in others as well and we will be companions with them in Christ.

 “We will never say ‘we’ve always done it this way.’ ” This is a phrase that I have learned from the people of Memorial UCC that I can apply to my life.

When the congregation of Memorial UUC moved from the area near the UW Field House out to Fitchburg in the late 1980s, this became a mantra:  “We’re starting over. We will never say ‘we’ve always done it this way.’ ” That allowed Memorial to try new things, to let go of those things that were not working, to weave people into the life of the congregation easily and graciously as they arrived.

That phrase is a reminder to me not to get too set into routines, not to get too locked into the comfortable but to be willing to try things and go places where my natural caution might hold me back. 

“Now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” This familiar line comes from Paul’s first letter to the people of Corinth (1 Cor 13: 13). It’s a good phrase to end on, because love is the guidestar for how I hope to live, whether the intimate love of my wife Ellen and our family, the harder love of those I don’t like so much, the sustaining love for God and that I trust God has for me.